Rune Seeker - Book 3 Chapter 19: The Empress Of The Hill

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She must have a long cooldown on the ability that causes Disoriented.

Not that Hiral wanted to know how long that cooldown was, so he charged ahead. One of the smaller ants stepped in front of him, then lost its head as he flipped over and swung at the same time. As soon as his feet were on the ground again, the Chord pulled him into a crouch. He swept out low, cleaving ant legs in a circle around him.

Flickering red and yellow erupted from the sides of his vision—Yanily and Seena starting on the adds—as he leapt to his feet to reach the Empress. Swing, swing. Two more ants fell, stacking up Killing Spree+, and then Hiral was within fifty feet of the Boss, her huge eyes glaring down at him. Just one more step, and he’d…

Wham!

He hit something in the air so hard he bounced backwards, the Chord turning discordant in his ears, and he landed on his back.

Ouch. What was that?

Leaving the greatsword where it lay on the ground, Hiral pushed himself to his feet—again—and called on Death Knell and Stormstrike as the ants scurried in from all around. A few quick gestures cut down the closest of them with little trouble, but his eyes were on the warped dome of air. That was what he’d hit.

It wasn’t rising heat; it was some kind of shield of pure force. And he’d found out the hard way he couldn’t go through it, but what about his weapons? Planting his feet, Hiral thrust both hands forward, the two swords whipping through the air and shooting straight for the Empress’s wide torso.

Thunk, thunk. Both weapons bounced off the barely visible field, the reverberations actually shooting up Hiral’s arms even though he wasn’t holding the swords. That didn’t work. Still, he twisted and punched, using the weapons to thin the herd of swarming ants.

“I can’t teleport through,” Seeyela said, appearing near him with a bamf and driving her daggers through the head of an unfortunate ant. “Can you do anything?”

“Tried,” Hiral said. “It stopped me cold. Is the Empress creating the field?”

“No, it’s two ants up on the balcony,” Yanily said through the chat. “Big asses, weird patterns. You can’t miss them.”

“Balcony?” Hiral asked, cutting through two more ants, then leaving the weapons to float by his sides while he formed Runes of Impact around his fists.

“There!” Seeyela said beside him at the same time a fireball exploded against the shield, a trio of scorched ant bodies landing at the Boss’s feet.

Following Seeyela’s pointed dagger, Hiral spotted what the others had seen. The creature was almost more beetle-shaped than ant, with a huge abdomen that seemed to make up seventy-five percent of its body’s length. And now that he was looking, that weird pattern Yanily was talking about appeared far too much like Hiral’s own Rune of Rejection to be coincidental.

Which means the ants have chosen something to reject. Everything?

But that couldn’t be true, as Hiral spotted an ant speeding through one side of the boundary without even slowing. It lets other ants pass—and their special abilities, by the looks of the acid sprays.

“Seena, can you control where your explosive pets go?” Hiral asked as he dodged a snapping set of mandibles. Narrowly avoiding the attack, he left a Lost Echo in his place, and the resulting explosion took the ant’s head clean off.

“A bit. Why would I… Oh!” she said, quickly catching his meaning. “On it.”

While Seena focused on guiding her walking bombs where they needed to go, Hiral turned his attention to the crowd of ants around them. The Royal Brood Guards were by far the strongest of the lot, but the acid-shooting ones were annoying. The party members spent as much time avoiding the relatively slow-moving acid as they did killing other ants. As long as those Artillery Ants were safely hidden behind the shield, however, there wasn’t much they could do about them.

So, as Hiral’s Ever Changing+ counted down towards zero, he let the runes fade and drew his RHCs. Being so much weaker than he was, the ants within about a hundred feet easily fell under the thrall of the Chord—that had to be the range of the influence—and practically lined themselves up to be shot. With Left and Right also out cutting through the almost endless stream of monsters, buffs and debuffs came and went every few seconds. A Piercing Shot literally punched through a dozen ants before cracking into the wall, while the Ghost-Web Venom melted a pair of nearby Royal Brood Guards.

“Get ready!” Seena shouted, and a duo of violent explosions lit up the room on both sides of the Empress. As fire reached for the ceiling—and incinerated the beetle-like ants—the shimmering dome around the Empress faded from view.

“Let’s do this, Seeyela,” Hiral said, pulling his triggers at the Empress. The bolts crossed the distance in the blink of an eye to smack into her wide chest. With the hit, the Boss’s head jerked back in surprise, and a very long health bar appeared above her head.

Seeyela Bamf’d to appear on the monster’s back, both Fangs of the Lady driving into the Empress. That alone wouldn’t be enough to bring the beast down, though, so Hiral sheathed his RHCs on his thighs and ran ahead while he called the Emperor’s Greatsword back to his hand. As soon as his fingers wrapped around the long hilt, the energy blade flared back to life, and he swung it around at the same time one of the Boss’s huge legs came sweeping across.

Uncaring about the other ants in her path, the Empress snapped her huge limb around in a wide arc, crushing her own children in her eagerness to flatten her enemy.

Part of Hiral balked at the sheer size of the serrated leg coming his way—he could leap over it with his Rune of Rejection, but that wasn’t what the Chord was demanding. Instead, with his Killing Spree+ maxed, Ever Changing+ at 4 stacks, and One-Man Army+ active, Hiral flooded solar energy into the sword’s Rune of Gravity and brought it chopping down with all his strength.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it.

Something Right or Left did buffed Hiral with Troblin Might—boosting his Str by 15 points—and a slight pull of the Chord shifted his swing to one side. Where, before, he would’ve slammed his blade into the hard chitin of the Boss’s leg, he instead crunched into the weaker joint.

Craaaa-aaaaaack! The hard shell caved under the impossible weight of the strike, internal fluids spewing out both sides, and the end of the leg went sliding past Hiral as the Empress recoiled in pain. A huge chunk of her health bar vanished with the dismemberment, then turned green as Seeyela’s venom went to work.

Seemingly furious at the pain in her severed appendage, the Boss’s antennae wiggled menacingly, and solid bolts of force shot out from them.

A swing from the Emperor’s Greatsword batted one of the bolts out of the air, while Hiral flipped over the other, sprinting towards the Empress as soon as his feet landed. More bolts zipped his way, the Boss choosing to ignore Seeyela on her back despite the never-ending needling of her dangerous daggers.

Apparently cutting off a limb works like Nivian’s Infuriate.

Swat, sidestep, flip, roll. Hiral dodged bolt after bolt as he charged in, but the time it took to avoid the shots would be just enough to prevent him from reaching the Boss before his Ever Changing+ ticked off. Skidding to a stop with the sword cocked back, he shifted slightly to avoid one more shot, then snapped his hip around and extended his arm.

Practically glowing with power, and tethered to the Empress’s chest at a dozen times its normal weight, the Emperor’s Greatsword jerked ahead as soon as Hiral let go. Then, without even waiting for it to hit—and it would—he pulled Death Knell and Stormstrike back under control. With Ever Changing+ fully stacked at 5, he continued ahead, hurling a lightning bolt from the sword on his right to intercept the massive, swinging leg.

Electricity arced along the outer shell but did little to penetrate, and Hiral was forced to dive out of the way as the limb crashed to the floor, cracking stone a dozen feet in every direction. Trying to stomp Hiral flat had cost the Boss, though—the Emperor’s Greatsword slammed into her chest with enough force and weight to crater the carapace.

Boom! A small explosion sounded behind Hiral as he rolled to his feet, Lost Echo triggering from his dodge, and he spun around to snap his left hand forward. Death Knell followed behind, driving straight into the ground in front of the Empress, and Hiral activated Cutting Field. The blue column sprang to life, encompassing the entire front half of the Boss, and tiny scratches immediately began to appear on her carapace. The damage of each cut was minor, but because of the monster’s huge body, she was getting struck by dozens of the small hits every second. They’d add up.

That did leave Hiral without a second sword, though, so he reached into the Ring of Amin Thett and pulled out the Reinforced Blightsteel Sabre. Blade dripping black, necrotic energy, and his Ever Changing+ already getting close to the ten-second mark, Hiral took the sabre in one hand while drawing an RHC with his other.

One shot blasted into the side of the Empress’s head, carving off another few percent of her health, and then he lunged in with the sabre. The first stab drove deep through the Empress’s natural armor, but Hiral quick-stepped back, pulling his trigger as he went. A second shot, and he dashed in with a violent barrage of slashes. Each cut left sickening black chitin around the wounds, and he slash, slash, slashed, then hit the weakened area with another shot from his RHC.

The whole piece of rotted carapace collapsed around the blast, another keening wail echoing from the Empress, but no matter what she did, she couldn’t reach him. Nestled up against her thorax like he was, he was inside the arc of her swinging limbs. The few force bolts she managed to shoot his way were cleanly avoided, only for Lost Echoes to appear and explode for more damage.

None of that was even counting the deadly venom pumping through her body almost as thoroughly as her own blood. Without a mechanism to trap or cure the venom, her health bar was being completely ravaged. Her only saving grace—and the reason it hadn’t killed her yet—was her sheer size. There was so much body for the venom to spread through, it lessened the effect on any one area.

Between Hiral dropping his weapons again to go back to Impact-enhanced fists, Seeyela having free rein to stab until she wanted to stop, and Left and Right joining the assault on the Boss, her health fell to twenty percent in short order.

“Ending this,” Hiral said into the party chat.

He dodged one more bolt of force, cartwheeled backwards once, twice, three times to make sure he had the best angle, and raised his right hand. The Ring of Amin Thett followed his motion, and he pushed the Rune of Energy into the empty space within the crystal, the script cutting bright lines in the air until it collapsed in on itself. With that, arcs of the collected solar energy along the ring leapt to the glowing sphere, where it stabilized. The whole process took less than a heartbeat, and once it was complete, Hiral swept his hand forward to point at the Empress’s head.

Then the death beam fired.