Chương 184: Chapter 182: Mountain vultures

I find Amanda's trail, but it doesn't go on for very long. After about a hundred feet of walking through the path she blazed through the snow, her path suddenly stops. I blaze a few more feet, moving much more slowly than I was through the path she made, and then try to cast Shell. I let out a sigh of relief as I feel the spell take hold.

"Magic is back," I say. Vincent immediately floats up off the ground. His face relaxes, and a huge smile drifts across it. He then takes a moment to heal himself, then goes through the group and casts a heal spell on each of us, almost giddy to be using the magic again. It's very pleasant having the bolt out of my leg. Moving forward now is a slog. The snow is almost four feet thick, and crusted with ice.

The ice isn't thick enough to support any of our weight, so stepping into it would just mean breaking through and dropping down. That means I have to push through every step, pushing aside thick snow and trying to keep my footing as I go. It is exhausting. We take turns, switching off every half hour or so. It's disheartening that I can still see the part of the path that Amanda blazed even after two hours of trekking upwards. In those two hours, we've barely made it another two hundred feet up the mountain.

I'm used to moving several miles an hour. We're nowhere close to that. It's like I'm used to speeding down the highway, and now I have to walk. I don't like it. After my second time blazing in the front, I notice that the air is getting thicker. Not thicker like easier to breathe, but thicker like there's a fog forming. I realize that we're getting close to the cloud cover. It's starting to make visibility much harder.

Vincent is still scouting ahead, but there isn't much distance he can safely go and still keep us in sight. I'm just glad there aren't any monsters coming after us yet. I know it will come eventually. If our luck holds the way it usually does, the monsters will attack as soon as the fog gets really thick. I don't know if Vincent has any wind spells that can improve our visibility up here. The problem isn't just visibility, of course. The thicker air muffles the sound.

Which counteracts the fact that colder air, and air with snow in it, blankets the world in a level of silence that you can't find anywhere else. It's one of the best things about winter. If you go out during a gentle snow storm, or shortly after, the world is so quiet. It's like the snow grabs onto sound itself and brings it down to the ground. But even though that has happened, even though there is an eerie silence, it still feels like sound is being muffled. It doesn't echo the way it's supposed to.

I also can't smell much besides the crisp moisture of the cloud itself. I feel like all my senses are being dulled, and I really, really don't like it. I draw my bow as visibility reduces to almost nothing. We've got the light from Ash's mace again, but even that doesn't reach as far as it should. I know we're glowing like a beacon, and I keep my eyes on the fog around us, looking for shadows to move through. I know a shadow might be all the warning I get. I see a shadow flit by us suddenly, moving incredibly fast.

Too fast for me to shoot. I barely get a glimpse of it. I might even have dismissed it as as illusion of a paranoid and tired mind, but there's a screeching sound that accompanies it, and the others hear it too. We're standing on a slope, so everyone takes their pick axes and slams them into the ground to give us something to brace ourselves with. I don't know what this is, but it's not friendly. Nothing is every friendly. Why isn't anything ever happy to see us?

The shadow flies by again, but this time it seems to be heading closer. It definitely gets bigger. Much bigger. Where before it looked like it might be about human sized, this time it's very clearly several times my size. It looks like it has a wingspan close to thirty feet. I raise my bow and take aim, but it once again veers away and disappears into the fog. Third time is the charm. It comes barreling towards us, its bulk filling my vision.

I shoot a Sniper Shot at it, and the system tells me that I do the full 2, 079 damage I'm hoping to do. The creature wobbles a little, but the attack doesn't quite knock it off its trajectory. It burst through the fog and rakes its claws across our party. We all duck down, and I don't think anyone gets hit. But I get a good look at the creature. Mountain vulture. Legendary elite monster, level 55. HP: 52, 921/55, 000. I pull more arrows out of my quiver. I don't have that many left. Maybe a hundred arrows total.

I need to make more, but while I have plenty of arrow heads and a ton of fletching from broken shafts that I used on the cave golem, I don't have any actual shafts I can use. Maybe I can find some bones somewhere that will work. They'd have to be really long bones, though. When the vulture sweeps by again, I use Rapid Shot, eating through my supply of arrows. Assuming that the bird is bleeding from my strikes, I've done about ten thousand damage to it. That's not bad, all things considered.

But there might be more than one of them. There's no way to tell. Maybe I hit one of them for two thousand points and the other for 3, 861. Maybe there are more than two of them. I won't know until multiple vultures attack at once. They keep sweeping across us, trying to claw at us. Maybe trying to grab one of us, I can't tell. El stands tall, swiping at the talons as they draw near, trying to knock them away. Ash and Gigi both raise shields to deflect the claw strikes.

Vincent casts a shielding spell around himself that seems to repel the attacks. The vulture hits his shield and bounces off, nearly falling to the ground in surprise as its trajectory is suddenly reversed. It flaps its wings madly, managing to get back in the air before El can chop one of its wings off. I hit it three times before it disappears back into the mist. This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

My bow, without using abilities, only does around 590 damage. That's enough to kill one of these birds if I hit them a hundred times, but that would completely deplete my arrows. We need a better strategy. We need to get them out of the air. I put my bow away and draw my sword, bracing myself against the pickaxe at my feet. I'm not looking to do a ton of damage, but rather just trying to strike at the wing. If I can damage the wing, I might be able to bring it down to the ground. And then we can pulverize it.

Clearly, El is thinking the same thing. We are a little bit spread out, so there's a chance that if one of us misses, the other will still hit. It all depends on which direction the attack is going to come from. I hear hear grunt, and I whirl on my heel so that I can get a swing at the creature. I'm not quite fast enough, but I do manage to give it a little bit of a wound on the wing. Enough to make its flight a bit erratic, but not enough to bring it to the ground.

As soon as the one flies past me into the mist, another one comes out of the cloud from the other direction. I see that its talons are spread wide, like it's going to try to grab me. And I decide to do something incredibly stupid. Rather than swinging my sword at the creature, I drop my sword and hold out my hands. I catch the talons on my hands, taking 589 points of damage to my Shell. Then I pull with all my might. My strength, with my items, is 213.

Hoping and trusting that to be enough, I try to stop a speeding bird from picking me off the ground. It drags me several feet, pulling me away from the pickaxe I was bracing against, but I do manage to pull it out of the air. I can feel the muscles on my back tense and twist as I slam it on the ground. It immediately tries to escape, but I do my best to hold on to it. And it doesn't take long before the others are surrounding it, attacking it relentlessly.

Only Vincent holds back, looking in the air and waiting for the other bird to attack while we pulverize its friend. The vulture lashes about desperately, biting with its huge beak and wildly slashing with its talons. But it's a creature of the sky, and it's not meant to be sprawled on its back and surrounded by warriors trying to kill it. It doesn't take long before it stops thrashing around, before Ash's glowing mace slams down and crushes its skull.

The other vulture screeches in a combination of rage and pain as Vincent's Magical Dart hits it, followed up quickly by a lava lance that brings the smell of burned feathers to my nose. He doesn't down the creature, but he does cause it to divert its path and dive back into the protective mist. I move back to where my sword dropped, glad that its blade stabbed into the snow rather than sliding down the path we've been blazing. That would have sucked.

I use my own Magical Dart the next time I hear the vulture squawk. The sound isn't getting further away, so I don't think it's retreating. I hate how little damage the spell does. It's only 77 damage. But the fact that it always hits means that I can at least keep harrying it even when I can't see it. As long as I know generally where the creature is, the spell will find it. That's useful, I suppose. El ends up catching this next one. Unlike me, she doesn't let it pull her even an inch from where she's standing.

She just plucks it out of the air and slams it to the ground so hard that it sends up a cloud of snow and stuns the creature for just a second. I hear a loud crack as she twists her arms, breaking the creature's leg. That should make it hard for the thing to take off at all. El isn't done, though, and she soon breaks its wing too. She is just brutal, and strong as anything I've ever seen. The ease with which she snaps the creature's bones is just awe inspiring.

Once it is unable to fly, the second vulture is not long for this world. You have defeated mountain vulture x2. You gain (110, 000/5) 22, 000 experience. Something about that victory doesn't feel good. I mean, I know that it was a life or death battle. I know that the monsters were trying to kill us. I get that. I get that we were just defending ourselves. But it felt wrong. Like we were abusing the poor creatures. They might have had a decent amount of hit points, but they really weren't much of a challenge.

Once we got them out of the air, it felt like we were just bullying them. It felt cheap, maybe. I don't know. I just know I don't feel good about that victory. If there was a way to refuse the experience, I think I might have. They just weren't that dangerous. They could barely hit any of us, and the way they died was messy. I don't say anything about it, but the battle definitely sours my mood.

Apparently, I also wear my emotions on my face, because not five minutes later, Ash is putting her hand on my shoulder and asking me if I'm okay.

"I'm fine," I say.

"I just don't feel good about that last battle."

"I get it," she says.

"I was expecting more of a challenge myself."

"Is that wrong of us? Are we being arrogant?"

"I don't know, honestly. Maybe there's more going on than just random battles. Maybe we were supposed to handle that attack differently."

"Do you think the mountain is judging us?" I feel crazy just saying it. The mountain isn't judging us. I'm anthropomorphizing a feature of the land. Mountains aren't intelligent. It can't be judging us. Can it?

"Who knows," she says.

"If it is, what are we supposed to do about it? We couldn't keep going and just ignore them. Sooner or later, they would have been dangerous. We had no choice." I know she's right. It doesn't make me feel any better. I lapse into a grumpy silence as I take the lead again, pushing at the snow and ice and inching my way further up the mountain. I really hope there's another cave soon. I don't think the snow is going to let up. This stuff is probably at this thickness all the way up the mountain.

Mountains don't just have rings of snow and rings of clear areas, do they? All things considered, this part of the climb is easy. It's strenuous and it's slow, but it's not exactly dangerous. The slope is steep, but not so steep as to be a problem. We're going around the mountain at an upward angle rather than straight up. Straight up would be faster, in theory, but also much more difficult. I wonder if Amanda went straight up. She's probably made up all the time we caught up now that she can fly again.

Fuck, this is frustrating. I don't know why it matters to me that we catch her before she ascends. I don't want to stop her. If she wants to be a god, I'm not going to stand in her way. But I do want to ask her some questions. I want to get some information out of her, and I'm not sure we'll be able to do that once she ascends. Will she bother talking to lowly mortals like us once she becomes a god?

It might not even be an immediate change; what if she goes into some kind of hibernation for a few years as she matures into godhood? Then we won't be able to ask her anything. She has the information that we need. She knows so much, and I know I can get her to share that knowledge with us. We just have to catch her. But it feels like that's never going to happen now. We're moving about two hundred feet an hour. That's barely anything.