Oh, now this is interesting.
My passenger doesn’t react to the new skills, but this is… truly something.
Heretic is a trait, and it doesn’t seem terribly interesting at first. The others all do something passive, and they all have boosts that always apply. This is a one-time benefit, not something that’ll last forever.
But granting me new affinities is incredible. Prior to the application of Heretic, I had two magic affinities, General and Blood. The former is at stage 1, while the latter is at 2 and still hasn’t advanced further despite me having a plethora of blood-related skills now.
This new trait has given me two new affinities at stage 3. That means that the pool of skills I have access to has just ballooned. The power floor and ceiling of the skills I can receive have just been shifted upwards monumentally, and thus so has my overall ability. On top of all of that, a higher stage means
Levels aren’t the only number that matters.
You have advanced. When you are ready, I will lead you.
Somehow, my passenger seems… muted. It still speaks with the force of a thousand voices behind it, but the voices feel quieter, as if they’ve been beaten into submission.
I suppose that in some sense, they have. I can’t deny that its newfound meekness pleases me.
Right. I assume that my passenger is still shoving away the perception-dodging creatures, because I don’t sense any of them with my blood.
It looks like gaining these two affinities has awarded me with one skill apiece from them. Both Gold-tier, which is once again amazing.
I examine the list of skills from what I presume to be the Divine side first.
Smite (Legendary)
Tier: Gold
Embody the power of the heavens and strike with a focused blast of radiant energy upon a single enemy. Temporarily stuns target. Can be used independently as a ranged attack at distances up to 10 feet or as an addition to a melee attack. Damage increases against demons and beings with twisted souls.
Bless (Rare)
Tier: Gold
Draw upon divine favor. Touch an ally to ambue them with divine energy. Grants a +5 to all stats for one minute. Grants a minor amount of regeneration while active.
Retribution (Rare)
Judge those who strike you and return the favor. When you take damage, you may use this skill to reflect 100% of it back to the attacker.
Now this is a set of skills. Gone are the days of being able to easily throw aside half the skill list because of how abjectly useless it is. All three of these are extremely powerful skills.
Alright. Cost-benefit analysis. Smite is pure offense, Bless is an all-around boost, and Retribution is a defense that requires someone else to attack me. All three of them seem to be able to scale up with level, which is exactly what I’m looking for out of a skill.
Smite will likely increase its damage and range, while Bless will probably increase the numerical value of the boost as well as the duration. Retribution’s progression will almost certainly revolve around the percentage of damage returned.
I think I’ll go with Smite. It probably outclasses my current offensive skills by a fair amount. While Bless is theoretically the best, it’s significantly hampered by the fact that it’s to help an ally. I get that it’s a divine skill, so it’s meant to be used in a party, but taking it right now won’t help me at all.
Retribution is the worst by just a little bit. Though I imagine it’ll scale up a lot, I don’t really want to be taking tons of damage in order to deal damage of my own.
There’s still arguments to be made for either of the non-Smite skills, but every minute I spend dawdling here is a minute where Sapphire draws ever closer. If I regret it, I’ll just swap the skills out when I next level up.
New skill unlocked: Smite
That’s that done. Now, the Demonic side.
Corrupt (Legendary)
Tier: Gold
Spread demonic influence. The individual you activate this skill on becomes a vector of demonic corruption. Their access to the system will be modified. They will gain resistance to system-based skills. They will gain power upon consuming others. Inhibitions will be removed.
The last time I was offered Corrupt, it was as a special skill, but its abilities have been slightly toned down now that it’s a regular one. That holds interesting implications. I wonder if I can get Wraithfire as a regular skill with no cooldown someday.
Soulrend (Legendary)
Tier: Gold
Tear your opponent’s souls from their body, reducing their ability to recover. You may target up to five enemies within 100 feet; until the skill ends, you twist their souls. Alternatively, you may use this as an addition to a melee attack. Temporarily stuns enemy.
Abyssal Echo (Rare)
Tier: Gold
Force a shadow of the abyss upon your foes. Releases a shockwave that heavily disorients enemies and damages them with demonic energy.
Yeah, alright, it’s a little more cut and dry for this. I already know I’m not using Corrupt, since the last thing I need is more competitors. Abyssal Echo might have some interesting effects at later levels, but the skill description doesn’t tell me enough to convince me to use it.
Soulrend, on the other hand, reads like a demonic version of Smite that attacks the soul first and foremost. If there’s one thing I know about soul damage, it’s that it is genuinely crippling even if the target is immune to death by it. Experience has taught me that much.
On top of all of that, it synergizes with Smite. Dealing soul damage will make the divine-aligned skill deal increased damage. It’s a match made in… I hesitate to say heaven.
New skill unlocked: Soulrend
With my new skills selected, I return my attention to the space around me.
“Lead me to the Forgotten Queen,” I say. “Let’s get this over with.”
Antimemetic Resistance overriden!
My vision briefly flashes white, and I’m halfway to readying myself for another prolonged soulspace battle when it fades just as quickly as it came.
Some of your skills are lacking.
“You keep on popping into my system text,” I murmur. “Could you at least warn me? At some point, I’m going to think you are the system.”
I don’t expect a response, but surprisingly enough, one comes.
Very well. Is this sufficient?
It really is subdued, huh?
“Yes,” I say, finally looking at what’s changed thanks to my passenger’s influence.
The darkness around me is illuminated with a soft, unearthly greenish-blue glow. It doesn’t take long to realize where it’s coming from.
A network of bioluminescent tendrils rain down from the sky, jutting down from the ceiling of this level far above. They move slightly, and the patterns make it look like there’s a hundred thunderstorms going on at the same time, each of their lightning strikes caught at the moment of impact and frozen.
Over a hundred feet above me, the Forgotten Queen’s glowing body covers the entire ceiling.
It connects to its children.
Connects… oh.
Those lightning-shaped tendrils. None of them touch down towards any point near me. There are no antimemetic monsters around me.
Every anomaly in here is linked.
“Right then,” I say, looking upwards. “I just need to kill that, huh?”
No time to start like the present.
I slip into my Bloodpath and begin my ascent.
My passenger is eerily silent for once.
It does, however, appear to be augmenting my instincts. I keep myself from spreading my bloody parts too wide. If the Forgotten Queen disrupts my skill or even takes control of it, both real possibilities from an anomaly whose powers are unknown to me, I’d rather be in as intact a form as possible.
Appraise fails. No surprise there. That’s been pretty consistent with demonic beings and anomalies, and this thing likely falls into one of those categories.
A hundred feet becomes seventy, then fifty.
The anomaly finally reacts when I’m within striking distance of it.
Tendrils linking the massive fluorescent mass of flesh with its anomalous offspring jump upwards from the ground. The others are coming.
At the same time, the blue-green flesh starts to smoke, emitting mist that’s the same color as its previously-hidden body.
It quickly obscures the area around me, forcing me to rely on my blood-sense to keep myself oriented.
I think I’m about thirty feet away from its main body when the mist demonstrates its use.
Up until this point, the Forgotten Queen hasn’t demonstrated any abilities other than hiding itself in plain sight. I’ve honestly allowed myself to hope that that’s the only effective skill it has, but then my Bloodpath stops working.
I’ve gotten to the point that I’m no longer surprised when something can cancel this skill out. Bloodpath is strong, but it’s only Silver tier. Meanwhile, the enemies I’m facing definitely have skills that are above that. We’re not in the Crowned Islands anymore, and that means that Bronze and Silver tier skills alone just aren’t going to cut it.
What does catch me off guard is the fact that I don’t stop rising. My body feels oddly balanced, too, and that’s when I realize that I can’t feel the pull of gravity anymore.
Except it’s not just that. It’s not just gravity that’s missing—it’s something more. The rush of the air feels harsher than it should against my skin, and I realize what’s wrong.
The internal cohesion holding my body together isn’t there anymore.
My arms split from my body first, my tendons stretching and snapping as my softened body gives way. The flesh there starts to fall apart as well, the bones separating. The rest of my body starts to crumple in on itself as well, the various forces acting on it beginning the process of dissolving me.
I’m still in one piece, technically, but if this anti-cohesion field lasts much longer, I probably won’t be.
I resist the urge to chuckle, mostly because I know that doing so will likely not be good for my face.
I hope this works. If it doesn’t, I suppose this god is dying with me.
I push as much power into a single activation of a skill as I can, overloading the Silver skill with far too much magic.
And then I dissolve into blood.
The individual particles of my Bloodpath start to come apart just like my body was, but that doesn’t matter at all.
Thanks to my increased points in Magic (Meta), I can still use skills while in this state.
Shape Blood doesn’t work to create any form of blade. Instead, when I direct blood to create a solid shape, it just forms a larger, amorphous blob that starts to separate as well.
Though everything is tinted red on top of the existing bluish-green that the Forgotten Queen is so generously providing through some anomalous means, I can sense and see the presence of other entities in this place.
Whatever my passenger did to me, it’s drastically increased my resistance to the perception-blocking effects. I can see rats and tigers and deformed half-beats of all shapes and sizes, each of them struggling through the mist.
There’s dwellers here, too. They all look the same, so I can’t tell if any of them are the ones that I’ve interacted with before, but there’s nearly a dozen of them here.
And they’re dying. While I have the Bloodpath to hide from the worst effects of this field, the dwellers and the anomalies don’t. Even though the former have survived on this level and the latter were birthed by the Queen itself, they all start to liquefy. Their bodies fall apart, and then the broken pieces vibrate apart. The pieces of pieces break as well, gradually increasing in intensity until each body liquefies into a bloody slurry.
It’s not the most pleasant to watch, but Shape Blood does eventually start working on the mess of blood. I suppose the restriction of the blood having to be outside the body stops applying when the body and blood are pretty much the same thing.
Though I can’t form a solid attack, I can still throw blood upwards. With no sense of gravity and no real vision of my target, I’m more than a little disoriented.
I do, however, have a lot of blood to work with.
If I can’t tell which direction to attack in, I’ll just attack in every direction.
The liquefied corpses of several dozen previously-living entities swirl around me, courtesy of an enhanced usage of Shape Blood, and I push them outwards. Though it’s not a particularly powerful attack, it’s an attack nonetheless.
As it turns out, the direction that I thought was “in front” of me is actually directly up. I redirect every blob of blood I control towards it as soon as I’m able to.
They splash harmlessly against hardened anomalous flesh, but that’s all I need.
Each of them is a shitty attack, but they only need to be an attack to qualify for my two new skills.
I strike out with Soulrend first. Pure black energy strikes out from the disparate blood that I’m currently composed of, linking me and my attack for an instant, and then it leaves me entirely and coalesces on my target.
The sound of the Forgotten Queen screeching echoes through the level, annihilating what few remaining intact creatures still remain in its mist. I wonder if any of the dwellers below are suffering from it.
My Soulrend doesn’t do as much as I’d hoped. Though it audibly inflicts damage, I don’t see any signs of its lasting impact.
A god’s soul is not so easy to strike down.
We’ll see about that. I don’t have a mouth to respond to my passenger with, but I trust my thoughts to be enough to tell it off.
A moment later, I activate Smite for the first time.
When I was selecting them, I noted that the two skills I picked are pretty similar to each other. Activating them, however, feels nothing alike. Soulrend comes naturally to me, no more difficult to use than, say, Shape Blood.
On the other hand, Smite feels wrong. I have the affinity for it, and it’s at a higher stage than any other affinity I have, so I meet the qualifications. I have enough magic in my reserves to cast it. I have the desire.
But using it makes me feel as if I’m being torn apart from the inside out. Even in my blood form, it hurts me on a level so deep that I almost fear it indicates soul damage. It’s not, but the sensation is so close to the worst of it that it actually guides me to realize what’s happening.
Smite punishes those with broken souls, and mine has been broken and mended and broken and mended until it’s become unrecognizable.
I hope it’s not like this every time.
I watch as radiant white energy pierces the mist. Whereas the darkness of the Soulrend simply vanished into the anti-cohesion field and struck out at the Forgotten Queen, the Smite parts the blue-green clouds and illuminates the midnight darkness of the level, revealing the form of the anomaly above.
If my soul is broken, the Forgotten Queen’s has to be shattered. It’s an anomaly, after all. Something that rejects the system, refuses to be categorized by it.
Smite connects, and the light intensifies, burning with the force of a thousand suns behind it.
Earlier, I thought the Forgotten Queen was screaming.
Compared to this, that was a whisper.
The sound of its screech is so loud that it physically blasts my bloody form back, reducing it to mist and its component droplets. A hundred thousand different parts of me start to rain down towards the ground, disparate and torn, but I can pull myself back together.
If anything else was alive up there with me, it isn’t now. The weather down here is looking like a light shower of blood, gore, and liquefied corpse. How pleasant.
Above me, light and darkness coalesce on the same impact sight, and the Forgotten Queen writhes. For all its offensive power, for all its stealth, it doesn’t appear to be very resistant to my attacks.
Maybe a reminder of what even a humble little demonic girl can do is in order.
Smite and Soulrend detonate on each other, radiant white and overpowering black twisting and curling around each other before the two detonate.
Smite advanced to level 2!
Soulrend advanced to level 2!
For a brief, terrifying second, there is nothing at all in the space above us. For that instant, I stare into a void that is less than pure darkness, less than the empty soulspaces I’ve been in.
I stare into nothingness, and I get the distinct impression that something stares back.
The moment passes, and the Forgotten Queen lets out one final screech as my two skills strike it straight to its core.
When I reassemble myself, my body is only about half-intact, but I’ll recover. With Demonic Heritage and my new Restore Self, getting back on my feet is much more doable than it has been before.
Above me, the ceiling begins to crumble.
Objective: Exterminate the infestation [COMPLETE]
Through a combination attack that exploits its greatest weaknesses, you have defeated the Forgotten Queen.
3000 XP rewarded!
You have advanced to level 16!
You have advanced to level 17!
All stats increased by 2.
You have gained 6 stat points.
Class evolution acquired!
Relentless Demon -> Divine Demon
Due to your actions, you may exchange up to 1 of your existing skills with skills from the following list.
Electromagnetism (Silver)
Dominate Monster (Silver)
Corrupt (Gold)
Bless (Gold)
Abyssal Echo (Gold)
Retribution (Gold)
You may also gain a random skill from your Divine or Demonic affinity.
Oh, now this is interesting.
My passenger doesn’t react to the new skills, but this is… truly something.
Heretic is a trait, and it doesn’t seem terribly interesting at first. The others all do something passive, and they all have boosts that always apply. This is a one-time benefit, not something that’ll last forever.
But granting me new affinities is incredible. Prior to the application of Heretic, I had two magic affinities, General and Blood. The former is at stage 1, while the latter is at 2 and still hasn’t advanced further despite me having a plethora of blood-related skills now.
This new trait has given me two new affinities at stage 3. That means that the pool of skills I have access to has just ballooned. The power floor and ceiling of the skills I can receive have just been shifted upwards monumentally, and thus so has my overall ability. On top of all of that, a higher stage means
Levels aren’t the only number that matters.
You have advanced. When you are ready, I will lead you.
Somehow, my passenger seems… muted. It still speaks with the force of a thousand voices behind it, but the voices feel quieter, as if they’ve been beaten into submission.
I suppose that in some sense, they have. I can’t deny that its newfound meekness pleases me.
Right. I assume that my passenger is still shoving away the perception-dodging creatures, because I don’t sense any of them with my blood.
It looks like gaining these two affinities has awarded me with one skill apiece from them. Both Gold-tier, which is once again amazing.
I examine the list of skills from what I presume to be the Divine side first.
Smite (Legendary)
Tier: Gold
Embody the power of the heavens and strike with a focused blast of radiant energy upon a single enemy. Temporarily stuns target. Can be used independently as a ranged attack at distances up to 10 feet or as an addition to a melee attack. Damage increases against demons and beings with twisted souls.
Bless (Rare)
Tier: Gold
Draw upon divine favor. Touch an ally to ambue them with divine energy. Grants a +5 to all stats for one minute. Grants a minor amount of regeneration while active.
Retribution (Rare)
Judge those who strike you and return the favor. When you take damage, you may use this skill to reflect 100% of it back to the attacker.
Now this is a set of skills. Gone are the days of being able to easily throw aside half the skill list because of how abjectly useless it is. All three of these are extremely powerful skills.
Alright. Cost-benefit analysis. Smite is pure offense, Bless is an all-around boost, and Retribution is a defense that requires someone else to attack me. All three of them seem to be able to scale up with level, which is exactly what I’m looking for out of a skill.
Smite will likely increase its damage and range, while Bless will probably increase the numerical value of the boost as well as the duration. Retribution’s progression will almost certainly revolve around the percentage of damage returned.
I think I’ll go with Smite. It probably outclasses my current offensive skills by a fair amount. While Bless is theoretically the best, it’s significantly hampered by the fact that it’s to help an ally. I get that it’s a divine skill, so it’s meant to be used in a party, but taking it right now won’t help me at all.
Retribution is the worst by just a little bit. Though I imagine it’ll scale up a lot, I don’t really want to be taking tons of damage in order to deal damage of my own.
There’s still arguments to be made for either of the non-Smite skills, but every minute I spend dawdling here is a minute where Sapphire draws ever closer. If I regret it, I’ll just swap the skills out when I next level up.
New skill unlocked: Smite
That’s that done. Now, the Demonic side.
Corrupt (Legendary)
Tier: Gold
Spread demonic influence. The individual you activate this skill on becomes a vector of demonic corruption. Their access to the system will be modified. They will gain resistance to system-based skills. They will gain power upon consuming others. Inhibitions will be removed.
The last time I was offered Corrupt, it was as a special skill, but its abilities have been slightly toned down now that it’s a regular one. That holds interesting implications. I wonder if I can get Wraithfire as a regular skill with no cooldown someday.
Soulrend (Legendary)
Tier: Gold
Tear your opponent’s souls from their body, reducing their ability to recover. You may target up to five enemies within 100 feet; until the skill ends, you twist their souls. Alternatively, you may use this as an addition to a melee attack. Temporarily stuns enemy.
Abyssal Echo (Rare)
Tier: Gold
Force a shadow of the abyss upon your foes. Releases a shockwave that heavily disorients enemies and damages them with demonic energy.
Yeah, alright, it’s a little more cut and dry for this. I already know I’m not using Corrupt, since the last thing I need is more competitors. Abyssal Echo might have some interesting effects at later levels, but the skill description doesn’t tell me enough to convince me to use it.
Soulrend, on the other hand, reads like a demonic version of Smite that attacks the soul first and foremost. If there’s one thing I know about soul damage, it’s that it is genuinely crippling even if the target is immune to death by it. Experience has taught me that much.
On top of all of that, it synergizes with Smite. Dealing soul damage will make the divine-aligned skill deal increased damage. It’s a match made in… I hesitate to say heaven.
New skill unlocked: Soulrend
With my new skills selected, I return my attention to the space around me.
“Lead me to the Forgotten Queen,” I say. “Let’s get this over with.”
Antimemetic Resistance overriden!
My vision briefly flashes white, and I’m halfway to readying myself for another prolonged soulspace battle when it fades just as quickly as it came.
Some of your skills are lacking.
“You keep on popping into my system text,” I murmur. “Could you at least warn me? At some point, I’m going to think you are the system.”
I don’t expect a response, but surprisingly enough, one comes.
Very well. Is this sufficient?
It really is subdued, huh?
“Yes,” I say, finally looking at what’s changed thanks to my passenger’s influence.
The darkness around me is illuminated with a soft, unearthly greenish-blue glow. It doesn’t take long to realize where it’s coming from.
A network of bioluminescent tendrils rain down from the sky, jutting down from the ceiling of this level far above. They move slightly, and the patterns make it look like there’s a hundred thunderstorms going on at the same time, each of their lightning strikes caught at the moment of impact and frozen.
Over a hundred feet above me, the Forgotten Queen’s glowing body covers the entire ceiling.
It connects to its children.
Connects… oh.
Those lightning-shaped tendrils. None of them touch down towards any point near me. There are no antimemetic monsters around me.
Every anomaly in here is linked.
“Right then,” I say, looking upwards. “I just need to kill that, huh?”
No time to start like the present.
I slip into my Bloodpath and begin my ascent.
My passenger is eerily silent for once.
It does, however, appear to be augmenting my instincts. I keep myself from spreading my bloody parts too wide. If the Forgotten Queen disrupts my skill or even takes control of it, both real possibilities from an anomaly whose powers are unknown to me, I’d rather be in as intact a form as possible.
Appraise fails. No surprise there. That’s been pretty consistent with demonic beings and anomalies, and this thing likely falls into one of those categories.
A hundred feet becomes seventy, then fifty.
The anomaly finally reacts when I’m within striking distance of it.
Tendrils linking the massive fluorescent mass of flesh with its anomalous offspring jump upwards from the ground. The others are coming.
At the same time, the blue-green flesh starts to smoke, emitting mist that’s the same color as its previously-hidden body.
It quickly obscures the area around me, forcing me to rely on my blood-sense to keep myself oriented.
I think I’m about thirty feet away from its main body when the mist demonstrates its use.
Up until this point, the Forgotten Queen hasn’t demonstrated any abilities other than hiding itself in plain sight. I’ve honestly allowed myself to hope that that’s the only effective skill it has, but then my Bloodpath stops working.
I’ve gotten to the point that I’m no longer surprised when something can cancel this skill out. Bloodpath is strong, but it’s only Silver tier. Meanwhile, the enemies I’m facing definitely have skills that are above that. We’re not in the Crowned Islands anymore, and that means that Bronze and Silver tier skills alone just aren’t going to cut it.
What does catch me off guard is the fact that I don’t stop rising. My body feels oddly balanced, too, and that’s when I realize that I can’t feel the pull of gravity anymore.
Except it’s not just that. It’s not just gravity that’s missing—it’s something more. The rush of the air feels harsher than it should against my skin, and I realize what’s wrong.
The internal cohesion holding my body together isn’t there anymore.
My arms split from my body first, my tendons stretching and snapping as my softened body gives way. The flesh there starts to fall apart as well, the bones separating. The rest of my body starts to crumple in on itself as well, the various forces acting on it beginning the process of dissolving me.
I’m still in one piece, technically, but if this anti-cohesion field lasts much longer, I probably won’t be.
I resist the urge to chuckle, mostly because I know that doing so will likely not be good for my face.
I hope this works. If it doesn’t, I suppose this god is dying with me.
I push as much power into a single activation of a skill as I can, overloading the Silver skill with far too much magic.
And then I dissolve into blood.
The individual particles of my Bloodpath start to come apart just like my body was, but that doesn’t matter at all.
Thanks to my increased points in Magic (Meta), I can still use skills while in this state.
Shape Blood doesn’t work to create any form of blade. Instead, when I direct blood to create a solid shape, it just forms a larger, amorphous blob that starts to separate as well.
Though everything is tinted red on top of the existing bluish-green that the Forgotten Queen is so generously providing through some anomalous means, I can sense and see the presence of other entities in this place.
Whatever my passenger did to me, it’s drastically increased my resistance to the perception-blocking effects. I can see rats and tigers and deformed half-beats of all shapes and sizes, each of them struggling through the mist.
There’s dwellers here, too. They all look the same, so I can’t tell if any of them are the ones that I’ve interacted with before, but there’s nearly a dozen of them here.
And they’re dying. While I have the Bloodpath to hide from the worst effects of this field, the dwellers and the anomalies don’t. Even though the former have survived on this level and the latter were birthed by the Queen itself, they all start to liquefy. Their bodies fall apart, and then the broken pieces vibrate apart. The pieces of pieces break as well, gradually increasing in intensity until each body liquefies into a bloody slurry.
It’s not the most pleasant to watch, but Shape Blood does eventually start working on the mess of blood. I suppose the restriction of the blood having to be outside the body stops applying when the body and blood are pretty much the same thing.
Though I can’t form a solid attack, I can still throw blood upwards. With no sense of gravity and no real vision of my target, I’m more than a little disoriented.
I do, however, have a lot of blood to work with.
If I can’t tell which direction to attack in, I’ll just attack in every direction.
The liquefied corpses of several dozen previously-living entities swirl around me, courtesy of an enhanced usage of Shape Blood, and I push them outwards. Though it’s not a particularly powerful attack, it’s an attack nonetheless.
As it turns out, the direction that I thought was “in front” of me is actually directly up. I redirect every blob of blood I control towards it as soon as I’m able to.
They splash harmlessly against hardened anomalous flesh, but that’s all I need.
Each of them is a shitty attack, but they only need to be an attack to qualify for my two new skills.
I strike out with Soulrend first. Pure black energy strikes out from the disparate blood that I’m currently composed of, linking me and my attack for an instant, and then it leaves me entirely and coalesces on my target.
The sound of the Forgotten Queen screeching echoes through the level, annihilating what few remaining intact creatures still remain in its mist. I wonder if any of the dwellers below are suffering from it.
My Soulrend doesn’t do as much as I’d hoped. Though it audibly inflicts damage, I don’t see any signs of its lasting impact.
A god’s soul is not so easy to strike down.
We’ll see about that. I don’t have a mouth to respond to my passenger with, but I trust my thoughts to be enough to tell it off.
A moment later, I activate Smite for the first time.
When I was selecting them, I noted that the two skills I picked are pretty similar to each other. Activating them, however, feels nothing alike. Soulrend comes naturally to me, no more difficult to use than, say, Shape Blood.
On the other hand, Smite feels wrong. I have the affinity for it, and it’s at a higher stage than any other affinity I have, so I meet the qualifications. I have enough magic in my reserves to cast it. I have the desire.
But using it makes me feel as if I’m being torn apart from the inside out. Even in my blood form, it hurts me on a level so deep that I almost fear it indicates soul damage. It’s not, but the sensation is so close to the worst of it that it actually guides me to realize what’s happening.
Smite punishes those with broken souls, and mine has been broken and mended and broken and mended until it’s become unrecognizable.
I hope it’s not like this every time.
I watch as radiant white energy pierces the mist. Whereas the darkness of the Soulrend simply vanished into the anti-cohesion field and struck out at the Forgotten Queen, the Smite parts the blue-green clouds and illuminates the midnight darkness of the level, revealing the form of the anomaly above.
If my soul is broken, the Forgotten Queen’s has to be shattered. It’s an anomaly, after all. Something that rejects the system, refuses to be categorized by it.
Smite connects, and the light intensifies, burning with the force of a thousand suns behind it.
Earlier, I thought the Forgotten Queen was screaming.
Compared to this, that was a whisper.
The sound of its screech is so loud that it physically blasts my bloody form back, reducing it to mist and its component droplets. A hundred thousand different parts of me start to rain down towards the ground, disparate and torn, but I can pull myself back together.
If anything else was alive up there with me, it isn’t now. The weather down here is looking like a light shower of blood, gore, and liquefied corpse. How pleasant.
Above me, light and darkness coalesce on the same impact sight, and the Forgotten Queen writhes. For all its offensive power, for all its stealth, it doesn’t appear to be very resistant to my attacks.
Maybe a reminder of what even a humble little demonic girl can do is in order.
Smite and Soulrend detonate on each other, radiant white and overpowering black twisting and curling around each other before the two detonate.
Smite advanced to level 2!
Soulrend advanced to level 2!
For a brief, terrifying second, there is nothing at all in the space above us. For that instant, I stare into a void that is less than pure darkness, less than the empty soulspaces I’ve been in.
I stare into nothingness, and I get the distinct impression that something stares back.
The moment passes, and the Forgotten Queen lets out one final screech as my two skills strike it straight to its core.
When I reassemble myself, my body is only about half-intact, but I’ll recover. With Demonic Heritage and my new Restore Self, getting back on my feet is much more doable than it has been before.
Above me, the ceiling begins to crumble.
Objective: Exterminate the infestation [COMPLETE]
Through a combination attack that exploits its greatest weaknesses, you have defeated the Forgotten Queen.
3000 XP rewarded!
You have advanced to level 16!
You have advanced to level 17!
All stats increased by 2.
You have gained 6 stat points.
Class evolution acquired!
Relentless Demon -> Divine Demon
Due to your actions, you may exchange up to 1 of your existing skills with skills from the following list.
Electromagnetism (Silver)
Dominate Monster (Silver)
Corrupt (Gold)
Bless (Gold)
Abyssal Echo (Gold)
Retribution (Gold)
You may also gain a random skill from your Divine or Demonic affinity.
