“You sure we shouldn’t do some crowd control?” Cuby asked, looking down the hill at the ramthorn. It hadn’t noticed us, and was currently preoccupied scraping its horns against a nearby tree, the trunk bare where it had rubbed away all the bark.
“Absolutely,” I said, casting my second Supercharged Implosive Missile Rune Trap and emblazoning it onto the ground. “Unnatural Terror is a great spell—that takes half as long to cast as Implosive Missile but has the same spellcraft. Also,” I added. “I was doing it wrong before.”
“Doing what wrong?”
“My rune traps,” I said. “I didn’t calculate the spellcraft properly. Rune Trap Spell sets a spell’s base spellcraft to 8 if it’s lower, then doubles that. I don’t think I realized that Supercharged Spell’s multiplier will triple that, not quadruple it. Well, it adds 1, then triples the new base—spell augments are complicated.”
“Okay.”
I’d made a new mental note of all my eligible spells as we prepared for combat—it wasn’t a tough list to memorize. It looked like this:
Total Spellcraft: 54
Mana Shield: 16
S. Mana Shield: 27
Implosive Missile: 16
S. Implosive Missile: 27
Unnatural Terror: 16
S. Unnatural Terror: 27
Devour Magic: 20
S. Devour Magic: 33
Haste: 20
S. Haste: 33
Psychic Parasite: 24
S. Psychic Parasite: 39
Hardlight Construct: 24
S. Hardlight Construct: 39
“The point is, I’ve been doing some math on my rune traps and I can put two Supercharged Implosive Missiles down.”
Cuby nodded and smiled. “That’s great, Alatar! That’s… actually, that’s a lot of damage.”
“It’s a lot,” I said. “Even if I didn’t have my Chosen Boon, I’d still be able to store one. All of the Spell Augments that I’ve seen have been fairly strong, but this one almost feels like it should’ve been iconic.”
Cuby nodded down toward our quarry. “You think we can kill the goat before the noise draws any more?”
“I don’t know if the noise is drawing them, or if they have some kind of psychic connection,” I said. “We can either try to drop that one as fast as possible, or use stuff like my terror spell to kill it slow and careful without popping my runes.”
“What do you think?” Cuby asked.
I glanced over at her, worried once again that she was letting me take the lead because I was human, but also worried that I was imagining things when in reality she just trusted me.
“I think we should kill it fast and find out if that works,” I said. “Since we’ll be doing this a few times, it looks like. If more goats show up, I’ll rely on my new tether and some fears—their charge is very strong, so I’ll stop them from using it. And if some spirefiends show, I’ll use the big fear to keep them away while we tree-tank the goats.”
“Sounds good!” said Cuby. Then she added: “You know, I wish you had a flurry. Something that doubled your cast speed for a few seconds—my stuff is all instantaneous and that’s nice, but your stuff has way, way more effect.”
I chuckled. “True for now,” I said. “But we’ll gauge how true it stays once you’re one of the chosen.”
Cuby turned back to the goat. In the same way someone might excitedly say the word pizza as their pizza came while they sat at a restaurant, Cuby said: “Haroshi.”
“Ready?” I asked.
“Mhmm!”
We both moved down the slope toward the ramthorn, and it spotted us before I was in range to cast my missile. Cuby threw her weapon at it to make sure its attention was on her, then rolled out of the way of its charge while I cast my missile, backing up to be within range of my runes.
Cuby took a single normal melee attack to her Mana Shield, but then my missile struck the ramthorn, dealing 30% of its Hit Points and causing it to shift its attention my way. From there I might have tethered it to one of the nearby trees and tried to kill it while keeping it tied down, but instead I let it rush toward me before triggering both my runes and dealing what was probably its entire 1500 or so hit points with both attacks, frying it in an explosion of leaping arcs of lightning.
It was hard to tell from just looking at my bar, but it had given me almost 3% of my next level, a thought that made me almost giddy: if Cuby and I could figure out how to do this safely, grinding our way inside the mountain was a very real prospect.
I had started casting new rune traps as soon as it fell—Unnatural Terror traps, not Implosive Missile traps, as the former took only 6 seconds to cast, not 12.3.
Sure enough, we heard a set of cries come from further up the mountain even before I’d finished laying the first rune—and I looked to see a corrupted mountain lion leaping down the slope with frightening speed, its body rippling with bulging muscles, its leaps enough to clear a house. From another direction a bear had appeared out from the shadow of a cluster of pines, its face a mangled heap of metal, its body wreathed in a cloud of green-brown particles.
Shearcat – Level 9
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Sporebear – Level 9
The shearcat reached us with a frightening speed, but we were ready for it. I launched the Supercharged Implosive Missile I’d kept as my Fragmented Spell to get its attention, and the shock explosion took it down to just over 50%. Then I started casting a Supercharged Haste as the cat bounded toward me.
It pounced; I cracked Moment of Mastery to dodge that attack and its follow-up even as Cuby laid into the cat with her kukris, blinding it a moment later as my Haste finished casting and moving through a flurry-less damage combo that was nonetheless enough to almost finish the cast as the bear came to join us.
But I hit the bear with a Supercharged Hardlight Tether that I cast while the blind cat was flailing at me, dealing no damage. The tether, at 238 Hit Points, bound the bear around the neck on one end and to a nearby tree at the other—and the bear growled and roared at us from its position just a couple of meters away, helpless to do anything but turn and claw at the glowing cable.
The cat fell. We heard a succession of cries in the air above us—at least two wyverns, from the sounds of it—and then more from further down the mountain. I spun to see two more ramthorns charging up the slopes toward us and began to cast a Fragmented Supercharged Unnatural Terror.
Storing up a fear, I told Cuby as the bear, with one red-wreathed claw that signified some kind of ability and one claw that looked to be just a basic attack, finally broke the tether I’d spent only two seconds casting. It reared up on its hind legs, something like ten feet in height as it bore down on Cuby—a sight that, much like with the wyverns, sent a clear message to my brain that it was time to leave. But by the time it slammed its weight down to attack her, she’d sprang behind it and started attacking its flank.
Cuby popped her Flurry of Steel while the Haste was still on her, and I threw a basic, two second cast Unnatural Terror at the sporebear to make sure it didn’t interrupt or damage her while she worked on it.
I glanced at the sky quickly as I turned my attention to the charging ramthorns, but could only see one wyvern as a distant, approaching shape. Not yet.
The goats had crossed a lot of distance quickly, and I used another basic fear on the one in front, causing it to dig in its hooves and turn to bound away—just as I tethered it to its comrade. With both of them struggling against the tether, I turned, still watching the sky, and managed to cast an Implosive Missile at the bear that Cuby was attacking—it did 709 damage, which was a third of the bear’s Hit Points, leaving it with almost nothing.
And then it was time. I could see the wyverns above us—one diving in toward me, my Heightened Sight enough to clearly make out the morthoth on its back. And I had a plan for that particular son of a bitch.
Leaving, I told Cuby. Watch the goats.
Mm.
Then I grappled into the crown of the tree that was closest the morthoth, watching the diving wyvern adjust its course as I did so. The morthoth on its back roared—the same cry that had been a spell the last time we’d fought it. As it came into range, I cast a basic Moment of Mastery—2.7 seconds that passed extraordinarily slowly because this had to be perfect, I had to hit my window perfectly….
My cast finished. The wyvern came into range and spat a yellow-green glob of poisonous fire at me. I threw my Fragmented Supercharged Unnatural Terror at it even as I catapulted myself into the air, wind rushing by me and yellow flames engulfing me in a shock of pain—and as I emerged from the flames I saw what I had expected to see and spent my Moment of Mastery, time slowing while an iron chain, wielded by the morthoth on the wyvern, sped through the air toward me. I twisted, avoiding it, then landed on the back of the spirefiend that I had just feared and starting casting an Unnatural Terror.
The spirefiend shrieked, twisting in the air as the fear spell affected it—then, gloriously, it began to gain elevation, doing what I expect all flying creature do when they’re terrified—they fly away.
Trigger! Cuby shouted in my mind, and I triggered my rune trap with a spare thought.
My Evasive Insights let me smoothly whirl out of the way of a downward stroke of the morthoth’s sword as I landed, crouched, before the saddle on the back of the spirefiend. Then my opponent raised its shield and started casting again, but at that moment the basic Unnatural Terror I’d been casting finished and the morthoth began to cower.
The wyvern was still howling and beating its wings, taking us both higher and higher. I cast a Fragmented Supercharged Unnatural Terror, confident from our last fight that even my basic fear would give me enough time to store that spell. When I’d finished, I cast a Telekinetic Hammer, launching the cowering morthoth off the wyvern at startling speeds before jumping off myself and casting glide.
I watched the morthoth plummet almost 50 meters with great satisfaction, but then turned in the air as I saw the second spirefiend, this one bearing a cultist, rising away from the battlefield below, where I could mark Cuby’s position by the goats at the base of her tree-tank.
Get that—
Got him, I answered, diving toward the other wyvern, landing on its back and beginning another Unnatural Terror before—annoyingly—having my spell canceled by one of the cultist’s spells:
Hex of Silence
You are silenced.
The cultist began to cast something else, but he never finished—I cast an Intuitive Unnatural Terror through his hex. The deformed humanoid began to claw at his face, and I glanced overboard at the ground below, threw an Implosive Missile at the spirefiend while I waited for some more elevation, and then knocked its rider from the saddle with a Telekinetic Hammer and leapt from the spirefiend’s back.
I’d cut it close with the fear on the cultist, but it was still enough: he struck the rocks with an unnerving crack as I glided back toward where Cuby was sitting in a tree—only to catch sight of the morthoth, its Hit Points at 20%, running up the slopes that it had doubtless tumbled down after striking the ground.
I landed on the far side of Cuby, and the goats left her tree to come charging at me as the morthoth saw me and commanded them to attack. My maneuver was quite simple: in the time it took the goats to approach me, I cast a Fragmented Hardlight Construct before leaping over them to land before the morthoth, who I promptly put into the box before grappling a nearby tree.
The goats charged the box, shattering it, but the morthoth started casting the buff spell he’d never finished earlier, and this—plus the distance I’d put between us—was enough for me to store a Fragmented Supercharged Implosive Missile.
Ghostly red flamed engulfed the two ramthorns and the morthoth and, presumably, the wyverns above, one of which I could see diving toward Cuby. I cast a Devour Magic on the morthoth and his two companions just as he whipped me out of the tree with his chain—and I used my Rousing Command before I’d even hit the ground, rising to find one spare moment of time in which to launch my spell at the Morthoth, killing it just before the ramthorns both knocked me to the ground with their charges and ate away all the Mana Shield I’d gotten for eating their buffs.
From there, the combat was simple. Cuby could stay in a tree and keep her spirefiend busy, her evasions and dodges more than enough to avoid its breath attack and talons as it made passes at her, its strategy basic and predictable without the morthoth around.
I put myself in a tree, cast a Moment of Mastery, and used that to avoid the fire but not the talons of the second wyvern, which I simply shot again and again while being carried away. It dropped me, I found a tree, and I shot the ramthorns below until the spirefiend came back, at which point I repeated the process.
They were all dead within a minute—and unlike last time, I had lost only a meager amount of Hit Points, which I recovered with a single potion, bringing me down to 7 healing potions remaining.
“That went better,” Cuby said as the last wyvern went down. “I took a little damage from the sporebear’s cloudy thing, but that’s it!”
I grinned at her. All things considered, it had gone wonderfully. Sure, it would have been nice to learn that we could keep the packs separate—but killing 9 monsters that each had more Hit Points than I did by cheating, tricking, and overpowering them in every way we could was, to my mind, an acceptable way to go about it.
“Let’s loot these guys fast,” I said. “And go find us some more goats.”