New Eden: Live to Play, Play to Live



Reaching the dark veil on the inside of the coliseum, Phoenix's group quickly figured out how they could cross it. Once they were through, though, they were met with horror.

Lying across the ground, dismembered, disembowelled, turned to ashes, and in many other states, hundreds upon thousands of undead.

Phoenix looked further ahead, and noticed further ahead, a wall of undead pushing against each other, trying to reach an enormous mound of bodies, hundreds of meters away.

They didn't even turn to look at them, oblivious to the newcomers. Whatever had their attention, it had it well.

And Phoenix knew what that was.

"What the fuck caused this?" Jaxx asked, his face livid.

"What else, you think?" his sister replied, pointing at something further away.

Raising his eyes a bit, Jaxx spotted a flying bat, covered in slight cuts, almost imperceptible in the dark area, if not for the light flicker of light shining on its body.

Morpheus also spotted the party, relaying this information in his master's mind.

A message popped in the party chat, dinging in everyone's ears.

'About time you made it. A little help, please? Whatever boost I got earlier, it's dying out.'

Astaroth had already realized his temporary boost was fading when his body's glow started flickering away. With this, he noticed that some of the undead he culled in the latter part of his advance stayed on the ground for about a minute before reforming.

At this rate, he would go back into the previous stalemate, and it wouldn't be good. But his team's arrival gave him hope.

Maybe with their help, they could reach the boss quickly enough that they wouldn't have to back away. He also hoped this boss wouldn't detonate itself when it began losing the fight.

He was certain Luna wasn't back at full power, or at least enough to block such a blast for the second time in one day.

Phoenix assessed the situation and judged it was better for the ranged players to stay back here, in this open space. From here, if the undead on the ground started moving again, she would see it and could react.

But she sent Jaxx, Meat-Shield, SharpTusk and Galtion to the front. Food goblin would perform hit-and-run strikes, since most of his usefulness didn't work on the undead, their meat long gone bad.

In the casters, she and Violette were down to quarter power, at most, while Peaceful Grove and Twinxie were drained dry.

Jeanne d'Arc was still halfway in her mana bar, which was great, considering the healing they had needed to reach here.

Chronos, although he had been scarcely useful before, was still almost at full power. But it remained to be seen whether he was useful any further.

He had saved the melee players' skins a few times, with his slows and hastes. But that was the extent of what he had shown until now.

In short bursts of combat, Phoenix could see the potential uses. But in a drawn-out, warlike scenario, like this one? It was much harder to call it useful.

But something disturbed Phoenix about the guy.

His lack of emotional feedback.

Chronos had the emotional responses of a rock, and his smiles or reactions were all but genuine. If she didn't think he was holding a facade, she would assume he had emotional dysregulation.

As she was thinking this, Chronos broke her thought pattern, as he smirked.

This broke her preconceptions and brought worry to her heart.

Chronos raised both his hands, palms toward the enemies, before he balled them into fists. As he did, something changed.

In his vision, Chronos was now holding hundreds of golden strings, and withing his two hands, and sending his mana into them, stopping their flow, if only temporarily.

Astaroth noticed it instantly, when the enemies charging at him suddenly lurched to a stop, like their bodies had locked in place. He grinned, before transforming into a whirlwind, his weapon changing into two finger guns connected at his chest.

"Wind Blade; Cyclone of Blades!" he shouted.

In an instant, a hundred small wind blades exploded out of his position, severing heads and limbs, smashing chests, and slaying a hundred undead in one fell swoop.

Chronos felt the threads connected to those monsters snap under his fingers as they passed away. But they didn't disappear.

On the ground, closer to the mob of zombies and skeletons, he could see some undead monsters on the ground, with golden threads dulled out of their glow, but the threads were still active above them, wavering freely.

When Chronos looked further into the room, he saw the lich, from which hundreds of threads of golden left, with some of them dulled. He understood the lich was the one holding the fate of the monsters in his grasp.

The threads he was holding started burning the interior of his hands, the power becoming too much to hold, and he let them go. Immediately after, the undead that had stopped resumed their actions, taking Astaroth a bit by surprise.

But the time it bought him was enough to clear a lot of enemies. By rapid count, he estimated there were about two hundred undead left between him and the lich boss.

It may not be a small amount, but it was much less than at the beginning, and he felt confident he could make it. That was the moment his glow flickered out completely.

'God damn it!' he cursed inwardly.

It was the worst time for this to happen. Now his troubles had gone up a notch again.

Fortunately, the rest of his allies suddenly making their move reduced the pressure on him. He felt the undead behind him turn their attention off of him, and he smiled lightly.

'About fifty fewer problems. Only a hundred and fifty left.'

Phoenix felt the mana usage of Chronos and saw the subtle changes on the battlefield as he acted. She couldn't see what he did, her mana senses being limited to feeling, more than seeing.

But she knew he had done something extraordinary, regardless. And he didn't seem to be done by how she watched him move his hands, like he was plucking invisible strings.

Even the lich at the end of the area frowned.

'What is a follower of time doing here? I thought they were all long dead…'

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