Nice,’ Alex thought as he read over his updated quest rewards. His journey to this general had been simpler than the first in some ways, though that didn’t necessarily mean easy. Unlike the other tunnel, which was mostly uniform with the occasional fork leading to a dead end, this section was entirely labyrinthine in nature. There were constant offshoots, some turned out to be dead ends, while others pathed him back to parts he’d already explored.
The elevation was all off as well. Alex was never certain how deep underground he was, but tunnels constantly rose and fell, like the space’s construction had been inspired by the rolling hills of San Francisco. A combination of Sixth Sense and Soul Sight turned out to be the only reliable means of navigation, especially after his earlier tactic of just going right, led him to accidentally backtracking a few times. Besides the unnecessarily complicated environment, Alex’s exploration was further slowed by his newly developed fear of overdrawing on his mental energy.
He’d traded out his mana imbued sticks first for his hammers, then for a metal quarterstaff after the added range proved a better counter to his newest opponents, the Rebos Drone. Alex personally knew jack shit about staff fighting. Its longer range made the majority of his Arnis techniques less effective, and his only actual staff knowledge came in the form of a late night YouTube rabbit hole involving one video about Jo. Of course, he could now recall everything that had happened in that video, so it wasn’t as if he was going in entirely blind.
The drones, while only slightly smaller than the workers, had a key feature that differentiated them from the lowest caste of the colony in the form of thin insectoid wings. Alex had only been paying half attention the first time he’d run into one, and the sudden flight of what he’d assumed to be a normal worker caught him off guard. The beast, equally frightened, immediately began gaining what altitude it could as it spat acid at him, the new form of attack only adding to the Planestrider’s surprise.
Still lacking a ranged attack of his own, Alex activated Echo Relocation on a near instinctual level, the gap-closer teleporting him into the air directly below the beast. He swung his hammer up, the strike meeting no resistance as the creature died on impact. It turned out the drones’ defenses were even worse than that of the worker ants’, and while their method of attack might have proved more difficult to deal with in an open space; the compact environment of the tunnels limited that advantage.
His explorations weren’t all hostile battles, however. Alex also stumbled on a few deposit sites the Rebos used to store seemingly anything they came across. His infinite inventory proved its usefulness once more, as he transferred literal tons worth of weight onto his person in seconds. He found everything from dirt and dung, to what looked like chunks of precious metals. A couple of the rooms were just filled to the brim with a goopy sweet smelling substance Alex mentally designated as Rebos honey, which he was extremely tempted to try. Of course, the stuff was as likely to be poisoned as it was to be delectable, so he decided not to risk it, though the intrusive thought was eating at him.
By the time Alex reached the General’s room, it had taken him over four hours, half again the length it had taken to clear the entirety of the first tunnel. The extra time might have seemed drawn out initially, but it had been a tactical decision that left Alex at near 100% as he neared the chamber of the second general. Well, it was actually the Fourth General, if his quest reward was anything to go by, but semantics.
Scanning the enclosure through an expanded Sixth Sense, Alex could only come up with one word to properly describe the place, immense. Like all the tunnels, it was cavernous in nature, but the presence the large area held was incomparable. The ceiling was over thirty meters up, and there were hundreds of holes embedded into the walls. Each hole, at least all the ones he could inspect, led to another tunnel, explaining much of the seemingly random inclines and declines Alex had maneuvered to get there. By some miracle, he’d managed to end up only one level above the room’s lowest point, and it only took a short walk to get to ground level.
The space buzzed with activity, drones flying in and out of holes seemingly at random. Alex had no idea how to identify the boss in all that chaos, let alone defeat it, and while one of those problems was solved when Sixth Sense picked up a massive drone, the other, soon became even more apparent. The beast was like most of the drones, but upscaled to be on par with the size of the First General. That, combined with the amount of maneuverability the room allowed the creature, would have been issue enough, but it was more complicated than that.
Besides the constant swarm of nearly a hundred drones in and around the area, a collection of ten Warrior sized flyers directly surrounded the general as it moved. Sixth Sense had had trouble finding the beast initially due to this fact, the density of the larger drone bodies making it difficult for his sensory skill to penetrate. Alex spent another minute standing in the shadows, watching in fascinated disgust as the larger drones clung onto the General like it was a queen bee, before retreating for the moment.
Backtracking a bit, Alex moved to an unoccupied section of tunnel and took some time to reason his best method of moving forward. He could go look for another general, postponing this fight until he leveled enough, or received a skill upgrade that gave better crowd damage. The idea had merit, but of his four abilities with skill levels twenty or higher, only Thorn’s Touch seemed likely to evolve in that direction.
Even if he ignored that fact, he still had no clue what dangers the other general’s section held. Postponing this battle, just to end up with another task equally difficult, would leave him off no better than he was now. It was best he finished what he started, especially after he spends so much time clearing out the tunnels in preparation for the fight. Shifting his line of thought from alternatives to the creation of a battle plan, Alex was back in front of the General’s room fifteen minutes later.
Heart racing as he convinced himself this was the correct path, he took in a deep breath, dropped stealth, and screamed; the noise cutting through the constant buzz as it echoed out. The drones, completely unprepared for his sudden outburst, lost touch with the underlying flow of the room, the beast’s crashing and colliding with one another in a chain reaction of chaos. The room had always seemed erratic, but now it was in full disarray, and Alex was in the perfect position to wreak even more havoc.
Alex charged into the fray with a fury, holding nothing back as he activated multiple skills at once. Mana flared through his pathways, the energy almost seeming excited as it awaited his command, and a wave of elation passed through him as his staff connected with the first beast. Alex couldn’t tell if it was from his mana, the battle, or the sheer relief of not having been hit by a crippling headache, but he moved all the same. Swinging his staff like the blades of a helicopter, he began smashing every bug within reach. Each beast died from what Alex would barely consider a tap, but there was no time to rest, as Sixth Sense pointed out another two targets for every one he managed to kill.
Clearing the ground nearest him in seconds, Alex activated Echo Relocation, an illusory clone of him appearing on the ground as he was transported onto the back of a drone seven feet above. Rather than immediately kill it, he used the beast as a platform, the weight of his step enough to send the Rebos plummeting toward the ground as he propelled himself upwards.
This went on for nearly thirty seconds, Alex managing to kill entirely unopposed as the beast lost themselves in the hectic environment. He did his best to stay away from the general and its guards. Instead, in an attempt to cull the number of drones before the battle truly began, but an interruption to his one-sided massacre soon came in the form of a chittering hiss. The noise seemed to act like an off switch for the seventy or so remaining ants, every last one of the beasts immediately coming to a halt, their wings allowing them to hover as if motionless.
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Alex didn’t know what was happening, but it wasn’t hard to assume when the ants did start moving again, they would still be his enemy. Pushing himself even harder, he swung the staff with increased ferocity, hands feeling like they burned with every strike. His kill counter continued to rise, but the pause barely lasted three seconds, and Alex found himself falling back to the ground as the once motionless drone he’d planned to use as a stepping stone suddenly flew for its general. Relocating twice to bleed momentum, Alex landed on the ground with a roll, staff up and ready for whatever came his way. But before anything could, his sensory skill picked up something important, there was now an angle that gave him a direct line of sight to the general’s body.
The sudden use of the skill had been surprising, but Alex didn’t focus on that, it didn’t matter. What did was the fact that just like the regular drones, the personal guards had been affected by the general’s call, and they were now moving in a way that exposed their charge to danger. Throwing his pre-made plan out the window, Alex sprinted toward the spot Sixth Sense determined to be ideal, and dropped to one knee. Releasing his grip on the staff, the heavy metal crashed to the floor as he pulled an ornate crossbow from his inventory. The bow was one from the repeater family, with a horizontal magazine half full of orange and red bolts. He took only a moment to steady his aim before releasing the arrow, the shot rushed as he tried not to fumble the opportunity that had been gifted to him.
Moving as soon as his arrow was live, Alex immediately stored the bow, subsequently reaching down to grab his temporarily discarded weapon. He had been worried the shot might be off due to the entirely nonexistent nature of his experience with ranged weapons, but his stats had proved to be enough, passively correcting his aim in the milliseconds before he loosed. The arrow flew true, and for a moment Alex thought he’d manage to cheat the system, but of course it couldn’t be that easy, it never was. In a moment of pure selflessness, one he never expected to see in a group of seemingly unintelligent, oversized, acid shooting ants, he watched as one of the smaller drones pulled a Paulie, diving to intercept the arrow meant for its general.
While the interception now meant the massive drove wasn’t assured to die from the attack, Alex wasn’t writing off the attempt as a failure just yet. After all, he hadn’t just shot any old bolt at the beast, but one of the arrows he’d recovered from Ben of house Kufah the day prior, the power of which he’d come face to face with. As Alex retreated, the punctured drone was flung back, the projectiles remaining momentum leaving it even closer to the general as the arrow, beast, and everything else in the vicinity was encompassed by a massive fireball.
Maybe it was because he was so much closer to the epicenter of the blast this time, but this one seemed bigger than the others had. The air pushed at him, to the point he needed to crouch slightly to remain in place. Squinting as the light and heat reached a crescendo, Alex received death notifications for another twenty beasts, and he was expecting the boss’s announcement to follow shortly, but it never did. Instead, as the particle density lowered and the general came back into the focus of Sixth Sense, Alex saw that while the beast had clearly taken significant damage, it was still very much alive.
The smell of blood and burnt chitin filled the room as he considered using another explosive arrow to immediately end the battle, but quickly ruled against the idea. He only had two left, and the arrow had just proved its ability to completely shift a battle in an instant, shooting another at this point would be beyond wasteful. Alex didn’t know how the magical arrows functioned exactly, but he was also worried about the oxygen content remaining in the room after such a large fireball, and didn’t feel like accidentally suffocating himself. No, it was better he did this the old fashion way, but as he moved, the remaining beast in the room showed they wouldn’t make his goal an easy one to complete.
The previous call to unite forgotten, every drone in the area seemed to lose all reason as they charged for him, the ants occasionally killing one another in their attempts to reach Alex. Using his staff to deflect the first ant that reached him, he managed to throw the nearest drone off, but was pushed back for the first time in hours. Twisting his body Alex brought the staff down on the beast’s head, before shifting his grip to impale the bottom of the weapon in the chest of another. More and more began to crowd around him, and he knew it wouldn’t be long until the swarm overran him, he needed to move now.
Switching his staff to a one-handed grip, Alex withdrew his dagger of the jagged release, the weapon immediately being stabbed into the nearest drone. It was still his most powerful melee weapon, purely based on the fact it was the only enchanted one he owned, but it hadn’t been getting much use lately. His attempts at gaining as many weapons skills as possible was the main reason, though the noticeable dulling due to constant use was another factor. Since Alex was unwilling to risk trying to sharpen the magical blade unless absolutely necessary, he’d been doing his best to save the dagger for moments like this.
Stabbing out at two other beasts, Alex relocated once, and broke into a sprint, before landing his third strike on one of the still living warrior sized drones. It had already been half dead when he’d attacked, and the beast immediately slumped on his weapon. Dislodging the corpse with a kick, Alex expended another 500 mana, as Echo Relocation put him only a few paces from the general. A drone swooped down in what looked to be a tackle, but Alex redirected the creature with his staff, his dagger stabbing out a moment later in the fourth strike. Deciding to waste mana rather than throw the battle, he relocated a final time to stand over the drone general’s prone form, but when he arrived, he doubted the rush had been necessary.
A large, gross wound leaked green ichor from where the creature’s midsection should have been, while the rest of its abdomen barely remained connected to its body. Much of its chitin was burned, cracked, or entirely missing in places, and the beast looked to have broken its wings in the fall. Forgoing dramatics as the swarming drones shifted from his disappearing clones to him, Alex brought his dagger down into the beast’s head, and activated his blade's skill, decisively ending the general.
From there the clean-up had been simple, many of the remaining beasts continued to attack him, but with their leader dead, much of their ferocity had been tempered. With so many of the creatures attacking at once, avoiding injury entirely was impossible, but between his abilities and items, Alex walked out of the battle mostly unharmed; though once more covered in a combination of bodily fluids he very much wished not to be.
Looting what he could off the corpses, Alex backtracked to an earlier tunnel where he’d been sitting for the last few minutes.
***
Quest
Tutorial Quest – Main – Subquest 2.1: King of The (Ant) Hill
Generals Killed (2/5)
Time Remaining: 01:16:14 (Day Thirteen, 3:38 P.M.)
Rewards:
Fourth General’s Boots of Alacrity
Item Upgrade Sigil x1
+ 75 Gold
Name: Fourth General’s Boots of Alacrity
Grade: E
Rarity: Uncommon
Description: Speed embodies the peak of all which is dynamic. It holds the secrets to safety in its tenets, and the path to power in its haste. To be one with speed is to be unpredictable, and to be unpredictable is to be secure. The Fourth General, by stilling their body and that of their subjects, allowed their movements to be easily foreseen. Hope you are never still again. Gain a 15% reduction to all stamina related skills while this item is equipped.
You have defeated Rebos Drone x 311.
You have defeated Worker Rebos x23.
You have defeated Rebos Warrior Drone x28. Bonus experience awarded for killing enemies above your level.
You have defeated Rebos General (Level 45). Bonus experience awarded for killing an enemy above your level.
+407 Gold
Congratulations, you have advanced to Level Thirty-two.
Attribute Points Granted. Allocate Free (3) Point(s)
Your skill [Stealth] has advanced to Level Twenty-three.
Your skill [Soul Sight] has advanced to Level Eighteen.
Your skill [Soul Sight] has advanced to Level Nineteen.
Your skill [Silent Strike] has advanced to Level Twenty-two.
Your skill [Silent Strike] has advanced to Level Twenty-three.
Your skill [Battle Trance] has advanced to Level Twenty.
Your skill [Lord’s Confidence] has advanced to Level Two.
***