Chapter 17: Stone Golem (3)

The golem lunged again, and Leon rolled beneath the swing, coming up already firing. Dust and splinters of stone kicked up around his boots where the fist had struck a heartbeat behind him, close enough that he felt the impact tremor through the ground and up into his knees.

Crack! Crack! Crack!

[Stone Golem HP: -0.5]

[Stone Golem HP: -0.5]

[Stone Golem HP: -0.6]

He caught the shift immediately. Small. Barely worth noticing on its own. But it was there.

He kept firing.

Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack!

[Stone Golem HP: -0.7]

[Stone Golem HP: -0.8]

[Stone Golem HP: -0.9]

[Stone Golem HP: -1.1]

Ding!

[Absolute Adaptation has activated!]

[Your Arcane Surge is adapting to "Runic Fortification."]

[Damage Efficiency against this defensive property increased.]

There it was.

Leon didn’t let up, didn’t slow down, didn’t give the golem a single second to reset whatever advantage it had been counting on. He kept moving, circling, ducking beneath its lumbering swings while his staff fired again and again, an unbroken stream of poison-laced mana slamming into stone that was starting, finally, to actually crack under the pressure.

Every step he took was calculated, deliberate, his boots finding purchase on the uneven ground even as his focus stayed locked entirely on the golem’s shifting weight.

The beauty of it, the part that made him grin even as sweat ran down the side of his face, was that none of this would have been possible without Eternal Mana. Any ordinary caster would have burned through their reserves within the first dozen shots and been left standing there with an empty tank and a very annoyed golem.

Leon’s MP bar barely dipped before it started climbing back up again, regenerating fast enough that spamming his strongest attack wasn’t a resource decision anymore. It was simply a question of how quickly he wanted this fight to end. He let out a short, breathless laugh at the thought, even as another swing whistled past his ear close enough to stir his hair.

Ding!

[Absolute Adaptation has activated!]

[Damage Efficiency against "Runic Fortification" increased further.]

[Stone Golem HP: -1.8]

[Stone Golem HP: -2.3]

[Stone Golem HP: -2.9]

The golem’s movements were growing sluggish now, cracks spreading visibly across its chest and forearms, chunks of stone flaking away where poison had eaten into the fractures left by repeated impacts. One of the runes along its shoulder guttered out entirely, the light behind it dying like a snuffed candle. Leon caught the flicker out of the corner of his eye and felt a fresh surge of confidence steady his aim.

Leon pressed the advantage without mercy.

Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack!

[Stone Golem HP: -3.5]

[Stone Golem HP: -4.1]

[Stone Golem HP: -4.8]

[Stone Golem HP: -5.0]

[Stone Golem HP: -5.0]

The golem staggered, one knee buckling as an entire section of its chest crumbled inward, the runic light beneath finally guttering out across its whole body at once.

It swayed for a moment, some last fragment trying and failing to hold the wreckage of itself upright, and then it collapsed forward in a thunderous avalanche of broken stone that shook the road beneath Leon’s feet, sending a fine cloud of grey dust rolling outward across the clearing.

Silence settled over the clearing.

Leon lowered his staff slowly, chest heaving, sweat soaking through the back of his coat. For several seconds he simply stood there, staring at the rubble that had, moments earlier, been trying very hard to kill him.

His arms ached from the sustained casting, and there was a dull throb along his ribs where one of the golem’s near misses had clipped him hard enough to leave a bruise despite never quite landing cleanly. He’d worry about that later. For now, he let himself breathe, drawing in slow, deliberate lungfuls of dust-thick air until his pulse finally began to settle.

Ding!

[You have killed "Stone Golem (Level 8, Boss)" and gained 280 experience points.]

[Lucky Fate has activated!]

[Rare Drop Probability significantly increased.]

[Stone Golem, Boss has dropped: Stone Resources x24]

[Eternal Coins Acquired: 500]

[Gold-Rank Skill Rune Acquired: "True Verlimon Bird Slash"]

Leon blinked. A gold ranked skill rune, from a level 8 monster? His lucky fate talent was at it again.

Then,

[Ding! You have obtained your first Skill Rune.]

[Skill Runes can only be obtained by defeating Boss-class opponents.]

[The level of a Skill Rune determines the minimum player level required to learn the skill contained within it.]

[The Comprehension Time indicates the amount of time required to fully learn and comprehend the skill.]

[Skill Rune: True Verlimon Bird Slash]

[Level: 2]

[Rank: Gold]

[Time to Comprehend: 2 Seconds]

[Note: Skill Runes are an exceedingly rare material. They can only be obtained from Boss-Rank monsters.]

Leon stared at the small, faintly glowing shard resting in his palm, turning it slowly between his fingers, watching the light inside it pulse faintly in time with his own heartbeat.

Behind him, he heard the carriage creak to a stop, followed by the sound of Garrick’s boots hitting the dirt at a dead run.

"You’re alive," the merchant said, breathless, staring past Leon at the mountain of broken stone where the golem had stood only moments earlier, his eyes wide with a mixture of disbelief and something close to relief. "You’re actually alive."

Leon closed his fist gently around the rune, feeling its faint warmth pulse once against his palm.

"Barely," he said. "But yes."