“Pull back!” Dwayne said.
The Stone Raiders did so, giving them some room to move and fight for a few seconds. The spiders filled it in and hammered on their shields within seconds.
Before the spiders seemed to attack with some kind of sense and tactics. Now, they were in a frenzy.
Stone Raiders cried out, falling to the spiders’ attacks.
Some screamed as fighters tore them from their positions in the line. The Mana barrier spell failed as the front lines turned into chaos.
The behemoths that had been taken down, ignited their Mana cores, tearing holes through the spider ranks around them.
Dave held his hands out, trying to balance himself, watching in horror as unstable Stone Raiders were taken down by tens of spiders.
“Pull from the soul gems! Pull back to the teleport pad!” Josh yelled, it was clear that they had lost this fight.
“POEs, get a move on!” Lucy barked.
The Players could come back, but the POE’s weren’t as lucky; they turned and ran back, thinning out the Stone Raiders.
“Queen’s Knights!” A scout called out as the corridor shook, the massive spiders had taken down the last of the behemoths and now charged the Stone Raider’s lines. They were so large that only three of them could fit in the hall.
“Damn bastard spat on me!” Steve yelled out as venom hit his body.
There wasn’t time to reply. Everyone was using whatever spells and weapons they had to try and stave off the spiders for just a few more minutes as they pulled back towards the teleport pad.
Anna’s Air blades cut lines in the ceiling, but the spiders moved so fast that she couldn’t stop them.
Red traces of fire imbued arrows hit spiders, exploding on impact. Deia’s hands moving in a blur as she moved from target to target.
“Lox, Gurren! Get out of here!” Deia yelled.
“We’re not leaving without you!” Lox barked back, grunting as he stopped a spider knight’s charge with his shield.
Gurren leaned over cutting off the spider’s leg, yelling as he stabbed into its head.
“We’re staying right here,” Malsour said, speaking for himself and Induca, spears of metal taking a dozen spiders down from the walls.
Induca floated up, taking a deep breath, as she released it, flames rushed forth turning the walls red hot, causing the stone to crack and explode here and there with the overwhelming heat.
Knowing it was a failing argument, Deia focused on firing her arrows instead as they pulled back. The spiders didn’t give them time to catch their breath as they continued to hammer on their shields, pulling them open in places and attacking the Raiders behind.
Dave stepped over Stone Raider bodies as he cut, slashed, and stabbed at the writhing mass of spiders in front of him.
“Make sure you’re not touching any of the webs,” Shard said.
Dave checked around him.
“Big step back when Shard says so!” Dwayne said.
Dave tensed himself at Shard’s words.
“Jump back now!” Shard yelled to all of the Stone Raiders.
They rushed backwards, everyone making sure that they weren’t touching a part of the web.
Three remaining behemoths destroyed the soul gems that supported their cores, converting it into lightning mana.
Lightning ran through the now conductive webs and rushed through the hallways, right through the spiders. Electricity arced through the webs, causing the spiders to fry from the inside out. Some even exploded and painted the walls blue.
Dave winced at the noises the spiders made as they died in the thousands.
It lasted for a few seconds but the spiders around the Stone Raiders were either stunned or dead.
“To the teleport pad!” Josh barked.
The Stone Raiders turned and ran. The behemoths hadn’t even made it to the center of the web and they’d only been able to burn around twenty percent of the webbing that made up the spider’s territory to make it conductive.
Spider screams cut through the halls as the facility seemed to shake with thousands of legs rushing to meet the intruders.
Dave glanced backwards. Past Steve, he could see the spider knights that had been advancing were now rushing forwards. Smoke rose from some of their bodies, but their injuries only seemed to enrage them more.
They got to the active teleport pad, rushing through as fast as possible.
Dave made it through, moving out of the path of the pad’s event horizon as more people charged through.
“Make sure none of them make it through!” Lucy yelled.
Those that had made it through now faced the event horizon, watching as spiders covered the walls, floor and roof of the housing complex they had been in. They were like a living sea.
“Well that’s nightmare fuel,” Steve shivered.
“Come on!” One of the Stone Raiders yelled to the last members who were running with all their might for the teleport pad.
The Stone Raiders yelled out their encouragement. Ranged attackers fired spells or weapons through the teleport pad to support them.
The last three made it to the teleport pad just as a spider knight jumped through the teleport pad and into the tower, crushing one of the last Stone Raiders.
“Shut the teleport pad!” Josh yelled, spiderlings rushed in and a few fighters before the teleport closed, cutting some of the creatures in half.
“Focus on the small spiders first!” Dwayne yelled.
Using their soul gems, the mages supported the melee types as they charged forward to greet the spiders that made it into their base.
The fighting was furious and desperate. The knight’s limbs hit hard enough to throw the unlucky Stone Raiders that found themselves in its path.
The fighters and Spiderlings were quickly killed off.
“Focus on the spider knight! Speed and strength debuffs!” Josh said as he appeared behind the spider, his blades cutting deep into the spider.
All of the Guild was focused on the spider knight.
It was so large that hitting anything vital was hard.
Rogues and assassins flittered around behind it. Mages threw down debuffs on the spiders while healing their fellow Stone Raiders as they could.
Support pulled out fighters that had been too wounded or tossed by the Spider.
As one melee fighter was thrown or pushed down, another took their spot.
Steve cut through the spider’s leg like a lumberjack cutting through a tree trunk.
The knight’s eyes turned to focus on Steve as it let out a pained screech.
“Damn thing’s a tank!” Dwayne yelled.
“No, you don’t!” Steve barked. It was one of the few times Dave had see the large metal man being serious. The Spider Knight slammed a leg down on top of Steve.
Steve stopped the Spider’s leg with his axe, his metal body groaning with strain as the floor cracked beneath him.
The spider’s attention was all on Steve as more limbs came in from either side.
“Huaahhh!” Lox and Gurren yelled out, bracing themselves and their shields, stopping the twin mana imbued scythe legs that were meant to tear Steve apart.
Rage built within Dave, he was too weak to do what they were doing. Any help he provided would be in the way.
He called on his mana reserves, draining out from his armor. With the venom and Mana bolts, he was dangerously low on Mana.
His bow came apart as he held his twin rods in his hands. He planted his feet; the engraved runes along his skin started to glow as grey circles holding runes formed in front of Dave’s hands, connecting to the rods.
Another magical circle formed under his feet.
Identical magical circles formed on Gurren and Lox’s shields, while a circle appeared under Steve’s legs.
Through the magical circles, he boosted their Strength and Agility, reducing the strain on them.
They pushed the spider back.
The spider knight, ala
rmed at their small creatures ability to push it back, let out a screech of anger. Even as it was hit with different spells and weapons, Gurren, Lox and Steve had earned it’s aggro.
It spat out a glob of Mana infused venom right at Gurren, Lox and Steve.
Panic and fear ran through Dave as he felt cold fear grip his body. Time seemed to slow as his higher Intelligence focused on one thing, saving his friends.
His mind was under such strain from fighting, amplifying people’s spells and barriers that he wasn’t sure that he could properly form a complex spell, definitely not a spell that could stop the Mana venom.
Dave let out a wordless yell as Gurren, Lox and Steve seemed to move in slow motion as they covered themselves with their shields, trying to overlap their coverage with one another.
Even facing their demise, they were protecting one another.
Mana seemed to surge through the air; it was familiar as it was powerful.
Deia’s fuel air bomb! The thought raced through Dave’s mind. Deia’s spell ignited the air before the trio. Dave added in what weak amplification he could. Anna fed it more Air and helped direct it and Induca followed it up with another if the first didn’t work.
Time seemed to come back to normal.
The first fuel air bomb spell went off; the very air in the room seemed to explode as pressure built up and release faster than Dave could comprehend.
The pressure wave of the fuel air bomb, pushed the venom back in the direction it had come from.
The second from Induca was much more focused, where the venom’s forward momentum was stopped by Deia’s attack, Induca’s turned it into a lance, back at the spider knight.
The accelerating venom hit the knight, piercing its carapace.
It screamed out in pain. While it had made the venom it had stayed in venom sacs, never being ingested.
The Mana imbued venom tore at Mana constructs, working on a creature that had spent so much time around Mana that it had become part of its physiology; the Spider Knight’s health plummeted.
Some of the Venom hit Stone Raiders, but it was nowhere as concentrated as it was before.
They moved back as the knight spasmed, hitting and killing people out of accident rather than in any kind of coordinated attack.
It took it nearly a full minute before it collapsed to the ground, its hit points finally reaching zero, speaking to its massive health pool.
Josh stabbed the creature, making sure that it was indeed dead.
“Check your wounds! Badly wounded to waypoint one! Anyone poisoned or burned by venom, to waypoint two!” Jules called out. Two new waypoints appeared on the minimap as the supporting Stone Raiders looked to their guild mates.
Gurren, Lox and Steve sat down on the ground where they stood.
After a few moments, the three of them started laughing and shaking their fists in the air. They knew how close they had been to death.
Dave felt as if his guts uncoiled as he stumbled slightly. The strain of his low Stamina and Mana pool making him feel light headed and nauseous.
“You good?” Dwayne looked Dave over for burns and signs of wounds.
“Good.” Dave had slight cuts on his arms and legs, but nothing that was life-threatening. Dave looked over Dwayne. “You feeling okay?”
“Yeah.” Dwayne shook his head. “Damn, that was one hell of a raid! Damn risky! If we didn’t have those behemoths, I don’t know if we could have held off all those spiders.”
Dave tapped him on the shoulder. “I don’t see any wounds—you’re good. Yeah.” Dave hooked his rods onto his hips and pulled his hood down. He was covered in sweat, his arms heavy from the constant fighting. “If the rest of the spiders got here, we would have been fucked.”
“There were more of them?” Dwayne asked.
“This was just the tip of the iceberg.” Dave waved to the spiders that filled the control room and the housing complex that had been on the other side of the teleport pad.
“How many more were there?” Dwayne’s voice dropped so no one else could hear.
“You don’t want to know.” Dave shook his head to try to forget the number of spiders that littered the housing complex’s hallways.
“Do you have any ideas of how to deal with them?” Dwayne asked.
Dave thought about it for a moment, looking at the spider knight.
“Smoke them out,” Dave said seriously, looking to Dwayne.
“Dave, honey how are you?’ Deia asked, moving to Dave’s side to check him over.
“I’m fine, are you okay,” Dave said, studying her for injuries.
“I’m okay,” Deia said with a weak smile; it was clear that the Spiders had put the love of creepy crawlies into her.
“Quick thinking with that spell,” Dave said.
“I didn’t know if I could make it work,” Deia admitted, running a shaky hand through her hair.
“It was a close call,” Dwayne agreed looking around at everyone. Stone Raiders were sprawled over the ground; wounded were being carried to the different waypoints as others recovered from their ordeal.
“If we can help it, I don’t want to have to go into that housing complex again. If you figure out someway to clear out those spiders, let me know. I’m going to check on if anyone got perm’d,” Dwayne said, his tone sad.
Perm’d was a term that the Stone Raiders used when talking about POEs that died. Unlike the Players, there was no coming back from death for them.
Dave and Deia nodded to Dwayne, not jealous of his job.
He wandered away.
Dave put an arm around Deia, the two of them looking over the battlefield that the control room had turned into.
If Deia and the rest of Party Zero wasn’t there, then Gurren, Lox and Steve might not have made it. I’ve been focused on increasing my own strength to protect everyone instead of realizing their strengths.
***
Josh sat down heavily, looking to his lieutenants and Dave.
He hadn’t washed since going to the Housing Complex filled with spiders.
With the information that they had gathered, they hadn’t thought that they would fight such a tenacious and powerful enemy.
Five Stone Raider POEs had been perm’d, with several more which had been seriously injured but had been saved by the healers. Twenty three Players had also needed to respawn.
Even though they’re just NPC’s, its hard to think of them that way. I talked to them, saw them in the halls, fought beside them and they followed me. Now their code is gone forever and I can’t get them back.
Josh let out a heavy sigh. In other games, he had seen NPCs under his command. In those games, they had been two dimensional characters that he saw as nothing more than resources to be used. Just like gold or weapons.
In Emerilia, thinking of them as NPCs just didn’t make sense. They were POE, the sentient forces of the game.
“Dwayne said that you have a plan Dave?” Josh asked, trying to distract himself.
“I think so,” Dave said seriously.
“Okay, what is it?” Josh asked.
“I can enchant a bunch of items that we can chuck into the Housing complex. They’ll be enchanted with fire circuits. They’ll burn up all the energy in them, creating flames that will use the air in the Housing complex to fuel them,” Dave said.
“Burn all the oxygen up and they have nothing to breath,” Kim said with a nod. Even her normally playful mood was subdued by their recent losses.
So close to the end, it hurt to lose people.
“Lucy, see that Dave has everything he needs. We’ll try it out. I don’t want anyone going to that Housing Complex. There are just too many powerful and high level creatures there,” Josh looked around, his people agreed with his assessment.
“Dave, let me know when you’ve got something that works,” Josh said.
“Will do,” Dave agreed.
***
Dave wiped his brow, looking at the half dozen fire bombs.
“Well that was fun,” He muttered to himself.
Deia snorted, shaking her head.
“Yes, playing around with pieces of metal that have been magically coded to burn up as much oxygen as possible is always an exciting time.”
They had been working together, Deia showing Dave different magical spells, layering them so that they could figure out the best way to burn up the oxygen in the housing complex. Once they found the right spells, Dave had memorized them, playing around with magical coding to get the required effects.
Deia had watched; with her intimate knowledge of Fire, she was able to troubleshoot issues easily.
She could also control the Fire coming off of the metal plates so that it didn’t melt Dave’ workbench or take his head off.
“Tell that to my eyebrows,” Dave muttered, waggling them at Deia.
She giggled at the odd sight. With his regenerative abilities, they were coming back, but they were just two black lines of fuzz right now.
Kim wandered into the room that Dave had claimed as his workshop, mostly because it was the furthest place from the tower that the Stone Raiders were staying in.
“I heard that you were done with the bombs,” Kim said.
“Yep!” Dave gestured to the bombs. They weren’t pretty, each was simply a large metal plate with runes engraved on it, attached to a greater soul gem.
Kim looked over the plates.
“You sure this is going to work?” Kim asked.
“Well unless they don’t breath oxygen to live, I’m pretty sure it’ll work,” Dave said.
“Well, worth a try in my books!” Kim smiled. “The others are waiting at the teleport pad.”
“I’ll just bag them up,” Dave said, grabbing the six plates and throwing them into his bag.
They jogged to the tower. There was a somber air in the tower. Losing a battle so close the end grated on everyone’s nerves.
Other guilds might have people leaving the raid in frustration. The Stone Raiders instead redoubled their efforts.
All of them were armed and armored. As Dave made it into the control room, ranged attackers were on the second floor, watching the teleport pad with mages behind them. On the bottom floor melee types formed lines, ready for whatever might come through the teleport pad.
New Horizons (Emerilia Book 4) Page 9