End Online: Volume 5
Page 12
CaptainGordon, on the other hand, stands in place stupidly while not knowing what to do. I can’t blame him though, as he isn’t overly familiar with how we fight. When I take a closer look at him, I notice that he hasn’t even drawn the sword just visible beneath his cloak.
‘Is this guy not planning to help us fight?’ I muse.
Mason’s arrows connect first, drawing the attention of three scorpions away from the others as we move off to the side. The remaining two attack Mikhail’s party who remain in position on the dune. Due to having a higher position, they don’t seem to have any trouble fending off the scorpions’ attacks.
“Creature Analysis,” I speak quietly, inspecting the scorpions.
Name: Blue Scorching Scorpion
Level: 210
Health: 8400
Magic: 0
Stamina: 1420
??
‘Hmm, that’s strange. Why are they called ‘Blue’?’ I wonder to myself, with a note of caution edging into my awareness.
As the scorpions attack our front line, Matrix uses fire magic on his sword to launch flame blades while maintaining a safe distance from their tail attacks. I attempt to use my throwing knives, but they simply rebound off hard carapaces. Mason’s attacks also seem to be relatively ineffective. I suspect the scorpions have a strong resistance to or are immune to fire.
A barrage of ice spears several times the usual size pierce the scorpions but fail to go all the way through. Regardless, Fen moves sideways as more oversized ice spears form around her body.
Sir Laurence and Verde attack one of the scorpions from their flank, but their attacks do little damage.
The shining knight adopts a defensive stance and begins to chant. I am surprised to discover that he is in fact using two chants, one after another, for a single spell.
“Group Target, Stone Resonance!” He finally calls out, completing his spell.
A soft golden glow shines down on everyone in the party, applying a boost to endurance and health. As the spell falls on me, I somehow feel like I have become increasingly sturdy.
“Careful!” Mason calls out in warning.
The car-sized scorpions are incredibly cunning, waiting for our attention to waver just the slightest bit before activating their sacred arts. Their tails begin to glow with a poisonous green aura. Sensing a formidable danger in those tails I use ‘Backstab’ to avoid the attack.
The scorpions suddenly strike like lightning, leaving afterimages behind them. One of their stingers pierce directly through the center of my afterimage from using backstab and cause an explosion of sand in its place.
Another stinger attacks Matrix, who desperately attempts to dodge. The attack is simply too fast and the sand has slowed his movement too well. The venomous stinger passes through his hip. The attack doesn’t finish there, as he is raised up while skewered and flung away. Matrix lands about thirty meters away, creating a small crater in the sand around him. In the party window in my peripheral vision, I see he has already lost more than half of his health and is poisoned!
“Sir Laurence!” I call out as he uses his shield to partially block the third stinger and is knocked back several meters, “Matrix needs healing! That poison will probably kill him.”
The prince nods, dragging Verde with him to keep protecting her as he moves toward Matrix’s location.
The scorpion I am fighting dies as I use my ‘Triple Stab’ sacred art, and I immediately move to cover Sir Laurence and Verde from the scorpion chasing them. The enemy ignores me initially and relentlessly pursues the two, but as my damage accumulates, it eventually targets me.
I hear a strange crackling sound from behind me and turn my head to see a frightening scene. The dead scorpion corpse has spontaneously combusted, producing a cobalt fireball ten meters in diameter. I finally understand why the scorpion is called ‘Blue Scorching Scorpions’.
In front of me, a few unexpected swings of the scorpion’s claws catch me off guard and rapidly take me down to a quarter health. Fen’s ice bolts increase in number and press the scorpion as I withdraw in a panic to consume a few healing herbs.
An arrow seemingly enchanted with strong air pressure and gravitational fluctuation cuts through the scorpion while I am trying to keep my distance. I am surprised at first, but then notice that the scorpion Mason was fighting has also turned into a large fireball on the sand.
This scorpion’s health was already low from the combination of Sir Laurence and Verde’s attacks and then Fen’s and mine after, so Mason’s assistance easily finishes it off.
“Get back away from the corpse!” Mason shouts as it dies.
“I know, I know,” I call out, amused, while retreating beyond the range of the flames.
With the battle over, I finally realize just how strong those scorpions were. Not only were their attacks lightning fast, but their defense was incredible and the sand didn’t affect their manoeuvrability in the slightest.
Sir Laurence and Verde return with Matrix who is now in much better shape, and my health is slowly rising above the halfway point. I look to Mikhail’s party to see if they need any backup, but am shocked instead.
Mikhail and his three teammates are casually sitting a little away from the flames left by the death of their two scorpions. What is surprising is that those flames have already dwindled down to a small ball of a single meter in diameter.
It is a given that they won’t burn forever and will slowly extinguish, but the first scorpion of ours that was killed is still fuelling a blaze of about five meters in diameter.
‘What could it be that helped them defeat the scorpions so quickly? It wasn’t equipment or level. So was it tactics?’ I try to figure it out, but unfortunately I could not inspect the bodies as they had already been enveloped and burned away by the flames
As the blue fireballs from the corpses become smaller, a reflection of light catches my eye. Waiting for the flames to completely vanish, I walk over to the area and inspect the ground. I notice several fingernail-sized shards of glass, each colored with a light blue tint.
The blue flames emitted from the corpses of the scorpions must be hot beyond imagination to be able to melt the sand. While my dire flame is practically unstoppable and could be described as ‘Immortal’, this blue flame would come under the description of ‘Almighty’.
I attempt to pick one of them up but end up causing it to sink into the sand and vanish. Sifting my fingers through the sand also turns out to be pointless. Taking more care with the next shard, I gingerly pick it up.
As it turns out, the shards are called ‘Cobalt Glass Shard’ by the system. It is a slow process of picking them up due to the possibility of losing them in the sand, but from each fireball between twenty and thirty are formed.
“They’re useless,” I raise my head to see Mikhail the Stalwart looking down on me picking up the shards. “They have no value and are considered a rubbish item. I recommend ignoring them only because I don’t want you to waste your time.”
I can’t see his facial expression through the helmet, and his voice is calm, but something about the way he speaks makes annoys me.
I stubbornly clench my jaw before forcing myself to speak politely, “Perhaps, but I think this is an item local to this place and can’t be gotten elsewhere. How could we know so much about it without investigating its uses properly?”
Mikhail seems to pause in surprise, but quickly recovers, “I just looked at the item description earlier. It has no uses for crafting and is only a cosmetic item. Perhaps you could glue them to something to create a mosaic or some fake jewellery, but that’s about it.”
What he says is true, there is no information in regard to using the glass in crafting. Perhaps this doesn’t appear until the crafting skill is high enough to use it, but to dismiss it immediately is a bit much.
I continue picking up the glass shards until there are none left. I also offer to share them among everyone. MoonKite takes five simply because she thinks
they are incredibly pretty and Mason takes ten to test creating glass arrowheads. The leftover amount of just over a hundred shards goes directly into my inventory.
Both of our parties head off as soon as I am done, once again climbing over monstrous sand dunes as our water supply steadily depletes. My cloak also has an effect that prevents the heat from increasing the drain on my satiety level, leaving me with more water than everyone else. I share some with the others in my team so we can keep an equal amount per person.
We encounter a new group of ‘Blue Scorching Scorpions’ every five to ten minutes. Occasionally just two or three appear and we easily get rid of them. Other times there are as many as eight or nine, causing us to adopt a fighting retreat to prevent us from being surrounded and swarmed by the mob. The ‘Cobalt Glass Shards’ that form from the sand after the fire have next to no weight, so I don’t hesitate to collect as many of them as possible.
My level has also been steadily increasing. The scorpions give an extremely generous amount of experience when they are killed. I open my stats window to inspect my character.
Name: Lost(Desert Pilgrim)
Health: 2248/2934
Stamina: 891/891
Mana: 2190/2190
Lvl: 221
Lvl UP: 51%
Str: 67 +44
Agi: 206 +70
Dex: 74 +43
Int: 31 + 20
Mnd: 47
Lck: 31
Infamy: 19
Alignment: -39
God: Grael
Belief: 78
Equipped Skills:
Class Skill: White Warrior (SLvl 26, 79%)
[Unavailable]
Potion Production (SLvl 17, 64%)
Mining (SLvl 15, 15%)
Smithing (SLvl 13, 12%)
Grael's Essence (SLvl 7, 80%)
Origin of Dire Flame (SLvl 7, 80%)
[Empty]
[Empty]
Reserve Skills:
[Empty]
***************************************************
Non-skill resistances and bonuses
Cutting resistance: 5%
Impact resistance: -5%
Poison resistance: 12%
Acid resistance: 6%
Flame resistance: 14%
Ice resistance 5%
~ +5% chance to completely resist all minor to intermediate poisons
***************************************************
Skills
Sacred Art Cost
Triple Thrust 11 Stamina
CrossX 19 Stamina
Backstab 80 Stamina
Pincer 100 Stamina
Multi Mirage 175 Stamina
Magic Cost
Minor Dire Flame 800 Mana
Just after I close my character window and climb an especially large sand dune, I notice a familiar shape in the distance. It is a pyramid, a tomb created by a specific ancient civilization. There isn’t only one, but six or seven spread out with a mile or two in between each.
“Hey, how about we go there?” I ask everyone with brimming enthusiasm.
“I would like to,” Mason seems to be conflicted, “but we really need to find a water source first.”
“Perhaps there is one inside.”
“That’s impossible. The pyramid will be a dungeon similar to a tomb. There is nothing inside of a tomb except for bones, dust, and sand.”
Everyone else is completely unable to decide whether or not to go. Everyone wants to explore a new, uncharted dungeon, but argues that we have a greater priority at the moment.
We log off to get some rest but my thoughts are fixated on the pyramids and prevent me from having peaceful rest. I log back on the following day, weary from a lack of sleep.
***************************************************
We come across a few different kinds of monsters. ‘Sand Wraiths’ which are immune to physical attacks and highly resistant against fire. Small fox-faced humanoids about half the size of an adult wielding various bows and covered with sand-stained rags. My creature analysis reveals that they are called ‘Sahar Tribesman’.
I am completely useless against the ‘Sand Wraiths’ but the ‘Sahar Tribesman’ are easy to kill. They are numerous, with a single group easily having twenty to thirty of them. Despite having a strong coordination amongst themselves, they have low defense and health.
A day later, when our water and food supplies are beginning to run out, I spot an oasis surrounded by several palm trees from the peak of a large sand dune.
Trembling with excitement, I don’t even consider that it may be an illusion in the desert. It is far too lifelike to be caused by the refraction of light. Focusing my eyes, I even see several different types of enemies patrolling the oasis.
As soon as everyone else is aware of the oasis, they begin rushing toward the water, drawing weapons to slaughter any enemies in the way.
Fen stops beside me, a deep thirst showing in her eyes. She hasn’t drunk much water this entire time, but I thought that may be because her nature is that of ice. Clearly, she was only restraining herself for my sake.
“Fen, let’s get there first,” I say enthusiastically to the wolf next to me.
Getting ready to sprint away and overtake everyone, I feel an icy breath on the back of my neck. Before I can react, the endless blue sky fills my vision as I am thrown up in the air. Gravity then takes hold and I begin to fall.
I land on a soft surface, completely unlike the sand I expect. I grab onto a few tufts of pure white fur and realize I am on top of Fen. The wolf crouches down and I have a flashback of riding Grael.
She construes my grabbing onto her tighter in a panic as a signal to move, loping forward at maximum speed. The massive sand dune in front of us, which we would normally follow along to find a point where we could climb it, proves to be nothing against her size and speed. She easily climbs up the nearly vertical slope and reaches the top in less than a second.
Behind us, I see a large cloud of sand kicked up by her paws. The cloud is enormous, actually similar to a sand storm.
“Fen, we need to get everyone else too,” I remark sternly while she pauses at the top of the dune.
The wolf snorts and ignores me but I press the matter and she eventually listens.
“Lost! There you are!” Mason exclaims as he sees Fen descend the sand dune with me on her back.
“Hah, sorry, we were just scouting the area,” I lie, not wanting to tell him we nearly abandoned them. “Everyone, get on. We will rush to the oasis and get water before the others do!”
Mikhail’s group has already left us behind, scampering up the sand dune and disappearing over it to get to the water source as soon as possible. CaptainGordon, however, was still with us. I don’t know what the other party members’ thoughts are, but I accept him as a part of our group.
Fen crouches down next to them to allow everyone to get on top, but they seem a little reluctant. One by one they eventually climb on. The last person is Verde, who Fen glares at but still allows her to get on. Verde’s face suddenly becomes terrified, and it looks like she operates an invisible menu as if she is about to log off, but stops just as unexpectedly. I give her a puzzled look and she climbs onto Fen with extreme hesitance.
Knowing how fast Fen is, Sir Laurence grabs some fur to brace himself. Everyone else follows his example and holds on to some fur or the person in front of them.
With everyone sitting on her, Fen’s movements are slightly slower than before. The weight is clearly not that much to her as she easily ascends the sand dune again, which none of us could have done. I may have been able to get to the top with a long running start, but I would most likely end up hitting the wall of sand or falling backwards where it is nearly vertical. Fen’s ability to climb the impossible slope is unmatched.
From the top of the slope, I can see Mikhail’s party not too far away fighting a small group of ‘Sahar Tribesmen’. We completely ignore them and rush forward.
&
nbsp; The hot, sandy wind blows into my eyes, causing me to squint and be unable to see properly.
‘Everyone else is probably in the same situation,’ I think to myself while trying to turn my head and check but failing as my vision is still blurry.
Fen’s speed drastically increases when running downhill, but slows down enough to see clearly as she climbs up another impassable slope. Whenever we reach a group of enemies, scorpions, the Sahar, or sand wraiths, Fen summons ice walls to hold them back as we pass by like a flash.
I can only imagine what Mikhail and his party are thinking, seeing us taking an impossible path atop a great white wolf to rush toward the oasis. I silently chuckle to myself, mentally picturing his dumbstruck stare.
“Fen, Stop!” I shout at the wolf, hoping she will hear me over the rushing wind.
She does, and fortunately stops atop the last sand dune before the oasis. There is a hundred meters between the water and us, but the ground is completely flat. No matter how I look at it or think about why it is so flat, I can’t help but see this as a trap.
We all dismount the wolf and carefully proceed. With the second step on the flat surface, all the sand starts to quiver. Several small sinkholes appear, but rather than being there to catch us and drag us under, they start to spit out monsters. ‘Blue Scorching Scorpions’, ‘Sahar Tribesmen’, ‘Sand Wraiths’ and something new: a swarm of flying creatures, several tens of thousands strong.
“Creature Analysis,” I bark tersely, glaring at the unknown flying creature.
Name: Desert Locust
Level: 133
Health: 300
Magic: 0
Stamina: 50
??
Taking up a defensive formation, we proceed cautiously. All the monsters seem to notice us at the same time, charging as a single unit. The ‘Desert Locusts’ are the first to reach us, attacking with their vast superiority in numbers.
From within the swarm of locusts, small glows of green begin to shine like gemstones. All of a sudden my instincts about the locusts make sense.
“Be careful of the green lights! It’s the locusts using a poison sacred art!” I shout out to warn the party.