Chương 44: Undead Abound

The temple is easy to find. It's a bit on the overgrown side, a bit on the ruined side, but it's still clear to see the white of the marble even through all the vines that have grown up around it. There's still a clear entrance, and there are still clearly undead already waiting for us when we get there. Undead Warrior. Rare elite undead, level 16. HP: 4000/4000. There are three of them standing outside. They aren't entirely skeletal, parts of them being made of flesh and other parts that are pure spirit.

They're clearly stronger than anything we've fought before, and I'm starting to understand why this quest was worth so much.

"Can the three of us really take out this entire temple?" I ask.

"My spell has a two hour cooldown."

"Let's take out these three, see how it goes," Gigi says. There's a sparkle in her eye, like she's excited for the challenge. I'm reminded of how often I would play games not for the challenge, but specifically for the lack of challenge. I wanted to feel powerful, and feel like some kind of super hero. I wanted to feel untouchable. I wonder if I'll get to feel that fighting these guys. Or am I about to find out what it's like to get really challenged?

"Okay," I say. I draw back and arrow and use Sniper Shot to hit one of the skeletons. It does 301 damage. That's half damage from the arrow. I don't like that at all. I charge in with the girls, drawing my elven blade and readying my new leaf shield for the fight. The undead warrior looks at me with glowing white eyes and a sword that looks like it's seen better decades of constant use. It swings at me, trying to cleave me in half with the heavy sword.

I duck under and stab right where the shoulder and the armpit meet, where I know that armor will be weakest. It hits one of the fleshy bits of the body and deals 141 damage. That's maximum damage for my sword, near as I can tell. And it will wear the other guy down eventually. He swipes at me with his sword, and I deflect it with my new shield, though the impact makes me take a step to the side. I stab him again, this time right where his heart would be. Another 141 damage.

He's down about six hundred damage, and he hasn't hit me once. This is going well. He stabs out at me, but I deflect his weapon with a swipe of my sword, bringing my sword back to cut just under where his helmet ends and just above where his armor begins, slitting his throat for 141 damage. All of my attacks so far would be lethal on a human. It's nice that they're all dealing the maximum damage that I can deal, but this is going to take forever.

I throw a fire bolt from point blank range right into the glowing eyes, following that up with a stab to the gut that should've left his entrails on the floor. And as I pull out my sword, he finally hits me. For 26 damage. It's not much, but it makes me wonder. If my defense were zero, would he have done 150 damage? Is he technically dealing more damage than I am? He chops downward, and I sidestep, slicing up under his arm again, this time for 137 damage. Then I shoot him with another fire bolt.

But this time, the fire bolt just splashes against him and doesn't do even a single point of damage. Shit. He must have some level of magical resistance, and he just resisted my spell. I shoot him again to make sure it isn't a permanent thing, like that he adapted to the spell and now is immune to it. My second shot does normal damage, but shooting him again allows him to hit me for 27 more damage. His health is down to 2839. My Shell is still close to a thousand points.

So he has more health than me, but it's a near thing, and I still do a lot more damage than he does. This fight isn't that hard. Just remember that. Keep telling yourself that. This fight, one on one, is easy. You hit him three or four times for every time he hits you, and you hit him for about five or six times as much as he hits you. The battle is yours; it's just a matter of time. I duck under a wicked swipe, block a chop on my little shield, and stab up under the chin and into the brain. It does 141 damage.

And I have another thing that I don't like about fighting the undead. Anything else I fight, if I stab it in the brain, it dies. These undead warriors do not. It still hurts them, which I suppose is something, but it doesn't do extra damage or anything like that. It doesn't kill them instantly. And it should. If he hit me in the brain, I'm pretty sure I'd die. Only fair that he dies too. But no; undead don't play fair. He chops, I block. He swings, I duck. He stabs, I dodge. I stab back, I slash back, I chop back.

Every so often, he hits me again, always for around 25-30 damage. Far more frequently, I hit him for about 140 damage. When I finally defeat him, I see that I'm the last one to actually do finish. I've taken only about 200 points of damage, so I'm still good to go.

"This is going to be a long night," El says. There's a smile on her face, along with a little scratch across her cheek that looks like it should really hurt, but clearly does not.

"But I still say we do it." If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

"Think you can take on another forty or fifty of those guys?" Gigi asks. She looks at me.

"Do you?" I need to math this out. Every five minutes, I can recast Shell. This battle took about three minutes. So if we keep fighting one on one, I can definitely do this. I can recast Shell every time it goes back down and essentially have infinite health for as long as my MP lasts. And my MP is pretty high, so it should last through forty or fifty castings of Shell. Even if we don't let it refill after this first combat. So I can definitely take on fifty more of those undead warriors.

So long as it's one at a time. But what are the odds of that? We might be able to stay next to each other and force the undead warriors to come at us one at a time or three at a time to keep going with the one on one fight. But what if they surround us? What if they can attack us three on one? That would mean three times as much damage being dealt, at least. Call it four times as much. So that's eight hundred damage every two to three minutes.

That means that Shell won't actually hold all of it off, even if I recast it. Eight hundred damage every two minutes is going to take out the initial Shell and the recast of it, plus some damage dealt to my meat points, my HP, before I can cast Shell again.

"I'm not sure that's a good idea," I say.

"I mean, we can probably take them if we can stick to normal formation and prevent them from coming at us too many at a time. But if we can't, they're going to overwhelm us faster than we can kill them."

"Yeah, but we can keep a formation!" El says.

"We're used to fighting together. We've done it before. We'll be fine."

"I think it might be too dangerous," Gigi says.

"Maybe we should wait and take it on when we're heading back."

"But we're here now!" El says.

"We're here now and we have healing spells and we can totally do this. We'll stay together, we'll go slow, and we'll take them out. If we start getting surrounded, Caleb can use his ice spell thing and we can take them out a whole lot faster and get things back to normal."

"There is that," Gigi agrees. She looks at me. They both look at me. This is a bad plan. But it is a plan. And it is possible.

"Think about the experience," Gigi says.

"We're talking like fifty or sixty thousand each. We might level twice."

"Especially if you include the experience we get for the quest itself," El says. I sigh. I can tell when I'm beaten.

"Worst case scenario, we retreat, right?"

"Exactly," El says, though I can tell she has no intention of retreating.

"We retreat, regroup, and come back stronger next time." I think about it. The quest is worth twelve thousand experience. That's a good number of levels if I die and they complete it without me. I'll at least have the quest complete, so I'll be able to jump back up a number of levels really quickly. Maybe even enough to make up for the death penalty. Then I'll catch back up to them in time. I suppose we can do this.

"All right," I say. They both celebrate a little bit.

"But let's at least wait until we're fully recovered from this fight."

"That's fair," Gigi says, though El seems like she wants to go rushing in as is, like she doesn't much care. I can understand that; her Shell is probably at 40% by now, and she has 2080 hit points to begin with. Plus she takes less damage from physical attacks. And her hit points regenerate. She's probably riding high on being all but unkillable at this point. I cast Shell again and make sure we wait another ten minute to let me refill my MP from casting it. While I'm at it, I check my notifications.

Seems my sword skill went up again, and my shield increased from 4 all the way to 7. So I'm getting better with the shield. I'm as prepped as I'm going to be.

"Okay," I finally say.

"Let's do this." We step into the tunnel with El taking the front, Gigi to her left and me to her right. Her left is her most vulnerable position, so Gigi's shield, which is almost three times the size of mine, should serve her well. But really, we're just hoping to run into the undead warriors in groups as small as possible. We'll move carefully, I'm sure. It doesn't take long before come across another group of the undead warriors.

There are six of them, and the corridor is too wide for us to block them off effectively. So our formation breaks more or less immediately. Maybe three isn't enough for us to be doing this. We really were better off when we had the full five of us fighting together. We need to get Ash and Vincent back. I don't cast Mab's Rage just yet. Outnumbered two to one is still probably doable. I get hit a bit more frequently, but at the end of the day the undead warriors are a lot slower than I am.

Even without my boosts to attack speed, I think I'd be faster than they are. Their swipes are almost lazy in how easy they are to dodge, though there is a lot of strength behind them. I'm almost positive that the undead are stronger than I am. Though not stronger than Gigi, judging by how easily she pushes them back with her shield. But when I try to push back with my shield, the weapon tends to slide over the side and nick my Shell a bit. I keep dealing lethal strikes, even if they aren't actually lethal.

The way I figure it, if I can keep practicing lethal strikes, and I get used to dealing them, that will make me better in future combats. Also, while it doesn't seem like I get any bonus to the strikes as far as extra damage, I do get a bonus in so far as the strikes all do maximum damage. So I deal 141 damage with each strike when I pierce the heart or slash across the throat or puncture a lung or anything like that.

I try to lean into the strikes a little bit, hoping that I can maybe decapitate one of these things. Hopefully that will take it out instantly. If it doesn't, I may have words about wanting to retreat when we finish with these six. The girls finish before me and come help me kill my second opponent, but it's a near thing. I'm not keeping up on them as far as raw damage per hit, but I am hitting a lot more than they are, so it's nearly balancing out.

"How we doing?" El asks me when we finish with that group of six. There's another group coming towards us, but she's just waiting for them, stretching her arms out and smiling.

"I'm good," I say. I've taken about 400 damage to my Shell, but the spell is already off cooldown, so I can cast it again any time I want to. Then I just have to hold out for five more minutes without losing too many hit points, and I can cast it again.

"Let's keep going."