Chapter 18: Pathetic
Liam watched Berry take a hit to the shoulder that sent her skidding across the dirt, and he watched Noir’s mana shield come apart like wet paper, and he did not move. The formation had been built on pride, and the bill for that was currently being processed at a rate of one guild member per twenty seconds.
He was waiting for the moment when they figured that out.
"Liam," Elizabeth said quietly, her hand finding his wrist in the dust and staying there.
"I know," he said.
A Level 13 Mage named Kaelie, one of the ones who had laughed when he fell, was still finding time to have opinions about him while her backline burned. "It’s a pheromone passive," she announced to the people around her, staff glowing a frantic blue while she chanted something the Ogre was not interested in. "That’s all it is. Some high-tier scent buff that tricks beast-kin. We were Beta testers and we don’t need a glitchy cook."
"Exactly," someone beside her agreed, with the confidence of a person who had been wrong before and had not updated their approach. "He’s a fluke, and she’s just baggage watch how a real guild handles a boss."
The Mages began to chant in unison, a synchronised [Frost-Nova].
But the Ogre General didn’t care about their chants or plans. Abruptly, in a brutal shift from chanting to chaos, it swung its mace in a massive, horizontal overhead arc. The sonic boom from the impact hit the mages first, bursting eardrums before the stone even reached them. Twenty mages, the entire backline support of the Iron Hearth, were simply deleted. Their physical forms couldn’t even process the damage before they were turned into a cloud of red pixels. The "Beta experts" died with the same expressions of shock they’d had in the simulation—only this time, there was no respawn button.
"The backline," Johan roared, his rabbit ears flat against his skull as he locked his shield into the earth. "Berry, the mages are gone, we have no cover!"
He didn’t run to save the guild. He stood in the dust, Ellie at his side, watching the Iron Hearth guild break. He waited for the moment when the "warriors" realised that pride didn’t put food on the table.
Berry didn’t answer because Berry was currently unconscious forty feet away, where the Ogre had backhanded her mid-charge, her rare greatsword in two pieces on the dirt beside her, her HP bar in the dark red of something that was not getting better on its own.
In the space between the chaos and the Ogre’s next swing, a Lion-kin Assassin with a golden mane broke from the scatter and skidded to a stop in front of Liam and Elizabeth instead of the actual threat, which said everything about where her priorities were her name tag read Ducky, which was doing a lot of work, given the expression on her face.
She looked at Elizabeth the way people look at things they have decided to blame for their problems, and she spat on Elizabeth’s boots.
"You think you’re something special?" Ducky said, her eyes going between Elizabeth and Liam with the specific bitterness of someone who had been staring at him all raid and was now redirecting that energy somewhere it felt safer to put it. "You’re a leech and you’re the reason we lost focus."
Elizabeth looked at her boots. Looked up and didn’t say anything, which was worse than anything she could have said, and Ducky opened her mouth to continue, and then the Ogre’s hand came down like a falling building and Ducky didn’t have time to finish the sentence because she was in the ridge wall, her HP bar flickering in the near-death red, and the wall had a new crack in it shaped approximately like a Lion Assassin named ducky.
Liam reached into his inventory and pulled out three wooden bowls.
"Elizabeth," he said, holding one out without looking at her, "drink."
She was still looking at her boots, her grip on his wrist tight enough that he could feel her pulse through it, and she looked up at him, and he looked back at her with the expression he wore when the maths was settled, and the next step was obvious.
She took the bowl and drank it.
The warmth of the chicken soup hit her in the chest like a mothers hug and the crushing pressure of the Ogre’s aura, the thing that had been sitting on everyone’s lungs since Grogthe arrived, lifted completely.
[Chicken Soup consumed — Perfect Grade.]
[Buff Applied: +500% Melee Resistance, 12 hours.]
Liam’s arm came up, and the second bowl arced through the air toward Johan, who caught it without thinking and drank it in one motion because when Liam threw something at you in a combat situation, you did not stop to ask questions.
The Hobgoblins still hammering at Johan’s armour went from feeling like a serious problem to feeling like a minor inconvenience.
Johan’s rabbit ears came straight up and stayed there.
"Go to Johan," Liam said to Elizabeth, his voice dropping a few decibles. "Get behind the shield and stay there."
She looked at him for a moment, and he was already not looking at her, already turning toward the Ogre with his third bowl in his hand, and she went, because she knew the look and she knew what came after it, and she had decided she trusted both.
Liam took a slow sip. The warmth that came back was different from the soup in the pot; it was something more specific, a adjustment, the raw uncollected energy of eighteen levels of stats finding the shape they were supposed to have. He let the last mouthful settle, dropped the bowl onto the dirt.
"The salt was just right," he said, to nobody.
The scent that came off him changed. The cedar and woodsmoke that had been ambient and constant since the appearance sync became something with weight to it. The Ogre General’s code stuttered, something it wasn’t built for.
It turned its massive head toward Liam.
Liam looked back at it with the calm of a man who has identified an ingredient and is deciding what to do with it.
[Absorption: 999/1000.]
One more hit. He rolled his neck; a click. His red eyes pinned the spot where the core beat under obsidian plates. One more and the skill caps. Let’s find out what a Level 20 Mutant tastes like.
He walked.