Chapter 115: A Pair of Guards

I stood in the battlefield, still covered in the blood of the Infernals that had just died by my hand—and by Asmo’s arrow. And the Archer, who was standing just a couple dozen paces away from me, bow drawn, was standing in my way alongside the other axe-wielding royal guard.

Behind them, I could see Ainash and the Dragon still rampaging through the enemy forces of the wall, though those forces seemed to be dwindling—if just a bit. At the very least, the constant notifications I got about Ainash killing enemies and giving me XP were getting a little less frequent by now.

Thinking back to my encounter with the Royal Guards, way back before I’d even gotten to Level 10, I remembered they had been around the mid to high Level 20s. I’d certainly gotten a good bit stronger by then—and these two people were probably pretty damaged by Astintash’s assault on the wall—but I had no doubt I’d probably lose in a fair fight against the two. I’d just gotten out of a fight of my own, so even my basic advantage of them being a bit beaten up was nullified.

“Listen,” I said, trying my best to keep things from resorting to violence, “I’m sure you hate the Demons too. If we just work together–”

And then Asmo shot an arrow at my head.

I ducked underneath it, just barely dodging in time, and the woman with the axe rushed forward, preparing for a full-force swing at my torso. I leapt back and cursed them both with Crippling Chill.

You have cursed Level 25 Human Berserker with Crippling Chill. For the next 15 seconds, she loses 7.76 Health and 6.21 Stamina each second, and her Dexterity score is lowered by 15.5.

31.8 Mana Cost. Your Mana is 484.

You have cursed Level 24 Human Archer with Crippling Chill. For the next 15 seconds, she loses 7.76 Health and 6.21 Stamina each second, and her Dexterity score is lowered by 15.5.

31.8 Mana Cost. Your Mana is 452.

Level 25 Berserker, and Level 24 Archer, huh? Yeah, so they were both mid-20s. Not exactly the highest in the Kingdom—generally, guards didn’t have the highest Levels when compared to adventurers, since their jobs didn’t involve them actually going out and fighting monsters to get XP—but it was still plenty high enough for them to kill me.

The Berserker woman swung her axe in a wide arc, stepping forward at a supernatural pace using what was probably a Martial Art in order to hit me despite my attempt to evade her strike. The battleaxe swung around, straight toward the side of my stomach, and I knew I wasn’t fast enough to dodge it this time.

So, in a split-second decision, I decided to activate Expedite two more times. I’d already put two stacks of the Spell on myself, so this would raise my Dexterity to an absolutely blistering score of 148. A score that I was in no way prepared for. But I’d die without it, so I grit my teeth and prepared to focus every drop of effort on staying upright.

The effects of the Spell hit me like a Dragon’s stomp, and in an instant I kicked my foot to fling myself backward.

You have been sliced. 4 damage.

Your Health is 61.

You have been inflicted with Burning Blood.

For the next 10 seconds, you gain the following effects:

You lose 1 Health every second.

Whenever you take damage from a physical source, that source deals an additional 50% damage, up to a maximum of 25 additional damage.

I mentally cursed. The blade of the battleaxe just barely grazed my stomach, but of course the damn thing had been Enchanted. I’d take a minimum of an extra 10 damage from the Burning Blood curse, but if I got hit again, it’d deal extra.

The combination of the pain from my new wound and the disorienting nature of Expedite caused me to land wrong when I hit the ground, and I tumbled backward to the dirt.

“Ripley, to the side,” I heard Asmo’s voice say, and looking up from my sitting position in the gravel, I saw the Berserker woman—apparently her name was Ripley—step to the side while she charged forward at me with her axe. Behind her, she revealed Asmo, with her bow drawn, now having a clear shot straight at my head.

I raised my hand and cast a Ray of Frost at her head just as she loosed her arrow.

You have struck Level 24 Human Archer for 54 damage using Ray of Frost.

You have cursed Level 24 Human Archer with Ray of Frost. For the next 5 seconds, its Dexterity score is lowered by 7.77.

14.2 Mana Cost. Your Mana is 377.

The Ray shot straight into her eyes, and luckily, caused her aim to waver just enough that the arrow shot to my left, narrowly missing me.

I activated Gravity Well on the still-approaching Ripley to buy just a bit of time as I scrambled to my feet, just barely getting to a standing position as she swung her axe diagonally across my chest. This time, I let up Gravity Well just as she began swinging to try and trip her up a bit, and lunged forward, too close to her for the axe to be effective, grabbing onto her face in a half-tackle and activating Noxious Grasp.

I had to let go just as quickly and flee, though, because Asmo had drawn another arrow and was about to shoot.

You have struck Level 25 Human Berserker for 3.2 damage and drained 3.3 Stamina over the course of 1.3 seconds using Noxious Grasp.

0.6 Mana Cost. Your Mana is 369.

I was stuck in a state of constant flight, fighting the two of them simultaneously. If I tried to attack one of them, the other would be there to fight me off and keep me occupied. Noxious Grasp, by nature, wanted me to hold onto an enemy, staying stationary while I drained away their Health. Normally, I could do that with the debuffing nature of my other Spells, keeping my enemy weakened and using a combination of Noxious Grasp and Ray of Frost to slowly chip away their Health.

But when up against a pair of powerful foes, I couldn’t focus my debuffs on a single one of them, and if I tried to use everything on both, not only would it totally drain my Mana, but it probably wouldn’t even be enough to severely weaken them, anyway—I’d need to also drain their Stamina to do that.

I didn’t have enough Health, Stamina, or Mana to take them both on at once. And I knew that going into this.

My goal wasn’t to kill them. My goal was to survive long enough for someone else to come in and even the sides.

Astintash would obviously be ideal—if it came over here, they’d be forced to flee—but I didn’t have much hope of the Dragon being so benevolent as to come and willingly save my life when it was so busy killing enemies of its own. Ainash was also too far to be able to quickly come over here, not to mention she was in the midst of fighting dozens of Humans and Infernals, too.

My only hope was—

A ball of fire flew across my vision and slammed into Asmo, the resulting explosion flinging her several paces away.

Before I could even say “thank you” to Erani, she rushed forward and yelled over to me, “I’ll take the Archer! You focus on the other one.”

She shot another Firebolt at Asmo, who was lying on the ground, covered in burns, but before the Firebolt hit, she suddenly disappeared from sight, reappearing a dozen paces back, standing on her two feet with bow drawn. Erani didn’t seem too worried at this, though, and simply raised her hands to cast another.

Ripley charged at me, unfazed at her partner’s being shot. She seemed purely focused on her fight. I ducked underneath her swing and leapt to her side. Thankfully, since I’d already gotten used to tow stacks of Expedite, raising that number to four wasn’t too bad. At least, I was beginning to become used to it. With two Expedites active, my Dexterity would be 86, meaning the new score of 148 was only about double what it had been before. Still an extreme increase, but not as bad as going from zero Expedites to two of them.

I sidestepped a strike and ducked below another, focusing every piece of my mind on just dodging the fast and powerful attacks of such a high-Level Classer.

Index, I thought as I dodged, what can you tell me about her?

“Well, I can tell you the basic way the Berserker Class functions,” she said.

I ducked below another swing of the axe with the help of a pulse of Gravity Well on Ripley to temporarily throw her off.

“It’s actually a bit similar to Minute Mage in a sense,” Index continued, “in that is has a single, signature Talent that it gets at Level 0 and will get more powerful as the Class Levels. That Talent is the appropriately-named ‘Berserk.’”

I shot Ripley with a Ray of Frost to distract her as I backed away some more.

“I can’t tell you the exact numbers, but the Talent is technically free to activate at any time, as often as the user wants. And what it does is increases all of a person’s physical Stats, general fighting abilities, and especially Health regeneration.”

I re-cast Expedite on myself as the older two stacks of the Spell wore off.

“There’s a reason Berserkers use their Talent sparingly, though. In return for increasing their fighting abilities, it has a couple costs. First, it costs some Stamina every second it’s active, which does physically limit how often someone can keep it active. But the second thing it does—and this is the more well-known downside—is it impairs the user’s sense.”

Ripley tore her axe through the air, and it grazed my arm this time, re-activating its Burning Blood curse on me.

“Basically, when someone’s under the effects of Berserk, they’re completely filled with rage. To an inhuman degree. They still have decent battle-sense and can tell friend from foe and everything, but while that Talent is active, a Berserker wants nothing more than to end the life of their opponent.”

She swung her axe straight downward, threatening to split my head in half, and a well-timed sidestep was all that saved me.

“The way this is relevant to you is that it’s functionally impossible to reason with that woman, in her current state. She understands language just fine, but she won’t listen to anything you say. And she won’t really act in accordance to basic principles like self-preservation, either. She’d be happy to die if it meant you died, too. Regardless of her feelings about all this while the Talent isn’t active, she hates you more than anything else for now.”

Ripley suddenly began moving in a completely unnatural way—a classic sign that she’d activated another Martial Art. Her arms moved faster than I could see, swinging the axe down at me in what felt like five directions at once. In a split-second decision, I charged forward and tackled her, just barely dodging the lethal attack. I got in half a second’s worth of Noxious Grasp with that, too, but nothing else before I was forced to flee from her once again.

“There are a couple ways the Talent can deactivate. One is that, after a bit of time, it’ll just turn off on its own. It’s on a set timer. But, like I said before, the Talent is free to turn on and doesn’t have any limits like yours about how many times in a day it can be activated. So the only way for it to turn off and stay off is if this woman runs out of Stamina. The Talent can’t be used if its user’s Stamina levels are below five percent of their maximum, since the Talent has a natural cost of Stamina every second it’s active.”

Ripley screamed in rage, sounding more like the Infernals I’d fought than an actual person, and charged at me with her axe glinting in the setting sun. I shot off a pair of Rays of Frost, careful not to use too much of my Mana, and used that moment of distraction to dodge to the side and avoid another of her strikes.

“So, basically, you’re up against a super-powered Melee-Type with an insatiable lust for my blood. And until that Talent shuts off, you’re not going to have much luck in killing her. The boosted Health regeneration really is quite ridiculous. In fact… yep, I’m just now getting that I can tell you this, she is literally missing six Health from her maximum right now. That’s all the damage you’ve actually managed to deal to her in this fight, with your slower means of dealing damage.”

I ducked under another swing of her axe.

“But she is at around half Stamina. So you’ve been doing quite well in that department. Let’s see… what do you have available to you… Your Health is 34, Stamina’s 61, and Mana’s down to 345. I guess you could activate Regenerate for a bit more Health, but that’d leave you with so little Stamina I’d be worried about your ability to keep fighting. So let’s not do that.”

I backed away from Ripley, breathing heavily.

“Seems like your best friend in this fight is gonna be your Noxious Grasp Upgrade, Venomous Grasp. It doubles all Stamina loss for five seconds after hitting them with the Spell, and that counts the natural Stamina cost every second from the Berserk Talent. It also counts all Stamina costs of Martial Arts.”

Ripley scowled and charged.

“So Stamina is going to be the bottleneck for her. You need to abuse that as best as you can here. She’s using up a bit more every second she fights, all you have to do is make sure those seconds pass by without you taking damage.”

Just as she swung at me, I re-cast Crippling Chill, which had worn off at some point during the fight. With the sudden loss of Dexterity she was stunned for a fraction of a second, allowing me to escape her swing alive one more time.

“So, uh, yeah. You got all that?”

Yeah, I thought. By some miracle, I managed to listen to everything Index was saying while not dying to Ripley. I’d taken a bit more damage than I’d have liked—and definitely spent more Mana than I’d have wanted—but I also got a bit more Mana back every second, so spending it to keep myself from dying was a pretty good use of it, in my opinion.

Erani and Asmo were still battling in the background, taking long-range shots at each other, with Erani using Angelic Shield to shrug off all of the hits that weren’t direct, and Asmo abusing her teleportation to avoid being hit by the Firebolts.

But between me and Ripley, we were both looking much worse for wear. Even with just the couple grazing hits she’d managed to get on me, the Enchantment on her axe tore through my Health all the same. Just a couple more like that and I’d be dead. But she was also low on Stamina, and all I had to do was rid her of the last bit she was clinging on to.

And that was what I’d do.

It was time for me to finish this fight.