The Hollow One that had once been the Viper took one step forward, then another. It didn’t show the extreme speed of the Viper; instead, it moved slowly, almost ploddingly. If this was as fast as it could go and there were no other Hollow Ones between them and Legion, they could gather him up and escape without conflict. They might not be able to destroy the ritual, but they could get out.

That was a very big pair of ifs and Serenity didn’t believe either of them. The faster this one was truly dead, the better.

Serenity slashed at it. Again, unlike Viper, there was no shield. The manablade cut through the Hollow One’s arm and kept going, leaving it only slightly attached.

That wasn’t enough. The arm seemed to grow from both sides of the cut; seconds later, the Hollow One was whole again. This was why Serenity hated fighting Life-based Hollow Ones.

Serenity concentrated and shifted the Affinity of his manablade from its default Arcane mana to Death Affinity mana. It might be better or it might be worse; you never knew how a Hollow One would react until you tried. There were so many different variants.

A Death Manabolt slipped by Serenity and impacted on the Hollow One. There was no visible effect. Serenity could hear Zanzital’s exclamation of dismay from behind him.

The arrow that followed directly on the heels of the manabolt stuck into the Hollow One. It didn’t slow the creature down, but having an arrow embedded was better than nothing.

Serenity slashed again. This time, his manablade met significant resistance. While he was able to force it through the Hollow One’s flesh again, it was harder and the effect was about the same. The Hollow One was definitely resistant to the Death Affinity. Even though it was Serenity’s best Affinity, it would do him no good here.

Over the next couple of minutes, Serenity spent more mana than he liked testing his different Affinities with his manablade. Plasma and energy were both better than Death, fairly similar to the base Arcane. Liminal, Magitech, and Mind were worse than Death; he could barely penetrate the Hollow One’s hide while his manablade was attuned to them. Solid, Liquid, and Vapor were hopeless, worse than the previous trio.

Spacetime was just weird; he sliced through the Hollow One easily, but it didn’t burn or cut; instead, it was like the slice was moved, jerking the rest of the Hollow One to follow it. It wasn’t a teleport, but it was strikingly similar, and it didn’t follow Serenity’s blade. He wasn’t sure how to control the completely unexpected effect and it was so mana-intensive that he didn’t want to try to learn in combat.

Solar was a surprising winner. Serenity expected it to act like Plasma or maybe Energy; after all, wasn’t the Sun more or less a big ball of plasma?

That wasn’t the effect at all. Instead of forcibly burning his way through the Hollow One, its flesh parted around his blade. Even better, it was slow growing back. His lower Affinity with Solar meant that it cost significantly more mana, but the effect was good enough that it was worth using.

Nihility was the one Serenity had expected to be the best. It was certainly good; it was by far the easiest to cut with, better than even Solar. What it didn’t have was the same thing that all of his other Affinities, other than Solar, were lacking: a way to slow down the Hollow One’s regrowth.

During the time Serenity spent testing his Affinities on the former Viper, Daryl and Zanzital seemed to do something similar. An entire series of different arrows rained down on the Hollow One, accompanied by different magical Skills. The Hollow One was pushed back, frozen, incinerated, electrocuted, and sliced into a dozen pieces.

No matter what they tried, it moved forward one step after another, pulling itself together faster than they could damage it. By the time it had forced them to retreat a hundred feet, it had doubled in mass as it pulled the slashed off pieces back to itself and healed the injuries as well.

It looked like a real Hollow One now, a mass of something living that really shouldn’t be alive with no clear functional anatomy and a number of broken weapons sticking out of it with no sign of pain. The fact that they were all arrows didn’t detract from the horror of its appearance, nor its resemblance to Hollow Ones Serenity had seen in the past. Hollow Ones were hard to kill.

Anything that was sliced off simply attached itself to the closest spot, so there were at least half a dozen hands reaching out from spots on the body that shouldn’t have hands; they were somehow still functional. Some of the hands tried to grab whatever came close; others, which had more of the arm left, could still try to twist or slap or even punch.

The good news was that it had the same weakness as most Hollow Ones: the primary way it could hurt you required it to get close. It wouldn’t tire and it didn’t need to sleep; worse, it could affect people of far higher Tier than such seemingly simple abilities should be able to. Serenity expected it to be able to punch straight through a shield. He hadn’t waited to find out; he made sure he wasn’t wherever the thing was going to hit when it attacked, even if it meant missing his own strike.

The Viper had been Tier Ten, which meant that was probably roughly the Tier of his ritual and the Hollow Ones it created should be able to affect Tier Tens once they were close enough. That was especially true of the one created by the Viper’s body, but even Hollow Ones created from lesser sources would quickly get there if the ritual had the power. This was probably another reason the base was situated near a ley line; that would make a good source of power for the Hollow One ritual.

Some Hollow Ones had worse tricks, but those were usually the type that could spread. Serenity hoped that this one didn’t have a way to infect others; it was created by a ritual, which meant there were good odds that there wasn’t a secondary spread method.

There were a number of ways to kill Hollow Ones. The simplest required a Life Affinity spellcaster to completely cut them off from the Affinity. A good one could drain them, but any Life Affinity caster who knew the trick could at least keep them from regenerating.

Serenity wasn’t sure Gabriel knew how.

Serenity fell back a few more feet and opened up some room between him and the Hollow One. He was confident he knew what he could do now, even if it would be difficult to achieve anything on his own. He glanced backwards; Gabriel was there, but he didn’t seem to be doing anything. He looked better than a few minutes earlier, even if there was still a greenish-blue haze around him. “Gabriel! Can you cut the Hollow One off from its source of Life magic? If you can stop its healing, we can kill it!”

Gabriel’s expression hardened and he stabbed out with a wand. Serenity was surprised; he hadn’t expected a wand. What was he doing?

A glance back towards the Hollow One made it obvious what Gabriel was doing; the Hollow One that had once been the Viper was already hard to see through the wall of ice that plugged the corridor between them. Serenity hoped it would hold for long enough; Gabriel’s ice wasn’t Tier Ten.

Serenity trotted closer to Gabriel. “No way to cut off his Life Affinity?”

Gabriel shook his head and replied softly. His voice seemed deeper than Serenity remembered. “No. I can’t even touch my Life Affinity or-” He clenched his right hand into a fist.

It seemed more like an angry gesture than a demonstration, since he didn’t raise it or make it easier to see, but Serenity could still see that there was something wrong with it. There was something pale, paler than Gabriel’s normal skin tone, that covered the back of his hand and seemed to protrude past the knuckles when he made a fist. More than anything else, it reminded Serenity of a bagh nakh, a claw weapon worn over the knuckles. He hoped he wasn’t seeing what he thought he saw; it would mean significant issues for Gabriel in the future, even if he survived.

Gabriel shook himself, then focused on Serenity. “Will destroying the ritual end this? Stop him?” He waved towards the ice wall. He didn’t even try to hide his hand; Serenity wasn’t sure he even knew it looked odd.

Serenity couldn’t answer that easily. “Maybe. If nothing else, it’ll make them easier to kill and stop new ones from being created.” That was probably true, but it depended on a lot of assumptions.

One of them was that it wasn’t as strong as the Hollow One rituals Serenity had seen as Vengeance and the Final Reaper. Both Legion and Gabriel seemed to have been able to hold the ritual off at least partially; that made far more sense for Gabriel than it did for Legion. Gabriel had Life Affinity, while as fast as Serenity knew, the portion of Legion that was affected didn’t. The fact that Legion had more than one body and it was clearly affecting the collective might have quite a bit to do with it; Serenity simply didn’t know.

Gabriel nodded and set off down the hallway towards the other ritual room. “Then let’s hurry.”

Serenity moved to get in front of Gabriel; they now had two reasons to want to kill the ritual quickly, Gabriel and Legion. Perhaps he should count it as three reasons; Serenity disliked the entire idea of that ritual and didn’t want it loose on a world he had friends on.

The next Hollow One they saw wasn’t the Viper. They heard it before they saw it, a howl that echoed down a connecting corridor followed by three Hollow Ones. Gabriel set another Ice Wall between that corridor and the group and they hurried onwards. It was becoming a race and a race to the center of Hollow One power was usually not won by the attackers.

The next group was not so easily walled off. They came from in front, one close behind a second and a third not far behind. As the only person who could take a hit, Serenity hurried forward; he didn’t want to be hit, but he was the least squishy and the only way he had to use his Solar Affinity was his manablade and his Solar Affinity was the only one that seemed truly effective. He could only hope that there was indeed a ley line connection at the room with the ritual so that he could replenish his mana; it seemed likely, but that was no guarantee and he hadn’t actually checked it out.

An arrow caught the leg of the second Hollow One. It wasn’t disabled for long, but it was enough to make it trip and separate the first two by a dozen feet. Serenity called back to Daryl without taking his eyes off the Hollow Ones, “Thanks!”

A low wall of ice started to form between the last two Hollow Ones. It reached about three and a half feet high; that was clearly Gabriel doing his best to separate the fights without making it difficult to continue.

Zanzital seemed to have settled onto a spell that was positively explosive; at least, Serenity hadn’t seen either Daryl or Gabriel use anything like the pellet that zipped past Serenity and into the chest of the second Hollow One. It didn’t penetrate far, barely enough to get under the Hollow One’s skin, but when it exploded there was a wash of fire and death mana, along with more than a little force that separated the Hollow One into half a dozen pieces.

Serenity didn’t have time to see how quickly it reassembled itself; he’d reached an undamaged one.

Lillene

Hollow Ones come straight out of horror stories.