Captain of the Black Scripture's POV [level 65]
The door opened.
I had been a warrior for thirty years. I had trained under the previous Captain, had earned my seat through engagements that had broken lesser people, had carried the spear that the Theocracy's finest enchanters had spent a decade perfecting. I had fought things that the rest of the world would not believe existed. I had only lost Once before.
I looked at Tim standing in the doorway with eyes the colour of dark blood, and I felt something I had not felt in years.
Fear.
I thrust with full power.
The spear was the fastest thing I could produce, the full extension of thirty years of technique, every buff the magic casters had applied channelled into a single strike aimed at the centre of his chest with the accumulated force of everything I was.
He stopped it with his fingers.
Two fingers. The tip of my spear sat between his index and middle finger and did not move, and I pushed against it with everything I had and it continued not to move.
He took the spear, right from my hands.
Just a removal, clean and final, the weapon leaving my grip with the matter-of-fact quality of someone taking something that was not serving its purpose away from the person who had been holding it.
I processed this. Began reaching for the backup weapon at my hip.
His arm went through my chest.
The sensation was not what I would have described as pain, exactly, it was too large and too immediate for the word pain, maybe shock was the better word for it. His hand came out of my back. I could feel the heat of his arm inside my chest cavity and the impossible fact of it, the absolute wrongness of a thing that should not be able to happen happening.
I hit my fist at his face.
I hit it again.
And again. My fists connected. I could feel the impact travelling back up my arms. His expression did not change in any way that suggested the impacts were registering as meaningful. His eyes, those dark red eyes with the visible veins, looked at my face with cool look.
*I think he wants to watch me die*
I looked past him at the magic casters.
The wizard's eyes met mine for one second. Then she activated her spell and the air where she had been standing became empty air as she teleported away.
The priest ran away.
The footsteps went up the corridor and was soon gone.
My body soon stopped responding to my instructions. Gradually, as I kept punching as hard as I can non-stop till my arms stopped moving. My arms hanging at my sides a few seconds later.
I hung limply on his arm.
He pulled it out.
I fell on the wet floor.
The floor was cold and the blood was mine and spreading from under me, as my vision was dimming, the reduction of the world to a shrinking circle.
He stepped over me and walked toward the basement stairs.
I watched the ceiling for a while.
Then I stopped watching anything.
---
Antilene Heran Fouche's POV [zesshi] [level 85]
The children were giving me a headache.
My main job was guarding the grave room of the 6 great gods, and there items.
but now I had been assigned babysitting duty with the specific reasoning that my presence would deter any rescue attempt, which was sound tactical logic and also meant I was sitting in a room full of frightened, angry children who had been kidnapped in their sleep and woken in an underground chamber, and all of them were hero rank, and hero rank children who had been kidnapped were not children who sat quietly and waited for things to resolve.
There even was a brat who called me a little girl received a black eye before he finished the sentence.
This established a baseline of understanding that kept the subsequent complaints at a verbal rather than physical level.
I was bored out of my mind.
Then the door at the top of the stairs opened.
I stood up.
If someone was coming through that door, it meant the Captain had been dealt with, which meant what was coming down those stairs was something that had dealt with the Captain of the Black Scripture. The remaining Scripture members in the room with me registered this simultaneously and the fear in the room went up.
Someone asked me to help deal with this.
I picked up my cross-shaped War Scythe and walked toward the stairs.
The intruder came into view. Human in appearance. Dark red eyes. And a look of murder in his eyes, and he came with no weapon.
*what an idiot*
He took a battle stance.
I swung.
The War Scythe connected and he was send into the wall with the force that the weapon carried when I used it without restraint. I crossed the room and pinned him to the floor with the ease as I look down at him.
He stopped moving.
I looked at him.
Then he turned to shadow.
The shadow dispersed.
"A shadow clone?"
---
Tim's POV
My shadow clone had done its job.
The distance between where Zesshi had taken the clone to the wall and where the children were sitting was sufficient. The children were frightened and watching, which meant their attention was on the fight.
*Perfect Unknowable* held. I was nothing in the room, no sound, no presence, no displacement of the air that contained me. The Black Scripture members who were not Zesshi were watching the clone fight with the desperate attention of people hoping the outcome was going to be different from what they feared. The children were watching with worry in their eyes.
I activated all the buffs I knew.
Everything I carried that applied to physical capacity, stacked, layered, and than the final TWO.
Then Limit Breaker.
than.
Then Limit Breaker: Mind.
The warning Vesuchā had given me years ago was present in my awareness as I activated it. *Last resort. Not before. Not to win a fight you could walk away from. Use them when the alternative is death.*
I felt Unstoppable [level 92] [plus 5 level form the ring]
I went behind Zesshi.
The Sixfold Slash of Light hit the back of her head with every gram of force that Limit Breaker and every accumulated buff and six years of sword training under Vesuchā behind it.
She went flat into the floor.
I kicked the War Scythe away from her hands before she could reach it.
As I stopped thinking, as I swinged non-stop at her, as I tried to kill her, before she gets back up.
Die die die die die die die
Something hugged my side.
the specific pressure of small arms wrapping around my torso.
I stopped, as I looked back down.
Jynn was behind me. The red-headed teenager. His face was pressed against my back. He was not saying anything. He had made the decision to stop me with his body.
I looked past him.
The children were against the far wall. they were pressed against the wall with scared expressions, as it hit me.
they were frightened of me.
Zesshi was on the floor. Unconscious. Breathing. The armour she had been wearing was perfectly intact. I removed it with a efficient pull, as I leave her in her underwear.
Paladin armour. I would examine it later.
I looked at the door that led toward the tomb of the gods. The pull of what was in there the items, the artifacts, the things that the Theocracy had been collecting for generations, was real and I acknowledged it and set it aside. Limit Breaker was still active. Limit Breaker: Mind was still active. My body was currently operating without the safeguards that prevented catastrophic self-damage, and the debt was accumulating with every second, and I need to leave quickly before the skills ran out.
The spear was in my hand, I swung it at the ceiling of the basement with the little force as stone gave way and the ground floor of the cathedral opened above us and daylight came in.
"Follow me kids, we're going home" I said.
The children came. Frightened, shaky, some of them crying, all of them moving as I counted them as we left.
We came out of the cathedral into the street.
The city around us was the Theocracy's capital, unfamiliar, daylight, people in the street stopping to look at a large group of children emerging from a hole in a cathedral floor.
We move less than eighty meters, before one of my skills ended.
Limit Breaker ended.
Every muscle in my body tore at once. Every bone broke in the sequence of a structural collapse, as my legs bended in odd angles as I fell to the floor.
I attempted to cast *Light Healing*.
Limit Breaker: Mind ended next.
The blood came from everywhere at once, nose, eyes, ears, I stayed awake for two more seconds through pure stubbornness.
Than the world turned black.
---
Tim
[level 82] [plus 5]