Chương 26: Undead Assault

The skeleton warriors aren't hard to find. They're milling around outside the basilica, waiting for someone to come close. I'm not sure what their range is as far as detection, but I activate Camouflage anyway to try to make it that much harder for them to spot me. I just need to find their spawn point, and I can go back and get the girls. There are thirty of them. Way more than I want to fight on my own. More than I'd feel comfortable fighting even the five of us.

But maybe, if I could get them to follow in a line, we could take them out. Maybe if we had the right set up of the battlefield, we could take them all out. It's amazing what a difference a battlefield can make. If you prepare and block off different avenues, you can fight them in a more even manner, and two people can take out over a hundred wolves in a matter of hours. The same has got to be true about skeleton warriors. I notice as I get close that they've changed a little. They've leveled up. Skeleton warrior.

Basic rare undead, level 10. HP 500/500. It's two more levels and a hundred extra hit points. I'm not worried about fighting them one on one; I have more base hit points than they do. But thirty of them is like fifteen thousand points of damage we have to deal, and I'm not confident that I can do that without getting killed. Still, I need to get a little bit closer. They're clustered around something. I need to see it with my own eyes.

If I can see the thing that they're clustered around spit out another skeleton warrior, then I'll know that I've got the right place, the right target. Then I can get the girls. I don't know how I'm able to see so clearly, but I think my vision has gotten better. Maybe it has to do with my awareness going all the way up to twenty. Maybe it's to do with my alertness being eight. Maybe it's a combination of the two.

Whatever the case, I can see a lot farther than I feel like I should be able to, and with a lot more clarity. And sure enough, the skeletons are coming out of the spawn point that they're all standing around. It's a grave, and they're climbing out of it one at a time. They seem to spawn slower than the shadow wolves, though. As I watch, letting two minutes go by, I only count four of them crawl out of the grave. So two per minute. That's slower than the wolves, but not by all that much.

In the time it takes me to find the girls and gather Vinny, there could be a hundred skeleton warriors. Can we take on a hundred? Do we want to? The problem with taking on that many is that they may overwhelm us and kill us. The last thing I want to do is die and have my level reset right at the end of the tutorial. If that happens, I might as well stay out of the park and go through this whole three day period again. Maybe then I'll finish the tutorial with a decent level.

But if we can kill a hundred of them, think of the experience. That's ten thousand experience points. Each. That'll get me and El to level twenty and a good portion of the way to level twenty one. It will get Vince several levels, help him catch up a bit. And I think I saw that Ashley and Gigi were both level seventeen. Ten thousand experience will get them at least to level eighteen, possibly to nineteen. It could be worth it. Damn it. I think it's worth it. If we can manage.

I stay long enough for my sneak to go to 16, my alertness to 9, and my tracking to 7 You have successfully sneaked past Skeleton Warrior x28. You gain 500 experience. I guess I'm not going to get half the experience they're worth every time. Too bad; I could've used an extra seven thousand experience. But I would probably have to get a lot closer to them for that to qualify, and I don't want to risk that. I decide it's time to find the girls.

They left about half an hour before I did, which puts them about an hour ahead of me. But I can find their tracks, even in the urban jungle. I can see the smear of mud as they transition from pavement to grass and back, and I can even see where they stepped through broken glass. After heading back to the sculpture garden to get their trail, I have no trouble following it. It's amazing that there is even a trail to follow. I don't think I could've done this a day ago, let along before this week started.

It's amazing that I've been in this tutorial for a little bit less than a week at this point. My life has been a game for less than seven days, but I've learned so much. I've gotten so much better at everything. My spellcraft increased to eleven after the use of Camouflage, and my tracking goes up to eight by the time I catch up to the girls. They're fighting a giant, and I don't interfere.

They've got it well and truly on the ropes, and if I fired my bow at it, I'd just be hogging the experience that they've earned. So I wait for them to finish it, and then make my presence known.

"I found what you guys are looking for," I say.

"I found a spawn point for the skeleton warriors."

"How many of them are there?" Gigi asks.

"By the time we get Vinny and get back to them?" I ask.

"Maybe eighty. Maybe more. They're spawning at two per minute, and there were thirty when I last saw them."

"I hate undead," El says.

"They don't bleed."

"But they smash real good," Ashley says. She looks resplendent in the lancer's armor, and I see that she's given her chain shirt to El.

"Plus I need to kill them to unlock a new class." You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

"What's the class?" I ask. This is the first time I've seen a need for kills to qualify for a class.

"Paladin," she says.

"I need to kill fifty skeleton warriors to get it, so this will be perfect." I was really hoping they'd say that they wanted to keep hunting giants. Giants I can help with. Giants I can feel like I'm really supporting them. With magic, I just don't feel like I'm doing as much. Still, every little bit helps. Even if I'm doing half damage, I'll still be doing some damage. So that will still matter. And five of us is better than two of us. Plus, think of the experience.

I'm less than two hundred points away from level twenty. If we start fighting the skeleton warriors and decide to back off, I'll still level up at least once. And maybe there will be more than just a hundred of them. Maybe there will be enough that I'll level up twice. Assuming I survive.

"We can do this," I say.

"But let's be careful not to get overwhelmed. We don't have the confines of a cave to help mitigate their attacks or to force them to come at us just a few at a time."

"He's right," Gigi says.

"We need to do something to force them to come at us more slowly. Can we move some more cars in the way?"

"We'll see," Ashley says.

"Let's get Vinny and get over there. We can decide on the battlefield when we know more what we're getting into.

"I can help funnel them," Vinny tells us when we get close to the horde of skeleton warriors.

"I'll cast the ice storm spell on their flank. If they walk through it, they'll take a lot of damage. They should avoid it, which will force them to come at us more directly, and won't let them surround us."

"I suppose I'll attack the other flank, try to drive them towards us," I say.

"I don't know how effective I'll be, though. My bow doesn't do all that much damage to skeletons."

"It's all right. The ice storm isn't concentration based. So while it's going, I'll shoot over at your side too. Between us, we should be able to funnel them towards the girls."

"And we'll smash them to pieces," Ashley says, swinging her mace through the air.

"If they start to overwhelm us, we'll do a fighting retreat until things even out. There are a group of cars we can retreat to, the same group that we used to funnel the mantises the other day. We'll move towards that and make our stand there. If they start to overwhelm us." It's not the greatest plan, but it is a plan. It's better than "get 'em," so I'm not complaining. There are a lot of walking bones out there. I draw back my bow and use Sniper Shot on one of them.

The way I figure it, I'll do the damage of the sniper shot, plus the damage of a sneak attack, divided in half. That should still be some pretty significant damage. The one shot does 412 damage. That's probably the best damage I've ever done, and likely to be the best damage I'll be able to do in this combat, at least. It's almost enough to kill one of them. Unlike the other times I've done the Sniper Shot, though, it's also enough to draw the attention of the entire crowd of skeleton warriors.

They turn towards us in unison, empty eye sockets locking on our location. We have two torches in the ground so that Ashley, Vinny, and Gigi will be able to see better. They stand like goal posts, the place where we want the skeletons to attack us from. They're far enough apart for four skeleton warriors to be fighting shoulder to shoulder. I keep shooting on the left flank, trying to drive them forward and stop them from spreading out.

Vinny casts his spell, and I see a storm of ice start to shatter bones over on the right flank. He does so much more damage than I do; my arrows at this distance are only doing about 40 damage each hit. It's enough that two hits takes out the one I shot first, but I don't know if I'll be able to take any others out before they get to us. When they get a little closer, I switch over to flame ball.

It at least does 60 points of damage every time I hit one of them, lighting them up a bit so that Gigi can shoot her own bow at them. She's pretty good with a bow. I wonder how long she spent practicing today. She may be better than I am at this point. Hard to say. She is shooting at the left flank, same as me.

We're not doing much when you compare it to the ice spears that Vinny is shooting, but we're whittling them down, taking a bit of health away from them with every step, and funneling them to come at us in a spear shape, if not quite a straight line. The skeletons line up and start using their shields to protect themselves from the onslaught of arrows and magic. They're in ranks four across and about twenty deep when I cast another flame ball to try to break them up a bit, the flame splashing against a shield.

My MP is still doing good, but I want to save some of it for both Shell and for Healing Touch. The girls have a lot of health, but it will go away eventually. I switch back to my bow as the skeletons get closer. Ashley steps forward to the edge of the torchlight and brings her mace down hard on the top of one of the lead skeletons, smashing it to pieces. Then she shield bashes another one, sending it flying in a pile of broken bones, and grunts as a third skeleton slashes across her new armor with its rusted sword.

Gigi steps forward to join her, and El comes through with a smashing swing of her axe at the rib cage of one of the other skeletons on the front line. I step off to the side a little bit and begin firing as fast as I can into the group of skeletons. They're clustered so close together that I essentially can't miss, and I use my bow's faster speed to shoot arrow after arrow into the group of skeletons. I'm not killing any of them, just wounding a lot of them.

Making it so that when they do get through to the girls, it'll be easier for them to smash the skeletons to bits. We don't hold our position long. I notice that the girls are back between the torches maybe a minute later, and are already starting to get pushed even further back. I'm going to run out of arrows in a bit, and then I'll switch to my sword and get into the fray with them to help out. Maybe I can reverse the movement a little bit.

Vinny casts his ice storm spell again, this time right into the middle of the cluster of skeleton warriors. They spread out to get outside the spell, but not fast enough; at least a dozen of them are smashed to bits by the ice chunks that fly through the storm. That's good. But those that got out of the spell start to flank us. That's bad.

"Back towards the cars!" I shout, firing my last arrow and putting my bow over my shoulder while I draw my scimitar. I shoot another ball of fire into the crowd, then another as I move to engage with one of the skeletons. I don't do that much damage to it. 36 damage on average, which means it takes me more than thirteen hits to kill each one. And during that time, I get hit several times. Even with my defense up to 83, I'm still taking about 12 damage from each hit.

My Shell is worth 342 points, but that isn't going to last forever. I'm already fighting two skeletons at once, and it's just a matter of time before that number increases to three.