So far, the fight was quite disappointing.
While I did limit the information I received about Gary’s fighting abilities, the feats I heard about spoke for themselves. The voidling had single-handedly completed all the quests the system presented him with, seemingly with little to no trouble. He’d won a tournament where every opponent was two tiers higher than him. And most importantly, he’d come out on top in a fight against a dragon-type monster that was reportedly of the twelfth tier. Based on the information I had received, I’d imagined all kinds of scenarios. Wondered about what amazing skills the other traveler possessed that would allow him to go toe to toe with such a titan.
Yet, all he had displayed in our fight so far was simple teleportation and a rather explosive arsenal of spells.
There was no finesse, no proper strategy behind it all, a mere display of raw power. But, said power was, while impressive, rather lacking.
So far, I had little trouble countering everything he had to offer by employing simple, premade tactics. Stratagems that I’d drilled with my pack thousands of times, applicable to any foe that could either move extremely fast or could teleport. There was some trouble stemming from the fact that Gary was almost completely odorless, which made the spread-out net of detection almost useless. Fortunately for me, Gary was not exploiting his advantage, falling into the trap of attacking the seemingly easy target of a lone wolf again and again, allowing them to call on me wherever he went.
Just now, I’d gotten in quite a bit of damage, which was unfortunately blocked by a magical shield. Even then, I knew about the weakness of those shields. Taking damage like that was a massive drain on MP, which could eventually become fatal for a spellcaster. Which, unless he was hiding some skills from me, Gary definitely was. After analyzing the fight so far, I’d come to the conclusion that he was as pure a spellcaster as he could be and slightly adjusted the strategy to accommodate for the situation. Communicating with the pack over the distance of the arena was no problem, since they were easily within range of my command skill, and every wolf gave an answer in the affirmative.
I glanced at Blue, who was still limping along. The spell Gary used earlier was incredibly fast and destructive, and I’d honestly been caught off guard, forcing me to transfer the damage to the pack. They were all a bit worse for wear, but our natural healing would eventually take care of it. Just in case, I ordered Green and Yellow to switch positions, so Yellow would take over the monitoring of the mountain, while Green could run around to provide healing to the others.
I sniffed the air, trying to get a whiff of a spell being cast, which was, while not optimal, the easiest way to locate the eldritch being. As expected, I could not smell anything, so I took the opportunity to choose the next skill to test on my opponent. After scrolling through the stupidly long list of skills, most of which I didn’t even use, I decided on an old favorite of mine. One of my most powerful skills, which had no small part in the taking of the asphon settlements.
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Shadow Flash Assassination (SS)
Attack from the shadows, delivering a piercing strike that ignores any and all resistances, immunities, shields, buffs, and natural armor. Deals damage based on your strength and dexterity attributes, multiplied by an extreme amount. Prevents the movement and spatial shift skills of the target until completion of the skill.
Conditions: Must be activated while in perfect stealth.
Cooldown: 24 hours
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The skill might be hard to pull off, but if it landed, it had the power to even assassinate a tier ten monster with relatively low HP. It had dispatched of many a mighty foe in a singular strike, and had taken care of all my political opponents in the asphon settlements. Undoubtedly, one of my trump cards, amidst a sea of garbage that the system had bestowed upon me. Since I got to draw a random reward every time I killed one hundred monsters, my status screen was swamped with low-tier skills that saw little to no use, but every now and again, I drew something truly worthwhile.
While it was one of my strongest skills, this one was very situational compared to some others. Yet, I was curious if it would end this fight early, or if Gary could avoid a boring end.
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Shadow Assimilation (S)
Merge with the shadows, becoming almost undetectable. While assimilated, you may shadow jump to any shadows within 1km and move at twice your usual speed. While in shadow form, you become undetectable by any detection skills of the same or lower tier.
Cost: 8’000 MP per minute
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My best stealth spell, while quite costly in the long run, paired excellently with my assassination skill. So, still not having found Gary, I merged with Blue’s shadow, waiting for my chance to strike.
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I stewed a bit in my most recent failure, observing Caedus from far above with void cloak and my stealth passive engaged. Still annoyed at the fact that the wolf apparently knew all my tricks and had counters for them at the ready, I was unsure what to do, aside from turning the spam up to eleven. Overwhelming force was the name of the game, and it was something that I could most certainly provide. And since the whole pack seemed rather unimpressed by my poison for some reason, it was all I had left.
As I considered my next actions carefully, Caedus vanished in a puff of black smoke. Great, now I had to be wary of another surprise ambush. Thankfully, my void feelers could help me spot the wolf early, which could give me the time I needed to react to his honestly ludicrous speed. Once again, I couldn’t help but feel like my lack of a proper fighting style was holding me back. Sure, having a whole team allowed for more varied tactics, but even if I was alone, I should really expand my fighting style beyond simply firing off whatever spells felt right at the moment.
I’m sure that was something I could rectify eventually once I joined the traveler initiative properly, but for now, doing my best while not dying was all I could do. For now, my biggest problem was that the pack enhanced the alpha by a ton, so the immediate goal was still the same. The smaller wolves needed to go before I could take care of Caedus. Unfortunately, they seemed to be able to summon their leader almost instantly. Yet, almost instantly wasn’t the same as instantly. There was a short window of vulnerability before they activated the summoning, and if I could exploit that, I would have a proper chance.
I quickly came up with two ways to approach the problem. First, I could take the colorful wolves out with a single attack, preventing them from buying the time they needed with evasive skills to summon their leader. Second, I quickly attacked the smaller ones in sequence, forcing them to use their evasive skills before leaving them high and dry while going after another wolf, before coming back to finish them off while their skill was still on cooldown. I thought back to my fight with Rollo, and how two point-blank void rends absolutely decimated even him.
The problem with that was that I needed to lower my shield so I could stick to their back, which would expose me to the damaging explosion of my own spell. Still, while the feat was taxing when I was still tier seven, I had gained quite a bit of power since then. It would still be very difficult to pull off, but I was confident enough that I could snap out a teleport spell to run away in the brief moment before reality realigned itself, causing the explosion. If nothing else, I wanted to see if I could pull it off, so I decided on this plan to start out with. My eyes landed on the forest, deciding that the wolf hiding there would make for a perfect first target, since the wooded area would provide me with a perfect environment to uphold my stealth skills.
I teleported above the forest, gliding along the canopy while scanning the ground with my void feelers until I located the red wolf about five minutes later. It was carefully stalking through the underbrush, constantly sniffing the air, no doubt searching for me. I followed it for about a minute, making sure that my own stealth skills were holding up, before enacting the plan. I started constructing the spell matrices for two void rends in parallel, immediately noticing that I’d failed to consider that I had several other spells active at the moment. Sure, once a spell like void cloak was going, it needed minimal input, but keeping a steady flow of MP going to the spell still required some attention, if barely.
Still, I powered through, and once the spells were complete and I started charging them with mana, I carefully started my approach. I had to take extra care not to accidentally hit a tree branch on my descent, lest I alert the wolf to my presence, but I managed to do it by exploiting a large gap between trees. Keeping the two spells at the ready while trying to accurately land on the back of a moving wolf that was about the same size as I was, was no easy feat. I should have predicted this and shrunk myself down by using the adult form skill, but it was too late for regrets now.
The jig was up pretty much immediately once I made contact with the wolf, who buckled under my weight suddenly pressing down on it. Rude. But also, convenient. No stealth skill in the world could disguise a heavy monster suddenly pin you to the ground… or maybe there was. I couldn’t rule out some EX-tier stealth skill allowing for some truly ridiculous shenanigans. I only considered this for a split second, as my mind was occupied with more important things.
The wolf let out a surprised yelp when I bowled it over, and before it could even think of reacting, I let loose my spells. Reality broke apart as I crossed the spells along the length of the red wolf's body, and I immediately started casting a teleport in a hurried panic.
Then, several things happened in rapid succession. The wolf let out the ethereal bark that I now knew summoned the alpha. My void feelers picked up Caedus’s presence behind me as he emerged from a tree's shadow, his right front claw alight with the shimmer of a skill, already mid-lunge. My teleport spell snapped into place and activated, before immediately fizzling out to my shock. And, before I could do anything, reality forcefully fixed itself, causing an explosion that sent both Caedus and me flying in different directions, while completely obliterating the red wolf.
It took me a second to process what happened before I caught myself in mid-air by snapping open my wings. Everything hurt, and a quick look at my status revealed that I’d come incredibly close to killing myself. If Caedus’s skill had reached me, I would’ve been toast. With a shiver running down my back, I carefully cast teleport once again to get away, which didn’t fail this time, to my relief. I appeared on the far side of the lake, stealth skills once again active, and dove into the water. I was incredibly thankful to past me for mutating some gills while diving to the bottom of the lake.
My HP was pitifully low, and I needed to buy some time to properly heal up. I idly noted that I rarely ever used my heal spell, denoted by its low level, since I usually didn’t have the time during a fight to worry about that. Getting back to full health would take a few minutes, as well as drain a substantial amount of my MP. I really needed to get that spell to a higher tier. As it stood, healing myself gobbled up over eighty thousand MP, which was entirely too much. Still, losing a hefty chunk of mana beats dying every day. Plus, I was able to take the time it took to heal myself to calm down, analyze the situation, and formulate a new plan.
While it was far from perfect, and I almost died, I had taken out the first wolf, and I couldn’t help but grin.
This was fun.