The Gamer's POV-Chapter 280: Battle of the Lords: Obsidian Burial
Lee Lim looked down at his side that had been hit and his expression became unreadable again. In the next second, that spot began to shine with a faint, pulsating gold.
When that happened, Cedric received a notification:
[The character Lee Lim has activated the skill: Vengeful Counter.]
The light began to travel rapidly up Lee Lim’s arm and down to his fingertips, which he pointed directly at Celeste while she was still busy engaging his shadow creature.
Then, the light formed into a perfect, vibrating sphere, after which Lee Lim gave a casual flick of his wrist.
In the next second, the light erupted into a blinding beam that completely pulverized her head. As her body began to slump, the shadow creature, whose hands had already turned into jagged black obsidian blades, began shredding what remained of her torso.
At the same time, Lee Lim raised his free hand and caught Cedric’s nodachi, which had been descending with all the strength Cedric could muster. He caught the blade between his thumb and forefinger, and it snapped in two from the sheer, concentrated pressure.
In the same breath, Lee Lim stood up and kicked Cedric squarely in the chest. The impact shattered the front of his armor and caved in his ribs with a sickening crunch. Blood erupted from Cedric’s mouth and he felt his insides puncture as the force of the blow sent him reeling backward.
Cedric didn’t even have time to process the agony. He was still in the air, his vision blurring, when Lee Lim threw his heavy bladed naginata directly at him.
That should have been enough to kill Cedric then and there, except Cedric turned into a bursting cloud of ravens just as the blade was inches from his chest. The naginata whistled through the empty space where his chest had been, slicing only through air and black feathers.
Barely a second later, two metallic golden arrows suddenly flew through the air from the left and another two from the right, all whistling toward Lee Lim. However, right before they could hit him, the four arrows paused as if they had been held back by an invisible force. They hung there in the air, vibrating against the unseen pressure.
Lee Lim raised his right hand and said, "It’s nice of you to join us."
He turned his gaze to the right toward Leon, who had already nocked another two arrows and fired. Without even flinching as the new projectiles approached, Lee Lim added, "Leon."
The two more arrows shot by Leon also froze in the air alongside the others. Then, all the arrows shuddered and slowly began to rotate. Their golden tips, once aimed at the head of the Lord, now pointed back toward Leon at the right and Uriel who stood several hundred meters to the left.
Their eyes widened, and to avoid being skewered by their own weapons, Leon quickly dismissed all the arrows through a mental command.
In the next instant, the projectiles launched back with double their original speed toward the two people who had shot them. But just before the tips could pierce their flesh, the arrows faded into fine golden dust. The momentum carried the sparkling powder harmlessly past them. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝓮𝒘𝙚𝙗𝒏𝙤𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝒐𝙢
However, right at that moment, Lee Lim extended both hands with his fingers in a choking motion. In the next instant, Leon felt his feet lift off the floor and he immediately clutched his neck as he gasped for a breath that wouldn’t come. His feet dangled and kicked desperately against the air as his face darkened to a deep red.
The same thing was happening to his bond as she tried to claw at the invisible iron grip tightening around her throat. Her eyes bulged with the strain of the pressure, and her struggle grew weaker by the second as Lee Lim’s focus turned to her too.
The only reason they did not die completely after a few seconds was that dozens of daffodils were flowing in emerald light into their necks, mending the crushed windpipes as fast as the telekinetic grip could break them.
While this was happening, Cedric’s ravens, which had been multiplying and now numbered more than five hundred, were already flying above Lee Lim. They flew so tightly together that they blotted out the sun above and made it impossible to see anything beyond their beating wings.
Lee Lim looked up for a split second and all he could see, at least for several hundred meters wide, was a swirling, suffocating ceiling of black feathers and the screeching of the ravens was so deafening and distracting.
He probably wondered what Cedric was trying to pull, but he quickly looked away because ten of Celeste’s chains suddenly slammed into him from all sides.
It seemed that his darkness ability gave him some kind of passive defense because he should have been impaled by those whips. But instead, thick ribbons of darkness flowed out of his cloak right on time and coiled around the whips of fire like hungry snakes. They held the whips in place, and while the darkness vibrated as it struggled to hold back the force of the strike, the whips struggled to shred through the shadows to reach his skin.
Since Lee Lim was now so focused on the whips, and on the two people he was choking, he didn’t — or pretended to not — notice that the ravens above were actually hiding something truly massive. You see, all this while, Goldie had been imagining a colossal, jagged obsidian monolith that was easily the width of a house and as high as a watchtower.
The reason the ravens were blocking the view was to stop Lee Lim from seeing the thousands of tons of cursed stone hanging directly over his head until it was too late.
Which... was right about... now.
With a final, unified screech, the five hundred ravens suddenly reverted back to being feathers. A silent, black rain fell around Lee Lim, but their disappearance did not bring back the sunlight above him. Instead, the monolith had already begun its terminal descent, and its massive bulk now occupied the entire air above him.
In the next beat, it crashed on top of him.
Thousands of tons of jagged obsidian slammed into the shore, burying Lee Lim under a tapering mountain of stone.
