Chapter 100

At first, he had a hard time picking the thing out of the background, but eventually it stepped away from the trees. It was shaped like a man, but eight feet tall. Long, spindly arms made great, ponderous swings with each step it took. If Luke had to describe it, he would have said it was a skeleton made of sticks, packed with dirt to give it mass and bound together in a layer of vines.

He would put it at level 26 at best, based on the XP he could feel from it. Assuming it didn’t have any abilities to hide its strength, Luke thought he could take it. He was level 30, but he was also sitting on 2 levels of AP that he’d been saving for rank 2 [Life Surge]. Effectively, that brought him down to 28 and made the fight a lot closer.

Fortunately, he no longer needed to make judgment calls like that. A simple use of [Analyze] gave him plenty of information to gauge how threatening the stick monster was.

[Name: Lesser Guardian of Nature]
[Level: 26]
[Strength: 31]
[Agility: 22]
[Stamina: 50]
[Perception: 8]

He was pleased to see he’d been dead on with his guess at its level, and also to know that he was stronger and faster. Less pleasing was that monstrous amount of stamina, especially considering how it looked like it would break apart under his own weight. But as long as it didn’t have any weird tricks, he was confident he could beat it.

What he wasn’t confident about was the idea that he’d fight it one-on-one. More squirrels were showing up, and even though they were all the normal kind so far, that stick monster just screamed, ‘druid.’ He’d bet his hat there was at least one around. At least, he would if he still owned a hat.

Ideally, he’d put down the stick monster quickly, before any of the squirrels got a chance to reinforce it. 50 stamina told him that wasn’t likely to happen. With its agility so much lower than his, Luke thought he might just end up running around fighting squirrels while the damn thing chased him.

The lesser guardian of nature staggered forward, its movements somehow awkward and jerky despite its high agility. Each step flung it at Luke, its ground-eating stride at odds with its preposterous movements. He watched it approach and idly wondered what a greater guardian would look like. If he was lucky, he’d never have to find out.

One part of him wanted to rush forward and meet the stick monster’s charge, but he’d gained a ton of experience in the fine art of beating shit to a pulp over the last few months, and with [Tactical Foresight] working overtime in the back of his brain, he recognized this as his chance to gain useful information about how it moved before the dangerous part started.

It seemed like it should fall over with each step, but it didn’t. That had to be a function of its strength and agility holding it upright despite how uncoordinated it was, which was a bit of a brain buster. How could something have both high agility and move like that?

Despite its clumsy, lurching gait, the stick monster closed the gap within seconds of appearing. Luke ducked under its approximation of a hand, which resembled nothing so much as a bundle of twigs that had been dropped in a pigpen and rolled around a bit. He wasn’t fooled by its fragile appearance. With a strength of 31 behind that swing, it could rend through brick easily.

Luke swung his mace at its hip. He was hoping to tear the leg clean off, but he wasn’t expecting it. More likely, he’d just knock it down and it would remain in one piece. Either way, it was going to be the start of his plan to lead it on a merry chase while he dealt with all the squirrels that were, for the moment, still spectating.

The mace cracked into the mud-filled stick framework as planned, and then things went wrong. It didn’t break anything, didn’t even budge the monster. Instead, it skipped off the mud, not even tearing a furrow through it, and left Luke open for a counter attack.

[Twitch Reflexes], [Unarmed Martialist], and [Tactical Foresight] all started screaming at the same time, warning him to get away. The skills guided his feet into a pivot then turned into a roll as he dove clear of the monster just in time to avoid its rising leg and descending arm. Both attacks missed him by a hair, if that. They were far too fast for its supposed agility, and Luke quickly backed out of its range as it pursued him.

“Something fucky’s going on with you,” he told the monster. It was far faster than its agility said it should be, and he suspected it was more durable than it should be as well. He had known going in that he’d have to work to lay the hurt down on the stick monster, but his attack shouldn’t have just bounced off of it like that.

It wasn’t hard to think of a likely culprit. He’d already seen plenty of evidence of skills that could debuff enemies, and it seemed like someone the system labeled as a druid might very well have some skills or spells that went the other direction. Zea would probably know, and System could definitely tell him, but he didn’t have the time to ask right now, not with the monster in pursuit.

The only thing going right so far was that the squirrels hadn’t made a move to do anything other than observe. Then again, it wasn’t like they needed to. Luke had lost the first round, by his estimate. He’d scored the only hit, but it hadn’t been strong enough to do any damage. [Power Strike] might be able to overcome that thing’s defenses, but he doubted he could chain enough of them to kill it before he was completely exhausted himself.

Worst case, there was always the fallback option of spending his AP mid-fight. No matter how tough that thing was, he was pretty sure if he buffed his strength up 30 points, that monster would feel it when he smacked it around. That wasn’t what he was supposed to be using that AP for, though.

The monster came back in, arms flailing wildly while Luke dodged around it. Every now and then, he parried an attack, just to test the monster’s strength. It certainly didn’t seem stronger than him, at least. Perhaps he’d misjudged how effective its stamina was at warding off damage, or he’d managed to choose some random point where its defenses were reinforced by some sort of skill.

There was only one way to find out. He could probably smack it on its face, such as it was, without jumping, but only if he went for a one-handed overhead swing. That wasn’t conducive for channeling the strength of his whole body into the attack, so Luke opted to slip under its clubbing arm attacks, take a step past, and then turn his pivot into a full-body, [Power Strike] reinforced swing.

The mace cracked into the monster’s back and hurled it face forward into the ground. At the same time, there was an explosion of wood in the forest beyond the squirrels, and Luke’s weapon was flung up and back so hard that he actually left the ground to keep his hands on it. The lesser guardian was somehow unharmed and already rolling over with its long, gangly limbs sticking out at weird angles.

It was back on its feet before Luke could recover, and rushed in with a single bounding step to drive its twig-hand directly into his chest. Pain flared through him and he thought he felt his sternum crack as he was flung backwards.

“Definitely fucky,” he wheezed, skidding to a stop twenty feet away. The squirrels still hadn’t moved, and he was beginning to suspect that wasn’t because they were enjoying the show. He’d hit the stick monster as hard as he could, and it wasn’t even a little bit injured. But it sure as fuck sounded like a God damn tree had exploded a few hundred yards in the forest, possibly with about as much force as a man with 42 strength enhanced by a skill could deliver in a single stroke.

And if that were the case, that would mean the squirrels were there to keep him out of the forest, which meant he was playing a sucker’s game standing around fighting their monster. The only way he was winning this fight was to figure out what bullshit they’d cooked up behind enemy lines and break it.

Luke turned his back on the stick monster and sprinted for the tree line. The squirrels reacted immediately, all of them boiling out of the woods in numbers far greater than he’d seen and moving to intercept him. That was fine. There were only a hundred of them, no big deal.

The front line of the squirrel wave met him while the lesser guardian of nature chased after, and Luke’s answer to that was simple. He jumped as high and as far as his stats would let him go, which turned out to be about twenty feet into the air and fifty feet forward before he crashed into the trees.

“Wooooo!” he screamed in exhilaration. “Holy shit, that was awesome!”

He’d have to do that again when he had more room and less monsters wanting to kill him nearby. For now, he had something else to take care of. The trailing squirrels hadn’t quite made it out of the trees before he arrived, and they instantly changed direction to attack him.

They didn’t stand a chance individually, and he was fast enough to kill them as they closed in. It honestly might have been easier without the mace and just relying on [Unarmed Martialist] to move his body against them. He certainly didn’t need the weapon when a single blow would kill any of his opponents.

But he was already holding it, so he might as well put it to good use. They died by the dozens in the first three seconds, most of them never even reaching him. Luke heard so many damn dings in his head that it started to drown out everything else, which was a bit of a problem since he was specifically listening for them coming at him from behind. [Peripheral Awareness] only did so much to keep them off his back, after all.

The back edge of the squirrel swarm crashed into him, and that’s when things started to hurt. When they were all coming from more or less the same direction, he’d done a damn good job of crushing them. Once they started attacking from multiple angles, that got a lot harder, but he’d at least kept himself clean even if his kill rate had slowed down.

After they surrounded him completely, that became impossible. He had them hanging off his arms, his back, even one stubbornly clutching his hair, and all of them attempting to scratch, claw, or bite him to death. For the most part, their efforts were painful but not debilitating. His stamina was just too high for them to casually chew through his skin.

What they could do, and did, was keep him pinned down long enough for the stick monster to catch up. It burst through the tree line in a shower of exploding splinters and squirrels as it stormed through its own allies to reach Luke. He casually swatted aside a furry corpse heading straight for his face.

The squirrel folk had set their trap well, as long as they didn’t care how many of their brethren they sacrificed to keep him pinned in place. He couldn’t kill their monster with whatever magic they were using on it, and he couldn’t get away from it with all the smaller squirrels throwing themselves into the wood chipper to slow him down.

It looked like he was going to need to use his backup plan after all.