Chapter 297: Lernaean, The Reformed Self Vs. Chosen of Aelia Pt. 1

“Alright, is everyone ready?” Rory called out, looking around at their small group.

“You bet your ass ,” Eric was nearly bouncing around on the balls of his feet, cradling a small cylindrical object in his hands. “Aren’t we, my precious?”

“Assuming what comes out is what we expect, everyone, remember the game plan?” Rory asked as Zoey rolled her eyes.

“Avoid the gaze, keep our mantle’s flaring to resist its aura, don’t get eaten.”

“I… well, I guess that’s basically it,” Rory sighed. “Then, I guess here we go.”

Holding his hand out, he watched a single scale drop onto the ground in the mountaintop ‘arena’ they were in.

Because ultimately, anyone with half a brain could recognize that it was no coincidence that the crests of the surrounding mountaintops formed a perfect basin; the location had been mandated by the scale itself.

Lernaean Scale Reformed

The reformed scale of Lernaean, Third General of Phosphorus. When dropped upon the location of Lernaean’s original severing point, it pulls together the reforming essence of the former General.

WARNING: Extreme Danger may precede. Caution is advised.

The ‘location’ had been determined by one fuck off sized game of ‘hot or cold,’ the scale warming or cooling depending on if they went in the right direction, until they’d eventually triangulated the exact location.

And now, it was time to do battle.

As soon as the scale hit the ground, the group felt the area begin to tremble lightly, growing more intense by the second.

“Eyes up, people, we’ve got incoming,” Allison said as her helmet appeared over her face. “And it’s a doozy.”

From the center of the mountain bluff that served as the main ‘arena’ floor, the ground began to crack, tremors and jagged rifts torn open, until, all at once, it exploded as something huge emerged.

Fuck me sideways, guess we were a little bit off on our guess.

A massive hydra had emerged, its scales pitch-black, three giant, gnashing heads snapping around. They’d expected that part, given the split selves they’d first fought over a year ago. What they hadn’t accounted for was the millions of tiny, thrashing, shadowy serpents also flailing and snapping all down its body. If one had particularly bad eyesight, they might even mistake the giant Hydra for being covered in hair.

Lernaean, Apophis Hydra of Loss, Third General of Phosphorus

Rory had never seen a level denoted by an exclamation mark before. Still, purely by the pressure radiating from the monster, there was no doubt it was beyond the likes of a territory alpha.

“ Architect!” The Spear shouted as Rory instantly clapped his hands together.

“ On it!”

All around the ‘arena,’ massive red obelisks speared upwards, a little something they’d prepared in advance.

Hey, no one said cheating wasn’t allowed, not if ascension energy was off the table anyway.

“ Liminal Realm: Open!” Rory shouted as a twilight field enveloped the area, blood red ‘stars’ twinkling within. It wasn’t a fully realized domain, trying to hold something the likes of Lernaean within that sounded like the exact recipe for putting Rory instantly out of commission. Instead, it was one glorified filtration unit.

And for good reason, as not a moment too soon, the Hydra screeched , as its aura fully manifested and rolled outward, an aura that seemed to want to suck the very energy from the universe itself. It attempted to eat away at the domain. Still, with his domain already established, it never got a chance to carpet itself in enough concentration to override the domain; the twinkling blood red crystal ‘stars’ sucking in the energy before funneling it into the giant obelisks so that Rory wouldn’t have to withstand the burden of so much pneuma himself physically.

“ Nightfall: Singularity!” The Rogue called out, this wasn’t a fight to ‘measure the paces’ as the ace moves were pulled straight from the beginning. Shadows crept over the otherwise unassuming cylinder he held before it reformed, elongating and growing protrusions, until, a moment later, the man was fully armed.

With a sniper rifle.

“Sexy bitch,” The Rogue cooed to the weapon before stepping through the shadows and appearing far away, already lining up shots on Lernaean.

“ World On Fire!”

While Rory’s domain had muted the worst of the giant Hydra’s aura, the closer one got to it, the denser the aura became. Meaning only those with particularly strong auras or mantles could get close.

And with World On Fire active, Zoey was a physical embodiment of a planetary core , crushing gravity that greedily refused to release even a single morsel of her energies to the predatory aura.

Rushing the serpent head-on, every step The Vanguard took caused geysers of magma to burst upward, but she wasn’t alone; two others flanked her on either side.

“ FormZero: Cold of the Still Universe”

Much as The Vanguard had an experimental technique she’d been working on in the form of World On Fire, so too had The Monk begun working on one. Only possibly through intense concentration and the pendant he now wore. Freezing his aura within himself, the man then pushed the immovable glacier through his spiritways. Normally, forcing two opposing concepts, the state of being utterly frozen, with movement, would have caused friction, or even the paradoxical energy of oblivion to form. But when coupled with frozen stillness , it was as if the paradox failed to take form, unnoticed by the world.

If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

Which all amounted to the First Monk racing alongside the feminine avatar of world ichor while he himself was completely sheathed in an ice that defied physics.

The final figure alongside them hadn’t shouted anything in particular; she had sundered all her skills into one, along with all potential for other ‘skills’. Instead, the world around her was completely engulfed by black and white, reality itself breaking down, accompanied only by the sound of drums.

Together, the three raced forward before delivering a triple uppercut in perfect synchrony.

The force, enough to shatter mountains, merely launched the Kaiser’s General into the air. Except that, rather than crash back to the ground, it began to fly as the many flailing, shadowy serpents covering its body began to weave and thrash up and down like an undulating eldritch cloud.

Only to instantly lurch to the side mid-air as a bullet of pure Primal Night slammed into it, a black tracer path marking the path through the air.

Finally, Rory raised his staff into the air, a staff that had been slightly modified. Rory technically hadn’t made any new gear for himself.

But he had altered one.

Sticking out from near the top of the staff, a piece of ‘glass’ jutted out, or what had once looked like a piece of glass shattered from the sky itself. Now, it was marked by ugly purple veins, a sign of what had transpired.

“ Sunder the Earth: Fulmination!”

Rather than a wall of lighting crashing down, or a giant meteor, or any of his signature abilities, it was as if a slash had appeared atop the flying Hydra, unbothered by things such as ‘space’ or ‘durability.’

Which made sense; it was essentially a retelling of the Woodsman’s death, told as a spell. A piece of savagely sharp shard of the sky, teleported directly into his brain, the sky sundering the Earth.

Fuck!

The backlash hit Rory a moment later. Baneful energies infested the shard, perfectly fused into the form of the ordinary sky shard through the significance of a Founder’s death. And every ounce of the Woodsman’s baneful hate cracked through him on using the magic, literally scouring him from the inside, so heavy was the cursed emotion.

It wasn’t the ultimate goal of the unique grade item, but it was one hell of a temporary catalyst for his staff.

Gritting his teeth, Rory didn’t let himself falter. The reality slash had caused the Hydra to pour out acidic black blood, screeching in pain as its flesh tried and failed to regenerate.

Leaning into his shoulder, Rory spoke into what looked like a regular grey box that was clipped to him.

“ Ground it,”

“On it,” The Rogue answered through a staticky response. Stepping from his spot, the man appeared above the Hydra, his shadow sniper rifle reforming into something that looked more like an entire rocket launcher .

“ Sit down, you ugly ass fucker!”

A hammer shot of metal and condensed Primal Night energy slammed into the Hydra, knocking it to the ground, as the mountains shook from the force. It didn’t have the same piercing power as the sniper form, but damn, it packed some kinetic force.

Brought back to the ground, the trio of melee fighters raced forward, no longer racing lockstep with one another as they dipped, dodged, and swerved around the snapping heads, shots from the Primal Night sniper blasting the heads out of the way when they looked as if they were about to catch one of the three.

Rory, meanwhile, was chanting under his breath, needing a moment to reinforce the domain; even with the oversized obelisks to assist, they were doing the equivalent of holding the sky up. Lernaean’s aura was simply that staggering if left alone.

“ Desscend the Ssserpentss!”

A deep rumbling voice, like a basso from hell, rang out from all three heads as Lernaean spoke for the first time.

The undulating mass of snakes that covered its body like ‘hairs’ began to shrivel and vanish, and black clouds appeared from the sky, literally raining serpents by the hundreds.

And each was an alpha variant.

“ Architect?’ A voice spoke out from the transmitter, the Monk obviously concerned.

“ I’m on it.”

Of the Founders, Rory was undeniably the one with the largest-scale attacks. In this case, he had the perfect attack to clear out large swaths of additional monsters.

A bunch of falling alpha-variant serpents was hard to ignore, but what was the rainfall of snakes compared to a Dragon’s Fall ?

Waving his hand, Rory was suddenly surrounded by a spinning ring of talismans, no fewer than thirty . A moment later, three dozen monster cores joined them, and finally, an equal amount of gems. Flashing a two-finger hand sign in front of himself, a physical action to help channel the sheer volume of intent, Rory spoke.

“ Thunder of Dragons: Fall!”

Before the falling serpents could do much of anything, a scene straight out of an Armageddon movie played out as dozens of giant meteors began to fall, crashing down upon their mountaintop and slaughtering the summoned alpha-variant serpents.

The downside was that the sheer force of the spell was too much for the mountain itself, which was ripped apart like a volcano unable to contain its own force as the land was terraformed.

Appearing atop his glider, Rory zipped through the explosion of debris, dust, and molten stone. Meanwhile, the other Founders handled the sudden mass-scale terraforming in their own ways. The Rogue had merely melted into the shadows. The Vanguard ignored the debris entirely as they melted into her world ichor body, as if her durability would have cared in the first place. The Monk’s frozen aura allowed it to ‘freeze’ the debris into footholds as he descended the crumbling mountain, and the Spear reflected everything, her aura bouncing them away.

But they weren’t the only ones involved. The rampaging Hydra’s aura ate the debris. And worst off?

Rory’s domain had waned.

Oh. Fuck.

Far less mindless than it appeared, the Hydra had taken advantage of the meteor shower and the chaos and destruction it caused to harden its aura into several spear-like points, which it then skewered the obelisks with. Between the physical damage from the exploding mountain and the aural assault, three of the obelisks had shattered; the rest remained floating in the air, suspended by sky-chanted materials.

“ I ssshhhalll feassst on your sssoulss in celebration of my rebirth!” Lernaean bellowed, a ravenous hunger in its voice.

It was the Rogue who made their opinion on that matter known.

And that was by shooting it in the god damn face.

Recoiling from the impact of the Primal Night bullet slamming into its face, the momentary ‘pause’ in the action ended when they landed upon the ruined remains of the mountain, large enough to make Everest blush.

The Vanguard, The Spear, and The Monk had needed no prompting to begin their assault once more, rushing the Hydra. A wave of shadow serpents rushed outward to blanket the trio, but Rory raised his hand, then clenched his fist.

“ Enchain!”

To clash Enchain directly against a being above that of a territory alpha would have been beyond foolish ordinarily, but it wasn’t ordinarily . While the main point of his domain had been to suppress the Hydra’s aura, it also did another thing.

It analyzed it. Not enough to copy it, not anywhere close, but between the still active, albeit weakened, domain and a sense of the serpent’s aura, Enchain found purchase where it might not have.

The effect was instant: the wave of shadow serpents froze in place before dispersing entirely as the trio of close-quarter Founders slammed attacks into the side of the Hydra, the Rogue still offering the suppressing fire needed for them to get close in the first place.

Under constant assault by the Rogue, battered by attacks from the three melee-focused Founders, assaulted by the exceptionally potent magic from Rory, and even caught in the crossfire of an exploding mountain, almost any territory alpha would have found itself crumbling; the group effort of the Founders was a force unseen before.

But Lernaean the Reformed wasn’t a territory alpha. It was something beyond even that, a step beneath the Kaisers, which were likened to tier ten monsters in at least energy terms.

Tier nine, at least in terms of durability and regeneration. Tier 8.5?

Whatever the case, while Lernaean clearly wasn’t happy , it didn’t even look like it was struggling.

“ Raisssse the Current!”

Raise the what now?

Rory’s answer came a moment later, when blue lightning began to seep from the ground, squiggling and flying around like worms, as if each arc were alive .

Oh. Current. Electrical current.

Dodging one of the living electrical arcs, Rory didn’t notice another appear from a blind spot, as it shot through him. Instantly, Rory felt as if he’d been, well, electrocuted, as a chunk of his internal energies was eaten .

“ Watch the living lightning,” Rory called into the transmitters as he heard back instantly.

“Yeah, no shit, Sherlock.”

Thank you, Zoey, for the wonderful feedback.

Sighing, Rory shook his head before flickering into the air. He was already the one doing his best to counter the Hydra’s aura, and now he had to figure out this major problem for their melee fighters.

Can’t catch a damn break.