As Asher stared in shock at the rat that had intercepted his blade, and the surrounding rats immediately tore into their fallen brethren in a wild frenzy, Eight flinched back at the sight of the dagger before turning to find Asher standing on his workstation.

"You!" Eight gasped, taking a step back and miraculously managing not to crush one of the swarming rats under his foot as he did so. "How are you still alive?!"

"Come on, if your super special powder didn't take care of me, do you really think an aggressive strain of mold was going to?" Asher snorted, his mind racing as he tried to figure out his next step. Already the sea of rats throughout the room was beginning to churn, as though the rodents were mentally linked to Eight's current mood.

"No, it has to be one of your elements," Eight muttered, glaring at him as he took on a thoughtful look. The alchemist didn't seem all that concerned about the fact that Asher had tracked him down and surprised him within his own lair, which didn't really fill Asher with confidence. "Your ability to vanish and reappear out of thin air… The fact you could keep nullifying my Aggressive Growth skill… You have skills I've never heard of before, and I have done a lot of research into elements in my day. What do you have, then? Spatial? Void?"

Asher tried not to let his surprise show on his face as Eight managed to guess his Spatial element correctly. Thankfully, the strip of Crush's shirt wrapped around the lower half of his face helped tremendously with that, and he shook his head as Eight continued muttering to himself. The sensation of cotton against his skin reminded him that standing around and talking to Eight was just about the last thing he should be doing at the moment. He didn't have a whole lot of faith in the remains of Crush's shirt functioning all that well against Eight's mold spores, but it was the best he could do on short notice. This world didn't exactly have personal protective equipment at the same standards as his workplace back on Earth. His real hope was that he'd be able to kill Eight before he had a chance to even activate his skill in the first place.

"I'm not just going to stand here and let you try and fill me with more mold spores like last time," he said, tapping his mask as he looked for an opening within the sea of rats. "You're not leaving this room alive, Eight."

"By all means, come get me then," Eight smirked, opening his arms wide and all but welcoming Asher to approach, the throng of rats swirling and writhing around him. "My pets simply love greeting new people. I'd say they don't bite, but you have some method of detecting lies, isn't that right?"

Well… Not anymore, Asher thought, glancing at the inert ring still on his finger. The restricted artifact had officially lost its enchantment during Asher's time spent among the less-than-living, but he didn't see any reason why he should tell Eight that.

Still, the time for talking was long done. He'd hoped it wouldn't come to this, but Asher didn't see a way to get to Eight without going through a thousand rats first. He'd just have to do things the hard way.

So long as he was mostly intact, Eternal Regeneration would bring him back from anything, after all.

Whipping out another dagger from his rift, Asher formed a tunnel of compressed space and launched himself through it, covering half the distance between them in a single moment and landing among the ocean of rats to Eight's utter shock. Before the rats filling the room could rush him and overwhelm him in sheer numbers, Asher threw up a large Spatial Lock, trapping Eight inside with him and preventing the majority of the rats from joining the fray.

Now he only had to deal with the hundred or so rats that were already inside the dome.

Asher bit back a scream as he landed and six rats immediately sank their teeth into the meat of his lower legs. As dozens more began screeching and scrambling over one another in a desperate attempt to get at him, he activated Distortion's second tier ability, elongating his mithral dagger into the length of a longsword and using that to start carving his way through the rats surrounding him.

With a steel dagger in one hand and a mithral sword in the other, he spun, desperately trying to cut his way through what felt like an actual wave of rats over to Eight. He wanted to use Distortion to make a tunnel to Eight and stab him, but he couldn't even find the man in the sudden wall of rats bearing down on him. Knowing the alchemist wouldn't be able to escape at the very least, Asher focused solely on staying alive as he attempted to hack and slash his way through the living barricade.

Unfortunately, the rats didn't just sit back and let him have his fun.

For every rat he killed, it felt like three more took its place, and Asher was quickly covered from head to toe in dozens upon dozens of minor wounds. Jagged teeth sank into his flesh. Sharp claws sliced across his skin. The weight of rat bodies slammed into him again and again, nearly causing his knees to buckle at one point, and Asher knew if he went down into the throng of rats he'd never get back up.

It was only the stock of potions he had hidden away in his rift that kept him going.

Asher downed Lesser Restoration potion after Lesser Restoration potion, feeling his skin and muscles repairing themselves almost as quickly as the rats could tear him apart. He knew that each subsequent potion taken in one day would be less effective than the last, but he didn't really have any better options as he fought for his life. He even had a few more tricks up his sleeve, such as chucking a rather volatile Potion of Detonation he'd taken from Draken in Eight's general direction, blowing up at least a handful of rats and hopefully injuring the man at the same time. He'd been hesitant to try using potions directly against the man after he'd noticed how his own potions of Lesser Restoration weren't working as effectively during his time in Eight's previous lab. He was all but certain that the man had some sort of Potion or Alchemy element, and he'd long since learned his lesson about attacking people with their own element. Even so, buying himself even a few seconds by startling Eight would be well worth raiding Draken's storeroom.

Stolen novel; please report.

After chucking out another Potion of Detonation largely at random and clearing another patch of rats, Asher lost himself in the throes of battle, focusing solely on slashing through enemy after enemy as he struggled to stay on his feet. It was the hardest thing he'd ever done, and without the ability to rely on Astral Dip to dodge attacks, he learned rather quickly that his basic fighting ability drastically needed work.

On top of all that, he couldn't just ignore the rest of the rats forever, either.

While Spatial Lock prevented the thousand-plus rats in the greater room from getting to him, the skill wasn't all-powerful. Similar to when Bordan had nearly shattered it with one massive overhead strike of his greatsword, or when Owl did destroy the barrier with his silent black arrow, the skill was reliant on his own reserves to keep it in place when he tried using it as an actual shield. A fact that became rather apparent to him as the rats outside of his skill got to work.

The majority of the rats outside his skill swarmed up the edges of the dome, pressing down on it with their weight and blocking the surrounding light from getting in as they quickly covered the dome in its entirety. The tiny scratches and nasty bites didn't have a very large impact on the dome on their own, but a thousand of the rats doing that all at the same time was quickly wearing down his energy reserves. If he didn't finish this fight and get out of here before his Spatial Lock went down, Asher would literally drown in rats as they came down on him.

It was just as he decided he was going to have to start risking taking even more injuries as he pushed harder to get to Eight that the alchemist himself decided to join the fray.

Though not as a regular fighter would.

The sound of glass shattering on the dome over his head was the only warning Asher received before a shower of blue powder landed on him, latching onto his skin and clothes and immediately causing his body to tingle and his lungs to seize up. Recognizing the familiar signs of the fabled magadrine powder, Asher hissed as he was forced to burn through even more of his energy by triggering Complete Resilience's second tier effect.

Ironically, despite the fact that it cost him a non-insignificant amount of energy to rid himself of the powder, Eight's attack ended up benefiting him overall. The powder hadn't just landed on him, after all, and Asher couldn't help but laugh as a large number of rats immediately surrounding him fell over dead, twitching as the blue powder absorbed its way into their bodies.

In that one attack, Eight must have taken out at least three or four dozen of his own rats.

"Figures an alchemist wouldn't know how to fight!" Asher taunted, finally spotting the nervous alchemist near the edge of his skill. Taking advantage of the brief break in all the fighting and sudden opening, he formed a tunnel of compressed space and stabbed forward. He'd long since been forced to return his mithral dagger back into dagger form, as he couldn't keep up Distortion's second tier effect for very long, but a dagger was more than enough for what he had in mind.

Eight managed to throw himself to the side fast enough to avoid the killing blow Asher was aiming for, but he didn't avoid the attack entirely. The Finger and head of Whikoga's Assassin's Guild screamed as, rather than get a dagger to the heart, Asher's blade cut a deep gash into his side, spraying blood everywhere.

"You bastard!" Eight shouted at him, pressing against the wound in his side as Asher was forced to once again turn his attention to the throng of rats around him as they crawled over their dead brethren to get to him.

At least I got that wound on him, Asher panted, his arms heavy as he continued doing everything in his power to cut down the never-ending tide of rats. His entire body was covered in blood, both from him and the rats, and it was only thanks to his assassin's class bonus that he was able to keep his footing on the slick stone ground of the sewer. In theory, I should be good to Recall now and let him bleed out. But if anyone were capable of finding a way to survive the constant blood loss from such a wound, it would be an experienced alchemist.

It seemed Eight had finally discovered for himself just how annoying Asher's Sever the Thread skill was, because Asher heard him scream from beyond the wall of rats.

"What did you do?!" the alchemist roared, causing Asher to grin despite the exhaustion already setting in on his wounded frame. At this point, there were less spots on his body untouched than there were injuries. He'd stopped bothering to try and chug Lesser Restoration potions after the fourth one, which he was pretty sure had done almost nothing for him.

"Come on, you're probably experienced with letting people die slow and painful deaths from your weird mold attacks, right?" Asher laughed, bisecting a lunging rat with a reflexive flick of his dagger. "Now it's your turn! Have fun bleeding to death!"

Even as the taunt left his mouth, Asher slashed his way through three more rats in quick succession, raising his daggers for the next batch only to blink stupidly at the realization that there were no more rats. It had taken him practically everything in the tank and probably a good few pounds of his flesh, but he'd finally finished off the last of the rats standing between him and his target.

Laughing from sheer relief, Asher grinned at the scowling alchemist as Eight tossed away a now-empty vial of what he could only assume was another potion of Restoration. As much as he wanted to savor this moment, he had no time to waste. He probably had less than a minute before the rats attacking his Spatial Lock from the outside drained enough energy from him that he wouldn't be able to Recall out of there.

"That was some workout," he chuckled, raising his dagger and carefully aiming one final strike to ensure the alchemist wouldn't dodge again. "I'll try and make this fast."

"I won't," Eight snarled, wiping the putrid green drops from his mouth as his empty potion bottle rolled to a stop.

Asher had just enough time to realize potions of Lesser Restoration weren't green before Eight's body erupted outward in bubbling mounds of flesh.

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