Chapter 55: Nemesis
Many had already fallen in the span of seconds to the mosquitos. The street was littered with dried-up corpses that looked like they had decomposed for years, not just been recently slain.
Felix was their next target. Having drained all the unlucky victims on that end of the street, Felix now stood between the mosquitos and the desperate civilians behind him. They swarmed toward him, but Felix was unshaken and prepared to take them on.
Just as they got within range, he cast the [Witcher’s Yrden] skill over the area, which greatly slowed the majority of the swarm—like they weren’t flying, but swimming in ink. Then he shot forward at once and began cutting them apart with his sword in fluid movements of his [Weapon Proficiency] skill, coupled with the [Telekinesis] skill that elevated him from the ground.
[You have slain Blood Servant]
[You have slain Blood Servant]
To the onlookers, it seemed Felix wasn’t flying or soaring, but calmly dancing in the air, the waves of his sword sending a couple of mosquitos to their early warranted graves.
[You have slain Blood Servant]
[You have slain Blood Servant]
Felix was starting to think it was all too easy, though he constantly felt the drain of the [Witcher’s Yrden] skill on his Spirit Pool, and knew it was on a timer before dissipating.
That was when he noticed something vital. The notifications flashing on his vision had a few missing components. A kill notification usually looked like this: [You have killed a Lv() Sahuagin], and was followed by the absorbed attribute points. But now, the notification used the term ’slain’ instead of ’kill’, didn’t display the level of the mosquito he had killed, and most importantly, he wasn’t getting any attribute points from the kills.
Felix felt troubled that something wasn’t right, that he might be missing the entire point, when his danger sense suddenly began tingling, and he felt it.
Something was coming at him. Something much more powerful than anything he had ever faced—not even Lady Morwen could compare.
Felix knew it might be too late to dodge considering the immense strength he sensed from it, but he managed to turn just in time, hoping the surrounding [Witcher’s Yrden] spell would slow down whatever it was.
He was so wrong.
Like a hot knife cutting into butter, a dark figure penetrated the barrier of the skill. And before Felix could even get a closer look, a scythe descended onto his raised sword.
For a split moment, the concept of time ceased to exist, and Felix got a closer look at the figure—or person—or demon.
It was a half-human, half-insectoid. The scythe they had used was their arm, transformed into the blade.
The figure gave a maniacal grin as she locked eyes with Felix, and the next second, he was bombarded with a torrent of notifications that flooded his vision like error messages.
Felix didn’t have the luxury of even glancing at one of the many debuff messages he had been afflicted with when the world snapped back to reality.
Crack! Bang!
An audible crack sounded from the bones of his arm holding the Deathrizzler, shattering, followed by a loud bang like a nuclear explosion from the clash of their weapons. The force propelled Felix away so violently that his body went through three adjacent buildings like a broken doll, only stopping midway into the fourth. His now bloodied and broken body stuck deep within the walls, before involuntarily falling out and plummeting to the ground below, unmoving.
[You have been afflicted by ’Fractured Focus’]
[You have been afflicted by ’Grave Dread’]
[You have been afflicted by ’Corrosion’]
[You have been afflicted by ’Mana Static’]
[You have been afflicted by ’Phantom Pain’]
[You have been afflicted by...’]
[You have been afflicted by...’]
...
Felix was in so much pain that he couldn’t even think straight. His mind was heavily clouded by the sheer pain from the destruction of his body, which his not-so-high [Constitution] attribute worked overtime to fix, but to no avail.
The civilians peering from their hideouts, including Elizabeth watching from the car windows—who had been silently praising him just minutes ago for taking care of the giant mosquito swarm like they were regular overgrown pests—now stared in silence and dread. The SSS-Rank Sage—Felix Thomasville—they had come to recognize from his trademark white hair, has been obliterated in a second by an even bigger mosquito.
If an SSS-Rank Sage, second only to the Great Walton, could be taken out like that in a single swing, then how were they supposed to survive, when the smaller mosquitos had killed so many in a matter of seconds?
The half-human, half-insectoid demoness made her descent, stopping where the broken Felix was sprawled.
She dragged her scythe-like arm across the floor, which sparked flames from the friction and her lips spread into a wide grin as she licked her upper lips with her split tongue.
"Champion of the Witch Master! Where is that bitch, Lilith?!" The demoness voice echoed across the silent street.
Felix heard her, albeit faintly. And it finally dawned on him the great mystery behind Lilith’s disappearance.
This wasn’t a case of a Doom-0 disaster. This was a subordinate of the Dark Lord himself. A bounty hunter from the underworld after the most hunted being in the universe—Demoness Lilith.
They had tracked him all the way down to Earth from just a second-long live stream.
Felix also finally understood the mystery behind the mosquito swarm and why the system notifications had failed to capture their essence or extract any remnant of attribute points from them.
It was simple: they weren’t true monsters.
They were monsters in a general sense, but they weren’t actually real Dark Creatures from the underworld.
They were born of a skill.
The swarm of mosquitos had been a skill of the half-human, half-insectoid demoness. And this was why had thought they were similar to the nameless dark creature from Doom-0 Disaster nine years ago. In other words, this wasn’t a dungeon outbreak, or an outbreak of any kind.
Because just like Champions could cross worlds at will, the demoness—or Champion of the Dark Lord himself—had crossed over to Earth in search of Felix, and therefore Lilith.
For a moment, Felix thought Lilith had betrayed him and probably escaped as soon as she felt the precense of a strong rival with the stench of the underworld.
But just as he was thinking, "Is this how I die?" the next couple of notifications that flashed in his vision reassured him he wasn’t alone.
[Absolute Domain skill activated]
[You have began live streaming for all]