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Chapter 103: Orcish Combat 2
🕑 Added 2025-02-06 00:31:14 +0000 UTCWe walked back to the still-growing group of people in silence. I had no idea what to say to her, and she didn’t really want to talk to me. Even the end of the world couldn’t change that. Too much has passed between us to ever really bridge that divide again.
“Dave, good luck, and I really mean that,” she said as she broke off from me, heading toward one of the soldiers who had come with us. I instead found Cecil and Elicec to check in with.
“Any new issues?” I asked, looking around. Nothing seemed to have changed other than more people showing up.
“No, just more and more people keep coming out of the woodwork,” Elicec answered.
“Yeah, this is probably the first sign of real hope they’ve had since the orcs showed up. Which means we can’t let them down. Any ideas where the leader might be hiding?” I asked, only to get two headshakes from each of the brothers.
“Elody, are you busy?” I yelled over some of the noise to where she was standing. She gently excused herself from the people gathered around her and joined us instead.
“What can I do?” she asked the moment she was clear of the crowd.
“We need to track the orcs, and considering what you and Elicec managed to do in the Arena, I was thinking it might be possible to apply that here,” I said.
“I already tried it myself, but, I assume it was more a matter of distance being the issue. If you can overcome that, yeah, we can probably find them,” Elicec said, smiling at the idea.
“As Elody opened her book and began to read, an idea dawned on her on how best to utilize the young twinoges’ ability best. Looking into the sky, she commanded the mana flow, direct us to your target!” Elody ordered a burst that had emanated from Elicec as she spoke. While similar to the Arena incident, in this case, it was a single arrow that fired off without a trail left behind.
“Can you follow that?” I asked, unsure if this was actually going to work.
“I can. Essentially, Elody just managed to turn my skill much longer ranged at the cost of her own mana. Everyone who came with me, follow me!” Elicec yelled at the crowd, his voice growing much louder than normal, thanks to some mana amplification.
By the time Elody and I had chased the brothers down the first alley, the rest of the squad had already caught up. Spotting them behind us, Elicec moved into an even faster run, helped by a new upbeat melody, thanks to our resident opera singer. Without our previous crowd in tow, we were now moving through the city at a breakneck pace, only stopping briefly for any orc we passed. Few crossed our path.
The reason for that soon became obvious as we exited an alley into a large open street, finding more orcs than I could easily count gathered together, waiting for something. That something was almost certainly us. “There,” one of the front ones screamed as we looked at the horde.
“That’s it? That few? Kill them!” a voice from the center of the horde bellowed out in anger.
“Uh, that’s a lot of orcs,” I said, which was not my proudest battle cry, but I was sure I had plenty of time to come up with something so much worse in the future.
“Yes, it is. Now, kill them before they kill us!” Rabyn yelled as a flurry of knives erupted from his body. While each of them found a home in an oncoming orc, the charging mass didn’t seem to shrink at all.
I quickly sent a message to Corey.
>Dave: Corey, I’m keeping my shield and going all out. Take as many down as quickly as you can!
>Corey: Understood.
All my friends and allies let loose with more of a coordinated concentration of magic at a single moment than I had seen so far in the Spiral. Connie’s song ramped up to a near earsplitting degree, shaking the ground around as orcs collapsed on top of each other, holding their heads, screaming in pain.
At the same time this happened, Elicec rained lighting down across the horde while Cecile’s hoe transformed into a giant scythe slashing deeply into anyone, managing to get too close to us. I spotted Glorp darting back and forth, pulling knives free and placing them in new targets faster than any of the orcs could react.
“Elody drew her bow, a new silvery arrow appearing in her hand, ready to fire the moment the previous left the drawstring to find the nearest beating heart of an orc daring to threaten those she has allied herself with,” Elody recited the words calmly as the gleaming silver arrows of death began firing from her newly manifested bow.
Corey had flown to the center of the horde and taken a swing at the leader. For my part, I started letting loose with fireballs, seeing if I could pour more mana into them to get them larger, and the answer was a resounding yes. When my mana finally dropped below the halfway point I let up on the oversized blasts and instead started working on healing up anyone who had taken a blow from an orc breaking through our counter onslaught.
A chat window popped into my view just as I was patching a slash across Glorp’s forehead.
>Corey: Dave, I am attempting to keep the leader distracted, but every moment I let up, he begins to attempt to cast something. I believe it is an attempt to bolster his army in some way. It would be extraordinarily detrimental if he were able to do so.
>Dave: Got it; I’ll see what I can do.
I dismissed the window and looked at the horde. While we were somehow managing to hold them at bay still, we had only cut their number in half so far, and more of their attacks were starting to get through. Corey was right. The leader had to die. “Elicec, we need to find a way to take out the leader now!” I yelled.
“I’m open for ideas!” he screamed back, dodging under an orc club swing while Cecile removed its head.
“Going to try what I did in the desert. Here’s hoping I can aim well enough,” I yelled back, hating the idea, but it was the only one that had sprung to mind.
“Glorp, follow Dave!” Elicec screamed to our smallest member. I took that as the go-ahead for my incredibly stupid idea, wrapped a fresh shield around myself, and reversed gravity, attempting to fling myself directly toward Corey and the big orc.
I missed.
I crashed down behind the horde, the shield taking the brunt of the damage. I quickly forced myself back to my feet as the small form of Glorp raced between and under orcs until he was back by my side. “Come on, we have to take down that guy!” I yelled, pointing to the orc that was currently sidestepping a blow from Corey. I really needed to find a way to get more magical attacks channeling through that mallet.
Yanking Corey back into my System storage, I reversed the gravity under the orc leader, now close enough to do so, and watched him and several orcs fly into the air. The mallet returned instantly from my storage, realizing what I had done, flew into the air to resume their attacks on the leader. While the orcs that went with him crashed back to the ground dead, the leader himself had managed to slow his fall and gently land back on the ground, looking furious but unhurt.
My fireball hit him directly in the face, quickly changing that, while Glorp stabbed two knives, one into each of his ankles. This made the orcs’ next attempt at dodging Corey’s swing laughable as he crashed to the ground in pain. While I targeted him with two more rapid-fire fireballs, Corey dove in and out, malleting down heavy blows. Within seconds, the leader was dead.
Whatever force he had been exerting on the orcs to keep them in this fight seemed to evaporate away the moment his life left his body. The order they maintained throughout the melee instantly vanished as their ranks collapsed into complete chaos. I watched from the other side of the battle as my squad took to an all-out attack as they realized what was happening. The orcs didn’t stand a chance. We had freed our first city, and I had only pissed off one president so far. Not a bad day, all things considered. The experience window flashed into view. It was over.
!Combatants Defeated!
Orc Blood Singer, Core Grade C (x1) {10,000 Experience}
Orcish Horde, Averaged Core Grade C (x2) {100,000 Experience}
-Experience Gained [110,000 Points]
+Multipliers Applied+
No Armor (x1.1)
No Weapon (x1.1)
Undergraded (x10)
More Undergraded (x100)
-Total Experience Gained [133,100,000 Points]
That was new. I didn’t realize if you had enough enemies; it just grouped them up as a swarm, but that made some sense. I imagine the notification would get pages long if it didn’t. Did that work as well if the enemies were different types? Or factions? Questions for the future. I looked over to the rest of the squad and saw them starting to patch each other up while Glorp collected the spoils. This was going to be a lot of potential orbs.
Blood Singers are a class usually favored by the more ruthless Arena climbers, rarely do you see it used in actual team climbs. Usually, it is used by one leader and their enthralled minions, who are often replaced every few floors when the controller has time to register more of them. Few people like being in the company of those willing to utilize such a class, but it is not yet considered an illegal one.
Distasteful Classes Volume 1 by Zolinjar
Comments
viperfan7
OOohh, I want to see more of these distasteful classes.
