I had to go around ten yards into the water, then the bottom disappeared beneath my feet and I disappeared under the surface. The level 494 Insatiable Shark finned toward me and attacked, but Equanimity activated and prevented the damage. The predator pulled me down toward the bottom, trying to swallow me. I opened my profile spasmodically, checked my stats. I had to put down the shark with a Combo series, then command my pets to stand down when they rushed to help me.
Monty grew to a height of ninety feet in combat, and didn’t miss the chance to show Fatcat who was boss. He roared into the liger’s face, unwinding all the braids in her mane.
I swam back to dry land, returned to the boys and noticed right away that Bomber’s eyes were wide as dinner plates.
“They stack!” he said, reverence in his voice. “My agility was at exactly two thousand, so that makes it easy to count. Now it’s at… Holy shit! Five hundred and seventy-six thousand! Almost three hundred times more! How the hell..?”
“I don’t get it…” Crag muttered, scratching his head. “Synergy multiplies it by three, my Nergal’s Fury – by twenty-four.”
I didn’t get it either. How were we getting such big numbers? Then I checked the logs and it hit me…
Sleeping Justice activated: your main stats and total vindication have been quadrupled, as have the main stats of your allies!
I picked my jaw up off the floor, felt rising excitement.
“Guys, I forgot all about Sleeping Justice! It kicked in when the shark attacked me and added another two multipliers – one for each temple! I have over a million health! Base damage… Nearly ten million! I can one-shot beast gods now!”
“As long as they attack you first,” Crag noted, chuckling. “Otherwise neither Nergal’s Fury nor Sleeping Justice will proc.”
“So Synergy and Sleeping Justice multiply our stats by twelve, and Nergal’s Fury multiplies the result,” Crawler muttered. “And best of all… Scyth, can Synergy level up?”
“Yep. But, like with everything from the Sleepers, who knows how. We have to try, though. Ready to jump?”
“We really not bringing Infect?” the mage asked. “He has the Horn, which gives +20% to all group members’ stats!”
I thought for a moment. “We’ll do without it,” I answered. “There’s no point in bringing extra people for now, why spread out the experience? When the Synergy limit goes up to at least six, then we’ll see. Alright, let’s go! And you, Crag, close your eyes just in case. We don’t want your god to see the temple. Uhm… What’s up, Tommy?”
Hiros was praying furiously to the Montosaurus.
“Godzilla!” he whispered. “Godzilla!”
“Pray later,” Bomber said, pulling the ninja to his feet. “Time to go!”
“Everyone ready?” I asked.
Crag closed his eyes. Hiros glanced at him, then did the same. The pets fell silent, knowing something was afoot.
“Juuuump!” Bomber shouted.
Chapter 8. The Threats in Action
I CAST A GLANCE at the temple, waved to Tiamat hovering and shimmering at the altar, and pointed at Crag, who stood with his eyes closed. The goddess nodded.
“Alright, Toby, you can look,” I said.
“Woah, grim place,” Crag whispered, looking out beyond the magic of Isis at the stone jungle of Terrastera, wreathed in vapors acrid even to look at.
“Just the way the devs like it,” Bomber said wryly, unfolding a camp table and laying out raid food on it. Then, wrinkling his nose, he produced five portions of Roast Undead Rat Chitterlings from his inventory and handed them out gingerly. “Don’t eat them right away, save them for the start of battle.”
We sat down around the table and quickly wolfed down the raid food – Big Banquet and Highland Feast. Crawler handed out some battle potions and cast a few elemental shields on me.
“Check out my new ice magic,” the gnome bragged. “Ice Armor! It’s something else! It lowers damage by 15%, and when your health drops to 5%, it puts you in an Iceblock.”
“Are we getting shields?” Crag asked.
“We don’t need ‘em,” Bomber answered. “Scyth takes all the damage.”
“How’s that?”
“Special path of Resilience,” I answered. “Path of Sacrifice. But if I die, the whole group dies with me, so keep an eye on my health bar. If it drops into the red, leave the group.”
“Scyth-san sacrifices himself for us…” Hiros muttered.
“Earth to Alex!” Crawler said. “Weren’t you listening? You’ll end up in an Iceblock! We’ll have plenty of time to leave the group. Hey, Hiros, how are you planning to fight? In melee range?”
“Hiros will use a crossbow,” the ninja answered.
“Alright, done eating?” I asked, yawning. “Let’s start farming, then. I’m about to fall asleep.”
“Wait! How are we going to aggro the mobs?” Bomber asked.
“We can’t aggro them, I told you!” Crag answered. “We’ll lose our multipliers.”
“Then that’s a problem. Last time, Scyth pulled mobs by flying around the forest and firing off Sleeping Vindication.”
Bomber’s fears were well founded, but the question didn’t particularly need an answer. Smelling fresh meat, the barakatas began to stream toward the place of power. The mobs crawled out of broad cracks in the boles of the purple trees.
“Eugh!” Crag said. “Gross!”
The black three-foot-long cockroaches, a high vertical fin on their chitinous backs, snapped their powerful claws, which dripped an oily liquid. Casting a glance over my enemies, I counted around thirty.
“Let’s go!” I shouted, raising my fist and rushing toward them.
The most important thing was to survive the first hit, or rather – bite. The huge cockroach’s pincers met in my ribcage, activating the two-minute invulnerability of Equanimity and the four-fold stat boost for the whole group from Sleeping Justice. My life bar grew by almost three billion from Path of Sacrifice, giving me all my allies’ health points.
Inspecting the mob carefully, I decided to see what kind of damage I would deal. Crack! Pale white blood spattered, the beast’s shell broke into pieces and an acid spray hung in the air at the point of the strike, droplets splashing my Cold-Blooded Punisher. One single Spirit-Crushing Hammerfist of Justice had been so destructive that my heart soared – the power of the strike, strengthened by three divine multipliers at once, squashed the barakata like a cockroach under a shoe!
Paying no attention to the dozen barakatas idly jabbing at me with their pincers, I turned to the boys. All four of them stood with their mouths open, not even thinking to attack.
“O Greatest One!” Hiros jabbered in awe, spreading his hands, dropping to his knees and bowing his head down to the ground. “Scyth-san! That was incredible! Hiros bows!”
“Bomber too!” the warrior shouted and laughed, giving the ninja a playful slap round the head. “Damn it, Hiros, stop that!”
“Hey, he really means it,” Crawler said. “No way anyone would pray to you like that, Bomb!”
“Come on, guys, get started!” I said, waving them the all-clear as I stood in the thick of the disgusting creatures. “Get in here! Enough of that, Tommy. Your damage is as good as ours, so get your head off the ground.”
The group came back to reality and started fighting while I fulfilled the role of lazy tank. Both warriors charged in and started cutting into the barakatas. Judging by the logs, their strikes missed owing the huge level gap with the mobs, but that didn’t discourage the boys. The game mechanics weren’t so dumb that they’d make every single strike miss on a higher-level target standing right in front of you. The boys’ attacks might have landed rarely, but their combat skills leveled up insanely fast.
Crawler and Hiros didn’t hit often either, but every hit counted. The former could have put on a firework show all on his own – his multicolored magic of the various elements flared up in an unceasing stream. The second, no longer scraping his
forehead on the floor, fired off bolts from his crossbow.
Caught up in the action, Bomber didn’t notice himself drifting over the edge of the safe zone. Drops of acid began to hiss on his armor, devouring the metal. I dashed over and pulled him out of the acid rain, dropped him at Crawler’s feet.
“Don’t get carried away!” I shouted.
Whoosh! A fireball the size of a watermelon rocketed past my head and hit a barakata. The cockroach flew back several yards and exploded.
“Got him!” the mage shouted in glee. “Plus four to fire magic in one hit! Hell yeah!”
It took us almost an hour to clear the first packs. I didn’t touch the monsters; that way my friends had more time to level their skills. In the end, I killed only one barakata that managed to push me to the ground and bite into my face… Good thing my helmet saved me from any pain. Assistance of the Sleepers sure came in handy. After every kill, even those by the others, it restored my health and vindication, which I fired off a couple of times toward the end, to speed up our farming.
Rarely but regularly, notifications told me of the progress of Resilience and Unarmed Combat.
Unarmed Combat level increased: +1. Current level: 13 (rank II).
Accuracy and damage of strikes dealt without a weapon increased by 570%.
Spirit: +100. Total: 1,300.
Along with my skills, my combat moves also leveled up. Spirit-Crushing Hammerfist of Justice, Storm Fists, Spirit Fast Combo and Spirit-Stunning Kick of Justice all grew stronger. Remembering to what I owed my victory in the Demonic Games, the boost to my total spirit made me happiest of all.
Something started running toward the corpses, little flashes of fur like…
“Ferrets,” Crawler explained. “From Big Po’s perk.”
Right! I smiled as I watched the boys’ twelve little ferrets, three from each. The barakatas only dropped reagents, which my Magnetism didn’t pull in. One of the ferrets brushed past my ankle, stood up on its hind legs and started sniffing, watching me with intelligent beady eyes. Its silver fur sparkled. A magical creature!
The acid rain was nothing to the ferrets. They scurried among the barakata corpses, bringing loot back in their teeth.
“Wonder how they’d carry heavy plate armor.”
“It’s just visual effects,” Bomber answered. “The loot goes into my inventory as soon as the ferret touches it.”
Everyone went up a few levels, even me, and Hiros hit 400. We took advantage of the breather to spend our stat points, then took down another pack of sixteen barakatas, and no more mobs came.
“I remember when Scyth took us to grind in the Mire,” Bomber said, happy as a clam. “It was right before the Arena, that time Axiom nearly wiped us out…”
“Come on, guys!” I cut in. “Let’s follow the edge of the safe zone round. It’ll probably take a while for the barakatas to respawn.”
Farming was always boring and routine. It was the way of the game – if you want progress, be ready for the monotonous process. But it would be a real sin for us to complain; we were leveling up thousands of times faster than ordinary players.
I only regretted that my Rindzin’s Ghostly Talon perk didn’t level up like Reaper’s Scythes. It was strategically better to have a permanently soulbound weapon. Maybe I should try and find the god Rindzin, Ruler of Dragons?
In the meantime, Reaper’s Scythes were leveling up so high that their bonus damage was already higher than the base damage:
Reaper’s Scythes, level 15
Soulbound to Scyth.
Divine scalable twin fist weapon.
Unique item.
Damage: 4,644–6,966.
Bonus damage: 6,966–10,449.
This weapon for harvesting impure souls was cast from celestial metal by Reaper himself, one of the ancient and powerful gods. Its haft was made from the first branch of the Primordial Tree of Life.
The spirits sealed inside have kindled within the weapon its own intelligence.
+10% chance to avoid deadly damage.
Special effect: The unspent lives of those killed by this weapon become sealed within it, increasing damage by 10% for every level of Reaper’s Scythes.
Sealed lives for next level: 441 / 1,500.
In our first lap around the edge of the safe zone, we encountered another seven packs of barakatas and ran into some spinners, colossal ranged dragonflies at least as big as a flyer that spat poison at us and kited us. So be it – ranged against ranged! I tanked and struck with Spirit Hammerfist to keep aggro, Crawler fired off bolts and fireballs, and it was as if Hiros, Crag and Bomber had agreed to level up Crossbows together.
The warriors only stepped in once – when the fattest dragonfly buzzed angrily in response to an attack from Crawler and launched itself at the gnome, brandishing a stinger-tipped tail and needle-like legs. The warriors rushed in and slice it into cabbage. Crawler got away with a light scare. Although my Path of Sacrifice kept him from taking damage anyway.
We quickly took down the spinners and went in search of more mobs.
There were no barakatas on the other side of the temple, but a dalezma had appeared. Without Destroying Plague Immortality, there was no way to kill it, and nothing to do but retreat; it was immune to both physical and magic damage.
Hiros reluctantly took a few steps back and suddenly stopped.
“Scyth-san, please allow Hiros to use Astral Fury,” he said. “With the help of your buff and Crag-san’s Nergal’s Fury, it might work!”
“Try it,” I shrugged. “We fought it last time with a big raid. Nothing could take it down.”
“I see its vulnerability,” the ninja said, and phased out of reality.
The dalezma stared at me, extended an antenna. Then the strange snail’s shell broke in half, freeing a powerful segmented tail. I started to kite the mob, and Crawler, Bomber and Crag moved behind me in preparation. The dalezma’s tail stretched out, curled to attack…
First Hiros’s invisible bolts whistled, then silence fell for a moment, and through the dalezma’s translucent flesh we saw invisible blades cutting out chunks of the boss’s flesh from the inside! The ninja’s monstrous damage didn’t continue for long – the scorpion tail fell, powerless, and the gigantic snail curled up and melted across the ground.
“Hey, Tommy!” Bomber shouted. “Can you hear us there in the astral plane?”
Nothing happened for twenty seconds except a few lines in our logs telling us of some mobs killed in the stone forest somewhere. Apparently, Hiros took no damage from Terrastera’s climate while in his other reality, which he took advantage of to take out another couple of spinners and a pack of barakatas.
“I’ll do the same again every half an hour,” came a voice by my ear. Turning, I saw the ninja taking shape again. He bowed: “Thank you for the opportunity, Scyth-san.”
In furious discussion of our synergy of Threats – not of my talent, but the combined boost to each other, – we returned to where we started farming. The mobs there had respawned, so we kept on grinding.
The hours we spent on Terrastera blended into a single moment. A significant notification flashed by in a stream of others:
You leveled up! Current level: 600.
5 free attribute points available!
Reached level 600!
Rank six is now available to your skills, abilities and crafts!
I had hit 600, and the boys were getting there. Unarmed Combat was improving, and my spirit along with it, but I had no need to use Clarity.
We talked plenty, especially when we realized that I could stand and tank several packs of barakatas at once for as long as we needed. Crag decided to move to our real-life base. It was silly to try and hide the place from him anyway – he had been there at the meeting when we first discussed the idea of moving to Cali Bottom. Hiros periodically disappeared into the woods, using his Astral Fury to gain a few more points in Daggers and Crossbows and a couple of character levels.
“What abo
ut the Inferno, Scyth?” Crawler asked while we were moving from spot to spot in search of mobs again.
“Once we finish up here, I’ll get a good night’s sleep and then head to Tuaf to find the Chief Councilman there. Although there is one problem, and I don’t know how to solve it yet.”
“What?”
“Flay says that to get to the Inferno, you have to die. How? You guys can’t deal damage to me, you’re my Subthreats. How else can we do it?”
Enemy of the Inferno (Disgardium Book #8): LitRPG Series Page 16