Chapter 56 Breakpoint

“I’m surprised to see you still standing,” said the Dark Overlord.  His mocking tone scratched at my self-control.  

I rotated my arm around.  The bones realigned, and I fused them with a quick Treatment.  “I’m just getting started.”

Of course, the last hit sent me bouncing off the ground and that hammer hurt.  I couldn’t just shrug off hits by it like I could other attacks, which of course was why Charles favored it.  The Dark Overlord put his thumb into his mouth and blew, causing his head to pop back out.

He couldn’t shrug off attacks with my bat either.  The Elder Demon infused wood was dripping with the kind of raw power that nations would battle over.  Pound for pound, it was the more powerful of the two weapons, but Charles was more skilled in using the hammer bringing us to a rough parity in strength.  

“Your dragon’s dead,” I said, adjusting my grip on the bat before using Fast Steps to cover the distance between us instantly.  Charles already anticipated this and the copy of him I was attacking exploded the instant before I reached it.

The explosion was only of middling magical potency, and didn’t even breach my anti-magic field, but it did give Charles a chance to position himself for another real attack.  He was invisible now, and there were dozens of illusory shapes around me that could have been him.  Turned out after Greater Invisibility the next tier was Invisibility with lots of distractions.  

I inhaled and spun to face one of the blots just as the fireball launched.  Technically a dozen fireballs launched, but this was the only one that mattered.  The rest were simply magical fire, this one was a cocoon of magical flames that concealed a warhead of shadow energy.  

Dodging to the side I brought the bat into the spell, detonating it.  Even a successful block allowed shadow energy to flow down my weapon and into my mana network.  I instantly processed that back to raw mana, filled my Fire and Biological Aeromancy cores and generated a pulse of BioPlasma that I fired back at Grebthar even as I leapt towards him.  

A wall of earth erupted from the ground, and the plasma spell carved partially through it before detonating.  The shockwave was enough to complicate my jump, and Grebthar took that moment to send a massive spike of shadow out from the ground at my underside.  

Shifting in midair, I avoided it and landed next to him with a downward stroke of my weapon.  It slammed into the hammer, knocking Charles back a pace even as I struck again and again.  Each blow knocked him back.  He had limitless reserves of Mana, not Stamina and Powerful Blow was a great equalizer when it came to close range combat.  

My final blow crushed his hand and sent the hammer spinning off into the distance.  Switching to a two handed grip, I brought the bat down on his skull only to run into the most powerful barrier I’d ever encountered.  

Three, Five, then Ten smashes with the bat and it was still intact.  Grebthar growled, “I’ll give you this has been the worst one.”

“Worst What,” I bellowed, activating Hack and Slash and striking the barrier over and over again, causing it to vibrate wildly.  

“Worst final battle,” said Grebthar, slamming the barrier into me as I rallied for my next attack.  “I mean, I’ve done this so many times it gets old.  You eventually forget what it even means to fight.”

“I can’t be the worst,” I said, banishing the bat before extending my claws and striking at the barrier with Fist of the Northern Badger.  Each magic weakening strike caused the barrier to crack.  

“You’d be surprised,” said Grebthar, tearing chucks of earth from the ground and orbiting them around himself, forcing me to dodge those while I pounded on the barrier.  

“What about the dragon, the one that took the crown,” I growled.  

“That was Badgelor’s fight, not mine,” bellowed Charles, causing the earth underneath me to shake and rumble.  I leapt up just as a spike of magma erupted from the ground.  I danced behind it and slammed both palms into it, deflecting the attack into the barrier.  The molten rock instantly cooled as it touched the barrier and then the barrier flared, becoming unbearably hot.

But I’d been to Jersey, even that oppressive heat wasn’t enough to slow me.  

“He seemed to think it was your battle,” I yelled, activating hack and slash with my fists, striking at the barrier until I chipped away at it.  Driving a fist into the mass, I began prying the thing apart.  

“I didn’t need him anymore,” bellowed Charles, as the barrier shattered and reformed around my arms, the infinitely sharp pieces digging into my flesh like fishhooks as I moved. Charles glared death at me as I struggled to pull my arms free, and for a moment the entire battle field collapsed down to a single point.  

• Strength Check: Power Lift + Stamina vs Grebthar’s Shield of Holding: FAILED

My arm’s wouldn’t budge.  Charles didn’t just have them pinned, he’d attached the magical connections to everything nearby.  I would literally have to pull mountains free and while I could disrupt barriers, they were the hardest things to disrupt due to their nature.  Even this malformed barrier was a challenge, and Charles was supplying it with massive amounts of mana.  Enough to overwhelm even my ability to drain spells.  

“Finally,” hissed Charles, jerking back to summon up another massive ball of fire.  The cracked barrier wasn’t going to offer me any protection from the spell, just hold me in place to make the attack unavoidable.  

I tried to counterspell the attack, but Charles was taking his time.  Casting the spell correctly with maximum integrity so that all of my defensive barriers weren’t going to do squat.  Which was fine, my hands were still on the other side.

As the fireball swelled, I cast BioLightning, draining the barrier and throwing enormous bolts of Biological Aeromancy infused power directly into Grebthar and his spell.  My hands were through his barrier, and the lightning wracked his body.

Still Grebthar kept forming the fireball.  I continued pouring more BioLightning into him, enough that his entire body became less stable and the godling started to melt.  Still he held onto the fireball.  

Finally I dumped all of that power into the necklace he wore, the Amulet of the Dark Overlord.  It drunk in the power and I was about to change targets when I noticed a tremor in the spell.  Focusing I dumped even more power into the amulet, it was durable but perhaps not invincible.  

“Noooo,” hissed Grebthar as he leveled the mostly completed spell at me and prepared to let it fly, but in that moment I switched targets with my counterspell to the fireball exclusively.  The amulet flickered and a wave of shadow seemed to roll out of it.  

Grebthar grabbed the amulet the same instant the fireball flashed towards me.

It only made it halfway before detonating.  The barrier shattered during the explosion and I went flying, covered in third degree burns.  

I activated Ignore Injury as a zombie strode over to me.  The undead watched me for a moment and then continued walking towards the front line.  Glancing down at my hands, I could see blackened bones at several points and my right eye was seeing funny.  

Casting Regenerate and using Treatment, I started patching up the worst injuries even as I scanned the battlefield for Charles.  I found him in another impact crater.  Holding up my hand I summoned the Bat.

My weapon slammed into my palm with enough force to partially tear my weakened hand free.  Pausing a second to reattach everything, I considered my options.  Hopefully if I was this bad, Grebthar would be worse.  

Three fast steps later and I found Charles on the ground struggling to rise.  His body was encased in shadow and the pinpricks of his eyes were almost lost in that mass.  I searched for the Crystal, but it was hidden in that mess.  

Divine crystals were impossibly tough, it would take something truly powerful to shatter one.  I gripped my bat and hoped.  

“Jim.”

Charles continued struggling but the shadow seemed to have him pinned down.  He was desperate, losing.  It hit me then, I didn’t need to break the crystal, that was Charles.  I needed to break the Amulet.  That was the Dark Overlord.  If I could destroy the amulet, Charles would be free.  He would have still done terrible things, but not of his own free will.  

That had to count for something, I didn’t want to kill the only other earthling on the planet.  

The problem was that Grebthar wasn’t a solid being.  His godling body was an amorphous blob that he kind of shaped into a human form when the urge struck him.  Right now he was writhing on the floor and looked like someone who wished he had no bones.  

Still, I flooded the bat with mana and stamina.  That was a trick I’d picked up from the Walker.  I wasn’t sure the weapon would survive the experience, but all that power granted my weapon the ability to break basically anything.

Finding the amulet, I prepared to smash it when I heard a whistling sound.  I managed to dodge back just as a sword blade rocketed past me.  Triblade, the one armed swordsman, appeared armed with triblade, the three bladed sword of the one armed swordsman.  I hated names on Ordinal.  

“I’m trying to rescue him,” I growled as Triblade slashed at me with a skill far beyond Expert.  I was edging towards Grand master with weapons, and Triblade’s skill was even beyond that.  

• Triblade: Swords skill: Divine Master

“False Mayor, peddle not your lies here,” spat Triblade.  

The opportunity to finish this battle once and for all was lost and I stopped filling my weapon even as I tried to defend myself against the attacks of one of the legendary companions of Grebthar.  

I sparred with Toomen once or twice after he’d been restored.  I didn’t have much of an opportunity, given his desire to check out all the restaurants in Windfall and nap.  However I did eventually manage to convince him to go to the training ground when I offered to pay off his tab at several local eateries.  

Prior to the trip to Jersey, Toomen had been on a whole different league than myself.  I was lucky to get a shot in and I could tell Toomen was going easy on me.  Triblade was similarly skilled and not holding back in the slightest.  

Bat’s don’t have guards, so I nearly lost my fingers twice when he managed a tight strike that ran down the length of my weapon.  Further, he did not view his single arm as any sort of disadvantage and could frequently strike in ways that a two armed man couldn’t.  

My only saving grace was that I wasn’t fighting with a sword.  I swung the almighty bat at him, and Triblade blocked oddly.  He attempted to catch the tip of my bat between both remaining blades, but the bat was simply too wide to fit.  

“That’s a sword breaker,” I said.

“Indeed, but that is not triblade’s only trick,” said Triblade.  

“The sword or you,” I asked.

“Damn it,” replied the swordmaster.

I heard the whistling again and this time the blade rocketed back towards the triblade, before stopping next to it, and hovering there.  Then the other blade detached, and started hovering next to the central blade.

“Three of them,” I said as the blades started moving in patterns I recognized from the greatest living swordsman, but all three patterns were different.  

“The other two will fight using all of my skill,” said Triblade.  

“That’s total bullshit,” I muttered as three Divine Master skilled blades rushed towards me.