Chương 45: The temple of undead

The next group is only five strong, and I end up being the one who gets to fight one on one. Now if I don't finish first and help one of the girls, it'll look really bad. They're both better than me at melee fighting. That's not a surprise, and it doesn't bother me. I'm not really a melee class. From what I can tell, I'm more of a utility class. Or at least a utility character. I'm getting relatively good at everything, but there isn't much that I really excel at, other than a few tricks with a bow.

The warrior in front of me has a shield and sword, unlike the last ones I fought who just had the large sword. His shield makes it a lot harder to get hits on him, as he moves the shield effectively to block my attacks. His smaller sword is faster, too, so he hits me more often. It's frustrating. I'll duck under one of his strikes and then slash at his throat, only to have him raise his shield a few inches and knock my blade aside with it.

Then he stabs me, and I twirl out of the way and deliver a blow to his torso that would've been much worse if he hadn't brought his shield to bear to knock me away before I could pierce too deep. I need to get that shield out of play, even as I use my own to deflect one of his blows. I feint low, chopping for his leg so that the shield will drop down. Then I use the momentum to spin and throw the attack at his neck, trying to utilize the heavier tip of the blade for the chopping motion that it was intended for.

He lowers his shield, just as I want him to, but while I'm spinning he pulls back his sword, stabbing it into my stomach as I come around. He must get a critical hit or something, because it deal 53 damage with that single hit. It doesn't matter, though. My sword does what it was designed to do, and I take his head off. And, thankfully, he just collapses into a pile of flesh and bones when I do, dying instantly though he still had more than two thousand hit points left. Decapitation works. Though it's costly.

I move to help Gigi with her opponents, stabbing one of them in the back and piercing all the way through his torso. If he were alive, that would definitely have killed him, but instead I just deal the normal 141 damage. I pull my elven blade out quickly and try to decapitate him, but it's a lot harder to cut off someone's head than they make it look in the movies. I chop deep into his neck, but not deep enough to take the head off. Only deep enough to deal another 141 damage.

If I'd taken one of those talents that let me develop my own abilities, I would've worked hard on one that made it easier to take off something's head. But I didn't take that one. I took the one that made me faster. Which is still a good thing, because I'm able to duck a blow that probably would've taken my own head off. That's something I have to remember. If it's good for the goose, it's good for the gander.

If I can kill something with a lot of hit points instantly just by doing something like cutting off its head, then they can do the same to me, and I have to be careful. It's not always going to be enough just to duck. I need to protect my head. In Highlander, they said that if your head comes away from your neck, it's over. And that's true for me too, no matter how many hit points I have left.

I mean, there are plenty of other ways to kill me too, but that's one of those instant kill things that I need to watch out for. Thankfully, me taking on one of Gigi's opponents allows her to focus fully on the other one, and it's not long before we're flanking the one I'm fighting. I do, it seems, get a flanking bonus. When Gigi hits it and draws its attention to her, and I stab it in the back again, I this time deal 282 damage. I wonder why I didn't get that benefit the first time.

Maybe we weren't quite flanking it, because Gigi had to fight two of them at once. My doubled damage lets us get through this undead warrior quickly enough that we go three on one for El's last opponent. It doesn't last long. That's eleven. Fourteen counting the three outside. That's not enough experience to level yet, but we're definitely getting there. And so far, so good. My Shell has taken about 700 damage, but I've got another one ready to cast. And I still haven't had to break out Mab's Rage yet.

I'm saving most of my MP for that, and in case I need to heal one of us. But from the looks of it, neither of my companions need healing just yet. They're both doing fine. We move forward again, and this time come to a large open room. We really should stay in the doorway, but there's only room there for one of us to fight comfortably. El might be willing to do that, but only if we let her be the one doing the fighting. I think she's getting addicted to all this. Which makes sense for her berserker class.

Is she still a berserker? El. Level 26 Battle Rager. HP: 1723/2080. Oh, right. She became a battle rager. Even more of a reason for her to fall in love with battle. Gigi. Level 26 Knight. HP: 2044/2600. Point is, we don't stay in the doorway. I would've if the enemy weren't undead and taking half damage from my bow shots. Sniper Shot and Rapid Shot still do decent damage, but the cooldowns from those make it untenable to just keep using them over and over again.

Maybe if I got a few more abilities that helped with bow damage I'd do it, but for now it just makes more sense for me to fight with my sword. So we step out into the larger room of the temple. Clearly, this is one of the worship chambers. I hope that the undead generator is behind one of these statues, but I don't see it just yet. The walls are lined with statues, one every thirty feet or so. So two on each wall. Some of the statues are broken, but those that remain look like they are in battle poses.

One of them even has a sword that I'm pretty sure is not made out of stone in her hand as she stands in a fighting pose not unlike the one that El takes, just before she roars out a challenge and gets all the undead warriors in the room to charge at us. I don't hesitate to use Mab's Rage this time. There are twenty of them charging at us. Mab's Rage isn't going to kill any of them, but it should be good for half their hit points, making all of them easier to kill.

I want to move to retreat into the corridor, but all that would do is put more distance between me, El, and Gigi. All it does it means that they will be dealing with more enemies, and that some of those enemies might escape the radius of my spell. So for now, I stay put, ready to fight the undead warriors as they get close. This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. The spell's other effect turns out to be a saving grace.

I can fight three or even four undead warriors at the same time when they're all slowed by ten percent, especially since I'm sped up by twenty percent. That difference in speed makes their strikes truly slow, giving me plenty of time to deflect them with my shield or with a swipe of my blade, to duck under and lean out of the way of strikes, and still to deal my blows as we fight.

The time ticks on, and I watch the little numbers over their heads as they take thirty three damage every second, even without me hitting them for another 141. They're all taking damage, even the ones that I'm not actively hitting. I'm trying to focus my attacks on one of them, mostly trying to dodge the other three that are surrounding me, using the difference in our speed to make it so that I am getting hit only once out of ever six or seven attacks.

I'm hitting about three times as often as I'm taking damage, and my Shell is still standing strong. I do have to recast it, but just as I do, I manage to decapitate the undead warrior I was facing, and then I'm down to three. Three is much more manageable than four. I take a breath, but it's a very brief reprieve, as another fills in the gap maybe five seconds after I fell the first one. But every second counts. Especially now. My cooldown for Shell has begun again.

I've taken 8 real damage from the spillover, and that stings, but I don't really notice it that much. It's like a hangnail as far as pain is concerned; it shows up every once in a while as a bit of a sting, but even then it isn't all that much, isn't all that bad. There's only about twenty seconds left on Mab's Rage.

And while it is going to deal 1980 total damage to all of the undead warriors in the room, making them all effectively only have 2020 hit points, it still takes a lot of hits for me to deal that two thousand damage. I still need to get fifteen hits to take one of them down. Hitting fifteen times translates into me getting hit for 170 damage, and again only buys me about five seconds before three once more become four.

And now, unfortunately, Mab's Rage has abated, letting them all suddenly move faster than they were before. I'm going to get hit more often, and I'm not sure how long this fight is going to go. We're not even a minute into my Shell cooldown, and it's already down 200 or so points. Maybe I'm relying too much on Shell. I'd like to just not get hit, but that isn't really an option when you're fighting four highly skilled undead warriors.

You can duck, dodge, twirl, and weave, but one of those slices is still going to hit you. You can dance around, and earn another notification that probably has to do with dodge, but you still get hit. What I really need to decide is how important hitting back is. If I focus purely on defense, I can limit myself to getting hit maybe one of ten attacks. That's about once every ten seconds or so of combat. But that's a losing battle, because I'm not dealing any damage to any of them.

It might have been worthwhile to fight that way while Mab's Rage was still going, but I've got two hours before I can cast that again. And if this fight is still going in two hours, we're in serious trouble. Even dodging all the time, I'm not going to survive that long. I've taken out two of the twenty that we started with. If Gigi and El have both done the same, that means there are only fourteen left, with a maximum of two thousand hit points each.

Do I want to wait until one of them can help me, and just try my best to stay alive until then? No. That doesn't sit well with me. I need to be able to attack. I need to be able to fight back. It means taking more damage, but so be it. I need to be sure that I'm an active participant in this battle, not just dodging and hoping that one of the girls will come and save me. So I grit my teeth and accept that I'm going to get hit more often than one in ten.

I'm going to get hit roughly once every five seconds, and I'm going to hit twice every five seconds. Over the next minute, I take 384 damage. But I deal enough damage to kill one of the undead warriors and bring another down by about half of his remaining hit points. And when another minute goes by, this time with me taking 274 damage, I'm able to take out two more undead warrirors, which are not replaced by fresh fighters. Two on one, I do much better.

Now I feel confident that I could just dodge their attacks until Gigi or El are finished with their own enemies. But if I do that, the girls might take a lot more damage. Still, the temptation is there. I'm still a lot faster than the undead warriors, and I'm able to block both of their attacks simultaneously, swinging back at one and dealing 141 damage to his throat without taking a hit of any kind to my dwindling Shell.

I see that the Shell cooldown is down to only two minutes left while I take another 107 damage and dish out another 846, bringing one of my two opponents down to the danger zone of health. Soon enough I'm fighting one on one, and just another 62 points of damage to my Shell later, I'm standing there, catching my breath and looking around at the battle field around us.

"Still good?" El asks. She's down to a thousand hit points. I cast Healing Touch on her, bringing her back above two thousand.

"Still good," Gigi confirms, stretching her neck and rolling her shoulders.

"Any sign of the generator?" I do a quick look around the room.

"Nothing," I say.

"Well," she says.

"Clock's ticking if we don't want to keep fighting so many of them. Where to next?" I'm about to say that her guess is as good as mine, that we could go anywhere in the temple in hopes of finding the generator. I'm about to point out that while there are a limited number of places where we could go without leaving the temple, one guess is as good as another. But then it occurs to me that it isn't true. I can tell where they came from. I cast Find Path and highlight the trail of one of the undead warriors.

I trail it back through the room and to one of the doors out of here. It came from the generator, so it makes sense that tracking backwards will lead us to the same generator. There might be other warriors wandering the temple, but we can get them once the generator is no longer pumping out more of them.

"This way," I say. I'm a little bothered that the ability takes a full fifty five seconds to cast, and it took more about another minute to follow the trail to a door. On the one hand, that does mean Shell is almost off cooldown. But it also means that more undead warriors have spawned. If we're lucky, they're only spawning at a rate of one a minute, or even one every five minutes. But whatever the rate, the longer it takes us to find the spawn point, the more of them there will be.

There's an upward limit, obviously. Otherwise, the undead warriors would swarm the entire forest. Even if only one was produced every hour, that would be two dozen a day. And this quest has been available for at least two days, maybe more than that. And if they spawn faster than one an hour, that would mean hundreds if not thousands of undead warriors. But there's a limit. There are only so many that can be in the temple at one time. But once we start killing them, the clock starts ticking.

More of them can be generated. And we've wiped out twenty nine of them already. How long will it take to replenish those numbers and make it as if we haven't done a thing? However long that is, it's two minutes shorter because I had to take the time to find the path. On the plus side, now that I have the path, now that I'm tracking the warrior, we should go directly to the generator. We should be able to find it with the fewest number of new undead warriors possible.

"I just hope there's a boss," El says.

"A boss would be awesome. Protecting the generator, maybe." I shake my head at her.

"What?" she asks.

"Bosses mean treasure." She does have a point there. Bosses also mean more experience. We've already killed enough for me to level up once. We might be able to level up twice from this whole experience.