Chapter 21: The Cursed Canyon (2/2)
The 10 Knights that were atleast 8 feet tall rushed towards the party.
" Okay now that we're outnumbered I'll take 5 you'll take the rest Athena " said loudly Arthur to Athena while running towards the Knights to the left side. Athena did the same but to the right side. The 3 other players simply waited that Athena and Arthur separated the group in two before splitting aswell. Vita went with Athena to help her tank the 5 Knights while Flaming Flower and Doux helped Arthur killing the 5 other knights.
On the left side, Arthur was running around the Knights, he parried every attack with Excalibur to not lose any durability waiting for Flaming Flower and Doux to be in position. Once they arrived and Flaming Flower was placed in a safe position, he used a bit of beginner's sword energy that was much stronger now due to the passive of Excalibur and infused it in the holy sword. The energy became a holy energy and the undead Knight were afraid of it, this caused them to stop their attacks, a gap that Arthur didn't miss as he mercilessly cut the bony leg of the knight in front of him.
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When Doux and Flaming Flower saw the damage that Arthur did with one attack, they were more confident than before concerning facing the 10 knights.
The Undead Knight was a level 17 monster that had 800 HP so two attacks and Arthur would finish him, but the consumption in EP was huge to maintain the sword energy.
He toggled off the ability and blocked the attack of another Undead Knight and simply attacked the Undead Knight that had one leg missing and was destabilized. With one slash, the undead Knight was killed. Doux didn't waste any time as he lauched him { Jumping Strike } one the Undead Knights.
It was a AOE skill that level 10 berserkers could learn. A -68 could be seen on the 4 remaining Knights, and Doux retreated as soon as he landed to let Arthur keep the aggro. The skill of Doux stunned for half a second the Undead Knights, but it was enough time for Arthur to kill yet another monster and approached the remaining.
Flaming Flower was waiting for the right moment and Arthur was getting low on EP so he ducked to dodge the attack of the Knight and shouted to Flaming Flower to use her Fireball. Flaming Flower perfectly timed the spell as Arthur jumped in the air to dodge another strike and the Undead knight was hit with the burning spell. He roared for a moment but Arthur finished the job by using the distraction to kill it.
Only two knights were remaining and they needed to hurry to help Athena and Vita. Arthur threw the corpse of a deceased in front of the Knight to block his vision, which succeeded, and after dodging the blind slash of the Undead Knight, he hit him twice and while he disappeared , he kicked what remained of the now killed Undead Knight onto the other before the body vanished completely, and while the last Undead Knight was catching his killed companion, he got hit by a fireball and stumbled until he realized that the warrior was waiting for him. Not letting the monster the time to catch its breath, not that an undead would have any, Doux hit him thrice in the chest in a quick succession before Arthur finished the job.
Not checking the loots, they directly rushed towards Athena, while Flaming Flower was already heading there as soon as she lauched the last fireball. They joined Athena and Vita and killed the rest of the Undead Knight. These monsters, althought they had not many HP and were low on defense due to the fact that they lacked several parts of their armor, had a good amount of strength but it was useless since Arthur's agility and Athena's positioning prevented them from even hitting the players. They were still a good source of experience as they were Boss monsters.
They started to loot the monsters and were surprised that they found a skill book for healers here. The healing skill books were very rare and the classes that relied on healing spell had only a few spell to begin with so this skill book was very valuable. Arthur didn't even look at it and gave it to Vita. This surprised everyone as they knew that Arthur was in need of money to create the shop and thought that he would simply sell the skill book instead of giving it away. They thought that this guild leader really deserved some respect and were even more inclined to stick with the guild Eclipse.
When Vita checked the skill, she nearly jumped of joy, surprising the party members. Athena asked what was the skill, and Vita put the description in the party chat.
{ Healing Wires } ( Rare Skill Book )
Heal for 15 + 20% of User's EP every 2 seconds for as long as the user's EP isn't null. Can be used on 3 people at the same time.
Cost: 5 EP every 2 seconds
Cooldown: 2 minutes
This was a really strong skill, basically giving a strong regeneration to 3 people in the party. This could compensate for the huge cost of the basic healing spell of the cleric class that Vita was using.
She learned the skill as she completed the requirement. Her EP regeneration was at 5 EP every 5 seconds so she could lower the cost of this ability somehow.
They also earned a Rare level 15 Heavy Chest Breastplate that went to Athena.
[ Heavy Corrupted Breastplate ] ( Rare )
Level 15
Equipment Requirement: END 30
Defense + 23
Effect: { Curse of the Knight }: For 5 seconds, user incur 10% more damage. At the end of this duration, every entity that hit user gets cursed. Inflicts 70% of the damage done and reduce healing by 50% for 15 seconds.
Cooldown: 180 seconds.
Durability: 80/80
This was also a good piece of equipment, but she wouldn't use the effect until she had more health, said Athena.
When everything was finished, they didn't know where to head so they decided to go back to the canyon but suddenly the Lich came back and apparently was pissed at the death of its knight but they couldn't tell because the Lich was shouting in another language. In the end, the Lich resurrected every dead soldier on the ground, and made them attack the players.
There was simply too much enemies this time, and Arthur didn't know if they could survive without his use of { Illuminate The World }.
" Alright now what's your plan Leader, because I'm not sure we can get away from this horde. " asked nervously Doux to Arthur.
Everyone realized how Arthur suddenly frowned when he saw the amount of monsters so they thought that the raid just ended there and they would come back with more players because it was just impossible to clear with 5 players alone. But what Arthur said next wasn't expected as he didn't give up, but instead grinned at the horde that was charging towards them.
In reality, Arthur remembered that his ranged attack using sword energy would go through weak mobs like this, but would use a lot of prana in order to clear them. But he could only try and he had a couple of weak prana potions in his inventory.
" Alright Athena you try to bait a group left and make them as close as possible. I'll take care of the rest. " said Arthur using the same method that he used on the Knights.
Athena thought that it wouldn't work on such a number of opponents and was unsure if she could handle even a portion of the horde but still followed the instructions. She ran to the left and successfully baited about a quarter of the horde by using the { Weak Taunt } skill she learned when she got to level 10.
Meanwhile , Arthur watched the Horde getting closer and closer and waited for the right moment, seeing this, the rest of the group thought that either their leader completely surrendered or that he had a way to succeed so they just stayed a bit behind him but didn't move anyway.
The moment a undead was about to strike Arthur, he used all of his EP and did a ranged attack of sword energy which was infused with the light element thanks to Excalibur and swiped horizontally with the broadest angle his arm could do. He sucessfully hit every undead that was approaching him and only the ones that were the furthest didn't die instantly.
When they saw the light coming of Arthur's sword, the amount of undead it killed and the non-stop system notification about receiving EXP, every party member was shocked beyong words and Athena nearly got caught because of it. Arthur wake them up shortly after he drank a weak prana potion.
" Hey, let's finish the work there aren't that many undead left. " said Arthur looking at the 3 flabbergasted players behind him.
They focused back into the fight and quickly finished the rest of the undead before heading towards Athena who had about a hundred of undead behind her. They all thanked the GM for the fact that these undead were absolute retards, if not, these sort of plans would have never worked.
Once again, Arthur used his light ranged attack and wiped out the undead, and now Athena understood why she got so much notifications. With the sheer number of undead that they killed. Everyone except Arthur levelled up, but he himself wasn't that far away from level 17. His sword Excalibur levelled up 2 times thanks to him using the holy attribute of Excalibur to kill the undead. He got 4 Free Attributes Points thanks to this. The Corpses were no more on the battlefield, and the Lich wasn't anywhere either. They once again decided to go down the canyon, but Arthur looked back before entering the cave to see if the Lich was about to prank them again. It didn't happen so they once again found themselves in the scary canyon, but this time the vile and gloomy air that was around in the first place was much denser, so they thought that they were near the final Boss.
They arrived at the end of the Canyon and this time, there was a hole in the wall that revealed another large room filled with what seemed demonic inscriptions on the walls. They understood why the dungeon was called the Cursed Canyon now. They saw the Lich once again but this time it was followed by a gigantic shadow like sword wielder that didn't hesitate to charge Athena who was in front. Although she tried to dodge she found that it was too fast so she could only block the attack with her bouche shield while activating { Attack And Defense }.
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When the party saw the damage that took Athena in one strike they frowned. Vita activated both { Healing Wires } and her healing spell to preserve Athena's life.
+120
+48
This was a good burst of heal and another tick of +48 would happen in two seconds but if Athena got hit two times, she was completely dead so Arthur stepped up with Doux while Flaming Flower threw a fireball at the Lich in the back since she saw that he was preparing a spell. This was a good decision since she interrupted whatever the Lich was doing.
-289
The fireball dealt a good amount of damage to the Lich since the monster had no defense but it wasn't enough to take it down. Arthur had already attacked two times the Shadown and dodged its attacks. He dealt 387 damage with each strike infused with sword energy which meant that this shadow had a good defense stat. In the end, Athena got back into action thanks to Vita's healing and the Shadow couldn't hit any player while his health was rapidly declining. There wasn't any corpse here and the other spells of the Lich took too much time to activate so Flaming Flower basically interrupted him everytime. When the Shadow only had 50% of its HP he activated a skill so everyone backed away while Flaming Flower didn't forget to throw a fireball at the Lich at the last moment. The shadow suddenly roared as waves of darkness came crashing against the players. Athena and Doux protected Vita and Flaming Flower who was preparing her next fireball. Vita then healed Athena first and activated { Healing Wire } on Doux while drinking a weak prana potion.
Flaming Flower once again interrupted the Lich who shouted in anger then took a talisman from nowhere and tore it. It summoned two smaller versions of the shadow that was getting dangerously low in terms of HP under the assault of Doux, Athena and Arthur.
The shadow didn't use another skill after the first one so it died easily. In the meantime, Athena took a couple of hit from the smaller shadows as they were faster than the big one but dealt less damage, the passive healing from { Healing Wires } was enough to cover the damage but it was taking a serious toll on Vita's EP. Arthur actually let the two small shadows to Athena and Doux because he saw that Flaming Flower now had trouble keeping up with the Lich now that he was attacking her with talismans that were instantanious. He slashed the dark arrow that was coming his way and once he got close to the Lich, he simply destroyed him thanks to Excalibur. Flaming Flower lauched a fireball that hit both smaller shadows for 300 damage and they finished the job.
System: You have cleared The Cursed Canyon's Hell Mode.
They looted the only corpse that they would see, the Lich's since the shadows were some sort of summons. They got 2 items from the Lich's body.
[ Rugged Magician's Robe ] ( Rare )
Level 15
Equipment Requirement: INT 30 WIS 25
Defense +5
Magical damage +10%
Durability 40/40
[ Rusted Knight's Shield ] ( Common )
Level 15
Equipment Requirement : END 30 STR 20
Defense +21
Damage Reduction +1%
Durability 80/80
Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone