NOVEL NEXT 2.17-Mopping Up
The world narrows to four bright threads stitching the air. I follow each shaft with the lazy cruelty of someone watching fate find a seam, of silent death flying toward those who want us harm. I shouldn't feel sorry about them. I know. They are here to kill us. They want us dead, or worse, sold into slavery, for the mere fact of associating with a boy some other noble dandy wants to get rid of. I suppress a sigh. There is no place for hesitation. We live in a violent world. Every clan, every man or woman struggles to get stronger. To kill your enemies before they kill you, by any means necessary.
Have I grown insensitive about killing people? I wonder what that makes me. Another noble beating down the weak into the gutters? I frown, trying to find out what exactly bugs me. I've killed people before, both stronger and weaker than myself. I've killed to survive. I've fought to prove my superiority.
Maybe the problem is that this doesn't feel like a fight, and more like an execution.
Since when did this bother me? What do I have to prove? I may be stronger than I ever could have dreamed of becoming. But I'm still too weak. I can't let my success get to my head. I'm still not strong enough to leave the shadows.
No, I can't hesitate about it. It's the wrong mindset, a dangerous mindset.
Could it be that cultivating and reaching higher ranks can make you overconfident? It could be, judging by what I have seen on campus. I need to be wary.
The arrows slice through the humid air of the cavern with the polite detachment of a magistrate, judging our opponents' fate.
Below us, the sound of the voices and weapons clashing against each other blurs at the edges, as if time itself held its breath, stretching for a bizarre moment, letting me taste the iron of choice on my tongue.
Then, impact.
Kenae's and Enea's arrows have found their targets. Mine impacts on a shimmering mana armor that appears around Scarface and rebounds uselessly onto the ground. A defensive technique? Shit!
Mon Veno and the lanky guy emit earsplitting screams. Mana flares wildly around their limbs as they make the fatal mistake of using a technique while the poison is freezing their meridians.
The noise seems to alert the scout, who ducks at the last moment. Han Ke's arrow flies over him, impacting the lizardman shaman in the face.
Another flare of uncontrolled mana. Three bodies stumble, then fall. The shaman's guards cry out in fury, unsheathing nasty-looking cleavers, trying to behead the human scout who has suddenly appeared between them. He manages to evade death, moving with the nimble grace of a cornered snake. I watch him ducking under the first strike, jumping over the second, trying to get out of the melee, to get some distance. He almost escapes without injury, but a stalactite gets in the way, clipping him on the hip.
Meanwhile, Mon Veno and the lanky guy disappear under the tide of lizardmen. An arm flies upward, sailing through the cave in a lazy arc before plunging into the lake, emitting almost silent ripples.
"Shit, Ken! Those fucking kids played us," screams Scarface, bashing and slashing lizardmen heads around him in a frenzied blur. "Where the fuck are they hiding? I need some help here!"
"I'm busy!" the scout screams back. "I need to get rid of these stupid guards first."
The scout seems to have overcome the initial surprise of being exposed. I watch him, dancing around the two big lizardmen guards, slowly whittling them down. They may look big and strong, but compared to him, they are slow. Wounds start accumulating on their bodies. I can already see it coming. If they don't get reinforcement soon, their fate is sealed.
"Should we shoot again?" asks Kenae, whispering.
Han Ke shakes his head. "Let's wait for a bit more and stay hidden as long as we can. If we reveal our position too soon, the lizardmen will split between them and us, relieving some of the pressure on those guys. That man with the scar is a Gold; let him tire himself out while he mops up the horde before we strike. Our arrows will be useless on him anyway as long as he can maintain his defensive technique." Han Ke's eyes wander toward the scout, who has almost taken down the first guard. "It would be nice to take out the other guy before he can come to support his friend. Now that they are aware that they are not alone, shooting is a risk, though." He scratches his neck. "Maybe the risk is worth it?" he mumbles, reaching for another arrow.
"Wait," I whisper, catching him by the arm before he can shoot. "I have a better idea."
My companions look at me.
"What?"
I smirk, lowering Kylo to the ground. "Can you take out the scout, Kylo?" I ask him.
He turns his head, looking up at me. "Easy," he says.
"Don't be overconfident, though," I warn him, holding him back before he can slip away in his eagerness. "You need to be careful, you can't let anyone see you doing it."
The cat puffs up his chest. "Sister no worry, Kylo hunt bad man, sneaky, sneaky. Kylo bestest hunter, bad hunter no see, no hear," he reassures us.
"Ok, but wait for him to kill those two big lizardmen," I say.
He nods, almost humanlike. "Kylo wait, Kylo ambush, Kylo pounce," he declares, before slipping away into the shadows and disappearing from my eyes in a puff of mana as he activates his invisibility rune.
I turn around, toward the wide eyes of my three teammates, staring at the place where the cat disappeared.
"How?" babbles Han Ke, staggering back, almost dropping his bow in surprise.
"Your cat is scary," observes Kenae. "Remind me never to get on his bad side."
Enea claps her mouth shut.
"He is impressive, but still only a cat, though," says Han Ke.
"Don't worry, he can take care of that guy," I say, suppressing a smirk.
Han Ke narrows his eyebrows and shakes his head without saying anything.
I look back at Scarface, a tornado lost in a tide of bodies trying to drown him. Blood sprays around him, scaled limbs fly, bodies drop, like wheat before the scythe of the farmer. But there are always more lizardmen following behind. His skin flares whenever his defensive technique deflects another rusty cleaver; none have gotten through.
"He is using a lot of mana," I observe, leaning against a column. "Won't he run out?"
"Nah," Han Ke shakes his head. "Judging by the speed he moves and his strength, he is well into the Gold rank. Probably Mid-Gold, maybe even High. Golds have tons of mana compared to us silvers. He won't run out of mana anytime soon," he explains. "To take out a Gold, you need to either fight for hours or force them to expend too much mana in a short time to overheat their meridians. Let's wait for those lizards to whittle his mana-armor down a bit more before we strike again."
I look back at the fight. Will the lizards be able, though? There may be dozens of them, but almost a quarter already lie dead on the ground. They are just too slow, too weak to pose a serious problem to the cultivator. The rank difference is too big.
The man has fallen into a rhythm, slashing and butchering the incoming waves, before stepping back to make room. He is good, an experienced fighter who doesn't care about fancy flourishes, just skilled efficiency.
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Bae once told me that the ideal number of people to face someone stronger or more skilled than yourself is three in a triangular formation that boxes your opponent in.
That way, everybody can hurl ranged techniques without fear of hitting their teammates. Meanwhile, the caged opponent has to worry about having two enemies at his back whenever he tries to face someone.
More people get in each other's way, increasing the risk of friendly fire. More is still better, of course, to replace whoever gets tired, hurt, or runs out of mana, but only marginally improves the odds.
I guess that is only true when you care about surviving. Watching the horde of lizardmen rushing the warrior like an unescapable tide, without care for how many lives get thrown away, as long as they can drown him with their sacrifice, open a way for another body to land a strike, I feel as if quantity has a quality of its own.
Still, somehow, the man is slowly gaining the upper hand, strike after strike, a professional killer.
Seeing him fighting feels humbling. He would absolutely trash me one-on-one. Not because he moves much faster than I do. I might even have a slight edge in speed. It's hard to judge. But he would absolutely dismantle me with martial skills. And even if I could probably hold out for a while, I lack a way to get through his defensive technique. If I had to face him alone, my only chance would be to run or resort to trickery, another reason to rebrand my runes. If associating myself with Han Ke confronts us with this caliber of opponents, I need every edge I can get. A full set of techniques would be nice too, but for that, I need to carve the rest of my meridians.
Time slips between my fingers like a thin mocking thread. Slow and tedious, but never enough of it. Strength was supposed to make me feel safe, in control, but all it has brought until now is the knowledge of how far I am from any of it. I'm always behind trying to catch up.
I feel as if I'm trying to outrun a storm, inching closer, following my tracks. And the cruelest part is knowing that when it finally reaches me, it will catch me half-prepared, caught between what I am and what I'm trying to become.
I shudder, trying to dismiss the spiral of worrying thoughts. There is no place to worry about the future mid-battle.
The scout has finished one of the two big lizardmen guards. The other one is on its last legs too, wheezing and stumbling, bleeding from a dozen wounds, only still alive because a few of the regular lizardmen have finally realized that their shaman is dead and have split away from the horde facing Scarface to avenge their fallen leader.
I watch the scout, cleverly guiding them deeper into a maze of columns and stalagmites, using the environment to hinder their advantage in numbers. I wonder where Kylo is hiding.
The scout parries another clumsy strike of the big lizardman's cleaver. The rusty blade gets deflected into the wet clay of the wall, which swallows it almost up to the hilt. In the brief moment the cleaver is stuck, the scout slashes out his short sword, cutting deep into the guard's jugular, it sags to its knees. The cleaver slips out of its hand, forgotten. A spray of blood erupts from its neck, beat after beat, until the scout kicks him over, emitting a triumphant yell.
"Finally!" His next slash decapitates one of the regular lizardmen. He steps back between two columns, holding the rest of the ones facing him there. "Hold out! I've almost finished here!" he yells toward Scarface.
A fanged maw appears behind his neck, a weight seems to settle on his shoulders for a brief instant, invisible paws holding him still. Then the maw snaps shut. The man sags to the ground like a puppet without strings.
The few lizardmen facing him look stunned. They poke at the dead body with their spears a few times. One of them shrugs, and they hurry back toward Scarface.
"Ken?" Finally, the Gold rank realizes that his companion is missing. "Ken? Thrice blasted and damned hellhole!" he curses.
"Huh? What happened to the scout?" asks Enea.
"Kylo," I say.
The girl blinks. "Where? When? How?"
I shrug. Kylo has long since disappeared, unheard, unseen. The dead body has disappeared, too. He must have dragged it somewhere.
Meanwhile, Scarface has killed more than half of the regular lizardmen. There are only about eighty or ninety remaining. He has changed tactics as well. Now he hits and disengages, weaving through the fallen bodies like a dancer, letting the horde stumble behind him. He has changed from keeping his mana armor permanently to flicking it on and off whenever he gets overwhelmed, prioritizing evasion over blocking.
"Do you think his meridians are overheating?" I ask.
"It seems like that," mumbles Han Ke, frowning. "Unless he is faking it, trying to bait us to reveal our position."
"It won't matter if we manage to hit him, though. Right?" asks Kenae, fiddling with an arrow.
"That's true," acknowledges Han Ke. "Let's try it." He dips the head of one of his arrows into the jar of poison. Then gestures for us to do the same. "Let's shoot our arrows staggered. We only need to hit him once."
I dip one of my arrowheads into the poison myself and notch the shaft.
We wait for an opening, in tense silence. Scarface kills another lizardman and retreats, leading the horde around in a circle. Han Ke draws, we imitate him. Kenae releases first, followed by Han Ke, me, and finally Enea.
One arrow flies wide, two bounce off the mana armor, one after the other. Then, the armor flicks off, and Enea's arrow punches through, embedding itself in the man's shoulder.
"Argh!" screams the man. He whips his head around, finding us. Then he staggers. "What is this? Poison? You fucking bastards! I'll kill you!"
I roll my eyes. Wasn't he already planning to kill us before?
For some reason, he has slowed down, moving almost clumsily now. Was he using a body-boosting technique all this time? Maybe he isn't that much stronger than me and only has a full set of gold-ranked techniques.
In the brief seconds it takes him to purge the poison, he receives almost half a dozen wounds, a few slashes, and a spear thrust through his biceps. A robust-looking lizardman manages to smash his spiked club into the man's knee.
"Fuck!" he curses. Then his armor flicks on again. He retreats a few steps to disengage from the horde, limping, glaring at us as if we had killed his puppy. Then, he rushes at us in a blur, knocking over rows of lizardmen in his way. It must be a movement technique he hasn't used until now.
He blurs again, straight at the wide-eyed Kenae, blade flashing, a mad grin on his face. I dash toward her to push the frozen girl out of the way. But Han Ke is even faster. He uses a movement technique of his own, appearing in the man's path and planting a town shield on the ground. A series of runes flash on the shield as the man crashes into it. Instead of toppling Han Ke over, the shield holds firm, and the man rebounds all the way back into the horde.
The lizardmen don't waste the opportunity and bash more clubs and spears at the briefly dazed man. A group of them throws a net over him before he can get up, tangling his limbs, pulling him to the ground before he can react.
Then they start bashing him again. For now, it seems useless; every strike rebounds on his mana armor. But immobilized as he is, it's only a matter of time until they kill him. He has lost his blade on the way. He may be able to use the short spear he is holding now to defend himself, but he can't get leverage to cut himself free with it.
"Argh!" he screams again. Clubs descend, spears poke.
A few of the lizardmen have seen us now, and since there is only so much space around the wriggling man, they have decided to come after us.
"Well, let's mop this up," says Han Ke, changing his bow for a sword. You three keep shooting. I'll hold them back as long as I can."
We fan out along the wall, a few steps behind Han Ke, keeping to the higher ground. I crack my neck and notch an arrow. Then, we start shooting.
Notch and release. Notch and release. Bodies drop, like flies, one after the other, in a steady rhythm. I feel almost detached.
The first lizardman reaches Han Ke, but its spear thrust is too clumsy to pose a threat to the boy. He deflects the shaft up his shield before slashing the lizardman's head off, then he takes a step back, letting the body fall.
Another arrives; they exchange a few strikes before it meets a similar fate. One after another, the few lizardmen who manage to get past our arrows trickle in. A dozen have remained behind, still bashing their clubs at Scarface's limp body.
I store my bow and take out a sword, dashing forward to cover Han Ke's flank before he gets overwhelmed. Kenae does the same on the other side. Enea keeps back, still shooting whenever there is an opening.
I duck beneath a club and slash. My blade parts scales, biting flesh. I kick the lizardman out of the way and thrust, impaling the next one before he can take advantage of the freed space. The blade gets stuck. I turn, shifting the lizardman's body into the way of an incoming spear thrust, still holding the handle. The spear gets stuck, too. The lizardman stares at me, his slit eyes sparkling, in a race to remove his weapon first.
I'm faster and lunge. The lizardman stumbles back, right into the way of Han Ke's blade. Another head flies away from its body.
"Phew," says the boy, wiping away the sweat from his face after this brief but intense fight. "That was the last one." He looks up. "Well, apart from those five still hammering down their clubs on that Gold rank's dead body."
Kenae snickers, tilting her head. "Should we go and kill them?"
"Nah, let's shoot them from afar while they are distracted," says Han Ke. "No need to risk injuries.
We take out our bows and shoot, dropping them one after the other before they can react. Then we wander over.
"Huh?" mutters Enea. "He is still alive."
I blink. The girl is right. The man's chest is still rising and falling, even though his body is broken and bruised, and he barely looks human anymore. Maybe we can interrogate him. Find out who the heck ordered this hit.
"That's easy to rectify," says Han Ke. Before anyone can react, he takes out his short sword and slashes the unconscious man's throat.
I whip my head around. Why has he done that? I frown. It seems stupid, unless he already knows more than he has told us. Well, whatever. I lean against a column.
"We got a chest!" yells Enea, clapping her hands and bouncing up and down in excitement. "Look!"
She is right. A sturdy-looking chest has appeared on an altar, behind the slain shaman. Kylo is sitting on it, sniffing at the hinges.
"Great!" says Han Ke. "That means the instance is clear. We have up to a full day now until the dungeon spits us out. Let's loot everything we can and try to recover. Who knows what is awaiting us outside?"