Tales of the Endless Empire

Chapter 451: Elfs vs Humans

The chamber was massive, with five floors. The walls were built from red marble Thalion hadn’t seen before. There was a big blood pool in the middle, soldiers who seemed to refill their stock before moving upward. The alarm was constantly going, which made any kind of talk impossible if you didn’t infuse your voice with mana.There were a few empty bars, a weaponry section, and most importantly, stairs going down in the middle. There were so many soldiers running around that no one noticed Thalion. Walking by the blood pool, he acted like the others by snatching some of the blood. The Sanguis Impera wanted to consume the whole thing, but Thalion held it back for now. Its time would come; there was no doubt about that.

Yet his visit to the blood pool differed in one other minor detail. He secretly guided a drop of his essence blood into the pool. He was about to go a level down—what did he care if chaos erupted in this place? The biggest reason for doing it was that he wanted to see if there was some kind of cleansing array, infecting the blood of the Scarlet Continuum before the king could activate the ritual. If there was some kind of cleansing array, this tactic wouldn’t work. This seemed the best way to test it.

By how the blood began to change color and ominously flowed like there was a dormant power lying within it, nothing changed at first. Thalion’s bloodsense, of course, knew a lot more. The curse had traveled through the whole pool in mere seconds.

A Scarlet Warden on the opposite side found out the hard way. When he absorbed a few liters of blood to get ready for the fight above, he almost stumbled over his own feet. A few seconds later, he was rolling over the ground screaming.

Thalion used the distraction to venture deeper into the tunnels under the ziggurat. He came out in an identical chamber and quickly ventured into one of the side tunnels, where he killed the two soldiers guarding the red crystal storage.

The whole stage had been so good to him. He had been able to enter, and now he could move freely through the levels and tunnels without anyone noticing. They were all panicking over what was happening above, and no one seemed to notice that the ascension chambers were emptying quickly. Maybe Thalion was just lucky, and someone thought they had already been woken up by someone else.

With how lucky he had been so far, Thalion still had to fight a crazy laughter bubbling up when he put mountain after mountain of red crystals into his spatial amulet. He even used the vines of the Sanguis Impera to get them down quicker because there were simply so many.

The best part was when he left and at the reception a Sanguine Prelate was waiting with the intention of handing over ten red crystals. The man complained loudly that someone must have already woken up the ones in the ascension room he had been ordered to handle.

As the good receptionist Thalion was, he took the crystals, and after a quick talk about how badly the whole Scarlet Continuum was organized, he killed the man the moment he turned around. That someone would complain that the mass murder of a whole kingdom wasn’t well organized wasn’t something Thalion had on his bingo card.

In the ascension chambers, Thalion helped produce Sanguine Prelates like the kingdom had never seen before. It couldn’t see it for much longer after they were fed to the Sanguis Impera one by one.

Thalion began to feel a bit bad as the Sanguis Impera radiated the joy of a plant that had survived the longest winter and was now seeing the first ray of sunshine.

Its appetite is just on a different level, that is all. You have done nothing wrong, Thalion told himself repeatedly.

With the crystals and the many Sanguine Prelates Thalion killed, his leaderboard points had also risen to entirely new levels even he couldn’t have anticipated.

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“What in the world is going on with this Thalion?!” Kaelir roared in rage after checking the leaderboard. He and the other elves had just entered the city and had only managed to kill a few Scarlet Wardens. In the meantime, the human had accomplished the impossible. He had not only overtaken them but the whole trial.

The worst of it? He had done it again.

“What are you complaining about, Kaelir? He is just a human. How many leaderboard points can he have? Maybe he found some half-dead Crimson Regent and got ten million leaderboard points by accident. Nothing to worry about,” Olyndra, an elven Chosen who was quite the opposite of Kaelir, said calmly. Being a plant mage, she always tried to see the positive side—something that backfired quite hard as Kaelir firmly exploded like a volcano, a five-meter-thick flame pillar rising over twenty meters into the sky.

“Ten million points? Are you joking? If you want to speak about the matter, then check the leaderboard first!”

This offense was something Olyndra couldn’t accept and was clearly beneath her.

“Do you really expect me to search the leaderboard for some human around the thirtieth position?”

This led to another fiery explosion.

“Ahhh! Thalion is not in the thirtieth position. He is in first place with five hundred twenty million leaderboard points, you stupid bitch!”

For a moment, Kaelir completely lost control, and with the soldiers on the walls taking this invasion very seriously, they noticed them immediately.

They weren’t the only ones locating them. Such a high fire pillar had to be noticed, and for Ethan’s sharp eyes, it didn’t even need to be that big.

“The human Chosen have noticed us,” Liareth stated with a deadpan face a second before could go all out on her own teammate for losing control like this.

“Please, they are only four, like they dare to—” Kaelir said before he stopped himself and shouted, “Formation NOW!”

Unlawfully taken from NovelFire, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

<--

“Eric, you still feeling good?” Ethan shouted, using mana in his voice so he could be heard over the sound of the battle.

“Of course, it’s never been better. We shouldn’t have made up our minds this quickly. Fighting the whole base is the easiest way to get leaderboard points,” Eric shouted back with a wild smile on his face.

He was currently fighting two Crimson Regents at the same time while being fifty meters above the ground.

“I spotted a group of elven Chosen. Roughly worth three hundred million leaderboard points. They have the numbers, but what do you think about giving it a try? It’s risky, but—” Ethan started before a massive wave of light shot out from Eric, who killed the two Crimson Regents with two follow-up laser beams before turning into light and reforming beside Ethan.

“Enough words. Let’s fuck them up. I’m itching for a battle and to finally let loose,” Eric shouted loudly while his aura climbed even higher, bathing hundreds of meters around him in dense white light. Since the fight against the prince, Eric had worked tirelessly to improve, and that showed right now. In the fight against the prince, it had been a problem that he couldn’t last too long with his boosting skill active. That problem was eliminated, and a bunch of elven Chosen would be the perfect testing dummies.

“Okay. Felix, Elaria, you in or out?” Ethan asked, a bit flabbergasted—but with that question, he basically ran through an open door.

“I’m offended that you’re even asking,” Felix said while his staff began to glow with a stronger light.

“Just one thing. There are a lot of skills I didn’t need to use yet. So two important things. Just keep going no matter the injury—they will close in no time. Second, don’t try to help me if parts of my body get destroyed. Just don’t let them gang up on me too much, alright?” Elaria said, also ready to go all out against other Chosen.

“Then let’s go. Oh, also, from now on use the tokens to talk so they can’t hear us,” Ethan said, drawing three special arrows from his quiver. Each one was coated in a green liquid that made the stone of the rooftop beneath his feet smoke every time a drop hit it.

There was no need for more words as they all shot forward. Eric chose the direct way and just flew ten meters above the rooftops by beating his light wings. Ethan jumped from rooftop to rooftop with impossible speed that made it hard to follow with the eye, partly due to some obscuring skill. Felix flew straight into the air, readying himself for a battle between mages. Elaria stayed a bit behind the others while taking an elevated position like Felix.

The elves seemed to understand quite quickly that this was serious, as hell broke loose on their side.

A fiery star ascended to the sky to fight it out with Felix. The heat alone was so intense that everything around the elf was burned to ash without compromise. Before Eric, a green jungle erupted toward the sky as multiple-meter-thick vines destroyed houses and thirty-meter-high predatory plants with wide maws burst from the ground.

Ethan sniped one of the plants with one of the arrows, destroying the head of the plant like it had been hit with a rocket launcher. The elven woman who had stood on it a second before just managed to dodge out of the way a moment before impact.

Shooting more arrows wasn’t possible for Ethan as Liareth appeared before him, the winds roaring around her form, blade already raised. Beside Ethan, another elf shot out of the shadows, two glowing daggers ready in hand.

Eric had the easiest part, just going straight forward and hacking at the jungle.

Felix was probably the one with the most difficult opponents. Besides Kaelir, Arelion also took to the sky. Arelion was even faster than Kaelir and used blue light for his attacks. Blue beams impacted the dense mana barrier Felix had summoned to protect himself while he fired multiple five-meter-long arrows made from wind to kill Kaelir, who was releasing a massive flamethrower in Felix’s direction.

Shockwaves rocked the city when the skills collided.

Elaria stood on a rooftop, buffing her three comrades from a distance, which resulted in them already being at the power output they normally had when activating their boosting skills to the maximum.

The mana loss on Elaria’s side was immense, but this was where her bloodline came in. Not only did she have a mana pool that was essentially ten times the amount of a normal mage, but her recovery also scaled with her total maximum mana, increasing when her actual mana got lower. This allowed her to keep all those buffs going without even losing mana.

There were more ways in which she could help her comrades in the fight, but for now she stuck to buffing and healing. It was like second nature to her, and she was able to keep the skills going even when she was attacked—which didn’t take long to happen.

For the enemy, getting the healer out of the way always provided a big advantage and often even resulted in winning the fight.

Elaria wasn’t surprised when an elf with two swords landed on the roof before her. His hair was as white as his skin, and there was frost building on both his blades. The elf grinned triumphantly, seeing that the humans were busy assisting their healer.

Without an illusion cast, it had only been a matter of time until one of the elves found her.

The elf didn’t hesitate any longer and shot forward, stabbing at her heart with one of his blades—only for an ethereal blade to stab at his heart a second later. The counterattack with the same weapon came so fast that the Chosen wasn’t able to dodge or even recognize it before his heart got punctured.

His sword was spreading frost around Elaria’s wound, and the ethereal copy of his frost sword was doing the exact same. With a shocked hiss, the Chosen jumped back, taking out a healing potion, with the ethereal sword disappearing the moment his attack stopped.

“What kind of stupid bloodline do you have?” the elf hissed at Elaria, who just stood there with a smile, unbothered. Her wound closed in seconds, and the frost disappeared. When it came to the Chosen, that process took a lot longer, even with his high ice affinity.

The elf had been wrong. Her bloodline had a few extra effects which allowed her to learn different skills. The first skill she learned was a transcendence skill that reflected every attack that hit her. The mana cost was quite high, but for her that didn’t matter much.

When healers used healing skills on themselves, they often lost efficiency. For Elaria, it was the exact opposite—with one small detail. She hadn’t even used a healing skill on herself yet.

Another passive skill she had learned was that she recovered life equal to half the mana she was spending. Since conjuring the step while supporting her teammates drained a lot of mana, it was easily enough mana spent to heal her instantly.

There were still a lot of weaknesses to this concept. For example, her life pool was recovering at absurd levels, but her total health pool wasn’t that high. Her resistance was also at the bottom. Should her head be cut off or her whole body nuked with a single blow, her skills wouldn’t work at all.

Her patron had already provided much insight into how she could fix that in the future, but those things were only possible at a higher grade. What she was currently doing was already exceptional for an E-grade.

There was also another issue. She was basically unable to kill someone with skills. Until now, she had learned to move mana barriers around quite fast, which could squash someone, but against a Chosen it wasn’t a possible strategy.

For now, she was the perfect counter against those fast fighters who most of the time tried to go for the healer.

The elf had enough and shot forward again, this time aiming for her head. Elaria wasn’t fast, so ducking under the swing wasn’t feasible. For this kind of attack, she had one last failsafe.

Her whole body turned into green mist before the blade hit her and reformed after the blade passed through. This left the elf in quite the open position, and she formed a mana barrier above the man to squash him.

Yet the elf was too fast again and simply jumped out of the way.

While reforming, Elaria cast three powerful illusions of herself, all of which would trigger the counter skill when hit.

Now the real fight could begin.