Chapter 4336: Turning Tides (Part 2)
The Tyrant and his wife were struggling to keep the hordes of Golems at bay while keeping the Scorpicore-Upyr that was chasing them from killing them.
"Seriously?" Quylla’s Bloodbind chains whipped furiously at the black leonine beast that had just tried to bite her in half. "You’re a Scorpicore, a Lesser Divine Beast!
"How could you join Meln, I mean, Jorl’s side when the foremother of your species ascended to Guardianhood?"
"Good question." The Upyr had two sets of wings and eyes like a Sekhmet, but the wings were all membranous like a bat’s, and his eyes shone with the red light of undeath instead of fire. "Here’s another. Do you know what a Sekhmet can do?"
"No." Morok dodged a cannonade of the Golems’ elemental blasts, using Domination to alter their trajectory enough to send them inside the Scorpicore’s open maw.
"And neither does anyone else!" Tershor roared, ignoring the pain from his tongue freezing, burning, and rotting at the same time. "While my so-called ancestor takes her sweet time doing whatever she wants, those like me suffer.
"I’m just taking what’s rightfully mine! It’s all Scarlett’s fault if I’m doing this. If only she cared about her descendants as she claims to, she would have taught us Scorpicores how to become Sekhmets, and I wouldn’t have been forced to become an Upyr."
"Wow. This guy must be Meln’s secret son. Nothing he does is his own fault." Quylla conjured a Spirit Barrier to repel the charge of the Upyr, but Thunder Soul blew it apart like a balloon.
"How dare you!" Tershor unleashed a tier five Spirit Spell, Primordial Roar.
The freezing shockwave generated by the hexaelemental spell would have seriously wounded the couple if the Tyrant hadn’t jumped behind a line of Soldier Golems with his wife in his arms.
The Scorpicore’s powerful spell destroyed several constructs while the couple just focused on escaping, so the Golem army marked the Divine Beast as the most dangerous threat and focused their fire on him.
"I love it when you are right, babe, but it’s not wise to mock someone who can kill us with one hit and is already trying to murder us." Morok said. "I’d like to go back to our children alive."
"Point taken." Quylla racked her brain, but couldn’t find a way out of their predicament.
There wasn’t enough space to dodge the Scorpicore-Upyr for long, and the constant flow of Golems swarming the area left the couple little space of maneuver. Protector had his speed, Nalrond had his new weapon and Dawn’s teachings, while Lith, Tista, and Solus were Divine Beasts.
Morok and Quylla had no special ability and couldn’t defeat an opponent of Tershor’s caliber unless they played it smart. Something hard to do when a giant monster chased you and countless Golems shot at you from every direction.
"What about your little human friends, Verhen?" Jorl and Lith were locked in a savage exchange of blows. "Are you going to let them die like that?"
The Tiamat replied by shapeshifting into his Indech form and using Umbral Shift to swap position with his shadow.
The Storm Griffon had put his entire weight and Focus Point in his blow, so when it hit empty air, Jorl ended up tumbling into a unit of Soldier Golems ready to shoot Lith in the back.
The Storm Griffon crushed the Golems, took an elemental volley to his face, and Ragnarök into his back. The Spirit Barrier of the Starpath armor activated by itself, stopping the angry blade before it could so much as scratch the Adamant.
The Black Throne believed Jorl to be more than capable of fighting anyone standing before him, and that even the Storm Griffon’s fair-weathered allies shared such conviction.
It was the reason the cursed tower had Forgemaster the Starpath armor with a backside thicker and sturdier than its front. No matter if Orpal or one of Jorl’s so-called loyalists betrayed him first, the Storm Griffon would survive until the Black Throne decided otherwise.
Lith grunted at the hitch in his plan, but didn’t turn to help Morok and Quylla.
If he did, Jorl would have killed him. The Storm Griffon had already infused himself with more Life Maelstrom and bounced off the Golems so fast that Lith could barely follow him with seven eyes.
"You should have taken my truce offer, Verhen." Jorl said. "If you did, I would have used this against these annoying constructs instead of you!"
He unfurled his wings and activated the tier five Source Magic spell, Battle Arms. It dismantled one of Jorl’s best Light Mastery spells and the tier five War Mage spell, Mud Tide, recombining them into something that bordered on Tower Magic.
The light and earth element formed dozens of limbs as hard as diamonds, the water element allowed the earth to alter its density and shapeshift quickly, while the fire element triggered a violent explosion the moment the light-earth constructs hit something.
When Battle Arms hit, the detonation would amplify the damage or disrupt Lith’s footwork. When Jorl used the constructs to block Lith’s attacks or spells, instead, the explosions knocked Ragnarök away and blinded the Tiamat’s mystical senses.
’That’s too big a fight even for a sexy midget like me.’ Menadion thought. ’Lith can take care of that pompous bird by himself, but Quylla and Morok need my help.’
Ignored by Golems and Upyrs alike, the First Ruler of the Flames remained hidden among the shadows until Tershor was kind enough to offer his back to her.
A jet stream of Void Flames dissolved his Life Maelstrom, and Menadion’s Fury hit the Scorpicore’s back of the head, sending him to crash amid the Golems’ formation.
’Thanks, Ripha!’ Quylla had two tier five Spirit Spells at the ready with Tershor’s name written on them, but Menadion stopped her.
’Forget about that moron!’ She yelled through the mind link. ’We just went from the frying pan into the fire!’
Uragar and Salanoth had been tossed like garbage in the middle of the area free of the Cursed Carrion array, and a few Upyrs had already lost their lives, but their unwilling sacrifice had bought the cursed objects the time they needed to recover.
Such an extensive mana poisoning would have crippled a living person for minutes and left them in a state of confusion for even longer. The living legacies, however, had never lost their consciousness, not even while Cursed Carrion ravaged their pseudo cores.
The Book of Knowledge and the Ring of Space had followed the events all along, using their hosts to prepare spells as the flow of pure world energy restored their strength.
"Now I’m really angry!" Uragar covered most of the battlefield in arrays in a single heartbeat, crushing Golems into powder and disrupting the Cursed Carrion magical formation. "I usually don’t bother crushing mindless toys, but I almost died because of you!"
The human host used his breathing technique to replenish the mana reserves that the Book of Knowledge burned through by conjuring one of the devastating tier five Spirit Spells stored in his page after another.
Uragar didn’t bother aiming, shooting them wherever the battle was fiercer. His targets were the Golems, but he didn’t care if the members of Lith’s group or his own ended up caught in the crossfire.
