Re: From Elf Mage to Overlord Slayer-Chapter 21: Guess who’s OP?

Chapter 21: Guess who’s OP?
I turned my back on the little campfire.
Away from the living, and into the blackness of the tunnels.
The silver line of the System’s waypoint pulsed in my vision, a steady, demanding heartbeat pulling me north.
Back toward the ruins.
Back toward the monsters.
My old gamer brain finally rebooted, but the logic was cold and sharp this time.
Kill stuff.
Get stronger.
Get the cure.
This wasn’t some impossible, emotional drama anymore.
It was a grind.
A high-stakes gear check.
Vex was just a world boss, and his little lieutenants were the trash mobs I needed to farm to level up.
The quest to save her had just become my main scenario.
And it started right now.
I walked through the maze of tunnels for what felt like hours, my new [Unbreakable Will] skill just pushing the exhaustion away.
I didn’t need rest.
I needed EXP.
The waypoint led me to a part of the undercity that opened up into the ruins of some old royal library.
Dust and busted-up stone were everywhere.
The air smelled like burnt paper and death.
And then I saw it.
A massive, stone-skinned giant, one of the dumber, brutish models, was just smashing what was left of the place.
Its single green eye glowed with a stupid, mindless hunger.
It was a trash mob.
Perfect.
Time to test out the new software.
It turned as I stepped out of the tunnel, its dumb eye locking onto me.
It let out a low rumble and raised a fist the size of a small house, ready to swat the bug that just showed up.
My new System was already feeding me the deets.
<Target: Giant Mauler. Level 14. Weak Point: Cervical joint, rear. Structural Integrity: 98%. Recommended strategy: Exploit mobility advantage.>
I didn’t need a strategy.
The pact I made had given me something way better.
Tools.
I raised my hand, not to cast some prissy Mana Bolt, but just to point.
A new skill, one I hadn’t even consciously registered from my pact, flared to life.
It wasn’t some sappy soul remnant from Yael.
It was a cold, logical tool from the Slayer program.
[Swap] (Rank 1): Instantly exchange positions with any visible target. Cooldown: 10 minutes.
The world twisted.
For a split second, I was looking down at my own little body from a hundred feet up, then the swap was done.
I was standing where the Titan had been, and it was standing where I had been.
Right under its own house-sized fist that was still coming down with unstoppable momentum.
There was a wet, grinding crunch as stone smashed into stone.
The Titan roared in stupid surprise as its own fist shattered its shoulder and clavicle, its whole arm twisting at some grotesque angle.
It staggered back, crippled and confused by the sudden server lag.
I didn’t give it time to process the glitch.
My body was already moving.
Another new skill, a pure function of the Slayer protocol, activated.
[Phase Step] (Rank 1): A 15-meter, instant teleport.
Reality tore like cheap paper.
The world dissolved into a black-and-white static scream, then snapped back together.
I was on its uninjured shoulder, right next to the back of its thick, stony neck.
The System’s target marker glowed red on its weak point.
My mana bar, which had been uselessly empty before, was now boiling.
The pact had refilled it.
[MANA: 150/150]
I jammed my hand against the side of its head.
I didn’t cast a spell.
I just opened the floodgates.
Raw, ugly power, fueled by the cold fire of my guilt, poured out of my hand.
It wasn’t a bolt.
It was a drill.
A drill of pure, focused energy that bored right into the Titan’s skull.
It shrieked, a sound that cracked the stones around us.
Then it went silent and toppled sideways with a ground-shaking thud that sent a cloud of century-old dust into the air.
A chime, cold and clinical, went off in my head.
<Ding!>
<LEVEL UP! You have reached Level 7!>
<You have gained 5 attribute points to allocate.>
I stood on the dead giant’s face, my hand still sizzling with static.
I had a bank of twenty attribute points saved from the Ogre and the Scrabblers, gathering dust.
The old Quinn would have hoarded them for a bigger Intelligence boost.
The Slayer needed to be unbreakable.
I spent half of my reserves without a second thought, dumping ten points directly into Constitution.
I needed to be able to take a hit.
That was all that mattered.
The System chimed again.
<’Slayer’s Pact’ bonus unlocked. For every Elite-class or higher enemy slain, a unique skill may be extracted from its remnant essence.>
<Extracting... Skill Found: [Stoneheart] (Passive). Your skin gains a minor resistance to physical damage.>
Good.
More durability.
I moved on to the next one.
This one was wading through the river that ran through the capital, scooping up debris like it was sad about it.
It seemed less aggressive.
I tried to get some info out of it, my old habits dying hard.
"Where is Vex?"
The thing’s voice was a low grinding sound, like rocks rubbing together.
"The... Master... is... everywhere... and... nowhere..."
Useless.
You couldn’t interrogate the NPCs.
You could only delete them.
[Phase Step].
A blur of motion.
Another torrent of raw power.
Another dead giant.
<Ding!>
<LEVEL UP! You have reached Level 8!>
<Skill Extracted: [River’s Flow] (Passive).
Your movements are no longer impeded by water.>
One after another, I moved through the ruins.
I wasn’t a mage anymore.
I was a virus, a bug in their system, my only purpose to farm every asset Vex had on this server until I was strong enough for the final boss.
And then I saw it.
The red-haired Giant.
The one that had looked me in the eye.
The one that had broken her.
It stood in the middle of the ruined main plaza, observing the destruction not with mindless hunger, but with a smart, evil kind of calm.
This was a boss, not a mob.
It sensed me.
Its single green eye swiveled to lock right on me.
It didn’t roar.
It didn’t charge.
It recognized the "error" had learned a new trick.
It remembered me.
It moved, faster than any of the others, its hand slicing through the air like a guillotine aimed at my head.
My System flashed a warning.
<INCOMING ATTACK: LETHAL>.
I didn’t dodge.
I smiled.
A cold, thin, ugly thing that was not my own.
[Swap].
The world twisted.
The red-haired Titan was now standing where I had been.
Its own hand, moving with unstoppable force, slammed into its own face like a meteor.
CRACK!
The sound was beautiful.
It staggered back, its faceplate of living stone fractured, green light bleeding from the cracks like corrupted data.
It let out a sound of pure shock and pain.
It was hurt.
It was vulnerable.
I didn’t give it a chance to recover.
The ten-minute cooldown on [Swap] was irrelevant.
The System’s core logic flashed in my mind.
The more I fought, the faster my tools came back.
My little mob-killing spree had slashed the timer.
It was already halfway recharged.
[Phase Step].
I was behind it.
I unloaded a full blast of power into the back of its skull.
It roared in fury and spun around, swatting me away like a fly.
My body slammed into a ruined wall.
Pain flared, a sharp, electric shock.
<HP: 85/130>.
Then, my [Pain Eater] flaw kicked in.
The damage didn’t slow me down.
It fed me.
A surge of adrenaline and raw power flooded my system.
The world sharpened, time seemed to slow for a precious few seconds.
I was on my feet before the dust even cleared, a blur of motion, circling it, peppering it with blasts of energy.
Annoying, stinging hits.
I was the kiter now.
It was her role, and now it was mine by necessity.
It was a grim, painful tribute.
It couldn’t keep up.
For every hit it landed on me, I used my speed and teleports to land three more, fueled by the pain of its own attacks.
Its stone body began to crack and crumble under the relentless assault.
Finally, with one last, desperate roar, it lunged.
[Swap] was ready again.
I swapped us.
It crashed, full-force, into the side of a collapsing tower, which then toppled over and buried it under a thousand tons of rock and broken dreams.
Silence.
A flood of notifications buried my vision.
<ELITE DEFEATED! MASSIVE EXPERIENCE BONUS AWARDED!>
<LEVEL UP! You have reached Level 11!>
<You have gained 20 attribute points to allocate.>
But there was one more, a new one, pulsing with a darker light.
<Unique Skill Awarded for defeating a Named Elite under the ’Overlord Slayer’ protocol.>
<New Skill Unlocked: [Shadow Bind] (Rank 1)>
<Tear a sliver of a defeated foe’s essence from the void and bind it to your will. The summoned shadow retains a fraction of the original’s power. Max Summons: 1.>
I looked at the mountain of rubble where the red-haired Titan was buried.
An army of misfits?
No.
Gandalf’s little test was a footnote in a forgotten story.
I would build my own damn army.
An army of one, and its shadow.
I walked to the pile of rubble, reached out my hand, and activated the skill.
"Bind," I whispered.
The air went cold.
Inky black shadows, darker than night, bled from the cracks in the rubble.
They swirled and coiled, rising up and pulling together into a familiar, titanic shape.
It was a perfect, silent copy of the red-haired Titan, made of pure, solid darkness.
It knelt before me, its head bowed.
And then, its single, massive eye opened.
It did not glow with a sickly green light.
It did not glow with the amethyst I so desperately longed for.
It glowed with a cold, empty, silver light.
A mirror of the cold, empty purpose that now lived in me.