Chapter 51 - The Corruptor’s Realm V

The icy dome overhead shattered soon after the battle’s conclusion. It turned into a thousand pieces, each of which split into a million tiny shards. Beneath the disintegrating barrier, in one of the city’s back alleys, was Claire. She paid little to no attention to the freshly dismantled defense mechanism. Her thoughts were focused instead on the target she was tracking. She didn’t have a direct line of sight on the inverse cat-monkey, but that wasn’t a problem. Her skill was providing her with an accurate estimate of its location.

The half-insect was significantly faster than its pursuer. The amount of distance between them only seemed to grow with the passage of time, but Claire was unconcerned. Tracking’s range exceeded the city’s limits, and more importantly, there was no way for her to pick up the pace without arousing suspicion. Her lack of insectoid features already made her stand out enough as it was. Dashing around at top speed was sure to get her questioned—or worse.

Following the insect to its destination led Claire to the circular building that she had noted when she first scanned the city. Finally seeing it from up close, the halfbreed found herself feeling nothing but disappointment. She had known the borrokian arena was small, even when she cast her gaze upon it from afar, but she hadn’t expected it to be so bland.

Valencia’s gladiator pit was an engineering marvel, a work of art that served as a prodigious architect’s chef d'oeuvre. The amphitheatre before her, on the other hand, was just another boring everyday building without any particularly interesting features. It barely had any seating; the top row was a scant five levels off the ground, with each ring supporting fifty average Cadrians at most. The entire thing was of an overwhelmingly average construction. There weren’t any floating VIP stands, nor did there appear to be any way to automagically transform the ring to accommodate a famed fighter's preferences. The destruction wreaked by the dolphins had only worsened her impression. A good third of the seats had been melted beyond the point of use.

Despite its subpar design, the borroks seemed to deem the building one of cultural importance. The arena was one of the few places that was already in the midst of being repaired. Corrupted watchers were working away at the damaged parts with pails of slush in hand. They were using their bare fingers to slather the frosty material over all the parts that were damaged, as one would a paste or ointment. Magic was the only reason any of it was sticking. The watchers used their spells to freeze the concrete replacement in place and make it a permanent feature of the structure. It was a surprisingly reasonable and well-thought out approach. Altering material that already existed was far less expensive than making something permanent from scratch.

Claire’s target was one of the many workers focused on repairing the stadium. The anti-borrok was functioning as a gopher. All of its time was spent moving buckets between the workers and the building’s storage unit. Its behaviour seemed to suggest that it was just another part of the collective, and likely not the sentinel she sought, but she continued following it around nonetheless, even as it moved on and started repairing other parts of town.

___

It took three hours of stalking for Claire to finally arrive at the not-sentinel’s humble abode. It lived in the city’s outskirts, on the side of town opposite the manor. The buildings that populated the suburb were a lot shorter than most of the others. They had three stories at most and the scaffolding didn’t go anywhere near as high. The neighbourhood was located by one of the crater’s far edges, but it didn’t reach all the way to the stony wall. A river of magma, roughly twenty meters across, stopped it from extending any further.

There was a decent stretch of land on the lavaway’s far shore. It was large enough to be usable, but the borroks hadn’t built anything on the other side. Crossing the river was no easy task and living on the other side seemed like it was more trouble than it was worth. It was a problem that the locals themselves had perpetuated. The molten stream stemmed from a natural source, a crack in a faraway wall. But at its headwater, it was thin and tiny, hardly noticeable and easily crossed. Its width was amplified tenfold by the pipe feeding into it, the very same pipe that wrapped all the way around the city.

Glancing around and triple-checking her surroundings, Claire confirmed that her target was the only one in the immediate vicinity. The neighbouring houses were completely empty and devoid of life, but that seemed more a function of timing than it was anything else. All the nearby residences looked lived-in. There were bits and pieces of shed fur just about everywhere. Some clumps were smaller, but others came together to form large tumbleweeds that would move and roll about each time there was even the slightest hint of a breeze. At first, she thought it was because the borroks were too lazy and unhygienic to dispose of their filth, but an extended observation led to the conclusion that manual intervention was unnecessary. Any hairballs that formed were eventually blown towards the lava, turned to ash, and taken away by the ardent river.

Claire took a deep breath as she turned to the building at the end of the street—the anti-borrok’s home. Its sole resident was already inside. The creature’s beetle-like face made it difficult to read, but she was at least fairly confident that it was tired. It had dragged its feet on its way home, shoulders slumped and head swaying left and right with every step. It had even stretched on a few occasions, albeit in a way more reminiscent of a cat than a monkey.

Slowly and silently, she crept towards its house with a hand on her dagger. She couldn’t tell if it was already asleep, but she highly doubted that it would be able to see her, given that it was covering its eyes with its hands. Not even her ears were able to provide any clear answers. The creature’s chest was moving up and down, but she couldn’t hear its breath. The only clue she had was its heartbeat, which gradually slowed with the passage of time. She didn’t close the final ten meters until she was certain that it had settled into a steady rhythm.

Standing above it, she took a moment to look at her target from up close. If it weren’t curled up, the bug-faced monkey would have stood at roughly three quarters her height, with its head making up a good third of its body. Unlike the watcher, which had a bluish white coat, the half-primate’s patchy fur was a deep shade of brown. It was still injured. Its fur was singed in places and torn in others, wounds from its previous fight. By contrast, its rhino beetle-like head was unblemished; the plum purple shell was completely scratch free.

Where should I hit it?

She paused for a moment to consider its weaknesses. Its heart and neck came off as obvious contenders. The former was the core of its circulatory system, while the latter seemed to be made up of weak connective tissue. There was neither fur nor shell where the two distinct parts of its body met, only a ring of soft pink flesh.

Targeting its limbs also seemed like viable options. She doubted it would be able to stay balanced if she broke its tail or shattered one of its legs, and its arms were clearly its primary means of attack. Both were safe choices. But Claire was not one to bother with safe choices.

She went right for the half-insect’s most obvious vitals. Her dagger shot towards the beast’s heart while her sword flew towards its throat. The shorter, quicksilver-coated weapon was thrust between the creature’s ribs while its ghostly echo burned away at its vitality. Her second soarspore-covered blade was moved back and forth like a saw. She tore through the fibres holding its neck together, over and over, as it woke up with a hysteric screech.

A kick to the gut nearly dislodged her from her position on top of it. She was winded by the blow, but she managed to twist her sword down its gullet as she was blown away.

Assassinate had empowered both of her attacks, but neither had done enough damage to finish the anti-borrok. The bug wasn’t bothered that its body was spewing blood, nor did it seem to care that its head was on the verge of falling off.

In fact, the borrok was the one to rid itself of its lower half—legs sprung from its head and started pushing the bloody monkey-body away. Claire couldn’t help but find herself fascinated by the bizarre, horrifying sight. She almost wanted to let the borrok finish, but she knew better than to let it happen. Freezing her prey in place with Paralyzing Gaze, she spun around and threw her mace with a wide circular swing. The projectile smashed the insect’s face back into its body as it made contact, its speed and power boosted by a burst of force magic. The coin-filled bag was next. She bashed the leather sack over the creature’s head and let its heavy contents do the work.

A knee followed as the bag tore at the seams. The joint had been drilled into one of the beetle’s massive yellow eyes, with the other targeted soon after by a fist. Amber-coloured blood erupted from the oculi like yolk from a crushed egg. It splashed all over her outfit and dyed her cloak in its vile stench.

With an irritated click of the tongue, the rogue reached down the cat-bug’s throat and retrieved her sword. All the blood and fat covering it made it hard to grip, but that didn’t stop the weapon from serving its purpose.

Nine additional double-stabs to the face ended the battle for good, with the fifth costing her the antler. Not that she minded. The bone sword was readily replaced by the insect’s freshly broken horn.

Like all the other borroks, the warrior swelled up as the reaper took it in its grasp, but Claire was ready for it. She kicked its body out the window she had entered from and magically pushed it into another house before it went off.

Log Entry 909

You have slain a level 39 Borrok Warrior.

This feat has earned you the following bonuses:

- 1 point of agility

- 4 points of dexterity

- 7 points of strength

I knew it wasn’t the sentinel. That was too easy.

The explosion happened right as Claire finished listening to the last of her log entries. The building beside hers was blown to smithereens. Chunks of ice the size of her head flew far up into the sky before crashing back down on the city. Accompanying the detonation was a rumble that pulsed through the crater. She didn’t just hear the sound, she felt its power course through her bones and up her spine.

Log Entry 910

You have leveled up. Your health and mana have been restored and all harmful status effects have been cleansed.

Your racial class, Halfbreed, has reached level 30.

Your primary class, Llystletein Rogue, has reached level 39.

Your secondary class, Llystletein Force Mage, has reached level 12.

You have gained 12 ability points.

That’s it? Claire frowned as she magically retrieved her dagger from the corpse’s chest. Taking its durability into account, she felt that the monster had hardly given her its fair share of experience. Is it because it isn’t Llystletein?

Log Entry 911

Assassinate has reached level 8.

Log Entry 912

Bloodthief has reached level 4.

Log Entry 913

Dagger Mastery has reached level 9.

Log Entry 914

Double Stab has reached level 9.

Now I’m even better at stabbing things.

Log Entry 915

Manathief has reached level 2.

Log Entry 916

Sneaking has reached level 11.

Log Entry 917

Sword Mastery has reached level 7.

Log Entry 918

Basic Force Manipulation has evolved into Force Manipulation. The range of your force spells has increased.

More range is nice, but I would have liked some more spells instead.

Claire had hardly thought anything of the borrok’s explosion. It wasn’t her first time seeing one, so she wound up dismissing it as she would have anything else of little consequence. But she found her outlook turned on its head. Because a second set of rumbling sounds assaulted her ears as soon as she stepped out of the house.

Confused, the halfbreed climbed atop of the building’s roof to get a better look at the situation. The moment she looked over the icy landscape was the moment she found herself face to face with a stampede. There was a veritable legion of townsfolk: borroks, corrupted watchers, warriors, bats, wolves, and bears. Every type of insectoid she had seen within the settlement was mingled into a messy bloodthirsty wave.

A wave with its sights set on her location.