Titan: A LitRPG Adventure (UnderVerse Book 4) Jez Cajiao (top ten books of all time TXT) 📖

more were appearing, and as I hooked one ankle with the butt of my weapon and yanked, slamming the blade into the face of another, I heard Yen call out.

“On the left!” she grunted, her arms held above her head as three glowing spears, wreathed in flames, hovered above her. As soon as she’d given the warning, she threw her hands forward, as though physically hurling the spears, and they shot away, spreading out.

They impacted, as she’d warned, to the left of our small group, one after the other, and as soon as they hit, they exploded.

The projectiles burst into flames, spaced evenly apart so that the first reinforced the second, which reinforced the third, creating a shockwave of blazing destruction that wiped out a solid forty feet of undead, sending bits flying everywhere.

I stepped back, then again. Rather than the pause I’d been expecting, it was us that were distracted by the attack, and the undead kept crowding forward, rushing us.

As the flames started to die away from Yen’s attack, I caught a glimpse of more undead crowding into the room from the doorway at the end, and I swore.

“There’s light above!” Miren yelled above the din, and I jerked my head upwards, looking instinctively, before swearing and turning back to the fight. Swinging my weapon from right to left, I cut through a half-decomposed corpse at the neck, sending the head tumbling as the body fell.

“Who is it?”  I called, feeling Oracle finish the spell she’d been working on. Whatever lingering effects the broken spell had wrought on her, her casting ability was certainly the most obvious right now, as it was taking her an order of magnitude longer than usual to cast.

A full spread of Magic Missiles flew from her, five in all, each aimed at a different undead. The massive darts slammed into them, killing two and injuring another, while the last two shamblers barely seemed to notice, and I swore as I saw them.

They were weird-looking skeletal creatures, standing about five feet high, and four broad, with huge carapaces on their backs. They moved more like an armadillo than anything else, but with weapons grasped in their hands while standing upright. Additional armor hung loose across their chests, including a few helms that should have covered their heads, making them look like someone had tried to create an organic living tank, then strapped more armor on for shits and giggles.

“What the hell are they!” I grunted, and Oracle called back to me in warning.

“Xon’dike!” she shouted. “They’re the original caretakers of this place, and its basic defenders, so watch out!”

“Really?” I shouted back, bashing another skeletal warrior in the face, then smashing its legs out from under it and crushing its skull with the base of my weapon. “I was going to let it kill me out of fucking curiosity!” I turned too late, getting shoulder charged by a skeleton from my left.

I staggered, then head-butted it, my greater weight driving it back far enough that I could let go of my naginata with my left hand and grab its throat. As soon as I felt the bones in my grip, I yanked, tearing its head free.

Before I could set myself again, another skeleton hit me, and another, and this time, I went down, slamming into the ground. Refusing to stay pinned, I immediately began rolling, lashing out with my legs and kicking.

The undead started piling on me, their bony fingers tugging and digging, frantically trying to get at my flesh.

One leapt on my right arm, pinning my naginata down, while the first two that had taken me down pinned my chest and waist as best they could.

Another appeared behind them, less decomposed than the rest, only at most a few months dead, and it leapt into the air, raising its mace high and aiming for my head.

A black arrow flashed through the air, slamming into the airborne undead’s breastplate and sending it flying backwards, even as I lashed out with the bones I still held in my left hand.

I had a fist full of spine, still connected somehow to the skull, and I slammed it into one of the skeletons. The crunching of bones sounded loud enough to me underneath it all that I winced as I planted my feet and arced my back, bucking the pair off my chest. Momentarily free, I twisted to my right and slammed the skull-mace into the face of the one that held onto my right arm.

Then Grizz was there, followed by Oracle and Lydia, and between the three of them, they cleared enough space that I could get back to my feet.

“Time to fall back!” Grizz insisted, and I nodded to him, winded but glancing around. At some point while I’d been on the floor, Yen or Oracle had hit another group with a big spell, and that’d created enough of a gap that we could back up.

“Get Lord Jax out of here,” Grizz ordered Lydia.” I’ll hold them long enough.”

“Scratch that. Miren, Stephanos, get back up there now, and then you can pick them off while the rest of us fall back…” I started to say, when an ominous creak rose from the debris behind us.

“What the…?”  I looked up, only to see movement, as two men began shoving a section of wall hard, making it tilt.

“Move!” Lydia bellowed, shouldering into me and shoving me aside as more of the section that led up began to fall away, taking with it the low-hanging ceiling.

Interlude – Thomas

“Sir, yes, sir!” Thomas barked along with the others as Sir Edvard Tunnik, Dark Paladin of Nimon, ordered him forward, proceeding down the wet marble steps into the pool of black liquid.

“Dark Lord!” Sir Edvard intoned sonorously. “This humble Soldier has risen fast in your service, barely weeks ago a slave, then a Slave-Aspirant, until he stood proudly and fought off all challengers to his right to ascend! Finally, his brothers and sisters in the Faith, Belladonna, Turk, Coran, and