I emerged about a hundred meters in the sky and snapped my wings open, once again activating rush to go just that tiny bit faster. Behind me, the two voidlings were destroying everything that hadn’t already been decimated by the shadow sphere earlier, another shockwave being created every time they clashed. Spells were cast from both sides, the spell matrixes flashing for a tiny moment before the spell was unleashed. The spells added a whole other layer to the chaos as a decent amount of them missed their mark, flew off into the distance where they wreaked havoc.

Even further behind them, another light show indicated where ground zero of the void invasion was. There, the same scene played out but amplified by a hundred as a ton of voidlings threw around spells and abilities without a care in the world. I was starting to worry that the entire layer might collapse at this rate, coming to understand why the system apparently wasn’t too fond of these events.

Making it my goal to get as far away as I could, I used another void jump to go up as high as I could, almost scraping the ceiling when I emerged. Now knowing that running wouldn’t do me any good, I decided to try and hide instead and cast void cloak in the hopes that they might not find me. Of course, that was wishful thinking. I didn’t doubt for a second that there would be voidlings that could easily spot me even with this spell active, so I made it a point to keep my eyes on a constant swivel, looking for any sign of an approaching enemy or attack.

As I was speeding along the ceiling, finally having a small moment where I wasn’t in immediate danger, I remembered that I still had a quest reward to cash in on. I’d defeated a hunter and was thus entitled to a C-tier skill. Sure, there was no way that a C-tier skill would make a sizable difference here, but any little bit counted here, no matter how small. The question was, what skill would be useful to get right now?

I almost immediately threw out defensive skills. The kinds of attacks coming after me wouldn’t care whether I had three or five or ten C-tier skills active at the time. Although, I did just manage to barely survive the shockwave thanks to my defenses… I could go for a skill that would help me hide better, maybe one that was similar to rush that would help me run away. Maybe get a skill that would help me dodge? I was having trouble deciding as there were many options that could help me in some way or another, but none stood out to me as a complete game changer.

I already had a C-tier stealth passive and I was loathe to double up on that. Combined with my void cloak spell, it was more than enough to hide from pretty much anything. It wasn’t as useful in this extraordinary situation, but since I was sure a voidling would find me sooner or later, there was little point in getting more stealth. I thought about it a bit more and eventually arrived at the conclusion that more speed would help me the most right now. Tim had seemed to think so as well since he made me a drink to help me run away. Deciding to take the old creature’s wisdom for what it was I decided to get something to increase my speed.

I took another look around before quickly pulling up my reward, immediately using the filter option of the system to narrow down my search. In a snap decision, I decided against active skills and almost sorted by passive skills, when I remembered that I was a magical monster through and through. Why get skills when I could just look for a spell that would buff my speed, taking not only advantage of my massive reserves of mana but also getting a new type of spell to analyze, should I survive.

The filter further narrowed down my options to present me with what I was looking for, and I was surprised that there were quite a few spells that did what I was looking for. I cursed as I didn’t have the time to go through every spell and weigh the pros and cons before doing something I hadn’t done in a long time: I picked a spell at random. Without even looking at the list properly, I mentally picked a spell about halfway down the list and immediately confirmed my choice when prompted to. Time to see if my luck would get me something good.

Grass Walk (C)

Increase your speed by 20% for as long as the spell is active.

Cost: 50MP per minute

It wasn’t anything crazy, but I’ll take it!

The rush skill I’d gotten from the oni guardian was a bit more potent but had a ten-minute cooldown. In comparison, this spell gave me less speed, but I could keep it up almost indefinitely. The spell matrix for the spell wasn’t all too complicated and snapped into place relatively quickly, increasing my speed an almost unnoticeable amount. I guess percentage buffs didn’t multiply but rather added to each other. Since I already got a sizable boost from Tim's drink, my spell didn’t make too much of a difference.

The entire process of picking a new skill had only taken half a minute at best, but the entire time that I’d been focused on the screen in front of me was nerve-wracking. I felt like it was only a matter of time until I was discovered by one of those monsters, and once that happened I’d be in heaps of trouble. I trusted my abilities enough that I could at the very least hide myself from the weaker voidlings that had come here, but those guys weren’t the problem. A look back revealed that the constant battle in the crater far behind me was dying down, meaning that the battle there was coming to a conclusion.

The strongest voidlings had probably completely ignored the battle there and went straight for me, but now that the brawl was over, only the strong would be left and would no doubt start looking for me soon. The two voidlings that had clashed near me earlier were still embroiled in a battle of massive proportions. Stray abilities were dismantling everything around them as they battled each other for the right to collect my seed.

I was watching the two fight with a morbid fascination when a black shape suddenly appeared in front of me, which I barely managed to avoid. My heart raced as I looked at the newcomer that was hanging onto the ceiling with four clawed hands. This voidling looked like two torsos fused together at the hips, creating one elongated body. A fugly head was attached at an odd angle on each of the necks, and each torso had two arms culminating in the aforementioned clawed hands.

“Where are you?”

“We know you’re close, running away is futile.”

The two heads spoke at the same time, making it hard to decipher what they were saying. Their voice was grating, even for the headache-inducing void language, and reminded me of chain smokers back on Earth. The heads swiveled around, making me think that they only knew my rough location.

“It is going away.”

“We cannot let it escape.”

No sooner had the words been spoken did the odd voidling take off, running after me with incredible speed. They used their incredibly sharp claws to punch holes into the ceiling to create handholds and somehow managed to run faster this way than I could fly with all my buffs active. I got startled by how accurately they went in my direction but a quick change in trajectory left the voidling barreling past my location.

“Too far.”

“It is behind us.”

The voidling came to an unnaturally fast stop before immediately coming back at me and I once again had to dodge with a mental curse. This whole spiel repeated itself a few times before I finally realized that it would have trouble catching me if I simply didn’t fly so close to the ceiling. I went for a dive, hoping that this thing couldn’t fly, as its actions until now seemed to suggest.

“Below.”

“Fire at will”

I barely managed to make out what was said and instinctively dodged to the right. Not a moment too soon as a purple laser shot past me shortly after. These damn voidlings and their lasers! I was annoyed but a part of me couldn’t wait until I learned that spell myself. Lasers were cool after all. The pair didn’t give me any time to ruminate over the coolness of lasers as they started randomly blasting the air around me with short bursts of said spell. I was having trouble avoiding all of the lasers and was convinced that the only reason none of them hit me was due to sheer luck.

Hooray for the luck attribute!

Not wanting to test how long my luck would hold up I charged another void jump to get me out of dodge. The portal was summoned directly in front of me and I could barely hear one of the heads shout the word “portal”. It made sense that they knew about my use of the spell since unlike me, the portal was not hidden by void cloak. When I emerged, I did so in the airspace above a volcano. I’d finally made it to this area.

From the beginning, my plan was to get here because I would be able to use the mountainous volcanoes to my advantage. Not only could I use them to block line of sight, I could potentially use them as shields as well. Tim had also recommended that I try to get underground, which should be possible here. I was analyzing the surroundings when I was suddenly grabbed from behind. The clawed hand of the two-headed voidling held me tightly in its grasp.

“Got you.”

“Foolish to use a portal.”

A cold shiver ran through me as I quickly realized my mistake. The portal hadn’t been invisible, so they probably wildly grabbed at the empty air in front of the exit portal since I had to have emerged from there. I stray thought wondered if they were simply fast enough to catch up with a teleport, or if they had some means of teleporting as well. It didn’t matter, though, since they managed to get a hold of me, which meant I was beyond fucked.

I struggled in their grasp, but my soft and squishy body did nothing to move the iron grip of the monster. I started casting my whole arsenal of spells, a lot of them detonating point blank, but the voidling hardly seemed to care.

“It is weak.”

“Does not deserve the seed.”

“We take.”

“You will surrender your right to us.”

“We give thanks.”

“Your death will benefit us.”

While they were talking up a storm we continued falling since, just as I’d thought, these guys couldn’t fly. The head closest to me was looking at me with fascination as its other hand struck at me, no doubt to deal the killing blow. In a panic-driven last-ditch effort, I summoned a void portal before immediately closing it again. I stared in awe as the spell I’d cast on pure instinct snapped into place, the voidlings arm went through, and was cleanly cut off once the portal closed. Black blood spurted from the stump as the voidling reflexively let go of me to try and hold the wound closed.

“Don’t let go!” The far head called out but didn’t get a reply for once since the other head was too busy screaming in pain.

I was just as surprised as the voidling and for a second I looked at the bleeding stump with fascination. I hadn’t really thought about anything as I was casting all sorts of spells in an attempt to escape the throes of death, with no strategy or plan at all. Using the void jump in this manner had never occurred to me before and I had no idea why I decided to cast the spell at that moment. It seemed to happen instinctively.

My dazed thoughts were rudely interrupted by both myself and the voidling falling into the top of an active volcano. The voidling let out an unholy screech as we were both engulfed by white-hot lava.