Chapter 149 - 149: Elite Scorpion

With the party of four working together to defeat the massive scorpion the battle would not last long, the skills of the elite made the situation problematic despite their ability to work together.

The poison mana aura that it created forced Ezekiel to fight it as primary vanguard while Layla had to rely on the healing of Hope rather than her own abilities due to the powerful poison mana she was being infected by.

Ezekiel focused on creating weak spots on the body of the scorpion while Layla targeted the old weak spots to take advantage of the reduced defense, her blade was able to Cleave through the pock marked shell and deal much more damage than before thanks to these efforts.

Behind them Hope was continuing to create barriers where the monster would strike so that their attacks would land uninterrupted.

Keith was aiming while hidden in shadow and watching the behavior of the monster while shooting it, keeping track of the health while doing so.

Upon reaching seventy-five percent health remaining the elite shifted over to a much more aggressive strategy of using faster claw swipes to throw the two away and trying to strike them randomly so that they could not dodge.

The creature even began to exude even more poison mana through the aura it had created.

With that aura growing stronger it forced Hope to expend even more mana to counteract the damage, making her support for Layla start to weaken as her casting versatility suffered.

During this Ezekiel was using his mana infused claws as well as his wings to slash across the legs of the scorpion in the hopes of forcing it to the ground and reduce it's movement.

He even began to use the mana injection skill to force his own Frenzied Void mana into the body of the monster to act as a powerful form of internal damage.

With poison mana mixed into the flow it made the mana spread faster, not a lot of mana but the extra damage would grow.

He was about to celebrate the idea working when he heard the pained scream of Hope behind him, looking back he saw her using a wind spell to blast a sticky glob of venom off of her arm.

The spell ripped away a large amount of skin from her arm in the process and Ezekiel began to question how dangerous that strange venom was if she was willing to basically skin herself just to get rid of it.

When the scorpion finally reached the fifty percent mark they saw a red glow begin to surge through it's body and to their shock it completely quit moving.

Their attacks no longer affected it but they noticed something odd about the scorpion in this position, the shell was splitting open.

The scorpion ripped out of it's own carapace like a gruesome alien ripping out of the back of a monster, slime and toxic blood connected the scorpion to the carapace in strings as they watched the shell rapidly harden.

Ezekiel could still feel his mana inside of the creature as it slowly spread through the circulatory system and damaged the insides of this monster, during this strange skill the damage had stopped despite it still spreading so he just waited for the damage ticks to signal the creature could be harmed again.

He watched and waited before his mouth dropped open by the sight of the freshly molted scorpion monster healing about twenty percent of it's own health just because of that skill.

"Oh come on!"

"Healing enemies suck, it has to have a pattern or some kind of rule that makes the healing balanced though!"

Before the others could lose motivation Layla had quickly told them about the general rule for monsters with healing mechanics in a game, usually the healing came at a cost of something or the healing had limits.

When the damage of the mana inside of it started to harm the scorpion again Ezekiel used a slash infused with his sharpest mana constructs while announcing it could be hurt again, when his claws slashed across the carapace he instantly realized that the shell was not as tough as before.

In fact it seemed like his claws could almost reach through the shell in one strike!

Layla and Keith picked up on the same information as their own attacks pierced the shell of the scorpion much more easily than they had before, before any of them could celebrate this the scorpion made a move of it's own.

It rushed forward with a savage snap of both claws while it's tail immediately made a stab for Ezekiel.

He could teleport a step away to avoid the stinger but he could tell it had gotten much faster with that molt finished, with a faster body it had also gotten sharper features.

Sharp claws slashed with Layla's blade when she carried but the other claw snapped out like a brutally sharp hammer trying to slam her against the ground.

The poison aura had gotten more potent and with the speed increase Ezekiel got to see where the globe of venom came from, the tail would shoot them out like snot globs but made of a deeply acidic venom that clung to you.

It fired a glob at each of them aside from Keith who was hidden and firing arrows between each movement to a new location in the brush.

His attacks harming it seemed to piss it off as it swung around to attack whoever was closest to the direction of where his arrow struck from, at one point even charging at Hope which caused both Layla and Ezekiel to do everything in their power to hurt it and anger it enough to remain.

Their efforts were rewarded with the health bar returning to fifty percent and creating that red haze across the body again.

The scorpion did not activate any skills this time but seemingly had a passive enrage effect that most likely activated while under the threshold necessary.

The speed did not increase but the attack power soared.

They immediately realized this when Layla tried to block a pincer snap again just to have her arm slashed by the force of the claw closing around her sword as she used the blade to block.

The Slash across her arm even allowed the poison mana to seep inside of her from the aura.

Ezekiel tried to help by using a powerful rending attack with his wings on a leg each and the scorpion released the most bizarre gurgling roar as one leg was finally removed.

'That better slow it down, we need to get more legs!'

He turned to the next leg with the most injuries to it's armored joints, his mana was fighting the periodic drain of the Frenzied Mana Burn effect as well as his mana injection skill reaching the point of having forced one percent of his own mana into that scorpion.

With less than sixty percent of his own mana remaining he pulled out the full power of his spells to try to kill this beast with his friends.

He began to reforge his mana constructs on the fly as he created them to be made of the slender and razor sharp edges like broken glass that he used in every spell, it took a fair amount of mana but as he slashed the joint of the next leg during a rushing charge bellow the scorpion he left behind a few of those shards in the shell.

He began to use a dash skill back to back with his stamina keeping up well, each attack targeted a joint and left behind mana shards like glass embedded each time his mana infused claws left a wound.

When he saw that he had also managed to leave a death mark on each attack he smiled to himself and snapped his fingers, every single shard detonating like a tiny bomb the moment he willed them to and causing those joints to be heavily wounded.

When the death marks detonated after the mana shards they cleaved an additional three legs from the body of that elite.

"Nice Zeke!"

As the scorpion slumped to the ground due to these wounds he watched the health reach thirty percent and began to use his spells to create more weak spots for Keith to exploit.

With the creature struggling to hold it's own weight now Layla could be careful of the claws and avoid the tail more easily, especially with Hope helping her.

Ezekiel also noticed that because of his previous attacks being done with vampiric strikes he actually got a large boost in healing as a reward for his reckless attacks.

As he began to damage the area at the front of the scorpion he had to avoid the claws more, his attacks primarily targeted the shoulder joints of a claw and the head of the scorpion.

He was waiting to void step away to avoid the stinger when he actually felt a splash of goo cover his shoulder and wing.

A deep, burning acid started to eat into his flesh forcing him to cover that area of body in void mana to try and disintegrate the venom.

That was when he saw the cracks forming in the carapace just like before, and his damage quit affecting it.