Chương 130: Chapter 128: Playing fair

Amanda and El keep slicing off tentacles, leaving piles of sand all around that I'm sure do not make the footing any easier on them. I keep shooting arrows, but I can't help but think that maybe I should try another tactic. Fire Bolt does more damage, though I can't throw it as often as I can shoot an arrow. I'm able to cast Fire Bolt in roughly three or four seconds. I can unleash two arrows in that time.

So while the arrows are a better consistent source of damage, I feel like there's something more that I can be doing. We've been fighting for solid two minutes now, and while still no one but Amanda has lost any health, we're getting kind of pummeled. Would I be of more use on the front line? Would it deal more damage if I was there lopping off tentacles the way Amanda is? I don't know if they do more damage or not. I don't know if I'd get the bonus damage from flanking and sneak attack if I got up close.

I think I could probably get the flanking bonus. That would mean more damage. But would I end up doing more damage with my sword than I am with my bow? On a good day, the bow will deal as much as 566 per arrow. The sword will deal as much as 493. But if the sword damage doubles, that's a lot more damage. I can shoot more often than I can slash, but not enough to overcome that doubling of the damage. I should be able to do more damage with my sword than I can with my bow, as long as I'm flanking with someone else.

That's always been my secret for melee fighting. Flanking changes everything. So I would do more damage with the sword than with the bow. But then it would be able to attack me. Right now, I'm getting away with shooting it because it's clearly preoccupied with the four women chopping, slicing, and smashing into it. But if I joined them, would it attack me as easily as it attacks them? Is there a limit to how many attacks it can make? Mab's Rage still has a good two minutes on its duration.

Vincent's has already dropped away, but both Amanda's and mine are still going strong. We're keeping it slow. Vincent finishes blasting it with acid after a full minute of spraying the stuff, and he seems a bit wiped out. I bet that used a lot of mana. Maybe as much as ten or even twenty points per second. That'll add up pretty fast. Hell, it might've been fifty points a second. That would mean he's spent over three thousand mana on this one spell. I hope it did a lot of damage. I look at the beach guardian.

It's health is still over half a million, but we're getting close to that point. We're making progress, even if it kind of slow. By some quick mental math, we're dealing close to fifteen thousand damage a minute to it. At this rate, we should kill it in a little over a half an hour. Longer than any fight we've been in. Something has to change. We're going to start draining stamina soon. If I remember right, we start losing one stamina per second after about five minutes of continuous combat.

Then it goes up to five per second after ten minutes, then ten per second after fifteen. Then it doubles every five minutes after that. So twenty per second after twenty minutes, forty per second after twenty five, eight per second after thirty, and a hundred and sixty per second at thirty five, which is how much time we'll need to be able to actually slay this creature at the rate we're going. I don't think any of us will be able to last that long. I keep firing my bow.

I must've shot this thing over a hundred times by now. Maybe over two hundred. No, not that often. If I'd hit that often, it would have fewer hit points. Unless it's somehow regenerating. Oh, for fuck's sake, don't tell me that it's regenerating. This is going to be hard enough as it is.

"If you have any bigger guns, bring them out!" I shout.

"We need to do more damage." I look over at Vincent.

"Do you have a debuff spell?" I ask him.

"Something that will reduce its defense rating?"

"I can blind it, but I don't know if it has eyes in the first place," he says.

"Wait, I know what I can do." He casts a spell, and all the ice in the area crystallizes around the creature. The ice then cracks, and most of the shells on the surface of the creature fall away. I shoot again. 266 damage. That spell reduced its defense by fifty.

"Perfect," I say to Vincent.

"How long will that last?"

"Not long," he says.

"But I can keep doing it."

"Keep it up as long as you can," I say. That lowering of the defense by 50 means that instead of doing 10, 000 damage a minute, we're dealing 15, 000. That's a significant increase. It's not enough for us to win, but it makes a huge difference. Just as I'm thinking that I need to charge forward and do the extra damage, the beach guardian starts shooting at us. It throws balls of sand and shells towards Vincent and I. One of them impacts me and does 353 damage.

That means they're doing a base damage of seven hundred points. I can't let that hit Vincent on the regular, or it will kill him. But I also can't just stand here and keep shooting at it; I need to do something that increases the damage we're dealing. Another minute passes, leaving Mab's Rage with just another sixty seconds. It's down to about half a million hit points, but we're just not doing the damage fast enough.

Amanda is still slicing and dicing the tentacles that come out of the giant beast, dodging surprisingly well but still taking a few hundred points of damage here and there. We're three minutes into the combat, and while no one else is taking any damage to their hit points, I know it's just a matter of time before Shell starts to fail and they start going down. I'm not sure even El's massive hit points will be enough for her to be able to keep fighting this thing.

I need to do something, need to change something, or we're going to lose this battle. It's not even a question of how much damage the beast guardian does when it hits. If we can't increase the amount of damage we deal to it, we're going to run out of stamina. And once we run out of stamina, this thing is going to just slaughter us. I don't want to go back to Marketplace and hand in quests to get some of my levels back, and I don't think anyone else wants to do that either. I'm all but certain Amanda doesn't.

Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. But what can I do? My spells aren't going to do all that much damage. I have nothing that will reduce the creature's defenses the way Vincent did. All I can do is pour on the damage and hope that's enough. I let loose another Rapid Shot and decide that I have to charge forward, have to engage with this thing directly. Vincent is going to have to protect himself. I can't spend the battle protecting him.

We have to go all out and be as aggressive as possible. That's the only way we're going to be able to do enough damage to actually kill this thing. So I put my bow away and pull out my sword and my dagger, charging forward to where Gigi is currently fighting. With her being mostly defensive, it leaves a lot of tentacles clear for me to chop at them, clear for me to use Vital Slash. I could use Stinging Defense, but that won't do much damage at all, even with its reduced defenses.

I need to find a way to deal more damage. Fighting next to Gigi does give me a flanking bonus on the tentacles that I slash at, and I see that my sword strikes are doing 386 damage each time I hit it, but 579 when I actually slice through a tentacle. I can't attack quite as fast as Amanda, but I notice that as I push myself to move faster, I'm getting pretty close. I have an agility of 281 at this point. That's pretty damned high.

Between that and my movement bonuses, I can keep attacking over and over, faster than I think I ever have before. As the last minute of Mab's Rage passes, I see that I'm hitting the creature not twenty times or even thirty times, but forty times in one minute. That's almost once a second. That's fifteen thousand damage all by myself. I don't know what I look like to the others, but I'm sure I've never moved this fast.

The swings of the tentacles are slow and ponderous, allowing me to slip underneath them or around them the same was Amanda is, slicing and stabbing, chopping and using Vital Slash to deal even more damage. The creature's health only drops by another twenty thousand over the course of the next minute, which means that it is definitely regenerating. I'm hitting enough to do more than fifteen thousand damage in a minute all by myself.

I know that Amanda is hitting about as often as I am, and I know that El is hitting about twenty to thirty times a minute. Between just the three of us, we should be doing forty thousand damage a minute. But it's only taking half that. Which means that it's regenerating, and regenerating fast. A tentacle hits me, dealing 653 damage. That's a lot. That's a thousand points of damage before my defense comes into play.

If it's hitting all of us that much, then it's just a matter of time before the Shells start to fall and we all die. I try to keep an eye on El, but I don't know if I'll be able to remind her to recast Shell when hers drops. I might have to trust her to remember on her own. I'm going to have to recast it myself in a few minutes if I keep getting hit. My casting of Mab's Rage ends, and the monster is just below four hundred and seventy thousand hit points. We're dealing more damage to it now, but not enough.

We need some way to stop the regeneration. Some way to prevent it from healing as fast as it is. But how? What will stop that from happening? I keep attacking, racking my brain as I try to think of some other trick that I haven't used, some backup plan that would allow me to do more damage. Can I channel all of my remaining mana into a single blast of power? If I had something like that, I could do a fair amount of damage. I still have over four thousand mana.

But I don't have a spell that lets me just unleash like that. Vincent said something about being able to push your mana out into your aura. I think he was talking in the context of sex, but there might be something there. Can I focus all my magic out into my sword? Can I push my mana into my blows and somehow deal a more powerful strike? Will it make that much of a difference if I can? I'm getting desperate, though I know that I'm also borrowing worry.

My stamina hasn't even started to drain yet, and I'm already acting as if it's draining so fast that my regeneration can't keep up with it. I'm thinking about how this is going to be bad, rather than fighting in the moment. Right now, in this moment. I'm still dealing out massive amounts of damage to this thing, fighting faster than I ever have before. Right now, I'm already doing more than I had been. Right now, I'm already making a difference.

Ash's weapon is glowing with power as she pounds it against the mass of sand of stone. Even El seems to be dealing some kind of additional damage with her sword. There must be something I can do. Or something that someone else can do, to make sure that we all deal more damage. If we can't turn off its regeneration, we need to keep overwhelming it with damage, so much so that the regeneration can't help it. Mab's Rage hasn't ended yet. Mine has, but the spell continues. I wonder how much damage Amanda's spell does.

It seems to be draining the creature's health relatively consistently, but I can't tell by how much. Is she getting thirty percent of her spell through its defenses? Fifty percent? I can't tell. I really wish there was a way to tell how much damage everyone else is doing, but the only way to do that would be to continuously identify the creature and watch its health drain down. And doing that would distract me from dodging and slashing, from stabbing and ducking.

I wouldn't be able to do that and deal damage myself, and the fifteen thousand damage that I deal every minute is too important for me to take a sideline view of things. All I can afford to do is look at its health bar as it moves slowly but steadily downward. We've got it down to about four hundred and fifty thousand hit points, meaning we've dealt more than a hundred thousand damage to it so far. That's an impressive amount, but I don't know that we'll be able to keep up this pace.

The battle has been going for almost five minutes at this point. Which means we're getting into the point where stamina is starting to drain. Stamina is going to become a vital currency, which means fewer uses of abilities going forward, which means less damage. It means relying on the base damage that I can deal rather than boosting it with the abilities that I so often rely on. What can I do? What can any of us do? I look at Gigi.

"You have to be more aggressive," I say.

"You have to ignore the attacks and just deal as much damage as you can."

"That's suicide!" she shouts back, knocking a sandy tentacle away with her shield.

"I'm barely holding on as it is."

"You can do more!" I assure her.

"Just attack a little bit more. We need to deal damage before we start running out of stamina!" It's exhausting to talk while dodging. I feel like it takes almost three times as long to say every sentence, because I'm constantly having to duck under a tentacle, deflect it with my shield, or dodge out of the way ever few words. Talking during combat is difficult. There are plenty of notifications for me to look at, but I'll bother with them later. Maybe I'll see them after I respawn.

I don't know if any of us are going to survive this fight. It amazes me to think that Amanda was planning on doing this battle on her own. But looking at her, I kind of get it. She's started casting other spells, and her swords are glowing a dangerous looking red color as she cleaves huge gashes into the beach guardian. How much damage is she doing with each hit? I check the beach guardian's health bar, and it seems to be moving a little bit faster than it was before. We're doing more damage than we were doing.

As the sixth minute of combat passes, I see that we've gotten it down below 425, 000 damage. So we're dealing twenty five thousand damage between the six of us every minute now. That's impressive. Is that enough? Twenty five thousand damage a minute means that we will kill it in seventeen more minutes, if we can keep up this pace. Will our stamina last that long? I have a lot of stamina left, but I don't know if it will last. If I lose ten stamina a second on average, then I have about ten minutes before I run out.

That's not long enough. Damn it.