Chapter 355: Struggling
"Oh, Goddess Nethera, give Your grace to this fluffy body and accept my soul through Your reincarnation doors."
Seeing the giant Serpent rushing toward them, Loudbark steadied his breath, set his mind for death, and began to chant.
In front of him, Rhadak and his Obsidren kin, from the same Path yet sworn to a different prayer, lifted their voices. "Without destruction, there would be no resurrection. May the Goddess bless us."
The 9 Obsidren spoke in perfect sync. Their dark stone bodies began to shift, surfaces grinding as they swelled and bulked; then, as if moving in pure synergy, they pressed together and fused, forming a single, sturdy wall of living rock.
The other Practitioners watched in silence, offering muted praise as the formation locked into place. They waited, breath held, to see whether this would be enough to meet the Serpent’s charge.
BOOM!
The Serpent, at full speed, slammed into the Obsidren wall.
The impact shoved the bulwark backward a little, gritty stone drifting across the void as shards scattered in a dark spray. Thick cracks spread like lightning veins through the surface.
"They really endured..." Maruun’s voice carried a mix of astonishment and respect as he looked at the rampart of Obsidren bodies.
The Serpent, checked by the blow, came to a full stop and even drew back slightly, as if the collision had hurt it.
Then Maruun’s gaze returned to the wall, and his heart dropped. After only 1 attack, the Obsidren barrier looked dangerously damaged, fractures yawning wider with each settling groan.
"Fuck, are they dead?" Loudbark blurted, panic snapping at his words. He couldn’t tell whether any Obsidren still lived; all he saw was a dark wall on the verge of crumbling.
"We endure for another one." Rhadak’s voice rolled out from within the stone. Slowly, visibly, the wall began to regenerate. Cracks tightened by degrees, edges drawing together, proof of life pulsing under the rock-sheen surface.
"What do you mean you can endure another one? You’ll die if it strikes again, damn it." Loudbark couldn’t hold himself. Anger flared, and he turned to his own kin. "Houndkin, we can’t hide behind a bunch of stone. Let’s show them what we’ve got."
He sent the crossbow in his hand back into his Sanctuary and drew on a different skill.
The Houndkin opened their jaws wide in unison, fangs bared at the Serpent as it coiled to strike once more. A single, unified bark erupted from their throats.
The sound left them as a rippling shockwave, converged to a point, darkened as if sound itself had thickened into a dense fluid, then crashed into the Serpent’s massive head with a heavy, wet thud.
At first, there was no visible damage. The scales did not so much as scuff. Yet the Serpent’s next movement told another story. Its thin eyes pinched shut as if stung, its coils tightened, and its stance slipped into guarded defense.
"Oh, it’s a debuff skill," Maruun said, watching the shift with narrowing eyes. It was a combination of Rank 3 Nether Path skills that blurred the opponent’s senses for a time and slowed their reflexes.
Seizing the opening the Houndkin had created, the Aqualeth refused to let it go to waste.
"Use your Water Shell skills," Maruun ordered at once.
Without delay, the Aqualeth raised their hands. Water droplets rapidly materialized in the air before them, beading and multiplying until they surged forward as a single tide.
The flow gathered at one point and wrapped the Serpent’s head while it was still struggling under the Sense Blur effect, shaping itself into a wide, sapphire shell of water like a cage.
Knowing this alone would not hold a Rank 4 Spark, Maruun drew a deep breath. He opened his fishlike mouth and expelled a pressurized gust of white, crystalline cold.
The jet struck the water shell; frost raced outward in spiderweb patterns, the surface whitening and thickening in layers.
In moments, the liquid cage froze solid, turning into a heavy block of ice that locked the Serpent’s head completely, the glossy facets catching the light while hairline frost crackles whispered across its surface.
"That’s it. We’ve done what we can—now run." Maruun didn’t wait to see the outcome. He raised his voice for the entire mixed-race group and began to fall back.
"Take the wall. We’re leaving." Loudbark ordered his kin as they vaulted onto their giant flying hounds, rushed to the Obsidren wall that was still trying to regenerate, gripped its fractured edge, and dragged back with it at speed.
SKREEE-CHCHCH!
They had barely gained distance when a sharp crack split the air behind them, a sound that made their hearts drop and their throats knot.
They looked back in time to see the massive block of ice around the Serpent’s head split into a rapid spiderweb of fractures, then explode outward into glittering shards that vanished into the dark.
A heartbeat later, the Serpent’s senses snapped back. Rage burned in its eyes—cold amber irises slit by a vertical pupil like a needle of night, the kind of predatory gaze that never blinks—and it fixed that gaze on the fleeing group. Then it charged again, faster and with a grim purpose, as if the game’s timer had run out.
"Oh, fuck... we’re dead."
Certain that this was the final moment of his life, Loudbark felt his memories surge up all at once as the Serpent’s colossal maw rushed toward them, like death itself taking shape and closing its jaws.
But before death reached them, something caught the Serpent mid-charge.
The massive body slowed in plain sight, momentum bleeding away until, as if its energy had been severed, it stopped altogether a few inches from Loudbark’s flying dog.
Realizing he had miraculously escaped death once again, he swept the field with his eyes, searching for whatever held the Serpent’s body in place—until he found it.
Every gaze fixed on Brakhtar at the rear. His second head was already half solid, flesh knitting beneath translucent skin. His hands lifted high, and a bluish aura rose from his core, streamed into his palms, then surged outward to clamp invisibly around the Serpent, holding it suspended in the air.
"I can’t hold it long," he ground out through his teeth. His frame shook, muscles jumping and knotting as if he were trying to hoist a weight his body could not bear.
Even the sight of him alone restraining a Rank 4 Spark dropped the Practitioners into stunned awe. In that moment, they understood how much difference a single bloodline talent could make in sheer power.
Freed at last from Fear Bind, the other Gorathim surged forward. They raised their hands and poured their mind skills into the struggle to steady their future Chief. Some of the strain bled from Brakhtar’s face.
With the rampaging Serpent subdued, if only briefly, Thalira glanced toward the vast floating book, the core of the dead Sanctuary. After a swift calculation, she summoned from her Sanctuary a small, crystallized droplet into her palm and, without hesitation, tossed it into her mouth.
"I need only 1 minute. Hold it until then."
At once, visible changes rippled through her body as the Synergy Crystal began to take effect.