Glorylust

"Alysha, take care of them!"

"You would waste me on these pitiful-?!" But she did as she was told, and hardly needed a command to defend herself: she entered the trance-like state of her sword style and delivered whirling cuts on her rabid opponents, deftly avoiding their grips and bites for now. John, meanwhile, jumped to the street before turning around and sending another lunge into the armored scalp of the beast's arched head, empowering it with serpent's fangs to ensure he felt every point of it. As promised, the full damage was delivered into the beast... but contrary to John's hope, it seemed to know exactly where it came from. It whipped its needle-face towards the young Gamer and closed the distance between them with terrifying speed, tearing up concrete with its spear-like feet as its nose pointed up to reveal the blender that was its toothy maw. John panicked, and blinked just before he would've found himself inside the beast's gnashing teeth, cursing as he blew a full 40 mana just to do that much.

John knew he couldn't keep this kind of attack and dodge pattern up on his mana budget, nor could he hope to pull the infinite falling trick: even taken at its narrowest dimension, the beast had to be nearly twelve feet across, too large to create a tunnel and keep it from recovering. As if to only worsen his situation, it suddenly stopped and spewed another hefty arc of its ichor onto the road, calling three more of its zombie-like slaves into the fight. "Oh come on! What's the cooldown on that, even?!"

The hideously bloated millipede... chuckled, John was pretty sure, but it wasted no time waiting for its new minions to charge before it restarted its advance, its mouth opening-

Of course. It didn't help his mana situation much, but it did help the horror of what was coming... somewhat. As the beast approached, its spinning rows of hand-long fangs growing larger in John's vision, John started to scream as he stood his ground, terrified and wide-eyed as certain **** came. He stood his ground, fought every urge to run or dodge or blink away... and as the the mouth became almost all he could see, opened a tunnel over the cavernous openingand balled up in the air before it, anchoring one portal to the creature's face and letting the monster "swallow" him with this alternative mouth. John landed with a thud on the grass near Alysha's fight against the first two animated dead, and started to feel and look around. I'm alive. Sweet baby fucking Jesus I'm alive!

"How- How did... DON'T EVER DO THAT AGAIN!" screamed Fairy, her voice cracking as she angrily lobbed another bolt down at the beast.

Alysha, in her battle trance as she was, said nothing, instead continuing to wear away at her opponents. She only favored one of them, keeping the male at bay with single cuts while the female was already in tatters. Both had long-since lost that "Empowered" status, replacing it with "Fragile", as the ogres had... and the only difference John could see was that the ichor on their bodies had been mostly dripped away and onto the purple copy of his backyard grass. Another three cuts, each on her neck, and the poor creature's head finally stopped hanging on by a meaty thread, followed shortly by it no longer moving. Behind Alysha's fight, the animator roared as it arched towards the sky, John's tunnel still over its mouth. Working quickly, John lanced another lunge into the remaining zombie, freeing Alysha up as it crumbled.

"You wanted big game, Alysha? There it is!"

She turned to regard the beast as it dove towards them, ichor spewing as if in rage from its long snout, and she braced herself for its attack. The creature seemed eager to oblige, seeing her challenge and coiling to prepare for a snake-like lunge. "H-Hey, I didn't mean- DON'T JUST STAND THERE AND LET IT-"

Something in Alysha... changed. Her body seemed to ripple before him, but those subtle changes were lost on him as he observed her new data, floating over her head and then on her status window to John's peripheral:

Status Effect: Glorylust

What-? The creature dove low, skittering across the ground to keep up the speed of its lunge. It almost moved too fast for John to react, nevermind to hope his mere level 10 warrior could hope to dodge it. It kept its head low, clearly adapting to the effective loss of its mouth, and leveraged its dripping tip to eviscerate Alysha. The latter, stoic and with swords held before her... didn't move. John blinked reflexively as the blurred bullet of the monster met its first kill this night-

Slash.

A sound of ringing steel, and John opened his eyes wide. Alysha was where she had been before, or so John thought since he watched the exchange in profile. But she was closer to him; she had stepped to the side. The two seemed frozen in time: the millipede merely a dozen feet past where he would have surely run Alysha through, and the latter just off from his center, both of her blades to her left at the zenith of a swing John couldn't even see. A beat. Two beats.

A few solitary drops of elven blood dripped down from an unseen wound on Alysha.

The Animator's entire snout exploded off of its face with a spray of bleeding ichor. "SKREEEEEERUUURGH!"

Glorylust: passive, racial. Dark elf only. Activated once per day against huge or larger enemies of higher level. Triples strength, agility, and endurance until the triggering enemy is destroyed. If racial fighting styles are used, all attacks are critical.

Alysha turned quietly, flicking ichor from her blades in a single motion, revealing the glean of elven steel beneath in the pale moonlight. "This is still nothing, John Newman." On hearing his name, John finally closed his slack-jawed mouth and joined in her approach on the beast.

Skittering Animator
Level 12 Elite
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647/1,000hp
250/500mp
Status Effects: Armored, Severe Wound (Dismembered Injector)
A massive horror from the Abyss. A weak version of its bigger brothers in the Festering Hive, this beast can still manage to be a mighty threat to unwary parties. Its injector has been severed, preventing minion summons.

The three newer zombies tried to crawl over their master's body to get to their enemies, the first among them ignoring the last bolt of magic Fairy had left in her. "I'm... fuck... I'm out." She more whispered it to herself, frustrated with her limitations; John had barely even noticed the effort, focusing instead on surviving the oncoming enemies.

Alysha looked to the Animator, ignoring the approaching zombies and John alike. "If you wish for me to blooded, John Newman, know that this creature is my prey; not its pets."

John grumbled in frustration before pouring 100HP into his mana, wincing as equilibrium gave him the juice necessary to face the oncoming corpses. He only managed to down one of them before the other two were upon him, and his **** dodging, even with his displacement, was too much for him to pay any mind to the sounds of Alysha's fight. Gnashing teeth nearly found purchase on his arm when he managed a ****, whipping strike into the second enemy's neck, breaking the spine therein.

The second one fell, and John leapt back from its bubbling corpse as it was smothered by the upside-down body of its creator, knocked into John's battle by some unseen blow. "What the fuck?!"

Alysha bellowed with her warcry, fearlessly jumping onto the insectoid horror's belly as bladed legs struggled to reach her. If she had walked anywhere save its exact middle, their **** stabs might have found purchase in her flesh... but with the grace of her people she quietly marched up towards the up-turned face of the Animator, pirouetting as her blades sliced the soft underbelly of the beast with her passing. The Animator was a living thing: it took her crits with ****, alien cries of pain before it finally rolled over, forcing her to leap away. The third zombie was finally put down as this happened, and John was left with almost no mana. He could only try and meditate, but his ears and mind were swimming too terribly in this fight to pull it off. Angrily, he rushed what seemed a safely unmoving part of the animator's body, if he could only strike it for his base damage at least-

Whoosh.

Crit! -246hp!

It slammed into him and bounced him away, nearly into the tunnel end floating over the grass with a critical blow to his entire body. Some expletive escaped his mouth before the floor took what little breath he had, and Fairy flew to his side. "Don't get yourself knocked into dying, you idiot! We'll get de-summoned and you'll turn into worm food!"

"But Alysha is..." John winced as he sat up... and watched the beast slam its head onto the street, the sight of its impact hidden by its coiling lengths. A moment later, it screamed with clicking fear as a spray of ichor sliced into the air.

"You're too fucking stupid for life, I swear..."

"Wh... But she was doing so little damage to me when I caught her-"

"You don't listen, do you?" Fairy sighed, and sat on his shoulder, exhausted as if she were the one half-beaten to ****. Only with her additional weight did he finally feel the sleepy-coma of a concussion urging him to lay on the grass. "That bitch is a hunter... from the Abyss. She met you, some small fry without any proper kills under your belt... and a human, too, and even your weird system of magic tells you she's stronger than you... so yeah, of course she doesn't have any drive to kill you. She gives you a few nicks and then you cheat by **** her into submission- hahaha!" Fairy leaned on the side of his head as she laughed. "Aaaah, sorry, I'm just remembering her describe it... haaa, memories." John watched through one swelling eye as the beast rose upright again, only to have Alysha bound through the air to stab her blades into its underbelly, just below its mouth and the portal that floated there. She glided down its length, gutting it as it howled and spewed its innards.

"She..."

Fairy continued to lecture him, strangely excited as the gore rained before them. "But now she's faced with a greater enemy... she's faced with a worthy hunt... and that's why her people are belittled, murdered in droves, driven into near extinction with genocide after genocide, **** to scurry and scrounge and organize into tightly-knit houses of only the worthiest hunters." The millipede writhed towards the hole it made through the remains of the faux Newman home, perhaps hoping for escape... until Alysha landed before its maw, and through the tunnel there stared at John. "Because when faced with worthy foes for their first kills... they become some of the greatest nightmares the Abyss can offer."

"John Newman, close your portal." He looked at her, stunned. Her eyes were no longer seas of black, but glowing white orbs of radiance. Her skin deepened from its blue-gray into a perfect black, and her armor gleamed with a red tint. Her hair was unbound and floating all about her as if underwater, and her swords now seemed more silver than steel, such that the ichor could not grasp them. She was... taller, he was sure of it. What the Hell was going on? "Please..." She said please. John nodded, and closed the gate... and watched in horror as the worm lunged forward to swallow her.

"Thank you." She dove into its mouth.

"NOOOO!" John cried.

"It's over," Fairy chuckled.

Alysha's blades created a guard as she passed its gnashing teeth... and the maw closed around her. John watched the beast remain still, satisfied that it had finally eaten its butcher... and after five beats without moving, the creature's head began to pulse, grow, and finally explode with chitin and viscera as two ichor-soaked blades rose out of the mess that was once the back of its head. Clutched between them, with the precision of a jeweler's tools, glowed a green pearl; the supernatural core of this awful beast rested with its clean, flawless surface until it glowed brighter, threatened to explode or cast a spell or commit any other action- and was then sliced in half, letting it exist in two perfect halves as the light dimmed in each. The remains fell to the air, and then exploded into dust. The beast's body trembled and and deflated before slowly fizzling into black smoke.

John finally regained enough mana to give himself a heal, clearing some of the ache of the last blow he received, just in time to watch Alysha approach. She was... normal, again. Still short, still with black eyes, still... miserable as she walked obediently to her owner. Her body and armor were soaked in the yellow ichor, though she had no status effects from them and seemed to suffer nothing from ingesting it. As she talked, he saw yellow even painted her tongue. Like its creator, the ichor had become inert. "It is done..."

John looked beyond her, at the wreckage, at the small glowing pile of glittering objects sitting on a debris-covered table, the loot of their kill, and on the last wisps of darkness that evidenced the presence of a defeated enemy. The ichor remained, and painted most of the square batch of grass that was the fake, curved copy of John's home. Despite the rain of her victory, she did not seem empowered. She was not pleased with her worthy kill. "You're..." John approached her. She did not recoil, or even meet his gaze. She closed her eyes, waiting for ****. He took her angular face in his hands, letting the ichor soak into his flesh as well, and lifted her face to kiss it. More than alive, a miracle unto itself, they were victorious... and wordlessly, she was blooded on a field soaked in the innards of her prey, in the hands of her enemy. He slipped his tongue into her mouth, and she tasted like ****. He withdrew only far enough to breath his words, and her own breathless gasps betrayed her exhaustion. "You were incredible."

"I... am blooded. You are a human, and yet you have blooded me."

"Yes."

"Then please: kill me. Will you not do me that one honor for saving you?"