lpffa Chapter 809: Mommy’s Boy
Chapter 809: Mommy’s Boy
Vespera spoke while her lattice held the reinflating glutton pinned against the basin floor, her red eyes never leaving the column’s front.
"Son. I will handle the elite. Please take care of the rest."
The stream chat pulsed in his peripheral.
— Thirsty247: SHADOW MOMMY IS DELEGATING!! 🥵
— TouchGrass: momma’s boy confirmed on live television lmaooo
— NyxWorshipper: can she adopt me next???
Kaiden’s mouth twitched behind the blood mask. ’Mommy’s boy charges are never going away at this rate.’
’Not helping, Alice.’
He looked at his mother across thirty meters of toxic haze, her shadow lattice braided through the basin’s forward half in a web that held the column’s heaviest bodies in place while her cables carved into whatever pushed through. She was asking him to cover the width so she could commit forward without restraint. The Shadow Monarch trusting her son to hold the flanks.
"Got it."
The column did not give him time to settle into the assignment.
The next wave cleared the burned lanes behind the pinned glutton, and this wave was not gluttons. These were long-bodied creatures built low to the ground with flat skulls and six legs that ate distance in a skittering gallop, their hides slick with a membrane that sealed the toxic air off their skin and their eyes set too wide apart for the shape of the head, angled outward like prey animals scanning for threats from every direction at once.
Except they were not prey.
The first three came at Kaiden in a fan that read the Mire’s cleared lanes and used them, splitting wide to force him to commit to one angle while the other two pressed past on the flanks. Alice’s perception caught the split before his eyes did.
He put his left blade through the center runner’s skull at full Wrath charge and felt the detonation blow the six legs out from under the body in a spray of dark ichor that painted the ground spores flat, then pivoted hard for the right-side runner that was already twenty meters past his position and accelerating toward the Mire’s far wall where the passage to the Verdant Expanse opened.
Too far. Too fast.
Kaiden dissolved the left greatsword back into his vambrace and shaped the blood mid-stride, the recovered material compressing into a javelin along his right palm that he launched overhand at the runner’s hindquarters. The blood-construct crossed the distance in a flat arc and punched through the membrane-slick hide at the base of the tail, detonating on impact with a Wrath charge that blew the creature’s back legs apart and sent it tumbling across the toxic floor.
The ground spores rose around the crippled body in a lazy cloud. The membrane had torn at the wound site. The spores found the exposed flesh underneath and the runner started convulsing before Kaiden reached it, its six legs kicking against rock it could no longer grip while the toxin ate inward through the breach.
He turned back to find the third runner already dying in the knee-height clouds where Alice’s single beam had taken it through the chest.
[You’ve slain invading Mirescutter (Level 88). +380,000 XP. +720 DMP.]
[You’ve slain invading Mirescutter (Level 91). +460,000 XP. +740 DMP.]
[Champion Kill: invading Mirescutter (Level 89). +760 DMP.]
Three down. He checked the basin behind him and his stomach dropped.
Fourteen more had cleared the lanes while he’d been killing the trio.
Vespera’s lattice caught six of them in the same breath, hooked shadows driving into the column’s leading edge and dragging bodies backward into the toxic strata where the denser ceiling vapor pressed down and cooked them from above. But the other eight had already committed wide, fanning across the basin in pairs, and his mother’s attention was buried in the glutton that had finished reinflating its hide and was building pressure for another stream.
’Damn it... The glutton fucker cleared the poison just enough to let them maneuver...’ he cursed inwardly.
Then the chime hit.
[Level Up! Level 56 ➣ 57.]
[You have 30 unspent stat points.]
The accumulated XP from every kill since the battle’s start had been climbing toward the threshold in the background, and the three Mirescutters had tipped it.
He didn’t hesitate.
’All Agility.’
[Agility: 198 ➣ 228.]
[Sin Fusion multiplier active. Agility (boosted): 317 ➣ 365.]
The difference was immediate.
His legs stopped being legs. His body went from fast to something that parsed the air differently, that processed distance as a smaller number than it had been three seconds ago, the gap between where he stood and where the runners were shrinking in his perception because his frame now had the answer for it. The Mire floor blurred under his first stride and by the second he was covering ground at a rate the Mirescutters had not been designed to outrun.
Kaiden sprinted left and committed to the nearest pair while his mind worked the terrain, his boosted Agility closing the distance between them in strides that shattered the rock under his weight. Two of the eight runners had split into a lane where the ground spores were still thick, the haze undisturbed by the earlier clearing. Their membranes held. The spores rolled off the slick hides without purchase.
The pair he was chasing did not have the same luxury. They’d taken a burned lane where the thermals from the earlier splash had scattered the ground layer, but the knee-height clouds above were settling back into place fast and one of them was running with a visible tear along its flank membrane where a piece of debris had caught it during the glutton’s decompression.
He threw a blood-thread from his right vambrace. The thin red line crossed fifteen meters and caught the torn one around the foreleg, and Kaiden planted his weight and yanked. The creature’s stride broke, its body whipping sideways into the knee-height clouds, and the toxic layer poured into the membrane breach along its flank in one concentrated dose. It seized. Its partner kept running.
Kaiden let the thread dissolve and gave chase, Wrath cooking the air around his frame as he closed the distance in four strides that erased the gap between them, and his right blade came down on the runner’s spine in a two-handed overhead that split the membrane and the vertebrae underneath in one wet stroke.
[You’ve slain invading Mirescutter (Level 90). +420,000 XP. +740 DMP.]
[You’ve slain invading Mirescutter (Level 87). +350,000 XP. +700 DMP.]
Six remaining. Four in the Mire’s far reaches where he couldn’t get to them in time.
The halo above his head split four beams in rapid sequence, gold-violet tracks crossing the basin in pencil-thin lines that found each runner through the toxic haze with the precision only her enhanced perception could deliver at this range. Two dropped clean. The third took the beam through its hindquarters and kept dragging itself forward on four remaining legs until the ground spores found the wound. The fourth dodged.
It dodged a beam of light.