“Where are the soldiers coming from?” Erani asked the Faerie Queene.
“Near the entrance. They’ll be here in a few minutes. We have some spies currently tailing them.”
“Oh, so the spies will be helping us in the combat?”
“Absolutely not. I hired you for help, and I’ll be getting my value on that.”
I set my jaw, trying not to say anything at that. She was technically right that we agreed to do what we could to help, but the Queene refusing to assist us when it was completely possible for her to do so… it just left a bad taste in my mouth.
But, I agreed to the deal, so I’d carry it out.
“Show us the way,” I said.
Erani, the Dryad, and I all stood together on the top of the wooden palisade, prepared to attack at any sight of the enemy soldiers. It was dark in the late hour, though, and our only light came from the soft glow of the blue and purple magical mites that dimly lit the village, so it was difficult to see.
We waited for some time, looking out into the treeline from our vantage point to try and locate any sort of movement. Minutes passed, and I began to suspect that they weren’t coming. By the time half an hour had passed, I was getting truly antsy. And once the hour mark had been reached, I’d gotten to the limit of my patience. Was the Queene’s intel wrong? Maybe they just saw some soldiers on a routine patrol and assumed they were coming to attack. The Faeries obviously didn’t hold a very high opinion of these people, so it would make sense if they just assumed the city was coming for them.
I looked back behind me, down to the ground below in the village. Aankin was down there doing stretches and routine exercises, getting used to his new body. “Can you go talk to the Queene and ask if she’s gotten any new information on the soldiers and what they’re doing? They should’ve shown up by now if they were attacking.”He muttered something about being an errand-boy, but still turned and did so, walking back to the damaged palace to speak with the Queene.
By the time he got back, another few minutes had passed. I’d seen some more wisps of movement out in the treeline, but it was all too far away and too dark to tell if it was a person or animal.
“Okay, so,” Aankin said as he walked back up to us, reading words off a piece of magically-inscribed parchment, “she said that… where was it… yes, here. They are currently building a ballista about a hundred paces away, and have been for half an hour. They’ll be done in a couple minutes. Oh, they also have explosive munitions.”
I looked at him. “Why didn’t you tell us before?!”
He shrugged. “Didn’t ask, I guess.”
I shook my head as I hurried to scale my way down the wooden walls, mentally cursing those damned Faeries. Probably just another ‘test of strength’ to see if I could survive getting a bomb getting shot through me.
“C’mon, we need to get to them before they finish,” I said to Erani, who helped visually communicate to the Dryad that we needed to go. The Faerie Queene, despite being fully capable of communicating with the Dryad, had outright refused to do so for our sake.
We landed on the ground from our climb down the walls and started sprinting through the woods, heading to the place I had seen those flickers of movement before.
We crashed through trees and bushes, with me and my newly-rejuvenated body leading the charge, searching for the soldiers. I was acutely aware of the Dryad running with us, and what she’d likely do once she found our enemies. But I didn’t really have a choice. Sure, I could technically refuse to fight and pull the Dryad away, but not only would that most likely lead to the insanely high-Level Faerie Queene killing me, but she’d probably just order someone else to go and kill these Humans. Their fates were effectively sealed.
And, at some point, I just had to accept that some Humans would die by my hand. There were plenty of people trying to kill me, and the main way I could stop them from doing so would be to kill them first. Simple survival.
A colder, more calculating part of my mind considered how much of a shame it was that you couldn’t get any XP from killing members of your own species; if I was going to be killing Humans, I’d at least want to be rewarded for it. But I pushed those thoughts from my head. It would always be a shame to see people die – people who really just wanted things to go back to the way they were before the Demons attacked. The Demons were my foe here, and they’d be the ones I’d be smiling at when I killed them.
After a few more moments of running, we leapt through the treeline into a clearing full of armored soldiers. The Dryad had a glint in her eye that told me she would not be hesitating here. I resolved to allow her to do most of the fighting here; even if I was healed of the venom and my injuries, my Health was still low, and I wasn’t about to jump into the fray while in my current state.
The group of soldiers in the clearing had just finished assembling their siege weapon as we arrived, the gigantic, swivel-mounted crossbow loaded with an explosive payload. There were, as the Queene had said, at least thirty of them, all wearing leather armor branded with the familiar logo of their city and wielding various weapons on their backs and waists. They must’ve been sent out right when the city got word of the first squad being killed.
I knew that they were just doing their jobs, but I was just surviving. We were two groups with opposing goals, and I intended to achieve mine. Right as we crashed into the clearing, I held out my hand and shot the three closest enemies with Rays of Frost.
You have struck Level 6 Human Swordsman for 46 damage using Ray of Frost.
You have cursed Level 6 Human Swordsman with Ray of Frost. For the next 5 seconds, his Dexterity score is lowered by 6.7.
23.2 Mana Cost. Your Mana is 622.
You have struck Level 7 Human Berserker for 47 damage using Ray of Frost.
You have cursed Level 7 Human Berserker with Ray of Frost. For the next 5 seconds, his Dexterity score is lowered by 6.7.
23.2 Mana Cost. Your Mana is 599.
You have struck Level 5 Human Wizard for 44 damage using Ray of Frost.
You have cursed Level 5 Human Wizard with Ray of Frost. For the next 5 seconds, his Dexterity score is lowered by 6.7.
23.2 Mana Cost. Your Mana is 575.
Immediately, Spells from the Magic-Types, arrows and bolts from the Ranged-Types, and a charging horde of Melee-Types came speeding toward us. The white lights of Erani’s Angelic Shield flashed to my left, deflecting any damage that came her way. And to my right, the Dryad used her signature whip to cut through the arrows and push back the Melee-Types that got too close, while she utilized her quick reflexes to dodge the Spells that would’ve managed to connect with her.
I, on the other hand, didn’t have as many defensive options.
You have been shot with magically-hardened stone. 21 damage.
Your Health is 36.
You have been pierced by an arrow. 17 damage.
Your Health is 19.
Even with my relative cover behind trees and bushes, a stone managed to find my head, and an arrow grazed my shoulder.
I ducked beneath a Swordsman’s swing – I at least knew how they fought, having trained for years against a much more talented mentor. But still, my Health had fallen right back into the danger-zone, and I still didn’t have any uses of Time Loop to fall back on. I took a step back and held a hand out as if to cast a Spell at the young man in front of me, who instantly ducked back and raised his buckler to block. But no Spell came out of my hand.
You have activated Regenerate. You will gain 15.5 Health over the next 10 seconds.
35.4 Stamina Cost. Your Stamina is 21.
I’d faked him out, buying myself some much-needed time to heal back up with Regenerate. I fought back the urge to laugh – pretending to cast a Spell was one of the oldest tricks Magic-Types had at their disposal.
Once the soldier realized what was happening, seeing my wounds close, he grunted and charged again. A swipe to the side, and I stepped back, easily dodging the amateur strike. Then, in his follow-through, I stepped close to him and grabbed his arm, yanking him forward so that I was too close for him to use his sword effectively, and activating Noxious Grasp.
He screamed in pain and frantically pulled back, wrenching his arm from my grasp – I had a Strength Stat higher than an Unclassed person’s thanks to Recursive Growth, but any Melee-Type Classer with a couple Levels under their belt would still easily beat me in a fair contest of Strength.
But that didn’t mean it had to be fair.
The moment he tried to pull free from my grip, I cast Crippling Chill on him.
You have cursed Level 6 Human Swordsman with Crippling Chill. For the next 15 seconds, he loses 7.76 Health and 6.21 Stamina each second, and his Dexterity score is lowered by 15.5.
56.2 Mana Cost. Your Mana is 519.
Now, one thing to note about the Swordsman Class was its relatively all-rounder progression path. Every Level, a Swordsman would get 1 Strength, 1 Endurance, and 1 Dexterity – along with the standard 3 Stat Points, of course.
The way an individual would spend their Stat Points was, of course, up to them, but if there was anything I’d learned from spending so much time around Erani, it was that there were normally only a few ways to make these types of choices that were considered ‘optimal’. And, for Swordsmen, the optimal way to spend Stat Points was generally seen as mostly Strength, some Endurance. I had personally planned on doing 2 in Strength, 1 in Endurance, with maybe one or two extra in Endurance as I saw fit.
Those two Stats were just seen as the most important to the Class; Strength determined your damage, and Endurance kept you alive. Sure, Dexterity might have helped you land a couple more blows or dodge one here or there, but what did it matter if you could tank all that damage anyway, and dealt enough that you only needed to hit once to be effective?
And so, most notably about that, almost no Swordsmen put any extra Stat Points into Dexterity. As a Level 6 Swordsman, this man would’ve gotten 7 total points in the Stat – one from Level 0, and 6 more from his subsequent Level-ups – putting him at 17 total. And, combined with the Ray of Frost I’d shot him with when the fight had first started, I’d drained away over 22 of the Stat.
And so, the moment I cast Crippling Chill, the man collapsed, completely paralyzed until one of the two curses wore off. I shot him with another Ray of Frost to make sure that wouldn’t happen anytime soon.
I also let go of him, getting a notification that I’d dealt somewhere around 30 damage with Noxious Grasp. Looking around the battlefield, I realized just how much work Erani and the Dryad could get done in such a short amount of time. With my build being much more geared toward dominating a fight against a single individual, I could take down my enemy without too much effort, sure, but with Erani’s massive explosions and the Dryad’s long-range whip, this was their prime environment.
Erani was blowing up entire crowds of soldiers, forcing them to spend time on making sure they weren’t grouped up, rather than on attacking us. She was to thank for the fact that I hadn’t had to deal with any more projectile attacks ever since the initial barrage. And the Dryad was even more effective, tearing through anyone and anything that got in her way.
I watched as she flung her whip in a wide arc at three people running at her. One of them managed to leap back just in time for the swipe to miss, but the other two had their legs cut clean off by the razor wire, blood spewing across the ground as they fell down, the soldiers screaming in pain at their sudden dismemberment.
A woman with a spear ran up and tried to stab her in the back while she wasn’t looking, but, before the soldier could react, the Dryad spun around with her whip, decapitating her enemy.
She turned to look behind herself once again, this time at the massive ballista that’d been constructed before we’d arrived. One of the soldiers had managed to run over and man it, loading in an explosive bolt and readying it to fire directly at her. She was too far away for her whip to reach, and apparently had no options for ranges past that, so it took a ready stance, waiting for the massive, tree-trunk sized bolt to fire.
With a loud thunk, the ballista bolt left its launcher, flying at high speed directly toward the Dryad. She bent backward, allowing the bolt to just barely fly over her, and then, as it was away behind her, she turned around and lashed her whip out with it, wrapping her weapon around the explosive ballista bolt, turning, and flinging it back to its launcher.
The bolt collided with the ballista and the person manning it, and the resulting explosion rocked the ground around us, causing the battle to come to a screeching halt. The five or six remaining soldiers saw how much their numbers had been thinned – and how ours hadn’t changed at all – looked at each other, and ran, retreating back into the forest they came from.
I watched them run. With my pitifully-low Stamina from having used Regenerate so much, I sure as hells couldn’t chase them. Erani’s Dexterity of 10 probably couldn’t keep up with the soldiers, and the Dryad wasn’t chasing them either – though for what reasons, I didn’t know. She could have just not wanted to kill a retreating enemy. Hells, I wasn’t sure if I’d have wanted to even if I could; it was one thing to fight for your life, and another to kill someone fleeing for theirs.
I took a breath and looked at my two companions. Whatever the reason, a few of them got away, and would definitely be informing the city that we were out here. We could probably expect some more serious reinforcements to arrive soon.