Pandora Unchained - a Cultivation Progression Fantasy

A vast pressure descended upon their group, causing Daphne’s summoned fireballs to dim slightly and the summoned harpies pouring out from Astley’s grimoire to shrink in size. Sorin felt a third of his strength get pulled out of his body. “Murderers, the lot of you!” screamed the lead harpy guardian. “Be cleansed!”

Sorin was the first to regain his clarity. A quick infusion of poison into his environment and his allies identified the offending restrictive power as a curse, and he was completely helpless again. However, thanks to his ability to see karmic strings, he was able to identify the strength of this curse.

The suppression is linked to the amount of lives each person has claimed, thought Sorin. The least affected are Astley, Lawrence, and Gareth. Daphne naturally kills many enemies thanks to her absurd amount of firepower, and Stephan’s always been one to throw himself into the thick of battle.

The most affected in the group was naturally Sorin, who could now destroy hundreds of Bone-Forging demons with a single flick of his sleeve. Poisons were weapons of mass destruction, after all, which was why plague mages were so feared.

But there’s another component of the curse that’s weakening it: lives saved. Sorin might have annihilated five to ten times as many life forms as his companions, but he’d also saved countless individuals through his medical practice and especially his recent activities in Mildred. It was a small consolation, given that the net effect was still a one-third reduction in all his attributes.

The harpy with the bow attacked while they were still stunned by the curse, but Sorin summoned a large python around him and his companions to serve as a shield. Most of the arrows fired bounced off the serpent’s runes, but the few arrows that snuck through were knocked out of the air by Lorimer, the second in their group to recover.

“Reee!” hissed the rat aggressively as his body grew and his hair grew to form steely bristles. He launched himself at the leader, giving her no time to point her spear at anyone else.

“This curse is hardly fair,” said Daphne, the third to regain her senses. She pointed at the central harpy and had her cluster of fifty fireballs fly toward her. The harpy dodged and detonated fireballs with her spear to avoid most of the damage. This, combined with Lorimer’s attack, fully restrained the powerful harpy, giving the others the time they needed to recover from their stunned state.

“Astley,” snapped Daphne. “Don’t you have some sort of ritual to cleanse such things, given how often you rob tombs?”

“As a matter of fact, I do,” said Astley cheerfully. “Once we all have ten minutes to sit around while no one’s attacking us, I’ll do just that. Harpies, tie down the whip master!”

Her incorporeal summoned harpies charged at the whip-bearing guardian with their sharp talons, only to fall to a single strike of the guardian’s whip. Fortunately, Astley could summon a great many of them from her grimoire noire. Each harpy they’d slain on Mount Pleasant had formed an imprint inside the book, enabling her to summon them. Each time bound myths perished, there was a small chance that their imprint would completely dissipate.

“You think these enslaved creatures are enough to hold me back?” screamed the whip-bearing guardian. “The Crime: Blasphemy. The Punishment: A thousand Lashes.” Her whip flashed with an alternating golden and silver light as it pierced through the screen of summoned creatures and attacked Daphne.

Sorin summoned Nemesis in spear form and used its sixth sense regarding aggression to calculate the whip’s trajectory. The whip curved to avoid him, but Lawrence was already on the scene. Shadowing strings wrapped around the Harpy’s wrists and diverted the whip away from Daphne. The whip struck the temple’s stone floor and cut a gash six inches deep.

Using Nemesis and Strife, Sorin determined that the whip-bearer was the biggest threat to their formation. Since the spear wielder was already being held back by Daphne, Lorimer, and the occasional arrow from Gareth, he moved to attack the whip-bearing harpy but was forced to pull back when a golden arrow shot straight through where he’d been about to move.

“You’re not going anywhere,” said the bow-wielding guardian. She shot another arrow out with inhuman speed, forcing Sorin to dodge in the opposite direction he wanted to move. Each arrow contained a much higher level of power than he was used to dealing with.

Fortunately, Stephan realized this and let out a growl that pulled the storm of arrows towards his body. He quickly became a highly enraged pincushion that forced the archer to retreat.

Spears shot out of the ground as Sorin closed the gap with the whip-bearer. The spears were slow compared to the previous arrows, but Sorin’s movement skills were lacking compared to some of his other techniques. Grazing cuts lacerated the armor on his legs, slowing his approach.

He ignored the pain and pushed towards the precariously entangled whip-bearing guardian, yet just as he broke past her whip’s range, he felt a splitting headache. Three harpies appeared several hundred meters away, and those three became three hundred and finally three thousand.

“You think these illusions will stop me?” huffed Sorin. His aura rolled out and melted the five hundred illusions closest to him. Fireballs blasted another group of five hundred, further narrowing the location of his target.

“Follow my string!” shouted Lawrence. A three-dimensional mental map appeared inside Sorin’s mind, complete with pathing that would lead past the mirror scape. There were three potential locations for the harpy’s true body. A storm-infused arrow, courtesy of Gareth, smashed through one of these illusions. Sorin threw a Python Coil at the second and used Adder Rush to snake through the mirror maze and approach the third.

A whip slashed Sorin’s chest as he approached his target, cutting through flesh and bones and inflicting wounds that didn’t immediately regenerate. He was about to reach his target when he suddenly sensed a flicker in the web of causality.

“Clever,” said Sorin, abruptly changing course. His poisonous python also changed directions and smashed into his original target, shattering the mirror image while Sorin summoned an array of needles around his target harpy.

“Poisons have taken hold. Physique analyzed. Ten percent deviation from standard harpies identified. Attacking key acupoints.” The harpy dodged as needles flew at its body, but the needles adjusted their trajectory. Thirty percent of the needles struck their targeted acupoints, injecting a cocktail of targeted neurotoxins and manatoxins that froze the harpy and its mirror projections in place.

“Hand of the Twisted Physician!” Sorin pressed his hand towards his ‘patient,’ forging a connection that allowed him to pour ten times the usual dose into her body compared to normal. A cocktail of hundred poisons bypassed normal defenses and invaded her critical systems.

The attack was exhausting, used up a third of Sorin’s total mana pool, and couldn’t be used again in the short term. Even so, it was the most powerful single-target attack he had and caused the guardian excruciating and debilitating pain as her physical systems were overloaded one after another.

The harpy’s body wasn’t completely helpless and tried to adapt, but Sorin expertly manipulated the poisons in response to these physiological changes using Autogenesis.

“I shall be avenged!” screamed the harpy when it was clear that the situation couldn’t be reversed. Sorin’s eyes widened as the harpy suddenly exploded, annihilating the poisons he’d planted, robbing him of the energy he might have been able to pillage, and splitting off a portion of the remaining energy into the two remaining harpies.

“Bow next!” shouted Gareth. A guiding wind increased Sorin’s speed by fifty percent as he snaked towards his next target. The bow wielder didn’t even bother summoning mirror projects and directly shot out a large, ballista-sized arrow that blasted away Stephan. A second arrow shot out towards Lawrence, who’d gotten caught up in the whip-bearing harpy’s explosion. Fortunately, Lorimer was there to save the day and deflected the arrow with his body. Both were now dreadfully wounded but still alive.

Sorin took advantage of Gareth’s wind to close the remaining distance with the archer. Astley’s summons flew ahead of him by the dozen, sacrificing their lives to grant Sorin an opening.

“You think I’ll let you—” The harpy froze before she could self-detonate, thanks to a carefully timed application of Gorgon’s Gaze. The skill hadn’t been very useful for some time, but this time, the opponent was unprepared.

Hand of the Twisted Physician’s ability to apply a massive payload of poison couldn’t be used a second time, so Sorin opted to stab the harpy guardian in the heart. He didn’t go for the kill. He knew it was impossible to kill this harpy in the time he had remaining. Instead, he injected the harpy with a heavy dose of corruption with the aim of destroying as much divinity as possible.

“You… how….?” The harpy looked confused and unresigned as her energy finally unfroze and the self-detonation she’d started continued where it started. A portion of the energy was consumed by Sorin’s corruption and dutifully returned to his body as nutrients, while the last portion empowered the spear-wielding leader of the harpies once again.

“So even God Seeds are not immune to the Tempter’s machinations,” said the remaining harpy with a cold and merciless voice. “The Crime: Collaborating with Evil. The Punishment: Death.”

A golden strength poured out from the temple walls and entered the harpy guardian. The walls cracked. The altar at the center crumbled to reveal a small golden core floating in the air. The dungeon core was now exposed and could be claimed by anyone.

“We can’t fight this thing!” shouted Gareth. “But as long as we touch that core, we can offer it to Lord Hope. The boss will naturally dissipate!”

“As if I’d let you,” said the harpy, splitting into three, then thirty copies.”

“Petty tricks,” growled Stephan, launching himself at the nearest spear-wielding harpy.

A shiver ran down Sorin’s spine as the bear’s icy claw strike did not unsummon the harpy. What’s more, the three ‘copies’ nearest Stephan launched their own counterattacks and stuck their spears into his armored body.

“Um, guys,” said Lawrence, raising a hand. “This might be obvious by now, but all thirty of those are very real.”

“Tell us something we don’t know,” said Daphne. “Did you guys all get that quest update?”

“We did,” said Sorin grimly. The update was only four words long:

Survive. One minute remaining.