Chapter 25
Harald didn’t have time to read the following messages that stemmed from his level ascension.
He didn’t have to.
He knew his old powers like the back of his hand.
Abyssal Grasp and Veil of Shadows.
It felt like the return of old friends. Dear companions he’d thought lost and never to return. Their power, their utility, their game-changing nature came flooding back, and even as Harald backed desperately away from the charging golems, he wove together a plan.
It all hinged on his newly returned powers being augmented like the others. If they only did what they’d once done, then he was dead.
First, he summoned Shadowpaw.
There was no way he was winning this fight by himself.
Darkness coalesced behind the three golems, resolving itself into the eager hound, the massive mastiff immediately throwing back his head to bay, the volume of his howl so intense that the air in the hall seemed to throb, to crash back and forth between the walls like a violent tide that had rushed into a narrow channel and there grown disordered and even more disruptive due to the straits.
Even as Shadowpaw manifested, even as the golems registered the threat at their rear so that one turned to summon its white spherical shield and begin the process of hurling a coruscating arc of burning white fire at the mastiff, Harald embraced Veil of Shadows.
Before, it had made him a creature of the night, a denizen of the dark. But he’d needed actual shadows in order to melt away from sight, and this hallway was drearily lit in pervasive white radiance.
The abyss swirled and swept up around him, through him, a vortex that surged out of the infinite depths between every speck of reality and existence, and with it arose a miasma of living darkness.
The abyss made manifest.
Harald’s Shadow Fortitude rejoiced as it was bathed in this nether baptism. He could see perfectly through his own obfuscation that spread through the air like ink poured into a clear vial of water.
With Aegis bound to his form and clothing him in demonic plates of cunningly interlocked pure darkness, he leaped to the side.
Just as the charging golems hurled their own blasts of white fire at where he’d stood.
Their arcs of sacred light clove his shadowed cloud easily, and burned away the darkness where they passed—but he wasn’t where he’d been, and they flashed past him harmlessly as he slammed into the wall, so desperate had his dodge been.
Heaving for breath, still recovering from his first fight against the original golem, Harald extended his gauntlet and clenched it violently into a fist.
The abyss heeded his command.
Thick ropes like the ancestor spirits of the world’s biggest pythons shot forth from his cloud of ragged night to curl and wend and spiral through the air to encircle and knot about both golems.
But his foes, though they ceased their charge, weren’t without defenses of their own. They would not go willingly into the night. Their great shields of lambent white light flared around them even as their twin swords of burning fire slashed and chopped his ropes of black smoke in twain.
Harald forced himself to straighten. Each moment inside his own cloud of darkness was feeding him fresh energy through Shadow Fortitude.
He grimaced, his focus total, and more snakes of smoke burst forth, four to each golem, so that their white spherical shields bulged between the coils, constricted, constrained.
The golems fought without fear or emotion. Wherever their swords passed, the smoke was severed and the tendril beyond that point dissipated—only for the stump to regrow smoothly and coil around them once more.
Pushing himself off the wall, Harald glanced past them to where Shadowpaw was distracting the third golem. It was clearly too strong for his friend, so it was kiting their enemy away through a series of lunges and snaps and quick disengagements.
Perfect. Now he’d—
The ground exploded up from beneath him, huge stalagmites erupting with spear points to hurl him aside.
His Aegis bore the brunt of the blow, but a plate on the inside of his thigh cracked, and stone tore at his flesh as he was hurled aside.
No pain.
But lassitude and weakness ran down his leg as he crashed to the ground, spun about, momentarily disoriented.
Damn it.
Veil of Shadows wreathed him in darkness, but with a broad attack like their stone spikes, that didn’t matter. Forcing himself upright, Harald saw that the golems were forcing their way closer, their shields warping under the pressure of his tendrils of void, but not bursting.
The golems were just too tough for him to brute force.
Perhaps he could aid his Abyssal Grasp.
He slashed toward both approaching foes with the Dawnblade, its black length blazing with hellish energy as a Demonic Edge flew forth, and when he swiped back, a second.
Angled so that they flew in a nearly horizontal “X,” both sizzling streaks of pure abyssal darkness passed harmlessly through his own ropes of smoke to crash into the great shields beneath them.
Which shattered.
The motes of white flashed outward like broken glass even as the coils clenched about the golems, wrapping and engulfing them so that both again staggered to a halt to wrestle with the mighty constraints.
Power instantly began to flood into Harald, stolen and siphoned from both prey to fuel him at a remove.
Invigorated, Harald thrust two fingers into his scale pouch, and whatever he absorbed instantly healed his flesh even as the stolen vitality renewed his clarity of mind and focus. He surged up into a crouch and then ran toward the golems, who were busy cleaving themselves free of his tendrils.
Damn, but they were powerful. The troll shamans on the 18th Level had been utterly paralyzed, and even the Thought Reavers on the 27th had been constrained—though that attack had been augmented with Shadow Dominion.
For both golems to continue slashing and freeing themselves, even as he drank deep of their power?
Incredible.
But not incredible enough.
Harald unleashed another Edge as he closed, driving a deep lateral gash into the closest golem, and then felt Shadowpaw finally lose his battle and return to Harald’s Cosmos.
Damn it. The third golem was back in the fray.
No matter.
He came in fast, Dawnblade held overhead as if for a downward chop, and at the last, dropped to his knees to slide along the smooth marble floor at tremendous speed, right under a burning white sword to take out the golem’s leg just below the knee.
The abyssal blade sent him yet another pulse of energy, and Harald felt like laughing, so deliriously good did it feel.
The golem crashed to the ground behind him, the coils of the abyss tightening around him further, and then Harald was up, charging at the third golem, who was in turn hurrying back into the fray.
It hurled a white arc of fire at him, which he met with his own Demonic Edge.
Both blasts cancelled themselves out with a fantastic explosion of light and dark, and they met right in the center of the detonation, their forms wreathed in shadow so that it seemed twin blades of light danced about his own heart of pure blackness, sparks flaring where they met.
Harald grinned, energy pulsing into him from his twin grappled foes, his four Thrones and Crown flooding him with what felt like endless might, and he ceased to parry the sword attacks and instead attacked the blades, swinging at them with the intent to shatter.
The sound of metallic stars ringing out against the void filled his mind.
The Demon Seed Has Stirred
Your Strength has risen from 9 to 10
Your Dexterity has risen from 10 to 11
Your Constitution has risen from 10 to 11
The golem, surprised, gave ground, then raised its boot to stomp—but Harald leaped away, the ground erupting behind him, to stagger, hit the wall, push off it and return to the fray, hammering at the blades which spat fire as if wounded.
The golem, massive and towering, rocked and gave ground again. Harald had the vor, the initiative, and was dictating the pace of the fight. He had no intention of releasing it.
But these golems. The angels wept, these were real foes. Its twin blades wove a defensive web he was mining his way through, but even on its heels, it kept its focus, its calm, and pulsed its shield each time Harald thought he was getting through.
Enough of that.
Harald inhaled deeply, borrowed against the power he was stealing from the other two golems and manifested a ninth tentacle.
It was nearly three times what he’d ever been able to summon before, but with his Thrones roaring like an inferno intent on consuming the world, with vitality being leached from his endlessly impressive foes behind him, he forced a ninth to snake out along the ground and wrap around the golem’s leg.
More power flooded into him. The golem stiffened, the drain from the Abyssal Grasp exceeding what it could handle, which had already involved the frigid oppression of the Aching Depths.
It was just what Harald needed. He slammed its second sword aside, ducked a riposte and then stabbed the Dawnblade up under its helm into the head.
The golem went rigid.
Harald tore his blade free, turning to face his other foes just as the ceiling collapsed upon him with unnatural violence.
Everything went dark as he was hurled to the ground, the Aegis cracking and straining to hold, its limits endlessly reinforced by his Thrones and the stolen essence. But the drain became near total—the Aegis drank three, four times as much as it fought to remain coherent.
Rocks groaned and shifted around Harald. His face was thrust into the hallway floor, kept above the paving stones by an inch only due to the shadow helm that protected him. All was dark. He was buried. His limbs were awry, pinned by boulders, his body bent to almost impossible angles.
Thank the Fallen Angel for Shadow Fortitude. He didn’t want to imagine how this would feel without it.
But the darkness was its own blessing.