Chapter 7 The Third Floor

The group once more entered the floor from a cave-room.

“Finally, we’re here!” Jasper called.

“Yes, but we need to be careful, remember what the trainer said?” answered Tia, one of the other archers.

“Nah, that old fart is way too wary. I’m level eight, and most of you are about the same level. These low leveled creatures will be no problem for us.”

The others weren’t sure enough of themselves to go against the confident archer, and followed him out into the open area.

Not one monster was in sight, and thus Jasper led the group further out. Soon the entrance was only a small spot in the far back. As they could have expected, that was the moment they were attacked.

A strange sound could suddenly be heard from around them. Immediately the group moved a bit closer to each other, but not one of them could find anything amiss.

Then the ground right in front of Deon crumbled away, and thin legs shot out to skewer him. Luckily his reflexes were fast enough to dodge the first leg, and he was able to parry the second leg.

Then the head of the fire ant came up, and two huge mandibles came into view. Deon backed away, but before he could take a second step, Leophon stepped forward and lunged toward the creature. With a shriek the creature backed up, but because its body wasn’t fully out of the earth it couldn’t back up fast enough. With one last shriek it fell silent.

The sounds however were any less loud. Almost immediately after the first fire ant fell, two more rose from the earth about ten paces away. Those met their end as soon as their heads rose from the ground, due to some fast shooting from Jasper and Zach.

But now three more rose from behind the group, only to be shot down by Xanthe and Tia with an ice shard and an arrow. The last managed to crawl up the whole way and charged at the group. Virgil also managed to shoot a shard of ice, but it was countered by one of the legs of the creature. Luckily it wasn’t fast enough to dodge Jasper’s arrow.

One moment it looked like that was it. Jasper opened his mouth to say something, but before he could do so the sounds started up again, and this time louder than ever.

“We need to get out of here!” shouted George, and the others couldn’t agree more. Even though the fighters hadn’t been needed, all of them were quite shook up due to the ferocious nature of the fire ants. Only Jasper looked like he wanted to argue, but since all the others started to back away towards the entrance of the third floor, he followed them.

Then the next ants came up from the ground. On both sides there were two of the creatures, but as soon as those were taken down by the ranged fighters more came up. Soon there were more than the ranged fighters could handle.

The fighters arranged themselves in a hexagon around the archers and mages, but they had to work in pairs to keep the fire ants from overwhelming them. While one defended the other could counter and kill the ant. Thus the hexagon was soon changed to three duo’s that had to work together. Meanwhile the archers kept shooting as fast as they could to clear the way back to the entrance.

Sam worked together with Erik to keep two ants back, but they couldn’t get a good opening to take down either of them.

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“Virgil, a little help out here!” Erik shouted back. But none of the expected shards of ice came. When she had a moment Sam managed to glance back, and saw that both the mages had enough trouble themselves. Some of the fire ants lived up to their name, and shot small globs of fire from their hind quarters. The mages had to shoot each of the globs with ice shards to keep them from hitting the group.

“We need to finish these two and help the others,” Sam exclaimed.

“We need some help to do that, what’s taking Virgil and Xanthe so long?”

“Those ants have ranged attacks, they’re defending us against those attacks. They can’t do both those things at the same time. I’ll try to distract them both, but then you need to kill one of them with that opening. I don’t know how long I will hold against two of them.”

“Sure, you do that.”

Without second guessing herself Sam stepped forward, while shouting.

“Hey, here you ugly bastards!”

She kept slashing at the closest creature, and she tried to duck under the attack from the second ant. The mandibles missed her by a few centimeters, but one of the legs managed to slash across her left leg. Luckily this gave Erik the opening he needed, and he skewered the second ant the moment it attacked Sam.

The first though, attacked the moment Sam went down due to the pain in her leg. Opening it’s mandibles as wide as possible, it tried to crush her head between them.

Out of reflex Sam reversed her short sword, and used it the same way she would’ve used her knife. She ducked under the attack and fell flat on the ground. Her sword though, she slashed under the head of the ant. Immediately its legs gave out, and it fell to the ground. Unfortunately Sam had fallen in the exact same spot. A huge weight pushed the air out of her lungs.

Erik saw her going down, and he rushed to push the ant away. Immediately after he had to pay attention to the ants again, because two more charged at the group.

“We can’t go on like this! We need to get to a place that we can defend better than this.” Tia shouted. The quiet girl was apparently the only one who had thought ahead of the moment.

“Find us some big boulder we can put our backs against.” Someone shouted back.

As soon as Sam had managed to get up again, the group made their way over to the closest of the big rocks. On the way they had to slay five more ants, but after several tense minutes they made it. Immediately the fighters Lufir, Deon, Erik and Leophon set themselves up as the first line of defense, while George and the injured Sam took the sides and acted as second line of defense.

The archers meanwhile kept shooting their arrows, and while they weren’t targeted by ranged attacks from the ants, the mages also managed to shoot some ice shards to slow down some of the ants.

Everything was just looking up for the group, until Tia mentioned something troubling.

“I only have five arrows left guys, how about you?”

“Only four left,” answered Jasper.

“Seven for me,” was Zach’s answer.

As the last one, it was Steve’s turn. “I still have a dozen. I didn’t shoot as many during the first two floors as you guys.

“Well, that’s not all. I think Xanthe has the same problem as me.” Virgil also had some problems, “The both of us are running out of mana.”

Sam hadn’t even thought about the fact that the mages had to be spending mana like crazy, shooting all those ice shards.

Soon both Tia and Jasper were out of arrows. The two of them took out their secondary weapons, with a big dagger for Tia and a short sword that looked a bit like the one Sam had gotten for Jasper. Zach and Steve meanwhile had shared the arrows between the two of them to use sparingly when necessary.

Even though they had lost most of their ranged attacks, the group now managed to hold the ants back a lot easier. With two more people to hold the line, nobody had to take crazy risks like Sam and Erik had done before. The downside was that they didn’t get as many kills as before. Now it was pretty much impossible to wade through the ever increasing number of fire ants to get back to the entrance.

It didn’t take much longer for both of the mages to start faltering. Their mana was well and truly spent. This meant that all of them started to get hit by the globs of fire that the ants shot at them. Luckily those didn’t do too much damage, but they still left nasty burn marks wherever they hit. As the mages didn’t have good secondary weapons, the two of them concentrated on not being hit.

Then suddenly the ants froze in their tracks. A single glob of fire kept flying towards the group, only to be batted away by Leophon. Then the ants scrambled away as fast as they could.

The reason soon became clear. With an ease that spoke of both a lot of statpoints, as well as an enormous amount of experience fighting monsters, the trainer walked through the dozens of ants. The ants scrambled away, but even though their trainer didn’t hurry, the ants couldn’t get away quickly enough. Several of them were sliced into several parts before the rest of them got away.

“Okay kids, your five hours are up. Time to go back to base.”