Thankfully, the giant birds ignored them in favor of feasting on the loudly bleating goats, who somehow seemed to be fighting back.
It was really weird seeing giant goats blasting sonic shockwaves at giant birds who retaliated with either beaks and claws or great gusts of wind mana.
As they clambered over the mountainside, trying to find a route that would take them closer to their target, he eagerly watched the birds, the lords of the sky, use their wind mana. It was extremely valuable to watch monsters in their natural environment using their preferred mana. Several players in his inherited memories claimed to have studied monsters to attain great powers. Naturally, they didn’t share any secrets, but Sam didn’t need those.
It just made sense to learn from those who instinctively used the mana he also wielded.
His senses, at least those not keeping an eye out for an ambush, were aimed at the giant birds, Storm Eagles, and he kept watching as the wind mana swirled around them in an oddly hypnotic pattern, before swelling momentarily and then being let loose against those blasted bleating goats.
His team walked behind Sam in a single line, gingerly stepping around loose stones while also keeping a wary eye out for attacks.
There were some really sneaky goats…
For a moment, Sam considered convincing Dan to take one of the goats as a familiar, but he realized that the loud bleating would become annoying quickly.
Plus, his scholar friend’s heart was set on a fire-type monster…
It took them only half an hour to reach the area where the battle was happening, wading through several groups of goats that seemed to be guarding the area. However, as they had already fought a lot of these monsters, they had learned their behavior, so it was pretty easy for the team to destroy them.
Because of the urgency of their movement, they only picked up the most important parts, leaving the carcasses in the open for any predator to finish them off.
He held up a hand, and the group stopped.
“Ready?” he whispered, not taking his eyes off the battle in front of them.
“We just head for the cave?” Dan whispered back, nervously clutching his already sizzling club.
“Yeah. The birds are still too strong for us in these numbers,” he explained.
The Storm Eagles were strong, yes, but when alone, their team would be able to take them down. In a group supporting each other, the battle could be won, but he didn’t want to bother for now.
His target was the anomalous mana signature that he suspected to be a fracture.
“So, we Leeroy?”
“We Leeroy,” he agreed, inwardly extremely amused that the famous meme was alive even in this dimension.
Clarissa just sighed while Katie giggled in anticipation.
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They huddled down and while Clarissa began layering them with buffs, the others began picking targets that they would need to eliminate on their way to the cave entrance they could see from their hiding place.
The monsters, meanwhile, just kept going at each other.
Sam frowned. Usually, monsters kept to their own areas, rarely leaving it. This fight, this battle, was extremely uncharacteristic of them.
Granted, the goat monsters were jerks at the best of times, but Storm Eagles were pretty chill unless somebody spent a long time pissing them off. ‘Probably the bleating…’ he thought. Even taking their young wouldn’t piss them off this much. They were pretty bad parents…
“Everybody got their targets?”
“Yup!”
“Sure do!”
“Buffs are on.”
Sam took a deep breath and let his mana loose. He spent a few seconds getting familiar with the turbulent mana in the area before unsheathing his sword.
“Let’s go!”
They rushed out of their hiding spot with great explosions thanks to Dan. A sea of flames covered the flat piece of ground that was worn down by eons of geological movements, monsters, and natural phenomena. Or somebody with a very sharp sword.
Sam used his control over the air to send out pockets of wind that caused localized explosions that distracted the goats, killing several of them, and sending the eagles high up in the air with cries of distress.
The team just rushed forward, covered by Clarissa and Sam’s shields, while Katie sent out giant crescent-shaped yellow energy from her sword leaving goats and a few daring Storm Eagles with bleeding wounds that looked rather jagged.
The distance between their hiding space and the cave entrance wasn’t that long, but there were at least a hundred, if not more, goats between them and the cave and the air was teeming with eagles eager to gather some snacks for later.
The first few seconds were filled with goats dying left and right, but the monsters soon gathered their wits, and while a lot of them kept bleating at the aggressive birds, the nearest ones turned toward Sam’s team.
Smiling grimly, he let loose several Blade Storms in their direction, hitting them head-on. The bleating was particularly painful.
Stolen story; please report.
Thanks to the speed-increasing buffs, they made good time. Granted, Sam, and probably Katie, could have crossed the distance in a few seconds, as they were more physically focused.
But teamwork made the dream work…
Halfway through the rocky clearing, the Storm Eagles realized that there was more food on the battlefield and one of them tried to dive-bomb them. Claws out and beak open in a hungry cry, it dove at them at impressive speed.
It was only Sam who could see the wind mana swirl around the gigantic monster, with a wingspan of at least twenty feet, as the mana boosted the monster’s speed. And more than likely, its deadliness.
Still running, he raised his trusty sword and after a brief moment of concentration released a sharp burst of wind mana, stabbing toward the rapidly approaching bird monster.
The attack wasn’t strong enough to kill the bird as he was running while also keeping up a shield and making sure nothing surprised them, but it contained enough of his own wind mana to disrupt the bird’s dive, causing it to crash into their shield with a surprised squeak.
“Ugh!” Clarissa grunted. “That took out a big chunk of the shield…”
“We’re almost there!” Katie cried out excitedly, waving her giant sword around.
They were indeed closing in on the cave entrance.
Thankfully, the goats seemed disinterested in preventing them from reaching it. They just tried to attack them. With attacks and sonic shocks that were easy to block or avoid.
Plus, Sam got the sense that they didn’t really like the blazing hot fire sea that Dan conjured up.
The Storm Eagles, seeing one of their own fail at attacking them demonstrated much more intelligence than the goats that still tried to find a way through the blazing inferno while their own infernal bleating did its best to drive them insane, and turned their attention back to the distracted goats.
They practically fell through the cave’s entrance as behind them, the goats and eagles continued their clash in the ashes of Sam and his team’s spells.
The moment they were a few yards in, Sam stomped on the ground and raised several layers of Earth Walls at the entrance, blocking monsters from following them, only leaving enough space so that the air could flow.
He straightened out, sword still in hand, and cast his Mana Sense deeper into the cave system while the rest of the team caught their breath.
“So, what is it?” Clarissa asked after finally evening out her labored breath while Sam made a note to have the young woman acquire a few physical passive skills.
Sam frowned, closing his eyes and focusing on the magical phenomenon while trying to ignore the sounds of carnage outside of the cave. By the decreasing amount of bleating, he suspected the local population of Storm Eagles would be eating well for a while.
Following the flow of mana, his senses soon arrived at the thing he sensed so far away. The pattern of the mana movement seemed like a fracture portal, but there were countless other things that it could be out here.
He knew that there were actually space-mana-attributed ores that could, if collected in enough concentration, create ‘natural’ portals leading to random locations, including the bottom of the sea or over the clouds. For a while, in the future that would never be, it would become a popular assassination tool. Mostly for the views…
“I would say seventy percent chance it’s a fracture…” he spoke up after a few seconds of contemplation.
‘The question is… is this the demonic portal?’ he mused as his team began their newest spelunking adventure while trying not to step into goat droppings.
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Thankfully, the journey was rather short without any monsters attacking them. Their path was illuminated by Sam’s Light Ball spell, with Katie walking ahead as a vanguard, as she was the most likely to survive any ambush or trap.
However, aside from a lot of dried goat droppings, they found nothing dangerous.
Then they were standing before the portal, and Sam frowned. He couldn’t sense an ounce of demonic mana from the fracture. The portal swirled in front of them merrily with white-colored swirls mixing with earthly colors.
“Well, that is a fracture…” the team healer deadpanned. “What now?”
“A break and then we clear it,” Sam stated while stepping close enough that the notification would pop up.
[You and your team found a new fracture, untouched by anybody!]
[Fracture: Where the buck stops]
[A Fracture high up in the mountains, surrounded by sparse flora but a rather loud fauna. If you don’t go in and clear it, the people of the kingdom will probably dislike what’s going to happen.]
[Time Limit: ???]
[Charges: 1/1]
“Good news, it’s a small fracture!” he called out after finishing it.
“And the bad news?” Dan asked, coming up next to him, peering at the portal with concentration. No doubt trying to level up his own Mana Sense skill.
“If I read my clues right, we are going to throw down with goats again…”
His only answer was a chorus of groans from the rest of the team.
“Cheer up! I sense this may have a surprise for us at the end!” he called out despite not sensing anything like that, but needs must, as they say. “Let’s take five, do a bio break, and then we can dive!”
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The fracture itself surprisingly wasn’t a cave but a giant rocky clearing dotted with monolithic rocks that created a simplified maze.
Filled to the brim with goats that started bleating the moment they sensed any movement, the gigantic rock formation echoed their voices around, creating a disorienting and dizzying environment.
“Hey look on the bright side, it could be worse!” Sam told the others as he tried to ignore the dirty glares.
“How?” Clarissa asked while putting an earmuff on. Why she had it in her inventory, Sam didn’t know.
“Dunno, imagine if they could fly… Or fart lightning…”
“I’d rather not…”
Katie just snickered at their byplay and hefted her giant sword on her shoulder.
“Can we start? I haven’t had a good fight in a while!”
Sam exchanged a look with the others and nodded. “Make sure to strike hard and fast. We want to prevent them from opening their mouths as much as possible.”
This just made Katie even more excited.
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They blazed through the small fracture fueled by annoyance and pain in their ears. Sam was just thankful that they couldn't get tinnitus from the game.
The goats dropped the same type of materials as the ones outside of the fracture only a little higher quantity and quality with a few extra reagents and junk materials added. They still harvested every one of them, as selling goat’s meat straight from an unknown fracture would net them a good amount of money.
The maze was simple. They only had to use the wall-following method.
They tried to jump up and simply run along the top of the monolithic stone structure, but the moment they reached a certain height, they found themselves touching down on the ground. It appeared that the fracture was really small.
The final boss of the fracture was a three-headed goat who bleated to the rhythm of a song they had to figure out to get close to the loud menace and decapitate it.
It dropped three Sonic Scream skill books and an old leather-bound journal that contained all manner of recipes for materials gathered from goats.
They stood in a small circle, staring at the open journal with disappointment.
“No treasure?”
“No treasure…”
“Bah…”
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Thankfully, they didn’t have to go back through the maze to leave the fracture as another portal was behind the stone circle that the three-headed goat boss used as its home.
They approached the portal, all of them happy to leave those annoying goats behind, and stepped through the swirling dimensional magic.
However, what they found on the other side stunned them speechless.
It took an entire minute for one of them to break the silence.
“Hey, Sam, didn’t we start at the top of a mountain?” Dan asked as they all looked at the deep valley, teeming with greenery, where they suddenly found themselves.
Sam could only laugh nervously. “Surprise?”