Chapter 170

Peishan knew it was hopeless. He didn’t have a tenth of the men he needed to stop a blood hunter swarm. The carrier demons could spit out thousands of them before they exhausted their reserves. Attacking the carriers directly was a losing strategy since only the strongest fighters could even hope to damage them. Even then, it was usually faster to kill the blood hunters and starve the carrier.

He’d known they weren’t likely to stop the outbreak when he’d ordered his men to rush to the farmhouse with all the wounded. They’d all known it. But they’d also all known the alternative was upwards of a dozen new blood hunters for each victim they claimed. The whole village was about to be massacred. In hindsight, they could have saved more people by evacuating the fighters from the village proper and telling them to flee.

By the time Peishan had realized that he’d made a tactical error, they were already half way there. He was just about to order the men to turn back when the foreigner blew past all of them. Cries of surprise went up, his own among them, and then the tall man was gone. A few seconds later, Luke impacted the carrier demon with an incredibly loud crash, made all the worse by the fact that the man actually knocked it back and caused the ground around it to crack and break.

“Gods Above,” one of his men whispered. “Are we sure he’s not a demon too?”

“If he is, we’re all fucked,” someone else said.

“We’re fucked anyway. What difference does it make?”

There was some truth to that. Regardless of either of the two foreigners, they’d stepped into a fight they didn’t have the manpower to win. But, for the first time since he’d realized the villagers had accidentally created a blood hunter bait pile, he wondered if they might make it out alive after all.

By the time they’d caught up with Luke, he was already fighting in the farmhouse to keep the injured villagers safe. He was chasing after a blood hunter that had reaped its harvest and was trying to return to the carrier.

“Kill those!” Peishan yelled to Luke. “If they get the blood back to the carrier worm, more hunters come out.”

The foreigner had probably already figured that out for himself, but it was good to make sure. That was the most important tactic for containing an outbreak anyway. If they were going to have any chance of surviving this, protecting the injured villagers and keeping the blood hunters from returning to the carriers with blood were the top priorities, and really, they were the same thing.

Peishan ordered his men into the house, where they put their weapons to good use as they spread out and protected various rooms. Slowly, they managed to relocate everyone to the main living area and start closing off doors to help reinforce the farmhouse. It wasn’t foolproof protection by any means since the blood hunters could and would break through wood if they needed to, but the demons also weren’t very smart. As long as a few openings were left for them to funnel themselves into, they would.

Things were going… Peishan wouldn’t say well, but the situation wasn’t getting worse. The Jigon-Sai was holding the farmhouse, and the foreigner was attacking the carrier demon. He might even kill the damn thing at the rate he was going, though Peishan didn’t think it was likely. At least Luke was killing blood hunters while he worked, and more importantly, his attack on the carrier was causing the smaller demons to focus on him and taking pressure off the farmhouse.

Those hopes were dashed when Luke went down under what had to be a hundred blood hunters piling on him. He knew from personal experience that they could punch through armor, and the stuff the foreigner was wearing had already been battered before this fight had even started. It looked like the man had been shot dozens of times with crossbows, just judging by how many holes it had. Once the blood hunters pinned him down, they’d eat him alive.

At least he’d killed way more than were going to be created using his blood. Peishan had been hoping for more, but it looked like they were all going to die here anyway.

Then the mound shifted and Luke burst out the side, sending blood hunters flying with mighty sweeps of his mace and vicious kicks as he strode out of the pile. He killed them, seven or eight every second, and the stupid demons just kept rushing in to bury him in numbers. It wasn’t that it was a bad tactic; it had probably worked on every single enemy they’d ever encountered, but the demons weren’t adapting to the threat of a single person so strong that they couldn’t physically hold him down.

That made sense to Peishan. Individuals like that would just survive the swarm, kill their share of blood hunters, and the thousands more that remained would find easier prey to use to replenish their numbers. Except here, they couldn’t. This was the kind of place they hit, swarmed over in a matter of minutes, and then retreated to their carrier to be safely transported through the earth to their next target.

Over the next minute, Luke was a blur. It was actually so distracting that Peishan had to shout warnings to his own men when they stopped to stare. Just because most of the blood hunters were focused on the battle around the carrier demon didn’t mean some weren’t still trying to attack their primary target.

“Hold that damn hallway!” Peishan ordered one of his men, a new recruit whose name escaped him at the moment. “It won’t matter if that carrier goes down if the blood hunters get in here and kill us all anyway!”

There was nothing they could do to affect the overall outcome of this battle, but they could stop the blood hunters from getting at the injured humans while that battle was raging outside. If the foreigner won, he would have living people to thank him at the end. If he lost, well, they’d be dead soon after.

* * *

Luke had to have killed at least a hundred blood hunters just since he’d triggered [Life Surge]. Hell, maybe it was two hundred. He couldn’t exactly keep track when they were on him so thick that they blotted out the sky. But for every one he killed, five more took its place.

It had turned into a running battle, him on the move just to get enough space to be able to see and them chasing him down. Every few seconds, the loop he was running took him close enough to the big silo-shaped demon and he’d smack it with a [Power Strike]. Those hits had torn giant chunks of flesh off it, which proved at least that it could be killed.

What he wouldn’t give for a few bombs right now. It was too bad Zea had exhausted most of her bag of tricks on that necromancer and his slave caravan. The tentacle ball would have done wonders for cleaning up blood hunters, and Luke was willing to bet if he dropped a bomb down the mouth of that carrier demon, it would fuck that thing right up.

Since he didn’t have that, Luke focused on what he could do. Thanks in large part to his latest boost to his stamina, Luke was a [Power Strike] machine. He could chain thirty of them in a row and still have the energy to keep fighting, and that was before considering [Life Surge]. Of course, factoring [Burst Step] into the equation made it a bit harder, since that was a fairly draining move on its own.

His primary concern was that there would still be hundreds of blood hunters in the air when [Life Surge] gave out, which even if he devoted himself completely to attacking them was looking like it’d be the case. He wished he knew if the carrier demon would just keep spewing them out indefinitely. One part of him thought that it would have to run out eventually. There was only so much room. The other part reminded him of all the bullshit magic stuff he’d already seen. Maybe it could just keep spewing them out forever. Maybe the only way to win this fight was to destroy the big stationary demon.

That Jigon-Sai guy probably knew. He seemed to know a lot about the demons, which Luke supposed just meant he was good at his job. Unfortunately, the only instruction he’d gotten was to not let the ones who were full of blood make it back to the carrier because that would cause more blood hunters to come out.

From his own observations, Luke knew that some blood hunters were going to come out regardless. They’d just come out faster if the carrier demon got a blood transfusion. That didn’t tell him whether they were limitless or not.

What it came down to was he needed to make a choice: kill as many blood hunters as he could or attack the thing that kept coughing them out in hopes that he could destroy it. It was so big that Luke wasn’t sure he could actually kill it, and while it was the source of the blood hunters, it wasn’t what was actually threatening people.

Luke made his choice and started attacking the demonic mosquitos directly instead of just defending himself from the ones that caught up. His kill rate instantly doubled, then doubled again as he leaped back into the cloud that was chasing him. [Twitch Reflexes] went nuts trying to keep up with all the attacks coming from every direction, but [Unarmed Martialist] and [Tactical Foresight] did a good job of keeping those attacks to a minimum by using blood hunters as shields against other blood hunters.

Over the next minute, he slaughtered hundreds of blood hunters. Every movement killed one or more, every swing swept through them and killed two or three. It didn’t stop them. It didn’t even slow them down much, except when the corpse piles got so big that they gave Luke a bit of cover.

When [Life Surge] ran out, Luke was ready for it. He transitioned into a more defensive stance and kept on fighting, and within another few minutes, he noticed that the numbers were thinning. They were no longer coming at him a dozen at a time and from all angles. In fact, there were only a few hundred left, evenly split between him and the farmhouse.

Luke mopped up his remaining targets and moved to the house to help clean that up too, but when he got there, the Jigon-Sai soldiers had already finished the job. It was strangely quiet now, more the absence of the overwhelmingly loud droning buzz than anything else. Luke could tell he wasn’t the only one who felt that way, judging by how nervous some of the soldiers looked when the last blood hunter died.

The captain stepped out the front door, looked around, and nodded. “I can’t believe you’re still alive,” he said. “I can’t believe any of us are still alive.”

“What about that thing?” Luke asked, gesturing towards the silo-shaped demon. It was almost completely horizontal from all the blows it had taken, but as far as Luke could tell, it was still alive.

The captain shook his head. “Nothing much we can do, not unless you want to bash it to death. It’s no threat unless someone walks into the mouth. It’ll retreat back underground as soon as it figures out that none of its bugs are coming back to feed it.”

“Does it just… die down there? Starve to death?”

“We don’t know,” the captain told him. “The carriers all look exactly alike. There’s no variation in color or size. Maybe there are only a handful of them that just keep coming back. Maybe there are hundreds.”

“Seems like we should kill it.”

“You can if you want. I’m ordering the rest of my men to return to the village to help finish securing it.”

“Oh shit, right,” Luke said. “I should get back there too. Just in case.”

Zea was probably fine. They’d had things under control when he left. What were the chances of shit going south?

“Yeah, I’m just going to… I’ll see you there? Right.”