The Nettle Tea Chronicles

Marissa

Once Marissa called out the spot, the rest of the party triggered their own flight skills and moved up to where she was waiting next to the little floating blue orb that denoted where the quest wanted them to be.

As everyone flew up, she took a quick read over a buff that had been applied to her that she hadn't noticed.

[Magical Updraft]

[Due to the abundance of magical currents in the area, flight time is not limited by normal means]

Marissa grinned at that, as well as the [Take Wing] buff that was on her status bar next to it, which didn't have the normal countdown displayed, denoting how much flight time she had remaining.

"Y'all, we've got unlimited flight here," she said happily, and quickly mashed her directional keys, jolting Hibiscus around in a jumble of directions.

"Oh?"

"Oh, hell yeah." Firo said.

"That does answer my question about how fighting the wyverns would work if we were only going to be able to spend a limited amount of time in the air." Kieran said.

"It also makes sense to have a buff like that in the game." Evie said. "They can basically put it anywhere they want, since it just says there is a high concentration of magic in the area. Which gives them pretty much free reign to do fully aerial battles whenever they want."

"Is everyone ready?" Marissa asked, more excited than she had been before. She didn't even care that her new special item was basically useless for this fight. Though she did consider un-investing it thanks to the area's buff, she decided that she'd rather not bank on the [Magical Updraft] buff being a 100% guarantee.

"Yup, let's get this done." Evan said, having Fiona draw her sword and shield as punctuation for the statement.

Marissa watched as each party member interacted with the starting point to mark themselves as ready to move on. She followed suit, clicking on the little blue orb. Once everyone had done so, her screen faded into a cutscene. She didn't hear anyone deafen, as it seemed, like her, they had all assumed this wouldn't be so much a story cutscene as an intro to the fight they just triggered.

Sure enough, the cutscene showed each of the party members lift up off the ground and slowly - majestically, even - rise into the air. The camera panned up with them to show first the sky over the city's walls, and then the cloud of wyvern that were headed toward the city.

While Marissa was sure that they were in for one hell of a fight, she wasn't sure exactly how the whole thing would go down. At the very least, this was clearly an eight member party facing down a literal hoard of almost-dragons.

Well, an eight member party plus whatever assistance the city's defenders could muster with ranged defensive weaponry. Which Marissa didn't think would be much.

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"Damn…" Nyx breathed.

"Yeah," Firo agreed. "They sure know how to sell the oncoming threat. Some good cinematography right there."

Jazz snorted. "Looks like that cliche shot of a war helicopter against the setting or rising sun."

"Same kinda shot, yeah." Firo said.

"So, what do we think the goal is here?" Kieran asked.

"My assumption is that - story-wise, at least - we're meant to hold out until reinforcements arrive, having pledged to the Daoine Sídhe." Ash said.

"Agreed," Marissa said. "I would assume it'll be either Uathach, Scathach, or maybe Cu."

"Seems about right." Nyx chuckled. "But I'm sure the fight will still be something we need to "win", of course."

"I would imagine so." Evie said.

"Then we'd better get ready." Kieran laughed.

"Any shot this fight is easy, and meant to be an intro to aerial combat?" Firo asked, as the cutscene's camera spun around the party, showing each of them drawing their weapons and preparing for battle, all while the enemy approached the walls.

"No chance." Evan said, the grin evident in his tone. "Or, at least, it better not be."

"It's just going to be a lot of mobs, isn't it?" Nyx asked, sounding disappointed, in direct contrast to Evan's excitement. "I see no boss out there."

"Then let's see if we can make a solid dent on their numbers and draw one out." Kieran said.

As the cutscene clearly began to wind down, Marissa rolled her shoulders and sat up straighter in her chair to prepare for the fight. With all of the flying she was getting to do, and finally getting into some more - hopefully fun - combat, her stress, aches, and pains from the day were all but forgotten.

When they all regained control over their characters, they had clearly been dropped into an instance. The other players that had completely overtaken the city streets were gone, as were the slightly lesser number of players that had taken the skies.

All that remained were their party, the enemies, and the armies clashing over the walls. On the plus side, at least, it looked like the city was holding strong against the incursion. All of the gates and walls were still mostly in one piece, with zero notable breeches.

It took only a few seconds after the end of the cutscene for things to escalate. The first wave of wyverns passed the walls, flying right over the defenders practically unchallenged. The ballistae and other larger ranged weapons fired on the wave of enemies, but with how badly the wyverns outnumbered the weaponry, even when most landed their shots and took out a wyvern each, it amounted to little impact.

"Charge!" Evan called dramatically, sending Fiona straight forward toward the mass of approaching enemies.

The wyvern, despite how massive the approaching cloud of enemies looked, were individually not all that large. They were essentially small dragons with only two hind legs. Their wings more or less took the place of their forward limbs, despite not having any actual hands, claws, or other such appendages.

Their bodies, discounting their wingspan, were roughly around the size of a large dog. Marissa figured it was something like the aerial equivalent of getting attacked by wolves.

As the party, charging right behind Fiona, finally clashed with the mess of wyverns, everything quickly shifted into survival mode. The mass of enemies was dense and overwhelming, but they found the wyverns themselves to be rather frail individually. Defensively, at least - the damage they put out was nothing to joke about, especially with their numbers.

Mellody and Evie immediately had their work cut out for them, as Fiona and Aleister did their best to wrangle as many of the enemies as they could to control how many angles the party was attacked from. Area-wide attacks that generated solid amounts of [Threat] was easily the best option here, but the two tanks - even spread out a little to try to keep some semblance of control over the space - were quickly overrun by numbers.

Even with the control over [Threat] and doing their best to position the enemies in a useful way, the tanks only really managed to create massive groups of enemies bunched up on the sides of the party. Marissa was pretty sure if she could see everything from certain angles, it would look like the party was the center of a massive hourglass, with the groups of enemies on each side facing the tanks looking like the two sand bulbs.

For the DPS, though, none of that really mattered. With the way the tanks had broken up the enemies in the area, the party naturally split into their two small parties to focus on what they could do. Marissa and Nyx had immediately started in on the enemies that Aleister had pulled to the party's left.

Marissa had started letting arrows go as soon as the enemies were within range. And while she did start with her normal opener, she quickly found that utilizing her normal rotation to maximize damage with [Critical Eye] and [Master's Shot] simply wasn't the play here.

Most of the wyverns were so fragile that anything that did more damage than a basic attack was basically a one-shot kill. And even then, basic attacks were downing enemies in two or three hits, depending on the damage rolls.

Instead of going through her attacks as normal, Marissa focused on landing her shots more precisely, making sure to rotate through her damage based skills. But even that approach seemed to be not worth the effort, as body - or even wing - shots seemed to do just as much damage as head shots. Or, at least, they were still enough damage to down the target all the same.

Shortly after the enemies had engaged in melee range, Marissa was grinning to herself as she heard Nyx and Caoimhe laughing maniacally over the voice chat, as their AoE attacks wrecked swathes of enemies at a time. Marissa thought the number of wyverns falling from the sky toward the city looked silly, simply because of the number of them.

And once she decided to swap tactics, opting for her own spammable AoE attacks, she started adding to the number of falling enemies.

But as the fight continued, the party found themselves getting overrun. Marissa was having flashbacks to watching her party members fight among the mass of Fomorians beyond the city walls when during the one attempt where they jumped down to fight outside the city. They were slowly getting surrounded and unable to keep up with the number of enemies closing in.

It was even more terrifying as they weren't just surrounded in one plane. The party had ended up fighting off the enemies quite well, but they were starting to find themselves in a literal sphere of enemies, beset from all sides - including above and below.

It was really only Aleister and Fiona that had managed to keep the party some space to maneuver around. They had managed their skills well, keeping the closest enemies funneled to the sides as much as they could.

But with the distinct lack of visuals on the ground or sky as the enemy closed in, Marissa genuinely couldn't tell which direction was up any longer. Especially given that her ascend and descend buttons were tied to her current camera position. It was just likely, while targeting one enemy or another, she had gotten turned around and now her descend key was sending her up into the sky.

"Y'all, this is getting concerning. Mildly, but still." Evie said.

"Are we taking too much damage?" Aleister asked. "I can use more mit."

"Same." Evan said, "I thought we've got this pretty under control. All things considered, anyway."

"Are we in the same fight?" Evie asked, laughing incredulously. "We are literally surrounded on all sides."

"Sure, but we're taking out so many of them, and we're not really sustaining all that much damage in the process!" Evan called back.

"Right?" Jazz agreed. "I thought we've got this totally in hand."

"We have very different definitions of "in hand," love." Ash laughed.

Marissa smiled, especially as she listened to Kieran and Nyx continue to cackle at the sheer number of enemies they were removing from the field despite the overwhelming numbers in play.

And that was ignoring Firo, who had remained fairly quiet the whole time, despite his massive explosion spells taking out the largest numbers of enemies between all of them.

"I feel like I'm playing a zombie survival game." Marissa said, changing the subject a bit while continuing to launch attacks at the crowd. "They don't take more than a bullet or two to take out, but the hoard is huge."

"If that's the case, then where are the big special zombies?" Firo asked. "Don't most of those games have some kind of special ones that are more bullet sponge-y every so often?"

"Bro." Evan said flatly. Even Marissa fought the urge to dump her head onto her desk. "You've said almost nothing since the fight began and the first words out of your mouth are to jinx us?"

"I don't…sorry." Firo muttered.

Kieran and Nyx both continued to laugh, but the tone had changed to something a little more wry at Firo's comment.

"I swear to god, Firo." Evie said, "when are you going to learn?"

"I'm sorry!" Firo said again.

"How many times have we told you, now? We even straight up told you not to say anything when we fought the Queen!" Evan said, his voice still full of good natured ribbing, rather than actual anger.

"I know…" Firo said sadly.

And at the same moment, a much larger creature broke through the massive throng of enemies. It still wasn't quite a full-on dragon, but it was certainly bigger than the wyverns, and looked more dangerous too.

The number of sighs that Marissa heard in the chat made her laugh.

"This is your fault, Firo." Evan said.

"Yup. We're gonna have to punish you later for this one. You really need to learn…" Evie said.

There was a short silence in the chat before Firo returned with, "Sorry, Mom. Dad. I'll be good, I promise."

That left the whole party laughing and sputtering as they turned to angle toward the new enemy.