The Territory Boss Pt7

Landing ahead of my familiars with the distance between Trollbone and I the same as the distance between the others and Trollbone, I call out to the territory boss who was keeping both parties in his line of sight as darkness slowly permeated out from his bones, "LAST CHANCE! TAKE IT BACK!"

After the first attack he used that wiped away at least a hundred people was dispelled at the 'hands' of a single person besides me, the lich lord's entire view of the world must have taken a hit. If he actually flashed over behind them and swung his sword, he would probably cut down dozens at once. However, the people were organized at this point to minimize effect.

"Last chance for you and yours, leave this place," is his sober reply, lacking emotion but bearing a certain depth to it. This guy was adapting already.

Shaking my head and taking up an obvious stance to keep his attention on me, I say, "Nah, you don't get to play that card this late in the game. We're a bunch of ants and you're the only royalty around, we're not going anywhere. Take it back."

"Why should I?" He asks flatly. "So what if they can kill me, you are still the most bothersome ant I have ever seen. So what if you can fuse with your familiars or you have divine creatures under you? Those two will die when you do and that thing on you will follow the next creature it meets more powerful than it. I can kill you and then face the other ants, why would it matter anymore?"

Sighing in exaggerated fashion with another shake of my head, I say, "Because you can't. If you could, you would have managed it before. You did not even bother using your ultimate against me because you knew it would only waste your time. Now, with these upgraded defenses, I could stop your ultimate with my body. Take it back."

Okay, even I had to admit that I sounded like a masochist at this point.

Trollbone's response was to throw caution to the wind and go through with his threat, flashing forward into a thrust that he had performed numerous times before. This time, though, there was somebody else in control of my defenses.

In response to the giant needling point of the equally huge sword in the same instant it touched the fused legs covering my chest, our bodies merely expanded outward from the contact point through the black ruby hornet's Corruption and created an opening the exact size of the sword.

Moving the overall body with my consciousness, I guide the Corruption to elongate the stinger of the hornet into a whip-like scorpion tail that cracks loudly around my body before snaking up under the lich lord's chin and wrapping around through his nose holes. Condensing our bodies around the sword with a thick layer of sole bone crystal surrounding the area, I trap the blade in place while dragging Trollbone's skull and body down to the ground.

Clicking my tongue in dissatisfaction after having experienced the attack in slowed time thanks to the overwhelming Agility afforded me by the fusion, I shake my head sadly once again before leaping thirty feet straight up in the air to drag the awkwardly positioned lich lord up with me.

Using Hauntings to initiate a Flying Guillotine that strikes nothing at all, I whip Lich Lord Trollbone around through the air by his hands still gripping his sword and his head before releasing my body into a Spore Shoal. Having been released from my grasp even as he managed to free a hand from the cordycep ensnared hilt, Trollbone was once again slammed down into the ground.

Condensing back into my fused form, I call out to the others advancing on the shallow crater around the downed lich lord, "Carve your names!"

At first there were only a few dozens of attacks in immediate response to this call, enough sword light and magic energy expansions to cover a third of the crater and Trollbone. In the next second, though, the rest of the hundreds responded almost in unison, completely covering the crater from my view up in the air.

I almost felt bad for the big guy. If he ever really fought anything previous, then this was probably his longest and most abusive battle. There was no doubt that this sentient being who used to be nothing more than a sub-intelligent primitive species was mentally exhausted from the battle. Especially if he had not actually fought since becoming a lich lord, his experience with himself- or lack thereof- was probably why he spent the entire time adapting.

However, he still had more than seventy percent of his monstrous health bar remaining before the first mass attacks even struck. He could handle a full cycle of hundreds of skills even in a dazed condition. The fact that he was actually taking so long to get up was a testament to his mental condition more than physical.

The cycle of skills and magic and equipment abilities lasted for around thirty seconds as everybody emptied themselves at once wherever they could into the crater. What the veil of raw damage finally cleared, the crater had expanded by half its original size and deepened to over Stonewall's head. At the bottom of it sat a worn looking lich lord with only his head exposed above the crater.

His health bar itself was down almost twenty percent and dangerously close to half.

Laughing gleefully with only a handful of extra voices in the general vocal ranges, I drop from the air and land only a dozen or so yards away from Trollbone's exposed head. "Did you see it?" I ask in my amplified voices. "That moment when I let go, did you see my ultimate form? That's the first and last time you'll get to see it but only because you're only worthy of feeding my sword. Eating you would make me sick. Instead, I've just spent my entire time practicing and flexing because you're nothing more to me than a fucking punching bag. Take it back."

"You seem pretty hung up on this punching bag," Trollbone seems to smirk in my mind with a soft voice that betrayed his tiredness. "I'll admit it, I cannot stop you… you or your ant army. Now what? We finish this?"

He was defeated through and through. Experience was the best teacher and I learned a lot while fighting this guy and trying to prove myself blindly to the enemy, but he had learned the most important lesson of all. I won.

"We'll see," I say dismissively, with a brief wave of my hand, throwing my giant bastard sword like a normal knife so that it strikes into Trollbone's shoulder. The initial damage was a ten-percent reduction to the ten thousand, but the following second brought with it a tick of one percent. Down.

The darkness around his body slowly fed into the sword with each passing second, negating his regeneration as Hauntings fed on his undead energy. It slowly grew to the point where the undead energy all over his body thinned as it was focused on a single point. This seemed to be the peak of my sword's consumption and began taking in two percent per second.

With the passive regeneration, this equaled out to one percent damage per second.

"This isn't so bad, right?" I ask casually, sitting down on the edge of the crater defenselessly, going so far as to separate from the new Imperial Corrupted Soul Carrier. "That sword is a one-of-a-kind growth-style weapon. The sword itself grows as I forge it anew time and again, but the true growth is its spirit. I used the weapons of a fallen fellow classless to craft that sword the first time and they were attached to them spiritually. Now, their spirit is bound to the sword and I and thanks to special powers granted by our relationship I can make the spirit stronger by feeding it undead energy.

"You are my ultimate whetstone," I inform him frankly and in a suddenly emotionless fashion, reminding him of the purpose he served to me. "Now, I don't know how much you know about proper weapons since your sword is part of… you… but swords usually need to be sharpened more than once. What do you say, Trollbone? Be my whetstone."

"To serve… or to feed," a distant voice states in my head while the giant troll skeleton stares at the sword embedded in its shoulder with much smaller flames for eyes. "Is this truly what I have been reduced to?"

"You missed your chance at playing equals after you started throwing a fit like a child while I was trying to reason with you," I inform him seriously. "I wanted things to go much more smoothly so things in the future will be much easier, but… you were stuck on your high horse. Now, I'm missing half a sandwich and some potions and I went through almost three sets of equipment rings that need a few hours to recharge. I only have… so many."

Turning his head slightly to focus his flames on me, he says, "You certainly had enough of them, did you not? How do you plan to do it? I am bound to this location."

"Meh," I say with a dismissive wave of my hand, "we'll be settling this plateau once the work below is done. You can continue to stay here and serve as our guardian spirit but you will serve me first and foremost. Your body, skills, knowledge, even your materials now belong to me. In exchange, I offer you another transcendence from your current state of being and the ability to continue living."

Did I really think the cordyceps would work on this guy? Maybe, his body was organic and he was technically already an undead like the ghouls cordyceps create. With a magically sustained consciousness already in effect, there was no reason why it should not work.

"How can you be certain-"

"Say yes and shut up," I state stiffly with a bland stare when he starts to continue questioning me. "You're not really in a position to ask questions and I don't feel like humoring you. Say yes."

"Yes," he replies almost instantly.

"Good, then sit there and wait until you only half a few hundred percent left," I say while rolling backward from my sitting position into a crouch before leaping across the crater with a flap of my half wings.

On the other side, I all but collapse into the group my friends had clustered into around Stonewall who was still low in his health bar. "You good, big guy?" I ask while sprawling outright on the ground after finally sheathing Hauntings, taking out one of the first potions I ever made just for something tasty to drink.

"Just waiting," he replies with a heavy breath of air, enjoying having his head cradled on the laps of not just Oleander but Ivana and Agnes. His helmet was marred up with a heavy gash across several small plates while the others around displayed cracks, but the game still recognized it as 'functional' because it had not disappeared yet. "I can't heal by magic or items for one minute after using that skill since this isn't the old suit and the skill once every three days."

"Good to know, thanks," I say while realizing my spare trump card for the previous situation only had a one-time use to such an extent. "You did great out there, we'd have been pretty screwed out there without you. Go, status rep."

"Overall ninety-percent survival rate," he says after a few seconds of looking around and counting. "Papi, Skooma, Ivana, and Conan all died but the rest of us still have our first lives. Everyone who died returned to the field ninety seconds after death, as long as their clan remained on the field. Otherwise, nothing, especially not loot. What's the deal?

Opening my mouth to answer I find myself at a loss for words as I realize what I was actually doing. Not killing the boss was going to not only deprive everybody of loot but also experience since I would be the one capturing and taming them. I immediately started pouring out my mana in the form of long bars of black crystalline material that corrupt their way out of my hands and arms.

After having made a hundred of these bars with the help of some potions, I take out ten bars and divide the others into two piles of forty-five. "For now, give these ten to Mistress and these stacks to Duality and Thirteenth. I'm taking the boss for myself, this is just paying for a favor because even if they don't want it I'm still keeping the boss. As for us… we get a raid boss. So, what?"

"Purpose," Go says without even looking at the piles of soul bone I had created.

"He'll be the territory guardian to keep the place under our control when we're not around and back up our allies so we don't have to," I say with a small smile and slow nod. Thirteenth might have the biggest shares since they completed first, but the world will know yours truly marked this territory when they see the resident protection. What's mine is ours, what's the issue?"

"If you keep that boss, others will follow in your footsteps," Merch says from nearby, sitting on the edge of the hole examining the lich lord. "Once they realize it can be done, they'll do it. This guy is level one hundred and can keep you in your place when it puts in the effort. What does level two hundred look like? What are the mythical dragons in this game like? We still have not even faced a demon with Ferithar, yet."

He had a point. Even though he was strong, he was a low leveled boss with an insane flash skill. If he would use a smaller and more mobile weapon he could double his current attack speed, but that would only buy time against a much stronger world or raid boss.

"He feeds Hauntings," I argue nonetheless. "Hauntings gets better effects, probability, and the spirit itself becomes more substantial from undead energy. That is top shelf undead energy and I can absorb as much of it as I want from a full health bar. Plus, we can farm materials from him better than me."

When Merch simply shrugs, Go can only sigh before saying, "Fine, but we need to work on finding a way to make more weapons like yours."

"Yeah, sure, no problem," I reply with a shrug like Merch's.

*