Adrenaline Junkie [Book 2 Complete]

Archie rushed through the forest, jumping from tree branch to tree branch, following the directions Aoife had given him to where she'd found the Dinomyrmex Gigas colony.

She said to make a left when reaching the large rock that looked like a foot. Archie thought to himself as he dodged an arrowhead-shaped stone bullet from one of the creatures, he rushed past. How can a rock look like a foot?

As Archie leaped from branch to branch, looking around for the large foot made of rock, his eyes widened before he sprang from his perch and vanished into the tree's crown.

Archie held his breath as he slowly turned his head to face the group of six patrolling guards, four hundred or so meters away from him.

Archie's red-tinged eyes, indicative that Vital Sight was currently active, zeroed in on the six of them. He watched and listened as they lazily joked with one another, barely paying attention to their surroundings.

"Joel, did ya see last night's game?" The one with blue skin and in the back of the group asked. "The one where Moaning Death played against Sinning Breath," he supplied when his human friend looked back at him with confusion.

"Ah," Joel replied in understanding. "No, I couldn't. Had to deal with fucking night patrol," he groaned, kicking an overground tree root and launching it somewhere into the forest.

"Why? What happened?" Another member in the group asked, a human with pink hair and thin cybernetics lining the side of her face.

"Wait! Oh, oh! Lemme guess," the pink-haired girl shouted in excitement, turning to face Joel.

"You were trying to hook up with Vaneera, weren't you?" The pink-haired girl guessed, smiling and wagging her finger in front of his face.

"For shame," she smirked, clicking her tongue teasingly.

"That's enough out of you, Veral," their captain said, grabbing the girl's cape hood and pulling her back into position. He paid no mind to how she crossed her arms and let herself be dragged, her cocky grin unwavering as she kept staring at Joel's annoyed expression.

"We need to put a muzzle on you," Joel muttered with a huff as he turned away from her annoyingly cocky grin. His cybernetic eyes' pupils dilated before he started to scan the trees around them, glowing a tinged red as he scanned for any signs of life within the forest.

Archie's heart quickened as Sixth Sense started to hum in response to Joel's sudden actions. He wasn't sure what to do.

If he moved, he would be caught.

If he didn't move, he would be caught.

Fuck, Archie thought as his eyes remained glued onto Joel's head as he slowly turned while following his teammates in front of him.

Each and every single one of them were D-Grades, with each one having far denser vital energy outlines and sparks than himself, even the three in the group with ranged Classes, including Joel. It was why his heart felt like beating drums when Joel suddenly made his vital energy funnel into his eyes.

He had some version of Vital Sight, or at least something that would sharpen his vision.

A nervous grin crawled atop his face as Archie felt the telltale sign of his adrenaline picking up. Fuck me, Archie thought as his adrenaline continued to rise. His grin turning into a full-blown toothy smile.

Archie had a few more seconds until Joel's eyes would find him hidden in the tree's crown, and both he and his team would either kill him on the spot or capture him, torture him, and then kill him.

Archie brought out a sliver of his mana and quickly drew out his Obscuring Stake before he covered the hilt with mana, just as Joel instantly whipped his head toward where Archie hid.

A wave of bloodlust erupted from Joel as his Perception skills instantly picked up on the sudden use of mana, not belonging to any creature he'd sensed during his four-year deployment into the Greenpatch forest.

But just as his eyes were millimeters away from catching sight of Archie in his periphery, a piercing sound of a shrieking wail echoed through the air, seventy meters away from where he sensed the sliver of unknown mana.

Joel's hands shot towards his ears and smashed them against his ears in an attempt to silence the shrill ringing that echoed through his mind. Its wailing screech was far louder than anything he'd ever heard before, causing him to physically recoil back, dismissing the oppressive bloodlust he'd instinctively sent out when he'd detected something out of place.

A moment later, Casandrea—their elven Aegis Bastion—deployed her enormous shield, which dwarfed her petite form. She struck it with her Warhammer that emerged from her right full-cast arm, producing a resounding gong that rippled through the air, sending a wave of force through the grass and shaking both the crowns of nearby trees and the trees themselves.

"We got an unknown on our one o'clock!" Casandrea shouted before she charged toward where the shrieking wail was echoing from, with her team not far behind her as she bulldozed through a few of the trees that stood in her path.

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Joel, who lingered slightly behind, was still a bit rattled from the sudden shrieking wail when his Perception heightening skills all instinctively activated when his Sense skill picked up on the sudden use of unrecognized mana around him.

His still dilated cybernetic eyes shakily traced to where he'd sensed mana activate from and found –

Nothing.

"Joel! Get your head out of your ass!" His captain, Swiir, a half-dwarf, shouted at him as he glanced over his shoulder to see Joel groggily standing, looking like a drunken fool with his hands still covering his ears.

Joel lingered for a moment, scanning the surrounding forest before clicking his tongue in annoyance, before rushing toward his team and deploying his full-cast Reinforced Ironwood Longbow with a flick of his arm and an arrow emerging from his opposite forearm.

Get your head back in the game, Joel, he chided himself, zigzagging through the trees to catch up to his teammates. It was probably a Coppertipped Vulture or something that got separated from its kettle.

Vaneera mentioned that around the fall season, she'd seen quite a few of them around the top of the wall looking for prey as the sandworm's mating cycle begins in fall and well, he knew firsthand that being around sandworms in general was a death sentence; his brothers in arms could attest to that.

"The war ended years ago," Joel muttered under his breath as he shook his head in an attempt to push away the faces of his fallen brothers. "Chasing ghosts will do nothing but tarnish their legacies."

"Carry their memory, not their weight," Joel repeated, reminding himself of the mantra his father told him long ago, when he'd returned from the war.

Archie released a heavy, gasping exhale as he stared at Joel, who'd started to chase after his team, a kilometer away from where he had previously hidden. His right fist tightened on the Obscuring Stake he'd surged with Runic Amplification.

His plan worked.

God, I love this, Archie smiled as his heart continued to beat with the frantic beat of a thousand drums. I knew it, Archie thought wistfully.

Back when he'd received his first-ever skill as an F-Grade Warrior, he was given the option between two skills: Warrior's Charge and Ambush Strike.

He'd spent quite a bit of time that evening both attempting to 'cook' and debating which skill to choose between the two. While he might have had an idea of what the two skills entailed at the time, only now, looking back, did he fully understand that if he'd chosen Ambush Strike over Warrior's Charge, he would never have gone down the path he was currently on.

If he'd chosen Ambush Strike over Warrior's Charge, then he was sure he never would have selected any of the rest of the skills he currently had, and definitely not his current class. He would have chosen Silentblade or some other equivalent Class and fulfilled the childhood dream of every kid and become the greatest ninja there ever was.

He'd initially thought that fighting like an assassin would make him have to control his emotions, and maybe it would have, but he would never know as he wasn't one. This had been the only time he'd actively hidden away from a stronger opponent… opponents.

What he did know was that the rush he'd gained from barely escaping Joel and his team's radar was just as euphoric as when he'd fought against bosses and other stronger creatures.

Maybe in another alternate dimension, if those existed, he would have become the greatest ninja that ever was.

Pulling himself from his musings, Archie continued to dash through the forest with the Obscuring Stake in hand, concealing all sound around him and obscuring his form, all the while continuously activating Runic Amplification on the runic script of Dampening, he'd placed all along the silver stake, which boosted its Obscuring Field ability.

He'd modeled it after the Impact Absorption rune he'd placed on his Shadowstalker Boots before plating them with steel. It was a relatively simple modification, requiring him to change its focus from a single direction and extend it to all directions, all while being surrounded by the remaining weapons of Dark imbuement he had swiped from a few demonic humans and thralls he'd killed during the raid on Oliver's camp.

When it had activated, it had created a field forty meters wide in all directions, and when amplified with Runic Amplification, its range extended from forty to seventy meters with a massive drain on its charge and higher physical degradation on both its runic script and the stake.

Archie had wasted no time with his left arm, already tossing one of the four Wailing Echo Spheres in another direction with all the strength he could muster without any more applications of mana, as that would have created a much longer lingering mana echo behind.

He couldn't even activate Runic Amplification on the runes he had placed atop the iron chips inside the spheres or the iron shelling itself, as doing so would increase their durability just enough to last a bit longer before they would inevitably explode, sending shrapnel everywhere.

I'm just glad it works, Archie thought as he hopped off a branch before, out of the corner of his right eye, something came into view of Vital Sight.

An ant.

Creating a thin mana platform underneath his left foot, Archie leaped off of it and towards the direction the ant had scurried from.

Landing on the side of a tree's trunk, Archie quickly kicked off of it and continued to tree-hop until he came across a large rock that looked like a foot.

Huh, it does look like a foot, Archie mused before making a left and narrowing his eyes at the number of ants he could see beneath the ground, underneath an oak tree with large overground gnarled roots.

Lowering the intensity of Vital Sight, Archie started to slow himself down and land just a few meters away from the tree, Aoife had informed him of.

As Archie slowly approached the tree, he noticed a large exoskeleton head pop out from under the roots. He immediately kicked off the ground toward it, placing the Obscuring Stake into his satchel before grabbing the sides of its head.

Archie's eyes quickly scanned around him and found no sight of any humanoid creature around him. He adjusted his sudden grip on the ant's head and then activated Adrenaline Rush at20%, ripping it off its neck.

*[Dinomyrmex Gigas – Scout Lv 99] has been slain – XP has been given.*

Letting its head fall out of his hands, Archie grabbed one of the folds of its exoskeleton and yanked out its twitching body from beneath the roots, revealing an entrance into its colony.

Deactivating Adrenaline Rush, Archie grabbed the three remaining Wailing Echo Spheres and activated Runic Amplification atop them just before channeling mana into Cragforge at the top of the sphere.

As a piercing sound of a shrieking wail erupted between his hands and rattled his brain, Archie quickly threw the Wailing Echo Spheres into the many tunnels that led into the Dinomyrmex Gigas colony.

Moments later, over the shrilling screeches of the Wailing Echo Spheres, faint chittering screeches could be heard.

Loud noise + caves = not a good time, Archie chuckled before taking out the four Dinomyrmex Gigas corpses and turning around to plant them in the direction of the wall.