Mage Tank-Chapter 248: Durgeons and… (4)

Your Physical Magic skill has increased to Level 29!

Varrin hadn’t used any skills during Hep’s ‘introduction’ but Bleeding was based in the Physical school, and he had many bonuses to that. The Dungeon was generous with its skillups, it seemed.

Varrin dismissed the notification and toggled them off. He didn’t want even a small glimmer in the corner of his eye distracting him.

Hep evaluated him for a beat, then shifted his sword so that it was again resting on his shoulder. He dropped his injured left hand from the hilt and a tower shield appeared over it, ruby in color like his armor, but a shade darker.

Hep shot forward, shield raised, and arrived in front of Varrin faster than the sound of his thundering movement. The temperature rose dramatically as Hep approached, as though the sun itself were charging. Varrin drew Kazandak and stepped left, striking the shield and turning it away before the air ahead of the shield exploded, a shockwave kicking up embers and ash for a hundred feet.

Hep moved with Varrin’s strike against his shield, swinging his blade down in a diagonal. Varrin stepped into the hit and brought Kazandak down across Hep’s chest. The ruby man’s sword lost power from the close angle, and while Varrin’s skin was seared, the blade didn’t make it past his regalia. The hit from Kazandak pushed Hep off balance, who was forced to adjust his stance back a step. Varrin followed up with Sanguine Strike, his blade alight with crimson mana as its edge sought to tear a river of blood from Hep’s veins.

Reptilian wings, the same color as Hep’s armor, appeared on his back, and the man’s imbalance disappeared. He brought the point of his longsword up to meet Varrin’s wrist, who was forced to adjust his swing to keep the limb from being skewered. The attack bounced off of Hep’s pauldron and the skill failed.

The pair exchanged several more times, their talent with the blade evenly matched, their armor and resilience protecting them from what glancing blows made it through. Hep pushed forward aggressively, his blade never ceasing its journey through the air to seek out Varrin’s neck, heart, liver, and joints. Varrin turned Hep’s strikes against him, matching the man’s power and ferocity with dangerous parries and reversals that quested for major veins and arteries.

The heat in the air continued to rise throughout, until finally, the first bead of sweat ran down Varrin’s face. Hep’s shield disappeared and he took his weapon up in two hands again. Lightning poured out from the blade and wreathed Hep’s body. It arced out to punch into Varrin’s armor, but like the heat, it wasn’t enough. Varrin fought past the uncomfortable buzzing coursing through his limbs and watched Hep’s blade fall. He waited for his moment, then dodged.

Varrin disappeared, then reappeared at Hep’s back. One of Varrin’s soul clones remained behind, and Hep’s blade passed harmlessly through it without resistance. The clone then caught Hep off guard by throwing a jab into his face.

The attack was hardly enough to hurt the ruby warrior, but Hep was momentarily surprised by the appearance of the spectral double and his head flinched back when the fist clanked against his helm. Kazandak found the side of Hep’s neck, and the mana from Sanguine Strike connected to make a ragged mess of Hep’s jugular.

Hep rushed forward through the clone as it dispersed it into a haze of spiritual mist. He spun and locked onto Varrin, who held his sword at the ready rather than giving chase. Hep held a hand up to his gorget, beneath which a gout of blood freed itself from his body with every pulse of his heart. Even had he not had a heart, the blood still would have found its release under the pull of Varrin’s technique.

“What was that?” asked Hep. Smoke began to flow out from his helm, and Varrin felt his connection to the man’s wounded neck fade.

“Which part?” asked Varrin. He began to stalk forward as they spoke, looking for the next opening.

“There was another you standing there for a moment.”

“You could see that?” said Varrin. “I have found that many cannot.”

“The soul does not often hide from those who know how to look,” said Hep. “You have a Physical attunement.”

“I do,” said Varrin. He suspected that was the entire reason he’d been brought to the Physical Dungeon, so it was no secret worth keeping. “What of it?”

Hep tapped his neck where Varrin had struck. “Your affinity for blood is good, but your connection with that copy was better. It’s unusual, for one not attuned with Spiritual. If I hadn’t smelled out your attunement myself, I’d think you were lying.”

Varrin paused his approach, reminded of an errant comment from more than a year beforehand. They were words from the Operator; the monstrous humanoid working for the System his party had met in Eschendur. It had said that Varrin had “an evolving Spiritual attunement.” Amidst all the other outrageous claims the thing had made, its mistake over Varrin’s attunement had been left without comment.

“Does this change anything?” asked Varrin. He didn’t think it did. He only focused on Physical and Spiritual Magic, both of which could be practiced so long as he had either attunement. Physical gave him access to Dimensional Magic as well, whereas Spiritual would add Divine to his options. Either way, he had no interest in a third school, so it was ultimately meaningless.

Hep adjusted his sword grip, remaining silent for a long moment. Lightning continually leapt from his body to strike the ground around him, kicking up sparks and ash as the air swam from his weapon’s heat. “Nah,” he said. “I was just curious.”

Varrin charged, and their dance resumed. Hep took to the air on his wings and Varrin followed, his gaudy cloak sparkling in the firelight. As the seconds passed, Varrin landed more and more blows, sending a rain of blood down to sizzle on the coals below. With each strike, Hep’s heat rose a degree, his lightning made Varrin’s muscles buzz just a bit harder, his blows were a fraction more forceful. The man was building Rage, and Varrin felt he was being toyed with.

Hep was capable of cauterizing his wounds to staunch the bleeding that Varrin applied. Even so, the man must have lost gallons of blood by this point. Delvers and mana monsters could bleed freely for much longer than a mundane organism, but there were still limits. Unless Hep was mostly blood, there wasn’t enough room inside him for all that Varrin drained.

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“You are so technical!” shouted Hep as their blades crossed. A snarl had entered his voice, the statement becoming an accusation. “The skill of a genius, but the heart of a construct!”

Hep swung with yet more force and speed, releasing an inhuman roar as he did so. Varrin’s block was too slow and the blade connected with his chest. The blade cut through Varrin’s armor, and a gout of flame filled his cuirass. Lightning followed, causing Varrin’s muscles to seize as the strike sent him hurtling away. He struck the ground a hundred feet below like a comet, creating a rising plume of ash and smoke.

From impact to impact, Varrin spent the second of travel time in thought. He’d been managing his own Rage, keeping the stacking buff from exceeding his threshold of 10. Any higher, and he’d become afflicted with Berserk. While endlessly stacking Rage would make him more powerful, it would only allow him to end the fight in one way.

Hep, on the other hand, seemed able to cultivate his Rage endlessly. The man grew more wild with each strike, more frequently abandoning his defense to land a hit, but he wasn’t ruthlessly pursuing victory. Even as Varrin crashed to the ground, Hep did not follow. The ruby man had not been overtaken by his lust for battle, but instead stared down at Varrin imperiously.

The duelist in Varrin hadn’t been taking the fight that seriously. Berserk was for battle, whereas this was more akin to a spar. But Hep’s last strike had pierced Varrin’s chest, two inches from his heart. Such a wound might not kill him anymore, but it told him that Hep perceived this situation very differently. Hep wasn’t administering a test, he was playing with Varrin like prey before a meal.

Varrin floated to his feet in the small crater he’d made and met Hep’s eyes.

“Where is your passion?” Hep asked with a hint of disgust. The question came between heavy breaths, ones that owed their birth to the thrill, rather than exertion.

Varrin decided to give Hep what he asked for, and to allow the man the honor of shouldering its consequences.

Varrin used Enrage, and his helm came to life with a pair of burning azure eyes. His muscles swelled, his heart rate quickened, and his head emptied of all thoughts save but for one–killing Hep.

Varrin used Adrenaline Rush to burn a Haste charge, then burst from the ground at nearly three times the speed of sound. Hep brought his sword up for a counter, unphased by Varrin’s sudden acceleration, but Varrin disappeared before Hep could strike. Another soul clone appeared in his place, but this one wasn’t a phantom looking for a sucker punch. This was a fully realized ancestral spirit, with all the skill that a century of Delver heritage had imparted onto the young Ravvenblaq.

Varrin had long ago used Damage Analysis to learn that Hep was extraordinarily resilient to Physical damage. If this entity was the arbiter of the Physical Dungeon, that only made sense, and Varrin had seen it as a challenge. But Hep’s defenses had only grown as they fought.

Hep ignored lethal amounts of blood loss even as his flesh became ever harder to cut. By this point, only the strength lent to Varrin through Rage could overcome the man’s absurd tolerances. However, Varrin was not beholden to Physical attacks, despite whatever this Dungeon ‘suggested’, and he could cut far deeper than any man’s flesh would allow.

The ancestral clone turned Hep’s blade aside as Varrin appeared behind him and used Soul Strike. Kazandak severed itself in two such that it could sever the world twice over. A spectral copy of Kazandak followed behind the physical blade as Varrin cut through Hep in both body and soul. While Hep’s armor and skin proved stalwart against Kazandak’s material edge, the spiritual blade dug deep, and Hep roared as Varrin struck his first serious blow.

Hep batted the clone’s sword aside and turned to face Varrin, but took another phantom blade in the back for his disregard of the spirit. Before Hep could orient on Varrin, the younger man vanished again. Varrin used Wraithwalk to step into the Spiritual realm, invisible and incorporeal as he walked through Hep and delivered another Soul Strike into the man’s increasingly ruined back.

Varrin’s skill ended the moment he landed his hit and Hep spun, blade slicing around him as both fire and lightning filled the air. Varrin had no time to dodge the retaliation, and Hep’s sword took him in the ribs. Varrin was blown across the sky, tumbling for over a hundred feet before he could right himself. When he looked up, Hep was already on him again.

The caldera’s master had flipped his sword, now holding it by the blade. He swung with a giant’s might and brought the pommel across Varrin’s helm. The heavy guard smashed into Varrin’s head, sending the world into a colorful blur as he became insensate. A distant feeling of halting jerks was the only awareness he had of hitting the ground again, tumbling across the fiery landscape a half-dozen times.

Varrin came to in less than a second, finding his soul clone standing over him and exchanging with Hep. The ruby warrior’s power had grown again, but the spiritual entity ignored the strikes. Its body was unaffected when Hep’s blade swung through it, and Hep only paid it enough heed to knock its blade away as he strode towards his real target.

Varrin flew up and activated Second Wind, burning a chunk of stamina to recover a large portion of the health he’d lost, then he spawned another soul clone while he charged at Hep. Two clones that lasted a minute each was his current limit, and they drew power for their techniques from his own stamina pool. With both out, it put a hard timer on the fight. Still, Hep had taken several gruesome hits on top of the blood loss he’d been suffering. Even Arlo wouldn’t be up and walking around after the abuse this man had endured, had the flamboyant man not been immune to Bleeding.

Even so, Hep looked more than capable of going further, and Varrin had no room in his thoughts to consider his opponent’s injuries; not any further than how Varrin could exploit them to end the fight. He would lay down all his cards and see where they fell.

Varrin landed outside of Hep’s reach, creating a triangle formation around Hep with his clones. Then he extended Kazandak to its full length, his clones mirroring the action with their spectral copies of the blade, and all three activated Cyclone.

The world around Hep became a whirlwind of razor edges for fifty feet in all directions. Three grinding wheels of 20-foot blades thrashed with Hep at their center, cutting him through in both body and spirit.

Hep wrapped himself in his wings, their hardened scales and tough membranes seeking to add another layer of protection, but they were shredded like so much meat. The attack lasted only an instant, but by the time it was done, Hep’s soul churned and his body wept a grown-man’s worth of blood every second.

Hep spread his wings outward, crimson streams spiraling into the air with arcs of electricity dancing between them. Varrin recovered from his skill and was set to use an even more powerful technique. He feared it was incomplete, but there was no room for doubt here. Varrin spun his sword until a gleaming circle began to appear in the air before him.

Then, the world erupted.

The ground kicked Varrin from below, driven forth by a sixty-foot-wide geyser of molten rock. It launched him hundreds of feet into the air in an instant, and fire hotter than any Varrin had ever felt embraced him.

Varrin flew away from the detonation, but the fire clung to him, eating at his skin and threatening to boil his organs. His health ticked down steadily, but Varrin had no mind to pay it. Behind him was a growing mushroom cloud spawned by the detonation. A fountain of lava continued to burst toward the sky, only to fall back upon the land as molten rain.

The endless smoke above the cataclysmic site turned and swirled. It grew bright with frequent flashes of blinding white light. The thunder became an omnipresent series of explosions and rolling pressure waves.

Then Hep fell upon him as a bolt of lightning from above.