Judging by the vast region it had subjugated, Lirael had known that the Revenant here was extremely strong. Still, it was only a Tier 5 beast and the inherent limitation of mana capacity and the disparity in the number of shards that came with that status meant that it wasn’t her match. Even then, she had been cautious, probing it with exploratory attacks from a distance to determine the shards it had apart from the obligatory Undead Marrow.

A close combat shard that increased the sharpness of its mandibles was the conclusion she had arrived at. It was a very practical shard, especially coupled with its colossal body and the strength that came with it. Now, pushed to its limits by her, it had revealed its third Tier 5 shard – a variant of the Dissociation shard. If it wasn’t for her Seismic Sense warning her of an extremely intense underground movement, she might have fallen into a predicament as the centipede split its body into millions of smaller individuals and travelled through the earth towards her, leaving an empty shell of dry earth behind.

When Lirael had crafted the blueprint of her Dungeon, she had paid dual attention to development potential as well as battle-strength. She had wanted a Dungeon that would be easy to manage while simultaneously boosting her fighting capabilities. As such, her shard combination was very well rounded. Investigation, attack, defense, and mobility – especially mobility – she was outstanding in all fields. But as her Dungeon was yet incomplete, it had a flaw. A flaw that had made itself manifest in the intense battle with the colossal centipede: She needed time to switch between attack and defense.

The sudden failure of her Shrinking Space shard had caught her off guard and she wasn’t able to employ her usual tactic of using her excellent mobility to buy the time required for the switch. Fortunately, in Vlad’s defensive shard, she had a backup.

The orange light from Vlad’s Noon Circle permeated the ground beneath their feet, lighting their forms from below; the white flames encircling them casting highlights on the dark sea of writhing insects that besieged them from all sides. The Thrall remained crouched with his Daybreak Shield touching the ground, maintaining the technique against the relentless onslaught of the suicidal insects. Whenever one of the fell creatures touched the flames or tried to tunnel up through the light, they would burn to ash – their jarring screams playing a symphony of horror to the accompaniment of the skittering of their countless feet.

The spell was an island of brightness in the dark.

Mana flowed out of Vlad like a river, pouring into his shards; and if not for Lirael’s Domain greatly suppressing the strength of the insects, he would have been overwhelmed within moments. Yet, the ring of fire shrank inwards and the protective light grew dimmer as the insects used their lives to consume his strength. His eyes glowed scarlet as he roared and raised his shield high above his head before bringing it slamming back down onto the ground. The rocky ground fissured and caved as another ripple of orange light radiated outwards from the point of impact, reinforcing the Noon Circle.

As Vlad and the swarm refused to compromise with each other, Lirael focused on swapping her shard combination as fast as possible. Her current set, the Frostmane Armour and the Bow of Frozen Blood was good for fighting a small number of opponents. With her high mobility, she could dodge any single-target attacks and the defense of her armour ensured that area of effect attacks would be too diffuse in might to affect her. Meanwhile, her bow gave her a powerful attack against flesh and blood opponents. But when pitted against a large swarm of weak enemies, this tactic became extremely inefficient as there was no way to adjust the might of each arrow or increase her firing speed.

Lirael’s outline blurred as wisps of mist rose from her crystalline armour and wreathed her. The haze grew thicker and thicker as the ice began to melt and then steam. It caught the light of Vlad’s spell, gaining a fiery orange glow. The temperature around her rose in steady steps from the chill of the heart of winter to the blazing heat of a midsummer’s noon. The heat warped the surrounding air, making her clothes and hair flutter upwards. A blast of hot air centred on her ripped the mist apart, revealing her form.

Her garnet eyes that had been reminiscent of blood, now smouldered with the intertwined reds, yellows and oranges of molten rock. Taking a step forward, she took a deep breath and opened her mouth, giving a glimpse of her throat that burnt with incandescent white flames. Her mana condensed around the shard in her throat and the flames within her gullet flared hotter. She roared.

~ Pyroclastic Flow ~

A cone of burning ash spewed out of her mouth and inundated the swarm of insects writhing outside the circle of white flames. The grey ash-cloud glowed orange with internal heat as it spread like lightning through the ranks of the insects, flash-boiling the blood in their veins and setting them into statues of solid ash. They didn’t even have time for a dying scream.

Lirael turned and swept all around her with her attack, scouring the land clean of the filth. Completing the full circle, she stopped her skill and fell to her knees clutching her throat – hacking and coughing painfully as smoke spewed out of the corners of her charred mouth. A red glow covered her mouth and throat as her Undead Marrow shard kicked in, regenerating the charred flesh.

Spitting out a gobbet of black ash, she pointed in a direction and rasped out through half-formed vocal cords. “Don’t… let… run.”

Without a word, Vlad raised his shield and charged into the lingering clouds of searing ash. Protected from the heat by his Aura of Strength, he barrelled through the ashen statues, shattering them like so much kindling. As he burst out from a bank of ash clouds, drawing grey trails behind him, he saw the insects that had survived by tunnelling underground emerging and fusing into a much larger entity.

The reforming creature was already a hundred metres from tip to tail – a massive monstrosity by any terms, but it was only a fraction of the size it had been, showing how badly it had been damaged by the battle. Still, as a result of splitting and reforming, all the stubborn wounds inflicted upon it by Lirael had healed. It could easily be understood why it had been able to wrest away such a large domain for itself. The Dissociation shard was a healing shard in disguised form and that, coupled with its Undead Marrow shard, gave it an abnormal tenacity. Adding on its extremely dangerous close combat shard that could cut through nearly anything, its opponents would be hard pressed to kill it or defend against millions of gnawing mandibles.

Noticing Vlad’s approach, the multitude of hands that had been lying flat on its body dispiritedly set upright like hackles, baring their fangs and glaring at him with their eyes. The monster turned to him and screeched its bloodcurdling cry, its mandibles gleaming with the light of its shard.

Stamping down hard on the ground, Vlad shot forward with his shield in front of him. As he slammed into the monster, its mandibles sliced through the shield almost like it didn’t exist, moving on to try and cut his body in half. But the slight detention produced by the shield was enough for the Thrall to duck beneath the snapping jaws and slam his open palm into the underside of the creature’s chin. Ripples of force spread through the centipede’s head as it was knocked upwards while the ground beneath Vlad’s feet cratered and cracked from the recoil.

With a low roar, the muscles on Vlad's thighs expanded as he jumped, shooting up to slam his fist into the chin of the monster, cracking its carapace and sending it toppling backwards. Just as he landed on the ground, panting for breath, a movement in the corner of his vision caught his attention. He only had enough time to re-summon his Daybreak Shield and keep it off in front of him as the centipede’s tail slammed into him, cracking up his shield and sending him flying back into the clouds of burning ash.

Screeching in defiance, the centipede didn’t chase after the injured Thrall, turning to escape instead. Knowing that it had lost the battle, its best course of action was to give up its domain and heal from its wounds. When it regained its strength, it could always challenge another Revenant for their territory.

“Going somewhere?”

A clear female voice rang out above its head causing it to stiffen. It didn’t know when she had got there but the hateful woman that had injured it so grievously was now standing atop its head clad in her icy armour and holding her glowing red bow. She had an arrow nocked and drawn, pointing downwards at its head – its only vital point.

Before it could react, Lirael released the arrow.

With a ripple of red light, the shaft sank deep into its brain and melted, turning it into sludge. The centipede collapsed lifelessly to the ground, raising a ring of dust.

Straightening up, she let her bow melt back into blood and enter her Dungeon. She let out a sigh of relief, her breath misting in the frigid cold around her armour. It was finally over…

Suddenly, all the hands on the corpse detached from it and lunged towards her, trying to dogpile onto her.

Lirael sneered. “Finally gave yourself away, huh?”

She had become suspicious about the amount of mana the centipede had when it had demonstrated a performance incongruous with its Tier. With the wounds she had inflicted upon it and the mana she was siphoning off it along with its blood, she hadn’t expected it to have enough mana to activate its third Tier 5 shard – especially not when the shard was one as mana-hungry as the Dissociation shard. Yet, it had activated the shard without much difficulty, even having enough mana left over to defeat Vlad and flee afterwards.

Another source of suspicion was the discrepancy between the undead variant she had expected to find here and the kind she had actually encountered. According to the annotations on her map, a hundred years ago, this region had been occupied by a Revenant with a control class shard that fought by enslaving and manipulating other undead. Instead of that, she had found a centipede from hell.

At first, she had merely assumed that the centipede had defeated the previous ruler of this territory and usurped it. But now that the hands attached to its body had attacked independently in a bid to catch her off guard even after its death, her suspicions were confirmed.

The gentle bluish-white radiance of her armour intensified. Anything shone by its light was frozen solid and with the sound of breaking glass, the frozen palms dropped onto the swiftly freezing corpse of the Revenant and shattered into tiny pieces.

Even as a bluish-white layer of rime spread outwards from the corpse, reducing the scorching temperatures created by the ash clouds, she turned her gaze to the distance. Using her Seismic Sense shard, she could feel minute tremors as something converged towards that direction through the ground.

It appeared that the centipede’s coup had ended in failure and it had been enslaved. For the ruler to have the ability to control a Revenant at the peak of Tier 5, it had to have formed its Embryonic Dungeon. The promotion from Revenant to pseudo-Lich had boosted its intelligence and bestowed upon it a low cunning.

It had used the centipede to probe Lirael's strength. Realizing that she was a thorny opponent, it deceitfully made it seem like the centipede was running away. This would send the impression that the centipede was the only Revenant in the forest of stone -- not a slave guarding its lord. Hopefully, she would be swindled and chase after the puppet, ignoring the true manipulator behind the scenes.

Unfortunately, the Lich's mind was still immature and it had let its predatory instincts take over; attacking Lirael when she seemingly relaxed after killing the centipede.

Threatened by Lirael's destruction of its strongest guard and having inadvertently exposed itself, the pseudo-Lich was gathering its strength in preparation for their inevitable confrontation. Now was the best opportunity to strike it down before it could bring all its might to bear.

Turning away with a sigh, Lirael took a step in another direction. Her form blurred and she appeared beside Vlad, her Domain pushing the clouds of burning ash away from his unconscious form.

He was in a very poor state. One of the spines at the end of the centipede's tail had raked across his stomach after shattering his shield and penetrating his Aura, leaving a huge gash behind. His blood soaked the gravel beneath him and his intestines lay half in and half out of his body. Scorch marks from exposure to the ash cloud marred his hide and his breathing was erratic and shallow – a sign of injured lungs.

Vlad was her earliest Thrall, having followed her for over a decade. Despite him having the least intelligence among her Thralls, he was the closest to her heart. If she left him unattended to chase after the pseudo-Lich, then he would die.

He was her vassal and she his liege. He was also family. Abandoning him wasn’t something Lirael could bring herself to do.