The blood portal brought in more than 500 ghoul-like fellows of both sexes, their skins extremely pale and their eyes the color of blood.
They didn't have decaying skin or rotting bones like typical ghouls, but they moved without consciousness and acted on instinct.
They were like beasts with beautiful faces and long fangs. They looked a bit like bootleg vampires, only that they were far more aggressive, less dressed, and darker.
Blood Thralls were a vampire's cannon fodder army just one step above typical undead. As for the Blood Warriors, they were their elites that could lead the thralls to fight more effectively since they had the same aura as their master.
Darm folded his arms as he levitated in mid-air, coldly gazing at the trio below getting ready to face his army. He sneered with derision at their naivety, doubting their ability to realistically muster any meaningful defense.
It was laughable. This group was nothing like the useless undead from before. Putting aside his thralls, his warriors could kill them a 100 times over!
This was Darm's confidence, and why he opted to watch the show instead of actively participating in it.
When the bloodthirsty thralls spotted the trio, they became unhinged and almost uncontrollable, making gestures and sounds like they couldn't wait to rip them to shreds and feast on their flesh as well as their blood.
Darius and Gunner remained calm while Xela showed an expression of disgust. The Blood Warriors leading the group charged forward as one, the thralls following behind their leaders, shrieking and roaring in delight.
Gunner stepped forward and stomped at angle, creating a shockwave of earth that rushed forward. This had nothing to do with his Earthen Stomp skill, but his own raw Strength that was pushed above 100 points thanks to Earth's Guardian.
While the powerful Blood Warriors adeptly avoided the shockwave by jumping at the right time, the mindless thralls all fell over each other, their formation collapsed in an instant as they got entangled.
Darius smiled and stepped forward casting his AoE spells in the midst of the thralls repeatedly. They screeched in agony as they burned, drowned, suffocated, got smashed, electrocuted, crushed, and flung.
Darius' opening salvo cut their numbers down by 30% in one go, culling about 150 of them in a mere minute or less! This left Darm up there speechless, but he continued watching patiently, refusing to believe that they could do the same to his sentient Blood Warriors.
Gunner stepped forward and met the charge of the Blood Warriors. Even though they wanted to bypass him and deal with the weak healer and the glass cannon damager dealer, they were forced to fight Gunner once he cast Engage.
Its aggro-attracting ability was absolute as it was handled by the Supreme System's targeting. All that depended on Gunner was his ability to tank whoever he aggroed, and against these Blood Warriors, he was doing fine.
While they were certainly powerful, they could not beat Gunner's Strength, nor his empowered Defense. Most of them dealt between 0 to 1 points of damage to the large lad, something that was a joke against his current power.
Meanwhile, Darius continued to bombard the still recovering thralls, which were now cowed by the continuous deaths of their fellows and the constantly exploding spells on their bodies.
In another minute and a half, he had turned the entire thrall army into ashes, Xela watching on with a slight smile. She was secretly awed by Darius firepower, and realized that the more he accumulated stats, the more prohibitive it would become.
Once Darius cleared out the trash, he then focused on one of the blood warriors, his eyes flashing with interest. This time, he raised his staff and cast his most powerful spell, Lightning Bolt!
-3,276!
The poor Blood Warrior didn't even get to screech before it died. The battle became silent as everyone gazed at Darius in shock, Darius himself blinking in surprise.
His mind whirred as he did the calculations. 80 Int x 520% x 5% boost from Spell Enhancement x 150% increase from Gloves of the Mage x 250% increase from Dragon Scale staff x 200% increase from elemental bonus damage (lightning vs undead/death)… and that was it.
'Ah! It did so much damage because the Blood Warriors have no Resistance or Magical Defense!' Darius realized.
Xela and Gunner seemed to reach the same conclusion, and so too did Darm, though he could not see the damage figures. All he saw though, was a powerful lightning spell far beyond the level of a human Journeymen evaporating his warrior in one blow.
'No, wait rather than that…'
Darm realized a problem he had been ignoring all this while. It was something that should have clicked in his mind, but his weeks of being tortured by those damned potions must have muddled his mind.
Before complaining about the power of this fellow's spells, he first had to ask why he could cast so quickly? He had literally released salvos of attacks each second without chanting or gesturing, just pointing his staff forward calmly.
How? Why? What?
Since when was such a feat possible on Faust? Even the mighty Dragon race and the Elves could at best, use One-Word Cast, with a select few able to use Thoughtless Cast. How could mere human, not even a Master at that, manage such a feat?
Darius didn't wait for Darm to figure out this pressing question as he began lancing the Blood Warriors one by one, scoring an instant kill for each one he struck.
In a single minute, 60 of them fell, leaving slightly less than 40 remainings who were being handled by Gunner with ease. In this time, Darm kept muttering to himself under his breath, trying to deduce the anomaly and impossibility he was witnessing.
Darius saw this and capitalized, quickly clearing out the remaining Blood Warriors until only the floating Darm was left, his mind still lost in his mutterings.
Thanks to that, Xela had time to knock an arrow and aim while Darius pointed the tip of his staff towards Darm, ready to fire off his Convert Vampire spell.
