Chapter 178: Phase Return
Chapter 178: Phase Return
As a T9, rampaging horse boss taller than a four-story building pursued a line of shield-bearing, backpedaling tanks, a single word bounced around Zach’s head like a rubber ball on a concrete surface.
Doomed.
Zach, along with everyone else, had actually been doomed. And it even made a sick sort of sense, you know? Like, why not? This was just what tended to happen to Zach these days. This kind of bullshit.
Doomed.
All throughout the world, people were often forced to take risks, and sometimes, these risks came with a high probability of death. But Zach envied these people, because it seemed like, every other day, he found himself in a situation where he was guaranteed to die. Seriously, how many times a month could one person be expected to survive the un-survivable? It never seemed to end.
Just for once, Zach would like to be in a situation where death was only “very likely” instead of 100% certain. Wouldn’t that be great? Wouldn’t it just be so amazing to have someone say, “Hey, Zach, I need you to go fight this giant monster, and when you do, you only have a 99% chance of dying instead of 100%?” But nope. Once more, he was thrown into a situation where death was not only possible, but basically a promise. Hell, death was currently counting down visibly above his head. How did this always happen to him? Truly, it was a miracle from the Gods that he’d only died once so far. If he somehow lived beyond today, a second death had to be right around the corner.
And so, here he was, on this stifling, scalding afternoon, with steaming, burning rain pouring down from an artificially cloudy sky, fighting in a raid against a T9 horse from hell that could’ve been safely ignored with just a little inconvenience and some roadwork. But no, of course Zach ended up in this position. Of course he was now being asked to use an ability that would take his life with no chance of survival—all while a completely separate “ability” that also had no chance of survival ticked down above his head.
“Zach!” Jimmy called to him urgently. “The hell are you waiting for?”
Ahead of them both, the boss, which had been slowed and was now using exclusively ranged attacks, fired off its dual eye lasers at the tanks, melting the shield of Frederick Britethorn while causing Maric’s grip on his own large shield to become unsteady. Frederick summoned another shield and Maric regained his stance. Truly, it was amazing how the two best tanks on the raid were both men over the age of a hundred.
“What’s it doing?” Maric shouted as the boss opened its mouth wide like it was going to use its standard biting attack. Yet, from this distance, which Zach approximated to be half a block away, the boss would only be nipping at the empty, humid air. For this reason, Zach was not surprised when it turned out that the boss did not crunch down at all. No, it instead left its mouth open wide, and now, a bright, blueish, flickering light emanated from within its throat as it suddenly stood upright on its hind legs and made three quick jerks of its neck.
Following each motion, a perfectly round, blueish orb of electricity emerged from the boss’s mouth as though “vomited” out while a cough-like sound accompanied each. These blue orbs, which started off in a single-file line, spread apart and then began moving towards three separate tanks at a moderate, but not quite fast pace that made each appear to be floating more than flying. One of them was heading over to Maric, another to old Frederick Britethorn, and the last to Ophelia Graven.