What did the poor girl do to draw the monster’s ire? Well, it didn’t matter. She had it now, and if the wide grin on her lips was anything to go by, she was having the time of her life.
Sparkle was harrying the beast, now with his own Skills, but they didn’t seem to have the firepower of Mia’s Arcane Blast. Still, the sprite was a crafty little shit and started making all sorts of obstacles in the Guardian’s path. Cubes of condensed arcane mana in the path of its feet, or perhaps an elevated platform of hardened mana where its paw was going to land, maybe a spiked ball going inside its maw. Anything and everything that could trip it up, or make it stumble at an inopportune moment. As Mia watched, the sprite managed to fool the Guardian into stepping onto a spot that had a knee-deep hole hidden under a rather believable illusion.
The Guardian ate dirt, its jaw slamming shut as the earth came up to meet its snout, then it slid across the forest floor until a tree stopped its momentum. Then a convulsion struck it, making its body writhe and spasm uncontrollably.
Sparkle’s trick allowed the nearest melee fighters to catch up, but they didn’t achieve much even against the temporarily incapacitated beast. Its body was still covered in sharp edges and sported a hundred blades. Anyone who got too close risked losing fingers, or entire limbs, or even getting eviscerated by a randomly spasming leg lashing out at the wrong moment.
Mia took the moment to unload six Arcane Blasts as close to the underside of its head as she could. She fell into a rhythm, one spell in the right hand, while mana gathered in the left. She let loose the first spell, then focused on the second in her left hand while mana flowed in to fill the gap in the right. This way, the gap between spells was pretty consistent, not just two spells fired in a quick burst before a few seconds of cooldown.
The Guardian lost its lower jaw, a layer of metallic flesh on its snout and an eye, a good chunk of its neck and a part of its shoulder, along with smaller parts across the rest of its body. Tristan had been focusing on the head too, just like her and Nikki, Mia noticed. Well, he was an elf, so it wouldn’t be a surprise if he had a sense of hearing to match her own. He must have heard Nikki’s mutterings, too.
But the Guardian recovered eventually, shifting from a writhing mass of sharp blades to an agile predator thirsting for blood. It stood and pounced in one single motion, so quick that the nearest melee fighters didn’t have more time than to widen their eyes and make hasty parries as the monster charged through their ranks, leaving three slumping to the ground in its wake, sporting deep, bloody gashes across their torsos.
Konstantin, the towering lion beastkin, didn’t seem to care, though, as he crashed into the monster from the side with a shoulder charge and a deep roar. The Guardian was just a few steps away from passing by a tree trunk, and while its blades no doubt hurt Konstantin, his charge still shifted the beast’s momentum, sending it slamming head-first into a colossal tree of steel.
That gave everyone enough time to put some distance between them and the Guardian. The next few minutes felt like an eternity, pushing Mia to her limits as adrenaline flowed freely in her veins, keeping her in that flow state of extreme focus. Sparkle’s, then Konstantin’s tripping up of the monster worked so well that it set a precedent, which everyone else who had suitable abilities did their best to replicate.
A patch of ice from Nikki, right under the monster’s feet, the moment it leaned on it, sent it stumbling. Someone managed to cajole one of the metal roots to trip the monster. Mark worked with his Earth Mana Manipulation, making inconvenient little holes just deep enough to break ankles. Sparkle continued doing his absolute best at being an utter nuisance to the Guardian. It tripped, stumbled, faltered, and was sent rolling head-first into trees more times than Mia cared to count. Its occasional spasms didn’t abate either, turning the monster into a convulsing mess every few seconds, though the interval between two spasms was ever so slowly growing. Just by a tiny margin, just a few milliseconds of growth per minute, but it did, and that was worrying.
Retreat was firmly off the table. The monster might just fully recover its original capabilities in a day, and it would certainly recover its original mass in less than an hour since it wasn’t lacking in metal to absorb, even if it seemed it had a cooldown of sorts on that ability.
The monster was now down to half its size, merely a metre tall at the shoulders and packing much less weight. That made its charges somewhat less lethal and made it much easier to push around for the few brave enough to risk their necks by doing so.
In turn, it became more erratic. In its humanoid form, it acted like one of those video-game bosses, attacking whoever landed the latest blow. Almost like it had an invisible agro-meter. Now? Now it was all but random, and Mia had been forced to dismiss more than one theory she came up with about its new attack pattern. The latest person it laid eyes on? The one who was closest? The one who annoyed it most by getting between it and its actual targets?
One after the other, the Guardian’s erratic behaviour made her dismiss all those ideas, leaving her stumped. Unpredictability was a strength of its own, making the monster much more annoying to fight. Maybe there was still some reason behind its actions, that reason being to not give them any clues about when, how or who it wanted to mutilate next.
Its loss in mass made it more agile, faster too, but thankfully not by a large enough margin to be untractable. Still, it meant the tanky melee fighters now took centre stage, and the scouts who’d been leading the Guardian around by its nose pulled away, down two members but having saved many times that with their actions over the last few minutes.
The werewolf, who had once gotten his neck broken by the Guardian, proved to be the best counter now, his wounds sealing up so quickly he could wrestle with the monster. His strength was also proving enough to contest the monster now that it didn’t have half a mountain’s worth of weight behind every charge and blow.
The Guardian’s increasing speed had Mia shifting gears. It was dodging three out of four of her Arcane Blasts now, and that was an utter waste of mana. A part of her wanted to tell the tanky beastkin to just hold the monster down so she could finally blow out its brain — core — that they should just pile on it, keep it pinned under their collective weight even if it shredded through them. Like everyone else, Mia desperately wanted this fight to be finally over.
She restrained herself, unwilling to make the request. What right did she have to ask others to risk a very likely death for the good of the others when she herself would certainly answer with ‘go fuck yourself’ if the roles were reversed? Being a hypocrite was better than being dead, though, so she filed away the idea, even if it made her gut wrench with guilt just considering it.
I just have to restrain it myself. Mia thought, her runic-model spinning furiously as it realigned itself, readying the Arcane Shackles spellcircle.
She hadn’t bothered with the spell before; she knew it did not make an indestructible chain, not by a long shot. It made an arcane construct that was on the upper end of the durability scale within its Rank. The problem was, the Guardian was a Rank above her spell, so she suspected it would have easily snapped the chains without even slowing down.
But maybe now that it was weakened and smaller … it was worth a try at least.
Mia followed the Guardian, keeping to the trees, and Camie shadowed her, unwilling to leave her side after the monster almost eviscerated her had it not been for her last-minute Wisp Form activation.
Brent had the raiders spread out, with a tanky frontliner protecting every three or four squishier fighters. This way, everyone had ample space to dodge and use the trees as cover against the rampaging monster. Its current target was Sandor, that lunatic in the shape of a human.
The man was shrouded in a visible crimson aura and radiated bloodlust in a way that unnerved Mia almost as much as the monster he was fighting. The man seemed lost in his strange mixture of rage and glee, laughing and roaring in equal measure as the Guardian’s claws raked across his torso, only for his flesh to snap back into place. However, his Berserker Class worked; it clearly worked on an escalating basis, since he hadn’t been healing anywhere near that fast before, nor did his counter punches ring with anywhere near the force they did now against the metallic canine.
It probably had something to do with the amount of damage he had taken since the start of the fight. Which was a ridiculous amount in this case, more than enough to kill a man twenty times over, yet he still stood, covered in blood and bloodlust, laughing gleefully.
Mia waited until the man kicked the Guardian away, then watched a handful of spells blast it further back, digging furrows into its side before a spasm struck the beast. Her spell activated, and a trio of arcane chains snaked forth, seeking to entangle the monster’s legs while it was writhing helplessly on the ground.
The moment the first chain wrapped around a paw, the beast yanked at it with a twitch of its leg. Overwhelming force tugged at the end of the chain. It snapped taut, tensing and creaking as pink sparkles of arcane mana escaped the construct. The spellcircle, the source of the chain, stood still and unmoving, though its light flickered. Then the moment passed, and with the sound of glass shattering, the chain snapped, letting go of the monster’s leg, not even having so much as slowed it. In the blink of an eye, the chain was reduced to a scattering of pink sparks and fading wisps of mana, and even those vanished in another moment.
A sharp jolt of pain raced up the hand holding the spell, making Mia’s fingers twitch and spasm. She gritted her teeth. Her energy channel was slightly strained, but not damaged, not yet. Then another chain snapped, and she quickly dismissed the spell before the beast could snap the third and final one. A partial backlash already had her poor right hand twitching from pulsing waves of phantom pain; she didn’t want to know what the whole spell snapping would have done. Probably put her right hand out of commission for the rest of the fight.
Alright, that idea had been a bust, or at least its execution had been. She still had something she could try, though, a spell she had that was tougher than any other in her arsenal, one that had been described as able to withstand the firepower of a spell an entire Rank above it.
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Mia slipped back behind a tree and ran gentle currents of mana through her hand to calm the strained energy channels in it. At the same time, the spellcircle of Arcane Shackles fell apart in her runic model, and the more robust spellcircle of Phalanx slowly started taking shape.
She took a deep, shuddering breath and steadied her quivering hand, ignoring the worried frown Camie was sending her. Phalanx was an absolute mana hog of a spell, one that’d knock her on her ass if she wasn’t topped up, so she drank her final System-made mana potion.
This spell would either win them the fight outright by immobilising the Guardian for long enough to finish it off, or it would bring them close enough that Mia could sit back and let the others handle the rest. Hell, if the monster’s size shrank down to half its current one, Camie might be able to rip its ugly head right off its shoulders.
‘Sparkle, can you trip the Guardian for me so it falls sideways against a tree? I want to box it in.’ Mia projected her thoughts and was rewarded with an eager ‘Sure!’ from her Bond.
She got ready while Sparkle waited for the perfect moment, tailing the Guardian. Mia prepared the mana, double-checked the spell circle and primed it, holding it just a single flick of her will away from activation. Each second that went by felt like an hour, each pained scream and drop of blood from her comrades felt preventable, if only she acted.
Mia centred herself, taking slow, shallow breaths. Planning was what separated her from the Guardian, what put her above it; it was the edge she had over it. Putting the mad beast down for good was worth some pain, if it spared more lives in the long run.
‘Now!’ Sparkle squealed into her mind, and Mia’s focus sharpened. The Guardian was maybe two seconds away from a spasm, charging towards a tree, and the terrified rabbit beastkin perched atop its lower branches.
A pink cube that thrummed with arcane power to Mia’s senses snapped into existence right before a paw and knocked it out from under the Guardian. It shattered a moment later, but its task was done. The monster fell, landing with a crunch of metal, its head slamming into the earth before its momentum sent it rolling further off. It smacked into the tree, its body curling around the trunk.
Mia measured the distance, took four steps closer and held out her palm, then tilted it forward at a 45-degree angle. Phalanx was her toughest defensive spell, but it had its quirks. It had to be affixed to the ground for one, and it always appeared a fixed distance away from the caster. But it also had just a hint of versatility to it in the form of allowing the caster to set its tilt by tilting their hand. If one held their palms vertically, the conjured wall would match it; if they held their palms flat, parallel with the ground, the wall would cover the ground instead.
‘A half step back.’ Sparkle shouted, making Mia pause just before casting. ‘Phalanx fails if there is anything too large or alive in the way. This mutt is both.’
Mia didn’t think, didn’t doubt; she just took a half step back and flexed her will. Mana poured out of her in an endless wave, leaving her dizzy and nauseous. Her channels burned as a good two-thirds of her entire mana pool evaporated, flowing into the spell.
The spellcircle snapped into place, glowing bright before her palm, and then it winked out of existence, only for the thick wall of solid arcane power to crash into existence right above the currently writhing Guardian.
At two metres tall and three wide, tilted forward just right, it boxed the Guardian in between itself, the ground and the trunk of a massive metal tree.
Mia stumbled back a step, her knees threatening to give out underneath her as she took a large breath. She felt like her whole body might just collapse upon itself. A moment ago she’d been filled to the brim with potent mana, and now she was all but empty, hollow and fragile.
But it didn’t matter. A fierce grin pulled weakly at the edge of her lips as she watched the Guardian flail and writhe, trying to escape the sudden bind it found itself in. One of its paws was pressed up against its torso, locked tight between its body and the earth, while the other just barely poked out from behind the Phalanx to paw at the dirt and the spell helplessly. Its head poked out too, that canine metallic sculpture set into a permanent snarl as it tried to twist its neck to bite into the spell, without success.
It was almost perfect. If Nikki was right, the supposed core of the monster was in its head, so that was what everyone should be focusing their fire on anyway.
Her satisfaction evaporated faster than a snowball in a desert when some absolute moron sent a massive fireball at her damned spell!
Mia spun around, glaring up at Aiden.
“You idiot!” She shouted. “Shoot the fucking monster, not the thing keeping it trapped!”
Okay, maybe the stress was getting to her, because she couldn’t remember the last time she’d gotten angry enough to shout, especially in public. Aiden at least had the grace to look sheepish, and his fireball blessedly hadn’t been strong enough to do much damage to her Phalanx … probably.
The wall the spell created was modular, built from as many as a hundred fist-sized, smaller arcane constructs. Triangle-based pyramids, two layers of them, to be specific. The destruction of one pyramid was just that, not diminishing the strength of the rest of the wall.
Meaning Aiden’s idiocy only damaged one side of the wall, which was bad, since it weakened the second line of defence should the Guardian’s struggle break the other side of the wall, but not as bad as it could have been for a regular barrier spell.
“SHOOT THE HEAD!” someone bellowed, though Mia was too tired to see who, as she slumped back against a trunk and just focused on breathing, though her gaze remained fixed on the struggling Guardian. There was a fierce glint in her eyes, a malice born of having to see that monster kill far too many people. It was only natural that seeing it brought low, made to flail and struggle as its death approached, sent a jolt of dark glee and grim satisfaction through her.
A translucent, icy blue bolt of frigid magic struck the underside of the monster’s jaw first, making the monster stiffen. After a brief moment, a fist-sized chunk of its jaw cracked and fell away, shattering on the ground like ice on pavement into hundreds of tiny shards.
Mia glanced back, seeing a serious frown on Nikki’s face, and another pair of spellcircles already glowing around her wrists. Just looking at them made Mia shiver from a sudden cold; she couldn’t imagine what getting hit by the spell itself would feel like.
The others didn’t waste any time. Tristan sent narrow arrows of Light that crackled and blew simmering holes into the exposed head of the Guardian. A blade of water tried to behead the beast, but only managed to cut a tenth of the way through its neck. A sniper rifle thundered somewhere far back, sending the monster’s head snapping to the side as its nose blew right off its face in a spark of pink arcane energy. But those were just the most notable ones; everyone who had something that could even slightly hurt it threw it at the monster until Brent shouted off a few people when another elemental cascade started brewing. That would have hurt Mia’s Phalanx more than the monster, so it was for the best.
The monster rippled, shrinking down to dog-sized, and suddenly its bindings didn’t seem as solid as before, and Phalanx wasn’t a spell that could be moved once placed, and recasting it was out of the question. Mia was out of System-made mana potions, and the regular ones would strain her channels to the point where she wouldn’t be able to channel the required quantity of mana for the spell anyway for a few hours.
“Grab its legs!” Brent shouted, moving already along with his order to fulfil it if no one else did, but the werewolf was quicker, pouncing behind Mia’s Phalanx. She couldn’t see what happened, but she assumed he grabbed its hind legs if the way the monster was yanked back behind the Phalanx was anything to go by. “Let its head out. Perfect! Now, hold it!”
The werewolf did just that perfectly, and while the Phalanx didn’t hold the monster as tightly anymore, it still couldn’t turn around in the little nook it had been trapped in, so the werewolf only had to worry about the hind legs and could ignore the writhing head and those jagged teeth.
Mia watched the monster flail, Camie standing tensely at her shoulder. She had maybe a dozen more Arcane Blasts' worth of mana remaining, but her channels might go from super sore to actually hurt if she pushed herself to cast them all. No, she’d done her part; the others could finish it up; she didn’t need to be the one to deliver the finishing blow. She had nothing to prove to anyone but herself, and she was … satisfied. Yes. Totally.
Okay, maybe she wasn’t, but that was just the childish part of her wanting to be the hero who saved the day. The realist in her knew that was stupid, and sat back to watch, knowing she’d contributed more than many of the others already. No, that doesn’t matter either. I did my best. That’s the only thing that matters.
It rippled, shrank some more, writhed and spasmed until it was reduced to the size of a corgi. That towering monster that once shook the earth with its footsteps was now an ankle-biter, and Mia might have found that hilarious had it not allowed the now-miniature Guardian to slip the werewolf’s grip.
“Motherfucker!” The man grunted, reeling back with both his furry arms reduced to a mangled mess. The Guardian slipped out from behind the Phalanx, darting forward … and running face-first into a quickly conjured arcane construct.
‘Hehehe.’ Mia ignored Sparkle’s giggling, pushing herself off the tree as she roused her mana and primed an Arcane Blast. Just in case.
A heavy torrent of air crashed down on its prone form from above like a hammer of God, sending its much lighter body sprawling, and that was enough for others to aim. Ice, Water, Earth and other spells landed on it, blasting away nearly a third of its body and leaving it without three of its limbs.
Its skin rippled, its form shifting again to repair the damage, and for the briefest instant, Mia saw a speck of something impossibly dark in the liquid metal. Then it was gone, swallowed by the Guardian’s reforming body, now the size of a cat, though one with an oversized head covered in dark iron carapace.
An arrow of light struck it right between the shoulder-blades, blasting the head of the monster in one direction, and the hindquarters in another.
Mia followed the head with a hawk-like gaze, watching it race through the air, bounce off a low branch, then nick a trunk before smacking into a third tree. But instead of bouncing off like before, it stuck, and as Mia’s eyes narrowed, she saw its form melt, thin streams of liquid metal flowing out of it like tiny rivers cascading over the metallic tree’s thick trunk.
Her eyes widened in panic as she realised what the monster was doing: trying to recover its lost mass by absorbing the entire damned tree!
Before she could give voice to her realisation, a beam of icy blue magic snapped out from somewhere, striking the melting metal ball that remained of the Guardian’s head dead centre. Frigid mana washed over it, drowning it in a deluge of supernatural cold.
Mia stumbled back, scrunching her eyes shut as she felt a brain freeze blossom behind her eyes just from looking too closely at the icy magic beam with her Spirit Sense.
She cracked open her eyes only once the magic cut off, and her gaze locked onto the target, while her ears caught a strangled gasp from Nikki and the girl’s subsequent collapse.
Mia watched, transfixed, as the silvery streams of liquid metal that had once snaked across the trunk to devour it fragmented and flaked away. But not only them, parts of the trunk crumbled like freshly fallen snow and blew away under the guidance of a soft gust. Not even the dark iron casing of what Mia suspected was the Guardian’s core escaped that fate. It was covered in a web of cracks, large chunks falling away to reveal an obsidian sphere within that swallowed the light.
Each chunk that fell away revealed more and more of the sphere, and before long, there weren't enough fragments of the casing remaining to hold on to the core. It slipped from their metallic grasp under gravity’s insistent tug, then fell, spinning through the air until it hit the ground.
It shattered as if it were made of glass, or perhaps obsidian, given its colour. Mia’s breath hitched as a veritable tide of miasma that had been confined within exploded out into the surroundings, but as quickly as it came, the miasma faded away, merging with the ambient atmospheric miasma of the Rift’s inner space.
[Congratulations! You have Cleared this Raid: ‘Forest of the Wolf King’]
[Rewards will be generated shortly for any delvers who’ve contributed! Please proceed through the Gate!]
[Hidden Quest: First Raid Clear!] has been Completed!
Objective:
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Take part in Clearing a Raid! COMPLETED!
Rewards: Doubled rewards for Clearing the Raid.
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Quest Statuses have been updated!
[Regional Quest: Raid!]
Objectives:
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COMPLETE! Clear the Raid!
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Destroy the Raid!
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Kill the monsters inside the Raid! ( 501 / 551 )
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COMPLETE! Kill the Raid Guardian!
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Assist in achieving the above-mentioned objectives! Contributions: Major (31% towards Supreme)
Reward: A Skill Shard of varying rarity, chosen from a short list. Rarity and number of options will depend on contributions!
***
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