Pestilence: Rise Of The Pure Undead
Chapter 977 - 977: Inferno

'Crap… Where did he go?' the strike sent the dark serpent barrelling straight into the depth of the ocean, the flash just before had cleansed the water of all blood, but the instant Loimos was sent down, the waters rapidly darkened once more and began to bubble, the undead's presence seemed to vanish beneath the surface, and the hero knew better than to try and chase him down.

That serpent form of his might have been flying about, but it was clearly very-well adapted to underwater movements, considering how much of a fan of conditions and battle arts Loimos was, trying to follow him into an environment that was to his advantage would be suicidal, that final Golden Glow might have been devastating, but the undead was not defeated, he would quickly recover even if it had costed him a dire amount of death force.

Truthfully, the hero did not know whether Loimos and himself had lost the most amount of energy as a result of this clash, he had consumed a lot of it to close the distance and with his repeated blows.

'What could he be doing down there?' that was always a worry with the pure undead, since Loimos could actually do anything within the realm of possibility, and perhaps even beyond it, he could quite literally be doing thousands of different things whilst out of sight, before the transformation, Sonnenträger wouldn't have worried too much about it, but now, every of the skeleton's attacks were troublesome and capable of inflicting damage, so it was a cause for worry.

For now, he focused on fully healing himself back up and calming down his nerves, whilst floating in the air, he sat down cross-legged and entered a meditative state to rid himself of any unnecessary thought or feeling, it had certainly been a long while since he had had to do something like this in a fight, but Loimos had indeed gotten him riled up and worried.

'Would he have become so powerful too if he had been allowed to grow stronger?' he wondered, thinking back to when he had faced off against The Defiler Of The Holy, despite sharing the same dark purple within their eyes, those two could not be more different, one would expect their kind to share more similarities…

These useless thoughts faded away, for they did not matter right now, by meditating, Sonnenträger could potentially recover some of gold, but the sheer amounts and intensity with which he had been fighting made it difficult, if there was one consolation, was that Loimos could not recover his festering death either as there was no death force to absorb, or things to kill around.

Sonnenträger suddenly opened his eyes as a realisation struck him.

'...Shit, he could absolutely do some summoning and get something to kill even in this realm, could he not?' if summoning was possible, then obviously Loimos could do it, it was probably more difficult to do here as the realm of memories was not supposed to have any beings within it in the first place, but if given enough time, the pure undead could definitely figure something out.

The hero debated what to do about the possibility.

It was possible that Loimos was not even planning on doing that, but he absolutely would know such a thing was available to him.

To prevent Loimos from potentially recovering a great amount of death force back, Sonnenträger could either dive into the dark ocean to find him and prevent that from happening, but that would require actually tracking the serpent down, who could have easily swam far away already.

He could also try to blast the ocean apart, but it would just be trying to hit blindly and potentially waste a lot of energy on nothing.

Or, he could shatter the memory forcefully and transport them both to the next one, that last one sounded best as it was the least prone to luck, but from fighting for so long and going through so many different memories, Sonnenträger was well aware that every memory had different breaking points, from what he could see, it either shattered when the amount of power was too great to it to handle, or when the area that was reflected within the memory was too thoroughly destroyed.

The undead continent had already been ravaged earlier and nothing had happened, so the breaking point might be too high to be easily reached…

The hero looked up, although the undead night sky was missing a lot of the things that were supposed to populate it, there were a few things that still remained, right above him, there was a pale sun, its light was probably so weak that vampires could step under it and be unaffected, but it was still a sun at the end of the day…

'That should-'

The surface exploded upward, the dark serpent rising out of the depths right next to the golden hero.

Opening its maw, Sonnenträger expected another roar to strike him, but instead, countless flying abominations emerged from within the creature, each of them attacking him through a variety of means, they were easily dispatched with simple bursts of gold, but their purpose was not to be powerful enough to inflict damage on their own, instead, they all suddenly inflated, exploding into showers of corrosive blood and bone shrapnel.

Sonnenträger was pushed around, but he had erected a golden barrier around him in time, but quickly discarded it, flying to the side as he evaded massive bolts of lightning falling from above, some were dark, some were yellow, and some were even blue amidst all sorts of colours, evading the lightning, his shoulder was pierced by a small attacks.

Soon followed by what felt like thousands more, countless piercing drops were manifested around Loimos every second before being launched out at the golden hero whilst he flew around, lighting and drops struck at the same time, making it difficult to evade everything.

So rather than dodging forever, the golden one headed directly for the undead, ready to protect himself against the death knell or roar, but he must have been too obvious about guarding against these specifics attacks, as Loimos instead spewed noxious gas, mere proximity was causing skin to take on a sickly yellow hue, but Sonnenträger went right through the toxic cloud anyways.

Gathering momentum to hit the undead with a kick, the hero instead found himself halted as a chain emerged from the ocean below and bound his left ankle, certainly something the undead had prepared whilst hidden down there.

Loimos manifested a draconic breath, condensing the powerful flame fuelled with death's aspect of destruction right down on the small figure of Sonnenträger.

The very air around them ignited with flames as the dark serpent spewed its annihilating inferno…