Chương 13: The Sculpture Garden

We can slaughter a giant mantis without any trouble. They're twice as tough as a lynxith, but really no challenge. But that's when we have them outnumbered. Even when we have an equal number of them. That doesn't account for this many. There are almost five times as many of them as there are of us. I don't think we survive this fight, and I'm not ready to suffer another death penalty.

"We need to think about this," I say, whispering and looking around at everyone.

"We can't kill that many."

"But we have to get past them," Vinny says.

"Do we want to sneak around?"

"I think we should kill them," El says.

"Think of the XP."

"Won't do us any good if we all die," I point out.

"So let's plan a way to make sure that doesn't happen." Ashley says.

"We could go up on the bridge and make them come to us, funneling their attacks." I shake my head.

"They'll find both ways to come at us and flank us. What if we use the bridge, but from underneath? They have to come at us down a two lane highway. It's not much, but it's something."

"You know, there are cars parked all around," Gigi says.

"We could probably push a few of them in the way, use that to funnel them a bit better." Pushing the cars isn't nearly as hard as I expected it to be. The cars are heavy, but once we get them moving, they roll just fine into place, letting us build a barricade that will force the mantises to come in at us one at a time. Even if they climb over the cars, they'll still be slowed down and easier to handle. We set up the fighting area as a killing ground, ready to take them on with the best set up we can possibly get.

Gigi and Ashley stand together, half a dozen cars between them and where I'm standing, in front of the whole setup. El is with me, ready to throw her javelin and eventually her axes before we back up and join the others. For right now, I'm going to shoot at the mantises and try to take out or at least wound as many of them as possible before they even get to the battle ground we've created.

I fire the arrow with a big arch, not really aiming at any one in particular but rather trusting that there are so many of them that I'm guaranteed to hit one of them. Of course, I don't hit with my first shot, nor with my second, but the third shot that I send into the group does find purchase, and soon they're all moving around, trying to figure out where the shot came from. The second hit gives them a better idea, and by the third hit, my sixth shot all told, they see us and begin to move towards us.

Once they start moving towards us, hitting them is much easier. Maybe it's because I gained another level of bow with those arching shots, maybe it's just because they're more clustered together. I'm not entirely sure. But I don't have to really aim as I fire arrow after arrow as fast as I can into the mass of mantises. One of them falls dead behind the group, which I find encouraging, but just the one. Maybe I'm spreading out my attacks to the others and they'll fall more easily to my friends.

Maybe I'm missing more than I think I am. I run out of hunter arrows around the point where they're close enough to start moving back and throwing daggers. El and I move steadily backwards, her throwing her axes into the few mantises in front, me throwing daggers into them and the ones past them. We keep moving and throwing, trying to eliminate a few more before we get into the real killing field.

When I get past Gigi and Ashley, I flank over to the right and draw my sword, ready to take on any of the mantises that decide to go over cars rather than around them. My ranged attacks are all spoken for, and I hope I did a lot of damage with them, but only time will tell. They break against Gigi and Ashley like a wave, slamming into their shields just to get pushed back again.

The mantises are stumbling over one another, giving the girls the opportunity to stab and slash at the monsters while keeping themselves safe. I hear loud cracking of exoskeleton as Ashley hits with her mace, breaking the armor of the bugs and exposing their fleshy innards to attack with each swing of the weapon. The mantises do start to crawl over the cars, getting hit with blasts of ice from Vinny as they do, and stumbling enough for me and El to have the advantage when we strike them.

I do my best to chop legs out from under the monsters, hitting them right where the joints articulate, breaking carapace with my sword. They have 120 hit points to start, and I only do about 20 with each of my hits. I'd do more of Vinny would get up here and flank them with me, but for now he's still casting his spells to keep them back, to slow down their progress before they get to me. I suppose I'm grateful for that, but I'd rather be doing three times as much damage with every hit.

I lose count of how many of them I take down. I use Bleeding Strike whenever I can, and I do get a sneak attack against the occasional mantis, just by hitting it before it knows that I'm there. One of them I kill with a sneak attack, it having already taken damage from my arrows. But as I fight them, as we keep killing them, sometimes they get through our defenses. My Shell doesn't last long, and soon I'm taking regular damage from the slash of their mantis claws and the rare bite of their mandibles.

One such bite nearly breaks my arm, the mandibles wrapping around my forearm and clacking together with enough force to probably bite my hand off. Luckily, I manage to stab my sword straight up under the mandibles and into the head before they can fully close, and I only take 7 damage from the bite. There'll be a nasty bruise there when this is said and done. If not for the regeneration, the bruise would probably last a week at least; I think it bruised down to the bone.

My hit points continue to decline slowly but surely as I fight these monsters. I know I'm going to level up after the fight, but I'm starting to wonder if I'll even survive that long. Thankfully, Vinny comes up with his sword and starts fighting with me, allowing us to flank the monsters and let me do the greater damage, but the slashes still come at me, doing 5 damage here and 6 there, sending my health down past fifty and towards forty, the little wounds starting to add up. I'm not moving as fast, I can tell.

Whether it be slashes or bruises through armor, I'm starting to wear down. And there's nothing I can do about it. My health passes forty, and I chop the head off another mantis. Then one right behind it bites down on my shoulder, the mandible piercing the leather coat and stabbing into me, on either side of my collar bone. If it bites all the way down and breaks my collar bone, I'm done. I won't be able to lift my sword arm anymore, and I don't have the magic to do anything of note.

Shell is still on cooldown, and I only do five damage with my ball of flame at this point. I stab wildly, jerking my blade around as I feel it make an impact. I tear the blade down, opening the carapace of the mantis as wide as I can, hoping that enough pain will make it retract its mandibles and try to get away from me. It doesn't break my collar, but the wound still brings me down another 11 points. I've got barely twenty five health left, and there still seems to be an endless number of the monsters.

I'm not going to be able to keep fighting much longer. I'm bleeding, which is going to bring me down below twenty, and I can't feel my left arm. Which might be for the best, but still isn't a good thing. This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. Then I feel a coolness flow through my body, like a breeze that only I can feel. It's pleasant, and when it passes I notice that my health has jumped all the way back up to forty one. Vinny healed me.

I don't know when he got the chance to actually learn the spell, but I'm glad he took the time. With those points healed, I'm able to continue fighting, reinvigorated and ready for the giant mantis that leaps off the car and attempts to pounce onto me. I roll underneath it, coming up behind it and stabbing it in the thorax, right where the legs meet. I do 63 damage, it staggers, and then I come around with a chop and take off two of its legs right at the thorax.

I stab it again as it falls, and it doesn't get back up. I'm panting for breath, but there don't seem to be any more of them. I'm not ready to calm down until I see the notification, though. I won't believe it's really done until I get the message. You have defeated Giant Mantis x25. You gain (3000/5) 600 experience. Your Bleeding Strike has advanced to level 2, and now deals 120% damage. You have qualified for class Pathfinder. Would you like to change your class? You have gained a level.

You have 4 stat points to distribute. The first thing to decide is if I want the pathfinder class. I think I do. It's an advanced class, which suggests that it will provide more and better things than the rogue class. Hopefully, I won't lose the sneak attack from flanking, but if I do, it might get replaced by something better. As for the four points, I put one in agility, one in vigor, and the other two into awareness. I need to up my awareness again so that my spell attack actually does something.

Right now, it'll do eight points of damage. That's not much, but it's getting there. Okay. So I'm taking the pathfinder class. What does that mean? As a pathfinder, your agility is added to your ranged attacks for damage. You gain Sniper Shot. Your pathfinding skills (animal harvesting, alertness, bow, scrounge, sneak, tracking) will all improve more quickly and be more efficient. Sniper Shot. Uncommon Ability 1/10. Stamina cost: 10. Casting time: 1 second. Cooldown: 1 minute.

Fire at an unsuspecting target and deal 310% maximum weapon damage. Not quite as good as the triple damage from sneak attack, because it won't happen every time. But it does do more damage and does it at range, which will mean it's increasing from an already pretty high number. I might even break a hundred damage with a single shot like this. It makes me feel like I can go hunting on my own if I want to. Which might be kind of the point of the class. Advanced class: Tracker.

Progress: Animal Harvesting 5/5, Alertness 3/5, Bow 3/8, Dodge 5/5, Scrounge 5/8, Sneak 8/10, Spellcraft 3/5, Tracking 3/10. Tracker seems like a cool class to get to. And from what I can see, most of what I need to improve is stuff that I can get on my own, and that pathfinder will actually make easier to get. I want to get my bow skill up to at least eight; I think it's going to be my primary weapon going forward. The sword is nice, but fighting with a sword is how you get hit back, and I want to avoid that.

I may have 96 hit points now, with a Shell of another 38, but that last fight was too close. I took way too much damage from those things, and I didn't take any of it at all until I started fighting with a sword. We don't really have anything we can loot from the mantises, so we climb over their bodies and keep heading to the park. I can see it in the distance. Or rather, I can see some of the sculptures.

There's a huge blue rooster, a giant spoon with a cherry on it for some reason, and a few others that I can't make out quite as well from this distance. There's something different about the park, though, from every other time I've ever seen it. Usually, there's a walking path around the park, but now there's a river. Like an honest to god moat around the whole thing, with bridges at each of the cardinal directions. Two bridges per side. All of that is new. The park isn't supposed to be cut off like that.

"I think that's a good sign," Vinny says when I point it out to him.

"It means that this is the park we're looking for." Sure enough, there's a subtle tingle that goes over my skin when I cross one of the bridges, and I have this pervasive feeling of safety. We walk around the sculptures, and we don't see any sign of monsters. I see no tracks from lynxith or from shadow wolves, no disturbed ground from the mantises, no footprints from skeletons or from giants of any size. It's even warmer in the park than it is outside of it, by a noticeable margin.

Maybe as many as five or even ten degrees. It's pleasant in the park. And, like I said, it feels safe. I check the countdown timer. 61: 23: 14. That's a long time before we have to be here. But we're here now, and we can rest. More importantly, we can train. I can set up the target against the big statue that spells out Love with the LO on the top and VE on the bottom. Then we can use the two bows and shoot at the targets with the target arrows.

I'm down to only 22 of the hunter arrows, the others either being bent or just unrecoverable. I managed to get 6 of the arrow heads from the lost arrows, but that's all. I really wish I had more of them. We shoot ten each of the target arrows every round, and I start to learn how to draw more quickly. After about an hour of shooting, my Bow goes up to 4. After two more hours, I'm at 6 while Ashley and Gigi are both at 3.

My arm aches from three hours of shooting, but I feel good about what I've been doing, and am ready to practice something else. I summon the ball of flame and shoot it at another of the statues, this one a big granite plinth. The balls of flame don't do anything other than scorch the granite, which makes it perfect for my purposes.

I can shoot twelve times before I run out of mana and have to let it recharge for an hour, which I spend with El throwing my knives at the same large tree that she's been throwing her axes at for the past four hours. The sun is setting by the time I get the second round of flame balls thrown and need to let my MP recharge again. In doing all of this training, my throwing has increased to 7, my spellcraft to 4, and my flame ball spell to level 2.

It now does double my awareness in damage, a respectable 16 points of damage. I also get a notification that my Strength has increased to thirteen, probably from all the time pulling the bow back. That's great too. I like training like this, being able to see the improvements in real time. In my old life, improving my natural strength would probably take weeks at the gym, but now I do it just by pulling the string on this bow over and over again. I probably fired a thousand arrows, but it's still fast.

And the regeneration I guess takes care of the sore muscles, because I feel absolutely fantastic. I'm getting back to where I was when I died, and my skills are expanding really fast. How close am I to completing that skills quest? I currently have sixty levels of skills, meaning I only need fifteen more. I think I know how I'm going to improve them, too. With the sun setting, we need to think about what we're going to do tonight.

I don't think we're going to go out hunting again; we're still a lot lower level than we were last time we did that. Everyone else is at level 5, I'm at level 6, but the night time monsters are still much more powerful than the daytime ones, and take a lot more damage to take down.

"I still want to fight," Ashley says.

"But I think we should stick close to the park. We might be able to retreat if things get too nasty. It depends on whether or not the monsters can come into the park. But even if they can, the bridges will put the battle back into our favor if they outnumber us."

"I'd rather stay where it's safe and practice what we have," Vinny says.

"I want my spells to get better before I go out and fight the undead again. And I don't want to think about fighting another of those giants. We got lucky last time."

"I'm going out," I say.

"I need to make sure that the other parks aren't set up the same as this one, make sure that this is the right place for us. I'll be back in the morning, but I'm going to head out to the falls at Minnehaha. Just to be safe."

"I'll go with you," El says. But I shake my head.

"I'm going to be moving quietly and quickly," I say.

"Not engaging with anything if I can help it. This is a scouting mission, not a fighting one. You should stay with Ashley and Gigi. Fight with them."

"We'll go through the Walker art center," Gigi says.

"Should be plenty to fight in there. And if not, we at least get to see some cool art."

"I'll be back by morning, hopefully," I say. Minnehaha falls is about six and a half miles away from here. I should be able to make that distance and back before dawn. Maybe a little while after, depending on how much time I spend at the falls. It's amazing how distance shifts when you're on foot. By car, it's maybe fifteen minutes away. But on foot, even if I keep up a pretty decent pace, it's at least a few hours. If I take my time while I'm there, I might be there for a few hours too.

Still, my hope is to be back by dawn.