Deacon barely registered the blur near the periphery of his vision seconds before he felt an overwhelming sense of danger coming from his left-hand side, which in his mind cast an image of an overwhelming presence suddenly appearing in the direction from which the danger came. Before he even knew it, the mana he kept coated around his feet exploded underneath him, sending him tumbling backwards and breaking out of the cubicle he was in and away from the thing that attacked him.
Skidding atop the damp office carpet, Deacon saw something bone-white barreling past right where he had previously crouched, and crashed into the cubicle beside it. "Wha-!"
The laptop clattered behind the table, obscured from Deacon's vision. The thing, whatever it was, didn't stop after it crashed into the next cubicle as it then tore through two more cubicle walls before it finally came to a jerking halt.
A wet, fleshy groan echoed throughout the ruined Executive's Lounge.
Deacon was already on his feet, dual short swords in hand and dagger back in his leg pouch, heart hammering.
The shape that rose from the dust was long and low, built like a nightmare centipede fused with a skinned dog. It crawled using too many limbs – some humanoid, others twisted and bent backwards at impossible angles. Where its head should have been was only a raw, stretched patch of muscle and bone, with a single eye socket glowing dimly with unstable mana.
[Skinwalker Aberrant – Elite Mutant Lv 6]
"Aw, fuck," Deacon complained, already shifting his stance. "Of course it's a fucking Elite."
The skinwalker twitched violently and lunged. Deacon darted sideways, nearly slipping, and slashed out with his right blade. Sparks burst as his weapon scraped bone rather than flesh. The creature whipped its body around and came at him again, faster now.
What the hell are Elites doing out here now of all times? Deacon complained as he ducked beneath a reaching limb, rolled forward, and spun on his heel. Flame erupted along the edge of his left blade as he activated Flame Armament, and with a growl, he drove the blade upward into the thing's underside as it passed overhead.
"Elites typically come out on the second day of a Timed Floor," Deacon said to himself, remembering the lectures he had about the potential Floors that they might encounter while climbing the Tower. "It can't be day two already..."
It shrieked. A sound like boiling tar and glass breaking echoed in the confined space.
They separated. Deacon panted, eyes scanning for an opening, and froze as he saw something fluttering from one of the creature's joints.
A strip of red cloth that was partially fused into its pus-ridden skin.
It looked… familiar, but for the life of him, he couldn't place his finger on it as to why that was the case.
The skinwalker lunged again, using its full body weight to smash desks and throw debris. Deacon kicked one of the chairs toward it, causing the creature to trip for just a second long enough for him to roll behind a broken filing cabinet and jab a short sword through a crack, skewering part of the beast's flank.
Blood, dark and bubbling, splattered the wall.
The skinwalker spun, tearing the blade from Deacon's grip and nearly severing two of its own limbs in the process. It hissed like a boiling kettle, the eye in its skull burning brighter.
The skinwalker twitched violently as the joints within its limbs began to reset themselves with sickening pops within a few seconds as it charged straight at him with surprising speed.
Deacon didn't even have time to reposition himself as the skinwalker grabbed him by the hair and hurled him back towards the rows of half-collapsed cubicles. The impact from his back smacking against the first couple of cubicles knocked the air out of his lungs, causing his sight to go dark for a moment as the back of his head smacked against the tiled floor on the other side of the room.
Deacon barely had time to roll to the side to dodge a stab at his head from the skinwalker and roll into a crouch to raise his short sword in time to parry the next strike it sent at his head. The clawed limb scraped across the steel blade, causing sparks to fly in the air, which distracted Deacon as a large amount of the sparks struck his face, causing him to flinch and give the skinwalker the opportunity to rake its sharpened limb past his shoulder and scraping his upper right arm.
Deacon snarled at both himself for flinching in a fight and at the skinwalker before he kicked out with both of his legs, catching the creature in its hardened gut and knocking it back far enough for him to scramble back onto his feet. Blood seeped from his arm. The skinwalker hissed again, stalking in a wide circle, crouched unnaturally low.
"Fuck my luck, man," Deacon muttered after spitting out a wad of blood to the floor. "What the hell even are you? And what the hell is a skinwalker?"
Deacon ground his teeth for a moment before he drew in a breath, exhaling slowly. He needed to calm himself before he'd do something stupid again, like flinch in the middle of a life-or-death fight.
Ignis, he mentally shouted as a massive ball of flame smashed across the skinwalker's face full-on as it lunged at him. Its forward momentum carried it through the massive fireball as it was now entirely engulfed in flickering tongues of flame. Which, satisfyingly, caught the skinwalker shrieking in fury and pain as it swung its limbs wildly.
Deacon twisted his body, ducking low under a flailing slash and dragging his left fire-wreathed short sword across one of its elongated limbs, severing a pencil-thin tendril that had whipped toward his face.
One of its back limbs twisted itself to form the head of a pit bull and bit down on Deacon's thigh before lifting him up into the air and tossing him away. The force spun him sideways.
He fell hard, rolled once, and immediately had to bring up his sword to deflect another crushing blow.
Sparks flared between his blades and the skinwalker's limbs.
Flames sputtered briefly on the skinwalker's burning skin but weren't doing enough; his Ignis lacked the raw power to penetrate through its flesh, which unfortunately made sense to him due to their level difference.
He needed it to make a mistake… he needed to set up a trap.
Deacon ducked under a strike, dove behind a rusted office desk, and yanked free a length of severed cable still attached to a snapped monitor arm. The skinwalker gave chase, scraping its limbs against the cubicle walls in wild, flailing strikes.
He looped the cable over a low water pipe overhead, then baited the creature with a shout in its direction.
It lunged towards him, and Deacon threw himself forward a second after.
As it soared over him, he yanked the cable that he'd wrapped around his arm, ignoring the pain as the cords constricted his arm. The pipe snapped down with a sharp metallic clang, the line catching around the skinwalker's hind legs. Mid-pounce, it was yanked backward and slammed into the floor with a bone-jarring thud.
The skinwalker's shriek was a raw, high-pitched, wet, gurgling sound as it thrashed against the tangled cable. Its limbs flailed in unnatural directions, several of them now bent or cracked at wrong angles, but it was still alive.
Deacon didn't wait for it to recover and immediately lunged for his right short sword that had clattered towards the ground.
Upon doing so, he gritted his teeth through the pain. Deacon slammed the hilt of both his blades into his thighs to snap him out of the pain just before he lunged forward, short swords raised in a high guard.
Crossing the distance between him and the skinwalker within a second, he leaped up into the air and brought the blades down hard toward the skinwalker's hunched back, only for a jagged elbow to snap upward and catch him just below the chin.
The blow snapped his head back, and for a second, everything around him flipped before he tumbled backwards midair and landed back on his legs before stumbling backwards.
As he stumbled backwards, the skinwalker jerked violently, snapping the cable with one final pull. The broken monitor arm skittered across the room, screeching against the floor. It rose again, limping, hunched, but filled with rage, its slashed body steaming from the residual flames of his spells.
"Ignis!" Deacon choked out.
The skinwalker ducked the fireball and charged.
Deacon barely parried the first swipe. The second swipe raked along his left forearm, which drew a sharp hiss from him as the blood splattered across the cubicle walls. Snapping his right leg into the crotch of the skinwalker, which sent it tumbling backwards, Deacon staggered backwards before crashing into an overturned chair, but didn't fall. His mind was already calculating the angles that he should use.
He pivoted hard, using his momentum to roll onto a low table, then kicked a desk fan toward the skinwalker.
He drew a sharp breath. "Let's dance, you bastard."
The skinwalker lunged again. He sidestepped this time, dragging his right blade along its exposed flank as he ducked under one claw and turned his hips into a spinning slash with the other. The twin cut left a deep, burning gash across its chest. The scent of cooked flesh filled the air as he flooded his mana into Flame Armament.
But it didn't stop and screech in pain like the previous times.
Instead, the creature dropped to all six limbs and scuttled backward like a spider before it launched itself forward in a full-body tackle, intending to trap Deacon's body beneath it and crush every bone in his body. Deacon braced, too slow to dodge out of the way, which led to the both of them crashing through the last intact cubicle wall, debris exploding outward in a rain of broken plastic and fiberboard.
He was pinned underneath the skinwalker now.
One of the skinwalker's claws raked across his thigh again, and blood poured from the wound. Deacon snarled through the pain and twisted himself beneath it and stabbed up through its jaw with both blades.
The creature spasmed, but continued to move its open maw towards his head. Deacon roared as he flooded his arms and short blades with as much mana as he could.
The blades turned molten red as they shot through the roof of its mouth and through its brain. Within milliseconds, its brain ignited from the inside out.
It released a gut-wrenching screech for a moment before it stilled, and a heartbeat later, the skinwalker collapsed atop him, smoking and limp.
Deacon gasped, vision swimming as he hurriedly shoved the burning carcass off of him with all the strength he had left and rolled over to his side, coughing as his entire body was trembling from blood loss and exertion.
The system chimed again:
*[Skinwalker Aberrant – Elite Mutant Lv 6] has been slain – XP has been given.*
*Your Class has reached Lv 4 – Points allocated, +1 Free Point*
*Your Class has reached Lv 5 – Points allocated, +1 Free Point*
*Your Race has reached Lv 4 – Points allocated, +1 Free Point*
"F..uck… yeah," Deacon heaved as he shakily reached for his potion pouch and pulled out a thin, viscous red vial before bringing it to his mouth. Ripping out the cork with his teeth, Deacon messily knocked back its contents and felt as the wounds atop his body began to knit back together.
"Ugh," Deacon groaned as he twisted himself to stare at the Executive Lounge ceiling. He stared at his own reflection on the mosaic mirror ceiling and let out a deep groan that came from his soul.
"I didn't even have time to use a Lesser Beastblood Tonic," he complained.
Deacon's leather armor creaked as he flexed his fingers, drawing in a deep breath. Mana pulsed sluggishly in his veins, while his reserves were drained, they were not empty.
With a grunt, he pressed his palm flat against his armor, fingers splayed, and focused.
A soft glow flickered across the scratched, battered leather plates. The faint silver etchings of a repair enchantment shimmered into life as the mana surged in.
Threads reknit. Tears closed. Burn marks faded to ash-black smudges and finally flaked off entirely.
"That's better," Deacon exhaled slowly. "Gotta love Self-Repair enchants."
His limbs still ached, but he was alive and moving. With a resigned grunt, he stepped over the corpse of the Skinwalker and drew the bone-handled dagger from the sheath strapped to the back of his waist.
"Fuck you," he muttered. "I hope imps in hell ram their spears in you until you become a blob of flesh, then regenerate and they do it again, forever. Fuck you for scaring me fucking shitless."
He crouched beside the twitching corpse of the skinwalker and steadied his boot on its chest to get better leverage. The blade bit into the flesh with a wet, rubbery resistance. It took time, longer than he wanted, and a lot less bloody than what he thought it would be to carve out a core from out of it. But eventually, after peeling away a warped ribcage and shoving aside strands of gristle and cooling blood, his dagger scraped something solid.
A dimly pulsing core.
It was sickly violet in color, almost crystalline in texture, with fine purple veins tracing its surface like cracks in glass. Its center hummed with fine energy.
That's one out of ten collected, Deacon noted to himself as he plucked it free, wiped it briefly on the remains of his tattered cloak, and dropped it into an empty pouch on his belt… Why are the Elites roaming around now? The lectures and textbooks said they spawn after… oh, it is the second day. I'm a fuckin dumbass.
Snapping himself out of his thoughts, Deacon made his way towards where the laptop fell. Crouching beside the fallen desk and snaking his head around it, he picked up the fallen laptop and clicked on its power button.
The laptop's strange crest shimmered faintly on the screen in front of him, and it remained that way until he tentatively tapped it, where something else occurred.
A login prompt appeared before him, asking him for the password.
"How the hell am I supposed to know the password for this?" Deacon muttered to himself, looking around the ruined lounge before sighing. Mentally praying that he would find the password somewhere within the rubble of the cubicle that he found it in.