“Now’s not the time to fool around, we’re out of our leagues here.” He hoped his thread of mana could transmit the vibrations faster.
The Berg Mammoths would’ve ignored her but she now held bombs that they could sense threat from. The surrounding Mammoths moved at the same time.
Both of them were instantly swallowed in an avalanche of ice and gusts.
‘Damn…I can’t see her.’
The Berg Mammoth were apathetic to the fact that she was a bright red fire mage. The release from their nostrils was enough to pat out her flames so he couldn’t see her despite keeping up.
Ebony tried to blow away the hill of snowy ice but his attempts were futile. He could sense the concentration of ice mana rising and not falling. The Berg Mammoths continued to empty their lungs or whatever organs they had to blow out the air and ice. The gust couldn’t push him but it affected his movements.
The thread of mana connecting them held strong and he enhanced her with Battle Song while following it. Flickering sent his body past her and it was not easy to gauge distance without sight. The range of his mana sense was honestly too short to matter thanks to his odd movement skill.
“Don’t be silly, the bombs are still under my control. Tossing them wouldn’t cause them to explode if I don’t let them.” The thread of mana shot upwards and he climbed the invisible mana platforms as he Flickered up.
They were not able to rush out of the Berg Mammoths’ exhale as the trunks simply rose and sprayed the ice cloud more. Ebony began to take damage. A sign that their magic or Intelligence was buffing their magic far more than his resistance.
He had ice running through his body. It was weird how more ice and cold could damage him. He quickly swapped out the BGM to classical music to buff her Intelligence rather than strength and agility. She needed to keep herself warm more so than speed.
‘Elites truly aren’t the same. Thankfully they seem one dimensional in their tactics.’ Ebony thanked the fact that the Mammoths didn’t charge in with their physical bodies.
To be fair, the colossal might find it extremely difficult to hit such tiny targets.
They probably couldn’t use earth magic or any magic from the looks of it. The earth flipping might just be their physical prowess and the ice was just their natural ability in the form of mana filled organs. This made them relatively easy targets as long as they could damage the colossal or outspeed them.
He was unable to do either.
Ebony switched off the noise.
Stopping the chase, he Flickered to the closest Berg Mammoth. Estimating the height at which their eyes sat, he appeared like a phantom and jammed an ice bomb under their eyelids when he succeeded in locating its eye. The giant eye noticed the speck that appeared and jerked its trunk back but it couldn’t stop or get rid of what Ebony stuffed under its eyelids.
Ebony made sure to freeze the bomb there tightly. The orb was so small the Mammoth wouldn’t even be able to feel it. Sadly, the Mammoths could sense the mana. He cast Phantom’s Flicker five times in a row, ascending to heights that caused Ning Xin to start freezing over.
The moment he cast his first step, he had no choice but to unleash the bomb as he would be out of range so the next four steps were rushed. He had to escape the explosive range after all.
What came next was a sonic attack in the form of a wail. He couldn’t even stabilise the mana within his domain to stop the vibrations and his eardrums burst. Other than that, he was unaffected.
He managed to close in and spot the three dense congregations of his mana. Directly dragging the bombs back to him before the spheres melted from her body temperature was the first thing he did.
The Mammoth lost a portion of its large eye before its allies aimed their fire extinguishers at it. It may be a weakened bomb but they couldn’t put it out immediately. Not when the target was directly hit and a mixture of flames and blood were spreading from its eye.
The second ring of Mammoths reacted by covering the gap that opened up and pushing aside the smaller Mammoths to swing at Ebony. He was barely able to see through the white clouds but their violent motions and redirection of their spraying nozzles helped to clear the air.
His body decided to carry out a series of high-intensity Flickers despite the pressure it put on his legs. The winged one could take care of herself.
An uncoordinated singular trunk came by and he backed off with the same momentum before latching himself onto the trunk and dashing along it. The colossus deemed their tusks unreliable for ant-sized targets.
Their perception was scarily precise despite how tiny he was and the Berg Mammoth beside the one he climbed swiped its trunk downwards along its ally. He had no choice but to leap onto the attacking trunk and dance around the Mammoths. They were so used to the motion it appeared as if they cleaned each other’s trunks from dirt and snow in this manner.
Every time he got close to eye level, they would find a way to force him to descend again. Protecting themselves with relative ease despite his agile advantage. It wasn’t a wasted effort as a Berg Mammoth fell in the meantime.
He didn’t need to be responsive to notifications to know who killed the injured Berg Mammoth. Their colossal size made it hard for many of them to work together. As the one with the bombs, they focused on him and left two firefighters with the injured Mammoth.
As for how Ning Xin killed the Berg Mammoth, he didn’t know. If he had the capacity to guess, he would say she dived into the injured eye and facilitated the burning flames within. Perhaps slicing apart anything she came across.
The Berg Mammoths cared less than he would have imagined as none of them stopped targeting him. He was still the tastier target. Their whole goal seemed to be him or the Frost Blaze. Since that was the case, he stopped his attempts at trying to injure them and did his job as bait.
“I’ll stay in contact.” He transmitted through the callstone. It was surprising the connection hadn’t broken.
He dared to go underneath their bodies and through their legs only because Phantom’s Flicker could guarantee his exit even if they sat down at full speed. They didn’t go so far as to attack each other. The inability to conjure ice under their bodies simply told him they were truly physical-only creatures with the exception of their icy breath and some variation of it. That made things simple.
The fourth ring was already seated and he had no choice but to ascend. It was a good chance since he desperately wanted to get out of range of these larger Mammoths. The crossing sweeps of a pair of Trunks were enough to knock him out of the air even though he dodged with a large distance. The sheer power between those swings made it hard for him to gauge the shockwaves.
In a state of semi-trance, he was relieved that they were trying not to kill him. Their formation was broken and they didn’t shoot out a bunch of icy gusts which allowed him to scan the area.
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The Berg Mammoths mostly ignored Ning Xin and their dead companion. Only two of them bothered her as she made her escape. The ice caps on their backs diminished, one had the tip sliced off and the other was drenched without any ice on it.
‘Level 398? She should be fine. I thought they would be enraged with a dead companion but no reaction?’ He thought that the bait strategy might not be as easy to pull off if the creatures were not easily angered. Just like Ful reported, most of them were above his Appraise range which was 470.
The Berg Mammoths might have used their weakest as a vanguard or they just simply don’t care about their young and weak.
Ebony refined Phantom’s Flicker to the current state but after over a hundred uses in a short time, even his new legs were not able to keep a perfect condition. He was high up in the skies with his flames dialled down. The cold winds were impossible to breathe in so he stopped breathing. His robe was frozen over by the winds and he couldn’t remove them so he left them alone.
Unable to get distracted to observe the difference in ice elemental mana, he eyed the Mammoths below. His shaky knees and feet made him conjure his extravagantly decorated chair to take a seat.
The two biggest Mammoths remained motionless. They didn’t break out of their nap and lay down with mountains on their backs. These Mammoths liked to create deep crater for their bodies and only the ice cap and a pair of yellowish-white tusks could be seen from above
Ebony’s body hummed, he generated contrasting frequencies within himself to shatter the restrictive ice that kept trying to form.
“Wow.” He got his chair driving when he saw the Berg Mammoths lie down and stack themselves close. They put their ice caps close together and had others exhale at the valleys to fill it up before another group climbed onto them. They were building a Mammoth pyramid and he didn’t want to watch them try.
Four strong Mammoths formed the foundations while another nestled in between them. After positioning themselves, the four Mammoth stood back up to prop up their ally. It was both interesting and terrifying to see them exceed his height and he was within their trunks reach again. They didn’t exactly double in height but it was close.
To be honest, he didn’t dare to ascend much more. The ice caps of the second-floor Mammoth were thickening as the seconds passed. It enlightened him as to how their ice caps came about and why they were so fast at climbing onto each other.
They coordinated their steps and moved stably. Needless to say, they lost a lot of speed and he was less afraid of them.
‘I have to make sure they don’t circle me and release that icy cloud en masse. I’ll go north, towards the sea.’ Ebony recalled the weird space above the sea in the region of the Glades. The extreme north of the Glades was mostly deserted because not even monsters wanted to stay close to something that could erase their existence.
‘If the forest comes back up, Ful can last another 2 weeks with the trailer’s power source. That might not be enough. I’ll have to shake them off and return in a week at the latest.’ Ebony didn’t like that the shared stealth skill he got didn’t seem to work. It must be an active skill that requires the caster to activate.
Trees didn’t do anything to stop the Berg Mammoths but actual mountains surprisingly worked. The Berg Mammoths weren’t experts at scaling mountains and were angered enough to flatten the mountains. There weren’t many natural mountains in the region so Ebony only came across a few to hide and rest his legs. They didn’t even give him a three-minute break before he had to evacuate the mountains.
The stacked Berg Mammoths were intimidating but the loss in agility and freedom of motion was the worst choice to pick a tiny ant that could zip around like him. He had to run his mind and legs at an all-time high as he couldn’t dodge the trunk swipes if he didn’t see it coming. Their size meant he had to keep an eye around him as his mental senses’ range was just too small. He would not have evaded in time if he only noticed the trunk when it was a kilometre away from him.
After night fell and the sun rose again, he found himself clinging onto a single fur of a random Berg Mammoth. He hid his body under its fur. The other Berg Mammoths noticed him using the stacked Mammoth’s fur to protect himself from the chilling winds but he was quickly being frozen into the ice cap.
Ebony waited while watching the surrounding Mammoths’ reaction. A single twitch of the other’s eyelids made him burst out and run. He was very sure they were going to attack their ally regardless. A tenth of a second after his robes breeze along with him, his ride was smacked right out of its nestle. Knocking it right down to cause a tremor after its fall.
The four mammoths it was riding on did not appreciate the shock but they only grumbled in annoyance.
‘Looks like I can’t hide on them either. Those Kings are trying to psyche me out, aren’t they? How naive.’ Ebony noticed that no matter how far he ran, two silhouettes remained within sight. He was glad to see that as it meant he succeeded in his bait mission.
Ful overreacted or the Berg Mammoths cared about him more than the tree imagined. They have not summoned the entire race’s strength to bring him down. However, Ebony wasn’t so dull. He managed to find out why he was still left alive.
They knew he couldn’t escape them without casting his Augmentation. Backpedalling would allow him to sense that fragments of his mana that should’ve been in the atmosphere were gone. No doubt, the Berg Mammoths were eating or absorbing his wasteful excretion.
They purposefully put enough pressure on him that he couldn’t let his guard and augmentation down but also didn’t push him far enough to pull off desperate moves. He was only able to use one more of his bombs before they got wary of it. He didn’t get another chance so far and the one he used didn’t kill any Mammoths. Ning Xin wasn’t around to help him finish it off.
Basically, he was treated as a game.
He didn’t know if the two leaders were waiting for him to show more desperation or if they simply didn’t care and just wanted his mana and essence. He just hoped that he got them out of range of Ful’s forest so that they couldn’t sense the forest surfacing.
Having done his best, he was also aware that he was still within their encirclement. His baiting tactic was under their control. They chose to be baited. Thoughtless as to where he wanted to bring them. At the same time, they were unable to keep him from pushing them where he wanted unless they used more forceful methods. They looked afraid of killing him.
Ebony might have difficulty understanding human emotions well but he was receptive to how animals or monsters acted. The ability was naturally sharpened as he was tossed into jungles and faced predators more than human children.
‘How can I shake them off and return?’ He wasn’t worried, enraged or aggrieved to be treated as a game. He simply appreciated the convenience as his goal was achieved.
His chances of pushing a Berg Mammoth off the cliff towards the sea were zero. Even if he unleashed all the remaining bombs on a single target. The colossal creatures wouldn’t fall or even tip over.
Both speed and stealth were out of the question. Force was not suitable when he couldn’t even kill one of them. The bombs barely blew up a single eye and most of its explosive force was thanks to a certain blood and fire mage.
Ebony Flickered to the ground after escaping from the fur of the fallen Mammoth. He didn’t think they would hit each other off the cliff either.
He shut off his augmentations and stood still.
The Berg Mammoths who were about to take casual trunk swipes at him were thrown off and panicked as they retrieved their trunks.
“Got you.” He conjured his oversized chair and rested after making sure the Mammoths were stunned and didn’t cause any strong winds or shockwaves with their mere movements.
Slipping out his bag, he took out his dining utensils. Plating some dried jerky, he boiled some water in his runic kettle but he needed to overcharge the runes as the ambient temperatures were too low.
Ebony exhaled after a sip of good’ol tea.
Within half an hour, the Berg Mammoths dismounted each other and made light steps to shift their formations. They were truly perceptive as they were aware of how fragile he was now that his Augmentation was down.
‘Now what…should I make a run for it.’ Ebony wasn’t sure if he wanted the two leaders to be invited to where he was. He had no assurance that he was better alive than dead. They could eat him and still reap the benefits. Like how he drank sap, Ning Xin ate crystallised essence or the Trolls who either ate Imperial armour or raw ores to strengthen its bones.
The only reason they might not want to eat him was that he was too small. His low level might also discourage them from nipping an unripe fruit from the tree.
‘They might not have magic, I doubt they can threaten to capture me.’
However, the two leaders didn’t walk to him.
Hours passed in peace as the Berg Mammoths rested with him in the centre. They left a path open to two unmoving mountains.
A waiting game?
Ebony would usually welcome a game of patience but he was on a timer.
‘Might as well take the chance to rest.’ He brewed another pot of tea and conjured some arms to massage his legs and shoulders after reclining his backrest.