Dietrich

Every time he cut an enemy, he came face to face with a second one. It didn’t matter if he bisected them or merely lopped off an arm, all he needed to do was separate one piece from the rest and he’d immediately have yet another walking statue to worry about.

It didn’t even feel like a victory anymore when he managed to split a giant slab of metal in twain. It felt like failure, like he’d taken one step closer to being overwhelmed by the horde.

Another use of his [Sword Art] took apart the largest remaining statue before the effigy of the ancient general could hurl its spear, and yet, once again, all it managed to achieve was put him in even more danger.

A strike with his elbow, enhanced by [Titan Strike], sent another one of the ogre-sized monsters flying, knocking over a dozen statues behind it, buying him just enough breathing room to cleave apart two more enemies ... while a fourth managed to land a punch straight to his nose.

Dietrich fell backwards, sword flying around to hack apart the monster. The moment his rear hit the hard stone floor with a loud clatter of armor, he leaped straight back to his feet, ready to strike down the next two even smaller enemies, only to be confronted by two inert chunks. Unmoving. Properly destroyed.

That was the limit. The point where the monster could no longer animate itself and stayed dead.

He launched himself at the closest small monster and slashed it apart from the top of its head to its pelvis, and once again, both halves stayed down. Those were … no, wiping out the small ones wasn’t the correct choice here, despite it being a sensible knee-jerk reaction.

[Swort Art: Giantsplitter] bisected the largest remaining foe, and while drawing on [Endless Cut] to take apart smaller statues, he passed, until he was on the reforming not-quite-giant-anymore statue.

Small metal fists thudded into his armor like an unceasing hail all the while, but he was able to ignore them. For now.

Because while hacking at the monsters repeatedly was an arduous process, he suddenly managed to get [Endless Edge] to work again, and he’d won. As numerous as his foes still were, they were tiny. Well, not tiny, but small enough that he could carve through them with ease.

Dietrich spun, his sword cleaving through every nearby monster, snapping back to full speed after it had left each monster, leaving him surrounded by scrap metal … only for him to go to the ground with yet another tiny beast having leaped into his face, even managing to land yet another clean punch to his nose before he tore it off and slashed it apart before it hit the ground.

Feeling blood trickle across his lip, he stood again, glaring at his gathering foes and spat bloody phlegm onto the ground.

“This is the part where you run,” he growled. No one took him up on his offer. They were like sheep, in a way. Just as dumb, just as incapable of making choices, just blindly aggressive instead of passive and prone to getting stuck on their backs.

His foes charged, and he met them halfway, every strike reaping lives until he was the only one left standing.

So, that was the end of the fight. Monster dead, adventurer looking like he’d thrown himself into the blades of one of those infernal helicopters …

Damnit!

Dietrich pressed shut one of his nostrils with his thumb and exhaled to clear his other nostril of blood, the resulting mess splattering across the ground. Between [Martial Constitution] and [Royal Visage], he’d be combat-capable and reasonably healthy-looking in due time, but this fight had been a far cry from his previous easy wins in duels against anything short of that Nation Boss.

… Maybe trying to beat a Raid Boss at near Level-parity hadn’t been the best idea he’d ever had.

Though, the next time, the gap wouldn’t be quite as small.

After all, this fight had brought him another two Levels.

[King of Adventure Lv. 53 -> King of Adventure Lv. 55]

[Skill Boost gained]

[Skill gained: Grand Slash]

Dietrich didn’t even have to look at his status to find out what [Grand Slash] did, he was already familiar with it since the British monarch Arthur used it.

But the boost would go elsewhere.

[Skill boosted: Endless Cut]

He had three big attacks for dealing with powerful foes, but crowds of lesser enemies could prove tricky.

***

Mia

There were a lot of monsters out there, but she only had eyes for a very specific foe. Twenty meters tall, made from bronze, though one wouldn’t be able to tell looking at it from the outside, and looking more than capable of ripping open the gates with casual ease.

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Bavaria (animated monument), Level 45 Raid Boss

Yeah, that thing would be a pain in the ass to take down. A bronze woman, tall to the point where her head practically scraped the ceiling.

An anti-materiel rifle barked, and with a loud thud, a hole appeared in the front of the walking statue. Then, suddenly, a massive gash was carved into the side of the wall as a thin stream of liquid blasted out of the monster.

Mia muttered several unflattering things under her breath as she noticed that.

That statue was hollow; she knew that from having been inside it. Nice view, but a great way to hit your head half a dozen times in under ten minutes if you weren’t careful.

And the stream didn’t seem to be abating, which meant that thing was either larger on the inside, or its liquid stores regenerated.

If every crack they carved into that thing led to water blasting out with enough force to carve stone … they were fucked.

That was when she noticed the smell, and sniffed the air a couple of times. Yeah, that wasn’t water.

That was the smell of college parties and drunken morons who thought that their slurred cliches were real panty droppers and wound up utterly confused when she ignored them.

The embodiment of Bavaria bled beer. That felt … vaguely racist. But was “racist” the correct term when referring to a small part of a nation, rather than an ethnicity?

Though she had figured out a way to probably make that less dangerous. Make the hole larger, increase the flow, reduce the pressure. Turn it from a water jet cutter into a fire hose.

Unless the pressure magically stayed equal regardless of the size of the hole. That would be … bad. Very bad. Though letting that thing advance unchallenged for fear of the consequences of injuring it would inevitably be worse than any consequences attacking it could ever be.

Balmung swept around, [Sword Art: A Blade Across Time and Space] triggering to project the cut through the intervening space to carve a massive gash into the statue’s chest, through the original injury. And in an instant, the frothing flood of beer redoubled, flowing out like a waterfall, but the sheer pressure behind it abating to simply cover the stone floor. Abating slightly, that was. It wasn’t a full-power waterjet anymore, but it still had more than enough force behind it to cause serious injury.

And the floor was rapidly becoming a small lake of alcoholic liquid.

Doing that outside would have actually helped, the beer turning the ground into mud that the statues could get bogged down in. In here … it would just make the fortress smell like the aftermath of a frat party until Tristan could apply his cleaning ability.

Mia grabbed the first grenade from the utility belt she’d borrowed from the military, took a couple of seconds to judge the distance, pulled the pin, and triggered the [Lesser Telekinetic Push] Tristan had taught her this morning. After all, her [Legend’s Apprentice] Class had given her the same previously useless [Arcane Core].

The enemy was still far enough away that there was no chance of blowback, so she felt safe throwing it.

It bounced off the armored shell, hit the ground, was submerged, and detonated into a geysir of frothing alcohol. The Raid Boss, to absolutely no one’s surprise, was entirely fine. If she could have gotten it through the hole in the armor, on the other hand … the overpressure from the explosion would only have been magnified by the liquid the statue contained, potentially even cracking the damn thing open completely.

Either way, that thing had to go, and orders to that effect were already coming down from the very top.

“All heavy weapons, focus on Bavaria. Ms. Vogt, take position in front of the main gates and deal with the minions. Lord Mac Cumail, please attack the Raid Boss from the rear.”

Simple, really. There were very few who could reliably beat the statues in melee combat who weren’t also ancients, with her being one of this mere handful. And there were also not many ranged weapons that were good at destroying them.

Stone, even marble, was “brittle” enough that assault rifles could shatter them with enough bullets; the higher caliber, the better, but the statues were harder to kill than even zombies. Anit-material rifles were better but rarer, and as for the rocket launchers, who on earth stockpiled enough of them for constant and sustained fire? Not Germany, certainly.

And finally, the grenades weren’t exactly easy to deploy, nor were they usually designed against targets as tough as, well, walking stone statues.

So by focussing their limited firepower on the Raid Boss, they were leaving a massive hole in their defenses.

Mia turned away from the murder hole, exited through the side door, and sprinted towards the main gates along the roof-corridor. There were multiple ways of getting down there, all of them collapsible if needed, but she didn’t want to emerge where the enemies already were, nor did she have to.

And then, she found herself standing before the advancing horde. Ragged from countless bullets, missiles and grenades, with many more projectiles flying over her head, but she was still facing them.

Plus, the murderholes overhead were more than a little terrifying, even though she knew no one would be hurling down grenades this close to the gates.

Balmung slid from its sheath as she readied herself, but before she had to attack her first foe, she noticed something more. Another smell in the air, in addition to smoke, dust, cordite and the overwhelming stench of beer.

Where those … candied nuts? Even with all the local craziness, that could not possibly be normal.

It was only then that she realized that the shadows around Bavaria were shifting, distorting, becoming twisted into now still-ethereal metal beams and …. And now she knew what it was, and now everything else made a hell of a lot more sense.

The statue overlooking the Oktoberfest bled beer that would, eventually, transform its surroundings into that, well, some demented demon version, at any rate, which explained the smell of burning sugar and also made that thing even more dangerous.

“It’s terraforming the area,” she yelled, on the off chance that someone had actually heard her and slashed at the nearest statue. She was bashing a sword into solid stone, it obviously didn’t do overly much, but still managed a hell of a lot more than it should have in an even remotely sane world, her blade sinking almost ten centimeters into her target’s torso and sending cracks radiating across it only for the damn thing to practically fall apart as she yanked her sword back, worsening the damage.

And when two seconds later the next enemy came in range, she went at it too. For all the good it did. If Bavaria got anywhere near her, she was done for … yet even as that thought flashed through her head, lightning exploded around the Raid Boss. Fionn had arrived.