The Liberomancer [Isekai Progression LitRPG]

As it advanced, I realized that no one else on the wall knew what I was doing, and it was best that I explain myself.

"Relax," I told everyone. "My summon is immune to flames and can even use them to its own advantage."

Most people wouldn't know about the Arachnea - they didn't live near Chipker (thank god for that) and I had only found a few pieces of information after asking the guild librarian to dig for them. Most of my knowledge came from the actual summoning spell.

"Immune to flames eh…" Drake said, clicking his tongue. To a fire elementalist like him, that was not good news. It was one of the biggest drawbacks to being an elementalist - if you ran into something like a Tyrant Arachnea that countered your element, you were in trouble. Conversely, it was good to be an elementalist against something you were strong against, which is why it was a huge relief that fire elementalists were so common in Arconia. Thankfully we were fighting dryads and not Arachnea - Drake was likely just annoyed that I had a summon that countered most of his build.

"This is…" Drake began to say as the dryads changed course, no longer heading towards the water, but away from what was rushing at them.

The Tyrant Arachnea's speed was faster than that of a horse and slower than that of your average car. I could try to make it faster in the future by learning a skill that might speed it up in proportion to my Speed stat, but from what I'd heard that would only be a marginal increase. Regardless, seeing something that big moving at you so fast would give anyone pause. I didn't know just how much the dryads understood things, but they were not without basic survival instincts.

There were ways to combat the Tyrant Arachnea, of course, even if fire magic didn't work on it. For one, its underside was not as well armored as the rest of its body, and was very vulnerable to attacks. However, while running, its underbelly was not exposed and very hard to target so this weakness was somewhat covered. Secondly, it was extremely susceptible to cold weather and ice element spells as you might expect, though with the coat of fire around it, it had no need to worry about such a thing currently. Third, its eyes were also a weak point that could be exploited and targeted readily even if its underbelly wasn't exposed. However, since summoned creatures shared information with their summoners, that meant that even if its eyes were gouged out completely, it would still know where to go via my own mental directions.

In other words, I had covered most of its weaknesses!

It ran into the dryad horde with the momentum of a freight train and suicidal nonchalance to boot - being a summon, it did not care whether it lived or died.

The dryad's claws and primitive weapons were like toothpicks before its extremely tough exoskeleton, and the fire began to spread very rapidly. Unlike the fire started via [Fireball] or [Grand Fireball], it was being maintained by the Tyrant Arachnea and kept on spreading from its body wherever it made contact, going from one dryad to the next like a stack of dominos falling.

Since the dryads were crowded so close together, it was easy for the flames to spread.

First the fire spread to a hundred, then later two hundred, and so on, until more than a thousand of them were ablaze. Some of them ran for the river as they realized what was going on by this point, but most were too far away and ran for the ocean instead. I guess they were so weak to fire that 'stop, drop, and roll' really weren't options for them.

Eventually though, the dryad's attacks, even if they were mostly ineffective, turned out to be too much, and the Tyrant Arachnea succumbed to its injuries when one of them got a lucky shot at its underbelly by slipping under it.

Looking at the chaos it had created in the enemy lines, it was more than well worth it.

The dryads had remarkable self-regenerating properties so long as they had enough water, sunlight, and blood. The last ingredient was something that we were starving them out of, but I didn't know how long they'd need to be starved of that before it affected how much they could regenerate.

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As such, it wasn't like I had killed over a thousand of them. Some of them might recover. Despite that, the effectiveness of this attack couldn't be understated.

For one, they would be out of commission for the next few days assuming that they still had enough fresh blood in their systems to recover. If not, then they might even end up dying from their injuries.

Secondly, you didn't need to be Sun Tzu to realize that war is mainly about one thing - fear. It was not about killing every single one of your enemies, but rather getting them to finally give up or in the case of humans and other intelligent races to put their weapons down. The goal was to get them to realize fighting was worthless. We wanted this invasion to end, but that didn't require killing all one hundred thousand or so of them gathered before us, no, we just needed to convince the majority of them that they had about as much chance of breaching our walls as a mouse did at killing a dragon.

It was here that we had an advantage over them - they did not wish to negotiate in any manner, only to kill all of us, so with our backs to the sea, we would fight to the very end. On the other hand, they were free to roam throughout the countryside. For them, it might soon make sense to leave and head off for greener pastures rather than squatting at our doorsteps.

And for that matter it was very obvious that I had managed to strike a massive amount of fear into their hearts. Although only a little over a thousand dryads had been directly affected by my spell, the force that had been set out in this direction consisting of over ten thousand was in disarray and many of them were scattered around the landscape in confusion. They must've been fearing another such attack, even if I couldn't do so for another twenty-four hours, it wasn't like they knew that.

This was why Liberomancers were so dangerous for normal soldiers to face. Yes - we could run out of mana and skills making us no more than regular people, how many ordinary soldiers could we kill before that happened? Any commander who said, "Alright, with that guy's mana capacity over there, he can only kill about four or five thousand of us. You five thousand, go ahead and sacrifice yourselves by taking his spells until his mana runs out and then we'll finish him off - okay?" would likely find himself swiftly beheaded by his own men before they agreed to charge the Liberomancer in question.

Ordinary soldiers would almost never charge against Liberomancer unless they were completely forced to, because of the simple fact that people would prefer living to dying.

On top of that, given that Liberomancers were a small target, if they had a way to get away or hide, they could continuously kite a very large force until it was either whittled down to nothing, or simply collapsed. The most obvious was to fly away for anyone who had a spell like that, but even I could do something as simple as riding away on the Elephant Frog after all my mana was used up and outpace most horses. After which I could recover my mana and do it all over again.

If Lance had a full set of thirty Rank Four grimoires - he would not have even needed all of us given how the gap between ranks kept widening. The enemy would've been slaughtered before it even reached our walls as he could soar above them like a fighter jet and rain down hellfire before coming back to recharge his mana and then doing so over and over until nothing of the enemy remained.

Alas, even the best Rank Four Liberomancers did not have even half of a set of Rank Four grimoires, so this was just a pointless thought exercise. Lance did not have enough options currently for such a bombardment strategy to work. As it was now, while he could soar out and damage the enemy no problem, the problem would arise if the enemy retaliated once his mana was depleted and then stormed the wall afterwards. Because of that, he was currently standing atop the wall like the rest of us, conserving most his mana for the worst-case scenario. If only he had a Rank Four summoning skill as well, and a greater mana reserve, the scene would be completely different.

Point being - if the enemy dryads wanted to, if they were controlled by a zombie-like hivemind and had no regard for their own safety, they could easily climb over the walls and overwhelm us until we were defeated. They might not be very intelligent, but they had no desire to die either and would not throw themselves at the wall with reckless self-abandon.

It was the same concept the other way around as well. If we wanted to, we could muster about thirty or forty thousand drafted soldiers, march out, and bombard the enemy with our spells out in the open field. We might even win a decisive victory like that. As a matter of fact, it was highly likely that such an endeavor would succeed against an undisciplined army like the dryads and we would probably win. The reason we didn't was because the risks involved were too high - Liberomancers were glass cannons, and it was here, on top of the wall where we could easily retreat and duck when we ran out of mana that we could show our true strength.

Not to mention victory would mean little if it meant a large number of casualties, especially if those were Rank Thee Liberomancers. Given that, why risk going out onto the field when we were perfectly safe here? Unlike the dryads, we were mostly comfortable camping out here atop our walls.

The dryad advance at our end had its momentum killed, and while the dryads seemed to be trying to rally together again, it would probably take them some time. I also had a feeling that they would not be eager to try the same thing again.