Chương 132: Chapter 130: Turning the tide

"We have to retreat!" I shout. Amanda glares at me and pulls out another potion. She's got stamina to burn, I guess. But I know I'm right. We might be able to do another hundred thousand damage before we all start running out of stamina, but not much more than that. This is a battle we can't win. We have to withdraw. I move towards Gigi again.

"Retreat!" I yell at her.

"I can keep fighting," she insists, though her breathing is already ragged. She's not going to be able to keep fighting for long. Soon enough, she's going to get too exhausted to hold up her shield. Damn it. If I can't get Gigi to withdraw, there's no way I'm going to get Ash and El to do it. I can pull back and avoid dying, but what good is that if my whole team ends up dead? Do I really want to go back to Marketplace to get them all? Will it just be me and Vincent making the trip back across the plains?

Stamina is draining fast. Twenty points per second. Eighteen for me. I have four thousand stamina left. How long is that? A little less than four minutes. I'm going to be completely tapped out in four minutes. And Gigi isn't going to last even that long. We're dealing about twenty five thousand damage per minute. So yeah, another hundred thousand is all we have. I pull back, chopping at the tentacles that chase me. Once I'm far enough away, I try to catch my breath. Maybe there is a way we can do this.

We can't keep fighting non stop. But we can take turns. We can keep up the pressure by pulling back for a few minutes each. Reset the stamina drain. That might work. I sheath my sword and my dagger and go back to my bow. I don't shoot as fast as I can, but rather take my time, focusing more on catching my breath than on dealing damage. Almost the instant I start doing that, my stamina stops draining as fast. I go from the twenty per second down to ten per second. Much more doable.

If I can get my breath back fast enough to reset the drain completely, then I can get back into the battle. But how do I tell the others that? How do I share my plan? Normally, I wouldn't bother sending a message during battle. Messages take a long time to write, as if I'm trying to text with a numeric keyboard instead of a qwerty one. But I'm purposely taking some time away from the battle, so maybe that will work in my favor. I just need to think of a message short enough that still gets the point across.

Something they can read without being overly distracted. Pull back and catch your breath. I send it just to Gigi, hoping that she'll understand that I'm not calling for her to retreat completely. I just want her to catch her breath. I just want her to lengthen the amount of time she can keep fighting. It takes almost another thirty seconds, but she does pull away, carefully stepping back, her shield guarding her retreat and knocking aside tentacles as she goes. Amanda thinks she can take this thing on by herself.

Maybe she can. Maybe I have to let her, just for a little while. I send the message to Ash, then check my own stamina drain. I'm still losing stamina every second, but I'm down to losing three per second. Maybe in another thirty seconds I'll have caught my breath completely, and I can go back into the fight. Two minutes out of combat isn't going to change that much, is it? The problem is El. I don't know if she will retreat. She might just keep fighting, despite the pounding that she's taking.

She has recast Shell, which is good, but she's also down to about half her health, meaning it took some time before she recast Shell. Either because she didn't notice or because there wasn't time. I don't know if she'll listen to me. She might not even see the message. She'll probably dismiss it as something she can read later. Damn it. I wish I had something that could force her to move. I start to slowly circle the beach guardian, shooting at it every three seconds or so, just to keep dealing damage.

I move until I'm about as close to El as I can get. I can't tell if Ash backed off or not. My stamina is regenerating. Only one per second, meaning I'm back down to the five minutes of fighting level of exhaustion. That's good. That means I can keep fighting for longer. I wish I had more of the potions, but I only had the one. I have two health potions, for all the good that they'll do me. I shoot close to El, trying to get her attention. But she's too busily focused on the beach guardian.

She's dodging a bit more than she was before, but mostly she's just chopping at the tentacles as they come, swinging her sword back and forth. It must be heavy by now. She has to take a break. No way she's got the stamina to last all that much longer. It's been two and a half minutes since I stepped back and went back to my bow. The beach guardian is still losing hit points, but only about ten thousand per minute. It's down to two hundred and twenty thousand hit points. This is not good.

I swap my bow for my sword and dagger and charge back in, trying to get close to El. I leap in and slash at a tentacle that was reaching for her, and almost bump into her.

"Pull back!" I yell.

"Catch your breath." She snarls at me.

"Your stamina will reset!" I tell her.

"Three minutes, then you can fight again." She still doesn't seem to comprehend. Damn it, how am I going to get through her battle haze? I could try knocking her sword aside, but that might lead to her taking a lot of damage from the tentacle. I need her to know that she can step back for a few minutes and catch her breath without retreating from the battle. This is a good plan. It's the only plan that will allow us to survive. How the hell can I convince her to follow it?

"You'll die when your stamina drains!" I shout. Still nothing. I step in front of her, blocking her from swinging her sword at the beach guardian without first cutting me in half. Hopefully, this will make her stop, just for a second. You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

"Three minutes!" I shout when her sword doesn't cut into me. She shakes her head, as if clearing it, and she blinks at me. I duck under a tentacle, then reach out and cast Healing Touch on her, filling her health back up to full. Doing that causes me to take a hit from a tentacle, but I don't care; I think I'm getting through to her.

"Back off," I say, looking at her.

"Catch your breath. Take a stamina potion. Then come back to the fight." She nods and starts back peddling, already gasping for air. Her sword drags through the sand, leaving a long line to follow her back out of the beach guardian's range. Now I just need to get Ash and Amanda to do the same. How long has it been since I got Gigi to back off? Probably not long enough. Maybe only a minute and a half.

I work my way around the giant blob of sand and dirt and shells, taking another four thousand points of damage as I go. I was right about one thing: the beach guardian attacks everyone who attacks it. It isn't a matter of it having a hundred and fifty attacks in two minutes. It's a matter of it being able to attack anyone in range. So it attacks me with three tentacles whether or not there are more people attacking it. It's playing fair. It can attack me with three tentacles.

It could attack fifty people with three tentacles each. But it can't attack the two of us still fighting it with a hundred tentacles. It has limits. It has to play fair. I see that Ash has moved back. She's now shooting the beach guardian with her arrows, still doing bits of damage even as she catches her breath. I wonder if that slows down the length of time to catch your breath. It probably does. But it might be worth it. She's still doing some damage, at least. Amanda's swords are no longer glowing.

Her enchantment must have run out, or her MP did. There are five glass bottles at her feet, though. She must be drinking potions pretty freely. Her stamina is probably draining at twenty per second now. She can't keep this up forever. Even if she started with more than twenty thousand stamina, she's got to be starting to run dry at this point. And if she isn't yet, she will be soon.

"Pull back!" I yell at her.

"Catch your breath!" She looks at me for a second with an angry glare. Then she glances behind us both and sees the others are already there, gathering themselves and trying to get their breath back. And she seems to understand. She nods at me. Then she turns away and uses Dash, darting so far away that I can barely see her. And now I'm fighting the beach guardian more or less by myself. The others are still shooting at it, and Vincent is still slinging bolts of magic at it.

But he isn't using any big spells anymore, and the arrows aren't coming quickly. Gigi and Ash are shooting about once every five seconds, lobbing arrows while they catch their breath. They still seem to be good for about five thousand damage a minute between them. I keep fighting at my top speed, still moving and weaving, trying to avoid the tentacles as best I can, but still occasionally getting hit by them. I just have to hold out for a few minutes, and then the others will be back in the fight.

They'll be back to fighting with no loss of stamina. I'm still technically losing one per second, but I'm regenerating two per second, so my total is slowly moving upwards. That won't last, but it's nice for now. I'm hitting for about eight thousand damage per minute by myself. I see that its health is down around the two hundred thousand mark, slowly but surely continuing to drain.

I grit my teeth, trying to keep my footing despite being lashed at by the three tentacles that come out of the guardian and try to trip me, to smash me to bits, and to hit me in the ribs. I bet there's a debuff that comes with those hits. My Shell is still about six thousand points strong, and I can recast it now if I need to, so I'm not all that worried. Maybe I can handle fighting this thing by myself. Then it pulls its three tentacles back, lifts them high, and slams them down right where I had been standing.

I barely get out of the way, still close enough that the dust cloud of stinging stand gets in my eyes, effectively blinding me. I can't really wipe my eyes without dropping either my sword or my dagger, so I have to rely on my body's natural defense mechanism for when things get into my eyes. I blink rapidly, my eyes watering heavily as they try to flush out the particulates.

I can shake my head to get the tears to fly off it, but it definitely slows me down and takes all of my concentration just to be able to see a little bit. But I don't really need to see all that well. The beach guardian is the size of an apartment building. It's kind of difficult not hitting it from this range. I can't aim at the tentacles quite as well, which definitely drops the amount of damage I'm dealing, but I'm still hitting it just as often. Time goes by. I can't really be sure how much.

But I can hear that Gigi is back in the fight, and I start to get the flanking bonus again. That's good. My stamina is draining again, and I'm losing three stamina per second. So it takes about a minute to undo all the progress I had been making with my regeneration. The beach guardian drops below two hundred thousand hit points, and I see that Ash is moving forwards again. Her mace is glowing again, and when it slams into the beach guardian, I hear a crack like thunder.

The glow on the weapon dims away to nothing, which just tells me that she dealt a major blow with that thunder crack hit. Now she's back to swatting at the tentacles, trying to shatter them to pieces as they slam against her and bounce off her shield. What did Ash say her defense was? It was over 500, wasn't it? So that means she's probably taking less than five hundred when she gets hit. She has more base hit points than I do, so that means she can survive a lot longer. Her Shell is probably still going strong.

Or maybe she recast it. El comes back into the fight, tapping me on the shoulder as she steps up next to me.

"Your turn!" she shouts, pointing over her shoulder. I back off, letting her take my place and letting her fight the tentacles I had been sparring with. I once again switch weapons and go back to shooting arrow after arrow into the monstrosity. I must have hit it with two hundred arrows by this point, but I've got plenty more where that came from. I think there are about a thousand arrows in my spatial bag. My spatial bag weighs almost a hundred pounds, which means there's over a thousand pounds of stuff inside it.

Much of that is arrows. As I pull back, I see Amanda moving forward again. She drops another empty potion bottle at her feet and gives me a grin. I see that she's wounded, and cast Healing Touch on her. She gives me a grateful look, tinged with a bit of surprise, but she doesn't say anything. She just draws her swords again and continues stalking towards the beach guardian. We're able to continue the fight this way.

We don't do nearly as much damage as when we were all attacking full out, but we're able to keep the battle going. It only has about a hundred and ninety thousand hit points left. Even if we can only do ten thousand damage a minute and have to spend the next twenty minutes whittling it down, we can do that.

I have to refresh Shell twice during the remainder of the battle, and I end up staying out of the battle for five minutes instead of just three, gaining myself stamina regeneration that continues well into the point where I'm up close and fighting it again. It does renew its armor, dropping our damage again, but Vincent saved his mana well, and is able to reduce it again.

It's only reduced by fifty rather than one hundred, because Amanda doesn't seem to have the mana to cast her spell a second time, but that's still a huge help. If Vincent did nothing else but reduce its defense, that would be enough. But he does blind it again, reducing its ability to attack us. Between the two, we are able to whittle it down. If I had to guess, I'd say the battle takes a total of almost forty minutes. Forty minutes during which the creature never runs out of stamina, which seems unfair to me.

But it might have had as much stamina as it did health, which would allow for that sort of thing. But we do manage to finally kill it. We deal the final blow, and the creature just collapses.