George had grown rapidly with consuming powerful monster cores in the Fourth Realm. His understanding of words had also gone through a change. Although he couldn’t talk himself, only yowl and whine in half-formed wolf words, Rugrat could understand him through the bond that they shared.
Gilga also did the same.
“For having a high quality bloodline, they don’t act it,” Erik said.
Gilga stood and shook her large body.
George yowled at her. He had grown but he was still smaller.
Gilga looked down on him, making him let out more annoyed noises.
“Could you get Gilga to not rub it in so much?” Rugrat asked.
George licked his front paws, staring at her. She let out a snort and turned, her tail hitting the wolf and sending him flying.
He landed and yowled at her, annoyed at being thrown around.
“Beasts do as beasts want to.” Erik shrugged but there was a grin on his face.
“With her powerful back legs, she looks more T-rex than anything,” Rugrat muttered to Erik.
Gilga gave him a look, as if trying to understand whether he were saying something bad or not.
George pawed the ground and snarled, unhappy about being ignored.
Gilga snorted and looked away, ignoring them all.
“Were you able to find anything that might purify their bloodline more in the Fourth Realm?” Rugrat asked.
“There are a number of concoctions that would be good, but I will need time to understand them and make them. Most of the concoctions from the Third Realm are not out of reach now and they can help them increase their strength,” Erik said.
“Mount up!” Glosil called from the front.
Everyone finished their last checks and got onto their mounts.
Erik and Rugrat mounted up and moved to the front of the formation.
“While Fred said that they have powerful bloodlines, even he didn’t know what kind of bloodline it was,” Rugrat said.
“Well, when have we ever been given the information?” Erik laughed.
Rugrat sighed and shook his head, but there was a light in his eyes. Forging their own path—it was exciting; it was a new path...a new way. We’ve been able to come pretty far with just following our own path, Rugrat thought as they moved to the front where Glosil waited.
Glosil got a signal from the sergeant to the rear. “We’re good to go,” he said.
“All right,” Erik said.
“Ready when you are, Captain,” Rugrat said.
Glosil stood up in his stirrups so everyone could see him. “When we head into the Metal floor, it is our goal to get to the top of the metal mountain as soon as possible. It looks like there are a great number of beasts around the teleportation formation. So we will have to charge forward and through them. Stick together. If you get separated, link back up. If you are wounded, trust your mount to bring you back to the formation. Cover one another.
“Once we reach the mountain, Dragon Company will establish a defensive position. The special teams will continue with First Sergeant Rodriguez and Major West. They will head to the top of the mountain to challenge the boss of the level. Once the boss is defeated, the special teams will clear the rest of the mountain. Dragon Company will head up to the summit of the mountain and establish a camp there. We will hold our position as the attached formation masters work to restore control over the formations located on the metal mountain.
“Then we will stabilize our forces and come up with a plan to clear the rest of the Metal floor! When we come back, we will have regained control over the second floor of the Alva Dungeon!”
There were slight cheers and smiles on the soldiers’ faces.
Rugrat could read their thoughts.
Now we will show the people of Alva just how strong we are.
Their hearts beat with pride as they sat up higher.
Glosil looked to Erik, who nodded.
“Alva Army moving out! Open the gates.” Glosil’s orders covered the barracks.
The gates opened ahead of them. There were people already outside of the gates, civilians seeing them off on their journey.
They looked at the rows of the Alva Army all wearing their armor, their panther mounts armed and armored with heavy repeaters mounted to their backs.
Egbert floated into the air, looking like a skeleton shaman as his bones glowed with runes that were imprinted into his very bones.
“Well, this should be different,” Egbert said as they rode out of the barracks.
The people of Alva broke into cheers as they passed.
The soldiers wanted to smile and wave but kept their stony expressions as they marched forward, not even looking away as they followed on after their commanders, row upon row.
Egbert turned around and started to fly backward, completely at ease, breaking the seriousness of the commanders as he started to read a romance book he had recently acquired from the various traders who had come back from their travels.
“What do you think about the other formation masters, the one in charge of them is Ida right?” Rugrat asked in a low voice.
“Yeah Ida’s in charge of their little group. I think that they’re skittish as hell. Thankfully they’re riding Alva Army trained panthers and they’re protected by Special Team Two,” Glosil muttered back.
“Should we have Egbert keep an eye on them?”
“Yeah, that might not be a bad idea,” Glosil agreed.
“Okay,” Egbert agreed. A flaming eye floated out of his skull and drifted up above the formation and then circled Ida and the formation masters, who sat up even straighter than before.
“Well, looks like if they weren’t nervous before, they are now,” Rugrat said.
“Egbert—” Erik started.
“What?!” Egbert, lying on his back, put down his book, his one eye looking at Erik furiously, cutting quite the sight as he drifted backward until he was right next to Erik.
“Uh, nothing.” Erik shook his head.
“Wasting the time of your elders—you should be ashamed,” Egbert said.
“Says the skeleton who is reading lord romance books while floating in the middle of a military formation,” Rugrat said.
“I don’t tell you how you’re supposed to spend your Sundays,” Egbert said back as he found where he was reading.
Glosil coughed rather hard, but wisely didn’t say anything.
They picked up their speed and went through the growing Alva Dungeon. People stood on either side of the street, watching them pass by, including those who hadn’t seen them before, being new members of Alva. A sign of a group’s strength was their military. The stronger the military was, the safer the people were from attacks. No power wanted to lose their fighting force for nothing.
“Such powerful auras—I nearly fainted from their strength and they’re just marching by,” one woman said, holding her chest.
“They are much stronger than even the lord’s own order of knights at the city we used to live in,” the man beside her said.
“You came from the Second Realm. Aren’t they stronger than the people there?” someone asked a woman with scars and an axe on her hip.
The woman coughed slightly. She was one of the people Blaze had sent from the Adventurer’s Guild to Alva. “Yes, they are much stronger.”
“Why don’t you join them? You look like someone who fights?” the person asked.
“I applied but I need to go through some increases in my cultivation before I can,” the woman said awkwardly in a low voice.
“Ah, no worries. If you pass the logic tests and an oath to try your best in the tests to join the army, then you can get help from the medical staff,” the Alvan said with comforting words.
“I didn’t pass the logic test,” the woman said in a low voice.
“What?” The man then coughed a bit, looking embarrassed. “Well, there are plenty of classes you can take that will allow you to pass the test,” he said, trying to comfor
t her.
The group passed through the center of Alva, headed past the dungeon core, where the council members stood in the headquarters level, looking down on the army passing by.
“Eyes—left!” Glosil called.
Erik, Rugrat, and Glosil snapped their fists to their chests, saluting the council leaders, who all looked on as the members of the army all looked over to the left in one motion.
They passed and turned toward the formation.
“Eyes front!” Glosil called out.
Everyone dropped their salute and looked forward once more.
“All right, get ready,” Erik said.
Erik and Rugrat picked up the pace and Egbert even turned around and faced forward, storing the book away into some storage bone.
“Load!” Glosil called out.
Everyone pulled on their charging handles for their heavy repeaters, chambering the first bolt. The riders lowered themselves. They were like unsheathed swords as they all looked out. They were arranged two abreast, with each of them aiming outward, splitting up their flanks so that they covered everything to their front, left, and right.
The teleportation formation started to glow with power as Egbert started to increase the power. A faint mist appeared around the formation as the different runes in the lines and shapes that made up the formation started to come to life.
There was nothing more they could do as they charged forward. Adrenaline flowed through their veins as they marched right after one another. The formation powered up as Erik and Rugrat reached the other side of the formation. They left behind the first floor and appeared in the Metal floor. George and Gilga had been building up power in their bodies and they shot out of the formation.
The beasts on the Metal floor had been alerted by the formation that was activating on their side. They looked up as Gilga let out a blast of Water magic and George let out his Fire magic.
Twin pillars crushed everything in their path.
Rugrat fired with twin repeater arrows. Mana condensed around him like a halo and his body glowed with power.
Erik’s body grew as he let out mana blasts with his fists, hurling back the beasts that were closest. The ten-meter-long beasts were tossed to the side as if they were nothing more than cardboard cutouts, blasted out of the path.
The Alva Army were right behind, their repeaters firing as they pierced through the beasts in their path, lying in wait.
The formation flashed again as another section of the army appeared right behind the first group. They had run through the formation so they were in motion already by the time they were on the other side. They had separated out the formation, leaving gaps in between so that they could teleport one group right behind the others and not cut anyone into pieces.
Egbert was a master with the teleportation formation and had organized it.
He now glowed and rose up above the formation. From his hands, purple blasts shot out, hitting the creatures all around the formation.
The beasts seemed to lose their minds, backing away from the Alva Army and the formation, as they tried to get the flames off them. Then the flames seemed to enter their bodies, infecting them with madness.
They turned on one another, allies turning enemies. Several were killed, only to have their wounds covered in purple flames as they changed, becoming undead.
“Last man!” Lieutenant Chen called as he and Domonos made it through the formation.
They broke through the beasts camped around the formation, but now the beasts were chasing after them. Egbert floated above, hurling attacks down on them as the Alva Army used the mana barriers that they had got from the Blood Demon sect army, deflecting magical attacks from behind.
“Follow!” Rugrat yelled as he altered their path. With his magical vision and connection with metal from working as a smith, he was able to see through the landscape that seemed to be made from Metal mana, being bathed in it for centuries.
He felt the power of George as they crossed the ground. Like arrows from a bow, they moved straight and true, a powerful force that nothing could stop. They were their own force of nature. A feeling of power rushed through their veins as higher level creatures appeared.
Rugrat pulled out his rifle as a large rhino covered in lightning crested a rise and bellowed.
Three repeaters tracked onto the rhino, cutting it down. It slumped on the rise but several other rhinos appeared, rushing up the hill. Rugrat fired, killing one, and reloaded. The repeaters kept firing and picking out targets, all of them working together to break down the enemy. This was a trained military; they proactively picked out their targets and then positioned themselves to get maximum effectiveness of their weapon system.
They didn’t need to talk, understanding one another simply by watching their tracers as they adjusted and altered. It was much like video games, how only a few gestures and watching what the others were doing would allow one to adapt to their play style so that they would do what was best for the team overall.
Rugrat focused on leading the group as they ran on. People were hit with attacks and wounded here and there, but nothing life-threatening. Most of them were able to use healing concoctions to recover while they were on the run.
“Egbert, how are we looking?” Rugrat asked on the command channel as he altered the path of the convoy. He wanted to know what the situation was on the mountain, to pick the easiest route up the mountain. Otherwise, they might take a route that they climbed up halfway before they had to descend again and try another route.
“Well, I think everything on the Metal floor knows that we’re here. I can’t see a clear path up the mountain right now. We’ll have to circle around.”
Glosil started to talk to his soldiers as Rugrat checked the map that they had on the floor and what he was seeing through his magical vision.
“Okay,” Rugrat said to himself, making a mental map through the lower ground that would afford them cover and not expose them to too many beasts at once.
The ground started to shake as Rugrat felt a magical reaction from below the ground.
“Beasts!” Rugrat yelled out. “Break up and move for the sides!” He and Erik moved to the side of the valley. The formation split as a massive creature appeared. Its sides glowed red, with molten metal falling off it.
Gilga shot out a focused stream of water that cut through the worm’s molten metal, revealing bands of metal beneath.
“Shit! They’re metal worms!” Erik called out.
“Come on!” Rugrat complained, remembering the worm that they had faced in the second realm when they were searching for dungeon cores.
The worms grew stronger the more metal that they consumed; then that metal was turned into bands of natural armor around their bodies.
Rugrat urged George on as he jumped into the sky. Egbert rushed past him with a purple blade, meeting a worm that was rising up right in front of Ida and the group of formation masters.
The purple blade cut through the worm, splitting it into two. Sizzling waves of heat and molten metal covered the ground around him as he leapt into the sky.
Rugrat held his M20, waiting for the perfect target. He turned and fired three grenades. They curved through the air as a worm opened its mouth. They fell into the worm’s mouth and exploded in its gut. The armor contained the shockwaves, so the damage killed the giant worm. Rugrat picked out another worm.
The worms seemed to get smarter as another collapsed on the ground; they reversed their direction and sunk back into the ground.
“We got separated but we’re on our way back.” Roska sounded pissed. Clearly it was not her plan to separate from the rest of the army.
Rugrat looked over as she led Ida and the formation masters back. It seemed that the worms had panicked the formation masters as their reins were now held by grim-looking members of Special Team Two.
Rugrat descended to the ground on George.
“I think I see a path up to the top of the mountain,” Egbert reported.
<
br /> He guided Rugrat, who led the reformed group back toward the mountain and the path up it.
“Looks like there is some company on the mountain coming down,” Egbert said in a grim voice. “We’ve got Metal rams coming down!”
“That does not sound good,” Erik muttered to Rugrat.
The Metal rams were just as they were described: pissed-off looking rams that had a bad day and a head of metal horns. They were much larger than the Earth variety, only about four meters long.
“Just what is the deal with this Metal beaver?” Rugrat hissed as the rams moved forward lazily.
“Glosil!” Erik called.
Glosil moved up to him.
“I want the platoon to advance side by side, moving section by section, fire and movement. Have the command element and the civvies with Special Team Two behind and Special Team One in the rear covering our asses,” Erik said.
“Yes, sir!” Glosil quickly passed out orders as Alva Army quickly moved into their new positions.
Sections one and three fired on the rams, holding their position as two and four fired and bounded forward and then slowed down in their new position.
“Covering!” they yelled out as their targeting became more accurate. The rams were being cut down, in a panic now as they were smart enough to know that the bolts fired at them were deadly.
The rams fired back blasts of lightning between their horns, but they were trying to find cover and their accuracy was horrible, only getting lucky hits here and there.
Rugrat nodded as he moved with the command element and Special Team Two, pressuring the rams with effective and superior weapons fire. The rams, seeing the Alva Army advancing as if there were nothing in the world that could stop them, finally lost their arrogance, not even able to close with the enemy. They turned and fled.
“Scan and watch your arcs!” Glosil ordered as they continued to move forward, making sure to be in visual contact with one another, ready to react to threats.
“Move into arrowhead formation. Third platoon will be the leading section,” Glosil said as they moved like an arrow with people on both sides. Special Team One was in the rear, making up the base of the arrow; the command group was in the middle with the formation masters under the careful watch of Special Team Two. There weren’t any of their usual antics as they revealed the deadly soldiers that lay underneath their jokes.
The Fifth Realm Page 4