Chapter 186
The next few minutes were a slog. Every single ‘communication disruption’ bullet took a huge amount of effort to make. She was getting faster every time she did it, because she was getting used to the way the different types of mana needed to feed into each other… but it was a very concentration-intensive process that made Alice wonder if this was really the most efficient use of her time. After creating her third, Alice was starting to question if she was having a big impact on the battlefield at all.
The biggest benefit of her ‘disruption bullets,’ as far as she could tell, was that it created infighting in the monstrous horde. The monsters acting as an organized army created a big problem for the humans trying to fend them off. However, this wasn’t the ‘natural’ state of affairs for monsters. In normal cases, monsters just attacked anything with mana – including other monsters. If Alice could create widespread chaos, making all of the monsters attack each other, that probably would have ended the siege of monsters in a single attack.
But she couldn’t do that. Maybe it was possible, but it definitely wasn’t something she could accomplish right now. Right now, it took Alice almost ten seconds to craft a single disruption bullet.
Despite her worries, she kept working at it… and started to worry less as she observed the effects of her actions. She started to realize that she wasn’t just disrupting a monster or two. With the help of Ethan, Allira, and Jonathan, their group was already firmly wedged at the edge of the battlefield, taking pressure off of the defenders. With the help of Alice’s disruption bullets, if she aimed them at the right monsters, she could create small areas of disorder at exactly the right times in the monster horde. Perhaps more importantly… she could also target dangerous monsters. Specifically, those that had assimilated some System mana and had started creating Perks.
Alice had a massive number of advantages when it came to identifying some types of mana. She had a ridiculous number of Perks and Achievements dedicated explicitly to helping her identify magic abnormalities, after all. This made it easier for Alice to identify potential threats. Then, she could turn those problems into wildcards that attacked their allies.
After she started targeting Perk-wielding monsters, she started to really notice how impactful her actions were. The disruption a monster’s Perk could provide was much greater than simply killing a monster. Many monsters had more passive Perks, which meant that they didn’t display an overwhelming difference between them and their monstrous kin. However, there were also a good number of Monsters with active Perks, where they had some sort of major upside in exchange for a long cooldown. If Alice managed to get those monsters to turn on the others, and the monster’s Perk wasn’t on cooldown, the entire battle formation of monsters in the area would get thrown into chaos. It was an easy way to inflict the maximum amount of damage with the minimum amount of mana. She wasn’t eliminating threats anywhere near as quickly as Ethan or Allira, but she was spending far less mana and Perks to do so.
Alice started to lose herself in the flow of the fight, constantly sniping problematic monsters, and the group kept slowly moving forward as they cut down a larger and larger number of monsters.
Until finally, the group arrived at the wall itself.
Alice glanced at the defenders, and saw that most parts of the wall were still struggling to keep things completely under control. However, things hadn’t reached a breaking point. More importantly, it seemed like the monsters were starting to run out of steam.