Keeping his eyes on the frostfury soldier and its retinue, Nick broke ranks and started running to one side. Moving like the pressure had gotten to him and he had fled in a panic. The audience had clearly bought into his act. Laughter, boos, and other derisive cries resounded across the arena floor. But none of that mattered. The only thing that mattered was what the wasps thought of his performance.
To Nick’s mingled horror and relief, the main group of killer insects turned to track his movement, flying straight for the swath of ground on which he stood. Visualizing the swarm’s advance for everything he was worth, he glanced over at Kenji while pointing to his belt. Nick let out a soft sigh when he caught the look of recognition in the older man’s eyes, and Kenji nodded in reply to Nick’s silent query. At Kenji’s command, the party shifted formation, spreading out to guard Nick’s back from the other wasps, which had begun to circle back the moment that the soldier selected its first victim.
He turned his head to track his opponents, who would be upon him in another… seven seconds, his tactical brain informed him. Nick broke into a dead sprint, taking another half dozen steps before his leg collapsed out from under him and he landed on his ass. He scrambled to regain his footing, but it was already too late. On sighting his plight, the frostfury soldier and its contingent committed to their attack, goaded into action by his show of weakness. They came at him as one, their descent transforming into a streaking dive. The frantic buzzing of their wings thundering in his ears.
Nick looked up, taking in the image of glossy blue bodies shining in the sunlight. The shimmer of iridescent wings. The cruel onyx barbs of the wasps’ stingers, poised to strike with the full force of their charge behind it. The squadron of killer insects bunched tighter as they converged upon Nick’s fallen form… which was exactly what he had been waiting for.
At the last possible moment, he raised his wand and pointed it toward the swarm, which he had drawn the moment that he hit the ground. Something in the soldier’s posture told him that the beast recognized the weapon in his hand and knew that it had been tricked. But its revelation had arrived too late. The beast was already in range.
Nick pressed the trigger and fired off two blasts a fraction of a second apart, praying that the wand would prove effective against airborne opponents. To his immense relief, the cluster of wasps was flung back with incredible force, soaring up until their bodies were pressed against the protective field running above the arena floor. Unfortunately, while the wand made the beasts lose control over their trajectory, the blast didn’t deal out any lasting damage that he could see.
Fortunately, that wasn’t what he had been counting on. All that he had really been hoping to accomplish was to disorient the creatures while forcing them to bunch together.
The reason why Nick had set all of this up was Paul’s power. The wasps were too agile to gamble on landing a direct hit with an arrow. They flew too high for Paul’s disabling ability to engulf them if it was triggered by the missile striking the floor, since his debuff only had a range of ten feet from the point of impact.
Even more critically, Devin had revealed that some beasts could sense mana during their strategy session. As a result, Paul was afraid that the nimble wasps would be able to dodge his attack if he tried to hit them when they were clumped naturally, like when they had converged to attack Nick.
But when Nick saw the forcefield shimmer into existence above his head, he realized that he had found a way to both corral the swarm and place them somewhere that Paul’s arrow could reach. If the man had grasped what Nick was planning and was quick enough to react in time.
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Nick rose to his feet and scrambled back into formation, shaking with nervous anticipation when he saw that Paul’s arrow was already in flight. It was clear at a glance that the missile was enchanted. The arrowhead shone with a pulsing lime radiance, streaking up toward the corner of the force-dome where Nick’s blast had shoved the soldier wasp and four of the scouts. He had hoped that his ploy would be sufficient to take out the most dangerous opponent on the field, but matters were not fated to be resolved so simply.
Unfortunately, although it was still dazed, the soldier sensed the attack coming at the last possible moment. The beast dodged a heartbeat before the arrow struck the barrier, escaping through the expedient process of stopping its wings and letting gravity carry it to safety, just before Paul’s spell detonated on contact.
As disheartening as it was to watch an elite enemy escape a trap that had cost him two of his wand’s charges, Nick’s eyes lit up when the arrow exploded. The glowing missile released a bright flash of yellow-green light, expanding into a neon sphere in the blink of an eye to engulf the quartet of scouts. The wasp in the center was grazed by the arrowhead in a remarkable feat of precision, and he heard Paul cry out in triumph. The effect of his spell was apparent immediately, especially on the beast that Paul had scratched, which had received an extra dose of his disabling magic.
The creature’s limbs locked up. Its wings ceased to beat, causing the scout to plummet toward the arena floor far below, in a move that mimicked the soldier’s escape. But instead of banking out of its dive halfway down, the stricken scout kept right on falling, striking the marble below with a sickening thud.
The other three scouts that had been caught by Paul’s spell were able to remain airborne. However, it was clear that his magic was already causing them problems. Instead of the crisp movements they had displayed before, the beasts bobbed and wove a drunken dance above Nick’s head. Size up told him that the wasps were still able to fight, but also that the beasts were operating well below peak efficiency. “How long will your spell disable them?” Sarah asked while tracking the other wasps circling over their heads.
“Longer than this fight will last,” Paul punctuated his statement by releasing a pair of arrows back-to-back, nearly taking out one of the stricken scouts before it lurched out of the way. Seeking to mitigate its disadvantage, the frostfury soldier recalled the unafflicted wasps to its side. Ten seconds later, the swarm descended upon Nick’s party in a loose formation. The rest of the wasps timed their attacks to land in sync with the muddled scouts, who were now operating independently instead of coordinating their movements with the swarm.
The next five minutes were a chaotic jumble of strikes and dodges. Nick’s team fought to keep the wasps at bay without overextending themselves in the process. Whenever he had a free moment, he targeted the soldier, trying his best to disrupt the beast’s ability to coordinate the attacks of its minions.
Each time Nick got in the way, he provoked the soldier’s wrath, a creature capable of ending his life in an instant if it wasn’t for his team. Even with Kenji and Devin watching his back, Nick was barely able to keep the killer insect from perforating him, pumping his veins full of venom in the process. But every time that its stinger slipped past Nick’s guard, Kenji’s spear was there.
Even with his allies’ assistance, Nick had to use a mana dart to save himself when the soldier broke through their defense, having summoned the silvery spell during a brief lull in the melee. A few seconds after his dart forced the elite insect to abort its attack, he saw Veronica leap, higher than he would have thought possible. The nimble woman used her cloak to snatch one of the impaired scouts out of the air, then speared it with her claws right through the fabric.
Two down, two disabled, Nick took stock of the evolving situation. One elite and six uninjured wasps. At this point, he knew that they were in trouble. Although team Earth was holding its own, the fight had already been dragging on for far too long. Their nerves were shot from the constant stress, and their stamina was dwindling by the dodge.
Nick knew that it was only a matter of time before someone made a fatal mistake. A dark premonition that came true twenty seconds later, when their luck took a dramatic turn for the worse.