Ruthless V6Ch8-End of the Orlando Fight

Air Strike!

An invisible blade of Mana and wind slashed through the air until it reached the slug Ruler and sliced her soft body in half—and almost as quickly, she reunited her severed parts. Little tendrils from each chunk reached out and pulled the whole back together, and in the middle of reassembling herself, she gushed a counter attack in the form of a wave of bubbling slime that surged out of her left half.

James’s body dodged and evaded successfully, moving almost on autopilot as he ran through his diminishing set of options.

Illusions couldn’t kill anyone. Even if he used them to get other monsters to attack the slug, it was unlikely those other monsters could do so more effectively than James himself.

He had already tried his theoretically most potent form of attack, Soul Magic. Air Strike had not availed him. That also meant that crushing the slug with Precision Gravity Control was pretty unlikely to do anything significant. She wasn’t an elemental and didn’t have a core to crush, so squishing her into thinly smeared paste wasn’t going to be more damaging than cutting her in half. Better not to waste the Mana, though he regenerated it very quickly.

He opened his magic satchel, eyes still on the wave of slug slime that was following him. It moved on a significant delay relative to his speed, but it could still catch him if he didn’t pay attention.

He drew out a dagger—probably one of the Wolfbone Daggers he still had left from Orientation, though he didn’t bother to check. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t the properties of the blade itself that interested him, only what he could use it for.

Predator’s Venomous Armaments!

Dark green liquid venom oozed from James’s skin, thoroughly coating the dagger.

Predator’s Guided Missile!

He hurled the blade, mentally controlling its direction—but he needn’t have bothered. The giant slug didn’t do anything to evade his weapon, apparently not perceiving a dagger as a threat. The weapon stabbed—or perhaps more accurately, sank—into her body and disappeared.

James darted around quickly as he considered his next options. He still had some equipment he could try in his magic satchel—the Ego Bloodsucking Arrows that he had obtained by killing Bat Queen Barbara came to mind—but he didn’t have the feeling that item would work.

Then again, his other equipment items, like the Bonded Oni Axes, would only do the sort of physical damage that he already knew the slug could survive.

He shrugged to himself, ordered Roscuro to transform into a bow, and drew out a trio of Ego Bloodsucking Arrows. He would still have more remaining in case this fight destroyed them. James leaped into the air, dodging another little wave of slime from the slug, and he loosed all three arrows at once.

Moving with their own intelligence—the sole characteristic that all ego weapons shared—they looped around the slime, dodged tentacles the slug raised to try to intercept them, and sank into the center of her body.

James saw liquid begin to be pulled toward the arrows, and they glowed red with power as they started to drain some of the massive slug’s fluids. Then they started visibly dissolving. Two of the arrows turned to mush almost instantly and sank into the Ruler’s body. The third tried to jerk back and escape from the grip of the slug’s gooey flesh, but a dozen tentacles clumsily snatched at it and managed to pull it back in.

The final arrow sank into the slug’s body, pulled against the arrow’s own efforts. That was the last James saw of it.

Damn.

But he hadn’t expected the arrows to work.

As the slug had dealt with his arrows, James had quickly charged a healthy chunk of Earth Mana. This park, where he was fighting the monsters, wasn’t anyone’s territory. No Ruler’s Mana suffused it; he thought it might have been a conflict zone even before he got there.

It seemed the mutual mistrust between the Rulers meant none was willing to have this fight within another’s territory.

That meant that James could just treat the soil like it was any soil. He pushed Mana into it, and a great fissure appeared beneath the slug. Her semi-liquid body immediately began partially dripping down through the gap, though it mostly held together.

James willed the soil into the form of a massive pair of jaws, and it responded instantly, surrounding the slug with a big, toothy maw of stone and earth that closed around her body.

Then the ground pulled the slug under.

James didn’t get an alert, but he hoped for a moment that the slug might be subdued for a while at least. That would give him time to deal with the other Rulers. If he could do that, then he could always come back to the slug—or simply leave her be. She was very difficult to kill so far, but she was also incredibly slow compared with James or any other Ruler. She wouldn’t be able to catch and kill anyone in the Army unless James simply stopped defending them.

As he was looking over the other Rulers, thinking about who to take on next, a bubble began inflating in a hole in the soil. It popped, and then the liquid that had composed it splattered all over the ground. More liquid followed, and James realized that the slug monster was slowly oozing her way back out from where he had buried it.

That hadn’t lasted long at all.

James opened his jaws wide and released a Hypnotic Shriek. He sensed how the sound had penetrated the eardrums of all around him, though James did not bother to look around and see what had happened to the others. His eyes were focused on the liquefied slug.

A ripple had run through the liquid that made up her body when the sound waves struck, and then—miracle of miracles—the liquid stopped moving. James’s voice had at least slowed the slug down, when nothing else seemed to have worked.

She clearly hadn’t suddenly died from the attack, but her temporary disorientation at least bought him a few seconds to think of something else to deal with her.

I could always try to eat her. James had eaten a lot of his enemies, some while they were still alive. But that idea would require some way of funneling her entire body down his gullet. The slug was larger than James; it didn’t seem physically possible.

Almost all of his other remaining Skills were physical attacks or chunks of Mana that the slug might just absorb, as she had absorbed his Soul Magic and used it against him.

No, there was one more thing.

As the slug’s liquid began moving again, continuing to pump out from beneath the soil, James called on his last remaining non-physical, non-Mana-based attack.

Solar Ray!

A blast of solar energy shot out of James’s hands in the following instant—he was full of pre-absorbed solar power, having been fighting in sunlight all morning—and struck the slug at unavoidable speed.

James had little hope that it would work. He had tried everything else. Then he heard the sound of sizzling semi-liquid flesh—and cries of pain from the ground. Some of the liquid of the slug was simply gone, but what was left of it had started trying to pull itself down into the hole again.

Seeing that, James slightly redirected the Solar Ray, down into the hole the slug was pulling itself into. The beam widened the hole, instantly boring a deep tunnel where before there had only been a small opening.

The air filled with the sound of screaming. James kept slightly adjusting the position of the ray, trying to make certain that he burned every scrap of the slug’s flesh. He didn’t stop until he got the notification.

[You killed Florida Leatherleaf Slug Queen Veronica, Lv. 40!]

There were other notifications, but almost at the same moment, before James could properly look at them, something jumped onto James’s back and sank its fangs into his neck. As James turned his head to try and see what was on his back a black winged shape jumped onto him from the front, blade-like beak savagely pecking at his flesh.

I guess the Rulers broke their elite bodyguards out of my illusion, was all James could think. More monsters leaped onto his shoulders or the backs of the ones that were already attacking him, and James allowed himself to be dragged to the ground. He would present a smaller target if the monsters were above him, after all.

Once he was down, James ignored the monster that was still on his back, clawing at him from underneath, even though he could feel the damage it was doing to the skin of his neck, shoulders, and back. He dealt with the easiest problem first. James reached up and grabbed the swan securely by the neck. He tightened his grip until he heard the crack, and then the shape dropped limply to the side.

And then a black wave of fur swept over him. James felt hundreds of mouths suddenly on every exposed inch of skin, biting and ripping at his flesh.

The Rat King had apparently managed to get free of its fight with the wasp colony to join in attacking James, and his components were trying to give James a brutal death by a thousand cuts.

Predator’s Sacred Armor!

A glowing green shield composed of mingled Mana and aura pushed out from every part of his body, instantly breaking the purchase of every claw, fang, beak, or other blade-like appendage trying to tear him apart.

This was the only adequate defense he could think of against an enemy that could attack all over his body simultaneously, that was too small and numerous to grab.

James rose to his feet, the rats tumbling off of his body now that they no longer found purchase in his skin. He bled from a thousand cuts, but even as he straightened his posture, he could feel them closing up. True Regeneration was showing its worth.

Only one enemy still clung to James—the initial monster that had latched onto his back before the rest piled on.

James thought it might actually be a Ruler, but he couldn’t be certain. It was just the strength of its grip that suggested that. Its claws that had been tearing his back apart no longer did anything to injure James. They glanced off of Predator’s Sacred Armor, like all other attacks.

But some of the more forceful claw strikes shook the hard magical shell slightly. That shouldn’t have been possible for a lower level creature, and he poured in more power to sustain it against the attacks.

More enemies piled on. The rats threw themselves at James in a flood of bodies again, though the wave broke on the aura armor that surrounded him.

That seemed to confirm that the creature on James’s back was a Ruler; its attacks shook and threatened his shielding, while the Rat King’s did not. Assorted smaller monsters—mainly possums and swans—tried to throw themselves at James, and he responded with bare fists that splattered bodies into red paste and twisting hands that popped heads from feathered necks.

None of them were threatening, and James had a little room to consider the best way to dispose of the monster on his back.

The wasps even flew up to begin attacking the component parts of the Rat King, forcing the enemy Ruler to become less threatening and more evasive, dividing his parts more to present a more difficult target. He was clearly the weakest of the Rulers who had gathered to fight James that day, at least in terms of pure combat power.

Maybe I can kill this thing on my back by throwing myself at the ground and bashing it against some solid rocks. It seems more like a natural organism rather than something that can turn into liquid or split its body up, based on the way it’s fought so far. So blunt force is probably a good approach.

Then a black swan, significantly larger than the others, swooped down and made a diving motion straight for James. The last remaining Ruler, besides the one on his back.

James pushed more energy into Predator’s Sacred Armor, crossed his arms in front of his chest, and prepared to be double-teamed.

Suddenly, James heard a loud thud close by and sensed a large presence land on the ground behind him. He didn’t instantly know what it was, but he resisted the urge to turn around; he would not be distracted from the dive bombing swan.

He heard a snapping sound from just behind his head. A sound of liquid gushing followed, and then the monster on James’s back shuddered and fell away.

The black swan, just ten feet away, saw this and began to pull up, and James’s strategy changed.

Precision Gravity Control.

He pulled the swan towards him, using both his gravity powers and its momentum against it. The swan Ruler tried to fly up, but it only wound up tumbling through the air and losing all control of its direction of travel.

As James pulled the bird to within five feet of him, he saw Mana gathering in its throat. The bird was preparing some sort of sonic or energy attack that would probably be directed from the mouth.

But if James could see it coming, he could stop it.

Lightning Strike!

He lunged in, grabbed the swan by the neck at lightning speed, and squeezed with superhuman strength. He saw the Mana gathered in and around the bird’s throat dissipate as it lost its focus. Then the swan battered his face and arms with heavy wings lined with razor sharp feathers. They somehow cut right through Predator’s Sacred Armor, leaving gaps in his aura defense and long cuts along his arms, chest, and face.

James never stopped squeezing the throat, though. The neck was clearly the weakest part of the bird’s body, and twist and fight though it tried, it could not get loose.

James knew he was compressing the neck enough to cut off the swan’s air supply, so he hoped he was doing enough to kill it. The spinal column on this one seemed too thick for him to snap it with one hand while it was taking all these wild swings at him. Most of his focus had to be on constantly reinforcing and rebuilding the aura shield that the swan kept damaging.

The swan took ten minutes to die.

In that time, it gave James a Glasgow grin, slashed one of his eyes open, ripped his chest to ribbons, and cut his throat twice. The problem the swan had was that James kept regenerating, and none of these wounds were fatal to him. All he had to do was protect the arm that was holding the swan’s throat closed.

Finally, the bird succumbed, the notification of its death appeared, and James was able to focus on the battle still going on all around him. Tunnel vision had set in during those last minutes of the fight, and he only had the one eye remaining. The other was slowly growing back. His regeneration Skill seemed to act to repair would-be lethal wounds first.

As he took in the sights around him, James was pleased with what he saw.

Behind him lay the body of the possum creatures’ Ruler, dead from a giant spider’s bite to the back, which had dissolved most of its neck.

Littering the ground was a scattering of dead rats, though half of the creatures continued fighting on and trying to escape. The Army was almost entirely focused on exterminating what remained of the Rat King at this point, though. They killed them with bullets, arrows, spears, swords, daggers—whatever was to hand.

In somewhat smaller numbers, dead swans littered the ground.  James’s forces had apparently killed around half of their total number just keeping them from interfering as James killed the boss.

Now the others had moved into a meek huddle at the edge of the battlefield. The surviving pigeons, slugs, and possums had done likewise.

“Dominion.”

Power surged from all through James’s body as he covered the entirety of Lake Eola Park in his aura. It was a little excessive, considering he only did it to be able to communicate to all those around him.

Then again, perhaps it wasn’t. He still needed to rescue Alan and the others, and every second counted.

He used his Fisher King powers to send an announcement.

[As far as I’m concerned, this battle will be over as soon as we’ve killed the Rat King. Continue in that mission until it’s accomplished. Accept the surrender of any others who don’t resist us. They can remain in the city as part of the Fisher Kingdom if they agree to accept my rule. Mina will resolve any disputes in my absence. Thank you, everyone, for your courageous fighting. Today, the Fisher Kingdom gains its second major settlement. You should all be very proud to be a part of history.]

James opened his magic satchel up, drew out the Precision Vespid Armor, and laid his hand on the chest.

Instantly, the armor latched onto him and began crawling up his arm, disassembling and reassembling itself to fully attach to his body.

When it was finished, James poured some Mana into his wings and started to take flight.

Then he remembered that there were two corpses at his feet.

A very powerful pair of corpses. Two Rulers.

Well, I can take thirty seconds to Pillage them…