Last Born Of The Desdemona

Chapter 290: Chapter 290: The Palatines’s Battle Skills

Chapter 290 – The Palatines’s Battle Skills

The sea of spiders exploded into flames, their bodies popping continuously as Cassius’s attack incinerated them.

For a brief instant, nothing else could be seen as a cloak of crimson dust and fog blanketed the surrounding area.

But it didn’t last long, as Cassandra slashed downward with one of her scimitars through the fog, a burst of golden light piercing through it, dispelling it entirely.

The current state of the battlefield became visible to all.

In a straight line from where Cassius stood, all the way to where the Tier 5 spiders had been positioned, ran a long stretch of burning, spluttering ground like molten lava, the spiders reduced to ash, or missing half their bodies.

The scent of smoke grew even stronger.

Copycat watched the scene and smiled thinly, his blind eye still burning with purple flame. He swept his gaze across the field, before it settled on the left side, where numerous spiders still remained, "Not bad, sucker." He said, "I’ll take this side. Shall we, then?"

He didn’t wait for an answer as his body blurred out of sight. The ground where he’d stood sank deep before exploding into splintered fragments of earth.

Cassius blocked the spray of rocks with a fiery glare from his left eye, burning them to ash.

Cassandra was already a blur of golden light before Copycat had even finished speaking, taking the right side.

Copycat’s body reappeared like a burst of purple flame in the middle of the spiders. His left leg twitched, and a pulse of purple flame erupted from it, sending the spiders staggering back a couple of meters.

He stood there, in the middle of the purple circle, expression as calm as a man in the middle of a peaceful dream.

The spiders shrieked from somewhere — they had no mouths — and swarmed him, spraying their poisons all at once.

Copycat lifted his right hand slowly overhead, muttering under his breath:

"Second Skill: Weapons Copy."

He searched through his memories for a weapon suited to the moment.

He found one instantly: the weapon of his own sister, Blossom Bishop.

At his selection, a colossal pink-and-black hammer, etched with runes and at least three times his own height, materialized in his hand out of nowhere. Its size was so massive it briefly eclipsed the sun.

Copycat gripped the hammer in his right hand, veins bulging along his forearm under its weight. He activated it, sending the hammer into a wild vibration before crashing it down onto the spiders, the head wreathed in purple flame.

The hammer struck the nearby spiders and reduced them to a smear of flesh across the ground. But the weapon didn’t stop there, slamming into the earth itself with chilling force.

The impact sent tremors rippling outward, the ground caving under the sheer physical power, carving out a crater that consumed the entire left side, the spiders tumbling into the newly formed pit alongside the scorched line Cassius had left behind.

The purple poisonous flame followed, spreading through the earth like veins through a body, burning most of the surviving spiders and poisoning the ground itself.

Copycat, hovering above the wide crater, wasn’t done yet. He swapped the hammer for the weapon of his class’s third ranker — a zither — and activated his Third Skill: Saved Skills.

He took hold of the zither and, combining the Saved Skill Music of Madness with his newly copied ability, Purple Flame, began to play.

Instantly, a sharp, high-pitched sound erupted from the instrument as he plucked a string, a sound that shouldn’t have been visible, yet was thanks to the purple flame trailing behind each note.

The sound reached the monsters first, sending them into a frenzy, shrieking, turning on each other in a maddened rage.

The purple flame followed, using sound as its conductor, manifesting inside the very minds of the monsters.

Their heads began to burn, their madness amplifying further still.

In no time, every monster on the left side was locked in combat with one another, heads engulfed in purple flame, poisoned by something they couldn’t heal from.

Through it all, Copycat hovered above the crater he’d just created, playing as though he were a professional, his mind entirely at peace.

The more he played, the faster the monsters dropped like flies.

His expression remained eerily calm, as though he hadn’t just combined two entirely different Skills, despite having obtained one of them barely 5 minutes prior.

That level of control was, by all accounts, impossible.

But he’d done it.

And judging by his expression, this was nothing new to him.

However, Copycat wasn’t the only one fighting.

Cassandra might not be as flashy, but her power was no less formidable.

Thanks to the Light Spirit she’d just consumed, Cassandra zigzagged through the monsters with such speed that nothing of her remained visible except a streak of golden light.

She wielded her twin weapons masterfully, cutting through the legs and bodies of the spiders with ease, condensing light along the edges of her blades to make them abnormally hot and lethal.

By the time one spider she’d cut down registered its own death, six others had already met the same fate.

The ground on the right side was soon littered with severed spider limbs.

They screeched, spraying poison in every direction. But none touched Cassandra, and whatever she couldn’t dodge, she incinerated with light.

Still, Drunken Widow kept an eye on Copycat, noting his kill count was climbing faster than hers, thanks to the area-of-effect sound skill he was using.

At this rate, she’d lose.

’Let’s get serious.’ Cassandra decided, cutting down three spiders in a single slash. Then she paused, standing amid the corpses.

She raised her two scimitars and drove them deep into the earth simultaneously, murmuring under her breath:

"Second Skill: Spirit Control."

Her yellow eyes glowed with a twisted, bright light as she channeled a considerable amount of essence, forcing the Earth Spirits hidden beneath the ground to detonate.

And detonate, they did.

The ground exploded with a thunderous crack, everything caving inward, burying more than half the spiders underground.

Smoke billowed out from the blast, obscuring Cassandra. But she wasn’t finished yet.

She used her essence to levitate, surveying the huge, wide hole she’d created.

The spiders might have been buried, but not all of them were dead, some were already melting through the earth to claw their way out.

That was when Cassandra pulled a bottle of wine from her space ring, along with a small cup. The wine was a rusty red, and she poured it into the cup.

She stored the bottle away and held the cup at eye level.

She frowned, hesitating briefly, wondering if this bet was really worth it. But she shook her head almost immediately.

’I can’t lose to my juniors.’

And then, without further hesitation, Drunken Widow used her Skill.

It wasn’t an Ultimate Skill, nor one usually gained by ranking up.

It was a Skill she’d obtained automatically, upon finding herself in this world, years ago.

A Skill that had left her addicted to wine as a side effect. And a Skill that made it easier to remember the brother she’d once had in that world, whose face she could still picture vividly...unlike her parents, whose faces had long since blurred.

She smiled sadly, her black braided hair swaying in the wind, and poured the wine onto the ground, whispering in a tone only she could hear,

"Chosen Skill, First Comprehension..."

In the distance, Cassius’s heart skipped a beat. He snapped his head instantly toward where Cassandra stood, seeing nothing but thick smoke obscuring her.

’What is this feeling?’ He frowned.

And in that same moment, Drunken Widow completed her Skill.

"...Aging Wine."

The moment the wine touched the earth and the spiders, it was as though time itself accelerated exponentially around them, aging them rapidly, then rotting them, then finally...killing them.

In under 10 seconds, the earth on the right side of the battlefield lay completely dead, along with every spider on it.

—End of Chapter 290—