Ben immediately pulled Thera back into the woods before she could do anything.
"What are you doing?" She asked as he tugged her away. "Look at that, we're almost done."
"Thera that is 100% what people on earth would call a boss battle. I'd bet money we're going to have to fight those six statues and the giant snake. It seems so on the nose I'm surprised we aren't getting background music right now." He could tell from far away that the statues were wrapped up in powerful enchantments, the same kind that filled the wall surrounding the trial. As much as he wanted to take a closer look and see how they compared to the ones on the outside, he also didn’t want to die.
Thera looked at him as he rambled on. "Okay, I understood about half of that. I can see why you think we'd need to fight the statues, but at the very least I don't think we’ll need to fight the one of Anailia, it wouldn’t make sense for believers to have to fight their god.”
“Okay that tracks. Which one is Anailia then?” Ben hadn’t gotten a physical description of Theras god, and from here he doubted he’d be able to make out which was which anyway, at least until she told him what one it was. To him they all looked expressionless, their most noticeable aspects being how they were at least twice his height, and the giant swords they had on their backs.
“That's easy, she’s the one in the middle. Maybe the rest are meant to be her guards or something?”
“That would make sense I guess… wait. The one in the middle?”
“Yeah that's Anailia.”
"You worship a giant snake?"
"You worship a cube."
"Touché. I just kind of figured she would resemble her race.”
“Why?” She asked him, and as he thought about it he realised he didn't have a good answer.
“I guess I just assumed because most of the gods I can think of from my world had human forms or were at least portrayed as human.”
“Just how many gods does your world have?”
“That’s a bit of a loaded question. Let’s get back to it after we deal with this. What do you think we should do?”
”Well I don’t exactly think we can just attack immediately. If they are just statues then I don’t really want to desecrate the area when we’re this close to being done. No offence but I'm not looking to get a level of sacrilege.”
“None taken, you've got a point. Maybe I'm just being a bit paranoid. Still, we should at least be at the ready. Worst to worst we can try and grab the flower then book it out of there. I’ll take my wins however I can get them.”
“Works for me, I’ll at least try and be ready to prepare a spell as fast as I can if you can help take some of the load off of my staff. Even with my earth magic level improving I don’t want to risk being without one if we have to fight.”
“Sounds good to me.” He took her hand and connected to her while hanging onto her staff, ready at any moment to start strengthening it as needed and repairing the sacrificial enchantments on it. With the benefit of an extra mind in his head, he suspected he would be able to make them significantly easier and faster.
With nothing else they could think to do without the risk of earning the god’s wrath should they be wrong they started walking out.
The clearing was large and they were far enough away that it would take a couple minutes to get there, but when they were about halfway all of the statues except Anailias turned their heads towards them.
“Creepy and not a good sign,” Ben muttered to Thera.
“They haven’t moved yet though. They’re just watching us.”
“I’m just saying that if we had boss music playing in the background this would be the part where it starts singing in Latin or something.”
“I still have no idea what any of that means.”
“Just that I’m feeling more and more like we’re going to be attacked.”
“Only one other part of the trial had anything that tried to fight us. It might be fine.”
“Mm.”
They ventured closer and each statue seemed to make a decision. As one, they all reached to their backs and pulled out their weapons before taking steps towards them.
"Unless you think they'll let us run away I'm pretty sure we have to start fighting now."
Thera didn't give an answer, instead she responded by pulling together a spell, ripping a spear of stone from the earth and launching it at the head of the closest one.
It looked good and she was feeling confident, with her earth magic better than it had ever been and Ben to maintain her equipment she thought that taking out six statues would be simple, but in one smooth motion it took its sword and slashed the spear in half, neither of which made any contact with the statue itself.
"Okay, that was the opposite of good."
"Don't need the commentary Ben," She told him while preparing something much, much bigger. With her level up in earth magic she was in top form, and with the growth Ben had gone through she was confident he would be able to keep up long enough to make it work.
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She pulled four earthen spears from the ground this time, each as long as she was tall, and threw them at the closest statue, altering their trajectory through the air as they went, trying to avoid the sword that wanted to deflect them and forcing as much speed into them as possible.
It almost wasn't good enough. With a level of dexterity he felt stone shouldn't have, he watched the statue swipe away three of the four spears, only for the last one to take it out at the chest, leaving a large crater in it and knocking it to the ground.
They felt a moment of joy. Only five more to go, though they were getting dangerously close. But then the sixth got up again.
"Damn it," Ben muttered. "Maybe you need to aim for the head? Or worse, try and take out the limbs?"
Thera renewed her concentration, pulling four more spears from the ground and took aim at the first statue again, aiming at its arms and a leg, with the last one going straight for its head.
Two shots made it through this time, the first taking out the arm not wielding the sword, tearing it from the rest of its body, and the second destroying the head, seemingly not affecting the statue in any way as it still marched towards them.
It didn't look particularly fast. None of them did. But at that size the length of their strides alone gave them the speed they would need to catch them, they needed to spring away before they got within range of one of the swords. Ben didn't doubt that a single strike had the power to kill them if it got through, something he very much wanted to avoid.
"Think you can manage to hold my staff together if I go a bit bigger?" She asked him as the stone warriors marched closer with a speed that made their running seem pointless.
"Don't think we have a choice." He was managing pretty well at the moment at least, but he didn't know how much of her magic he could compensate for without her using the spell.
When she did though, things got rough. He didn't know what she was attempting, but it was forcing a lot of mana through her staff, to an extent that that felt reminiscent of their battle in stonewall. The only problem was that the staff they were currently using was nowhere close to Falk's quality. The only way it was staying together was if he put everything he had into applying sacrificial enchantments to it, directing his mana through the staff to strengthen any weakening areas with an almost surgical precision.
The worst part was that despite all of his improvements since their battle with Roan, increasing his crafting level and focus, learning new tricks with enchanting, and somehow managing to get a whole other mind to work with, he could tell it wasn't enough. At best he could slow down and manage the damage that occurred, he couldn't stop it from happening.
Still he held out, and after what felt like an eternity as he strained his mind and skills, Thera fired her spell.
If Ben had to describe what he witnessed, he would compare it to three chainsaws rising from the earth under the feet of the closest three statues. There was no reacting to it, no stopping it. Just three sheets of earth tearing their way from the ground to extract untold damage to anything they came across. In mere seconds the number they had to face was cut in half, as each of the three was cleanly split in two and fell to the ground into unmoving piles.
"I'm surprised you didn't go for an earthwave," Ben got out between gasps of breath. Thanks to his own improvements he didn't run out of his mana stores trying to keep her staff together, but he was sure he was closer than he'd like. He'd have to use at least a few minutes to recover before trying something like that again, or else risk passing out.
Thera was able to grasp that through the connection and all but dragged him to run, putting as much distance as she could between them and the remaining three as they had to walk around their fallen comrades.
"I didn't want to risk doing an attack that might damage the flower when we've come this far, and they're statues. It's not like they'll die so I didn't want to take the chance of them digging themselves out."
"Makes sense." He hadn't even considered what would happen if they destroyed the flower, what a nightmare it would have been to get this far only to disqualify themselves. "What do you think we should do now? There's no way your staff will be able to handle something that big again. I should be able to keep it functioning so long as you use something significantly smaller though."
"Do you still have your charm bombs?" She asked, and Ben grimaced. He had designed them with a very particular use in mind, one that made perfect sense to him when he had expected this to be some sort of combat trial. With the way it had all gone though they'd never even had a chance.
"All 15. If you're going to tell me you have some use for them it might actually make my day."
"As long as you've kept them powered I will."
"Who do you think I am? Of course they're powered." Since they were disposable by their nature he didn't do anything as insane as use mythril in them, but he wanted to err on the side of caution and used some higher-end materials that would hold mana longer for the sake of the trial. Considering that he made sure to top them up each night while he was on watch to account for any ambient mana loss. Any that had faded away in the time they’d been walking had been properly accounted for in his planning at least, they would still be in working order.
He pulled one from his bag and handed it to Thera, who proceeded to throw it with far more accuracy than he could have managed under the foot of the closest statue, where it was immediately set off.
When he first tried to create his charm bombs, he had a particular idea in mind. While charm magic would attract people, it seemed to have slightly different effects on animals, at least depending on the species. Much like how the alseer ran to attack her the moment it was ensnared by her mana before, any creature that didn't have an emotional capacity to be charmed in a romantic sense would have another sense stimulated. Hunger. The principle behind its design was that a creature, once feeling the effects of the magic, would bite down on it, activating the barrier magic within and causing a spherical barrier about a meter across to rapidly expand over the course of a second, and presumably doing heavy damage to the creature, if not killing it outright. As for anything that was capable of the level of sentience that would cause a more normal emotional response in a creature, well he just hoped it would respond to it by giving it a small love nibble.
Of course, exploding a monster's head was the ideal outcome, but he knew it wasn’t a perfect solution, there were plenty of ways it could go wrong. Despite that, Thera showed that they could still have their uses in less than ideal situations when the statue placed its weight on it, activating the magic in it and throwing it off balance, causing it to fall to the ground.
Rather than attack it while it was down and risk being taken down by the two statues that were still standing, she opted for a different option. Running towards the flower with all of her speed, and dragging Ben with her along the way. If she could get it she was confident she could book it out of the trial. Ben would probably want to die of exhaustion after but it would be better than sticking around to fight when her staff was so close to breaking, she knew she wouldn’t be able to take out another three of them.
Unfortunately, it seemed that was something the stone warriors were desperate to prevent at any cost. For the first time since the fight with them started they ran. At least the two of them that were standing, and blocked their way to the flower, with the closest of the two swinging its sword at deadly speeds.
There was almost no time to react. Almost. As Ben saw death coming for him and Thera he managed to get his gauntlet up and activate the enchantment just in the last moment, but the force of the blow sent them both flying back and onto the ground.
Ben tried to push himself up before the statues could come for them and had to hold back a scream of pain. The arm he had the brace on, which had already been sliced open by the previous fights' claws, was now undeniably broken. Either his lack of mana prevented him from putting in enough power to reduce the force of the blow, or the statues were far more powerful than they looked. Either way it didn’t matter, he felt like he was running on fumes and the stone warriors were looking at them on the ground and resumed their confident walk towards them.