Deacon vaulted over another crumbling stretch of battlement and landed hard atop the shattered skull of a reanimated skeleton, crushing it underfoot. Without pausing, he drove his blade through the glowing core of another skeleton, attempting to notch another arrow at him. Sam landed beside him a second after he'd cleaved its bright yellow core, having leapt the same wall in stride.
Arrows hissed and clattered into the barrier behind them as it began to shrink. The modified Gust dome was now reaching its limit, as Sam's mana pool was in dire need of a top-off.
The two didn't stop running – the tornado-like dome was their goal, and it was in reach.
Corpses of cadets and reanimated skeletons littered the wall as they pressed on. Bone arrows pierced their robes, armor, and flesh in ways that made Deacon grimace. Throats, temples, eyes. One had a cluster of four jammed in a neat square into his sternum, followed by three more to the back of the head.
Deacon hopped over one body – the cadet's satchel had been blown open, and he could see the shimmer of potion vials glinting against the moonlight.
"That's annoying," Deacon muttered, more to himself than Sam.
"You're thinking about looting at a time like this?" Sam shot back, eyes forward, staff angled low. "Not a klepto my ass."
Deacon smirked faintly at Sam's words, but that quickly went away as he noticed something off about the corpses of the cadets.
The ones on the battlement and that littered their path to the tornado-like dome were facing the wrong way. Their bodies were slumped, facing away from the barrier dome.
"Ah, never mind," Deacon then muttered to himself upon noticing the large cleaving cuts that littered their bodies, along with a couple of small bone javelins that were embedded in a wooden wankel shield. "The Boneflayer was here before we were."
Sam barely gave a grunt in response as he struggled to keep the modified Gust barrier around them up, while doing his best to keep up with Deacon as they were now seconds away from reaching the barrier.
Then just as Sam's mana reserves reached 10%, they breached through it and he immediately stopped casting Gust and immediately caught himself from falling to the floor and took in heavy breaths.
And at the center of it all was a cadet slumped against the bright pink banner she had been guarding was behind her, its edges now stained with her blood. Catching sight of the bone arrows pierced through her chest and the nasty looking slice that went across her left thigh – Deacon could easily deduce that it was the Boneflayer that got her, unless she got caught up in a cadet vs cadet situation.
Near her open hand was a cracked potion vial with a few drops clinging to the inside bottom of the glass, as most of its contents seemed to have merged with the congealed blood that surrounded her corpse.
Deacon exhaled through his teeth before kneeling beside her. Gently, he raised the cadet's upper body from slumping against the banner, one hand behind her neck, the other supporting her spine. Walking a few steps away from the banner, Deacon gently laid her flat on the ground.
"You know her?" Sam asked as he gulped down a mana potion and quickly stashed its cork and empty glass container inside his Spatial Satchel.
"Yeah," Deacon muttered as he eyed her corpse for a moment longer before taking out a bottle of alcohol and pouring its contents atop her body. After he'd fully emptied it out, he placed the bottle in her arms and crossed them before taking a step back and muttering, "Ignis," setting her aflame.
"I'm surprised you don't with how often you used to tease me about it back in the day," Deacon muttered as he stared at her now burning corpse. "I had a crush of sorts on her back when I first entered the academy. It's Adeline Klein."
Sam's eyes suddenly widened in recognition before darting towards her face. He opened his mouth to say something, but before he could, he held himself back, and gently placed a hand atop of Deacon's shoulder.
Deacon gave a small nod in response before turning away from Adeline's aflame corpse and back towards the pink banner with the words, House Klein embroidered in gold.
"She always hated it when I joked about her height and how fitting it was considering her last name," Deacon said as from his Spatial Storage he pulled free a coil of rope he'd made from jungle vines from Floor Three.
"… Yeah, I remember," Sam muttered as he began to gather mana around the both of them. A second later, Gust flickered to life around them, Sam reshaping the spell into a tighter dome, isolating the two of them and the banner within a cocoon of force just as Deacon pulled the bright pink banner out of the ground, which caused the dome-like tornado barrier to vanish.
Deacon moved quickly. He wrapped the vine-rope tightly around the banner, securing it around its middle, and after double-knotting it, he looped the rope over his chest and shoulders, then hauled the banner onto his back with much thought.
"We have just about two hours left to look for the last banner," Sam said, as a barrage of arrows struck the Gust barrier he'd surrounded the both of them within.
"Yeah," Deacon answered as he reached into the pouch at his hip and pulled free a small tin of salve, fingers smeared with dried blood from earlier. He popped the lid, ran two fingers through the thick, herbal mix, and slapped it onto the gash along his thigh.
Taking one last glance at Adeline's still aflame corpse, Deacon smacked his face with both his palms and shook his head, in an attempt to get rid of the thoughts plaguing his mind. "Let's go."
***
Deacon quickly knelt beside the many-times-over-skewered corpse of a cadet, half-buried beneath shattered brick and bone fragments. He grabbed the iron-studded wooden heather shield that was still strapped to the dead warrior's arm, tore it free with one hard yank, and immediately lifted it to intercept the oncoming volley.
Bone arrows hammered against the shield like hail on metal. Splinters chipped off the front, bits of wood and bone flying, but the shield held firm.
"Cover me!" Deacon barked as he charged the stairs.
"Got it," Sam shouted back, still winded, but already beginning to cast smaller Gust barriers around Deacon's exposed back, which was immediately proven useful as it caught a stray arrow that would have caught him in the small of his back.
Deacon moved fast up the stairs while weaving in between the debris that littered his path up, teeth gritted, shield raised high as more arrows rained down from above.
Why were there only archers? Why was their Elite the only different one?
Neither of them had an answer. But they'd both read enough about Floor Theory to know that most Floors followed a theme – and judging by what they'd seen so far, this one centered around a fallen fortress. And those stationed atop the walls of a fortress were usually archers, with the occasional captain or commander mixed in.
Just as Deacon reached the top of the stairs, he clenched his teeth as he saw that the reanimated skeletons atop it were just about to release another volley of bone arrows and were now angling their bows to face him.
Without a second thought, he charged forward, shield first, like a living battering ram. The nearest skeleton crumpled on impact, bones clattering across the stone floor. The next two barely had time to screech before he plowed through them, sending fragments of bone skidding in every direction – some flying off the wall entirely. All three cores, however, remained intact, rolling freely across the ground amid the scattered remains.
Deacon peeked over the edge of his battered and arrow-ridden shield just in time to see four skeleton archers finish pulling back their strings with an arrow aimed dead on at him.
"Shit."
He immediately dodged to the left just as the arrows zipped towards him; however, one of the arrows miraculously curved midair and punched straight through the thick leather of his chestpiece, burying itself between his ribs.
Deacon grimaced but didn't stop.
Giving the shield a glance and seeing its front covered in arrows, he then hurled it like a discus. It spun through the air and smashed straight into one of the four reanimated skeletons, and caught it right across the skull just as it was already reaching for another rib to transmute it into a bone arrow to fire at him.
The shield easily cracked and broke its skull, sending the rest of its body crashing backward in a clattering heap and scattering across the floor, joining its fallen comrades.
Before the others could react, Deacon already reached into his Spatial Sling Bag and pulled out Echoform Reliquary in its broadsword form and darted towards them.
In one clean arc, the blade cleaved through the temple of the closest skeletal archer – its core glinting faintly in its right eye socket before splitting clean in half.
The body dropped like a puppet with its strings cut, bones scattering to the floor in a mess of motionless pieces, unlike its fallen comrades that surrounded it.
*Your Race has reached Lv 11 – Points allocated, +1 Free Point*
"About damn time," he muttered, eyes narrowing slightly as he adjusted his grip on the broadsword and eyed the next wave of archers scrambling into position at the far side of the wall before lunging towards them – not wanting to give up the advantage he had in close combat.
As he lunged towards them, a barrage of jagged stone spears, conjured by Sam as he'd repeatedly cast Earth Spear, erupted from the stone flooring beside him and shot towards the archers scrambling to notch their arrows.
The skeletal archers were flung like ragdolls as the barrage of stone spears struck them; ribcages bursting open, skulls pierced and snapped back, bones both whole and shattered flying in every direction.
Of the ten that had been hit, only three actually stopped moving as their yellow cores were found to be on the ends of the earthen spears, no longer glowing yellow. The rest groaned and clawed, attempting to pull themselves back up, regardless of their missing limbs, ribs, or skulls.
Deacon didn't waste a single second at the window of opportunity Sam provided for him.
The Echoform Reliquary rippled in his hands, shifting mid-stride into its dual short swords form – one forming in each hand.
He moved like a blur between the fallen reanimated skeletons, jabbing and slicing through core after core with ruthless precision. In doing so, one by one, their bright yellow cores were cleaved in two by his blades, causing the bones that made up their body to crumple lifelessly.
Sam followed close behind, launching a quick volley of Earth Spears to keep any of the more intact skeletons from fully gathering together.
By the time they finished clearing the last one, Deacon pulled out the arrow that had lodged itself in between his ribs and applied some Healing Salve atop it while Sam was downing the last drops of another mana potion.
"Gods," Sam breathed out, wiping the sweat that matted his forehead with the sleeves of his robe. "How many damn skele archers are on these walls? I think we've killed like 40 each."
"Not to mention the piss poor XP they seem to be giving us," Deacon said as he wiped his sweaty face.
Taking a moment to catch their breaths – longer than they probably should've. Both of them were now leaning on opposite sides of the parapet, searching for the last banner.
Sam was scanning the inside of the fortress and the nearby battlements, while Deacon searched the marshes surrounding the fortress.
"Think we'd be able to find it in time?" Sam asked, still catching his breath. "We have just over an hour left until the event ends."
Deacon opened his mouth to answer, but stopped short as a glimmer of bright violet caught his eye.
Across the marshes outside the fortress, past a half-collapsed gatehouse and watchtowers, a pulsing violet barrier shimmered faintly through the trees and gloom that filled the marsh.
Marsh wraiths slammed into it from all sides, and just like the banshees that attempted to touch the Rising Sun's spectral barrier, each time they touched the barrier, they were thrown back.
Deacon straightened. "Found it."