Chương 149: Chapter 147: Battle with the dire lynxiths

As soon as my first arrow hits the target, the whole pack of lynxiths rises to their feet and is very quickly charging at us. Thankfully, there is a bit of distance already between me and the three women, and they break the charge, the lynxiths moving to surround and attempt to pounce the three of them. The lynxiths are huge. Much bigger than any others we've seen before. Standing at her full height, El is barely up to the bottom of the lynxith's torso. They're maybe nine feet tall at the shoulder.

The creatures are fast, just like the other lynxith varieties we've fought. They can stand on four of their claws with no difficulty, allowing them to keep attacking with two claws back and forth all the time. El seems content with trying to chop off those claws with her axes, while Gigi and Ash are letting the claws drag against their shields as they form a tight cluster. The dire lynxiths move to surround them, but so far none of them are moving past them, towards me.

I fire of Rapid Shot and then another Sniper Shot. I even use a Killing Blow. And it actually works, dropping one of the giant cats into a pile of dead fur. I cast Mab's Rage and try to think how much damage it's going to do over the three minutes. I keep firing while I try to do the math. It's weird that doing math is somehow calming to me in times of battle. I draw arrows and fire them as fast as I can, which is pretty fast between my high agility and the bonus of the bow itself.

Mab's Rage is going to do just over twenty eight thousand points of damage over the course of three minutes. That leaves about seventeen thousand damage we have to do to each of them to kill them. Each arrow I fire does around 570 points of damage. So I need to hit each of them about thirty four times to guarantee that the spell is going to kill them. That's not counting what the girls are going to do.

I can see Ash smashing aside claws and occasionally even clipping the jaws of the giant beasts as they reach down to try to bite her head off. I can see Gigi slashing back and forth, stabbing when she can, trying to keep the dire lynxiths at bay. And I can see El doing her normal whirling dervish style of fighting, knocking claws aside and chopping through fur to leave blood splattering against her like a Jackson Pollock. There are twelve of the lynxiths still standing.

And after a minute, when I can use Rapid Shot and Power Shot again, there are only eleven of them standing. I keep shooting, but I can already tell that I won't be able to keep with the bow for long. Mab's Rage has been going for maybe a minute when the first two of the dire lynxiths get tired of being hit with the constant spray of arrows I'm sending their way and turn to pounce on me. I jump back out of the way and draw my sword, letting my bow fall to the ground. I'll pick it up after the battle is over.

I draw my dagger and almost immediately stab it into the paw of one of the dire lynxiths. The paw is bigger than my head. The dagger doesn't even go all the way through. But it does hold the paw still and under tension, allowing the Vital Slash of the sword to cut deeply into the creature's arm. That effectively neutralizes that claw. I still have the other claw to worry about, plus the other creature, but I'm pretty fast on my feet. Faster than the two of them, though not by all that much.

They do eventually hit me. That's something that I've just come to terms with. It isn't realistic to think that you can go through an entire battle without ever getting hit. But they are slowed by Mab's Rage, and I'm pretty fast, so they don't hit me very often. And a good thing, too. When they hit, I take 1646 damage. That's about ten percent of my Shell right there. If they were hitting me even a third as often as I'm hitting them, they'd get through my Shell in a single minute.

But the claws, while fast, are a bit awkward and don't have a great range of motion. They can slash at me, but I can usually dart to the side fast enough to avoid the blow, or I can cut at the paw that's attacking me to make it back off. I engage Stinging Defense. That allows me to still do 212 damage every time they attack, even when they don't get through. And my sword strikes are doing at least 480 damage as we keep going.

It would be more if I could shorten the distance between them and the girls, but I don't get any flanking advantage with the space between us. Still, I can keep using Vital Slash pretty liberally, allowing me to do more damage. Mostly, though, I focus on defense. The Stinging Defense will take them out eventually, and it's more important that I avoid taking damage than that I deal it.

So as the next minute passes, I dodge and weave, I lean back, and I take advantage of the fact that I have a speed boost in combat and, for right now at least, they have speed debuff. I keep cutting at their claws, leaving their once greyish white fur covered in lines of red. The creatures just seem to get angrier and angrier as time goes by. Another of the main group of them falls, this one unable to keep up with El's constant attacks.

I block a claw strike on my little shield, and it nearly throws me off balance with the force of the blow. That was no ordinary strike. Do these creatures have special attacks as well? Do they always do almost 1700 points of damage when they hit me? Or was that just a fluke? I get hit for another 1654 as one of the two I'm fighting moves a bit to the side and rakes both of its claws down my back. I'm not sure if that's the special attack or it's just another normal one.

It doesn't hurt, thanks to Shell, but Shell isn't going to last forever. I need it to last at least three minutes. If Shell lasts for three minutes, then my health can last for another two. And then I can cast Shell again. Five minutes doesn't seem that long, but in a battle it can be more or less forever. I'm lucky enough that I can cast Shell one time right away when this one goes down. Then I need to it last at least three minutes. This first one can actually go down as fast as it wants to.

It doesn't matter; I can cast it again without hesitation. Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon. Will El remember to cast hers again when her Shell goes down? Surely Ash will remind her. She doesn't need me to pay attention to her health bar, does she? I take a third hit, then a fourth in rapid succession. Okay, so each hit does 1654. That's a lot. More math. That means that each time these claws hit me, they do around 2000 damage. My defense cuts that down by 353.

So it's actually 2007 damage. I don't like that. I prefer round numbers. They're easier to calculate. I move so that the two dire lynxiths aren't able to flank me, and I use Killing Blow again. It doesn't work this time, but that's okay. My stamina is still recharging at normal rates. We're only about three minutes into the fight. Mab's Rage is going to end soon. When it does, they'll all get faster. Which means the tide will turn a bit in their favor. I'll get hit more often, which means Shell will go down sooner.

Can I keep it up for the full three minutes I need? Will this battle go long enough that I'll need to get to the end of the five minute cooldown? We've already dropped the entire crowd of creatures down below twenty thousand damage. Three of them are already dead. I've got two that I'm fighting, and El, Gigi, and Ash are fighting the other eight between the three of them. That's not great odds. I need to finish of these two so that I can help the three of them.

I stop using Stinging Defense, to give my stamina a chance to recover a bit as I focus my attention on just one of the dire lynxiths. This means that the other one is most likely going to hit me much more often, but it's what I have to do to get through this. I still keep light on my feet, dodging to the side as often as I can, trying to avoid the attacks by the other lynxith, but I focus most of my attention on the wounded one. I slash, I stab, I cut.

I duck, I block with my buckler shield, and I weave around the claws. I aim for more vital places, trying to stab the creature in the chest, trying to get at its heart. How many hearts does a dire lynxith have? It has a lot of room for organs in that massive body. Does it just have the one massive heart, or does it have more than one? Maybe one for each set of legs. I've never actually dissected one, so I don't know. Right now, I'm just trying to distract myself from the battle.

Fighting brings about this sort of meditative state. I think it's similar to what El does with her raging attacks. When I do it, it's kind of like sinking into a part of my mind. My body keeps reacting on its own, and I can kind of watch, as if from the outside. I can think while my body does its job. My hands move with the skill and grace of a lot of practice, of a hundred battles I've fought and survived. Have I really survived a hundred battles?

Maybe not individual battles, but I've definitely killed a hundred other beings with my sword. So maybe. This meditative state allows me to take note that the spell has ended, and allows me to speed up my movements to keep pace with the dire lynxith in front of me. It allows me to watch its health bar steadily decline, and it allows me to step to the side to avoid being pounced by the one behind me. I didn't even realize it was there and pouncing. Not consciously. But I'm not fighting consciously.

I'm leaving the fighting to my muscle memory, to my subconscious brain. All I'm doing is making the big picture decisions. Do I focus more on defense or offense? Do I keep dodging around or do I focus on just doing as much damage as I possibly can? Do I use abilities? Do I have any other spells that would help in this circumstance? I could Blur myself, but that won't help mid combat. I could cast Fire Bolt, but I don't have a free hand to do that with.

I don't need Healing Touch yet, even though that other lynxith has hit me a few times. How much do I have left in my Shell? Just over three thousand. So I can take two more hits before the third goes through to my normal health. I skewer the lynxith in front of me with my sword, stabbing up through its chest. It leans down as if trying to land on top of me and crush me, and I stab my dagger into its head.

I don't know how much extra damage I dealt with those two blows, or if the creature was just already really low on health, but that pretty much does it for the lynxith in front of me. I turn to the other one just in time to take one of the two hits I can still handle. This one still has the full seventeen thousand hit points left. I reactivate Stinging Defense and just deal with its attacks for a while. By focusing like this, it can't get through my defenses. One on one, I'm pretty solid.

One on one, I'm sure I can take this thing out eventually. It's not going to get another hit on me, not while I'm focused on it one on one. It attacks maybe thirty times in a minute. That's almost half its health gone to Stinging Defense. I get a few minor hits in between strikes, and its health is down in the danger zone. It won't last all that much longer. I look over its shoulder to see how the girls are doing. Not surprisingly, they're holding their own.

It looks like there are only six dire lynxiths still standing over there. I can't tell if the girls are wounded; El is completely drenched in blood, but I can't tell if it belongs to her or to the creatures she's carving apart. Their health bars all seem almost full. Maybe they have gone into their second casting of Shell. I need to focus on the one in front of me. As much as I talked a big game, it still got an attack through. Just one, but now my Shell is hanging on by a thread.

I really should just cast it again, even though that isn't the most efficient use of the spell. It takes just a brief second of thought to bring the spell to mind and cast it, but that second of distraction could be dangerous. Right now, fighting one on one, I can afford the momentary pause in the flow of my attacks. I might not be able to once this one is dead. I recast Shell and use Vital Slash against my opponent. It does 798 damage. But it doesn't cause bleed.

Bleeding Strike does, though it only does 698 damage to start. It's still worth about fourteen hundred damage, which is enough to get the creature in front of me on its last legs. It begins to panic as it nears death, the adrenaline pushing it to attack even faster than before. It manages to get another slash through, but Stinging Defense keeps pushing, keeps cutting away at its life total. It finally tries to pull away, but I manage another Vital Slash and put an end to the creature. I don't watch it fall.

As soon as I'm sure that it's out of the fight, I race past it to join my friends. Now I'm doing almost a thousand damage per hit, thanks to flanking. I'm able to attack the back legs of the creatures, slicing at hamstrings and carving off tails. The one I attack first turns to attack me back, but there's not much it can do at this point. The girls have more than evened out the odds, and the remaining two dire lynxiths don't last long.