Tarrishna pointed through a deep thicket of the forest, moving his hand as if to direct around corners, “and that’s where the Jinmerru was last spotted. That was a few days ago now, so expect it to have moved.”
“That’ll be fine. All I need are some tracks to follow”, Logan accepted.
“Then I shall take my leave. Good luck on your journey. The scouts will be alerted to contact you if they see you on the approach again. They will be far kinder this time though.”
Logan nodded to the gashriek who slowly walked in the opposite direction, meeting up with four others who joined him in his return to the guarding of the gashriek hidden community.
“That was smooth”, Amalia sighed.
Marcus began cracking his knuckles and adjusting his gauntlets, “They just needed a good talking to”, he said energetically.
“We just had to temper ourselves. I am just glad my planning paid off so well, I was expecting us to wait a day or two before they relented”, Logan admitted.
Marcus shrugged.
“We sticking with plan A3?” Amalia asked as she placed her headband back on to form the full helm.
Logan readjusted his newly acquired legendary spell rings, each holding two charges for a total of eighteen Dimensional Jaunts, “That we are. I changed out some spell slots so I can cast the new spell I picked up.”
“Fire Blast? Good call. This part of the forest holds a lot of animated flora”, Marcus added.
“We’ve got a few miles to walk until we reach where Tarrishna directed. Assume we’ll face jungle angst”, Logan informed as he led the team forward.
“Right”, Marcus and Amalia responded.
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It didn’t take long for Logan’s warning to come true. The rustling of bushes and an immediate end to chirping birds sounded the first ambush.
Twenty total mounds of meat came lunging from the greenery, snelriches. Four-foot tall, four-armed, and nasty monsters. Their skin was a weird mix of moss and muscle, eating via their skin rather than their mostly useless cracked maw. Armour made out of broken pieces of bark and mud covered their vitals while their long white claws dripped blood and sap to the floor from recent kills.
Their glowing grey eyes with yellow pupils stared at their latest would-be-meal, but Logan only returned their hungry smiles.
Flourishing his two hands through his coat, Logan opened them into claws and threw them towards the airborne foes, “Lightning Cascade”, he commanded, sparks of cobalt running across his hands and darting from his fingertips. The electricity pierced the closest two snelriches and gored through them as the blue death found its way to the remaining eighteen foes.
Puffs of smoke erupted with green blood as the monsters faltered to the floor with their failed first strike. As their bodies rolled around, Logan jumped far away, behind Amalia, who let out a massive roar. The snelriches angrily rose to their feet to attack the Guardian and mostly ignored the Devout who was running at them.
With a flurry of uppercuts, straight jabs, and spinning kicks, Marcus made mincemeat out of the weakened foes, the first two only requiring a single hit while the latter foes who had taken reduced damage required double slams before they hit the floor.
Holding such a distance before their antagonised target, the monsters barely made it to Amalia’s feet before they kissed the floor.
Amalia’s shout had brought in the more sneaky foes, though. Swarms of fist-sized hornets came darting for the lady in metal.
Logan side-stepped and slid across the grassy plains, aimed his arm forward and chanted, “Fire Blast”, causing red energies to spiral down from his shoulder and explode out a fiery eruption from his palm. Turning his head to look over his shoulder, Logan placed his other hand on Amalia’s shoulder, jumped over her, and incanted again, “Fire Blast”, shotgunning another swarm of hornets out of the air.
This new spell did much better with closer-knit groups, while Lightning Cascade did well with spread-out forces. The hornet corpses flopped to the floor in the dozens, their hurried assault just as quickly crashing to the floor.
“Above”, Marcus yelled as he ran towards Amalia, “Launch”, he commanded as he jumped atop Amalia’s shield.
Amalia gave a massive riposte with her wall of iron, sending Marcus up high, letting loose punches and kicks as he spun around. With every other strike, a large blue bird hit the floor around Amalia’s feet.
Logan drove a hand into his cloak and then flopped it out, like a cat knocking over your glass, causing fifteen daggers to fall from the magical confines. “Telekinesis”, Logan chanted, the daggers coming to life and flying at the direction of his fingers.
Aiming them skyward, Logan had his dance of death soar toward numerous other birds of prey.
“Something other than Amalia has them riled up”, Logan informed as he jumped to hit his back into Amalia’s.
“Oh good. It wasn’t my fault then”, Amalia teased as she bashed a bird away from her shield.
Marcus landed with a solid thud before cartwheeling into a downward smash to crush another bird. “Must be migration due to the—” Marcus was quickly interrupted by a flock of hungry beaks, his concentration needing to shift to combat and casting.
Numerous snelriches crowded the small clearing as they charged through bushes and jumped from trunks at the party.
“Damn it, this is going to eat into our supplies”, Logan cursed as he brought down his daggers from the air and began to accost the ground-based foes.
Even the floor began to fight back, large roots erupting from the mud that aimed to slam the party together.
Logan quickly placed a hand on Amalia’s back to Dimensional Jaunt the pair to a safer locale, following the teleport with four more casts of Lightning Cascade to deal with the oncoming storm.
Swinging her blade to a reverse grip, Amalia threw her shortsword at far-away foes, the blade singing around and returning to her grasp like a boomerang. Marcus continued his hurried fisticuffs with the aerial foes, dodging most attacks and healing those he couldn’t.
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A large grouping of snelriches made their way to the Guardian, but Logan rolled over her shoulder again to let fly two casts of Fire Blast, demolishing their front-line offensive.
“B2”, Logan commanded as he jumped back, drawing out two Bowen daggers.
Amalia yelled again and then knelt down, her body hidden behind her tower bouche shield. The monsters that had been relatively split up made a mad dash for the antagonising lady.
“Haste Sustained”, Logan chanted, his body whirring and increasing in speed as he darted to the preoccupied forces.
With a whirling dervish of spins and jabs, Logan let fly countless strikes at the monsters, many falling with five strikes. Marcus jumped to Logan’s side to allow the Spellthief to tap him on the shoulder and grant him the same effect.
Their attacks desecrated the air as it screamed in protest, the monsters’ anguish-filled roars of pain adding to the atmosphere of destruction.
With Come Forth in effect, the enemies could do little but charge down Amalia with the intent of answering the call to challenge. Their attention elsewhere, by the time they could react to Logan and Marcus’s assault, it was too late.
Several minutes of this attrition battle came to a close with both the attackers panting heavily from the workout.
Chapter 185 - Swarm Level XP [https://i.postimg.cc/dtxn3yFn/Chapter-185-Sw-arm-Level-XP.png]
“Level up x2! Gain: +2 Str, +3 Agi, +2 Con, +3 Int, +1 Wis, +1 Cha. You have gained 1 additional first-, second-, and third-level spell slots and 3 fourth-level slots. You have 2 attribute points to spend.”
Logan sighed and Cleaned the sweat from his brow. “I wasn’t expecting that quantity, nor that number of experience”, he admitted as he glanced over three windows that appeared before him, detailing his levels and spells.
“Three whole levels and a bucket of sweat”, Amalia cheered and complained.
“It certainly was exhilarating. The Jinmerru really pushed away the local monster populace. I would say this is all good news, but if we outpace our mastery it might prove to be an issue like you said before”, Marcus added.
“Can’t say it isn’t exciting though”, Logan replied.
“We are to rest?”
Logan nodded as he scanned the nearby area. “I don’t want to fight the Jinmerru at anything but full power. Seeing this army of enemies even before reaching it feels like the quest was a ‘danger’ one, like other Oracles fell to, and similar to the Frost Monarch’s Cavern.”
“Gives you time to prepare your new spells”, Amalia realised.
“And carve up all these bodies”, Logan replied as he spun his carving dagger between his fingers.
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With the section of the forest quite promptly cleared, any monsters that would have intruded upon the group’s rest got the message they were not to be messed with. The rest of the day spent Harvesting was met by a quiet night of rest. No boogymen in the night to steal away the adventurers that were much stronger than the ones who had been taken, or at least a strong enough unit to ward it off.
Logan readjusted his spells again, the multiple of 8 granting him access to new slots and new tiers of power. He had already proactively read some tomes to make sure he wasn’t left wanting for spells to fill in the new fourth-level slots.
* 1st (6+(4+1+3)): 1 Aqua, 1 Flame, 1 Frost, 1 Gaia, 2 Infuse, 2 Lightning, 5 Necromantic, 1 Wind.
* 2nd (5+(3+1+3)): 3+18/18* Dimensional Jaunt, 1 Earthen Eruption, 1 Fire Blast, 1 Flame Cloak, 2 Haste, 2 Lightning Cascade, 1 Skin of Ice, 1 Sleep, (+5 full summons).
* 3rd (4+(2+1+3)): 1 Air Blast, 1 Aqua 2nd, 1 Barrier, 1 Flame 2nd, 1 Frost 2nd, 1 Gaia 2nd, 1 Invisibility, 1 Necromantic 2nd.
* 4th (3+(1+1+2)): 1 Avalanche 2nd, 1 Fire Blast 2nd, 1 Lightning Cascade 2nd, 1 Sleep 2nd, 1 Summon Elemental 2nd, 2 Teleport.
Logan had a base spell slot of 3 plus 1 for every level below max. The Planar Spellforce demon skill granted 1 spell slot and an additional 1 for every level below max. At the same time, the Spell Diversification skill gave 1 slot for every level. Finally, the Spellthief Garb gave 3 extra first through third slots and 2 fourth-level.
The Spellthief was going to have to spend some time later exchanging his Bangle of the Convoker as it only provided space for the second-level summoning spell. At his current level and progression, the fourth-level spell would allow his summons to reach up to level 23 (21+2). That was close to 20 untapped MP he could gain, before increasing his mastery of the spell or skill.
After clicking his fingers, Logan told the party, “We’re still safe, but with that sort of migration we may find dangers further in. I ‘would’ hope what we faced tomorrow was all of it, but through seeing some of these quests to their end, that isn’t always the case.”
“We’re followed by misfortune”, Amalia added.
Marcus checked over his weapons as usual, “It should be fine. The Jinmerru has no ways to confine teleportation. If it gets to be too much, one of us can warp out the others.”
Logan remembered a similar case during his retry of the Frost Monarch Cavern, utilising Dimensional Jaunt to save his latter party against the final boss of the dungeon. “If it’s had enough time, the fruit amongst its canopy will come to life. The Jinmerru will then have a strong barrier that is powered by its underlings. Focus on the additional monsters if that turns out to be the case.”
Marcus looked toward Amalia, “The fight will be quiet… active. Your stand-in-place strategy will only work at a distance.”
“Will we use B2?”
Logan shook his head, “The possessed victims are already controlled, I’d wager most won’t even look at you if you’re far enough away, Come Forth will hardly affect a fifth of them.”
“Cut at the roots, they will animate and be a bother. The nearby trees will be networked, cut them off and you’ll cut off some of the monster’s power”, Marcus explained.
“Got it.”
“We’ll be warping quite a bit. I will take its attention and try to wipe away a lot of its minions if possible”, Logan offered.
“You have many more uses of Dimensional Jaunt than I do.”
“Marcus, your wings will be useful, but if the arena goes dark we’ll have to forsake the sky for our advantage. If the trees ‘are’ connected, the canopies will be empowered.”
“It was a bit messy of a fight yesterday so I didn’t think they’d be too useful then. Might be the same today, we’ll see.”
“See we will.”
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