Chương 83: True Elite

We began our incredibly slow, agonizingly tense approach toward Kullervo, our boots squelching through the bubbling purple slime like a group of highly optimistic toddlers wandering onto a live firing range. Right on cue, Dimitri hoisted his remarkably blunt Notched Iron Slab sword and locked his arm behind that ridiculous Rotting Barrel Lid shield, looking exactly like a glorious, superhero who had mistakenly raided a dumpster for his tactical loadout.

The fifteen-foot bipedal colossus just casually stared down at our incoming caravan, and even though the dude completely lacked an actual face, you could practically feel the smug wave of pure, unadulterated amusement radiating off his petrified wood armor. He was looking at our collective display of raw bravery the exact same way an unimpressed corporate executive looks at an intern trying to pitch a revolutionary stapler design.

Before we could even finish crossing into his personal space bubble, Kullervo decided that the absolute best way to introduce himself was to lock his massive joints and completely freeze his bipedal frame. The pulsating, neon-purple heart stone in his hollow chest cavity suddenly throbbed with a blinding, violent intensity, immediately triggering his Thorn-Burst Pulse right out of the gate without a single moment of polite hesitation.

"Oh, you have got to be absolutely kidding me right now," I shrieked into the toxic air, my eyes widening to the size of dinner plates as I stared at the expanding magical energy cracking across his wooden shell.

"Who even does that? You cannot just casually launch your absolute biggest, most devastating ultimate attack right off the literal bat on the very first turn of the encounter! Where is the tactical etiquette?" Instead of executing a beautifully synchronized, cinematic charge into the jaws of absolute destruction, our highly dysfunctional squad instinctively pulled a complete, synchronized U-turn.

We immediately fled backward like a flock of startled pigeons, sprinting for our lives right back into the dense, foggy safety of the surrounding tree line as our boots violently kicked up chunks of toxic goo. We scattered completely, diving frantically behind the thickest, sturdiest trunks we could find to use the natural environment as an unscripted meat shield against the impending magical apocalypse.

The absolute microsecond I managed to successfully slide my body flat against the bark of a massive tree, the cataclysmic detonation finally erupted from the dead center of the clearing behind us. It sounded like a fully loaded freight train crashing headfirst into an ammo factory, a sound so thunderous and packed with raw rage that it threatened to manually pop our eardrums.

A terrifying, high-velocity storm of hundreds of razor-sharp wooden splinters flew through the air in all directions, acting as a cloud of organic shrapnel that shredded absolutely everything within a fifty-yard radius of Kullervo's heavy frame. The projectile briars ripped through the fog, obliterating bushes, punching deep craters into solid stone, and aggressively chewing into the opposite sides of the trees we were currently clinging to for dear life. This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road.

If you spot it on Amazon, please report it. It was an absolute, unmitigated thematic calamity that instantly turned the entire clearing into a localized blender of flying wooden knives. I peered out from my wooden bunker, tracking Dimitri through the clearing like a guy looking for his buddy in a crowded theater. Our gazes locked across the smoke-filled gap. He gave me a slow, solemn nod that practically oozed motivational poster energy, signaling that he was ready to play the meat shield.

I shot a solid nod right back at him, confirming that my brain cells were functioning and the plan was officially a go. The microsecond the lethal rain of organic wooden shrapnel finally ceased its aggressive chewing of the landscape, I leaped out from behind my protective tree trunk. I hit the ground running, kicking up wet chunks of toxic purple goo as I began to circle the perimeter like a frantic squirrel looking for a dropped nut.

With a sharp mental command, I tapped into my inventory to manifest my long-range options, summoning the straight, splinter-prone barrel of my Standard Issue Matchlock musket right into my waiting hands. I slid to a sudden halt, hoisting the heavy wooden stock against my shoulder to bring the crosshairs flat onto Kullervo's oversized bipedal frame.

"Arcane Discharge," I muttered under my breath, activating the skill to overload the weapon's chamber with raw magical energy. I squeezed the trigger with confidence.

"Long-Trace Bolt," I added, calling out the specialized weapon bonus as the internal mana mechanism inside the rifle violently erupted. A brilliant, high-velocity bullet of pure blue mana tore out of the barrel, sizzling through the toxic purple fog like a miniature comet intent on boring a brand new hole right through the Sentinel's wooden torso. To my total and utter psychological horror, Kullervo didn't even bother executing a dramatic, high-speed anime dodge to avoid the incoming magical projectile.

Instead, the fifteen-foot-tall wooden mountain merely tilted his upper torso a fraction of an inch to the left, letting the blue streak of light casually zip right past his shoulder chimney without scratching a single piece of his petrified oak armor plating. It completely broke my brain because the maneuver had nothing to do with raw physical speed or lightning-fast reflexes.

The dude was simply operating on some seriously bloated observation statistics, casually reading the exact trajectory of my sightline before the bullet had even cleared the muzzle of my gun. Kullervo decided that casually avoiding my sniper shot wasn't quite extra enough, so he flexed his massive wooden torso to trigger Miasma Vent.

The pair of hollow bark chimneys sprouting from his shoulders instantly went into overdrive, violently chugging out a massive, pressurized wall of choking purple smoke that rapidly transformed the entire clearing into a localized environmental disaster zone. Unlike the mildly annoying patches of pollution we had been trudging through earlier, the freshly baked toxic exhaust this colossus just unleashed was on a completely different level of weaponized filth.

The sludge-colored fog rolled across the terrain so rapidly and with such a thick, opaque density that even my highly respectable, heavily inflated observation statistics were currently having a thoroughly miserable time trying to punch through the gloom, reducing my visual range to practically nothing.

"Wow, this giant, overgrown piece of kindling is turning out to be a vastly superior pain in the rear end than my initial calculations predicted," I complained aloud to the empty air, squinting through the thick haze while my lungs began to register the burning sensation of the smog.

Realizing that playing hide-and-seek on the muddy ground level with a blind spot the size of a continent was a one-way ticket to getting flattened, I scrambled over to the nearest sturdy trunk and began scaling the bark like a highly caffeinated lemur escaping a flood. I hauled my boots up into the lower branch network to secure a slightly elevated vantage point above the thickest layers of the ground-level soup.

With a quick flick of my mental inventory switch, my trusty Standard Issue Matchlock musket vanished from my grip into thin air, instantly replaced by the reassuringly heavy, primitive metal tube of my Field Lobber hand mortar, ready to introduce our wooden landlord to some low-yield explosive hospitality.