Chapter 121: A Good Strategy is a Predictable one

“How goes it?” Caddock asked as Orev took a deep swig of a healing potion while Maybin kept his ankle straight. A little time-out to catch his breath.

“He’s burning through Charge fast,” Orev gasped as he unsealed his mouth from the bottle. “But sir, I’m not sure if we’ll be able to pin him down in one place long enough to-“ Orev made a hammering motion.

“Don’t worry about that. As long as miss Thuy has parts of his Set, that’s about the second-best bait we could possibly have.”

“That’s the thing!” Orev said, raising a finger. “She’s claiming the set for herself, saying she’s gonna be some kind of Blood Lord, I don’ fuckin’ know. I do know that if she gets the rest of it, she’s gonna stab us in the back.”

“I know.” Caddock said with a shrug.

“Then why did you add her to the Party?” Orev asked. “She’s not even Graneshian.”

“Don’t worry about it. Just make him use up as much Charge as you can before miss Thuy’s Downswing. Which has…” Caddock glanced at the sand pouring through the narrow opening in his five-minute-glass. “About three minutes ‘till.”

“Three minutes? That kid fights like the devil. He stabbed me with my own arrow. With his foot! in midair! He’s level thirty, right? It feels like fighting another Advanced Class. I got him on the arm with some poison but it’s not doing much and Imtithal hasn’t done a damn thing to him…” Orev started muttering bitterly.

“Try not to die. I want you back here in three minutes.”

Orev scoffed.

“That’s one hundred and eighty seconds.”

“I know, I know,” Orev grumbled, testing his weight on his newly healed leg.

“You can do it.” Caddock said, giving his subordinate a stiff smile and a thumbs-up.

Orev rolled his eyes and disappeared in an explosion of feathers.

Once Orev was gone, Caddock straightened, all signs of levity vanishing.

“Once that timer runs out, Miss Thuy has outlived her usefulness. When it runs out, I want you to vaporize everything in the valley.” Caddock commanded. “Start with Miss Thuy and the Set items she’s wearing, then move on to Mr. Oh.”

“Yessir,” Miss Glasswind said, giving him a salute.

“I’m looking forward to seeing if your namesake is accurate.” Caddock said, clasping his hands behind his back as he observed the battle, picturing the valley filled with shards of rapidly cooling glass where once was earth and stone.

“My namesake is an understatement.” Maybin Glasswind said, picking up her mutated Staff of the Warmage in preparation for her task.

**William Oh**

“What now?” Loth asked as Will rose to his feet, watching himself from above for any sneaky behind-the-back attacks.

“Now we kill or scatter them and make our way back to the Fifth Floor. How’s Jason?”

“He’s on his way to the Hole.”

Will nodded, scanning the horizon for the next attack.

This whole battle felt off to Will, like all those times Lord Bakton had deliberately put him off balance in order to thump him on whatever unguarded body part he deemed necessary to teach Will the lesson.

The broad strokes of it were obvious:

The berserker had his gear, and Will wouldn’t leave without it. The ranger was keeping pressure on him in order to drain his Charge and tenderize him for the finishing blow.

Will just had no idea what the finishing blow would look like, but he could feel it looming over them.

Will also didn’t know who was running the show.

Is this a continuation of the battle against the paladin at Basalt, or did the church send someone else after me? Or is it someone else entirely who detected the set and is trying to steal it?

Unfortunately, Will hadn’t seen anyone he recognized yet. For the first time in his life, Will wished that he paid more attention to celebrities.

The people trying to kill him right now were powerful enough that they had to be some level of famous, and if Will knew who they were, he might be able to figure out who they were associated with and by extension, what their goal was.

How can I mess up their finishing blow? Will mused.

He could leave: just pick himself and Loth up and fly faster than they could match. That would infuriate whoever was orchestrating this farce, but it would also give them the opportunity to claim and/or destroy the remaining three pieces of Will’s Set.

And that would infuriate Will.

I could counter the killing blow. That would infuriate the puppetmaster.

The problem with that was that he didn’t know what form it would take, where it was coming from, and the timing of the attack.

A guttural bellow of rage emerged from underground as the berserker burst out of Loth’s stone containment trap, seemingly unharmed and flinging chunks of rock everywhere.

That damned rage is making the blood scales impenetrable. When the Downswing happens, I’ll-

Will considered as he retreated from her maddened swings.

There’s the timing. I’m on the defensive until her Rage expires. When it does, I’ll immediately go on the offensive and aim to retrieve my set, my focus on that goal blinding me to what might be happening around me.

That’s when I’ll be vulnerable to being blindsided. They’ll swoop in and switch out the berserker with something much more dangerous.

Now I still need to answer where and how.

“Hold STILL!” the berserker shouted.

Will turned his attention over to the berserker and two of his snakes wrapped themselves around her legs and flung her straight up into the air, letting go before she had the opportunity to reach down and remove them.

The snakes weren’t stronger than she was, but she only weighed two hundred and fifty pounds, at most. Even if she was stronger than them all he had to do was grab her in a place she couldn’t easily reach and give her a little toss.

Oh. Will hadn’t been able to throw her like that earlier mostly because he only had the one hand: He needed it to keep pressure on the ranger, and its grip wasn’t wide enough to circle a fully armored leg.

Now that he had five…

Phantom Eye spotted the ranger poof silently into existence overlooking him on the hillside above, drawing an arrow to his cheek.

Without any prompting, two of the snakes –

Let’s call them Thumb and Pointer, Will thought.

Thumb and Pointer sprang across the distance and tried to break the man’s ankle the same way they had earlier. The ranger managed to dodge it this time, teleporting out moment before the snakes wrapped around his neck.

Will leaned out of the way as the arrow whistled past him.

Will blinked, scanning the battlefield as the ranger retreated, teleporting back to whatever distant hole he liked to hide. When he wasn’t trying to trick Will, his retreat area was off the map entirely.

Did reaching the four-piece set bonus completely swing the fight the opposite direction? Will considered. Will’s ability to multitask was outrageously improved, and it was making dealing with two opponents at once a simple endeavor.

Off the map…

If I want to counter the killing blow I need to change the flow of the battle and go on the offensive right NOW. The 4-piece set bonus was granting him enough breathing room to choose his tactics, rather than play endless keepaway.

Phantom Eye

36 -> 16 Charge remaining.

Above Will, twenty Phantom Eyes emerged, causing Will to stagger in place as the vast amount of visual information flooded his mind.

He’d never practiced with more than a single one at a time, and now the spot he’d mentally partitioned for his ‘third eye’ was cluttered with twenty disparate viewpoints.

In a moment of inspiration, Will directed all of them to cluster close together and look straight down. After a bit of adjustment, his mind was able to stitch together the different viewpoints into a single image, which made him a lot less queasy.

Will directed the cluster of Phantom Eyes to shoot straight up a quarter mile before they began to gradually expand away from each other, creating a mental map that stretched dozens of miles in every direction.

Now where are the rest of you? Will mused, mentally scanning the map by dedicating his attention to one section of the map at a time, ‘expanding’ that part of the map by moving closer with the eye responsible for that piece, making the detail go up, while the overall map was preserved with the overlap between the Phantom Eye’s view.

This is very strange.

BOOM!

The berserker landed feet first, sending up a cloud of dust and stone.

The ground gave way underneath her as she fell into Loth’s trap.

He distantly heard a feral curse, muffled under a wall of stone.

“Are we just too good at this?” Will mused as his Phantom Snakes harried the ranger, chasing him from hiding spot to hiding spot.

All the while, Will was expanding his mental ‘map’, looking for any sign of their backup.

They wouldn’t be pressing this hard if they didn’t have backup.

The ranger certainly didn’t look like he wanted to be there, and there was no love lost between him and the berserker. Yet they were on the same team.

Will felt a Charge flow underneath his feet, and he pulled himself and Loth back moments before the berserker erupted from the ground again.

“You little shit,” She muttered, climbing to her feet.

Tried to climb to her feet. Two of the snakes he’d dedicated to harassing her  – Let’s call them Ring and Pinky – kept harrying her feet, preventing her from doing anything other than writhe face-down in the dirt where she belonged, never staying long enough to allow her to hit them with the tomahawk she was wildly swinging.

Meanwhile, Will kept searching the map in his mind, carefully keeping his stomach under control as the borders of the stitched-together images shifted, momentarily revealing that it was not one image, but twenty.

Finally he spotted two ant-size figures standing on the opposite side of the mountain southwest of them, some fifteen miles distant. One of whom was instantly recognizable as the paladin, while the other had a staff eerily similar to Mason’s Staff of the Warmage.

There you are.

A feral scream pulled his attention back to the berserker as she gave up on standing, instead putting a hand over her stolen mask.

“That’s how you wanna play it!?”

Will leapt backwards at the feel of a Charge being spent. The berserker exploded outward, the mask’s jaws opening to reveal a real, hissing mouth.

In a fraction of a second, what was human was replaced by serpent as the snake mask seemed to extend backwards, engulfing the berserker’s neck, shoulders, arms, legs, and gear, leaving nothing but a massive snake with a mane of multicolored feathers.

Between her scales, blood oozed outwards, forming another layer of protection until the entire snake turned crimson. She really could have been the Crimson Snake Lord.

“I don’t mind the aesthetic; scales are better, obviously. But is not having hands…a good thing?” Loth asked.

The berserker seemed to recover from her transformation, fixing the two of them with a golden-eyed stare.

“…Nope.” Will lifted himself straight up into the air with Middle while Loth sank into the earth. No sense letting that thing engage them on equal terms.

I guess we’re back to our rousing game of keepaway until I know exactly how dangerous that thing is.

The forty-foot crimson serpent leapt off the ground and began swimming through the air after him, eyes blazing with hunger.

Of course it can fly. Why wouldn’t it be able to fly? Silly me.

Ring and Pinky snakes tried to shove her nose around a bit, but the sheer mass of the creature made that a pointless endeavor.

Changing tactics, Will withdrew Ring and Pinky and set them on the task of keeping him aloft and dextrous while sending the two figures hiding fifteen miles distant…the middle finger.