Might as Well

Before approaching the people taking care of the remaining corpses of the stone spiders, he checked his gear and called out Lucky. The loyal wolf appeared in all his splendor from his shadow and landed softly on the gravel-covered ground in front of Sam with a wide grin on his muzzle.

He got on his knees and spent a few seconds hugging Lucky and running his finger through his fur to the delight of his familiar. Then, after getting his fill (for now) of the silky-smooth fur, he leaned forward and began whispering into the wolf’s ear. While he knew this way, the system would ‘hear’ parts of his plan, he hoped it would be fair and not react to it.

Finished with the instructions, he dismissed his shadowy familiar and resumed his journey toward the quarry. Meanwhile, his messages began to blow up with reports from Lucy, Adam, and Tim.

Taking a quick look at the messages, he saw that the messages from Lucy and Adam were mostly status reports of the guild members who responded to the request, while Tim’s were about the smokescreen he was setting up.

Opening the message, he saw that there was a war between two rival guilds in Ironwood, and a hitherto unknown fracture's location was leaked guaranteeing that everyone’s attention would be on those events.

‘Wow… he is really good…’

Another few steps were followed by another deluge of messages, this time from his team. Dan was on his way, and so were Katie and Izzy, while Clarissa still had some tasks at the Healer Guild. Giving it a quick thought, he directed the two chaotic girls to go and pick up Clarissa. Healers were, after all, prime targets and he doubted anyone could take the trio without large personal investments. Which, thanks to Tim’s machinations, would be improbable. But not impossible, thus his instructions.

Not a few seconds later, he received the acknowledgment of his message for the girls and he let out a relieved sigh.

A few minutes later he was down in the quarry walking forward toward the collection of guild members as they sat there, talking among themselves while clearly waiting for the next wave.

Sam didn’t try to hide so naturally, almost everyone (some people were standing with their backs to him) spotted his approach. Thankfully, there were actually people there who recognized him so he didn’t have to prove to a bunch of new people who he was.

He received several salutes and greetings, which he returned with small smiles and respectful nods.

“Sup, boss!”

“Hey!”

“What brings you here?”

Instead of answering every question, he quickly tapped the ground with his right foot, summoning a small podium made of stone and dirt. Ignoring the looks sent his way, he stepped up on it and then looked around.

He spent a few seconds meeting people’s eyes and waiting until the noise of conversation slowly disappeared as people began to focus on him.

Then a little awkwardly cleared his throat before speaking up. “Can everyone hear me?”

Silence was his answer.

Giving a small smile he continued. “Alright. I’m not big for speeches,” he pointed at the hole from where the stone spiders crawled out. “This place is important for the guild. We’re going down there and killing everything.”

Excitement quickly began to take over the crowd. Sam even saw the group that tried to ‘arrest’ him at the back, whispering to each other. The ascot still looked stupid.

“Is this a raid?” one person asked, instantly filling the crowd with even more excited whispers.

“Could be,” Sam replied. “We don’t know what is on the other end of the cave system,” he lied like a lying liar. “Could be a fracture or some monster nest…”

Everybody began nodding at that very logical explanation as Sam continued.

“Earth mages to my right, please,” he said and watched as a few people moved there. “The rest organize yourself in your usual teams.”

“Will this be enough for the raid?” asked another person.

“Don’t worry. The rest of the guild is on their way.”

That caused a wave of relief to go through the people in front of him.

“Now! Who was leading the efforts here?” he asked.

Instantly, a hand went up from the back of the crowd, which parted to show the ascot-wearing man walking toward him.

“Er, that would be me! Sir!” he replied, a tad nervous.

Sam hopped off his temporary podium, sent it back to the ground with a simple flex of his will, and walked closer to the guy while still ignoring the whispers, but called out just in case. “Everyone! Stand ready for the next wave, but don’t attack them. I want to test something!”

“Yes, sir!”

“Sure thing, boss!”

“Aye, aye!”

He approached the nervous young man and held out a hand. “Hi, name’s Solar.”

The other man accepted the hand and shook it. “Hi. Name is BlueKnight, but you can call me Fred. Everybody does it for some reason…”

Sam had to bite back a snort after hearing that. “Sure thing, Fred. Now tell me about the situation here!”

Fred nodded and quickly began to paint a picture for Sam.

Sam checked his messages and saw that the first groups were close to the quarry. They could have arrived faster, but both Adam and Lucy agreed that they needed to keep their movements at least a little secret no matter what distractions Tim arranged.

According to Fred – he would laugh about that later – the frequency of the waves had been increasing by a few minutes each time, thus he didn’t have to wait much longer.

The guild members were standing on the sides, leaving enough space in the middle for a fight while Sam stood in the middle of the empty place, facing the cave entrance.

Seeing people getting ready to throw down with the monsters, he called out. “Hold your fire! I want to test something!”

Instantly, another wave of whispers spread through the players.

“What?”

“Does he want to fight them alone?”

“Does the boss really need the experience points?”

“I kinda want to see it happen…”

However, before anyone could voice their objection or anything else, the area shook a little with a few smaller rocks rolling down the mountainside as a result of this.

“They are coming!” someone yelled.

Sam nodded and raised both of his hands and reached out to the surrounding wind. Instantly, wind spears began to appear near him, causing several people to gasp, followed by several hundred more, causing the air space above him to be saturated with buzzing wind spears.

His mana sense was fully trained on the mountain, trying to sense the being deep inside without poking it with his own mana again. He was powerful, but there were limits.

’A fucking Titan! Here, of all places!’ he grumbled to himself.

Titans were what the player base called the gigantic monsters that sometimes appeared in the world of Magic Unbound. There was nothing really common in them aside from being extremely big. Some were created by the natural mana at certain locations, some were the results of human experimentations, but there were Titans born from curses and even blessings.

They were always powerful, with enough health to tank several guilds worth of firepower, and caused devastation whenever they woke up.

The problem with this one was that Sam had never heard of one appearing this close to Ironwood. There were dozens in the ocean near Deepanchor, the swamps also held a few, and deep in the mountain range was another bunch that he knew. In his memories, he saw as the other Sam watched the videos as guilds spent an incredible amount of money and effort to find these Titans and defeat them for prestige and rewards.

And they didn’t wake up on their own. Somebody had to wake them up.

Either something was afoot, or maybe the fact that Sam suspected this one was a curse-type Titan caused it to wake up on its own.

Either way, he just knew the next few hours were going to suck as they had to defeat it before anybody else saw it.

It was not like they could hide a mountain-sized spider…

‘Maybe if we painted it pink…’ he mused with a small smile as he felt the tremors through the ground while his senses told him that several masses of mana were rapidly approaching the open air of the quarry.

Within seconds the first spider, one of the medium-sized ones broke into the sunlight screeching and dashing straight toward Sam, ignoring everybody else, and within a blink of an eye it was followed by a deluge of small and medium ones, their exit speed only constrained by the diameter of the hole in the mountainside.

Ignoring the clamor around him and the approaching horde intent on devouring him, Sam raised his right hand further up and then with a sharp movement brought it down, launching all the spears above him with extreme precision.

The sound the clash of wind spears and stone spiders made was enough to mask the noise the giant stone spiders made as they crawled out of the hole damaging the surrounding wall with their haste.

With the first wave dead, Sam sent forward a cloud of wind blades to make mincemeat of the small spiders and turned his attention to the big ones. They were big, angry, and really trying to reach him.

Experimentally, he sent one single wind blade at one of their legs and while it left a small scratch; it didn’t do too much damage. As if encouraged by this, the steps of the giant stone spiders became even faster as the guild members watched restlessly.

But they weren’t fast enough…

Sam raised his hand again and briefly focused on the area in front of him where he conjured a small ball of extremely condensed wind mana. The next second the ball shot forward, transforming during the flight into the crescent of an exceptionally sharp blade of mana that shone from the amount of mana it contained.

The nearest stone spider to Sam didn’t even stop as he released the spell, either because the last one didn’t hurt it or because in their anger, they didn’t care what happened to them. Looking into their angry red eyes, Sam suspected it was the second case.

This blade of wind mana also struck true. However, while the last one only scratched the leg of the giant stone spider, this one went through it like a hot knife through butter.

And the leg behind it.

Followed by several medium-sized spiders that had the misfortune to be in its path before the mana holding it together gave out and it exploded, taking out another batch of freshly arrived small spiders.

The wounded spider fell forward, losing its balance, straight into the spike of hardened earth that shot up with incredible speed, crushing its head.

There was a moment of silence and then the other giant spiders reeled up and let out a screech that shook the area, causing loose dirt and rocks to fly every which way while trying to deafen everyone present.

And in the sea of mana, Sam could see that the mass of mana inside the mountain got even angrier, the eight red eyes very visible even from far away.

All of them trained on Sam.

‘Joy…’ he thought as he quickly began summoning more wind blades.

Soon, the field was littered with the dead bodies of the stone spiders, none of them coming even close to his location while the surrounding players gaped at him.

The monsters themselves were nothing special, so he didn’t care. Instead, he continued to watch with resignation as the mana in the mountain began to move aggressively.

He had enough time to send out a warning to Adam before the ground he was standing on began shaking as if an earthquake was occurring.

Thanks to his skills he didn’t fall over, but he saw several players being sent to the ground.

“What the hell?”

“What is happening!”

“Get off! And stop touching me there!”

Then an explosion of rock and dust filled the air.

BAAAMMMM

CRASH

And part of the mountainside moved toward them. However, instead of boulders rolling, it was a giant slab of stone in the shape of the legs of a spider. The claws at the end of the leg were bigger than Sam.

The leg moved forward coming down on the ground with people running out of its way, raining down fine dust particles as it shook off who knows how many eons worth of detritus.

Meanwhile, quite understandably, the players around Sam were not so quietly freaking out.

“What the fuck is that?”

“Mommy!”

“I hate spiders!”

Then another explosion.

BAMMM

Another leg was revealed opposite of the first one, sending stone and rock everywhere.

Sam looked at the chaos around him, then closed his eyes and watched as the ‘core’ of the mana slowly began to move.

“I probably can’t talk myself out of this…” he spoke quietly to himself as he unsheathed his sword.