Chương 9: killing the Wraith

I was hit so hard that my rib cage broke as I tumbled toward the far end on my right, only stopping after crashing into a wall. The pain was so intense that I couldn't even breathe.

"Ack!" While struggling to get up, I finally noticed the shadow moving, and once again, I was thrown high into the air. I tried to use Aura, but I wasn't fast enough. The shadow struck me again in midair, breaking a few more bones as I crashed hard onto the ground. I started to lose consciousness. I need to heal. But the shadow didn't give me even the slightest chance as it bombarded me without stopping.

"Enough!!" Using Sovereign Aura, I stopped the shadow for a brief few seconds, giving me enough time to cast Butler Care four times. My body started healing rapidly as the blood in my chest cleared, and the pain slowly began to disappear. But before I could even catch my breath, I saw something whip toward me. I instantly used the Imperial Swordsman technique to move away and continued dodging. It was fast, really fast.

Then, taking the knife out of my coat, I slashed at the shadow repeatedly, each strike creating a wide arc that cut across the floor and wall. Finally, there was some distance between me and the shadow. Sovereign Composure was working overtime, and I stopped feeling anything, not even the slightest hint of fear. At last, I looked at the shadow standing in front of me. The creature looked like a mass of darkness given shape, its body covered in black mist that constantly moved and twisted around it.

There were no clear features on its face, only two faintly glowing eyes buried deep within the darkness. Its long, thin arms hung almost to the ground, with sharp claws extending from its fingers, while the lower half of its body faded into smoke instead of having legs. Every movement made the darkness around it ripple, and a cold, unnatural presence filled the room whenever it moved. It was a Wraith, a level 60 monster. Shit.

Wraiths were a very special class of monster, created from the dying wills of hundreds of monsters. They were incredibly strong creatures, so strong that they were extremely difficult to kill without using holy magic. It moved once again, raising its long claws and joining them together as a black glow began to gather between them. My instincts warned me immediately. I poured Aura into my knife and moved at an extreme speed, rushing toward the Wraith before it could finish whatever it was doing.

But before I could reach it, the Wraith made a terrifying sound.

"Krhaaa!" A beam of black light suddenly shot toward me. I swung my Aura-covered knife against it. The moment the beam collided with my blade, the entire space trembled. The force was so overwhelming that I was thrown backward once again, my body crashing into the ground as another bone broke from the impact. Damn it… I forced myself to move and immediately cast Butler Care. The broken bone healed almost as fast as it had broken. But the Wraith was already moving again.

Its black mist twisted around its body as it disappeared from my sight. I turned around just in time. Clang! Its claws collided with my knife, sending sparks flying through the darkness. The impact pushed me several steps back, but this time I didn't let it create distance. I stepped forward and slashed. The Wraith twisted its body, barely avoiding the blade, but the Aura still cut through the black mist around it. I rushed forward again, my knife moving faster and faster as I attacked from different angles. Slash.

Slash. Slash. The Wraith blocked some of the attacks with its claws while avoiding the rest, but every time my blade touched its body, the black mist scattered around it. It let out another terrifying cry.

"Krhaaaaa!" Wraith suddenly became completely still as the black mist surrounding its body began spreading across the floor, slowly moving toward me like something alive while the temperature around me continued to drop. I took a step back, but before I could understand what it was doing, I heard a faint voice coming from somewhere behind me.

"Help me." My body froze for a moment as I quickly turned around, but there was nothing there, and just as I was about to turn back toward the Wraith, another voice came from my left side.

"Please." Then another voice came from my right.

"Save me." The voices continued to appear from different directions, one after another, until I could no longer tell where they were coming from, and as the black mist spread farther across the floor, I noticed strange shapes beginning to form inside it. At first, I thought they were just shadows, but as they slowly became clearer, I realized they were faces, hundreds of them, buried inside the darkness with their mouths wide open as if they were screaming.

Then, all of those faces suddenly turned toward me at the same time. A terrifying scream exploded inside my head.

"AAAAAAHHHHH!" I grabbed my head as a sharp pain suddenly ran through my skull, and my vision began to distort so badly that for a moment I couldn't even tell what was real anymore, because the room around me seemed to twist while the Wraith standing in front of me slowly became surrounded by countless dark hands reaching out from the ground. I tried to raise my knife, but my body refused to respond, and then one of those enormous black hands suddenly reached toward me and passed straight through my chest.

My eyes widened as I felt something cold moving through my body, and I immediately understood that this wasn't a normal physical attack. The Wraith slowly moved toward me while the countless voices continued screaming inside my head, trying to drown out every thought I had, but I gritted my teeth and forced my body to move despite the pressure. Sovereign Composure started to push more.

A sudden coldness spread through my body as my emotions were suppressed, and the fear that had started building inside me eased up a little bit. The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. The voices became quieter, the pain inside my head weakened, and my vision slowly returned to normal as I tightened my grip around the knife.

"You will pay for this." I swung the Aura-covered knife with all my strength, and the blade tore through the darkness in front of me with enough force to split the black mist apart, but the Wraith reacted instantly as its body twisted away from the attack.

Before I could follow up, the black hand that had been buried inside my chest suddenly began pulling itself out, dragging itself through my body as if my flesh wasn't even there, and the moment it came free, the Wraith moved backward with it, separating itself from me. I staggered forward, taking a deep breath as the strange pressure inside my chest disappeared, while the Wraith landed several meters away and slowly straightened its body.

I looked down at myself, expecting to see serious damage, but apart from a strange coldness spreading through my chest and the pain left behind by the attack, there wasn't much damage at all. The Wraith suddenly disappeared into the darkness. My instincts immediately warned me that something was wrong, so I quickly turned to my left, but there was nothing there, and when I turned to my right, there was still nothing. The place had become completely silent. I couldn't even hear the voices anymore.

Then I felt something cold touch the back of my neck. My body went completely still. Slowly, I looked upward, and there it was. The Wraith was hanging upside down directly above me, its long arms dangling toward the ground while the black mist around its body slowly moved like smoke, and its two faintly glowing eyes were staring directly into mine. For a few seconds, neither of us moved, but the longer I looked at it, the more the anger inside me began to rise.

It had already broken several of my bones, thrown me across the room like I was nothing, and then tried to attack something inside my body that I didn't even fully understand, and now it was looking at me as if I was not a threat. I slowly raised my knife.

"You really pissed me off." The Wraith suddenly moved, but this time I didn't retreat. There has been something on my mind for a while now. My class said that I was a Magic Swordsman, but I didn't have a single skill related to Magic Swordsmanship. There were only a few reasons I could think of for this.

The first was that the original owner had never learned any Magic Swordsman skills, which was very unlikely considering his class, and the second was that there were skills, but for some reason, I hadn't inherited them. But it didn't really matter. As long as I had the class, I should be able to replicate the skills I had used in the game.

I tightened my grip on my knife, but this time, instead of covering it with Aura, I began pouring Mana into it while imagining one of the skills used by one of the characters in the game. Then the Mana in the air suddenly began to move. I could feel it gathering around my knife, responding to my thoughts as I slowly forced more Mana into the blade. The Wraith noticed it too. It suddenly brought its long claws together as it prepared to launch another attack.

The air around my knife began to tremble, and then the Mana suddenly transformed into flames, wrapping around the blade before stretching outward into a long whip made entirely of fire. I swung the knife.

"Flame Blossom." New Skill Registered Flame Blossom The flaming whip shot forward with tremendous force, but before it could reach the Wraith, the flames suddenly twisted and began spinning around each other, transforming into a massive fire tornado that rushed toward the monster. The Wraith tried to attack at the same time, but the fire tornado swallowed both it and its attack before either could reach me.

"Krhaaaaaaa!" Its scream echoed through the room as the flames continued spinning around its body, burning through the black mist and tearing it apart piece by piece. Strangely, the scream sounded almost musical to me. It wasn't a pleasant sound, but there was something strangely beautiful about it, as if hundreds of different voices were crying out together while the flames slowly consumed them. I stood there and watched without moving as the fire gradually began to die down.

The tornado became smaller as the flames faded. And when everything finally came to an end, there was nothing left of the Wraith except a pile of ash on the ground. I stared at it for a few seconds.

"That actually worked." I slowly lowered my knife, still unable to believe that I had managed to replicate a Magic Swordsman skill I had only used in the game. But I got happy too early, as the ashes suddenly started to rise once again.

"Now what?" Usually, when a wrath monster is killed, it doesn't rise again. That's why what was happening in front of me didn't make any sense. At first, I thought ash was just being carried by the wind, but then it started twisting and gathering together. The ash soon transformed into black smoke, and that smoke quickly condensed into a dark, slimy liquid. Then it began to spread everywhere. I instinctively took a step back, unwilling to touch whatever the hell it was.

From within the glowing liquid came a strange voice. Skrcc… skrcc… The sound was distorted, almost like something struggling to speak through a throat that wasn't meant for human words. Then the liquid suddenly pulled itself together. It shrank into a single, small orb. The orb began to spin as its mass continued to condense, becoming smaller and denser by the second. Wait. I knew something like this. I had seen it before. But where? This wasn't the time to forget something like this. I needed to remember.

The orb suddenly began to shine. The orb grew brighter and brighter until, all of a sudden, I remembered what it was, my eyes widening in realization as a single curse escaped my mouth. Shit … That thing was going to self-destruct. What the hell?! I immediately began pouring aura into my body, reinforcing my muscles, bones, and skin. At the same time, I gathered mana and began casting another skill. The orb started to crack. Thin fractures spread across its surface, and blinding light leaked through them.

The light became so intense that keeping my eyes open was becoming difficult. Damn it. Using my mana, I cast the defensive skill I had seen one of the characters in the game use. Proto. New Skill Registered Proto The earth beneath my feet violently trembled. A section of the ground broke apart and rose into the air. Chunks of earth rapidly gathered together, forming layer after layer until they became a massive wall surrounding me.

Proto was a defensive skill that continuously drained the user's mana in order to maintain itself. Normally, that would have been a problem. Right now, I didn't care. As long as it could stop whatever was about to happen. I'd gladly burn through every drop of mana I had.

The cracks across the orb continued to spread, crawling over its surface like a spiderweb while the light leaking through them grew brighter and brighter until it became almost impossible to keep my eyes open, but I forced myself to endure it as I poured even more aura into my body, reinforcing every part of myself while simultaneously feeding mana into Proto, and the moment I felt the earth wall around me becoming thicker I finally realized just how much power that tiny orb was containing, because even though it was no bigger than my fist, the pressure coming from it was completely different from anything I had felt before and every instinct in my body was screaming at me to run, yet there was nowhere to run anymore.

Please… hold. I gritted my teeth and poured more mana into Proto, causing another layer of earth to rise around me, then another, and another, until I was completely surrounded by several massive layers of hardened earth, but just as I began to believe that I might actually survive this, the orb suddenly stopped moving, and for one brief moment, everything became completely silent. Then… BOOM! The orb exploded.

A blinding flash swallowed everything around me as an enormous wave of destruction erupted from its center, tearing through the ground and sending countless fragments of stone flying in every direction, and the first layer of Proto shattered almost instantly, followed by the second and then the third, each layer collapsing beneath the overwhelming force of the explosion while I desperately reinforced my body with aura and continued pouring mana into the remaining barriers, but the impact was far stronger than I had expected and even with Proto protecting me, the sheer force of the blast slammed into my body like a mountain crashing down.

"Gah…!" My feet left the ground. I was thrown backward as if I weighed nothing, my body smashing into the remaining layers of earth while the shockwave continued to tear through everything around me, and for a few seconds I couldn't hear anything except a deafening ringing inside my skull as my vision became nothing but a blur of white light. Damn… it.

The aura reinforcing my body began to weaken as my concentration started slipping away, and although I desperately tried to gather more mana, my thoughts were becoming slower and slower, my vision growing darker around the edges as I struggled to remain conscious, until even the burning pain spreading throughout my body began to feel strangely distant. Was I… actually going to die here? My thoughts suddenly stopped.

The last thing I saw was the remains of Proto collapsing around me while black smoke filled the sky, and before I could even finish the thought forming inside my mind, the darkness swallowed my vision completely and I finally lost consciousness.