Chapter 17: Chapter 17
"Joffrey, pass me your sword, I need a weapon," I say as my mace was thrown into the opposite side of the room.
"This thing feels no pain, so crushing it does nothing with my strength, we need to cut this thing to pieces.", I say with determination, the handle of the sword sliding into my hand.
"How's the shoulder, did he get you?", I say eyes locked with the creature.
"It's fine, he just took a chunk of leather out of my armor", he says, body tensed.
'Inspect', I think hoping to find out what the hell this thing is.
[Race: Maggotkin (Undivided)]
[Stats: (Raise skill)]
"Oh great, I fucking hate whoever made this dungeon, that's a lesser demon, called a plaguebearer. Don't get hit under any circumstances, if it slices you open with it's sword, it can transmute any number of diseases into your body. We're just lucky that it's an undivided demon and not under its original chaos god. The moral of the story is that if you get hit, you will die. Don't worry though, I forgot to tell you earlier, but we have a few lives in this dungeon, meaning we can die and get back up", I say with a smirk. "Although, those diseases might just stay with us when we revive, so as I said, do not get hit."
"What the fuck did you just say? You'll explain it to me later, after we cut this asshole to chunks", he says.
Joffrey dashes forward with his knife, taking the rest of the wrist off of the sword arm of the plaugebearer, that part of the arm dropping onto the ground, but not before it flicked the sword into its other hand and slashed toward Joffrey.
The blade get caught by Joffrey's knife, after redirecting the blade, he whipped to the muttering demon's side and cuts its side, his blade reaching into the stomach, making more organs drip on to the floor.
'Rage Attunment'
[Strength: 23]
After this I run in swinging the sword with all my might, only to have it deflected by the Maggotkin, a clear difference in strength is evident even though mine is superhuman. I feel a tinge of anger as I realize I need to get stronger.
The maggotkin takes the opportunity my deflection gave him and swings toward my stomach, only for Joffrey to jump on the the back of this thing and drives his knife through the side of it's skull and me dashing out of the way only making the demon laugh harder.
Joffrey being on the back of this thing, blade still imbedded in its skull, drops off the demon dashing away.
The demon in response starts cackling while pulling the blade out with a prehensile tongue only to lick its putrid blood off the blade. It flicks the knife over at me. Catching it in my left hand, I have the sword in my right.
I throw the knife harmlessly over to Joffrey, saying,"See, we need to chop it up, stabbing it does nothing. Don't get any of that blood in your mouth or insides of any kind."
"I fuckin know, you wanker, do you believe me for a common fool?", says Joffrey.
"I've got lefty and then head, you focus on the legs, and if you get done before me just do whatever you can", I say locking in.
My body tenses as I sprint across the room going for a fast blow, only to feint when the demon tries to parry and take the left arm off at the elbow.
Joffrey then comes in and cuts across the thigh of it, cutting a good way in due to the knife's hefty weight, giving the demon a limp and making it slower.
The feeling of victory feels close, but before I can take off its head it picks the sword up off the ground in a lunge. Taking the sword in its mouth and going into a crouch position, before blasting off from that position slicing toward me.
I dodge out of the way and go into a roll.
It stumbles around the ground, as I run toward it and cut its leg off at the knee with a two handed overhead strike.
Taking it out of its misery, I kick the blade out of its mouth before taking my sword and cutting its head off like an executioner, but not long after I had to spin the carcass to truly decapitate it as the angle I was going at didn't quite cut all the way through.
In this process of me cutting its head off, the demon lunges forward and it bites me in the calf, causing a wave of pain to go through my body and a system message to invade my vision, even through closed eyes.
[Disease Transmitted]
[Disease: Great Necrotizing Fasciitis]
[Disease progress 1%-2%-3%]
Slowly the area around the bite starts to redden, and slowly starts to get purple.
The message sits in the corner of my vision as I move onto more important things
[Killed Plaguebearer of the Warp]
[+75 exp, +75 coins]
[Rewards granted: Plague Resisitance (B), +3 Strength, +5 Vitality, +3 Agility, +3 Reflexes for the party]
[Hidden Objective Completed]
[Mission: Kill the Plaguebearer of the Warp]
[Reward: +3 int, random cantrip for party]
"What the hell so this. Is this what you've been seeing when you talk about the system?", Joffrey says when I see a blue screen pops up in his vision completely evident in my vision.
"Yeah, but I didn't think I'd be able to see yours, I guess now you know what I mean.", I say with a chuckle.
I check back into the disease progress, and the progress has slowed down but sits at 15%, due to my plague resistance and healing speed it has greatly slowed but it doesn't change the fact that my leg is purple and dying
Suddenly the enhancements kick in as I know whats coming, but Joffrey doesn't, I say," The rewards for getting through this room are kicking in, this is gonna hurt Joff, get ready".
I lay down on the ground, back to the floor and wait for the inevitable, but different to what I expected, the muscle tearing pain is still apparent from me gaining above human strength but it's faded from before, more bearable. My guess would be most of my stats being superhuman.
I get up before Joffrey does and there is a pool of blood surrounding him, his bones still cracking and muscles convulsing.
I sit in concern, not being able to help and just sit there. I'm ready for anything Joffrey might do when the he wakes from this. It's an incredibly painful experience and who knows what might happen.
Meanwhile the bite from the plaguebearer is taking a toll on my leg, it slowly turning black, the hairs dying and falling to the floor. There is a constant pain, but it worries me more that it doesn't hurt in the places where it did before.
'While I'm waiting I might as well choose the cantrip it told me about, hopefully I can find something to keep this disease at bay.'
'Adel, show me the cantrips, please'
[Of course]
My menus opened and it flicked to the home menu where my stats sat, and focused on the spells part of my stat block, giving me a screen asking me if I wanted to choose my first cantrip.
Clicking on the 'yes' icon, a few categories opened in front of me.
[A cantrip is a minor magical implement that is fueled by your ambient mana, meaning that these spells don't affect your mana pool. Due to these spells being fueled by your residual mana, as you grow stronger and the mana coming off of you increases, so will the power of these spells.]
Aside from the huge magical bomb that Adel just dropped on me, I look through the categories of cantrips, them reading as Offensive, Defensive, and Support.
I immediately go to the support tab and look through it. The first few cantrips that catch my eye are as follows.
[Minor Bless][Minor Heal][Minor Cure]
I focus on minor cure and a description pops up.
[Minor Cure]
[Uses ambient magic and focuses on a malady that plagues the user. Minor Cure can work to slow the progress of a disease or poison and at higher levels of intelligence, even cure them.]
[Usage: Magic can be invoked in a miriad of ways, hand movements, words of mouth, or in some cases when lacking personal mana, a person can make a pact with a familiar or patron that lets them use their mana in replacement of their own. In the case of cantrips, they are evoked by a simple hand sign based on its category or by name and intent.]
This looks pretty nice for my first cantrip, I don't really know any hand signs yet, so I'll just try the name and intent.
"Minor Cure", I say with force.
A flecks of sparkling, gold light flow from my fingertips and attach to my wound, and the amount of flecks increases drastically, as I get this message.
[The efficiency of all healing spells increase by 50% due to the power of (Blessing of Exuberance)]
'Where the hell is this coming from?'
[Honestly, I have no idea, it was just... there]
[I don't know much more than you do, it seems the stronger you get, the more I start to remember things.]
The flecks of light from my hand start to slow as the pieces of light sticking into the wound start to integrate into the wounded flesh.
Gradually the purple starts to recede in color slightly.
The infection percent age sits at [22%] and after looking for a while it drops down to [21%].
'Fuck, is 50 percent really that much? The description makes it sound as though all it would really do at this point was slow the progression of the disease, but it's slowly curing it?'
[It seems that the power of the spell is only slightly stronger than the progression of the disease, meaning it will take a long time, but you just barely saved yourself. Not like it mattered anyway, you would've revived, but you saved yourself a life and the pain of slowly withering away.]
Suddenly, Joffrey springs up clenching his chest and groaning in pain.
"What in the hell was that?!", says Joffrey looking at me in angry confusion.
"That was the system forcefully making you stronger, if you'll check out your body, you'll see that almost all aspects of yourself have been strengthened, although you won't be able to be superhuman yet.", I say.
"Alright," he says slowly calming down and flexing his now enlarged bicep,"Why does it hurt so much, nothing should hurt that much", Joffrey says.
"I would have to agree that this way of getting stronger sucks more than a stripper with a big tipper, but take growing pains for example. When you grow, your body forcibly elongates or strengthens your limbs or muscles, this serves the same purpose but is many times stronger. Well, that's the explanation I've come up with", I say with a shrug.
"Though I have to say, for your own mental well-being you'll have to do this a few more times until you get to superhuman. I guarantee this will leave you with great strength to dominate your enemies. The feeling of being something more than human, it's undescribable", I say.
"That also means for the time being you will never be physically stronger than me, now that can change if you're willing to go the lengths needed. You will have to go through a full body reconstruction, which is much like its name in function. It is an incredibly painful experience, I would know, I've done it already. The point of this transformation is to let you be able to go beyond the human limit.", I say with a smirk.
"Well this is a lot, man I'm up for it but I know it's gonna 'suck', whatever that means," Joffrey says with air quotes he makes with his hands.
"Anyway besides the puddle of blood I'm currently sitting in I'm fine, how are you?", asks Joffrey with concern.
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