I'd replaced one of the healing potions at my waist with the Hero's Last Stand, an antidote next to it given the presence of the assassins. The stat and defensive potions, with their hour long duration, I drank. The weapon skill boosting one I left in my [Item Box]; maybe I'd drink it if I was forced to use the last stand, but otherwise I didn't intend to touch it. Taking those five potions within an hour was already pushing it, especially given their ranks, and I could expect some nasty side effects. If I took an antidote or regular healing, stamina or mana potions too, I was going to have a bad time.

I activated my physical buffs, took aim at the goblin king from my position at the entrance, and declared the opening of hostilities by letting loose the lightning. To be fair, I was starting to see where Vargalas was coming from; spraying bolts of lightning over the field was satisfying.

The goblins reacted to my attack immediately, and a rain of arrows came flying towards me, followed by bolts of ice and fire from the mage corps. [Distortion] was given a major workout as I tried to redirect as much of the ranged fire as I could into the charging mass of melee fighters. Unable to catch everything, I needed to dodge or parry arrows, and deflect spells with [Greater Mana Control], but I kept up the lightning barrage throughout. I was holding off using active mana scanning until the last moment; at minimum, I needed to take out the king first.

Ideally I wanted to take out the assassins too, and hence avoid the need for active scanning at all, but the king was an absolute tank. He held on for a full ten seconds, when a lesser goblin would have been vaporised in one. By that time, half of the assassins had vanished. I figured it would take them a few more seconds to reach me, so I took potshots at the remaining assassins before shutting down my long range attacks.

I'd apparently started my active scanning just in time, picking up an assassin creeping up behind me. I pointed behind myself and zapped him without even turning around. By this point I had the knight division almost on top of me, and enough other goblins around that I didn't have line of sight to evade with [Far Step], but that was fine; I'd planned for this. I aimed my [Far Step] straight up, then utilising my boosted sixty-four dexterity, I twisted in mid-air and kicked off the ceiling, using a maximum range [Far Step] to cross half the chamber, then a third step to make it the rest of the way.

I had to assume that these monsters were highly intelligent, even without their king. After watching that move once they would probably leave stealthed assassins at my likely teleport points, or otherwise be ready to respond in some way, but this time I'd caught them off guard. Confirming there were no assassins in my vicinity, I shut down my active scanning and started blasting out lightning again, hitting whatever targets presented themselves.

The generals, who had been hanging back behind their respective corps, were now exposed and went down one after the other. I tripped a few wolves with [Far Reach] before I needed to rededicate my staff to parrying another wave of arrows.

The goblin sages tried to switch strategy from fewer large attacks to rapid fire small ones, presumably in the hopes of overwhelming my defences, but their move backfired; the smaller attacks were weak enough for me to reflect with [Greater Mana Control] rather than just deflect, and a spread of small fireballs slammed into one of the goblin hero squads. The sages ceased fire rather swiftly after that.

Judging that I'd left enough time to be in danger from assassins again, I spun up my active mana scanner for the second time, but this time spotted nothing. Perhaps they really were laying in wait for me to use [Far Step]. I wasn't going to make the mistake of assuming they had lost the ability to strategise just because I'd taken out the generals as well as the king.

Nor was I going to get complacent, no matter how well things seemed to be going so far. Until I'd confirmed the death of every assassin on the field, it wouldn't be safe to switch off my active mana scanning, which meant no more long range lightning or controlled deflection of the sages' spells.

Another wave of arrows came in, which I did my best to redirect back to the archers. The amount of mana I was spending on [Distortion] was starting to become a concern, so I needed to kill their ranged fire as quickly as possible. I spotted a gap near the archer squad, where the squads of heroes had parted to move around them, and leapt in.

It wasn't a gap; it was bait. Three assassins were waiting there. Despite my insistence to the contrary, I had still underestimated the intelligence of these monsters. The only saving grace was that they hadn't known exactly where I'd teleport to, and needed to turn to attack, giving me the time to electrocute one, cave in the head of a second and kick out at the third. The kick wasn't damaging, but staggered him for long enough for me to attack properly. As I spun around to zap him, he threw his dagger straight at my face, but I saw his movement and used [Distortion] to redirect it into the head of a nearby wolf. The assassin fell to my lightning moments later, the ambush safely averted.

Dealing with the assassins had cost precious seconds, leaving me unable to do much damage to the archers before a squad of heroes closed in. I leapt back to my previous position at the back of the room before I lost line of sight.

Fortunately, I had taken out enough of the archers that between [Distortion] and dodging, I could deal with the arrows without the need to parry. That let me start attacking seriously with [Far Reach]. It was another load on my mana, but thanks to my funnelling trick, my tank was still half full. Or, more pessimistically, it was only half full, and I was yet to take out half of the enemy. I did my best to strike the archers with their own arrows, but I wasn't the only one who could dodge. I only managed to get a couple.

It occurred to me that the sages hadn't made any attacks recently, but [Mana Perception] was still picking up mana usage from them. Concerned they were plotting something new, I spared them a bit of attention. I realised with alarm that they were performing some sort of multi-person ritual casting, a group of eight of them arranged in a circle with a black flame growing between them. I recognised the spell from my library reading; if I let them finish, I'd be blasted by a lance of flame far greater than the spells they'd used so far, and I seriously doubted my mana control would be capable of deflecting it.

I took a swing in their direction, knowing that killing one of the eight would disrupt the ritual, but the others who were not part of the circle moved to defend. I knew they could sense mana, and they could spot and nullify my [Far Reach] attacks. Before I could make another attempt, I was interrupted by a group of knights. The knight squad had split into pairs and scattered around the chamber, meaning wherever I leapt with [Far Step] there would always be some nearby. That was bad, because I knew that the ritual was not something I wanted to let the sages complete.

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Taking one last look around at the very outer limits of my mana control and failing to spot any assassins, I took the risk of shutting down my active scanning momentarily, zapped the closest knights, then dosed the circle of sages with lightning. They seemed more resistant than the more mundane goblins, but still fell quickly enough. Unfortunately, the sages acting on defence leapt into the way of my attack, sacrificing themselves to protect the casters, and the black flame kept growing.

I felt a scratch at my chest and a sharp pain in my ankle. Alarmed, I started my active scanning again, and picked up a pair of assassins in front and behind me. How? I'd only stopped scanning a few seconds ago! I zapped the one behind me, but as I tried to manoeuvre myself to strike the one in front, I found I couldn't move my foot. The damn assassin had severed a tendon! The one in front had gone for my heart, and had penetrated my armour, but lost enough momentum that he'd failed to penetrate my potion-reinforced skin. Thank goodness for those extra potions, and that he'd gone for my heart instead of my unarmoured face...

That must have been planned; they must have been waiting right at the edge of my scanning range and known that I'd have to stop scanning to attack the sages. I knew they had no mana perception of their own, so it must also have required the sages to inform them of my scanning range. Again, I'd underestimated their intelligence.

I zapped the one in front too, before he could pull out the dagger that had got stuck in my armour, and grabbed a healing potion. I was still standing upright, but I needed my foot back if I wanted any hope of being mobile enough to survive this. Before I could get it to my mouth, the sages screeched, and lances of black flame spewed towards me.

The attack was too wide to dodge, and with my dysfunctional foot I couldn't get the purchase to [Far Step]. I tore at the magic with [Greater Mana Control], doing everything I could to deflect it, or pull apart the mana and unravel it, but there was simply too much. The flames washed over me, blasting me backwards into a wall. I lost my grip on the healing potion, which went flying off goodness knows where.

Between the spell and the impact with the wall, it was taking everything I had to cling to consciousness. My [Mana Perception] still worked, but nothing else did, and [Mana Perception] made it clear why; my eyes and ears were simply no longer there. Nor was my skin, the molten mess making it impossible to see where my armour ended and my burnt flesh began. How the hell I wasn't dead, I had no idea. Even if I was somehow clinging to life, I should be in far too much pain to function. Was that an effect of my massively boosted endurance?

My status showed me at nine health, which given that I currently had more than thirty temporary hit-points was, to put it mildly, undesirable. Then it dropped further as more arrows rained down, with me not being in any sort of condition to dodge or redirect them. My only saving grace was a complete dearth of enemies around me, as the black flames had consumed any allies in its path. I desperately grasped at the Hero's Last Stand, needing to use [Mana Perception] just to direct my unfeeling arm to the vial, and then again to find a hole in my face that connected to my stomach. Despite my condition, I somehow managed to swallow.

The potion hurt more than the flames, my burnt flesh knitting itself back together in seconds. Blood soaked arrows and chunks of smoking armour fell away from me as my skin rebuilt itself, and I stood back up on fully functional feet. A new rain of arrows came, which I redirected into the incoming fighters.

I needed to end this before my stamina stopped regenerating, so I reached into [Item Box] and drank the weapon buff potion, wincing as the extra knowledge and experience of dealing with all varieties of weapons crammed itself into my brain. There was no more time for fighting defensively and taking potshots, so I leapt into the middle of the heroes, and danced.

I stood in the middle of my enemies, and wherever their weapons were, I wasn't. My weapon passed through their shields and blades like a ghost. My mana and stamina regenerated faster than I could spend them. Despite my armour being in shambles, I didn't take any hits worse than a scratch, the defensive potion proving its worth ten times over, and even the scratches healed up as I watched. Goblins and wolves fell one after the other, and I fell nearly into a trance.

The sages were out of mana, only firing the odd small spell as it regenerated. The archers were out of arrows and had joined in the melee with their long knives. I'd found and taken out the final assassin, letting me use long range lightning again with impunity. Right now I felt untouchable, but fortunately I held on to enough presence of mind—not to mention cynicism—to know that this was the exact moment something was likely to go wrong. I noticed I was breathing heavily; my stamina was running low. The regeneration had stopped.

How long after the Hero's Last Stand had I drunk the weapon buff potion? I hurriedly leaped backwards, disengaging from the melee, and then the nausea hit as experience was ripped from my brain. The only reason I didn't throw up was because I couldn't, the regeneration from the Hero's Last Stand apparently not extending to my stomach contents. Fighting once more to keep my consciousness, I looked over the battlefield. I'd decimated the goblin numbers, and corpses lay strewn everywhere. There were barely a dozen combatants remaining. Needing to conserve my stamina, I started to pick them off with lightning, and one by one they fell, unable to reach me.

A few made last ditch attempts at taking me out. One played dead, but couldn't fool my [Mana Perception]. A couple threw weapons, but I was too far away, and they fell short. The sages launched a co-ordinated last strike, but I harmlessly deflected it. The last surviving orc charged at me, then threw a goblin hero at me when I moved to target him. I fried the goblin in mid-flight, his body crumbling as it hit the floor. Then it was over.

ding

I'd won.

The last few pieces of armour that had still been clinging to my body finally gave up and fell off, and I was really glad that I'd decided yesterday to stash a change of clothes in my [Item Box]. I fell to the floor myself, panting. Not that it would do any good; I had one whole day of zero regeneration ahead of me. I don't know what that potion did, biologically speaking, but it had done something. This obviously wasn't a System orchestrated penalty, because even manual mana funnelling didn't work. My [Mana Perception] showed that my mana storage organ had shrivelled up. It had obviously been damaged in some way.

My stamina was down to less than half. While that didn't sound too bad, my endurance was currently almost doubled between [Endurance] and the potion of physical superiority. I couldn't keep [Endurance] up without mana regeneration, and when the potion wore off in half an hour, I'd be consigned to dreamland for the day. No, it would be even sooner than that; with the adrenaline wearing off, I could acutely feel the effects of potion overconsumption. As well as some mild stat penalties, I didn't just have zero regeneration; I had negative. Stamina and mana were actively draining. Quickly. Thankfully, the toxicity wasn't bad enough to sap my health too.

I forced myself back to my feet, needing to wrap everything up while I was still conscious, pulling on some clothes and looting the chest. Ironically, it contained an amulet of protection against fire. I'd certainly be keeping that one, although I wasn't sure it would do anything against whatever ridiculous spell the sages had used. Or was it even fair to call it ridiculous? It was nothing compared to the guild master's attacks, and he didn't need a couple of minutes to charge up first.

Room looted, I headed through the rear exit, stumbling as [Endurance] expired, leaving me even more breathless. I pushed through to the core room, wondering what I was supposed to do next. Was Erryn listening?

"Erryn?" I called, panting, but there was no response. "I need to talk to you."

I almost fell over as [Dexterity] wore off. In my current state, I didn't trust myself to remain standing, so I sat down in front of the core, struggling to keep my eyes open. "But... maybe... a nap first... would be... a good... idea..."

Despite more than forty minutes of potion time remaining, I fell asleep.