The Culling of Man: A litrpg adventure (Peril's Prodigy Book 1) by Craig Kobayashi (ereader android TXT) 📕

plane of existence like Garath had. He recognized the cast immediately as Summon Flayer when a dark purple summoning circle appeared at her feet. A small, winged demon emerged from the circle three seconds later with a hideous scowl on its face.

Garath looked unimpressed at seeing the little creature Leviathan had summoned. The initial form of a Flayer next to his, much larger Flayer almost seemed cute. Or it would, if the demon’s weren’t so repulsive. Garath’s slightly blue-tinted Flayer had nearly twice the wingspan and its horns were far longer. Even the little muscles on the arms and chest of his bonded Flayer dwarfed those of Leviathan's puny answer to his attack.

During the three seconds that Leviathan had used to summon her Flayer, Garath landed another stack of Quickening Entropy on his target and started funneling Mana into Creeping Death to land a third. Though Creeping Death was easily his best single target option, the increasing Mana cost for each stack quickly became prohibitive. The first stack only cost him 60 Mana, a drop in the bucket. The second stack cost 78, and the third 101. Garath did an internal ‘woop woop!’ when he saw that his damage-over-time spell landed on his target without being affected by her shield of Black Blood.

*Ignore the Flayer,* he told the demon hovering in front of him sending Death Bolts at Leviathan on repeat without concern for Mana depletion. *Kill her.* Then he addressed the Fell Hound. *Keep her demon busy.*

Garath’s Flayer's Death Bolts were hitting Leviathan's Black Blood shield and ricocheting off into the night. Garath knew she would be able to use Black Blood as a shield for "up to five minutes," per the Skill description, but he himself had wondered just how much damage it could take. He resolved to find out exactly how much her shield could take by going over his combat log in detail after he killed her.

Garath continued stacking Creeping Death's QE debuffs on his enemy. The five stacks he managed to land on her, in all, cost him 540 Mana (and five more taints to his natural form). He knew he was winning the damage over time battle and planned to continue that. The duration of his opening Blight ended and he considered rushing forward to release another of the instant-cast DoT, but things were going well enough that he decided against it. That was when Leviathan turned the tables.

From behind the protective barrier of hardened blood, the insane Necrologist started laughing - sounding like the joker would have if he had ever outsmarted Batman. From Garath's point of view, her features were distorted behind black mist in the dark of night, but he saw her silhouette reach to the back of her waist and retrieve what was unmistakably a handgun tipped with a silencer.

‘Now how in the shit does a seventeen-year-old girl have a FUCKING silencer?’ was the thought going through Garath's mind as she lifted the pistol and fired.

He didn't have time to react. A white-hot searing exploded from his shoulder as the projectile passed through it. His HP matched the pain, dropping by almost two-hundred in a flash. The HP Garath was regenerating each second would have been able to heal the wound completely in under ten seconds, had he not been taking damage from Plague - but as it was, the hole in his shoulder was closing slowly. Leviathan's gun shot had also blessed him with a bleed debuff that, coupled with Plague, did nearly as much damage per second as he was restoring.

Garath cackled with delight. The pain aside, he felt truly powerful. He had just been fucking shot and the wound was closing before his eyes like he was Wolverine or some shit. With his HP steadily increasing and still over fifty-percent even after being shot, it was his turn to turn the tables.

Garath activated Black Blood, super-human or not, a few more rounds from that pistol and he'd be wrapped in a sheet next to Mark and Sarah. Tiny droplets emerged from his skin and formed a protective barrier between himself and the gargantuan girl-child.

Leviathan fired again but the bullet was deflected easily by Garath's sanguine shield. She loosed the entire clip into the barrier as Garath and his Flayer returned fire in the form of black balls of death energy and additional stacks of QE. The sixth stack of the Death magic debuff cost Garath 221 Mana, the seventh 287. He started getting light headed but kept his head in the game to stack the debuff an eighth time for the staggering cost of373 Mana - dropping his Mana bar to nearly zero.

Large cracks spread across each of their defensive walls of Black Blood, but it was Leviathan's that went down first. The hardened blood wall around her shattered then dispersed into the night air.

Levi fell to her knees with her hands covering her head. The spell backlash from the destruction of her shield, Garath figured, was causing a world of pain - having not experienced that himself, he wondered briefly if there was a way to dispel the shield before that happened but figured that was another thing to be explored at a later time. With her HP below thirty-percent and dropping precipitously from even more incoming Death Bolts, Garath hesitated. Could he really just kill this high school aged child?

‘Yes,’ he told himself. ‘Yes I can. For Mark and Sarah, for fucking Gran!’

Leviathan looked up at him with unadulterated rage on her demonic face, her eyes glowing fiercely. She reached out with one hand toward her Flayer, then clenched her hand into a fist. A beam of pure darkness - so dark it was even visible at night - shot from her hand and into her own Flayer. The base level demon shrieked awfully in pain and then died.

The effect of Leviathan's spell would serve only to prolong the fight. A quick look at his ever-scrolling combat log let Garath know that she had just