Mary and Lucas abandoned all [Stealth] and just sprinted through the goblin camp. If there had been any monsters nearby in any condition to confront them, they would have seen more company atop the altar. As it was, the camp was practically abandoned, and the current situation called for speed above all else anyway.
As Lucas ran past burning hut after burning hut, followed by the occasional goblin corpse that might have either been taken down by Belinda and Harry on their way out, or its own kin when the huts started burning, he thought over the fight he'd just been in. Now really wasn't the time for retrospection, but with his new [Mind of the Sentinel] Skill, even the sprint they were moving at felt a bit slow. He couldn't help his mind's wandering.
It...it had been beyond him. Whatever the being that had possessed the goblin was, and whatever the being that slowed down time, or at least his perception of it, to let his Class evolve was, Lucas didn't think he had any business getting between them. But at the same time, he had a feeling that bridge had already burnt to ground. He killed a goblin [Mage], not a corrupted vessel.
Whatever else that meant, he knew the being was still out there. And now it knew him.
He'd have to deal with it again, and maybe sooner than he was ready to. Lucas abandoned the chain of thought and instead devoted his wandering mind to watching the surroundings, particularly the flow of mana around him. It wasn't yet completely out of the realm of possibility that there could be another vessel--and if there wasn't, then he already knew the vessel wasn't the only corrupted monster. That being could be using one of them to sneak up on this very moment...
Nothing jumped out at the two of them on their way out of the camp and mountain pass, but that didn't make Lucas feel any more secure. He heard and saw more than a few goblins, and even a couple nilbogs alive and moving around the paths between their dwellings, but when injury did not prevent them from giving chase, the monsters displayed an uncharacteristic caution.
He did not see the first corrupted goblin until they were running through the woods. Mary took the two of them off the monsters' beaten path, following a rougher trail that stuck closer to the foot of the mountain and had evidently seen a lot of recent traffic. More corpses were strewn alongside this trail, and about five minutes down it, they encountered their first live one.
With the number of trees, ferns, and general undergrowth that worked with the pervading darkness of the night to limit visibility, Lucas and his mother had next to no warning before they sprinted right into the middle of a small group of goblins.
Mary trampled over one of the small creatures, and it was already out of the fight, but the monsters were of a similar enough size to Lucas that, when he ran into one, it could only be equated to a rough tackle. The two of them fell to the forest' floor and immediately started grappling.
The goblin tried to stick a knife into Lucas's side, but he reacted fast enough to catch its hand before trying to do the same with the broken [Single Sting]. Only, the goblin was able to catch his hand as well, and when both of their arms were immobilized, it lunged forward to try to take a bite out of Lucas's neck.
Lucas dodged the goblin's stinking maw and rolled across the ground to get on top of it as sounds of a larger fight broke out around them. Even engaged as he was, his senses were enhanced enough to make something of the chaos. His mother was doing well, systematically dismantling the monsters' offensive, but they had been ready for the two of them, somehow. The goblins ambushed Mary from all sides, and even though she felled them one after another, she was occupied with defending Lucas as well.
From the edge of his perception, Lucas felt the ambient mana twist sharply, and he knew it was time to finish his current opponent.
Lucas pinned the goblin below him against its screeching and struggling, then he tried something new. The current position of his limbs made the prospect of delivering a solid strike on the monster unlikely, even when he held it down, but his attack Skill was newly evolved. With the small amount of mana he thought he could spare, Lucas channeled an arcing current of electricity across his body. It did not escape the goblin's notice, and its resistance redoubled, but it was already too late.
Lucas head-butted the monster directly in its bulbous nose, and the resulting transfer of his lightning blew the front half of its head up entirely, showering the immediate area in gore.
[*ding You have slain a [Goblin Warrior - level 52]!]
[*ding Your party has slain [Goblin Warrior] x5]!]
BlegghH...Ugh, regret.
I won't be able to clean this up anytime soon, Lucas thought, but that was all the time he would waste on the consideration. He only remained above the corpse a moment longer in order to take its knife, then he shot up to help his mother.
The entire fight so far had only taken a handful of seconds, and it looked like it would only take a handful more. Even as Lucas took in the situation, his mom blasted the last three remaining goblins with paralytic lightning. But one of them did not stop its approach. It lunged at Mary from her side and reached out with claws emanating corruption, and in her surprise at her failed attack, she did not react fast enough.
Lucas [Quick Step]ped and hit it blade-first. Even in its supposedly broken state, [Single Sting] sunk into the corrupted's heart with very little resistance, and they fell to the ground as its death notification tolled in Lucas's head. As quickly as the chaos had started, the forest fell quiet and calm again.
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"This one nearly got you," Lucas panted out as he got to his feet. When he turned around, his mother had a pensive look on her face. "What?" he asked.
"They knew we were coming," she said.
"What do you mean?"
Mary looked to him and then pointed around at the fresh corpses. "They weren't chasing after the others, they set an ambush for us."
Lucas looked around as he processed her words. That is concerning, he nodded to himself, are they still being commanded? Or did the corrupted feel the death of the vessel somehow?
It was a concerning issue, but Lucas's mother broke him out of her thoughts by shaking her head and addressing him once more.
"Nevermind, we need to keep moving. Maybe we'll draw some of the monsters away from the others," she said, "but I doubt we'll get all of them."
"You're right," Lucas nodded, "let's go."
----------------------------------------
Sure enough, Lucas and Mary did end up drawing more goblins away from their pursuit. They encountered precisely three more ambushes before they even got near Belinda and Harry, and each one had at least one corrupted goblin. After the first ambush, the rest were expected and handled simply enough, but they also kept Lucas's mana from regenerating all that much.
It irritated him, so he tried to go through the last ambush without using his active Skills at all, but when that mistake nearly costed him an eye, he just swallowed his irritation and took the blow to his MP.
None of the fights got Lucas another level. With the amount of stress and the number of enemies he was facing, he definitely expected to at least get to level 53, but no. The only levels he got were a meager few in [Throwing] when he buried the crude knife he'd stolen in a goblin's neck at range. Advancing past level 50 was proving to be much slower than before.
After the fourth and final ambush, however, they got within earshot of the backline of monsters chasing after Belinda and Lucas abandoned all thought of his slowed leveling. Once they could hear the monsters screeching and trampling through the woods, it wasn't long before the could hear the sounds of clashing weapons and yelling voices.
Mary led the two of them off to the side in an indirect approach to the voices, bypassing the monster's backline so they wouldn't be held up, and from there they picked up their pace.
"Keep going, and get them to safety! I can buy you some time!"
That's Harry! What is that idiot doing?
Lucas pushed his legs harder till he was testing the limits of his endurance, but it didn't feel fast enough. His mom pulled ahead of him and he considered using a bit of his mana to match her increased pace, but that is when they both shot into the small clearing around which the fight was taking place. Lucas had just enough time to process his allies in the relatively calm center and the goblins quickly surrounding them before they crashed into the nearest ones.
Mary cleaved a path through the chaos with blasts of lightning that might have made someone second-guess what sort of Class she had, and the two of them sprinted down it, entirely ignoring the monsters that lunged and chased after them. Belinda apparently caught site of their approach, as a moment after they came into view, small sticks, rocks, and metal kitchenware started bombarding the incensed goblins. None of them even made it within five paces of either Lucas or Mary before they reached the clearing's edge, and a moment later they were through.
Nearby, Belinda stood directing her telekinetic projectiles surrounded by a dozen unconscious guards' bodies laid upon the ground--Eugene being the closest. It was thanks to her that Lucas and Mary were able to close that final distance unmolested, but the [Cook] looked truly exhausted. She held none of the surviving guards afloat, not even her brother, and Lucas didn't miss that she threw far fewer projectiles than he'd seen her manipulate in her kitchen. Belinda was low on mana.
Harry was off to the side, still lobbing rocks at the goblins that continued to stream past the tree-line by hand. The [Hunter] was so focussed on that task, that Lucas wasn't sure he even noticed their arrival. But there was nothing Harry could do to stop the veritable horde from encircling them all, and it also looked like he was missing most of his daggers, not to mention the point of his spear. They wouldn't be able to rely on Harry pulling them through, either.
Lucas looked around for some avenue of escape, some way to hold off the horde, and his eyes fell on the guards' immobile bodies. It was a long shot, but Lucas feared that was the best they were going to get.
Barely a second had passed while Lucas took everything in before he turned to her and asked, "How long can you keep the monsters from getting close?"
Mary's eyes flashed to him, and she turned quickly to survey the full extent of their situation before replying. "They could overrun us now. I could give us another two minutes once the horde decides to press in, but I can't be certain of anything more. Do you have a plan, Lu?"
Two minutes was not long, and Lucas couldn't afford to waste it. He moved toward Belinda and answered his mother's question without turning back. "I'm going to try to wake them up! Two minutes!"
His proclamation caught Belinda's attention, and even Harry paused his volley for a heartbeat to look over.
"I don't think they're in any condition to help us fight, kid," Belinda told him through her panting.
"There really aren't any other options," he said.
He reached Eugene's side and started looking him over with his perception of mana. He'd been in the goblins' captivity for who knows how long, and from the first glance, Eugene's mana did not look good. It was practically glazed with corruption in a way he had not seen so far. For a terrifying moment, Lucas thought he might be dead, purely based on the mana's sluggish flow. Then the man's eye's twitched, and Lucas let out a sight of relief.
He was just about to start working at extracting the corruption when a dissonant roar drowned the surrounding chaos and disrupted his focus. Lucas's attention, and everyone else's, shifted to the edge of the clearing where the goblins had been coming from, and to a hulking nilbog that stood out even among the rest of its evolved kin.
Even from where he was, Lucas felt the mana twisting in pain around the monster. It was too far away for his senses to pick up, but the sight alone seemed to bleed through to the rest--Lucas cringed back. Then the monster roared again and a huge impact reverberated through the air. Lucas forced himself to look back at it. At where it's fist hung, pressed hard against the empty air.
[Corrupted Vessel - level 172]
The notification almost drew his attention away from analyzing the situation. That was a much higher level than the last vessel--more than three times Lucas's own--and yet it couldn't get in. Lucas took look around the clearing, he really looked, and it was only then that he processed the strange calm that had overcome the nearby flows of ambient mana. The effect stretched throughout the entire clearing, but stopped right at the edge of the tree-line in a perfect circle.
They can't get in.
Lucas turned to his mother and caught her attention. "Mom, they can't get in."
"I think this is a fae circle."