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1225 Words
Even with Melinda trying to give direction, the two teams were unable to effectively coordinate an impactful defense. With that lack thereof, the mass of beetles soon flanked them, and they were quickly surrounded, fighting back-to-back.
To everyone’s horror, even Sam’s poison was unable to affect the beetles for long. The most effective method they had was her and Aster teaming up alternating their elemental attacks. The beetles were killed as they changed back and forth, but after a few successful skirmishes, the beetles turned a blue and green mix. Then, neither attack was particularly successful in killing the monsters. The best either of them could do was slightly weaken them.
Matt wanted to yell, but he didn’t have the time to do so. With the nine of them, they had more than enough elements to rotate through and kill the beetles, but their attacks all landed in separate locations. Or worse, they attacked the same monsters twice, which just wasted mana.
Melinda had started an AI group to coordinate their attack. It helped, but they were still getting crowded, as the two teams failed to anticipate each other’s actions. Matt, Liz, and Aster were used to doing their own thing in a battle, and completely failed to react to Melinda’s rapid orders. Even in the war, orders were bigger picture and not individual.
They had researched both normal summoners and the elemental beetles last night. A normal summoner used the Tier 14 skill [Summon Mana Monster], which created a copy of a monster they had killed before from its corpse. That monster was then recorded in the skill structure for future use. The base number of recordable monsters was five, while the skill could summon three monsters at once unless it was modified.
Since they were able to damage the constructs, Matt assumed Wrangle was lowering the strength of the monsters they were fighting somehow. But he hadn’t seen that listed in the information pact they bought.
The packet detailed a skill called [Barrage], which was a meta-skill and was cast in conjunction with them. It increased the number of effective casts by a multiplier, based on the skill it was coupled with and how that skill was expanded with mastery. The example given was [Barrage] cast with [Fireball]. Instead of one fireball, you could have five for a minimal, percentage-based increase in initial mana cost.
The skill was incredibly valuable, and the more they learned, the more they were impressed with Wrangle’s achievement of creating the skill for himself early.
But the fact that there were thousands of monsters boggled the mind. Wrangle shouldn’t be able to summon that many monsters, unless his custom [Barrage] allowed him to create more than the normal skill would have. Even if he could summon them, he shouldn’t be able to control that many. Summoners rarely went for numbers because the mana cost to summon an extensive amount was untenable. They also needed to split their concentration for each cast of the skill.
The fighting continued, but they were eventually overwhelmed. One by one, they fell.
Matt’s armor helped him last the longest but, eventually, even it was overwhelmed. When a beetle clamped its pincers around Matt’s actual leg and shook him, he found himself sitting with the rest of his friends, off to the side next to Luna. She was looking down at a watch on a chain.
She tsked as she put the watch away in her breast pocket. “Seven minutes and eleven seconds. Two hundred and fifteen kills against Tier 7 summons.”
The short woman met their eyes one by one. “That’s far worse than I expected. Clearly, we need to back up a bit and work on our basics.”
Luna gestured up with a single hand and an obstacle course rose from out of the sand. Or at least what Matt thought was an obstacle course.
“We will be working on this for the next few hours before we start a lesser program.”
She pointed imperiously and commanded, “Start climbing.”
Matt and everyone else turned and started walking, but it was apparently too slow for their trainer. From Luna’s fingertips, a small bolt of lightning zapped them all.
It went right through [Cracked Phantom Armor] and thoroughly shattered the skill in his spirit, while also locking up his muscles. To his relief, it didn’t actually hurt. It was more of a tingle than any real pain.
Matt scrambled to run with everyone else.
They reached the front of the course to find ropes hanging over a pit of some kind of sludge. Whatever it was, it smelled gut-wrenchingly awful.
The smell was so bad, Matt’s eyes watered. As he hadn’t reformed [Cracked Phantom Armor] in his spirit yet, he couldn’t protect himself from it either. Luna’s attack destroyed the skill structure far more thoroughly than Keith’s skill had when he trained with Liz’s brother-in-law.
Mathew reached out and grabbed one of the two ropes and handed it to Sam, who was closest to him.
Liz hooked the one next to Sam and swung over with Aster in her free arm. To their surprise, Aster appeared back on the other side. They turned to see Luna filing her nails in the air next to them.
The message was clear. No assistance allowed.
Aster just c****d her head back at Luna, and then to the still swaying rope.
Everyone paused as the difficulty of a fox with no hands crossing a pit of sludge with a rope was pondered.
No one answered, but Aster didn’t seem bothered. She sent Matt a picture through their bond.
He grabbed the rope, allowing Aster to create a platform to stand on with [Create Water] and her bloodline. They looked up to Luna, who still seemed to be ignoring them, so she jumped over while standing on the platform.
She didn’t reappear on their side, but the ice platform vanished as soon as Aster was off the rope.
So, they could help each other but couldn’t directly carry each other through the obstacle course.
The rest of the course was a child’s playground twisted to a sadistic level. They climbed over and under swinging logs, and traversed balance beams only a finger’s breadth wide that were suspended over pits with chains. There were areas that they needed to climb with only their fingers able to hold on to a ledge and a ladder with only one rung that they needed to use to climb over thirty feet up and back down. The hardest obstacle was a section of poles sticking out of the ground five feet apart from each other. They needed to jump from pole to pole, but since they weren’t in a line, they needed to pause between jumps.
All the while, failure came with the threat of falling into the pit of foul sludge.
Still, the course wasn’t that difficult to complete. They were Tier 6s and well beyond mortal limits. Completing each obstacle was more tricky than hard. Particularly for Aster. The fox was faced with a new puzzle to solve for each of the obstacles a small beast couldn’t possibly complete normally. Whether through ice constructs or clever schemes with Matt and Liz assisting, the fox was expected to complete the same challenges as everyone else.
- Writer
