63. Storm of Feathers (I)

ℂ𝕝𝕖𝕒𝕣𝕒𝕟𝕔𝕖 𝕆𝕓𝕛𝕖𝕔𝕥𝕚𝕧𝕖𝕤:

𝔽𝕝𝕠𝕠𝕣 𝟙

𝕊𝕝𝕒𝕪 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕋𝕙𝕦𝕟𝕕𝕖𝕣𝕠𝕦𝕤 𝔹𝕖𝕒𝕤𝕥

𝕊𝕝𝕒𝕪 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝔾𝕒𝕝𝕖𝕗𝕖𝕒𝕥𝕙𝕖𝕣 ℝ𝕒𝕧𝕖𝕟

(𝟘/𝟚)

𝔽𝕝𝕠𝕠𝕣 𝟚

𝕊𝕝𝕒𝕪 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕃𝕚𝕘𝕙𝕥𝕟𝕚𝕟𝕘 ℝ𝕠𝕔

(𝟘/𝟛)

𝕆𝕓𝕛𝕖𝕔𝕥𝕚𝕧𝕖𝕤 𝕞𝕖𝕥: 𝟘/𝟛

His mini-map changed. The dungeon was one shapeless block before. Now definition popped up. So did colors.

The Gorge was one long thin strip. It seemed to go on for miles. A chamber lay on either end. Zane guessed that was where the Bosses were. He caught it fleetingly.

Most of his attention was on the middle—where he was.

It was lit up red. All of it. He couldn't see anything else.

He blinked. Uh…

Storm gales scythed past him, watering his eyes. He squinted into the murk, trying to find the Monsters. He couldn't hear over that all that howling. It was so dark he couldn't see either—they were little flashes of light far below, like vivid yellow fireflies scattered down the length of the Gorge.

He plummeted after his Axe. Soon it came into view, sunk into a cleft in the stone. It was the one spot of light burning up the dark.

He was close enough now he could barely make out the shapes whipping past it—

𝔾𝕒𝕝𝕖𝕗𝕖𝕒𝕥𝕙𝕖𝕣 ℂ𝕣𝕠𝕨 (𝕄𝕠𝕟𝕤𝕥𝕖𝕣)

𝔼𝕤𝕤𝕖𝕟𝕔𝕖 𝕃𝕖𝕧𝕖𝕝 𝟝𝟠

𝔾𝕒𝕝𝕖𝕗𝕖𝕒𝕥𝕙𝕖𝕣 ℂ𝕣𝕠𝕨 (𝕄𝕠𝕟𝕤𝕥𝕖𝕣)

𝔼𝕤𝕤𝕖𝕟𝕔𝕖 𝕃𝕖𝕧𝕖𝕝 𝟞𝟛

𝔾𝕒𝕝𝕖𝕗𝕖𝕒𝕥𝕙𝕖𝕣 ℂ𝕣𝕠𝕨 (𝕄𝕠𝕟𝕤𝕥𝕖𝕣)

𝔼𝕤𝕤𝕖𝕟𝕔𝕖 𝕃𝕖𝕧𝕖𝕝 𝟞𝟞

Dozens of boxes shot up at once.

63? 66? And there were that many of them?

He saw a flash of light again, much closer now—like a bolt of lightning shooting through the dark. Something was moving.

𝕃𝕚𝕘𝕙𝕥𝕟𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕊𝕡𝕚𝕣𝕚𝕥 (𝕄𝕠𝕟𝕤𝕥𝕖𝕣)

𝔼𝕤𝕤𝕖𝕟𝕔𝕖 𝕃𝕖𝕧𝕖𝕝 𝟞𝟟

In that brief electric flash he caught a snapshot of where he was plummeting.

Sleek dark things with feathers gleaming slick like living metal. There were too many to count; they flooded the Gorge, a storm-cloud of razor-sharp feathers. Lightning danced through them—

Oh, boy. Zane had a bad feeling about this.

He tried throwing out another Chain, but it was too late to stop. He was going too fast. He hurtled toward them like a meteor.

He gritted his teeth.

If he thought it was loud before… he gave up on hearing. The shrieking got so loud he swore his ears were bleeding.

They collided.

He tore through the first layer by sheer momentum.

Then the rest of them were on him.

Lines of hot pain ripped up his arms, his legs, his midsection, everywhere. He hadn't known it was possible to feel pain in so many places, all at once—like he'd barreled through the world's sharpest thorn bush. He squeezed his eyes shut.

They'd used some kind of Skill. It ripped right past his skin, found the muscle—and the Major Law of Steel packed tight there. There was some kind of Law in the slashes. Wind Laws? Whatever it was, it couldn't cut past him.

If he hadn't gotten Spirit Steel Body, that might've been bad. It still felt like his body was being put through a meat grinder. His pain tolerance was very high—it was a simple fact. And even he hissed at the feeling.

Rebirth in Flame!

Light flared to life. White, ghostly light threw out the dark as every single wound on him caught fire. He saw the nightmare that held him. Gleaming beaks and gleaming feathers and gleaming yellow eyes streaked past, so many they seemed to blend into each other, one huge streaming mass of piercing pain. He poured all his essence into his Skill, tried desperately to hold on; it was all he could do as he fell. They just kept coming, opening up tear after tear, but with Rebirth in Flame, he could hold off the damage—sort of. Just barely.

It hurt like hell, but as long as he didn't bleed out—

Lightning flashed again, blinding him. Something foreign struck him, and he spasmed. He felt it tear right through his skin, his muscles, his bone—his Steel Laws tried to resist, but they did very little. These new laws—Lightning Laws? They struck him to his very core.

A Lightning Spirit hovered before him, a little sprite of sizzling light; he saw its cruel white grin.

𝕎𝕒𝕣𝕟𝕚𝕟𝕘! ℍ𝕖𝕒𝕝𝕥𝕙 𝕦𝕟𝕕𝕖𝕣 𝟟𝟝%!

Jerking up a shuddering arm, Zane traced a line. It came out jagged. But it still rushed out.

Rising Sun Slash!

And that smiling face was cut in half. Its last expression was shock. The Slash went past; it found body after body after body—

𝕊𝕜𝕚𝕝𝕝 𝕌𝕡!

ℝ𝕚𝕤𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕊𝕦𝕟 𝕊𝕝𝕒𝕤𝕙 𝕀𝕀 -> 𝕀𝕀𝕀

He didn't have time to register it. He fell through, still flailing—but the pain stopped, the howling thinned a little. He tried throwing his other Axe, getting another grip on the wall, managed to lodge it a foot deep—

—and hit the ground at last.

The problem was, he did so face-first. At just about terminal velocity.

That was enough force to kill pretty much everyone he knew.

For Zane, it just broke his face. Pretty much everything in it.

Zane groaned.

***

It spoke to his new durability that his Health didn't even drop past 50%.

It still hurt about as much as before, though.

Once the White Flames cleared from his face, Zane stumbled to his feet. He looked up. You could still see those crackling electric lights bobbing high above. The howling was still deafening. But it seemed he was past it the worst of it. At least for now, they didn't follow. They stayed up there in a brutal fake-cloud layer.

They were all Level 50s and 60s. The same Levels as bosses in a D-ranked dungeon. He shook his head, letting out a tight breath.

These C-ranked dungeons were different.

He tried to take stock of everything—he was still feeling pretty disoriented. Right. He'd just gotten a Skill up on Rising Sun Slash. That was kind of random. He'd been using it a lot lately. He guessed that pushed it over the edge?

He let out a tight breath and checked out his surroundings. Bare, craggy black walls. Bare, craggy black ground. The only thing that broke it up were the bones, littered here and there...

He pursed his lips. If he'd had a rough time coming down, and he was a World Ranker… no one normal was surviving that.

For the first time in a long time, he was alone. He'd have to clear this solo.

It was… kind of exhilarating, actually. He smiled. He was looking forward to the challenge.

What now?

He was alive. He supposed he could try for one of the bosses…

Before then, though… he scratched his chin, looking up.

Hmm.

He thought back to his Skill Up. Every time he Leveled a Skill, he noticed a significant difference. Inferno Cyclone, for instance, was a monstrous Skill now. He wondered how strong Rising Sun Slash was at Tier 3. It was one of his two Epic Skills, after all.

The other was his new thing, Rebirth in Flame. The thing that might've saved him just now.

Use a Skill over and over, and you Leveled it up. That fight he'd seen Azaroth have still lingered in his mind. Would he get there if he just kept leveling Rebirth in Flame? … That'd be a useful thing to have, wouldn't it?

Eventually, could he regenerate whole limbs too? It was always his Health that ran out first, never his essence. If he could convert one into the other…

He scratched his head. Essence wasn't tracked by the system, just like soul power. It felt like a weird oversight. But just from observing things, it seemed Mages and their subclasses had the biggest pools. Warriors had the smallest. It was balanced—for Warriors, a lot of the essence they got went into their bodies in the form of Stats. Mages kept more of it raw for use in spells.

Zane had heard his own Warriors complaining about running thin on essence… though he'd never had that issue. Maybe it was because of his Signature Title, or his Class…?

Oh, look. He blinked. They were coming for him. A lesser darkness had broken off from the greater one above. A tight pack, thirty or forty of those Crows, flanked by a Lightning Spirit. They screeched bloody murder at him as they got close. He checked one out.

𝔾𝕒𝕝𝕖𝕗𝕖𝕒𝕥𝕙𝕖𝕣 ℂ𝕣𝕠𝕨 (𝕄𝕠𝕟𝕤𝕥𝕖𝕣)

𝔼𝕤𝕤𝕖𝕟𝕔𝕖 𝕃𝕖𝕧𝕖𝕝 𝟞𝟚

𝕃𝕒𝕨: 𝕄𝕚𝕟𝕠𝕣 𝕃𝕒𝕨 𝕠𝕗 ℙ𝕚𝕖𝕣𝕔𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝔾𝕒𝕝𝕖𝕤 (𝔼𝕝𝕖𝕞𝕖𝕟𝕥𝕒𝕝 𝕃𝕒𝕨 𝕠𝕗 𝕎𝕚𝕟𝕕)

𝕂𝕖𝕪 𝕊𝕜𝕚𝕝𝕝𝕤:

𝔽𝕖𝕒𝕥𝕙𝕖𝕣 ℍ𝕒𝕚𝕝 [ℝ𝕒𝕣𝕖]: 𝕃𝕒𝕦𝕟𝕔𝕙𝕖𝕤 𝕣𝕒𝕫𝕠𝕣-𝕤𝕙𝕒𝕣𝕡 𝕗𝕖𝕒𝕥𝕙𝕖𝕣𝕤 𝕚𝕟𝕗𝕦𝕤𝕖𝕕 𝕨𝕚𝕥𝕙 𝕨𝕚𝕟𝕕-𝕃𝕒𝕨𝕤, 𝕤𝕦𝕣𝕖 𝕥𝕠 𝕤𝕙𝕖𝕒𝕣 𝕥𝕙𝕣𝕠𝕦𝕘𝕙 𝕗𝕝𝕖𝕤𝕙 𝕒𝕟𝕕 𝕞𝕦𝕤𝕔𝕝𝕖.

He got out his Axes and slashed as they came close. Rising Sun Slash!

It shot out a lot faster and brighter than before, burning like a solar flare; it ripped right through a row of them like they were tissue paper.

He thought it was a neat upgrade. But the problem was, his Slashes were thin.

The rest just kept coming.

He threw up another Slash, downed another line of them, but he realized he was using the wrong tool. This called for Inferno Cyclone.

He managed one last Slash—splitting that Lightning Spirit in half, the only thing that posed any kind of threat to him. Then the flock was on him.

A hail of blisteringly sharp carved into him, studded the ground around him, scoring deep wounds into the dense black dirt. They got several feet into the ground. They got hardly an inch into the skin.

Still hurt far more than they should've.

Then came another wave. And another. They started circling him in a rippling dark whirlpool, surrounding him, blotting out the world in swirling huge black feathers, slashing at him, loosing glass-shattering screeches at him—it was quite a performance.

They shredded him in seconds.

But they were mostly annoying. They were little more than paper cuts. They could rupture his skin, but they couldn't get far past. A little Rebirth in Flame, and he was good.

He was just about to get rolling with an Inferno Cyclone when he had a sudden thought.

…Let me try something.

He just stood there.

He let them tear into him. Soon they were mauling him with fervor. The feathers just kept coming. They seemed endless. He was caught in a storm of endless cuts. His body was torn up all over, hundreds and hundreds of times. Blood dripped from every inch of his skin.

And hundreds and hundreds of times, Rebirth in Flame activated. Little ghostly fires burned everywhere. Over and over and over.

You Level up Skills from repeated practice, right?

He grinned.

This was kind of neat, actually. His body was getting to the point actually wounding him was weirdly inconvenient. He was thinking of training Rebirth in Flame by repeatedly tossing himself off a mountain. But this was much easier.

A few minutes passed like this. He must have been cut thousands of times. The Monsters were getting angry. They threw harder and harder—to no avail. Phantom pains laced his arms, his legs, his belly; his skin was shredded and remade and shredded again… but soon—

𝕊𝕜𝕚𝕝𝕝 𝕌𝕡!

His smile widened for a second before he read the rest.

𝕊𝕡𝕚𝕣𝕚𝕥 𝕊𝕥𝕖𝕖𝕝 𝔹𝕠𝕕𝕪 𝕀 -> 𝕀𝕀

Eh. He'd take it.

This was kind of like an ice bath, or a sauna, back in the olden days. Just rinsing himself in temporary discomfort. But it was good for him. It sounded a little nuts, but he was kind of liking the feeling of getting mauled now. Some part of his brain started treating it as progress.

Then he saw the red on his mini-map start to shift. He squinted up.

… It seemed he was attracting attention. The swarm was taking notice… was he about to get swamped? That great storm cloud was heaving, bowing inward… Oh dear.

Seems like it.

He pulled up his Axes. It was a little hard to see, what with all the giant bird bodies flashing everywhere, slicing the shit out of him, but he could barely make out the wall on either side. He wiped some blood out of his eyes—yes. There was barely enough room if he kept the Chains really short. Ten feet to either side. More tornado than Cyclone.

He started to spin. Sparks flashed. And like a great beast rousing from a long slumber, the Cyclone burst into being.

And thousands of Monsters funneled down to meet him. Thousands of Monsters, in the Level 50s and 60s… just how much essence was that?

His first revolution crushed the Crows that'd been doing such a good job of shredding him. They went down shrieking, bursting into flame and little fireballs, crisping to ash. He kept on turning. Second revolution. Third…

By the fourth revolution, the first wave of Monsters was almost on him. But by then a new wind had howled into the Gorge, revolving against the old one.

The old wind was sharp. The new wind had the Major Law of Absolute Sharpness.

The old wind was fierce. The new wind was loaded with the Major Law of Scorched Wrath.

The old wind was made by thousands of monsters blasting at once.

The new wind was made by Zane Walker.

The old touched down… and crushed the new. Black wind drowned out the red.

Zane drowned under an avalanche of feathers.

And this time they cut past the skin. They tore through the muscle. He was cut so many times, so many thousands of times, the sheer weight of it was enough—there were just too many. He was drowning. It got through his Spirit Steel Body. It cut to the bone.

𝕎𝕒𝕣𝕟𝕚𝕟𝕘: ℍ𝕖𝕒𝕝𝕥𝕙 𝕦𝕟𝕕𝕖𝕣 𝟟𝟝%!

For an instant it felt utterly overwhelming.

But he didn't stop his revolutions.

He bit down hard, gritted his teeth and forced his way through. He was burning white all over, but it wasn't enough. His Health ratcheted down, shot back up, swooped back down again—

Fifth revolution.

Zane screamed, heart running wild in his shredded chest, blood running hot even as it gushed out of him. He poured in everything he had.

Sixth.

A swirl of red clawed its way out from under that towering tornado of black.

And it fought back.