Chapter 54 A Dark Chocolate Kind Of Guy,

  Isaac reached into his Inventory and pulled out a glove. It was a wool winter glove from their time in the north. He slipped it on and then turned to Jane as he let his death flames fade from Lenna. “I need you to cool the weapon I am about to grab. It’s Lenna’s sword and if I drop it, it will try to ignite the entire world at once or burn itself out, maybe both.”

  Catastrophe nodded and leveled her staff at him. “As much as I would like to see that, this is not the time. Ready.”

  Isaac nodded. “Now.” He said and grabbed Lenna’s sword out of his Inventory. His wool glove instantly started to smolder in his hand. A blink later, a solid beam of icy blue light connected directly from the sword to Jane’s staff. The heat was suddenly ripped from the weapon until it was covered in a thin layer of frost. Jane swayed on her feet.

  “You need to stop bottoming out.” Clark scolded his teacher. “You are going to pass out and then be worthless. What am I supposed to do in these situations?”

  “What are you, my dad?” Jane retorted with zero maturity whatsoever.

  Jane and Clark hadn’t even heard Isaac’s thanks and he hadn’t stuck around to hear their bickering. Instead, he did what he usually did. His boost reached the normal point where he would have sent the rest of it into his Truth but the sword was unreliable at the moment and lacked any real power of its own. The rest of his regeneration rate went to refilling his reserves. At that rate it would take him around twenty minutes to fill. With how little mana he had been able to regenerate, Isaac would have to use his shadow-steps sparingly. Lenna’s sword was broken at the halfway mark so it was little better than a butcher knife and he intended to use it as such.

  Isaac set his weight to double once more and launched directly at the legless undead. It tried to swing at him but he flipped over it while landing a chop to the side of its neck. Isaac’s boots tore troughs in the ashy dirt as he landed on the other side of the monstrosity. The monstrosity that was now actively on fire. The fire only lasted for a second but Isaac hadn’t planned on it ending the fight for him. As soon as he had stopped, he took off towards the undead from behind. It turned to meet him just in time for him to deliver another chop to the same location.

  Isaac didn’t bother wasting energy or time on strafing attacks and just met the undead blow for blow. Each of its clawing attacks were parried by Isaac’s bracers or shin guards, each of its biting attacks were met by a hacking strike to the side of the neck or a knuckle strike to the eye. Every one of Isaac’s sword chops momentarily ignited the monster and he could see the damage building up. More and more of the muscles were fraying and the neck muscles were faring the worst. With every hit he was both cutting into the muscles as well as burning away a bit of their integrity. Again and again Isaac met the undead’s attacks without taking any damage himself. More of his dragon scales were being scratched, dented, or even entirely blown off in a few cases, but Isaac was still coming out of every exchange far better than his opponent. That was, until the sword’s handle broke apart in his hands.

  The wooden handle that had been firmly inside of Lenna’s grip during the ash storm, and had also been reinforced against fire by the enchantment Gilgamesh had put on the entire weapon, suddenly just gave out. The wood had been too dried, turned too brittle, and then Isaac had been too rough on it until it finally just splintered in his grasp. “Shit.” Isaac swore under his breath and just grabbed on harder. He felt the wood try to burrow into his skin but his palms were being healed too quickly for the splinters to penetrate, instead, the handle just continued to grind down into ash and dusty wood chunks. Thankfully, the tang of the sword was still rectangular in shape so he had something to grab onto but his grip was awful and his edge alignment had fallen to pieces almost as badly as the wooden grip.

  Isaac twisted and brought his boot around in a roundhouse kick to the side of the monstrosity’s head. It was a kick that had perfect structure and had hit at the perfect angle and distance for the most damage it could physically impart. Where his shin guard was connected to his boot snapped and the laces on his boot were blasted apart from the impact on the top of his foot. The undead’s skull broke apart under the impact and slammed into the ground five feet to the side. Almost all of the muscles in the neck had been torn, ashed, or cut through but it still held on enough to bring the body with it. Isaac fell on it like a cannibal with a butcher knife and a fresh corpse. What was left of Lenna’s sword slammed again and again down on the last few muscle strands of the creature’s neck until it was finally separated.

  This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

  Isaac grabbed the fractured head of the undead and tossed it towards where Lenna had been standing when the volcanic spell had first gone off, that was the hottest part of the small ashy desert. The head hit and rolled as it caught fire and ash clung to it. Isaac got up and kicked the body of the undead into the ash. It tumbled and rolled as it tried to right itself without being able to see. All it succeeded in doing was collecting more ash as soon its muscles too caught fire. Isaac wasn’t sure if it would be enough to end the monstrosities but at the very least they wouldn’t be his problem for the next little while. The reason he had decided to just toss the one that he had been fighting into the ash was because the final monster was only a dozen seconds away. He only had one more to clean up before they could leave, or at least get some rest.

  Isaac vaguely heard Jane yell something towards him but he was too busy locking in on the inchworm monstrosity. With only one arm and one leg, it was bound to spend more time flailing than not, which was actually worse for Isaac. He thrived on fighting things that he could read, mostly mortals, but also big dogs and cats. They had muscles that he understood and would use them in very lateral and regular ways, the undead in front of him was just off enough to cause problems when it was also lopsided.

  Isaac pulled out his Truth and started steadily increasing the amount of power he was feeding it. At first it didn’t do anything, then dark mana started just flowing off of it, then it flickered, and then finally it formed its regular shape. Isaac dodged to the side as the entire monster shot towards him like a loaded spring. It flipped end over end and kicked out towards him but ended up impacting the edge of the hot ash.

  Isaac poured more and more power into his Truth and watched as it just got more and more stable. Unfortunately, doing so started to drain his almost empty reserves but he had what he needed. Isaac lowered the power back down to the sustainable limit, right at the edge of where it would start flickering and dodged the next attack from the monster.

  The undead spazzed and flailed immediately after it impacted the scorching hot ash. It flipped and spun until it reoriented on him. Its hand dug into the ash and caught fire, as did its foot. It bent and charged its body like a bent bow waiting to loose an arrow. Isaac readied himself. It was going to come at him fast, faster than he could get out of the way without a shadow-step. He had a very small window where he would be able to boost his sword up to an extreme level and shadow-step at the same time. It would take almost all of his reserves but it wouldn’t bottom him out. If he missed then he would either need to dismiss truth and fight it with just the fractured enchanted flame blade and his boosting skill, or he could bet all on black and drop his boosting skill in order to spike his sword’s sharpness as much as magically possible and he could try to cut his opponent in half like out of a storybook. He knew that physics did not work that way but it was worth a shot if all else failed.

  The undead launched at him and Isaac did two things at once: Truth’s sharpness spiked as Isaac dumped a huge chunk of his nearly nonexistent reserves into the blade, and Isaac appeared above the undead, facing the ground, and stabbed with everything he had. Isaac’s Truth punched deeply into the back of the monstrosity and he was yanked along its trajectory. The undead had tried to grab where he had been standing but since it caught nothing but air it started to roll in a forwards flip. Isaac’s sword had stopped that but the momentum cancelled out, only succeeding in dragging Isaac along for a few feet before they both slammed into the ground, the undead’s face dug into the dirt as its hand failed to save it.

  Isaac leaned in and tried to push truth as far into the undead as he could. His blade refused to pierce through the undead’s sternum so he ripped Truth out and threw it backwards over his head. He didn’t have the time to wind it down and he couldn’t have it exploding in his face or somehow feeding the undead. As soon as Truth was out of the way, Isaac grabbed the hilt of what was left of Lenna’s enchanted blade and slammed it into the open wound. It didn’t fit but Isaac had given it everything he had and the broken blade forced its way through reinforced muscle fibers and into the grooves in the bone that Truth had carved. The reinforced necromantic amalgamation of mortals burst into flames beneath him.

  Isaac left the blade wedged inside the monster and rolled off of it. Two rolls brought Isaac to his feet and then he was staring at the undead while it pulsed in bright orange flames over and over again. The undead flailed and tossed itself this way and that and Isaac was forced to jump out of the way to avoid being a casualty of its attempts to dislodge the magic weapon in its back. Isaac took a deep breath and steeled himself once he was safe enough from the flailing monster. ‘This is gonna hurt.’ He thought to himself and clenched his fist. He took one last deep breath and then dove into the undead. It kicked out and he caught a foot to his knee. The knee was obliterated and put back together before Isaac even hit the ground with the monster. He used his momentum, strength, and mental control over the death flames inside of himself to roll them both over with the undead firmly in his grasp. With a step and a heave of everything he had, Isaac tossed the undead into the smoldering ash two dozen feet away. He was sent skidding across the ground but the monster landed true and suddenly was being set upon by flames from within and smoldering ash from without.

  Isaac staggered back a step and then dropped to a knee as he let the echo of the pain of the hit he had taken wash over and through him. Isaac breathed out a deep sigh as the final undead just managed to get itself into a worse position by flailing even more. It seemed to be entirely focused on the sword in its back that the heat of the ash didn’t even register, not that Isaac blamed the barely thinking creature, the flames of the sword inside of it were probably hotter than the ash and were far more visible.

  Once the fourth undead finished flailing, Clark walked over to Isaac. That was also around the time that Isaac finally managed to push himself up onto his feet. “Lord of Darkness, that was quite a show.” Clark complimented him. “I have mana potions, if you would like them, I’ll sell any you use right now to you for one quarter than usual price, that is at cost, not counting my wages for the time spent, as a thank you.”

  Isaac shook his head. “I doubt you have one strong enough to matter and it would probably make me sick anyway.” Isaac told him. “I’m a dark chocolate kind of guy, most other candy just makes me sick if I eat too much of it.”