Before they even got close enough to Taejo’s patrol, Nick, piggybacking on Elizabeth rather than letting her scoop him up like a maiden again, was already able to hear the chaos of a battle ahead of them. They didn’t even have to search for the enemy forces. The sound of explosions, spell activations, and other loud thuds announcing their location.
“I guess we’re in the right place,” Adele said as she rushed ahead of the others. She activated her holy hammer conjuration spell as she charged, the large luminescent weapon glowing as it circled around her.
As his group continued to charge forward, Nick began to make out some of the carnage. Stacy and Amanda were fighting back to back against more than a dozen foes, Stacy swinging her heavy maul in continuous arcs in front of her. Despite the fact she was certainly strong enough to crush any of the snowball bastards with a single swing, she wasn’t able to actually go on the offense. She and Amanda, both already covered in bruises and blood and surrounded by a few corpses and dozens more enemies, were constantly being forced on the defensive. The attacks against them were so fast and frequent, their blade and maul moving back and forth to intercept the blows, that they couldn’t switch to the offensive to kill the enemies harassing them.
“I have heals! Go all out!” Adele yelled to the two barbaric women.
“Where’s Taejo?!” Seo-ah yelled in a panic, her speed doubling in a mad rush as she sprinted past Adele, a hundred small pink aura-filled flower petals forming on the ground in a circle around her, growing in number and sharpness as she rushed into the fight. Despite training with Seo-ah daily, Nick had never seen that skill before.
Stacy and Amanda, for their part, hearing Adele’s words, dropped the defensive stance. Ignoring the ramifications of what might come next, Stacy took a blow to her calf from a hard-shelled armadillo and then got hit by a hedgehog quills in her right arm as she raised her weapon up and swung it in an large horizontal arc, ignoring the brutal damage being done to her body as a second and third quill struck her in the shoulder and side, each one piercing her thick winter armor. The effect of her aura-filled attack was instant though, shredding through half a dozen enemies in a single crushing wave, clearing the foes around her.
Amanda, a little more cautious, took only one blow to her thigh from a squirrel mage as she performed a downward double chop, slicing two of the armadillos in front of her in half.
“I got them!” Adele told Nick as she activated Charge yet again, pulling ahead of Seo-ah and reaching the two women before the rest of the group. Her weapon and shield disappeared as she put a hand on each of them and almost instantly healed the injuries they’d sustained.
As this was going on, Nick had already taken out his standard of greatness, activated it, and thrown it into the center of the battlefield, turning the 3.8x skill and ability multiplier into a 5.5x multiplier and giving everyone in the AoE a 45% flat damage modifier to their regular attacks. He then added Stacy and Amanda to his Cloak of Madness effect, renewing the spell with three quick, simple words: “Kill ‘em all!!!”
While this was happening, Lou and Elizabeth had pushed forward too, Lou punching one of the lepuses so hard that its head exploded, the horn shooting out as the skull shattered into a hundred pieces. At the same time, Elizabeth slung two aura blades ahead of her, cutting several of the white rolling monsters in half.
“Noelle, Oliver, go support Lou on the left! Secure Stacy and Amanda’s position! The rest of you, back up Elizabeth on the right!” Nick commanded as he charged through the middle himself, running as fast as he could as he tried to catch up to Seo-ah.
The moment Seo-ah reached the enemy, the aura-filled flower petals around her exploded like an ever-expanded hurricane. They cut through over twenty enemies at once in a wide-arcing circle but harmlessly passed through allies, slicing through one sciuri, lepus, armadillo, or hedgehog after another before finally losing strength and lodging themselves in whatever final foe absorbed their attack.
Holy crap, Nick thought as he saw the skill’s carnage. It was on the level of one of Maria’s past-life hero skills. It was clear that the rage, panic, and emotions Seo-ah was feeling over potentially losing her brother again had bubbled up and boiled over into a new technique that might re-define her class in the future.
Not wanting to let her efforts go to waste, Nick raised up his spear and called out new orders for the group, pulling the rest of them back into formation. “Let’s end this quickly! Noelle, Oliver, you’re with me as we take the left side. The rest of you, take the right. We break them here!”
As soon as the formation struck against the wave of the enemies Seo-ah, Elizabeth, and Lou hadn’t finished off, Nick struck out with his spear, the weapon burning with the holy fire from his hands. He could hear the sound of the others killing on his left and right, and he trusted they had his flanks as he kept his shield up and his movements tight. He wanted to go crazy like Seo-ah and the rest, but he knew that he lacked the same destructive combat skills, and with Oliver, Tabitha, and the others, he had to prioritize keeping the formation tight and the group together.
A blur of fur and horn lunged before he could even retract his weapon from his first target. Nick was able to raise his shield, blocking the attack as a lepus’s horn met the cold hard metal of his defenses, a stab that might have even penetrated Reggie’s latest work if he hadn’t been quick enough. Before the creature could recover, he brought the butt of his spear down hard, feeling bone crunch beneath it.
“Nick, your left!” Noelle’s voice rang out.
Nick angled his defenses a little, his spear arm moving without conscious thought as the Weight of Dedication punched through the incoming wooly armadillo mid-leap, momentum carrying the skewered beast into another of its kind.
“Where’s my brother?” Seo-ah yelled, striking in all directions with her spear. The circle of petals that had been protecting her had died out after her explosive attack, and she was relying on Elizabeth and Lou, who were now hunting the casters and ranged attackers, to stop her from getting overwhelmed. “Where is Taejo?!”
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“Taken!” Amanda blurted out in response to Seo-ah’s question, causing the rampaging little sister to stop in her tracks, her stunned silence punctuated by a quill from one of the hedgehogs piercing through her gut as she failed to pay attention and dodge it.
“Adele, get to her!” Nick yelled as he nearly broke his own formation to run over to her, but he knew he wouldn’t reach her before she got taken out if he broke the line.
As much as he hated staying in position, he knew it was the right call as the line advanced forward, cleaning up the monsters one after the other along the way. He watched Seo-ah take another hit in the shoulder as she came to her senses.
It was gutting seeing her get hurt like that, but he knew he couldn’t help her. He knew Elizabeth and Lou were working on that as they tried to clean up the ranged attackers.
As Nick fought through toward Seo-ah, he couldn’t help but feel like there was something off. When they had been ambushed before, there had been an actual giant wooly mammoth-like monster capable of great ice magic assisting the ambush. Here, however, there was no wooly mammoth or great ice beast. In fact, there was nothing at all that seemed strong enough to take on a team of six people. If it had just been Stacy and Amanda, that’d be one thing, but they had Taejo and others, all powerful, experienced, well-trained adventurers. They should have been able to hang on.
As this realization dawned on Nick, he blurted out the question: “Stacy! Stacy, how did they overwhelm you?!”
“It was a fat reindeer with one of the critter knights,” Stacy replied in a matter-of-fact way between swings of her maul. With Adele there supporting her, she was tanking the blows, only blocking ones to her vitals as she let her armor take hit after hit to less lethal spots like her arms, shoulders, thighs, and shins. She just ignored them completely as the heavy maul in her hand crushed into the skull of one monster after the other.
“A crystal reindeer?” Nick didn’t even have to finish the words before he saw it. There, charging from the southeast, was a hulking reindeer-like beast, its monstrous frame towering at eight feet at the shoulder. Its thick, sinewy muscles rippled beneath a coat of unnaturally sleek white fur, too smooth, too perfect—like the frostbitten pelt of something that should not be alive. Its jagged antlers, looking like shards of broken ice climbing out of its skull, were covered in blood as the heavy red across the white background hung in the air while it charged. The beast began circling around to the north of them, its hooves carrying it across the icy ground with great speed and worrying ease.
Why is it circling? Nick wondered, turning to look south of them to see what it was trying to flank them with. “Crap! Everyone, we break now. Take the hits if you have to, but we have to clear this skirmish now!” Nick ordered, switching from spear and shield to spear only as he rushed forward, breaking formation the moment he saw the crystal reindeer’s intention.
Behind them, in the direction the reindeer had just come from, was a massive ice storm. The mammoth and whatever monsters they had left in the back were apparently about to hit them, and the reindeer wanted to get on their other side to trap them.
The woodland creatures were going to use the mammoth and his forces as the anvil so the crystal reindeer and its companions could smash into them like a hammer.
As hard as Nick was fighting, stabbing through everything with abandon as he tried to kill every little horned lepus, sciurus, and annoying, quill-shooting hedgehog in sight, he also had to remember to conserve his energy. “We need to save our mana for the conflict! We’re going to need it!” Nick cautioned as he saw a small pillar of holy fire envelope two horned lepuses. The effect, under all the amplification magic currently coursing through his team, was enough that it instantly incinerated the little rabbits.
It only took a minute, but the recklessness of their assault finally cleared out the remaining woodland creatures just in time for the next assault. However, Nick’s armor was now dented and damaged, his health had taken a hit, and he was too busy downing a red health potion, croissant, and cookie from Betty the Baker to call out orders, but as he prepared for the enemy hammer to strike the anvil, he used Omni-Trainer’s Insight on the crystal reindeer to see what they were up against.
Frosthorn Tarandrus
Level: 41
Type: Iceborn Beast
A deadly creature of the frozen tundra, the Frosthorn Tarandrus is not just fast—it is a relentless force of nature, wielding the power of the arctic winds to enhance its speed and maneuverability. It glides across icy terrain with unnatural grace, using sudden bursts of freezing wind to shift directions in an instant.
Insight Note:
The Frosthorn Tarandrus’s reliance on wind magic to move its large body at fast speeds often leaves it incapable of changing direction quickly. It also is much slower when at a standstill than it is when charging, as it struggles more in combat when once its charge is halted.
“Form up!” Nick ordered through a mouth full of food, the sound unfortunately getting garbled. A plan was coming together in his mind after reading the notification.
“Nnn,” “Mmm,” and “Nnn,” the others replied, sounding like Stacy as they grunted through mouthfuls of their own healing baked goods.
“Do you want me in the middle or backline?” Adele asked as she pulled out a shield, looking at the formation with a little confusion.
Without even telling them how to organize, they had created a line with the strongest four, Stacy, Elizabeth, Amber and Lou, on the outside, tiering down in power until Noelle and Tabitha were in the middle with Nick at the center.
No, this won’t work, Nick thought to himself. We’re going to need someone to handle the reindeer . . . but we can’t keep the formation split, and anyone we send isn’t going to have the mass to stop that momentum.
“There is no backline here,” Nick grumbled, having finished his snack. “Take my spot,” he told Adele as he turned around, lifting his spear and deciding to trust in his team as he charged straight at the tarandrus.
“Are you— Are you really doing that on your own?!” Seo-ah demanded before ditching her spot in the formation as well.
“Of course not,” Nick replied with a grin as he saw his wife chasing after him. He knew that he needed to catch and pin the reindeer before it reached the wide open back of the formation. In truth, he wanted to call for Lou as well. Lou was the only one in the group that didn’t have a shield and had the force to punch hard enough to crush the momentum of the charging reindeer.
The only issue was the mammoth. Lou was absolutely needed to make sure that juggernaut didn’t shatter their small defensive line and leave them vulnerable to attacks from all directions.
“Let’s do this then,” Seo-ah said as she charged forward. Nick could tell from how fast she was moving, burning her stamina without a second thought, that she was in a hurry, and he didn’t blame her. They had to finish this, and they had to finish it quickly to find Taejo and the others.
