The ghoul lords threat signals the start of the second part of this battle. The regular ghouls now join in. Courtney at the back lets her blindness spell drop from the two ghasts and chants again.

Jason stomps forward and delays the ghouls while Rosha the two ghasts on the ground. The lord hisses at the ghouls in irritation, “you keep letting the idiots die!”

The left ghoul shakes its head, “we just have to kill them and things should be fine boss. Weaklings are everywhere so we can collect more minions later.” Then it dodges around Jason and goes at Rosha.

She takes another step back to keep the distance, but now is behind Jason. While a line of two isn’t much of a line, what little benefits it gave was gone. The ghoul on the right side is able to use this to try and make a run around and attack Courtney.

However this is the point when she finishes her spell. With an obvious target, she waves her hand at the attacking ghoul. Another globe of darkness forms on the ghoul's head but this one is much darker. Unlike with the ghasts, though, it isn’t quite as effective. The ghoul is smart enough to keep going.

Though speaking of ghasts, the last two finally make it into melee range. They don’t in and of themselves provide much to the fight, but the new element allows the center ghoul to land a hit on Jason’s arm. Not even enough to deal real damage, but it left a red line as a few small drops of blood oozes out.

Normally not a problem, but with ghouls not so much. As Jason pulls back, his arm feels stiff. He just manages to get out, “Courtney, I got got!”, before his jaw seized up as the stiffness spreads throughout his body. Jason’s arms and legs are able to move, but just barely. This allows him to continue to block the ghoul in front of him, but leaves the Rosha to hold the front.

In the back Courtney doesn’t have time to cast an antidote spell on him. The right ghoul might not be able to see, but he can hear her and has taken to swinging in her general direction. She can’t drop the darkness illusion or it would deal her with.

Jason isn’t completely left out to dry. He can feel his energy circulate on its own, something he hadn’t felt in a long while. It was his poison resistance skill activating. The ghouls ability to paralyze was a poison.

He doesn’t have much room to split his attention, but that little bit is now focused on his skill. The passive resistance is enough that his limbs don’t lock up, but he needs more to win this fight. That little bit of mental space is enough to look into himself. His inner space has a cloud of dark threads coiled around his normal lines. Some dark threads are even attempting to bind his core, but from the looks of it they had no chance of that, even if he didn’t have the resistance skill.

Now that he knows what is going on, he can work on fixing it and he has just the tool. The recent change to his inner cultivation has left him with many loops of Energy cycling from his core. With a thought, he grabs a loop and swings it over a nearby dark thread. Originally, he only meant to try and pull the thread away from his body’s line.

Instead, the Energy loop slices right through the thread. This doesn’t destroy the dark thread, each side of it continues to strangle the line it is on, but with a lot less vigor. This discovery however pulls him out of the fight too much and the ghoul scores another hit on him.

-3

More black lines invade his body from the site of the wound. Now though, he had a plan to deal with it. This probably wouldn’t work for everything, but these threads are weak enough that he has an easy solution. With only slight mental effort, he starts to spin his core. This spins all those loops of Energy and his body becomes a blender. It shreds those dark threads down to the point they can no longer affect him.

Outside of his body, the fight continues. The first thing to come back from the paralysis is his jaw. Convenient as it lets Jason inform Courtney of the situation, “Just focus on your fight, I got this now.”

And he did. Jason only had a single ghoul to fight and if there is one thing he is good at it is fighting humanoids one on one. The ghoul goes in for another claw attack. No longer fearing the poison though, Jason takes it with his armguard.

-2

With him not dodging like expected, it throws the ghoul off balance. Jason takes advantage of this and ducks into its chest. The ghoul reacts by wrapping him with its arms in a bear hug. Just how Jason wanted it. He pulls his arms in and spins around. One arm grabs the ghoul’s left shoulder while the other grabs lower down on the same arm.

A small bump from his rear to knock the ghoul off balance. Jason grips the arm to his chest and drops his left shoulder towards the ground. This action effortlessly pulls the ghoul over his shoulder and slams it into the ground in front of him. Stunned, the ghoul is unable to react as Jason follows up with war stomp to the head, putting it down forever.

To his side one ghast tries to take advantage of him being crouched down. Jason just takes the claws across the back of his jerkin.

-1

Then with hand on fist he rams his elbow up into the ghasts stomach while standing up. It knocks the ghast back and it stumbles into the ghoul fighting Rosha.

Ghoul distracted, Rosha jigs her bladed staff up and over through the throat of the other ghast, decapitating it. She continues her swing around and slides her hands to the other side of the staff. This brings the back ends blade right into the now downed ghast, finishing it.

The ghoul lord screams, “You fools! Now I will have to come in and do it myself. This is going to hurt and you’re going to suffer for it later.” Out of the deeper shadows the lord strides. He might not be a vampire, but the light of the sun clearly hurts him. The lord hisses as its pristine skin discolors.