Chương 24: Endless Battle

It's not long before we see the first of the shadow wolves. In a perfect world, it would pad over to examine us, sniffing at us a little bit, and we would attack it, killing it before it could warn any of its pack mates that we're there. But this isn't a perfect world. The wolf sees us, and immediately throws its head back into a howl that reverberates through the cave. It's not quite deafening, but it definitely hurts my ears and makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

I draw my sword and take up a fighting position. The wolf charges forward, and El steps up and swings her axe at it, chopping right into the thing's face as it leaps at her fangs first. I don't know what kind of critical damage that chop did, but the wolf doesn't get back up. I don't have time to really say or do anything, though, as five more wolves are soon charging at us. El and I stand shoulder to shoulder, with her just a little bit ahead of me.

The wolves can only come at us three at a time, and that's a bit of a tight squeeze for them. That makes them less maneuverable and makes it easier for me to hit them. I slash and stab at the mound of fur and teeth in front of me, and it's almost impossible to miss. I try my best to dodge their attacks as I take them down, stabbing them in their flanks and their shoulders and, when possible, their heads. I kill one, only to have another take its place.

Behind the group we're fighting, I see an endless sea of wolf fur, and I wonder if this was the right idea. Hiding was good. Hiding was working. Hiding had gotten my alertness and my meditation both up to 8, and my sneak all the way up to 15. Fighting isn't going to help those skills. It'll help my dodge and my sword, but that's it. I don't have any weapons to throw and I don't have any arrows to shoot. All I have is my ranger's blade. I could throw balls of flame, but that's just a waste of magic.

They don't do enough damage to be more valuable than saving the MP for heal and for Shell. I get bitten on the hand, but Shell stops the damage from going through. With my defense as high as it is, when the attacks do get through, they're only doing single digits of damage. My Shell is worth 225 points every time I put it up. I might be able to put it up a third time if I'm careful. The truth is, fighting these wolves isn't all that hard.

We're keeping them down to only attacking us from one direction, and only three at a time, so it doesn't really feel like we're fighting that many of them. They get through with their attacks, but not very often and not for very much damage. El has about 700 hit points to start with now, so I'm not going to even worry about healing her until she has less than half of her pool, and that's going to take a while. I wonder if she put all seven of her points into vigor this last level. Maybe I should've done that.

That would've meant an extra hundred hit points, which would mean an extra sixty points of Shell. Too late now. The hardest part of this fight is that it just never ends. Every time we strike down a wolf, there's another fresh one waiting to take its place. The bodies aren't even piling up, because the wolves seem to be pulling the corpse out of the way to give themselves more space, a move that seems like it takes more intelligence than I'd given them credit for. My stamina is draining as we fight.

It isn't fast, but I notice that it's down to 250 after a few minutes, and I didn't do anything to spend those missing five. I'm not using Bleeding Strike, so that doesn't explain it. The only thing that explains it is that I'm getting tired. It's a slow process, but if I lose one stamina per minute, I'm going to run out in about three hours. Which is about five hours shy of darkness and our chance to escape. Can I kill all these wolves in just three hours? It seems like such a long time.

But the way I figure it, we're never actually going to run out of these wolves. We aren't killing three a minute, and that means that they are respawning as fast as we are killing them. Which means there are effectively an infinite number of them. I do up to 68 damage with swing of my sword. Some of them bleed, but most of them don't. Most of them just add up. Four swipes is enough to kill a wolf. Three is enough for El. Are we killing three a minute? I don't think we are.

We aren't getting swipes back and forth without trouble. Could we? Could we forgo defense and both just berserk our way through the pile of wolves? They'd be able to do a lot of damage to us as we went, but it might be worth it. It might be worth slaughtering a bunch of them to be able to whittle down the number. If we can't get the number down, we're never going to be able to stop fighting. And while this fight is easy for now, it won't be forever. My stamina is down to 200 the first time I heal El.

Each of my Healing Touches restores 30% of her maximum health. So it heals 216 points. How much health does that mean she has? 720. That's a lot. That's almost double what I have. Of course, she's still down at around 500 right now, but she still started way higher. She could probably use another Healing Touch. I'll cast it when the timing runs out. I've completely lost track of how many wolves we've killed.

I've lost track of everything but the swinging of the sword, the ache in my arms, and the snarling of wolves. I switched hands with my sword to give my right arm a break, and I can't help but get excited for the point where I switch back and can say that I'm not left handed. I'm such a nerd. But it really does help. Keeping focused on the battle is a challenge, and when I let my mind wander too much, I get bitten.

I've had to recast Shell once already, and it's starting to look like I'm going to be able to cast it as many times as I want to; it takes more than five minutes for them to take down my Shell, so I'm able to reup it when they finally do reduce it to the point where they do actual damage to my hit points. The only thing that's going to stop me from doing it is running out of MP. You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

I cast Healing Touch again and switch my sword back to my main hand. Because I know something they don't know: I am not left handed. Awesome. As I start swinging and stabbing with my good hand again, I take a look at my MP. I have 180 points left. That's three each of Healing Touch and Shell. The way I figure it, that means we can last another hour like this. But it's just a matter of time before that hour is up.

And while there are so many dead wolves in the tunnel that I can't be sure how much of the sea of fur is still alive, and though the ground has become muddy with blood, we're going to have to start retreating soon. And that's assuming that retreating will even help us. We have to decide. Forward or back. If we go back, we might stop getting stragglers and might run out of opponents long enough for us to rest and regenerate, long enough to be ready to start another one of these endless fights.

I'll almost certainly level again, and El probably will too. Or we can push forward, taking the riskier path, but potentially defeating enough of the wolves to get to the generator and maybe find some way to destroy it. Forward or back? Back is the wiser course of action. Back makes it more likely for us to be able to do this again. It means more experience, once we're finally out of the combat and get credit for the kills we've made so far.

But forward means potentially ending this portal completely, potentially stopping more wolves from being spawned. And there was more cave. That's the real problem. We backed out of the main chamber after the wolves started spawning and we fought a bunch of them. We came back to the beginning and hid there. But there was more cave past the large cavern, more branches that we could explore. And if I were a game designer, I would put a chest in the remainder of the cave.

I would put treasure there past the spawning point of the shadow wolves. There is almost certainly treasure in there. And maybe another way out. For all we know, we're waiting by an entrance that's never going to reemerge. What if the entrance isn't sealed for the day, it's just sealed? What if there's another exit from the cave, but we have to go forward to get to it? I grit my teeth and take a step forward. Maybe it's greed. Maybe it's a desire to be sure that what we're doing is right.

Maybe it's just that I don't want to be bored waiting for another of these fights to start, but I step forward and kill one of the wolves, then step into its place. It means that two more of them can attack me than before, but it also means I can flank one of the ones between me and El. And it means she gets the idea of what I'm doing and steps into the space when flanking the wolf kills it. We're going forward.

We take turns stepping up, and it isn't all that much increase in the danger or in the damage that we take. I cast Healing Touch on El again, but by the time I have to, we've made a lot of progress down the hall. My stamina is down to 163, meaning it's been about half an hour since we started moving forward. There are bodies behind us as far as I can see when I take half a second to glance back, and I think we're approaching the cavern.

There still is no end to the wolves, and they're still doing bits and pieces of damage as they go, but they're also continuing to fall to our attacks. I find myself glad that the weapons don't have durability. It seems like it would be so easy for our weapons to break and leave us completely screwed at this point. I don't have a backup weapon. I'll have to consider one for the future, in case durability is something I have to worry about after the tutorial. I have 120 MP left after putting up Shell again.

I've never used Shell this much before, and I wonder if it will go up another level. Eventually, it'll be worth 100% of my hit points, but that's two levels away. I don't think it will increase by two levels even with as much as I'm using it. We keep moving towards the big room, and eventually, I see an end to the wolves. There are maybe a dozen of them left, and while another three will come through in the next minute, I'm pretty sure we'll be able to get to the spawn point without much difficulty.

Then we can start a fighting retreat down the other tunnel, if we can't destroy the spawn point itself with our regular attacks. I know that a ball of fire won't do the trick, but that might just be a lack of enough damage. We didn't get close enough to chop at it before. I flank a wolf with El and we chop it down, turning to the next one as it tries to pounce on me. I shove my arm down its throat and stab it again and again. It's a tried and true tactic that seems to work well.

We work our way through the wolves, and soon we're standing right in front of the shadow portal that the wolves keep coming through. I take a deep breath, trying to catch a regular breathing pattern again, and we both chop at the shadow. Shadow portal. Basic legendary spawn point, level 10. HP 2283/2500. Okay. This is going to take a while, but it's encouraging that we can actually destroy it. It isn't fighting back, so we swing away at it.

One wolf comes through while we're chopping at the shadow portal, but we're flanking it. I deal 174 damage when I hit it, and El hits it once before I hit again for the same amount, killing the wolf. This we could do all day. At least, in theory. But my stamina is down to 121, and I don't know that we could spend the next two hours doing it. I'm exhausted, and even if the stamina says I can keep going, I'm not entirely sure that I can. I want to get this portal killed and see what else is in here.

I want to progress forward. You have destroyed the Shadow Portal. You gain (2500/2) 1250 experience. You have killed Shadow Wolf x 127. You gain (50, 800/2) 25, 400 experience. You have gained several levels. You are now a level 19 pathfinder. You have 28 stat points to spend. As if that weren't enough, my Strength is up to 22, Agility to 45, Vigor has increased to 27, and Willpower to 18. My Dodge is up to 14 and my Sword to 16.

I decide to put two points into Willpower, six points into Awareness, and ten to Manipulation, increasing them all to twenty. The remaining nine points I split between agility, vigor, and presence, adding three to each of those. I'm level 19, and I'm real close to level 20. My sheet is looking pretty damned impressive at this point: Caleb Strong, level 19 human pathfinder. XP 11, 388/12, 000.

HP: 570 MP: 380 Stamina: 380 Defense: 77 Magic Resist: 20% Strength: 22+2 Agility: 48 Vigor: 30 Manipulation: 20 Presence: 23 Willpower: 20 Charisma: 10 Awareness: 20. Skills: Animal Harvesting 6, Alertness 8, Bow 16, Dodge 14, Meditation 8, Pick Lock 7, Scrounge 7, Shield 3, Sneak 15, Spellcraft 10, Swimming 1, Sword 16, Throwing 9, Tracking 6. Secondary skills: Armorer 7, Bowyer 1, Fletcher 2, Scrapping 5, Smithing 8. Talents: Darkvision, Exemplar (Agility).

I see that El is also level 19, and she has 1330 hit points now. We could totally keep fighting, if there were anything else to fight.