Chapter 468: Monsters
With my newfound lightning ability, I immediately confirmed that I had a good way to contribute to the battle. I still wouldn’t be able to totally swap the course of the fight, but at the very least, I could contribute.
I dumped all the free stat points I had gotten from levelling up into mana. My [Vitality] and my other stats just didn’t matter right now - the one and only thing that mattered was how often and how quickly I could blast these birds with lightning bolts.
Then, I began to take a more proactive role in battle. I started out by blasting a few rocs at the center of the battlefield, especially the ones our mages and archers were already targeting. The rocs quickly wised up to my attacks and started dodging and weaving around - but I also quickly realized that I could use my portals to vary the places I could attack, even if it was considerably more demanding on my mind and my essence. If a lightning roc refused to expose both of its eyes to me at once, I could use a portal to hammer it from angles I wouldn’t normally be able to hit. I started blinding birds left and right as I sought to swing the battle back in our favor.
My actions didn’t go unnoticed either. The trainer near me blinked in surprise as he saw me breathe lightning, just like the monsters ravaging the top of our village-bearing beasts.
“Miria? Weren’t you an ice mage?” he asked.
“New level 30 Feat!” I said. “It lets me repurpose my ice magic into lightning magic when certain other conditions are met!” I had no idea what those ‘conditions’ were, but I would figure it out later. For now, all that mattered was that the trainers focused on the battle again.
The trainer seemed stunned, but a moment later, he nodded. “We’ll talk later. For now, what restrictions does your feat have? Is there a limit to the number of times you can use it per day, or anything of the sort?”
“No. It costs a lot of mana, but as long as I can keep my mana reserves healthy, I can keep going.”
“Aim for the ones I point out to you. The other trainers and I will focus them down afterwards!”
I looked at the other trainers, and saw them nod in confirmation. That was good enough for me. We needed to work together - I didn’t have the mana reserves to kill one of these things on my own.
With my assistance, we began to slowly clear out the rocs situated in more critical positions on the battlefield. The monsters quickly wised up to the fact that sometimes, they would get dragged into a lethal burst of lightning and spells when they got in range of my portals and my village-bearing beast. After that, they started to try to focus more on longer and more powerful ranged attacks - which proved rather frustrating, since my portals still had some range limitations, and my essence pools were limited. It was becoming increasingly clear that the birds had rather uneven stat distribution - and my reaction speed was definitely faster than theirs. A longer distance would give these birds more time to react to my attacks, and give them more opportunities to grind us down with their exceptionally high overall vitality and larger mana pools.
Even so, nearly a dozen rocs had fallen before the birds started pulling away. I had also gotten several System notifications, although I ignored them for now. We had a fight to manage first.
Despite our gradual efforts to whittle down the rocs, I started to get more nervous as the fight continued to rage. The rocs were dealing far more damage to us than we were to them, even with my interference. Nearly a third of the higher level mages in our clan had died during the battle already. Blast after blast of lightning ripped apart our higher level combatants, while I could do little but watch. Fireballs, icicles, and spells from other mages of our clan flew into the sky, only to miss the rocs, while they continued to soar through the skies and tear into our defensive lines. I was starting to miss the vulnerable eyeballs of these creatures, due to the heightened distance, and while they weren’t killing us as quickly as before, my impact on the battlefield had diminished again. Worse, despite my protective rune ability, one of the village-bearing beasts had still suffered grievous injuries during the battle when three rocs coordinated lightning bolts together and punched through my defensive blessing.
They hadn’t managed to kill the village-bearing beast, thankfully - its vitality was too strong. Still, it was starting to fall behind as the ember continued to charge forward, heedless of the desperate battle happening behind it.
Worse, all of my essence reserves were starting to bottom out. I was tossing around healing spells when I noticed someone get hurt, I was using my manifestation and binding essence to blast the rocs with lightning, and I was also tossing out the occasional portal. My friends weren’t in much better shape. Anise and Felix had coordinated a few spells and items to handle a few of the rocs with our trainers, and we had even started to use items that we had no real explanation for - things were dire enough that we could figure out the consequences later.
It wasn’t enough. The rocs didn’t seem to be running out of essence anywhere near as fast as our clan was, and they still had a huge number of reinforcements attacking the settlement in the distance. We had no such reinforcements. Soon, the other rocs attacking the village were starting to redirect their attention towards us, and even if we used our limited-use items, that might be the end of our clan.
<If things get bad enough, do we have a way to escape?> asked Felix.
I hesitated. If we ran, that would mean abandoning this clan to its fate. I didn’t like that.
On the other hand, I recognized the need to survive in this life. We could not afford to fail here. We only had this last world to prepare for the fight for more lives - if we died, that would be it. The end of our time to prepare for the most important confrontation of our lives so far.
On the other hand, I didn’t want to abandon the people of the clan, either. They had been nice so far. Not to mention, losing access to our clan meant losing access to new sparks - which would greatly hinder further progress. Instead, we would need to spend days, weeks, months, or even years in the frozen wilderness, spending essence to keep ourselves alive. We had planned to do that eventually anyway - but only once we were much better equipped.
<I can carry up to two of you and run. I haven’t spent much essence this fight - my lack of good ranged options is really giving me a headache right now,> said Sallia. <Anise, do you have enough essence to keep us warm if we need to flee?>
<I’m close to out of essence, but I still have a few reserves left in case of an emergency,> said Anise. <It’ll buy us time to find a few of the warmth-providing foods if need be.>
I felt my heard start to thud in my chest as my friends confirmed the possibility of fleeing in an emergency. Things hadn’t hit a critical stage yet… but I could feel their determination. If things went wrong enough, they would flee - and I would follow them, even if I hated leaving our clan behind this early.
My thoughts and fears continued to swirl around my mind, until a bean of essence tore through the sky and disrupted my thoughts. It looked almost as if someone had launched a spear at the heavens, and tore apart the sky.
A moment later, my senses picked up on something far more unusual for this world - spatial manipulation. Something very complex and esoteric, and not something that I had ever seen in quite this fashion before. It took me a few seconds of processing to figure out what I was looking at - it was a bridge that connected two worlds together.
A few seconds later, four new people appeared - each of them standing in midair, as if they had activated some kind of flying spell. I could barely see them directly, due to the distance, but I could definitely see how bright their souls were, and the massive amounts of essence radiating out of their bodies. A few moments later, I saw beams of fire and stone start to rip apart the birds in the sky.
The fight that had seemed desperate to the point of being unwinnable started to quickly tilt in favor of the town. At the same time, our ember started to slow down, as if it had finally realized the danger of charging forward.
It took me a few moments to assess the newcomers. They were nowhere near as strong as the nearly godlike person we had met earlier, but they were still far stronger than the other humans we had seen in this dimension. They were at least twice as strong as the heroic-grade shooter we had seen back in the Market, as well - and there were four of them.
I felt a strange mixture of relief and worry.
My earlier suspicion had been correct - the strange monster attack and behavior had likely been linked to the interdimensional war involving our dimensional cluster. That wasn’t a good sign - but at the very least, it had brought reinforcements to our battle when we desperately needed them.
It took them less than three minutes to clean up the rocs in the sky. The ones that had broken off to attack our clan started to notice the new threat, and instead of fleeing, they circled back towards the settlement - only to get annihilated.
A few moments after the last roc died, one of the combatants zipped towards our clan, before he stopped and gazed down at us. He had a far more imperious expression than the first man we had met.
“Identify yourselves,” he said.