Eduardo gradually made his way up through the enemy ranks to support Sam in person, and the two men fought back to back against the hordes, filling in each other’s gaps. Sam’s hammer had immense stopping power, enough that he could stop an enemy in their tracks so that Eduardo could strike them with his rapier and kill them. The margin of error for a rapier was very small, but it did a lot of damage when it actually struck them head on.
The strikes skewered straight through the monsters’ brains, and killed them instantly, as long as they were sufficiently weakened. Neither man said a word to one another, and they were so in sync that they did not have to. Sam could sense Eduardo starting to come near the cusp of ranking up his weapon mastery, and he silently cheered the man on.
A few minutes later, he did it, spurred on by a dozen monster deaths. The man shuddered as he began to become one with his rapier, almost getting him killed in the process as a monster came barreling towards the momentarily distracted Eduardo. Sam quickly tore the creature’s head off with a blow of his hammer, not even looking in its direction.
Eduardo finished a moment later, and he grinned, exploding into a storm of motion. His rapier moved like a shard of light itself, slipping and turning through the air with quicksilver grace. It was as if he had been possessed by some primal spirit of pure skill, which had transformed him into a god of battle. Sam took the back seat for a few moments, letting Eduardo get used to his new capabilities. He had gained almost nothing in terms of stats from the upgrade, at least compared to where he had been before, but his movements were on another level as compared to before. Gone were the occasional missteps or slip ups that came with a mortal mastery of a weapon. Now there was only perfection. Well, perfection as much as a mere F Ranker could ever achieve.
Sam was sure that there were plenty of flaws in his and Eduardo’s techniques, but at his current state, he was unable to detect any. They eventually beat back the encroaching monsters, who had decided to keep their efforts on the wall rather than on the seemingly invincible Sam.
He turned around and charged into the back of their lines, but they ignored his presence. None of the monsters had any sense of self preservation, and as a result, they used their bodies to block Sam from getting to the front. He roared in anger, and pulsed his armor’s skill, as well as refreshing his other enhancement abilities. Like a flame coated meteor, he crashed through the enemy lines, with his strikes now doing far more damage than before. Still, it was not enough.
As Sam desperately tried to make a difference, the shield finally broke. Sam felt it in his heart, like a rending sensation that spread out through his mana pool. It was as if a part of him had been ripped clean out. The shield flickered one last time, and then cracked all over, turning into a million shards of blue light that vanished into thin air. With a roar, the Legion force charged the city walls.
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Sam leaped over their lines, and raced for the walls, scrambling up the side of them as quickly as he could, barely noticing the heat from the lava. Eduardo followed behind him, moving just as quickly. If they could do such a thing however, it meant that the monsters could do so as well.
They reached the top of the wall a few seconds later, and started to fire their ranged attacks down into the milling horde beneath the walls. The monsters were starting to clamber up on top of each other to create a ladder of bodies that would allow for them to reach the top of the walls.
Sam’s attack blasted bodies off of the ladder, but more kept coming. At least there weren't enough of the monsters to surround the city, meaning that most of them were gathered around here. This would allow the defenders to concentrate their artillery fire on the monsters, which would end up damaging them more than if they had been spread out.
Sam emptied his entire mana pool into his Anger’s Reach skill over the next few minutes, and by the time that he was spent, the number of the enemies had diminished by quite a bit. A lot of them had fallen into the lava moat as a result of instability within the monster hordes, but enough of them remained to pose a serious threat to the city if they entered it.
Sam leaped off the wall, and made way for the defenders who were all rushing to this section of the wall to man the ranged weapons. Bolts of mana and large balls of rock from catapults hurtled down towards the monsters on the ground, knocking more and more of them into the lava. Death by lava was not a pleasant way to go, especially if one had enough durability to stretch it out.
It took almost thirty seconds for the Legion members to die from the lava, and Sam could smell the roasting flesh from here. It seemed like they had neglected Resilience somewhat. However, none of them seemed to care too much about it, and there were no screams of pain like he would have expected. Such were the benefits of lacking a conscious mind.
Sam ran towards the city hall, wanting to find out if Ava had been able to purchase the missiles like he had ordered.The other captains were off fighting the monsters, those of them who had ranged attacks at any rate. He had no idea where the others were right now.
By the time that he reached the city hall, he had begun to hear disconcerting noises coming from the walls.Looking back, he saw the first few monsters breaching the safety of the walls, and attacking the defenders.
Automatons raced up the stairs and engaged the enemy forces then and there, pushing them back off the walls. However, they just kept coming. By the time that Sam reached the city hall, he spotted a series of large missile tubes set deep into the ground. Each of them had a missile in them and he smiled at this. Ava stood by them, fiddling with an interface on a computer screen in front of the missiles. Upon seeing Sam, she gave him a terse nod.
“These missiles are only good for distances of over twenty miles. Do you have a target in mind?”
“Yes. How exactly does the targeting system work though?” Ava showed him the screen, which looked like a map of the surrounding area for about two thousand miles. Barely anything was visible on it, save for large physical features or cities. However, the large structures that Sam had seen in the distance were clearly visible on them.
There was a targeting reticule on the bottom of the screen, and Sam moved it up to rest on the dark masses in the ocean that were the Legion’s base. That was where all of the bombs were coming from, and if one hit the city dead on without a shield to protect it, then everyone within it would die. No, better to take out the greatest threat now.