"WOOOO!"
Grey plummeted from the air, blazing a trail down.
BOOM.
He landed on the molten rock. Waves of lava should have fallen out in endless streams, spilling out into the surroundings. But instead, it was like all the heat had been compressed into one super diamond.
Thi Lan and Amunet had both been forced to retreat wildly. The heat coming off of the large stone was problematic enough without Grey using it like his own personal meteor, streaking across the skies.
’I’m gonna ruin my shoes like this,’ Grey grumbled inwardly, but he pressed down the feeling. The real question here was if the woman was dead or not, and given the fact he hadn’t received a notification, he wasn’t sure.
But at the same time, he didn’t receive the usual notification they would when an Instance Battle was triggered either. So it was hard to say.
That was the real reason he had just been calling it "angel lady". He had never seen her real name. Then again, knowing him, he probably would have kept doing that anyway.
Thi Lan and Amunet slid to a stop in their retreat, their eyes looking forward with a serious sort of anticipation. If they could defeat this woman, thing, angel, whatever it was, then maybe they could get out of here.
A silence fell as the destruction settled down. Veins of crimson blooming out from the molten rock at the center, the heat leaching into the surrounding stone. Grey continued to stand on top of it, feeling for every change and shift.
His gaze suddenly sharpened.
The rock trembled.
’Shit.’ Grey cursed.
The grip Thi Lan and Amunet had on their weapons tightened. Thi Lan had brought out her whip again, wearing its handle thin with her palms and fingers.
Amunet breathed out slowly, the tip of her rapier trembling to the cadence of the molten rock as though she was trying to find a unique rhythm within it.
Chi.
A sudden crack burst through the middle of the stone, right between Grey’s legs.
"Hey! Watch it!"
Grey leapt up as a tendril of darkness shot out, whipping at the air and just barely missing his family jewels.
"There’s quality merchandise in here!"
Grey flipped through the air, his foot lightly tapping at the stone for an instant before he seemed to vanish in a blur. He landed on the ground below, skidding back until he came to a slow stop.
Gently, he rested the faces of his hammers on the cobblestone, looking ahead seriously.
The molten stone was cracking like an egg. The web of damage grew and spun out in greater and greater speeds until...
BANG.
Grey let go of one of his hammers and suddenly reached out, snagging one of the molten pieces of rock before it took his head off. His finger sank into the heat, his crimson irises flickering with hints of seriousness he seemed to rarely have.
However, when everything cleared, he didn’t find what he expected to find. Instead of a woman, a weird, foggy, tentacle monster with a spherical center hovered in the air like some sort of star swallowing beast.
Its tendrils and arms whipped about, lashing at the air as though the only thing it knew was destruction. But the woman... she was nowhere to be seen.
’... Well, this is awkward.’
Grey realized that they had probably successfully killed the woman, mission accomplished. The trouble was that she was the only one suppressing whatever the fuck that was.
In fact, maybe the only reason they had been able to kill her so easily was precisely because she was carrying that burden everywhere.
Grey’s eyes shifted over and he just barely managed to catch sight of the woman’s rod in the rubble.
His legs were moving before his mind even registered what was going on.
The hammers vanished into his inventory and he dove forward as a tentacle swiped out from underneath him.
His palms slammed into the crumbling ground and he launched himself up, twisting and weaving through another line of attacks before he just barely landed on what seemed like a solid piece of air.
Just beneath him. A stone only large enough for his soles to cover completely appeared. His body weight hit rock bottom and he kicked off of it with so much force it crumbled to ash before it hit the ground, leaving pelting lines of molten fury in its wake.
He dove one more time, snagging the rod and then quickly rolling up to his feet. Using the momentum, he slid back out of the way of another tentacle strike, leaning his head back and watching it as it swung overhead.
"Jeez. Relax."
Grey huffed out a breath as he slowed his skid to a stop. He looked at the rod and his eyes widened.
—
Name: The Virtueless
Rarity: Mythic
Class: Dominus
Accepted Type: None.
Rejected Type: All.
Description: A cursed weapon without virtue, without light, without hope. It carries the heft of a world and the weight of failure. Only the chosen of Atlas may unlock this weapon’s true potential.
—
’... Atlas?’
Grey’s eyes narrowed. Prometheus? Atlas? That couldn’t have been a coincidence at all.
Did that mean there was an Atlas Spirit out there just like there was a Prometheus Spirit inside of him? Where was it? Who had it? Were they being hunted down like Grey was? Or was their life a lot better than his own?
BANG.
Grey’s fist hit the ground as the rod pulled him down.
"Fucking hell..." he wheezed out. It almost felt like every tiny bone in his hand had been shattered. The rod suddenly felt like it weighed as much as the world did.
’Dammit! Dammit! Dammit!’
Grey hadn’t moved to get this rod because it was an upgrade, though that certainly would have been good enough of a reason. The real reason he had was because he felt like it was going to be their only way out of here. His intuition was telling him it would work against this blob of chaos.
But the weapon wasn’t made for him. He couldn’t use it.