THIS IS THE REAL CHAPTER 88
...Sorry, stupid me skipped this chapter before...
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Ank

 

“Quickly, after the ship”, Once I was already prepared to fight, I ordered my summon, and this last one put some extra energy into his wings, burning through its [SP] way faster than before, and pushing us forward and through the skies fast enough that we all had to grip onto the monster’s feathers to not be blown away by the wind.

Finally, then, we found the pursued ship, a tiny dot on the horizon. And, as if we had seen something we shouldn’t have, the vessel suddenly slowed down; it no longer violently cut through waves, unstoppable.

My flying beast was quickly approaching the pursued ship when Ur said:

“Remember: to retrieve the box is our priority”, the three of us, adventurers, nodded; Taffy simply continued to smile, heads in the clouds. Turning to her younger brother, she smiled, and patted his head. “Take care, Kon.”

“I will”, he promised.

Then, Ur let go of the feathers of my summon, and the wind carried her away. She didn’t get too far away from us, however, as her younger brother opened a portal to his pocket dimension just behind her, and the wind pushed her inside of it.

The 1st Guild Master safely tucked away, the three of us, adventurers, focused on the ship again. And noticed that there was something coming our way.

“[Black-Chinned Thrust!]”, a woman screamed, and a black needle of energy lunged at us.

“KWOA!”, my summon died immediately, as the energy pierced straight through its middle; and continued hundreds of meters upwards, parting away a few clouds that hung low.

It was the hummingbird-masked woman from the 3rd Guild Master’s [Party], and her mask was fuming.

“The ship is changing its course”, Kon noted, “They’re gonna distract us until they can port on land, and hide with the box”, he continued, as we all fell down, and the hummingbird-masked woman came our way.

“They can’t hide forever, though”, I pointed, not getting what was the big deal.

“Everyone in the highest ranks of the Adventurers’ Guild is either immortal, or has a very long life spam, remember? They will stay in hiding for centuries if necessary. We can’t just not complete Taffy’s quest, but you can’t allow yourselves to stagnate at your power as it is.”

“So? What’s the plan?”, I shrugged, crossing my legs, as hundreds of meters of air separating me from the waves beneath became just a few dozen.

Kon pulled out, proudly, the book his older sister gave to him, and explained:

“You shadowlings hurl this great darkness at the vessel of evil.”

“I wouldn’t agree if it was your idea, but once its Ur’s…”, Hunah said, grasping the black clothes of the 1st Guild Master. Tensing her muscles, she concluded: “Okay”, she threw Kon with all her might across the air.

We saw the man creating one of his clones, which killed himself to slow down the original Kon, by hitting the air with force similar of Hunah throwing. But, then, we didn’t have any more time to observe how the 1st Guild Master would deal with the 3rd Guild Master and however else was in that ship:

“WHERE IS BAT?!”, the hummingbird-masked woman finally reached us, right when my twin sister and I were diving in the waters beneath.

The beak of her mask started to shine underwater, as our opponent wanted to pierce us like she did with my summon. But, she didn’t seem to have imagined (perhaps because of the casual way we were all speaking just before) that, like I said before, I was already prepared to fight. That, alongside an armor and weapon, I had summoned a friend before getting too close to the ship:

“BOOOM!” the 30 meters long, [Proto-God Level: 701] bit down on our opponent and broke through the waves of the ocean.

“You little shitters…!”, the hummingbird-masked woman gritted her teeth from behind her mask, holding still between the multiple rows of teeth of the summon, her hands and feet stopping the jaws of the monster to close on her.

And, damn, I had to say:

“The fuck, with that hit-kill attack, I thought she was a magic user, not a tank?”, shaking my head from one side to another, before the woman freed herself, I used: “[Summon Embodiment: Ice Mage]”, no section of my body changed, as I was just embodying a generic man, but when I pointed my palm to the waters around, and used: “[Freeze]”, the magic worked, and a relatively small iceberg quickly formed before my eyes.

Of course, with that, and having summed my then strongest creature, my [MP] was almost empty already.

“[Blue-Throated Spikes!]”, our enemy used one of her skills, as Hunah and I climbed over the iceberg, and the wood feathers of her mask grew many meters longer, and sharper in an instant, turning her head into a mortal spike ball, and forcing my summon to let her go, its mouth bleeding and full of holes. “You’re not the only ones who invested in multiple [Class] branches, assholes!”, she screamed, kicking the body of my summon, and jumping right over my iceberg.

“Oh, she heard me before”, I commented.

“[Inventory]”, Hunah pulled a serrated sword from her green window, “[Weapon Soul]”, she imbued the weapon with a red aura before swinging it down over our opponent.

“[Broad-Billed Defense!]”, the hummingbird-masked woman crossed her arms before her head, and stopped my twin sister’s attack.

“[Inventory]”, Hunah used again, letting go of her serrated sword, and pocking our enemy’s belly with a dagger.

“Kuch! It’s useless!”, the hummingbird-masked woman tanked the pocking of her belly, un-made her defense over her head, and slapped away Hunah’s hand with the dagger. Then, she tried to connect a punch, but my twin sister easily avoided it; she became visibly less agile after using that defensive skill.

My twin sister continued to take out weapon after weapon, and test on our opponent every possible kind of damage, but the hummingbird-masked woman showed herself to be surprisingly tough, and, advancing little by little, she managed to push Hunah to the edge of my iceberg.

“Where is Bat?!”, she asked again, cornering my twin sister.

“He is dead. We killed him”, I replied, stepping behind the enemy. Touching her with a hand, I used: “[Freeze]”

The spell was quite weak, but it seemed the hummingbird-masked woman’s defense came from some kind of buff, so, while she may have a variety of [spells], she probably did not invest in many [Attributes], so her defense towards the magic wasn’t greater than that of a commoner:

 

[Critical Attack!]

 

The system notified me as ice crystals formed all over our opponent’s back. We didn’t wait for her to recover, though, and my summoned [Proto-God] jumped from the water again, arching over my magically made iceberg, and bit and dragged the slowed down the hummingbird-masked woman to the underwater, before flying upwards again, and repeating the move that it tried to use to finalize Hunah and I.

There was something strange, though: the hummingbird-masked woman simply wasn’t reacting to all of that, even if it was clear that she had suffered much damage.

And her mask was starting to crack all over.

“Dude, why did you say this? It didn’t go well with Umi’s [High Priest] when he tried to make you, the strong adventurer, lose your mind, right?”, Hunah asked, perplexed with my actions.

“I wasn’t trying to be cruel or anything, I just thought that we shouldn’t make her dedicate the rest of her life in the pursuit of a dead guy, in case she survived this battle”, I tried to explain myself, raising my hands in surrender to my twin sister.

“YOOOU!”, the hummingbird-masked woman finally screamed, as the cracks on her mask change the appearance of this one, shedding off all the beautiful feathers of the wood-piece, turning her face into a skullish form of her previous self, and at the same time, her arms morphed into a pair of huge wooden wings tipped with claws. “YOU WILL PAY FOR IT! [PATAGONA GIGAS!]”, the beak of the hummingbird mask turned black, and like before, she shot a giant black needle against us. This time, however, red lines marks stained the power.

The hit exploded my [Proto-God] in half as if the giant monster didn’t mean any danger at all.

…Shit, Hunah was right, wasn’t she?

“DIIIIE!”, flying in the skies, the hummingbird-masked woman shot another laser, this time down at us, twins.

Hunah and I jumped away, but the impact of the power against the iceberg and the water beneath and all around was enough to significantly damage us:

 

[Name: Ank, HP: 3990/7490]

 

[Name: Hunah, HP: 3989/7490]

 

“[Summon: Chenoo]”, I summoned a dozen of one of my weakest creatures. They had just zero chances of ever harming our opponent even in a thousand years, but they were humanoid enough, so that the hummingbird-masked woman couldn’t tell what was a summoned creature, what was one of us, twins.

This didn’t stop her, however, from shooting continuously, and randomly:

“BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!”

“We will die as soon as she runs out of targets”, Hunah said, opening her [Inventory] behind her, to hide the light.

“Yeah”, I agreed, summoning underwater so as to stay hidden behind all the steam from our enemy’s attack. “Good thing we passively leveled up 50 more times in these past three days.”

At [level: 750], I’d be out of [MP] already, and Hunah wouldn’t have any more [SP], but with 1250 points added to our [Magic] and [Stamina] pools respectively, we still had something to burn:

From underwater, hundreds of deformed hands lunged out, and in the direction of the hummingbird-masked woman, and though she shot and destroyed many of them, more just kept coming, and from all directions, until she had sealed in her position by the restricting members. Kept still enough, so that my twin sister could hit her with a handful of the many, many [Apacheta] stones she collected from the battlefield involving the Intermediate God that once was our king, Aipaec:

“SWOOSH!”, the half a dozen of divine projectiles soared through the air in the direction of the hummingbird-masked woman. And exploded with 10 times the power of her own attacks; the hit rippled the sea surface, and at the same time it raised massive clouds of vapor, huge waves were thrown in every direction.

Not a second later, Hunah and I heard yet another explosion, and this one much bigger than the one we caused: looking back, we saw the water touching the skies in an enormous pillar, as the ship that was transporting Taffy’s box was reduced to nothing, an impact so huge it could have destroyed an entire city instantly. Kon had punched seriously.

“Splash, splash, splash”, I heard the surface of the water being hit repeatedly by a row. The 1st Guild Master, again in his minuscule skull-shaped canoe, stopped by our side.

And, even though our attack wasn’t half as strong as his, he stared at it with intense seriousness.

“So?”, I asked, once Kon seemed to be entering some kind of trance because of our victory. “Where’s the box?”

“Oh, my, I also want to know”, Taffy commented; again, untouched by the sea, or by our battles.

Shaking his head before looking at us, the 1st Guild Master replied:

“Sorry, I couldn’t get it.”

“Oh, my, it’s not like that explosion could possibly have damaged the c-”, Taffy coughed, correcting herself: “the box. Should we look at the bottom of the sea?”

“No, that’s not it”, Kon explained. “The 3rd Guild Master took it to another dimension… He took it to the world of shadow and death.”

The three of us stared intensely at Kon, and only after a long minute of silence, he frowned and said, offended:

“I mean, literally, I’m not just trying to sound cool! He took it to one of the Underworld’s Pocket Dimensions!”