Sael had fought destroyers before, but he had never fought a devilish destroyer alone.
And certainly never in conditions this disadvantageous.
The monster’s jaw unhinged, wider than physically possible, and exhaled.
Black mist poured from its mouth like oil smoke, thick and unnatural. It spread across the ground, creeping toward his feet with deliberate slowness... too deliberate, too controlled. Where it touched his light arrow’s glow, the illumination hissed—a sound like water on hot iron—and died.
Sael fired imdiately. The light arrow scread across the chamber, guided by perfect accuracy and Northern’s shadow bow’s autonomous targeting. The shot was clean, the trajectory flawless. It should have struck center mass.
The arrow passed through empty darkness.
The Stalker had already moved.
The black mist spread faster now, flooding across the cavern floor like spilled ink. Sael manifested a wind platform beneath his feet and launched himself upward, escaping the creeping darkness. Three more platforms materialized in quick succession—invisible steps of condensed air and moonlight forming his aerial highway.
’Create space. Maintain distance advantage.’
He nocked another arrow mid-leap, fired, nocked, fired again. Four shots in two seconds, each one targeting a different position where the monster might be. Each arrow adjusted mid-flight, seeking. Hunting.
All four passed through shadow.
The mist reached the dead elf against the wall. Where it touched the corpse, the body seed to... diminish. Not decay—sothing worse. As if the darkness were drinking it.
Sael landed on a platform twenty feet up, bow drawn, breathing controlled. His stern deanor crystallized, emotion locked away behind the facade he’d perfected over years of training. This required thodology. System. The creature was fast, yes, but everything had patterns. Everything could be read.
’Find the pattern. Exploit the opening.’
He activated one of his talent abilities—five invisible lunar sigils manifesting around his position, pale marks hanging in the air like frozen starlight. The marks would bind to whatever he hit first, priority targets for focused fire. Each one represented a stacking advantage.
The darkness spread across the ceiling now, flowing like liquid shadow. His remaining light sources flickered. Dimd.
Then died.
Absolute blackness swallowed the cavern.
Sael’s heart hamred once. Twice. The old panic rising, that familiar sensation of walls closing in—the sa helplessness he’d felt against the Kageyama scion who’d beaten him in the narrow dark passageway, who had made him feel slow, predictable, outmatched.
No.
Not again. Not here.
He fed more essence into the shadow bow, the weapon drinking his power like water into dry earth. The bow pulsed in response, its semi-autonomous senses bleeding into his awareness. Not sight, exactly. More like... knowing. He could feel the shape of things—air currents displaced by movent, the texture of space where sothing solid existed. The bow whispered positions, distances, trajectories into his mind like a second set of instincts.
There.
Behind and above. Descending.
He fired into the darkness behind him without turning, trusting the feedback completely. The arrow adjusted mid-flight and curved upward, targeting sothing Sael’s eyes couldn’t see but his bow absolutely could.
A wet thunk. The sound of a broadhead finding at.
The Stalker shrieked.
The sound was wrong—too high-pitched for sothing that size, layered with multiple tones like three voices screaming at once. It reverberated off the stone walls, disorienting, maddening. The echo seed to co from everywhere and nowhere.
The ability Sael activated locked onto the beast imdiately. One sigil embedded, invisible, permanent until death. The Stalker would take 25% increased damage from all his attacks now.
’First mark. Four more to stack.’
He manifested ten more wind platforms across the chamber’s airspace, building his three-dinsional network. If he couldn’t see, he’d control the space through positioning. Force the monster to co at him through predictable angles, funnel its approach vectors.
Sothing dripped in the darkness below. Thick. Heavy.
Blood, maybe. Or sothing worse.
Then that sll hit him—rot and wet earth and old at, the stench of carrion left too long in standing water. Close. Too close.
’Move.’
Sael dove forward, abandoning his platform. Wind caught him mid-fall, guided by instinct and the heritage of a lineage built on aerial supremacy. A new platform materialized under his boots just as sothing massive displaced the air where he’d been standing. He felt the rush of it, the pressure wave of enormous mass moving fast.
The shadow bow thrumd a warning directly into his mind.
’Behind. Above. Diving attack.’
He twisted, fired blind into the darkness above and behind. The arrow scread upward, curved impossibly right, struck sothing solid with the aty impact of a perfect hit.
Another shriek—this one frustrated, pained.
Second [Constellation Mark] embedded. The slow effect was stacking now—10% reduced movent speed on the Stalker. Not much. But every advantage mattered when fighting above your weight class.
’Good. Keep it thodical. Stack the marks. Reduce its advantage increntally.’
Sael landed on another platform, already repositioning before his boots fully touched down. His breathing stayed controlled despite the darkness pressing in from all sides like a physical weight. The bow’s senses fed him information in fragnts—displacent here, movent there, the faint sound of claws scraping stone in a circular pattern.
Stalking.
He fired into that sound. The arrow adjusted trajectory three tis mid-flight before impact, compensating for target movent with machine precision.
Thunk.
Third mark. The debuff was building. 15% slower now.
The Stalker’s breathing changed. No longer confident, no longer treating this as easy prey. Annoyed, maybe. The breathing pattern shifted—circular now, orbiting his position. Testing his defenses. Looking for openings.
Patient.
’It’s learning.’
The realization chilled him more than the darkness, more than the sll, more than the weight of fighting alone. Catastrophic danger level ant monsters weren’t just fast and dangerous anymore. They beca tactical. Devilish monsters beca intelligent, shrewd and cunning—capable of adapting mid-fight, capable of strategy. Abysmal beca nace, neutral evil, sotis even lawful evil.
Every exchange with the Penumbral Stalker was teaching it sothing about his capabilities. His patterns. His limitations.
And he was fighting in complete darkness.
Against sothing built for it.
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