The Intermission Pt1

Using First-Aid to recover most of my hand back, I Quick Step right in front of the commander with a high-reaching snap-kick that plants the heal of my foot in the thinly armored throat of the commander above the cross in his poles.

Eating the attack that only took away ten percent of its health, the troll simply leans back while throwing my foot aside using the plated chin of its own helmet while leaning its poles to the same side. Riding out the sideways momentum with a quick hop from my back leg, I spin around into an airborne roundhouse only to feel a heavy impact down the full length of my back that swats me down to the side to roll across the ground.

Much more than ten percent of my health was lost by the time I rolled myself backward over my shoulder and onto my feet again. As if adding insult to injury, the troll was already their with a kick of its own that stomped almost straight down on my hip and slammed me into the ground again.

My only choice was to fall back on my skills by slapping out a base Spirit Wave both at the commander beside me and the ground to throw myself back up to my feet and they smash their poles into the wave and skid back several yards. Taking a Quick Step back to reevaluate the situation after witnessing the Spirit Wave shattering against its weapons, I start throwing up my layers of scaled and plated defenses over my armor.

Witnessing my holing up in shells like a multi-layered turtle, the commander lunges across the twenty yards of distance between us and simply spear-thrusts one of its poles. The other pole was held low and back at the ready as I tempted fate by thrusting out an open palm to meet the end of the black crystalline pole with the heel of my armored palm.

The volume of breakage was finally equal on both sides as not only the layers of my defenses were stripped down to a fracturing arm but the pole itself splintered down its outer length and snapped in the center to spray out hundreds almost as much debris as my own arm.

Down fifteen more percent of my health while the Troll Commander is simply thrown to the side, I narrowly avoid taking the hit from a thrust of the other staff by raising my feet to ride back the resulting release of energy from our attacks.

Narrowly pinching the broken piece of staff to attempt claiming it as I let myself be thrown, I immediately Devour and Assimilate the large fragment of pole.

[Assimilating: Lord Trollbone's Black Soul Bone]

The ensuing rush of traits and perks were blurred over as the commander pushed his advantage by unleashing a blizzard carrying roar the filled the air with ice and snow and broken rock debris. Even with a broken arm I swiftly threw up more defenses, fighting for time with attrition by crouching down behind a steady rush of Air Cannon casts to redirect most of the storm passing over me.

Finding myself slowly but steadily pushed back while taking just barely less duration damage than regen, I commit to the supply of mana twofold the base amount while rapidly casting my most base elemental magic almost automatically. Only a few seconds later, the duration of my earlier potions finally ran out at around the same time as the blizzard roar. I had managed to get up to sixty percent even while taking fire.

Throwing myself forward into the vacuum of detonating air that outlasted the roar, I almost blur forward even to my own gaze with my remaining good arm drawn back and at the ready. Stepping down only a few feet away from the commander as they recovered from their roar, I put all of my momentum and power into a savage right upper hook that smashes my left hand to pieces against the likewise shattering helmet of the Troll Commander.

Simply stepping back once from the recoil of the exchange, I take a moment to breathe and shudder while silently casting First Aid and my own regeneration skill to recover my ruined arms. I had dropped myself straight down to thirty percent with the loss of another hand and arm while the troll was only dropped to fifty with the loss of its helmet.

However, I had finally bought enough seconds to complete the Assimilation of the incredibly advanced material that I had just consumed. Now, I could at least start producing it while recovering my defenses. On top of my body grew a whole new layer of black crystalline scales at the cost of my ice mana scales.

It was not that these scales simply performed better to replace them entirely but that they were as costly and hulking a single part of my body and the ice mana scales were the second most costly material behind them.

The troll that had been somersaulted from the punch and rolled on the ground more than ten yards away now used more of its skills to recover its balance, raising ice and stone columns about itself before a combination of rapidly forming field controlling skills rush forward to crush or impale me.

Throwing my recovered arms up in front of me while planting my elbows down on my forward knee in a defensive kneel to brace for impact, I do my best to tank the attack. I quickly found myself sliding back to form a long and deep trench across the final outpost field for several tens of yards before the skills finally gave out while grinding my health away at roughly two percent per second.

I had no choice but to fall back on more trump cards as the commander was resorting to reshaping the landscape in order to damage me and buy time for its own healing. I instantly secreted a combination of the recently improved virulent souls and my new Aegis Mucus that rapidly recovered my health while providing an omnipotent shell worth one attack of any kind.

I was back to full health and condition even as I walked out from around the helix-like combination of ice lance bulwarks and rubble walls that had pushed me away for roughly forty yards over the course of ten seconds. The Troll Commander, however, was looking worse for wear with cracking armor and freezing but copious amounts of blood from the side of its face under a health bar that only contained sixty percent.

Sprinting forward almost gleefully, I Just start to close the distance when the commander amazingly unleashed ANOTHER combination of field skills for the sole purpose of buying its own time. After everything that I had been through just to reach the upper hand? No way, this guy was going to eat the same shit I just went through!

Using Quick Step to rush upward into a wild leap, I blur just under thirty feet up and forward into the air to safely pass over the racing end of the field skill. Air Cannon was only needed twice to keep myself moving through the air and off to the side around the skill before immediately utilizing the second charge of Flash Step to cover the distance in an instant.

Appearing even before the thundering booms of several sound barriers broken by my giant body sounded out, I turn into a power-sliding stop to face the commander from the side before sprinting once again. Having only been about twenty yards away and to the side after coming out of the Flash, I reach the troll in three bounding steps to hop up, plant both feet together, and stomp straight out.

The commander did not sit idle and simply accept my dropkick but instead hammered out with their remaining pole to once again attempt meeting force with force. Unbeknownst to the Troll Commander, the clear and shiny layer of gel around my body was a perfect sacrificial defense that absorbed the impact of its swing and stopped it in its tracks while exploding outward and a wet mist from my body.

Luckily, the healing effects of the mucus were already gone after I reached full health or else I might have just screwed myself over. Unluckily for the commander, its pole ended up soaking up all of the damage from my kick and exploded into a spray of glassy dust. Upon seeing this dust cloud of perfectly pulverized 'soul bone', I threw everything else to the wind and exploded into a Spore Shoal.

Ravenously attacking everything in the air with Devour and Assimilate, I soon find numerous notifications for Assimilate rising up in my panoramic view concerning the multiple materials making up not only the commander's equipment but even the commander itself.

In my current mode of berserk starvation, nothing was safe from me and even the environment became tainted form my impulsive colonization to try and contain every trace amount of soul bone. The Troll Commander itself could only flail and wail as everything outside of its body disintegrated into my now cloud-like body before turning on its body as well. They still held a large chunk of their weapon in their hand and embedded in their fingers was shrapnel.

I did not miss a single speck.

Long enough for reinforcements to reach my once idle companions later, I automatically reverted to my normal body while reading notifications for advancing the Earthen Enrichment perk of my new body's Reproduction skill. I now had a standalone perk that I suspected was named by Melpomene that signified that I had reached the first level of a permanent growth buff.

Each of my stats were raised by twenty points, shoving everything into the three hundreds to produce new stat perks, while my health and mana pools were raised by one hundred points with the cherry of ten percent more movement speed on top of the first stage of Polycrystalline Plague Physique.

On top of all of this were titles for being an early physique cultivator with a rank in the upper teens and miscellaneous plague attributes. These titles brought me ten points in my physical stats as well as increased aptitudes in certain areas.

I spent the entire time just watching my party fight off a fresh set of three hundred trolls with their diamond formation and my familiars running laps. Not only to get a better idea of my team's abilities through comparisons with others but also to let my heart calm down from the intense fight. As usual, I could only take the time to reflect on the fight to remind myself of all of the times that everything could have gone horribly wrong as well as find ways to have better used my few moments of advantage.

Their fighting only lasted for a minute or so but after that minute the world suddenly blurred as if in Fast Travel. This setting only lasted for a few seconds before we all came into real time, or space, at the back of a default lane outside of a massive black pit in the ground.

Standing waist deep in this pit of tangible darkness rose a massive entity of twisted and fused ivory limbs and joints in the general shape of a giant troll's body. This thing was so huge I had to crane my head back to look up at its head that was easily twice as tall as I was by itself. Rising up from the pit to cover its body in a gaseous cloak of veiling darkness was a mass of darkness that rushed out from its body in a myriad of weapon or bestial forms to attack two large groups of several hundred players.

I quickly recognized a few of the main commanding figures in these companies as Duality and Thirteenth 's elites and commanders. Both companies were fairly close together to provide support to one another but there was an obvious divide between them that the various forms of darkness were driving themselves into like a wedge.

It was everything my two allies, who had been here for as much as half an hour already, could do just to fend off the shadow-like fiends throwing themselves upon their front lines.

Above the giant monstrosity's head was the biggest health bar that I had ever seen and instead of '100%' like my Appraisal would usually register on its own was now a '1000%'. As far as I could tell, this guy had yet to even take any damage from the looks of his HP. Two full clans had been stalemated for half an hour while steadily taking one-sided damage.

Undead the health bar was the giant jet black name, 'Lich Lord Trollbone LV100'.

Just as I was opening my player inventory before we got the boss's attention and preparing to give my familiars the order to unleash all hell upon Lord Trollbone itself, the world once again froze in Fast Travel fashion. Then, a brief notification appeared.

[Bygone Era will now begin its first major update that will take an estimated twenty-four hours, we apologize to all of our players for this sudden inconvenience. All players interrupted by this update will be sufficiently compensated with a gift pack and character refresh regardless of circumstances. Thank you for playing. 00:10… 00:09… 00:08…]

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