Blood Shaper

Kay threw his arms back, launching himself out of the crater his body had made and just skimming over the first fist that wanted to pulp him. A thin streak of blood coated one of the knuckles as the outer layer of his helmet skimmed across the stone. Kay pulled back and slammed his twin blades into the arm as he flew past, leaving long gouges following behind him. The whole body of the asura golem shook as its attacks landed on the wall and Kay had to tuck and roll to avoid slamming into a slightly higher elbow joint. He stuck the landing after a second of wobbling and started concentrating and pressurizing his daggers again, since it was the only thing that had done any damage so far.

After getting the pair he was holding nice and compressed he tossed them up and made them float above him. He created another pair and repeated the process, dodging in between fingers and under flicks that the golem sent his way from the two other arms on that side of its body. The face facing him opened its mouth wide and its eyes began to glow brighter as it let out another silent roar. Kay’s stance slipped as the arm he was on jerked toward the open mouth. He looked up to see sharpened stone fangs looming toward him as the asura attempted to bite him.

He dove from the arm before he ended up anywhere near the golem’s gullet, and the monster probably thought he was easy prey at that moment, stuck in the air with no way to maneuver. Two walls, the palms of two massive hands bent on crushing him, swept from above and below. Kay solidified a bar in his hand and pulled, sending himself flying out of the way. The wave of air pushed away from the two hands colliding knocked him tumbling. Kay managed to recover before he crashed into the ground by making more temporary bars in each hand that he left suspended for less than a second, each yank on arms and shoulders slowing him down until he could land safely.

Eleniah flipped away from another attempt to stomp her and jogged over to Kay as the golem straightened up. “What’s up?”

“I’m waiting to see if this thing has any surprises in store. The fights up to here have been challenging, but this guy is way too slow and the only interesting move its pulled so far was that behind the back smack that sent me into the wall. “

They both turned to watch at the asura stomped over to them.

“I’m not going to spoil and surprises for you.”

“So it does? Was you calling it a slow bruiser that can’t hit us from a distance a lie?”

“No, right now its exactly that.”

They dived in opposite directions to avoid the foot coming down on them and Kay created a platform beneath his feet that rose into the air.

“I said no flying!” Eleniah shouted at him.

“You said no flying above it!” Kay floated over to the arm he’d been standing on before the golem tried to bite him and landed at the elbow again. Before anything changed he stabbed the half-dozen punch daggers he’d made and charged up in a ring around the joint. Stepping back out of the blast radius he detonated all of the daggers at once, sending a wave of destruction into the limb. With the sound of thousands of pots being smashed and at least one rock slide the bottom half of the arm snapped off and started to fall. Shards of shrapnel glanced off Kay’s armor and he started to make more daggers for the next limb.

Moving multiple times faster than he’d seen so far, one of the golem’s hands snapped up and wrapped around him. Rearing back, the asura turned him into a fastball aimed at the opposite wall. Kay used his Skills to force his armor in the opposite direction, canceling out some of the momentum and turning his impact from something that would have been disastrous to merely fast enough to make another crater. The second instance of ramming into the wall hadn’t ruptured any internal organs, so he didn’t need to spend any mana on healing as he climbed out.

The golem reached down with one of its hands on the injured side while simultaneously gripping the remaining chunk of limb still attacked to it with it’s uninjured match on the other side. Both ends of the broken arm began to glow similarly to when the earlier golems had activated their boosting powers, with glowing channels lighting up. In a sudden movement, the golem braced itself and yanked on the still attacked portion of the severed arm and pulled it off, leaving behind a massive crevice in its body. That damage was quickly repaired though as dust and the tiny shards of stone that rained down off of the golem began collecting at the site like iron sand following a magnet. The pieces slotted themselves in to the injury and repaired the area into smooth stone skin.

Loud cracking noises resounded as the two chunks of arm began to crumble apart into person sized chunks. When they had each completely come apart the process began to reverse, the chunks forming themselves into a new shape. One hand on the right side where Kay had destroyed the arm soon held a giant-sized shortsword while the other side had a bow in one hand and an arrow taller than most buildings in Avalon in another. Kay goggled at the sight of the newly armed golem, the entire development only taking a few seconds. In one smooth, practiced look motion the asura drew its bow, aimed at Kay and fired while simultaneously bringing the sword down at Eleniah in a no-nonsense chop.

Kay shook himself out of his shock and threw himself to the side. The point of the arrow looked like a flat surface as tall as he was at it came at him. He felt like a movie character throwing himself into a subway wall to avoid an oncoming train as the arrow drove itself into the wall. It stopped with the haft crushing him against the edge of the crater that had widened with the arrow’s impact, and he began to hear that cracking noise again. With it still touching him the arrow broke apart into more chunks of stone and all of the chunks flew back to the asura before forming themselves into another arrow.

“This is more of what I was expecting,” He muttered to himself. He launched himself forward, ignoring whether the height he flew at was technically above the asura or not at any moment. Just restricting himself to melee ranged attacks with the punch daggers was going to be a challenge, if he couldn’t fly to dodge or get close the fight would take ages. As he flew in close the golem surprised him yet again, turning an arching slash down at Eleniah who was still trying to break its legs into an upward swing that clipped Kay and sent him spinning through the air. In the same motion it stabbed down with the arrow, crushing the ground at Eleniah’s feet and forcing her to scramble away.

Correcting his spin, Kay dove for the ground and skimmed along it. He grabbed Eleniah around the waist and dragged her up into the air. Pausing high in the air he made a thin platform and set her down so they both could see the enemy.

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“What’s the plan?” She asked.

“You’re more nimble than me and I can tank better than you once I get some stuff going. You take out the arms and I’ll deal with the legs.”

“You got it!” She took one step off the platform and dropped.

With a thought Kay moved the platform to the side out of the trajectory of the arrow shot straight up at him. He drew blood out of his spatially expanded veins and began to add it to his armor a layer at a time. With each consecutive layer his form grew in size until he was three times his times his original height. That was the limit of what he could control and still be able to fight at the same level, so he stopped channeling and let the platform below him break apart.

Underneath him Eleniah landed in a superhero pose, one knees bent and one fist slamming into the golem’s shoulder. The pose was important because a fist hitting something counts as a punch and with her Unstoppable Fist Skill combined with the force of her landing the single hit was enough to break off the entire arm that the golem’s arrow was reforming in the palm of. The empty hand on that same side whipped around, the speed increased again, and tried to paste Eleniah as she fell down, the foothold beneath her breaking apart from her own attack. She grabbed onto a jagged spike before the damage she’d created could heal and used that to vault up and over the attack so that she could land on the arm trying to hit her and start sprinting up It toward the next joint to break.

The golem moved like a well oiled machine, the guise of a slow and ponderous enemy giving way as they damaged it more and more. The shortsword came up in a series of lightning quick jabs at Eleniah and the arm below that swung down to grab the limb she’d just broken off. The arrow had finished reforming while all this happened and the free hand grabbed it. The golem tossed the arrow up and grabbed it with the arm Eleniah was running up. It snatched it by the haft and drew the bow, aiming at where Kay would be falling through. Moving back down, the free hand grabbed the two arrows the broken off arm had just become and held them ready, with the points between two fingers.

Kay added extra acceleration to supplement gravity and the arrow flew over his head as he descended. Turning his uncontrolled fall into a controlled one with Blood Manipulation he also made himself two new punch daggers to fit his larger shape. They were more like foot long blades that jutted out of his fists and were as sharp as he could make them, but he was pretty sure they still counted as punch daggers. He slid into position right next to the golem and began to spin the arms of his expanded armor in a continuous whirl. He blended his way down the side of the asura leaving slashes and cracks all down the side of it’s torso and leg.

The arm holding the shortsword bent in an anatomically impossible way, the shoulder joint rotating three hundred and sixty degrees to drive the point of the sword at his chest. Kay ducked under it while turning the armor around his arm into a sloped edge that deflected the sword right over him. He slammed the blade on his other hand into the golem’s ankle and detonated the dagger without moving, creating a spiderweb of cracks all along the foot and up the leg. He blocked the kick it responded with with crossed arms and started weaving his blood mech through repeated attempts to stab and slash at him. He lost several layers of armor in a few exchanged but managed to heal them up before the next successful hit got through.

The ground shook as Eleniah fractured the arm drawing the bow with one hit and fully broke it off with the second. The asura roared silently in rage with all three faces as she removed its ability to fire the bow on that side. It dropped the bow and turned all of its focus onto forcing her off of its body with it’s three remaining arms. It managed to corner her between the three limbs and she dove for the ground rather than let it get a hold of her. For the first time the golem retreated, keeping it’s distance from them as it scooped down to pick up the appendages and weapons on the ground. As it paced back, the bow and arrows began to crack apart. Some of the pieces became a matching short sword while the rest floated up into a long shape, taller than the golem. When the came back together they had made a truly gigantic spear with two blades that arced out like a bull’s horns before coming back together into a point. Holding two swords on one side and the spear on the other it reversed its course and charged back at them.

Moving the fastest it ever had throughout the fight, the golem swung its two swords at Kay like scissor blades. With the same impossible motions as before it kept the edges tracking toward him by bending its joints at insane degrees so that Kay couldn’t avoid the attack. With no way to dodge normally, Kay used his yet-to-fail personal strategy and dropped out the bottom of the armor, keeping it in one piece as he landed on the ground and sprinted forward. The golem kept its attention on the much larger reg target and sliced through it, sending a wave of blood gushing out over the surrounding area.

Eleniah braced herself and the air around her seemed to still as she pulled back her fist. She watched calmly as the spear’s tip rushed at her from above. He body began to glow faintly as she stared down incoming death, her eyes narrowed on the very edge of the point.

Underneath it’s notice Kay slipped up to the golem’s injured foot and began condensing a dagger in his right hand. He could feel the golem’s attention swing down toward him and could see the shadow growing beneath him as it brought its twin swords in his direction, but the momentary distraction had been more than enough time. Kay drove the blade into one of the cracks he’d made earlier and pumped an Olympic swimming pool’s worth of blood deep into the crevices. Instead of detonating a pressure bomb like before Kay took the path that liquid usually did when breaking stone and forced his blood to expand.

At the same moment, the spear reached Eleniah. She punched forward, her motions simple and elegant as the golden glow concentrated in her fist. Unleashing the Skill that shared a name with her Class, the Indomitable Fist met a gargantuan spear and refused to move. A crack sprang up from where Eleniah’s fist met the weapon and traveled along the entirety of it as the repulsed force of the attack traveled the length of the spear and into the body of the golem. Thrown back by its own might returned to it and with a disintegrating foot and ankle unable to support its weight, the asura golem fell backward. It slammed into the ground, throwing its two opponents several feet into the air with its impact. The golem’s entire body began to crack under the damage of its landing and it’s eyes let out one long pulse of light before going completely dark.

“Is that it?” Kay asked over the pitter-pattering and slams of chunks of rock of varying sizes hitting the ground.

“Should be!” Eleniah said cheerfully as she walked over to him.

“’Should be’?” Kay swung around to watch the body of the golem. “What do you mean ‘should be’? I thought you’d done this fight before.”

“I’ve only been able to fight this miniboss twice before, and we never killed it this way. I have no idea if it has anything else left. And stuff changes, like the rhinos getting replaced with water buffalo.”

“How did you kill it before?”

“Both times we had a mage that could trace the flow of magic to detect its core and we broke that with a big attack. We never got the chance to just overwhelm it with damage till it fell apart like this. This fight was great!”

The pieces of giant golem dissipated into rock dust which settled onto the ground and created an extra layer on the arena floor that was a few inches thick. When it all cleared away and Kay could see, there was something sitting on the ground where the golem’s chest had been. Three stone chests sat in a line, presumably holding their loot from the fight. Behind them was a single unmoving figure. A smaller copy of the miniboss stood there, made out of a deep black stone unlike the brown colored rock the giant had been made out of. It’s arms were splayed out behind it, each one holding a different weapon.

Kay braced himself as he saw the new enemy and jumped in surprise when Eleniah squealed in joy and started pounding him on the back.

“You are my lucky charm, Kay!” She cheered with a massive grin on her face, “That’s one of the best pieces of loot you can get from this fight! I’m taking you to every dungeon to see if we can get all the good shit!” She started literally skipping toward the loot. “I hope it’s the best version! Even Alahna doesn’t have one of those!”

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