Young Master's PoV: Woke Up As A Villain In A Game One Day

Chapter 485: Lightning And Thunder [II]

Tendrils of blue electricity writhed in the air around me, dancing across my skin and crackling like angry hornets.

My shirt was charred to crisp rags, smoke rising off my body in wisps.

Every single nerve ending in my body felt like it was scorched, my muscles twitching involuntarily as the residual high-voltage charge coursed through my veins.

That lightning bolt wasn’t normal. Thalia was using her innate ability to ramp up the electrical output. She was basically turning Moria’s already lethal lightning into an amplified plasma cannon.

Spitting out a mouthful of dark blood into the mud, I tried standing back up but my legs were trembling.

The rotting stag didn’t give me a single second to catch my breath. It kept on charging, its razor-sharp antlers lowering to skewer me through the chest.

I threw myself to the side, rolling across the ground just as the beast thundered past. But I wasn’t fast enough. One of its blade-like tines sliced deep into my thigh, tearing through my pants and flesh.

I hissed in pain as I came up, pressing a hand to my leg, but the sharp pain of the cut immediately turned into a hot burn.

That wasn’t right.

Looking down, my eyes widened.

The open wound I just took had already turned a pale purple. Slimy, translucent worms — the exact same foul parasites crawling out of that stag’s decaying flesh — were writhing out of my open skin there.

Some kind of curse effect. Perfect.

My legs felt like lead and I was still feeling a little dizzy from being electrocuted. But I forced myself back onto my feet anyway.

Not a moment too soon, either.

The ground beneath me burst open, and a giant, fanged serpent shot out from the dirt like an oversized spring, its jaws snapping shut on empty air where my torso had been a second prior.

I managed to leap back in time, but my forced evasion threw me right into the blind spot of a wolf-like beast with a massive scorpion tail.

The creature whipped its tail forward with the speed of a cracking whip.

—BANG!

The heavy chitinous stinger smashed straight into my stomach.

The air was violently blasted from my lungs, and all that kinetic force behind the attack lifted me off my feet, flinging me backward like a weightless ragdoll.

The world blurred for a second. Wind whistled in my ears as my battered body skidded across the earth, but I didn’t let the disorientation take over.

The second my back slammed into the dirt for the third time, I used the momentum of the bounce to tuck my chin, plant my hands, and execute a quick backward flip.

My boots hit the mud on the landing, digging two long trenches into the ground before I came to a halt.

I wiped a streak of blood from my chin, gasping for air that tasted like sulfur.

All around me, the remaining Spirit Beasts were closing in.

The burning bird swooped low from above. The stag and wolf advanced together from my right.

The serpent circled me like a predator stalking its prey, and all the remaining monsters that had been lurking around until now dashed forward with their glinting teeth and claws that promised a world of pain.

To anyone else, this would’ve been a hopeless situation. Unarmed, debuffed, cursed, and surrounded by a horde of nightmare abominations.

But I didn’t feel worried. Not in the slightest.

Because right on cue, a brilliant azure streak of light cut through the stormy night sky, shooting down from above like a falling star.

My vajra was here.

I held out my open right hand toward the heavens.

—THWIP!

The Divine Scepter fell into my palm.

An enormous explosion of lightning erupted from both of its closed-prong heads, bursting outward in an expanding shockwave.

Whizzing arcs of high-voltage electricity tore through everything that was present in the clearing, striking every single Spirit Beast in a ten-meter radius.

The abominations screeched and howled, thrashing wildly in agony as the current stunned them.

I drew another Card that I had borrowed from Alexia and threw it up high in the air. The Card blew up in a bright flash, temporarily blinding everyone.

I used this opportunity to flank the stitch-faced, coming to her left a few meters away while she was still shielding her eyes from the flash.

Yasmeen didn’t realize I was there until I had already discharged a thin bolt of lightning at her.

KZRTZZZ—!!

—Thrumm!!

But to my annoyance, it didn’t hit her.

The humanoid woman in red stepped between us and removed the blood-soaked rag from her eyes in time, revealing two jewel-like ruby orbs in her sockets.

The moment the rag fell away, an invisible wave of repulsive pressure rippled off her eerily thin frame.

The lightning bolt I had fired was deflected, bending in mid-air as if hitting a curved mirror of dense red aura before grounded itself into the dirt beside her.

“Tsk!” I clicked my tongue in frustration.

This was why I hated Summoners and Beast Tamers. Their repertoire was far too versatile.

“Fine, then,” I huffed to myself and snapped my aim toward my sister up on the cliff.

Thalia was visibly shaking, her cruciform sword trembling in her grasp. I charged up my vajra once more and discharged another lightning bolt at her, this one a little bigger.

Thalia’s eyes widened in a rare show of panic as she saw the vajra in my hand.

For a split second, her composure cracked. But she was a Theosbane, through and through.

She dug her heels into the rock, solidified her footing, and braced herself, aligning the tip of her cruciform sword straight toward the trajectory of my incoming attack.

The arc of lightning struck her clean.

A deafening CRACK echoed off the cliff face.

Plasma exploded around her frame in a violent shell, the high-voltage current crackling so loudly it must’ve made her eardrums rupture.

I could see the agonizing strain on her face as the raw energy threatened to fry her alive, but with a guttural scream, she planted her back leg and whipped her sword upward toward the heavens.

The redirected thunderbolt shot straight into the swirling vortex above, making the dark clouds tremble.

Moria didn’t miss the cue. Seizing the opening, the Caster raised her ornate staff and called upon her innate power.

The storm answered immediately, letting loose an even larger, thick pillar of blue lightning from the sky than the one I shot my sister with.

Thalia’s sword, still pointed at the heavens, caught the incoming strike like a lightning rod.

She didn’t hold it for even a fraction of a second this time— the moment the bolt hit her blade, she pivoted on her heel, brought her sword down in a hasty slash, and returned my serve with interest.

A massive torrent of scorching electricity came hurtling down at me.

On the ground, though, I was a little busy.

A heavy, hobgoblin-like monster had lunged at me from my blind spot, swinging a massive stone club toward my head.

I stepped back, feeling the displacement of air as the club whistled past my nose.

Before the beast could reset its balance, I materialized Alexia’s golden lasso in my free hand. With a flick of my wrist, the glowing cord whipped out and wrapped itself tightly around the creature’s thick ankle.

I leaned into the turn and yanked the line with everything I had.

The heavy hobgoblin was hoisted off its feet, its massive body swinging through the air… right into the path of Thalia’s incoming plasma beam.

—KABOOOM!

The lightning column hit the airborne beast head-on, vaporizing it into a shower of burning cinders before the attack could ever reach the ground.

Okay.

With the threat neutralized for now, I whirled around without missing a beat. The giant bird-shaped beast was swooping in low for a second pass, its long beak snapping toward my throat.

I ducked under the strike, cocked my arm, and threw a menacing punch into the side of its beak.

The force of the blow shattered the beast’s jaw, throwing its head to the side.

Disbalanced and grounded, the beast could do nothing as I stepped to the side and ran my dark claws through into one of its ablaze wings, ripping it asunder like a sheet of paper to shredder.

The creature let out a high-pitched shriek, but I didn’t give it room to recover. I plunged my claws under its ribs, deep into its chest cavity.

The dark ichor flowing through its veins surged straight into my claws, sating my hunger for blood even more. The feeling was pure ecstasy. I had done drugs that gave me less of a high.

All of that took maybe five seconds.

The very next moment, I was moving again.

An ominous shadow fell over me as the scorpion-tailed wolf lashed out with its stinger. I dropped low, sliding beneath the whistling chitinous tail.

As I came out of the slide, I popped back onto my feet right beside the rotting stag.

Before the wide-antlered beast could turn to gore me, I lashed out with my blood-stained claws, carving four deep, visceral gashes across its flank.

I latched onto the open wounds, letting my vampiric arm suck out its infected blood at maximum speed and turn it into usable Essence for me. Not a single drop was spilled.

From there, everything went downhill for my twin.