Chương 162: Chapter 160: The Boss Battle

They screech at me, and I realize that I can understand the little screeches. Well, sort of. They aren't really making much sense. They're talking about eating and crunching and munching and bones and master and delicious and a bunch of other words like that. But I can't make out any kind of grammatical structure. I get the gist, though. I draw my sword and dagger and take a swipe that makes all three of them leap back a step. Then I smirk. The cooldown is over. I cast Mab's Rage and start pushing forward.

The implings are moving slower, and I think I have everything in range of the spell. The succubi hiss at me, moving around the others to all come and attack me. Terrific. I focus on defending myself above all else. I use Stinging Defense on the implings, and I use my sword to knock aside the metal feather spear halberd things that the succubi start swinging at me.

Unfortunately, they're able to attack me over the heads of the implings, so all six of them are attacking me at once, trying to surround me and cut me to ribbons. I don't do anything to attack anyone. I just dodge, duck, and weave. They're all slowed by ten percent, and I'm sped up by my buckler by ten percent. Also, I have a really high agility. So that lets me lean out of the way of one swiping spear and knock aside another with my dagger.

It lets me brace my buckler to knock aside a third, and it allows me to hit a fourth with my sword. But I can't block all of them. They do hit me, and I do take damage. Doesn't seem to be that much, though. The implings hit for 500 before my defense drops their damage to 108. The succubi get their damage reduced to 358. But the nine of them are still hitting me pretty frequently. Over the course of the first minute of the spell, I take five thousand points of damage.

And at the speed I'm moving, my stamina starts to drain. I can see that it's recovering as fast as its draining, but that's still concerning. Another minute passes. The first impling dies, giving me a little bit of breathing room. Even still, I take the same amount of damage over the course of that minute. This isn't a pace I can keep up. My Shell is down to just under seven thousand damage.

And the fact that the other two implings are both going to die before the spell ends is only a little bit helpful; the six succubi are still the bigger threat. Thankfully, my friends come to my rescue before the spell ends. My Shell is down to about three thousand, but I'm now only facing three of the succubi. Each of the other three is currently in a losing battle with one of my friends. The succubus in front of me slashes at me with her weapon, then spits a glob of something green at me.

It hits me for 50 points of damage, then slides to the floor, where it starts to sizzle. Definitely acid. And definitely a spell. The other two repeat the process. I manage to dodge one of the globs of acid, and take another 50 from the third. Then I use Killing Blow on the one in front of me. It does damage, but it doesn't kill her. They keep attacking me, and I find myself grateful that I'm not really a breast man. I mean, I appreciate breasts, certainly.

I like them when they're round and firm, just like any other heterosexual or heteroflexible man. But that's not my primary feature that I find attractive in a woman. And a good thing, too. These three succubi have what might be the most perfect sets of breasts I've ever seen in my life. They are pure perfection, and I can feel an urge to just stop and stare at them. In fact, the urge to stare at them feels like more than what I would normally feel. I'm pretty sure there's some magic going on.

They're trying to distract me, to force me to just stare at their perfect breasts. To lower my weapon and enjoy the view. It's like a voice I can hear whispering in my head. But my magic resistance is really high, and it blocks almost all of the spell out. I get the urge, but it's like any other passing intrusive thought; I can push it away without any difficulty. I just focus on attacking them, on seeing those two mounds of flesh as nothing more than a weak point inviting the thrust of my sword. Not that sword.

The actual sword. The one in my hand. Damn it, that spell is still messing with my mind. I slowly shift the way I'm fighting, going more on the offensive. I use Disarming Strike on one of the succubi, and then I thrust my blade right into the cleft of her chest, pushing her away with all my strength once I've skewered her. She staggers back and ends up getting hit with one of El's axes. It's still not enough to kill her, but she's definitely looking a bit worse for wear.

I kick her weapon out of the way and focus on the weapons of the other two women around me. The one that I pushed away goes after her weapon, which buys me a bit of time. I move around so that the two demons aren't surrounding me and can't pincer me between their feather spears, and I start going more on the offensive. While I'm fighting, I try to keep one eye on the glutton lord. I don't think he's going to do anything that would put his own soldiers at risk, but that doesn't mean he has nothing he can do.

I notice him moving his hands around in some kind of pattern, and I see a small ball of light appear between his hands. I recognize that spell. That's the fireball that Vincent uses. And of course he can cast it with the succubi all around us. They're immune to fire, so they won't take any damage from it. But we will. How much damage do those things do? How do I warn everyone? I break away from the two succubi and charge towards the other room.

I don't know if this is going to work, but I'm going to try to intercept the spell. Maybe it won't hit Gigi or El if I do that. Maybe I'll be able to absorb all the damage myself. I still have two thousand points in my Shell. Which might be enough, between my magic resistance and my fire resistance. Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. The glutton lord throws the fireball when I'm about halfway too him.

I aim for it and use Dash, throwing myself right into the path of the fireball. It explodes around me as I soar over the glutton lord's head and further into the room behind him. I take 1, 250 points of damage from the blast, and another 200 from the landing. But I'm behind the glutton lord now, and there's nothing between him and me. Maybe I should just start attacking him, and let the women fight the succubi.

I don't know how effective the succubi spells will be against them, but I know I can trust them to get the job done. This is breaking with the plan a bit, but it might still be worth it. Especially because I know I'm going to get back stab damage. I move towards the glutton lord. He hasn't turned to look over his shoulder at me, and isn't moving to turn around. So I use Bleeding Strike to cut into the folds of his back. I do 1405 damage, with bleed bringing it to almost double that.

Then I do a Vital Slash, which does 1606 damage. I keep attacking, each hit doing about a thousand damage. The glutton lord starts to move, but he's slow to turn, so I just move with him, keeping myself at his back. He casts a spell that washes over me and makes me stagger back a step, but it only does 100 damage. I recast Shell. The spell continues, pulsing out of his body. Every few seconds, I take another 100 damage. It seems to be about once every three seconds. That's two thousand damage a minute.

If that's all he does to me, I can easily survive that. But someone without all our bonuses would not. Over the course of the next two minutes, I deal about seventy thousand damage to the glutton lord, and he deals four thousand damage to me. Then he farts. I don't like fart jokes on the best of days. I definitely don't like fart attacks. I hold my breath and step back from the cloud that exudes from him. Which is probably a good thing.

The smell would probably overwhelm me, and it makes my skin tingle just being close to it. I end up stepping almost to his side to avoid it. That stops me from doing back stab damage, but only for a few seconds. Soon, I'm doing flanking damage instead. Seems like the succubi have been dealt with. Two thousand damage a minute to everyone surrounding him is really nasty. I don't know how bad the claws are, as I stay behind him.

I do get both flanking and sneak attack bonuses, making each of my strikes do around two thousand damage. That makes a huge difference. Instead of doing seventy thousand damage in two minutes, I now do it in one. He only had three hundred thousand to begin with. By the time the girls came to help, he was down to almost half. Three minutes later, he's dead. He smells worse dead than he did alive. You have defeated impling x15, succubus x6, glutton lord. You gain ((330, 000+288, 000+300, 000)/4) 229, 500 experience.

You are now level 45. You have 13 stat points to spend. You have one talent to spend. I'm not the only one who leveled up. We all leveled with that much experience. Gigi actually leveled twice, though just barely. I have to figure out how to spend my points. I think I'm going to put five points into agility, three points into willpower, and the remaining five points into awareness. I'm also going to take that Stalwart talent to double my stamina.

That way, hopefully, I won't have to worry about it running out any time soon. That puts my hit points to a nice round 18, 000, my mana at 6, 300, and my stamina at a whopping 14, 580. I look around at my friends. Ash has 25, 200 hit points, El is at 29, 900, just shy of thirty thousand, and Gigi is at 15, 600. She's catching up fast. Ash is still considering what talent she wants to get when I finish leveling up, so I start examing all the treasure.

I could probably harvest the demons for something useful, but I honestly don't know if I can stand the smell. I don't know if I can handle cutting the glutton lord open. It's bad enough that I'm already holding my nose shut with one hand while I go looking around the room. Most of the coins are gold. In fact, I don't see any platinum, which is a bit unfortunate. Platinum spends just as easy as gold, but it weighs a lot less for the value.

The two coins weigh pretty close to the same amount, but a platinum is worth a hundred gold. Anyway, I start gathering the coins together to see how many we have, but my attention is pretty quickly drawn away from the coins and over to the book shelf. I'm hoping that there will be another spellbook or two in here. I have a lot of mana, and I could definitely use more spells to help me out. More abilities, too. And the things that I can't use, someone else probably can.

These can make us all more effective, and that really is the whole point. A team is only as strong as its weakest member. I'm not sure that's entirely true. A good team compensates for its weaknesses, so the weakest member might not be a weakness for the whole team. If you work together well, that weakest member still contributes in important ways, and all of you are stronger for having them, even if they are the weakest. Take Vincent, for example. He has by far the fewest hit points among us.

Ash has ten times his health maximum. But he contributes a lot with his spells. He has weaknesses, but he also has strengths, and we know we can rely on those strengths. El has practically no magic whatsoever, but she makes up for that with her martial prowess. And the rest of us fill in where she is lacking. I think a team is only as strong as its cohesion. That makes more sense to me. The better you work together, the stronger you will be, regardless of other strengths and weaknesses.

So if I find something in this bookshelf that looks like it will make the cohesion stronger if I give it to someone else, I'm going to do that. There are a few offensive spells in here. Lava lance is one of them. Though, technically, I think it's only lava when it's underground. When it comes out of the ground, I think it's magma. Though I may have that backwards. I know that Vincent already has that spell, so I can safely take it for myself. There's also a spell here called Spike Growth.

From the looks of it, it covers your body in spikes. That's for El, definitely. She gets up close and personal in every fight, and having something that will injure people trying to grab her or even get close to her will definitely be helpful. There're are a couple of spells that seem to be useful for crafting, too. Heat metal, solidify, soften, and purify. I'll see if anyone wants one of those. I don't know if I need magic to help with my crafting. I don't really do all that much of it.

But if no one else wants them, maybe I'll collect more spells just to have a bigger repetoire. The ability scrolls, most of which have been cut up and bound into books, are also interesting. There's another stinging defense, which I will probably also make sure El gets. Then there's another leaping attack, which could go to anyone, and will probably help us get out of the dungeon. There's one called sharpen that will probably help Gigi, one for critical strike that could go to anyone, and one for bleeding strike.

That's one hell of a haul.