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[Skill-Eater] Chapter 53: Finale
🕑 Added 2024-07-20 05:11:39 +0000 UTCEdge sprang to his feet in a single motion, activating shadow step before his boots hit the ground.
His body transformed into flowing darkness, moving faster than ever before. The world faded away to silvery fog, except for Trapper’s crew, who looked washed out, and the reaver, which appeared completely solid.
He knew in that moment that he would be able to fight the monster. That since they were both ethereal, they would be solid to each other. That the reaver hadn’t realized what had happened and didn’t see him coming.
The fiend was focused on setting up a killing blow, ready to tear into Trapper’s body with its beak and both sets of claws. But Edge wasn’t about to let that happen.
He went flying at his opponent like a bullet, iceblade erupting from his hand as he streaked across the soil. The glowing shard was three feet long, emitting arctic might like the wrath of winter personified. Elemental blade was sharper and colder than ever before, but it wasn’t going to make it in time.
Edge was just getting started.
As he raced to close the distance, he cast entangle. Once, twice, then another ten times.
The monster sensed the incredible release of mana and realized that something was wrong. It looked away from its intended prey, toward the man with the same power as its own.
The reaver let loose an astonished squawk, shocked to see someone else who was solid in this state. Before it could recover from its surprise, Edge’s spell arrived.
The world behind the fiend erupted into grasping vines, so thick that he couldn’t see the ground. They passed right through Trapper and her crew, shielding them from the reaver’s wrath. It hasn’t realized what’s behind it yet. I need to keep it focused on me, then use the trick I learned from the nymphs.
He yelled and raised his iceblade above him, slashing at the air as he ran. The creature looked down at the lethal weapon clasp in Edge’s hands and then leapt back to open some distance. A move that carried it straight into the forest of vines that were bursting free from the soil.
The monster might have been able to get away if it had turned off shadow step. But in that moment, its instincts betrayed it, and it tried using force instead.
It managed to dodge the first dozen strands. It cut its way through the next, using talon, beak, and claw to sever the tough tendrils. But no matter how many plants it sliced and diced, there were always more behind. As he made his approach, Edge hadn’t stopped casting entangle for a second.
Surrounded by dozens of skills, the monster began to panic. It kept swiping in a frenzy of feathered limbs, desperate to get away before it was bound. A blizzard of shorn vines rained to the ground, as more surged for the creature like an army of angry serpents.
It bought Edge enough time to finish closing the distance. He flew across the final few feet with his iceblade poised to strike.
Meanwhile, the last hole in his chest pulled itself closed. His torn flesh sealed shut, leaving healthy pink skin behind. Bolstered by regeneration, his bone marrow kept making fresh blood, sharpening his mind and adding more strength to his body.
By now, the reaver was sparring with a score of grasping vines, too encumbered to break away. Edge looked it in the eye as he made his move, iceblade trailing mist like the tail of a comet. It’s time to bring you down.
It wasn’t just an aspiration. It was a promise he knew he could keep. When his brain fog burned away, he had realized that his ultimate didn’t just let him use endless skills. He could use them all at the same time.
Three-skill combos were something that people spoke of with reverence on the feed, although they almost never happened. The mana cost of using three skills at once was exponentially higher than two, making it wildly inefficient and prohibitively expensive.
But such concerns were trivial to Skill-Eater. The drain was nothing compared to the torrent of mana that [Overdrive] was pumping out. He cast another entangle at the monster’s feet as he brought his iceblade down hard, adding slash to the power of his swing.
The whole thing was surreal. Edge had never expected to execute a triple combo, but he had just pulled one off without breaking a sweat. Actually, I think that was four. Shadow step is still going full blast.
The reaver crossed its claws and braced itself to receive the blow, catching the elemental blade mere inches in front of its throat. He tried to push harder, but the subzero sword wouldn’t budge. Even now, the monster’s strength was shocking to behold.
Edge was running out of time and needed to work fast. As a fresh set of vines burst through the ground and bound the monster’s legs, he disengaged then came darting back in, slashing again and again.
The reaver parried every strike, filling him with doubt.
But then the vines reached its arms, pulling them down and out of the way.
His next slash connected clearly, carving deep into the creature’s flank. The iceblade left sundered tissue in its wake, frozen solid before it had time to bleed.
Down to only a single weapon, the reaver pulled its head back and lunged. It wagered its life on one last strike… only to realize that Edge was nowhere to be found.
He had taken advantage of the moment to duck low and use conceal, shrouding himself from the monster’s sight. The instant that its beak went streaking through the space that his throat had occupied half a heartbeat before, he put everything that he had into one final barrage.
He slashed and brought elemental blade up in a rising strike, putting the full power of his new body behind it. It sliced the reaver from hip to shoulder, leaving rime-coated ruin behind.
Edge slashed a dozen more times in half as many heartbeats. His arctic blade came down time and time again, freezing more of the monster’s body, until only its head remained.
He could feel the fire in his reactor cooling. The great engine drifting back to sleep. There were only two seconds left on [Overdrive], something that he could sense on an instinctual level.
It was two more seconds than he needed.
He could finish the reaver off anytime that he wanted, but Edge had another plan in mind. Extraction. He willed his other ultimate to activate, hoping that he would be able to use both powers at once.
As it turned out, he could. Accompanied by an insatiable hunger, his chains came slithering out of his wrists and went plunging into the reaver’s core.
Once again, Skill-Eater stopped his mind from following along. It wasn’t a problem. Their desires were aligned. Without waiting to receive a command, his chains ignored the other skills and went straight for shadow step.
They struck in a flash and grabbed hold tight, pulling the skill out of the core before flinging into his mouth. He crushed the flitting shadows and swallowed, as the flavor of dusk broke over his tongue.
Edge spent the mortium required to digest the rare skill. Then he drove his iceblade straight into the shadowreaver’s head, stealing the life from its eyes.
Comments
Robert McCarter
Excellent! Thank you very much!
Bryan Dickerson
Bonus chapter.
