Chương 97: Chapter 95: The outcome of the battle

Ash is dead. She was apparently out of stamina over a minute ago, and my healing her didn't do much to delay the inevitable. I hear her fall, feel her fall, and realize that I'm once again completely surrounded. I turn to face the field. I can see it, not even a dozen steps away. Salvation is so close I can almost taste it. But I'm not going to survive.

"Go El!" I shout.

"Get out of here!" If one of us is going to survive, it's her. She might break through the line and be able to just run across the field. I may try going with her, but it's better if I stay and try to hold off the horde. If I can buy her even one second, that'll be enough for her to get out of here. It'll be enough for her to be able to survive the battle and get the experience that will no doubt level her up several times.

I manage to cast Shell one more time, leaving me with under a hundred mana and under a thousand hit points. I'll be able to give myself another six thousand in a minute, but it isn't going to matter. I'm definitely not going to survive another five minutes. It's not even a matter of how much damage I can soak or how many hit points I have left. I have under a thousand stamina, and what I have isn't going to last me another three minutes, let alone another five.

I'll keep fighting until the bitter end, but I feel like I'm going to go the same way as Ash. I'm also going to get just exhausted, and then swarmed and overwhelmed. I can't do anything about the drain in stamina. And I understand it. I've been fighting at full force, at my 120% speed, for close to half an hour. I've been swinging my sword back and forth, stabbing and slicing, chopping and skewering, for nearly thirty minutes. My sword already feels heavy, and breathing is getting harder and harder to do.

Nobody talks about how hard it is to keep fighting for this long. There's a reason boxing matches have rounds that are only three minutes long. And even those guys get exhausted relatively quickly, even with a bit of a breather between each round. I haven't had a breather, and I've gone ten rounds with a sword in my hand. And ten rounds of getting beaten pretty badly, too. I'm sure I've taken over a hundred thousand damage in the course of this fight, between the magic and the melee.

I'm not really upset that I'm going to die. I'll be back relatively quickly. And then I get to level up again. Maybe I won't spend so many points on manipulation this time around. Or maybe I'll get it back to 100 just to make sure that everything is at that level. How long will that take me? I guess I'll see soon enough. El manages to break through the rest of the orc line. The line is only three orcs thick in that direction. That's only three orcs between me and safety. I watch as El stagger runs across the field.

I watch as a few orcs chase her, only to get cut down by a swarm of arrows. I'm glad she made it through. I heal myself one last time, bringing my health to full just as my Shell drops and my stamina trickles down to zero. Suddenly, I can feel all the aches and pains in my body. I can feel the thousands of wounds, the burns, the scorches, the freezing spikes that poke into my body. I can feel the weight of my sword. It feels like it weighs a hundred pounds. I can't keep dodging. I can't keep fighting.

What I can do is just give in. Give in and rest. Let them kill me. That's what I want to do. Actually, that's not a bad idea. Maybe I'm just tired of fighting, but this seems like a good idea. I put my sword away, into my spatial bag. Then, as the blows just rain down on me, I take off my ring and my necklace, putting them into the bag. I start to unlace my bracers, intending to put them in the bag as well. But not defending myself means that I'm taking a lot more damage.

My defense is apparently down a fair amount, too, because the hits aren't doing 56 anymore. They're doing 203. It only takes them a minute to kill me. You are dead. Respawning. You have been reset to level 1. You have lost 15 points from each of your attributes. Your Mab's Rage has increased to level 4. Your Healing Touch has increased to level 4. Your Blur has increased to level 9. Your Sword skill has increased to 35. Your Spellcraft skill has increased to 42. Your Dodge skill has increased to 31.

Your Sneak skill has increased to 44. Respawning in Elmspire. Selecting equipment: Bracers of Might. I open my eyes and see the priestess looking at me with a smile.

"Welcome back, hero," she says.

"Do you know your name?"

"Caleb Strong," I say.

"And this is Elmspire." She holds up her hand.

"Three fingers," I say.

"Great!" she says.

"Seems like you're fully intact. You've been out for a day, and kind of a lot has happened in that time."

"Can you fill me in?" I ask.

"I can," she says. Then she gestures next to the bed.

"Those are for you, by the way." I look next to the bed. There's a suit of armor and a pair of boots there. The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement. Elmspire Armor. Uncommon armor set 10/10. Bonus per piece: +10 armor. Pieces in set: 3. Boots of the Ranger. Rare boots 10/20. +10 armor, +30% movement.

"Wow," I say.

"What did I do to deserve these?"

"You broke the orc army," she says.

"The three of you killed almost a thousand orcs, and wounded gods only know how many more. They packed up and withdrew late yesterday evening. By the morning, they were completely gone. We have scouts following them to make sure that they keep going and leave the forest, but the point is, we won!"

"How's the other front doing?" I ask.

"Now that they have reinforcements from your side of the wall, they're managing," she says.

"I don't know if we'll get a victory on that side. Though now that you're back, maybe you can make that happen?"

"I'm level one again," I point out.

"I'm sure that won't last," she says, waving a hand.

"You've got a ton of war quests you can hand in, I'm sure. Besides, even at level one you have almost three hundred hit points. That's a lot for level one."

"Yeah, I'm kind of special," I say as I strap on the armor, pulling it tight. It's a solid leather breast plate with a metal symbol of the great tree on the chest, the branches and roots spreading out to add another layer of protection to the armor.

"I'll say," she says, smiling again.

"You three are amazing. How did you manage that?"

"Do you know how the other two are doing?" I ask. She nods.

"One of them resurrected a few hours ago," she says.

"She's being fitted for a new set of armor right now, I think. The standard leather was deemed to be not appropriate for her." Right. Ash had really good armor. I bet she's pissed that she lost it. I hope she kept something good, though.

"And El?" I ask. The elf priestess laughs and shakes her head.

"She's already fighting on the other front," she tells me.

"That woman is a beast. An absolute monster."

"Do you happen to know what level she is?"

"Thirty seven. Why?" I shake my head.

"That incredible," I say.

"She was only level thirty when we went out there." The elf girl lets out an impressed whistle.

"You people level up so fast," she says.

"She earned every experience point," I say.

"I know!" she gets excited again as I strap the thigh pieces into place.

"They say that you three fought the entire orc army to a standstill for a full hour. Is that true?"

"I think it was more like half that," I say.

"But yeah, I suppose we did."

"You're heroes," she says, looking at me with awe. It makes me very uncomfortable.

"Thanks," I say.

"We're just doing our part." She laughs at that. I get out of there as quickly as I can, grateful for the armor and the boots, but wanting to get away from the adoring fan. I don't want to be famous. I don't want to be a hero. People expect too much from heroes. I head to one of the guilds that's giving out war quests, and see what I can turn in. I immediately get 75, 000 experience for what I had already taken and completed, but then I see that I can turn in the one for slaying the enemy multiple times.

The number of enemies required keeps going up, but I manage to turn that one in another four times, for another two hundred thousand experience and four hundred war renown. You have received multiple levels. You are now level 27. You have 157 stat points to distribute. Twenty seven? Impressive. Okay, let's undo the death penalty first. That leaves me with 37 more points to distribute. I think I'll put eight more into strength, agility, and vigor, five into presence and willpower, and then three into charisma.

My health is back down under ten thousand, but my defense is all the way up to 310. I came out of this with a higher defense than I went into it, and that with like ten fewer levels. This new armor is pretty awesome. I find Ash when I head over to the side of the wall that's still under assault. She's wearing gleaming new armor, and has a big smile on her face. I see that she effectively only lost two levels; she's level twenty six again, and she does have over ten thousand hit points.

But that's nothing compared to El. El has 20, 350 hit points.

"Can we do it again?" she asks as Ash and I join her.

"Like, can we try it with this other army?" I sigh.

"I don't know if I can handle it again," I say.

"Aren't you tougher than you were?" El asks. I nod. That much is true. My vigor is eight points higher now than it was when we went into the battle. But my stamina is lower. So is my mana. So are my hit points.

"I still wouldn't last even as long as we did last time," I say.

"So we go down fighting. Again." Ash says.

"No big deal."

"I'll go down this time too," El says. Though I doubt it. I'm not sure what can possibly kill her now, other than her own not noticing when her Shell goes down and forgetting to recast it. But she effectively has more hit points than any three level fifty natives. She can just keep going virtually forever.

"We should talk to the command around here," I say.

"See what they want to do. My spell doesn't effect stuff, only people, and I know they do a lot of building stuff on this side. Like siege towers and that sort of thing."

"Yeah," El says.

"The dwarves and elves are pretty impressive. They keep building these towers that just soak up arrow damage like it was nothing. Then, when they get to the wall, the front of the tower opens up and the soldiers come pouring out. They've breached the wall three times in the past day, but we keep rebuilding it once we force them back. A lot more casualties over here than with the orcs, though."

"I can imagine," I say. If they're breaching the wall, that means there are melees breaking out, and that means a lot more damage done to the defenders. It's great being a defender when you can sit behind a wall and just shoot your bow at the enemy. It's another thing entirely when the enemy is there with blades to fight back and you don't have the wall in between you anymore.

"How do they rebuild the wall?"

"A lot of the time, with the towers that the dwarves abandon," El says.

"They just shove the wooden structure on its side and use it as a makeshift wall. Not very effective, if you ask me. But better than nothing at all."

"I'm kind of tired of the war," Ash says.

"If we can move to end it quickly, we should do that."

"Shouldn't we wait a few skirmishes, try to level up a bit more?" I ask. I'm not opposed to using Mab's Rage again. It leveled up, which means it will last two and a half minutes now. So it can do even more damage. Plus my willpower is higher now, so it will do more damage per second. We can wipe out players with a quickness doing that. Can we sneak out there and do this again? Can I manage to get into their camp before setting off Mab's Rage? Can we really pull this off?

I feel like they should know what we're capable of at this point. Are they not in communication with the orcs? Do they not know that the orcs have fled already? Maybe there's a way to do this.

"What if we went out there to parlay?" I ask.

"Just the three of us. We go out under a flag of truce, and we try to convince them to withdraw and leave Elmspire alone. If they say yes, then we've ended the war. If they say no, we drop the flag of truce and start killing them." I'm ninety percent sure I just suggested another war crime. You're not supposed to kill people who go out for a parlay. I know that. But if you're one of the people who went out, are you allowed to attack? Are you allowed to cast a spell that kills a big chunk of the opposing army?

Rules of warfare never really deal much with spells and magic, since those aren't a thing back on Earth. But I don't know if the rules of war exist here at all. It might be okay to commit war crimes. I certainly hope so; we've committed at least one. Well, I have. And I'm definitely suggesting another one.

"That sounds like a good plan," Ash says.

"We should run it by the higher ups, to make sure that we're negotiating in good faith. They're probably going to want something in return, and we should know what we're able to offer them. I'll go find someone in charge. You two hang out here, maybe protect the wall. I'll come find you when I have an answer." El claps her hands in excitement.

"This is going to be awesome," she says. Then she claps me on the back.

"Come on, let's go fight some dwarves."