Chương 512: Chapter 513: Fog (2)

"Battle plan?" I asked Veritum.

"Miria, you kill one of the mist monsters with your gift immediately. Leave half of your essence in reserve for healing or emergencies, but I want the little mist horrors to know that we can kill them, at least." Then, Veritum paused.

"If your attempt fails, immediately retreat and don't do anything but prepare healing spells. We'll retreat from the battlefield if our other initial attacks and experiments fail." Then, he turned towards the other adults in the hunting party.

"If we need to retreat, I will yell once as loudly as possible. Take that as a cue to disengage as a group. If we need to retreat, and get separated while fleeing, meet back up at the village. Understood?" Everyone acknowledged his words, even the adults who had initially been reluctant to start this battle. When I saw the expressions of those people, I understood something. Most of them still didn't think this battle was really a good idea - but that didn't mean they didn't want to take part in it.

After seeing a scout dead, most of them were angry. We had lost too much during the flight from the Universal Tree, and people were tired of being pushed around.

"All right, go!" Hissed Veritum. We crept closer to the clearing where the scout had been killed. Once we were in range, I immediately zeroed in on the weakest mist monster. Then, I activated extinguish. For a moment after my extinguish hit the weakest mist monster, I got a very peculiar sort of feedback from my magic. It normally felt like I was dropping water onto a flickering candle - a literal destruction of the candle of life, or at least my symbolic understanding of the 'flame of life.'

This time, it felt more like I was dripping water into a dry well - there was no 'flame of life' to destroy, because these creatures were somehow fundamentally different from other creatures. They weren't bone constructs, like the skeletons of the Market, nor were they biological creatures, like most of the monsters and people we had fought so far. They were something else entirely - constructs made almost entirely of the soul, bound with essence instead of biology.

Then, the weakest mist monster flared with essence, almost like my extinguish was a match hitting a barrel of oil. The mist monster flickered with essence, as it struggled to fight off my extinguish, and then, in a fraction of a second, it died. I grinned. I still didn't quite understand what sensations I had just felt while hitting a mist monster with an extinguish, but I was sure of one thing. Just like some creatures had an unusual resistance to extinguish, these things were unusually vulnerable to extinguish.

A System notification dinged at me. I pushed the System notification aside, to deal with later.

"One's dead!" I said. The other mist monsters twisted in response to one of their companions dying. Then, the remaining five pounced towards us like hyenas that smelled blood. I had no idea how they had even located us. We were still far enough away that smelling us or sensing us via essence should have been hard, and we were hidden by the trees - and yet, the moment they realized they were under attack, they found us.

Despite my confusion, the enemy didn't wait around for me to puzzle out their remaining unknown abilities. Moments later, the very souls of the mist monsters started to thin out, and new monsters made entirely of mist started to appear out of thin air. These monsters had no souls of their own, but I could see thin threads connecting them to the globs of mist that had 'birthed' them, like puppets controlled by strings.

The first few adults from our side leapt into the fray, and the melee combatants met the newly-formed monsters head on. Just like the first time we had fought these globs of mist, I quickly realized that the mist monsters didn't seem to have any methods of direct attack. Every single mist monster constantly churned out more mist monsters, but they didn't directly fire a ray of mist at our combatants, or anything like that. Their direct attack methods were limited.

I also started picking up on details I hadn't noticed the first time we fought a fog bank. Each fog bank seemed to have a limited number of mist-monsters it could control at once. The weakest surviving mist monster could control about eighty fog monsters at once, while the strongest one could control nearly four hundred of them. In total, the battlefield had about a thousand mist monsters on it at once - which proved far too much for our front lines to deal with.

Even with the help of our other elite fighters, Sallia, Felix, and Anise, the front lines were quickly forced to start retreating. That was when I noticed the second interesting thing. The mist monsters could not get very far away from the fog banks that controlled them.

It seemed like the range varied a bit from one mist monster to another, but even at most, the mist monsters could never get more than about five hundred meters away from the fog banks - which made running away very easy, especially since Veritum noticed this quite quickly and then repositioned our soldiers further away. The fog banks themselves were fast enough that they could constantly reposition themselves and keep us 'in range' of their monsters…

but their monsters were slower than the fog banks themselves, and it seemed to cost a decent amount of fog for them to resummon a monster. Fortunately, they didn't seem to be able to regain most of their essence if they 'dismissed' one of their summons, which was a huge relief - if they had that one, single ability, they would have been about ten times more terrifying.

As it stood, they were a tricky foe to deal with, but as long as we paid careful attention to positioning, they didn't seem willing to outright dismiss their summons and reform them inside of our ranks, which led to an awkward battle where we constantly repositioned ourselves while the fog monsters and their minions tried and failed to keep us in the middle of the fight. It was almost comedic, in a ridiculous, terrifying sort of way.

Nearly a minute and a half passed, as we constantly maneuvered around the battlefield and fired magic at the fog banks while they tried and failed to surround us with their minions. This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings. At first, I thought this made the mist monsters easy to deal with - all we had to do was stay out of range and toss projectiles at them until we figured out how to deal with them.

Five hundred meters was a pretty annoying range to handle, but it was far from impossible to launch projectiles and magic over that distance, even if a few of the lower level members of the hunting group missed sometimes. That was when I discovered the second aspect of the mist monsters - one that tied together a few things I had previously noticed, but never connected.

"These things do have some kind of mental attack," I said, as I frowned at the melee combatants of our group.

"At the front, do you guys feel unusually… angry? Or something like that?" Veritum, one of the front-line warriors, paused, right in the middle of arranging yet another retreat from the mist monsters in front of us.

"I do, now that you mention it. It's very subtle, though. It makes me want to charge these things." I nodded to myself. I had no idea how the mist monsters were doing it - it was a very subtle feeling, but even I had a very faint urge to charge these mist monsters and rip them apart with my bare hands. Given the fact that I was almost entirely devoted to magic, that struck me was strange.

When I tried to detect any magic they were using on us, I came up totally blank, though - the mist horrors weren't using any of the four essences to make us want to attack them. As far as I could tell, this was something that worked on a deeper level. It was somewhat similar to the conceptual-level attacks and spells of eldritch magic, which was why I could still faintly pick up on what was happening - even if only barely.

Whatever the fog banks were doing, it felt completely invisible to my human half, but the eldritch half of my existence could faintly pick up on traces of the fog bank's techniques. Perhaps it was some kind of adjacent school of magic to my own eldritch keyword, or something that had similar outward effects but a completely different base. I wasn't sure. In any case, my conclusion was the same.

"The longer anyone is near these fog clouds, the larger their impact on your mind. Any sort of combat-you engage in seems to accelerate the process. At some point in time, you will lose all reason and just charge the fog bank - and in the process, you'll probably spend most of your stamina and mana. After that, I imagine you die," I said.

"So that's why the scout died," said Veritum, as he grunted. He sighed, as he looked at the five remaining fog banks. Anise fired another fireball at one of the fog banks, and it twisted and churned as it tried to dodge. Anise's fireball slightly swerved in midair and crashed into it anyway, and I noticed its life force diminish considerably. True to our earlier conjectures, fire magic was reasonably effective against these creatures - at the very least, I noticed them getting noticeably weaker after each attack.

Even so, every form of attack we had tried was far less effective than we had hoped for. Anise's strongest fireball could wipe out maybe five percent of the weakest fog bank's life force, and these things weren't exactly sitting around and waiting to be attacked. They were constantly twisting, changing shape, and dodging.

"How long do you think we have? Does your healing magic do anything against these mental attacks?"

"I think we have about three minutes before our weakest members start to lose their minds and attack the fog banks. If we get better at rotating people out of combat when they're close to snapping, maybe five or six minutes," I said.

"My healing doesn't help." I had already tried that, but nothing I could do at the physical level helped much. I suspected that if I tried to use the concept of 'hope' it might work - but it would chew through my essence like a wildfire, so it wasn't a particularly practical solution. Veritum cursed.

"Are any of them close to dead? We should at least take one of them down before we retreat," he muttered. I pointed out one of the fog banks, and Anise and the two other people with access to fire magic launched another salvo of fireballs at it. Even though it dodged most of them, one of the other [Fire Mages] managed to nail it with another fireball, which finally dropped the creature. Finally, Veritum glared at the monsters, before he gritted his teeth.

"Retreat!" he called out. We regrouped, and began to retreat back through the forest and towards the settlement. The fog banks tried to chase us at first, but while they could keep up, their minions could not, so after a few minutes, they seemed to give up and retreated back into the forest. On one hand, I was glad that we had discovered that fire was useful against them - that meant that our defenses around the settlement would be at least somewhat useful.

On the other hand, we hadn't found anything exceptionally effective against the monsters, at least not anything accessible to regular System-users of this world. We hadn't even managed to retrieve the corpses of the two monsters we had slain. I had a sneaking suspicion that while we had successfully run some tests today, this wasn't over.