She conjured her sword once again, then pulled a heart out of her locket and consumed it in midair, topping up her [Bloodfire] before diving straight toward her enemy.
She wanted to engage it as quickly as possible. If her plan didn’t work, she was getting zapped, and she didn’t want the construct to have its beam ready to fire if that happened.
She landed, then charged the construct across the field, making it seem like she meant to close for melee. The construct continued to move toward her with quick, powerful strides.
Then, finally, the aperture in the center of its weapons platform opened, revealing red light beneath. She knelt, setting her knees to hopefully absorb most of the counterforce, then leveled her sword at the construct and threw it into the glowing red weapon.
This time, though, she used her [Mighty Strike].
After all: the magic barrier that the construct had used to defend itself from her sword-blows had flashed orange when she’d stricken it the first time.
Somehow, she doubted that it changed colors because it had infinite integrity.
Ashtoreth felt her knees pressed violently into the ground beneath her for a moment… and a massive counterforce slammed into her so hard that she was thrown backward and away, sent tumbling and bouncing across the ground behind her at a shockingly fast speed.
She’d gotten the faintest impression of the barrier popping up, flashing red, shattering….
The ground was unrelenting in its assault, and it took her several moments of chaotically rolling away from the construct before she got her claws into the earth and slowed her motion, fingers carving grooves into soft soil as she regenerated her torn skin.
She looked up to see the construct with her sword jutting out of the crater of bent and collapsed steel that it had made in the construct’s chest.
“Wow!” she said, beaming and hardly believing her eyes. “Is that scaled to the weight of the weapon, or something?!” she stood shakily to see that she’d thrown herself backward almost a hundred meters, then began to heal the skin that had been torn off her arms and ankles. Had she found an overpowered interaction completely by accident?
It had cost her almost two thirds of her [Bloodfire] to launch the weapon, and she spent half of the remainder healing the wounds dealt by the recoil, but she was still immensely satisfied. Her sword was indeed turning into the boss-killer she’d always meant it be.
She ate two more of the charred hearts in her satchel as she pulled her sword so that the counterforce dragged her toward the construct, bounding across the distance between it and her.
The aperture on the construct’s shoulder opened, revealing the angry red light within, but it was too late: Asthoreth closed to quickly, sprinting into its shadow and leaping up to grab the sword-hilt jutting from the center of its chest, then plant her feet against its body.
She almost wasn’t strong enough to heave the sword free. As it was, it took her several powerful tugs on the hilt, the blade lurching a few inches each time before finally coming loose with the sound of scraping, twisting metal.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
She pushed the sword down to the ground to launch herself up and over the lip of the weapons platform, where she landed, gripped some jutting pipes, and held fast.
To an outside observer, it might have looked like Ashtoreth wasn’t doing anything: she was perched atop the construct, unmoving.
But every passing moment that she was touching it, she affected it with her [Energy Drain], stacking a debuff each of its stats and giving her a little [Bloodfire]. Best of all, she suspected that its movement came not just from [Strength], but [Magic] as well, possibly even [Psychic], like her sword.
The construct wheeled about, unable to attack her without its lightning-thrower. Soon enough it began to slow, the debuff growing greater and greater.
It weakened so much that it teetered in place, unable to balance its own movements, then fell to the ground with a massive, earthshaking noise. She leapt free from it, then glided down to the ground once it had fallen.
Taking cover on the far side of the construct from its beam generator in case that part exploded, she lay a hand on its surface and steadily affected it with more and more of her [Energy Drain].
It struggled to rise once, then fell still.
Two more groups of infernals moved past in the field around her. Whether they refrained from engaging her because they had orders, or because they were just afraid, she couldn’t say.
The important thing was that when [Energy Drain] was finished depleting all of the construct’s stats to 0, it would either die on its own the way a living creature did, or be trivially easy for her to kill.
“Love the clever workaround,” she heard Dazel say as he stepped around the immobile construct and into view. “It has a shield to protect itself from having you smash your sword into its guts, so what do you do? Smash harder, somehow.”
Ashtoreth snorted with laughter. “Yeah, or I deceived it into letting me disable its long-range anti-air capability so that it could only engage me with the slow-charge dodgeable beam weapon while I farmed the upgrade I knew I needed to break its forcefield.”
“Like I said, smash harder,” said Dazel.
“I’m surprised you’re still here,” Ashtoreth said. “I figured it got you with something after I ran away from the lightning.”
“I ran away too,” he said. “Just not as quick. And then I couldn’t catch up to you because you can basically fly. How did you launch your sword so fast?”
“It’s an ability,” she said. “Costs a lot of resources. You know, though? I think it’s pretty strong.”
“Yeah? You think?”
“Uh-huh!” she said. “Once I’m done with this thing, we’re gonna find the boss chest quick, plunder it as fast as we can, then go find the humans. Sound good?”
“Sure,” he said. “I’ll try to hope for the best.”
“They’ll be fine,” she said. “Frost knows how to—”
{You receive 1 [Demonic Chorus Golem]; Tier 1}
“Oooh!” she said excitedly. “It died!”
{You absorb 1 [Demonic Chorus Golem]; Tier 1}
{Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! You level up four times!}
{You gain 44 DEX, 44 STR, 60 VIT, 52 MAG, 28 PSY, 28 DEF}
{Reaching level 9 has granted advancement. Choose one of your progression paths other than [Armament].}
“Too bad it doesn’t have a heart,” she said, reaching out with her senses and feeling nothing inside it. “I could really go for a chunk of its stats. I’m sure they’re higher than those other two guys we fought.”
As she was speaking, she climbed up onto the boss’s corpse and scanned the field around them. She frowned as she saw nothing, then noticed a black metal chest of huge proportions had appeared just in front of the construct’s shoulder, right beneath her.
“Let’s see….” she said, hopping down and touching the chest. It clicked, and the lid swung slowly open. Ashtoreth looked inside.
“Say, would you look at that!”
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