Chương 61: Luck of the Draw

When the other three disappeared, Cormac started to panic. Panic was a fairly rare experience for him. Not that it never happened to Cormac, but… most of the time he was pretty confident things would work out all right. The last time he really remembered feeling this way was when he'd overheard Róise making plans with Máirín to steal Shorinu supplies from the city garrison. Up until that point Máirín had been careful to keep Róise out of the real rebellion's work.

This time was meant to be her first hint of exposure for the cause. Now this panic was for himself, which was honestly even rarer. He hadn't done poorly in the combat training, but the whole thing felt foreign to him. Every instinct he had developed since gaining his fórsa nature screamed at him to stop, to hide, to stay in the shadows, or out in front where no one could see in plain sight the tricks he was pulling. Cian had said he thought Cormac was improving, but improving wasn't the same as saying good enough.

It was a foreign feeling, as someone whose entire identity revolved around protecting Róise, to finally admit how much he relied on her to protect him. He walked slowly through the jungle, ears straining to hear the slightest sound. Why are you worried? He demanded to himself. Cormac had fought these beasts on his own for weeks now. He had done just fine. He was a Fourth now, stronger than anyone he'd grown up around. It was the creatures after Domhain he should be concerned about.

Then he heard a scuttling behind him. The monster behind him was one he'd faced before. It was literally just a giant crab the size of a horse - a powerful Third enemy, but particularly poor at navigating the thick of the jungle. Cormac relaxed. These were easy. Of course, there were five of them suddenly powering their way through the foliage. Cormac whirled - he was surrounded. They had never coordinated before. He didn't think they could. How did they even communicate?

The first one he'd noticed walked steadily towards him - well, scuttled sideways towards him - clacking its giant claw. Cormac knew from experience that claw could snap a tree trunk in two. Cormac tried to calm down and settle into his forms. This had always been the easy part - his luck came best when he wasn't trying so hard to wrangle it - but the threads fell apart in his shaky fingers. He gasped, looking down at his hands.

His luck never failed him, not unless it was a low luck area or facing a stronger opponent! He was shaking.

"Don't be an idiot!" An image of Róise slammed into his head.

"You're scared out of your britches. You're letting anxiety drive. Nothing lucky about that." Cormac let out a deep breath. Imaginary Róise was right. There was so much uncertainty about their situation, so much tension for both himself and Róise that he was as tight as Kelly's bodhrán. How would she loosen up? He grinned. The same way she did anything. With sudden and unanswerable violence. The spikes on his knuckle dusters dug huge furrows out of the closest crab's shell as his punch completely obliterated it.

This was a new Fourth, rested and trained, against a lowly Third creature. It stood no chance and two more jabs to its face ended it for good. Cormac straightened up, reinvigorated. Maybe there was something to getting your hands dirty after all. It had a clean sort of efficiency to it. He turned to the other four crabs, smiling as threads wrapped taut around his fingers with no further issues.

"Now serving our next guests!" He had been overthinking everything. Both he and Róise would be just fine. They always were! Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon. Of course, the crabs decided to not all dash forward conveniently. They broadened the circle, as if daring him to try an escape through the gaps. He thought he could even see two of them getting even further apart, as if to offer an easy escape.

He had no doubt that when he stepped foot in that gap he would be snapped apart faster than he could blink. Fortunately, he wasn't looking to run. He put his hands up into the boxing stance Cian had showed him and began to activate his combat techniques.

"You can't just ask the universe to make good things happen, then just ride out the wave," Cian had instructed.

"Not if you want to pair your luck with physical attacks. You need to know what will happen and how you can capitalize on it." With that in mind, Cormac activated a Saint Adept technique Cian had called At What Cost. It was a sneaky application of his Adept class that Cormac wouldn't have even considered.

"Conceptually, it embeds a fact of life into a Luck-based concept," he'd explained.

"Luck isn't zero-sum. When you help one person, you may be hurting someone else. Your black threads leech luck from one opponent and the gold threads give it to another." In this case At What Cost wrapped his black threads around the crab to the right of the larger gap, particularly around its pincer claw. A casual casting of golden threads over his shoulder connected golden threads to the crab furthest from him, mirroring the black ones, also wrapped around the claw, with himself as a conduit in the middle.

The crab to the right of the gap lurched forward to attack with its claw, seeming even itself surprised at the action. Cormac danced directly inside of the claw's attack zone, which the crab fully capitalized on, snapping its powerful appendage around his neck with devastating power. Except it… missed? While the crab seemed utterly perplexed about how it could miss prey that literally put itself into its clutches, Cormac was far inside its guard.

Two punches shattered the shell and a third put the crab out of its misery. The next two he took apart just as methodically with exactly the same approach. At What Cost pulled any good luck his opponents could have away, which he funneled into the single claw of the same crab he'd added the stolen luck to before. Four out of five dead, he turned to pay the piper - the fifth crab who couldn't miss with that claw if it tried, and if it hit would basically cause him to explode with the force it could apply.

Cormac just wasn't going to let him use the claw. The next technique he used wasn't from the Saint class, but it took advantage of the targeting Cian had drilled into him to use with At What Cost. The crab was an unstoppable juggernaut with the claw - but the rest of the crab wasn't so enhanced. This technique was called Deadly Ground. This was a pure curse technique that tied black threads to the crab's legs and sunk them deep into the ground.

Every step the crab took, its leg became sunk deeper into suddenly softened ground, until it couldn't move its body at all while the threads held. Then Cormac simply walked behind the crab out of the enchanted claw's reach and slammed repeated punches into its shell until it died. No matter how much Luck was poured into something, it couldn't do the impossible. Due to the crab's anatomy and its stuck body, there was no possible path for that claw to attack Cormac.

"Whew," he said to himself, dusting his hands off.

"Well, it definitely seems like something has changed here. I'd better not keep Róise waiting!" With that he skipped merrily off into the jungle towards Domhain. ✧✧✧ When Miriam stepped foot into Domhain, she was greeted enthusiastically by Cormac, Róise and Sol.

"It was simple," Sol said.

"As soon as your fórsa drained from me, I was alone again and just walked here. No monsters bothered me at all."

"Lucky!" Miriam teased, grasping his shoulder warmly. She wanted to talk more about how he'd appeared with her in the jungle, but there would be time later.

"Speaking of, how did you do, Cormac?"

"No problems whatsoever!" he declared.

"However, the monsters I encountered were behaving very unusually. Coordinating attacks, when before they had been quite mindless. It was not as easy a walk as I thought it would be."

"I noticed the same thing," Miriam said.

"Three of the giant birds, teaming up together. Also, the landscape of the island is changing." She described the clearing and the odd stalagmites that should not have been there.

"It has to be whatever is happening with Cian. Perhaps the island used to be even deadlier." Róise grunted.

"If that's the case, we don't have any time to lose. If Scior is the same we could be in a lot of trouble."

"Wait, how was your journey here?" Sol asked.

"You're the only one who hasn't said."

"Oh," Róise said.

"Like you said, easy. I just used Seven Drunken Nights and walked through. I left a lot of inebriated monsters in the jungle, but none of them so much as caught a whiff of me."

"I might be starting to see why you guys get pissed off by my power," Cormac admitted, grinning.

"Enough of that," Róise said, but Miriam could tell she was pleased. The walk to Domhain had been a good test to show how much they had really grown. It was only going to get worse from here.