Dungeon of Knowledge

Chapter 193: Realm Break

- Nevyn Eld [Guardian of the Realm], Professor of Domain Magic, University of Dal’mohra.

Aliandra

So many demons poured through the tunnels of the mostly cleared Emberforge Mines that she couldn’t see or hear the end of it. How could she even begin to imagine stopping that? And yet Calen’s words had filled her with dread – what would happen to the people of Myrin’s Keep if they failed? Even just a single Hellfire Imp could set the entire town ablaze, killing most of the townsfolk before one of the few high-level people could stop them. Nor could they easily escape without unleashing a plague of corruption upon the unsuspecting citizens.

No, this horde would tear through the library, killing Ryn and burning Lira’s Forest without pause. Nothing truly substantial stood in the way of the horde reaching Myrin’s Keep. Those hornets alone could drain everyone, and whatever was left would be sliced up by the spider demons or burned to ash by the imps and wargs.

She threw up a barrier in front of her, blocking a volley of firebolts from the respawned Shards of Flame, but they ignored them, tearing past as fast as they could. In moments, the pursuing Hellfire Imps teleported in using the bodies of the Shards of Flame as fire destinations for their teleportation magic. But, although vastly outnumbered, the Shards and Lava Lurkers still managed to slow the demonic horde down just a little, absorbing the fireballs and hellfire breath until the rest of the demons could overwhelm them in a tide of slashing limbs and dreadful fangs.

But blindly fleeing while the blood of the Pit Lord slowly corrupted her mind was no solution either. And there was one more thing. “What are we going to do about those Sentinels?”

“I don’t think they can get through the rift,” Malika said. “Too big.”

“Are you sure?”

“Chuckles here isn’t prancing around like a tipsy ballerina anymore,” Malika panted. “Yes, the limitations of rifts are well-known – otherwise, history would be a touch different, shall we say?”

Mato snorted.

“Uh… sorry,” Calen said, trying to look anywhere but them. “I’ll… aah, keep an eye out, shall I?”

Finally, Ali burst out into the jungle – the pungent scent of trees and damp earth and the welcome sense of her own domain mana – and her mind caught up again. She had lost most of her minions to the demons, and by either instinct or luck, she had managed to protect two of her Kobold acolytes. Without their constant holy magic, even with her high resistance, the blood corruption would have killed her in less than fifteen seconds.

“Ali? Where’s your boss?” Calen exclaimed, his head swiveling left and right in alarm.

“I removed it,” she gasped. If only she still had the Hobgoblin boss she left guarding the entrance, but she regularly unsummoned it whenever they entered the mines as a way to conserve her mana.

She didn’t just need a boss; she needed a ridiculously powerful boss who could take out an entire horde of demons without dying. It was clear that the Flamecaller Demon Hunter had been constantly guarding the rift against the incursion of the demons for centuries, and they had just happened by and killed him, ripping it open for the hordes to pour through. Then, they had naïvely entered the Abyssal Realm and poked the proverbial hornet’s nest. She winced, recalling just how easily she had been entranced by the siren’s call of that Sentinel demon’s mind magic. It would be at least six hours before the Emberforge Mines respawned the hunter, sealing the rift.

And she had already used her Arcane Recall. She frowned, trying to concentrate as the endless hordes of glistening crimson demons spewed out of the mouth of the Emberforge Mines and into the jungle, attracting the attention of all kinds of elementals: flame from within the dungeon, but also the flying Glimmer Shards and Coruscant Rays from the summoning pool. Her mind did not want to work properly, dizziness and disorientation playing havoc with her concentration, and now, even the world around her warped and shimmered in ways she knew were not real.

Her eyes scanned across the pitiful remnants of her minion army. She didn’t exactly have much left to work with. She had a single dual-axe-wielding Hobgoblin, a Hellfire Imp, two holy Acolytes, and a Sparkling Ooze that had managed to survive by hitching a ride on the Hobgoblin’s back. Dozens of Demonic Hornets twitched feebly from within the Ooze’s transparent body, slowly dissolving. Everything else had been wiped out somewhere along the way.

She had visions of the demons burning down the entire library on the way to razing the town. She slowed, forcing her mind to work via sheer willpower, and placed a hand on her Hobgoblin’s shoulder.

“” Ali told her and dredged up her magic.

“Yes, Mistress,” her Hobgoblin replied, turning the grim mask of her bloody face to the oncoming horde, raising her axes without hesitation. Even her Hobgoblin was suffering under the devastating corruption, but the raid domain enhancement should give her a lot more health.

She needed her Hobgoblin to be powerful, but she did not have much time, so she chose the first things that came to mind, thinking only of what the essence of a warrior was.

The Hobgoblin’s body swelled as the potent domain mana infused her with power. Her muscles bulged massively, and her body twitched as she let out a ferocious battle cry that caused the entire horde of demons to pause.

Domain mana surged within her, drawn like a great inhalation from the surrounding trees and moss, and she summoned a copy of herself. Then it surged again as a third copy appeared. All three identical Hobgoblins turned to regard each other for a moment. A brief nod was exchanged and then all three of them charged, tearing into the demons with a savage brutality that sent chills running down Ali’s spine.

She had the presence of mind to notice at least that.

“Keep running,” Malika urged.

The three warriors coordinated perfectly, guarding each other as they lashed out with an incredible flurry of dark Eimuuran steel blades and flying blood in a display of martial arts that would have made even Malika proud. The speed of their strikes was unreal, and so was the power. The strength enhancement on top of the two-and-a-half-times damage multiplier from the raid domain enhancement sent the smaller demons flying, limbs separated so violently that their obsidian bones ripped right through their tough hides. The dexterity boost granted speed, reactions, critical damage, and accuracy, all of which combined to produce a nightmare of steel and gore.

Ali’s notification chime sounded continuously as she fled the scene catching up to her friends. But she kept her Martial Insight trained on the senses of her newest raid boss, desperately hoping that she would be enough.

“Is it working?” Calen gasped.

But it quickly became clear that they would fall. Clouds of demonic hornets swarmed around the Hobgoblins with an angry droning, biting and stinging, spraying clouds of Goblin blood into the air that formed an ominous red mist that somehow empowered the swarm. Gleaming, scythe-like legs slashed and pierced as the stalker demons emerged like a dark and shimmering tide from the unseen shadows with vicious rending strikes.

Even with the power and enormous life and energy of the raid boss, all the clones were losing health steadily and many of the demons began bypassing them, leaving them to the never-ending horde that followed.

“No…” she said. The Hobgoblins would buy them some time, but she would need a second boss, and for that, she needed to get further away. “I need… something stronger.”

She racked her brain to think of something that might be effective against such unimaginable numbers. The wargs and the imps were immune to fire, and the imps would heal the wargs. What seemed abundantly clear was that she needed some way to block the tide or an area damage attack to hit all of them simultaneously – anything that was not fire. Frantically, she threw out enormous domain-enhanced barrier walls, desperate to buy them just a little more time. She staggered, her barrier tipping sideways precariously before she caught herself, holding onto the blood-slick surface with a death grip.

“The Demon Hunter,” Calen panted. “How did he do it?”

As she was desperately

The cost was enormous, but she wasn’t counting right now. The massive wooden guardian elemental creaked and groaned as its body grew rapidly, substantially larger than the one she had set to guard the shrine. But it wasn’t done – as the noise of her friends engaging the demons crashed through the area, echoing off the walls of the library, and the hellfire fireballs began detonating, her massive guardian summoned its clones.

“” she told them, and the three enormous elementals charged forward simultaneously, crashing heavily into the horde of demons.

“Uh, Ali, aren’t those vulnerable to fire?” Calen asked, sounding rather uncertain.

“I’m not done yet,” she said, rapidly flipping the pages of her Grimoire and summoning her next monster. The guardians’ regeneration auras scaled with wisdom, enhancing both their power and range dramatically, and all three of them overlapped, giving her beleaguered and wrung-out Kobolds a much-needed break. The entire battlefield erupted with roots, brambles, and explosions of plant life as the guardians engaged the horde of demons. In the air above them, they began summoning Poison Wyverns which swooped and darted back and forth, spraying the entire field with their poison breath. The buzzing demonic hornets rose in a cloud to engage the wyverns in the air, swooping back and forth in swirling formations trying to avoid the sprays of poison. The first wyvern fell spiraling downward, quickly overcome by the ravenous swarm.

But even with their stupendous health and regeneration, the guardians’ fire vulnerability was too much against such a horde of wargs, imps, and the horrifying spider-like stealth demons that struck from the shadows. Their health began to spiral downward as the imps freed themselves from the roots and lobbed fireballs everywhere.

she thought, urging her Grimoire to go faster.

In a rush she finished up her domain magic, trying frantically to hurry and also to go slow enough that she didn’t make any mistakes. This was the monster that they had struggled with so much at the pool of liquid nature mana – she had not forgotten the ridiculous combination it made with the guardians.

There was a moment of severe anxiousness when she applied Elemental Storm to her boss. She had made something of an educated guess that the poison-affinity would work, based on her success at using poison as a compatible subset of nature affinity for her Tunnel Weaver’s Affinity Aura, but she had never exactly tried it with Elemental Storm before, and her relief was palpable when it seemed to apply correctly.

This monster was to be both her battlefield stability, and her finisher. The guardians were not meant to kill anything – their job was to tank and heal – and to fuel the slime spawner. The Toxic Spitter was how she intended to overwhelm the Hellfire Wargs’ ability to heal, and simultaneously take out all the imps.

As her gigantic ooze swelled in size, growing in power from the great infusion of domain mana, a toxic aura of poisonous gas billowed out through the battlefield, pulsing with poison magic. The Forest Guardians’ health immediately stopped dropping as they began absorbing the poison aura as healing.

“Run!” Ali shouted, ignoring the notification. “Into the library!” Her friends reacted immediately, even while shooting her very surprised and confused looks, but she knew it wouldn’t take long for the poison to overwhelm all of them.

On its own, the Toxic Spitter would spend health, spitting out smaller slimes whenever it was full, relying on its regeneration to recover. But they had discovered that under the influence of the Forest Guardian’s magical regeneration aura, it could spit out more, faster, and even occasionally split itself into two. Now, subject to the vast power of three domain-empowered regeneration auras, the Toxic Spitter did not hold back, launching a continuous torrent of toxic slimes into the air to rain down across the battlefield with wet splats and plops.

They all charged into the cool, dark library and Ali slammed the strongest barrier she could manage across the door, bound to whatever left-over domain capacity she had in the area, and then stopped to watch the battle unfold through the transparent golden wall, her breath snagging in her throat as she dared hope it would be enough.

“Keep a Restoration on that spitter,” she said, directing her Acolytes to heal the boss.

Overhead, Poison Wyverns spawned continuously, ignoring the poison aura emitted by the Toxic Spitter, spreading more and more sprays of lurid green liquid throughout the demonic sea. The demonic hornets began dropping from the swarm, landing on the chaos of the battlefield with thumps barely audible above the chaos of fire and crashing limbs.

“Ali… what exactly did you do?” Calen asked breathlessly.

“I gave it Demon Slayer, poison aura, and… Elemental Storm.”

“Oh… shit,” he said, backing away from the barrier nervously.

“Isn’t that the ability you got from the Inferno?” Malika asked.

“Yup.” As she said it, she felt a tidal surge of mana being drawn into the Toxic Spitter.

Staring out at the horde, she quietly said, “This is where you hide.” Outside, beyond the barrier, the world turned a violent muddy green as a veritable hurricane of poisonous gas ripped through the demon horde with enough force to throw the smaller monsters flying. It raged on and on, and the only thing she could see was the virulent wave of mana grounding through her barrier’s absorption into the domain itself as the Toxic Spitter unleashed a poison Armageddon.

Enough poison mana was absorbed through her barrier and into her domain that it began leaking out through the domain mana nearby and her remaining Kobolds began handing out extra restoration spells to everyone watching, even though they were all still standing in the triple regeneration aura of the now maximum health Forest Guardians.

“The guardians have poison absorb,” Calen said, understanding dawning in his eyes. “So that’s how you handled the fire vulnerability?”

“Yes, and they’re constantly healing the Toxic Spitter, meaning it will split faster, generating more slimes,” Ali noted.

“And the wyverns?” he asked.

“They’re for more poison damage between elemental storms, and for the flying hornets. We have at least six hours of this to go before the Emberforge Mines respawns that Demon Hunter and locks down the rift.”

He nodded in apparent disbelief. “You thought that far ahead?”

“It took two failures,” Ali said, shaking her head. She needed to be better. Smarter and quicker – not every encounter would leave room for retries.

As the poison maelstrom died down beyond the barrier, the battlefield cleared to the sight of hordes of dead and dying demons, and a sea of toxic slimes and rivers of poison. She could barely even see the Forest Guardians among the ooze.

And then, the monsters all turned to face the next wave of incoming demons.

“Enough talking. Ali, make me a hole,” Mato said, his voice rough and followed by a hacking cough. He was back in his Beastkin form, dripping blood from his eyes and mouth, holding himself up using the wall.

It was a simple matter to wield her Domain Mastery and turn a large circle of the flagstones into dirt beside the Elder Tree, and Mato immediately planted himself, transforming into his Tree Form. His aura burst outward the moment he completed his shapeshifting, covering the entire area, and extending even out into the battlefield beyond. For the first time since encountering Maalgaroth the Pit Lord, Ali felt the hold of the corruption – the nausea and dizziness – begin to loosen.

“Ali, maybe we should put some defenders on the door to the level above? Or at least block it off with a barrier – some of those demons could have flown up there,” Calen suggested, pointing out a flaw in her blockade. Indeed, she would be having nightmares of the bloodsucking demonic hornet swarms that had chased them through the mines, draining the life from her minions.

“Eep! What…  that?”

Ali’s head snapped up at the sound of the surprisingly high-pitched and terrified Gnomish voice that interrupted their conversation. She found Ryn, Brena, and Sabri all huddled together, staring with wide eyes at the devastation unfolding right before them on the opposite side of a very transparent barrier.

Behind them, silhouetted against the dim light of the library, Clarence swooped and dove aggressively, brandishing the terrifying glowing golden teeth and barrier magic she had glimpsed once before.

“Uh… I can explain…” Ali began and then trailed off. Her mind balked at the magnitude of what they had just endured, and yet somehow survived.

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/Dubat-litrpg