"Nan. Ni. Rut..." Henry, watching from his tower as the buffed-up wolves marched through the blazing walls, continued preparing his spell undisturbed.
This counter-attack wasn't surprising to him. Stopping the wolves had never been the fire's primary purpose.
In the fort below him, the evacuees were funnelling into the tunnel.
As they would emerge on the other side, in the bunker in the river, all scent and sight of them would be curtained-off by the fire and the plumes of smoke it was throwing up.
To achieve this effect, the fort had to be positioned at a very precise point where the river, after a series of S-bends, transitioned into a long straight.
Of course, Henry couldn't be certain that the trick would work. Given that the Wolf Emperor had been forewarned of his wolf-napping plan, this, too, might have been spoiled.
The wolves, climbing over the last burning layer, began to drop down into a 10-metre gap outside the fort, landing in the next trap.
The gap was much more restricted than the wolves had expected. About a third of the perimeter was closed off by the
If that wasn't enough, Shaman
Those wolves that somehow survived all this were then chopped apart by Qi Masters, Crusaders, and Fighters. These melee fighters, having slipped through the slits in the fort walls, were striding unconcerned through the AOE spells, their health being replenished by healers to their back.
Conceptually, nothing was spectacular about the defensive arrangement Henry'd laid out, such measures being standard in Saana's sieges. However, what had caught the wolves off guard, along with The Emperor, was the timing of the setup. Before the walls of trees were ignited, they had seen of the gap a fairly open space, and only a dozen seconds had passed since then. To build the defence so quickly, the humans had to have prepared as soon as the first flames went up. This, in turn, meant they'd also predicted the pack would continue to charge.
Worse yet, now that the pack were caught out, the frontmost wolves had no means to retreat. Although their Vitality had been buffed, making one journey through the flames had stripped off more than half their health. A retreat could not be survived.
Henry, still casting, felt his brain pulse, the big-wolf addressing him again.
"Mea culpa. I admit to having underestimated thee, human. But alas, what mattereth these tricks when thou art outnumbered three-hundred to one?"
Under The Emperor's orders, the horde of wolves proceeded straight onwards into the meat grinder, embracing their gruesome demise.
It was true, however, that there were simply too many.
Now and then, a wolf managed to break through the carnage and reach the fort. As its walls were magically reinforced, they could not climb them as they had the outer layer of trees. But this did not seem to deter the beasts. One by one, they hurled themselves against the structure, as though they might somehow, through sheer numbers and collective will, cause it to shatter.
The trainees were quick to respond. With their long, make-shift wooden spears, they jabbed down at the beasts. Having received extra buffs from the Empire's Miracleworkers and Accompanists, their attacks were able to penetrate the wolves' hides. The only limitation was the poor quality of the spears, which splintered constantly; however, many spares had been distributed by the meatheads.
Henry, still casting, sent a message to the Beast Tamer.
-Anonymous: It looks futile, but the ones slipping through are building ramps with their corpses. Don't ignore them.
At the same moment this was happening, Henry noticed The Wolf Emperor, still being suppressed by focus fire, begin to laugh as its body underwent a strange transformation.
The monster became translucent, and its blue fur grew indistinct, seemingly dissolving. An arrow about to strike the monster's chest glided through it and landed in the dirt behind, its fletching feathers soaking wet.
With the subsequent attacks passing through its now watery-body just as harmlessly, the monster's pace quickened.
Henry groaned.
The 'royal' blue fur...Wisguh of the 'Wolf Wave'...how ambiguously misleading. This monster had a water affinity.
No mention of it possessing such abilities had been made by the Cutthroats. Most likely, it'd not been hiding its abilities, but, rather, it had gained them only after feasting on the Villagers. Like players, monsters also unlocked further skills as they levelled up.
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Considering Henry’s plans to escape via river, this water-affinity did not bode well.
In the end, after all his efforts, this stupid game might just force him to use his ace.
But, before it did or didn't come to that, he still had to collect his fifteenth pup.
"VIT!" Henry chanted
In front of him, a miniature constellation dragon came to life and bit the cover of the Spelltome strapped to his chest. The dragon, ripping the Spelltome away, flew a few centimetres in front of Henry, opened the book to its central page, and hovered there, flapping its tiny, indigo wings.
From each of Henry’s now-freed fingers, a tendril of pure arcane energy shot out, growing at a rate of about 5 metres per second. The movement of each tendril was synchronised with its source finger. Extension caused them to lengthen, bending caused them to shrink, rotating changed their direction.
Since the Beast Tamer’s response to the wolves building ramps was too slow, Henry, carefully spread the tendrils along the fort walls.
As they dipped over the edge and out of sight, he swept them along the outer surface, the tendrils lapping at the wolves like tongues licking food off teeth.
You have absorbed the lifeforce of a Grey Wolf (3). 55 XP gained.
You are now levelling up!
Congratulations! You are now a Level 4 Adventurer!
15/15.
And that was it, the final wolf. He was now free to leave and progress to the tutorial's last stage.
At last...
Following that, his vision was spammed with duplicate messages, Henry's
Due to being over-levelled, you are unable to absorb the lifeforce of the Grey Wolf.
Due to being over-levelled, you are unable to absorb the lifeforce of the Grey Wolf.
Due to being over-levelled, you are unable to absorb the lifeforce of the Grey Wolf...
At this moment, The Wolf Emperor dove headfirst into the walls of flame. Its body dissolved into a wave that swept effortlessly through a section of burning logs, quelling the fire as it passed to create a safe entranceway for its minions.
As the wave reemerged within the 10-metre space, it reformed into the wolfen shape. The Emperor, tracing back the glowing tendrils demolishing his forces to their source, finally spotted the human at the very back of this many-layered defence, standing high in a watchtower with ten glowing appendages extending from him.
It gave an elated click. "Hahahaha!
'By true form, they are distinguished,
Wolf of Waves and Ten-Head Serpent.
And so The Hydra weighs choices grave:
Tooth or claw - all ends the same!'"
Henry, hearing this prophecy, sighed out loud.
If even the outcome of a coin flip to choose spells could be predicted, then perhaps it was truly futile to resist.
A heavy feeling washed over him, much like what he’d felt one day as a kid when he’d visited the beach and a series of waves had held him underwater for half a minute. Being scraped along the coral, his aching lungs trying to convince his mouth that saltwater might be breathable, in that moment, he’d found that, despite his body’s panic, his mind had been unusually tranquil, in the way it'd been ever since in these hopeless situations.
The sea will take me, he’d thought, or it won’t. That’s all there was to it.
Henry looked at the scenery around him now with the same fatalistic, disimpassioned clarity.
He saw the amateur troop manoeuvres of the Beast Tamer, his Tendrils continuing to sweep along outside the fort, the meatheads and other trainees spearing beasts, the blazing walls around them, the section doused by The Wolf Emperor over which a dense trail of its minions were beginning to funnel in. Amidst the notification spam for the wolves being obliterated by his tyrannical hand, he caught a message from his guildmate, announcing her arrival. The Wolf Emperor's eyeballs, floating in the fluids of its liquid head, were locked on him with the deranged single-mindedness of the starved, a look not foreign to Henry.
However, some things had changed since Henry's childhood. These days, his body never panicked either, and it'd been a long time since he’d really frozen in the face of a challenge. If anything, this was the space where he moved mostly freely, where his lungs breathed at ease, up in the mountain's most suffocating altitudes.
If then he was destined to kill this pompous mutt, his current position was not favourable to him.
Cancelling the rest of the spell and catching the hovering Spelltome, he jumped from the watchtower, aiming for the entrance to the tunnel through which the NPCs had fled.
As the ground sped towards him, he gave the Wolf Emperor a disappointed shake of his head, along with an exhausted click.
"Man..." he said with resignation. "Why waste the gift of thought? Can't you see what it means that I'm an Offworlder, that I’m immortal? Even if you had the strength to kill me, I can be back here in an hour. It’s not like I’m going to bend over and give you my kingdoms just because you can beat me once when I’m Level 4. That's a ludicrous premise. Do you know how many times I’ve been swallowed, disembowelled, stomped, quartered by over-sized monsters proclaiming themselves "kings" or "gods"? Yet, in the end, I'm still here, while they're the support beams of my ships, the fertiliser feeding my fields, the carpet upon which my feet so comfortably tread. It's such a pathetic fate. Why can’t you use your brain to be the exception who avoids it?"
How wonderfully efficient the secret language was.
The Wolf Emperor, hearing this rant that seemed to take its loss as a foregone conclusion, upped its pace even further. Ignoring everything else, it aimed straight for The Tyrant, The Hydra, or whatever else this puny human was called. Let him talk so arrogantly from the pit of his stomach.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the fortress, the Beast Tamer, noticing The Wolf Emperor's charge, shouted an order for everyone to save their crowd control abilities and prepare. He planned to exploit the giant beast isolating itself from the pack. Within the confines of the fort, his troops could chain stun it and whittle down its health.
Henry, as his falling feet phased through the illusion covering the tunnel's entrance, overheard the order and shook his head again.
It was a nice plan in theory, but the Beast Tamer hadn’t been tracking his troops’ cooldowns well enough - too many of them had used their crowd control abilities already. This miscalculation would be the end of everyone else here.
While Henry made a temporary exit, The Wolf Emperor splashed through the slits in the wall, arriving in the fort's centre.