"Now!" Sam shouted, causing Jass to leap away from where she took over and held the front of their formation.
Deacon released the hold he had on his Ignis spell the instant the word left Sam's mouth, hurling the large fireball forward. A heartbeat later, Sam and Esmerelda unleashed their Gust spells in perfect synchronization, the massive twin blasts converging on the rushing fireball.
The wind fed into the fire mid-flight, twisting and expanding it into a massive fireball the size of a building as it tore toward the charging antlion swarm. As the two spells merged, the inferno passed through the field generated by Deacon's Innate Skill, Undying Flame, mutating from a building-sized fireball into a fire tornado three times that size.
The resulting firestorm was unlike anything Deacon had created before — a massive conflagration that spread across nearly a third of the platform and consumed everything in its path, the flames fed by the constant circulation of oxygen-rich wind until they burned hot enough that Deacon could feel his exposed skin prickling with heat even from behind the safety of his armor and the Ravenlight Banner's protective dome.
Antlions shrieked as they were caught in the inferno, their chitinous bodies cracking and bursting from the sudden extreme heat, and for the first time since the swarm had started falling from the ceiling, there was actually empty space between Deacon and Jass's positions and the leading edge of the enemy force.
Deacon pivoted on his heel and sprinted the few meters to the altar, gripping the outer rim of the sand-filled basin as he leaned in and quickly wrote the word "Responsibility" in Jotnar. His strokes were still clumsy, a result of having only recently begun learning how to write the language, but the word was legible enough that the altar's magic should recognize it.
The moment he finished the final character and lifted his finger from the sand, the grains vanished from the basin, and the altar began its now-familiar rumbling descent into the platform.
Deacon snatched the sky-blue, palm-sized gem that appeared in the empty space before it could sink out of reach, shoved it into his pouch, and immediately turned back to reclaim his position on the front line.
By the time he reached his previous position at the front of the formation, the firestorm was already dying down as the wind magic feeding it dissipated. Fresh antlions continued to pour from the tunnel in the ceiling, scrambling over the charred corpses of their fallen swarm-mates to resume the assault. Their sheer numbers made the Ravenlight Party believe the swarm was truly endless, given how many had already been slain — yet it showed no sign of stopping.
"Deacon!" Bonehead shouted from somewhere behind him.
Deacon glanced back to see his undead friend kneeling on the ground, pouring four different vials of variously colored liquids into a large glass flask. He tossed the empty vials aside without a second thought, corked the mixture, and shook it vigorously. The contents reacted violently, thickening as the colors bled together until they settled into a muddy brown mass that resembled a liquid less and more like a tar-like substance.
"Throw this at where they're falling from!" Bonehead shouted as he rose from his kneel and thrust the flask toward Deacon. "It'll seal the hole and release an obscenely concentrated dose of fast-acting insecticide gas. Anything that touches it dies, clogging the tunnel and forcing the rest of them to find another way down."
Letting his shield slide off his arm and drop to the ground, Deacon grabbed hold of the flask with his now-free hand while Echoform Reliquary shifted into its crowbar form in the other. He didn't want to disrupt the balance that the Ulfberht had placed on his body.
Catching the movement out of the corner of her eye and seeing him drop his shield, Jass stepped forward and stomped the ground, casting a large-scale Earth Spear spell. A conical spread of sandstone spikes erupted from the platform at various angles, each one skewering multiple charging antlions and buying them a few precious seconds of breathing room.
During that brief window that Jass had created for him, Deacon wound up and threw the flask with every ounce of power his stats could provide, sending it hurtling toward the ceiling and the spot where antlions were still pouring out of the tunnel opening in a seemingly endless stream.
The glass shattered against the stone ceiling with a sound barely audible over the endless chittering and screeching, but the effect of its contents was immediate. The muddy brown, tar-like substance that had been trapped inside the flask expanded the instant it hit open air, spreading across the tunnel opening like a rapidly growing foam before hardening almost instantly into a solid brown plug that completely cut off the flow of antlions.
The stream of falling bodies cut off abruptly, and for the first time since they'd reached this chamber, no new enemies were being added to the swarm already on the platform, which meant they finally had a chance to actually reduce the numbers arrayed against them instead of just treading water.
Swallowing back their excitement at the antlions finally cutting off their endless reinforcements, and unwilling to risk jinxing it or losing focus with danger still all around them, the Ravenlight Party pushed forward and cut down the remaining antlions on the platform with renewed vigor.
Deacon's blades became a blur as he cut through enemy after enemy. Jass's glaive swept in wide arcs, leaving trails of bisected chitin in its wake. Sam rained down Wind Arrows while Esmerelda answered with Ice Arrows, and Bonehead's alchemical concoctions wiped out entire clusters whenever the antlions inevitably bunched together.
Eventually, after what felt like an eternity of continuous fighting, the last antlion fell with its head caved in by Deacon's crowbar, and an eerie silence descended over the platform as everyone stood there breathing hard and trying to process the fact that they were actually still alive.
"That went better than I expected," Bonehead remarked as he chugged down a Mana Potion while passing one to Sam.
The Ravenlight Party allowed themselves a brief moment of celebration, though nothing too elaborate, just relieved laughter and a few exchanged high-fives as they acknowledged that they'd survived something that would have supposedly killed them.
Something Deacon believed given that Esmerelda no longer looked solemn and had had the widest smile on her face that he'd ever seen before, informing him that she was no longer seeing the premonitions she had on seeing them all die.
After refilling their resource pools and handing Bonehead just under a dozen empty potion bottles, they turned their attention toward the glass case that held the amulet they'd come all this way to retrieve.
"The hell is that?" Deacon murmured with a frown as he looked at the scrawl of silverish blue text on the top face of the glass container.
"Ghoul. Elder Ghoul, to be precise," Bonehead answered in a tone that took everyone else aback as he pulled the hood of his robes back from his head.
"You know it?" Esmerelda asked him with a soft touch on his back as Bonehead looked entirely at the Elder Ghoul script with such an immense feeling of longing.
"…My uncle," Bonehead said softly after a long pause for him to gather his own words. "Uncle Tars taught me it long ago; he was the only one I knew who knew the language."
"Sorry, it's just been…" Suddenly, as though he remembered what he was doing, Bonehead shook his head and snapped himself out of his thoughts. "It's asking us to arrange the colored gems in a way that represents the word "Tievghreen", which in Common most closely translates to the thread between life and death."
"Well, let's get to work on answering that," Esmerelda offered as she squeezed Bonehead's shoulder.
"Yeah, you two do that," Deacon said, recognizing that they were going to need some time and that he had no way of answering the puzzle himself, lacking any real understanding of how to arrange colored stones to represent the thread between life and death.
"We'll go harvest the corpses," Deacon informed Esmerelda as both he and Jass handed her the colorful palm-sized gems they had collected from the altar basins.
As Esmerelda and Bonehead exchanged a nod and began placing the gems along the glass top, Deacon, Sam, and Jass turned their attention elsewhere. They set about the tedious task of carving cores and glands from the dead antlions scattered across the platform, both because the materials would fetch a decent price back at the settlement and because Bonehead would undoubtedly want them for whatever alchemical projects he had planned.
The Ravenlight Party had been working at their tasks for maybe seventeen minutes when a loud cracking sound echoed from somewhere off to the side of the platform, followed almost immediately by the unmistakable sound of chittering falling through open air.
All five of them snapped their heads up in time to see a fresh, seemingly new and endless stream of antlions plummeting past the edge of the platform, vanishing into the darkness below without ever touching the enlarged circular sandstone platform they stood on.
Jass let out a laugh at the absurdity of it. " And they have no way of knowing that they aren't dropping to their deaths."
Sam shook his head with a grin. "You love to see it!"
Deacon was about to comment that, given their numbers, they might eventually fill the seemingly bottomless space below the platform enough to simply walk off it. But as he traced the long, winding stream of antlions with Blood Sense, something caught his eye. His focus followed the flow until he looked just above him, where it abruptly stopped on a far more humanoid shape.
Halting his cast on Blood Sense, he saw that the creature there was blue — nothing like the sand-colored antlions they'd been fighting.
As his blood ran cold, Deacon took in the full sight of the blue humanoid figure. It was covered from head to toe in chitinous scales, bore the head of an antlion, and possessed a pair of large insectoid wings folded openly at its back. From its perch, it watched them with an intelligence he'd never seen the antlions possess.
[Antlion Prince – General Lv 25]
W-What? Deacon asked himself in confusion. A General Rank creature here? Level 26?
The creature's head turned slightly, and Deacon saw the exact moment when it registered that he'd spotted it, their eyes locking across the distance in a moment of mutual recognition that felt like it stretched on for far longer than the second or two it actually lasted.
In that frozen instant, Deacon called up a portion of the Quest panel with a mental command, needing to confirm what he was already starting to suspect, and what he saw displayed there shocked him so thoroughly that he almost forgot to keep breathing.
Task Objective:
▸ Retrieve the Amulet of Solomon
Optional Objectives:
▸ Kill the Antlion Queen Sun'ar ✗
▸ Kill Antlion Prince Αλλάσσων
Before Deacon could even begin to process the implications of the Antlion Queen somehow being dead despite them never having encountered her, let alone killed her, his mind was already boggling at the reveal of the second optional objective that had apparently replaced the first one, and he found himself staring at the name "Αλλάσσων" with complete incomprehension.
What the fuck kind of name is that?What even language is that? His mind supplied uselessly, the observation absurd given the circumstances, but apparently the only thing his brain could latch onto in the moment.
Then, for a single heartbeat, everything went perfectly quiet. Deacon watched as the Antlion Prince turned its head away from him and fixed its gaze on Esmerelda and Bonehead, who had just managed to unlock the magical seal on the glass case protecting what they assumed was the Amulet of Solomon. Unaware of the danger, both of them were already smiling at having solved the puzzle.
Deacon's mouth opened to shout a warning — just as the creature became a blur of motion in his vision.
"Ambush! A General Rank!" he shouted, flinging his harvesting knife at the Antlion Prince. The blade clinked harmlessly off the sandstone ceiling, the creature's speed far outpacing Deacon's throw.
Deacon launched himself forward in a desperate sprint toward the Prince's trajectory, adrenaline flooding his system and pushing him faster than he'd ever moved before. Still, it wasn't fast enough, and everything seemed to slow to a crawl in his perception as the distance refused to close.
Please!
His hand went to the throwing knives on his back, only to find they were gone — lost somewhere along the way while he'd been checking his Status Page. Without slowing his sprint, he reached for another weapon, grasping for anything that might let him intercept the attack or at least draw the Prince's attention away from his party members, who were just now aware of the General Rank creature amongst them.
Fuck! Come on!
He watched in horror as the creature managed to close half the distance between its perch and where the amulet case stood in what felt like less than a second, its clawed hand extended and aimed directly at Bonehead's back.
Fuck!
Esmerelda must have sensed something at the very last moment. Whether it was because she'd poured her points into Agility and Perception, some glimpse granted by her evolved sixth sense, or the spirits Deacon was starting to believe truly existed, she moved fast enough to physically shove Bonehead out of the creature's path. Her hands struck his shoulder, releasing a clear blue pulse of mana that Deacon could see plainly as it sent Bonehead stumbling hard to the side.
Fuck!
Just as Deacon took another step forward, still nearly a hundred meters from Esmerelda and Bonehead, the Antlion Prince struck. Its clawed, humanoid hand drove straight through Esmerelda's chest and burst out her back in a violent spray, lifting her off her feet in a single, brutal motion.
For a frozen instant, the creature held her there before wrenching its arm free, leaving her collapsing as Deacon's world seemed to shatter around him.
"NO!"