Chapter 31

Luke hit the trail at full speed and sprinted towards the battle. Some smaller elementals had already formed, but he didn’t have time to take care of them. Instead, he wove a path through and rushed headlong towards the giant elemental up the pass.

The ground shook beneath him, and he felt a growing knot of dread in his stomach as he closed the distance. There was the normal feeling of encountering something with significantly higher XP than him, but there was another facet to it this time. He was charging into a fight he had no chance of winning in hopes of saving the person he’d spotted.

There was every chance that he’d die in the next few minutes. He’d meant to be much stronger, strong enough to fight the giant elemental by himself, before he confronted it. He’d also planned on killing it at that time, but that wasn’t necessary today. He just needed to get the other person free, to distract it long enough for them to both run.

Luke approached the fight just in time to see the jumbo elemental form a third arm out of its earthy mass and slam it down. The human it was targeting leaped to the side and swung his sword in an upwards two-handed grip. The blade carved a chunk of dirt out of the arm, but that didn’t slow the elemental down at all.

Unlike the smaller elementals Luke had been fighting, the big one wasn’t man-shaped. It was more like a sentient, mobile hill that flowed across the ground and had something vaguely resembling a face on one slope. It formed limbs out of its central mass that lashed out like boneless tendrils and disappeared back in just as quickly. He’d never seen it make more than three at a time, but he didn’t trust that to be a hard limit.

Luke rushed in and put his full strength behind the first attack. He even infused it with [Power Strike], just because the elemental didn’t appear to have noticed him and he wasn’t sure when he’d get another cheap shot in. The mace whistled through the air for a brief instant before a massive boom echoed down the pass.

Literal tons of dirt, sand, and stones blew out the side of the elemental, briefly giving him a view all the way through its mass. He had a second to see the stupefied expression on the other human’s face before the elemental condensed its body down to fill the hole, losing a full six feet of its height in the process.

Luke was about to wind up for another swing when a new arm formed directly in front of him and pushed straight forward. He was knocked clear off his feet and tumbled through the air to land a good twenty feet away, a blow that he managed to absorb thanks mostly to his high agility. He was back in the fight immediately, and quickly learned that his assumption about the number of arms the elemental could form being higher than three was correct.

It didn’t seem to have omnidirectional senses though. Arms lashed out more or less randomly, some completely off-target and others easily dodged or blocked. Then the elemental’s face popped out of the dirt half way up and its attacks became far more coordinated, forcing Luke to give ground and work harder to stay ahead of the flailing limbs.

The stranger took advantage of the fact that Luke had gained its attention and started carving chunks out of the back end, or at least that’s what Luke assumed from the noises he heard. Within seconds, the face dissolved back into a featureless slope and he saw new arms sprouting from the other side of the elemental.

He got in a few powerful strikes, though none as heavy as his initial one that used an actual skill to enhance the blow, then the stranger yelled something just moments before the face reappeared on Luke’s side. That forced him to switch his tactics again to a more defensive mindset, but allowed the other human to go ham on the elemental’s ass.

Luke had no idea what language the other guy was speaking. It definitely wasn’t English, and it didn’t sound like anything he was familiar with either. It was a bit disappointing to confirm that he wouldn’t be able to talk to other humans without picking up some sort of language skill, but not really surprising.

When it spun back around, he yelled out his own warning. They quickly figured out what the yelling meant and after that, it got a lot easier to predict when the elemental was switching sides. Unfortunately, that didn’t do much to kill it. It just pulled up more material from the ground to replace lost body mass, and they were hard pressed to stay ahead of its regeneration.

Luke thought they’d wear it down eventually, assuming their stamina could last long enough, but he recognized that it was going to be a long, long battle. He allowed himself to be cautiously optimistic that, combined with the other human, they would win. Then [Peripheral Awareness]caught movement behind him and he saw four of the regular-sized earth elementals approaching him.

“Shit,” Luke swore. The jumbo elemental was facing the other way, which meant Luke could disengage from it, but if he wasn’t putting pressure on the big guy’s ass, it would be free to focus completely on the stranger. The guy had survived for at least a few minutes before Luke showed up to help, so hopefully he could manage thirty or forty seconds.

Luke broke free of the jumbo and spun in place to meet the smaller elementals. It was easy enough to chop them down; he’d been doing it for a while anyway and he was a significantly higher level than them. Two or three quick blows targeted at vulnerable joints was enough to break them to pieces. The notification dings sounded in his mind, one-two-three-four, and he spun back to the big guy.

Then he realized that more elementals were forming all around them. There were three coming out of the cliff face to his left, two more crawling out of the ground right next to the big guy, and three over on the stranger’s side. No doubt there were dozens more drawn to the fighting but not in sight yet.

Luke knew his own limits. He knew he could manage four more Power Strikes before he was so exhausted that he wouldn’t be able to flee. What he didn’t know was whether four would be enough to put the jumbo down. If it wasn’t, he’d be fucking himself over completely.

“I don’t know if you can understand me,” Luke yelled, “but now would be a good time to run away!”

The stranger shouted something back, none of which Luke got. Trying to play a game of charades while they were fighting for their lives didn’t seem like a winning proposition, so Luke resigned himself to plan B: beating the everloving fuck out of a sentient, malevolent hill, then grabbing the other guy and dragging him along while he made a break for it if the elemental didn’t die.

He lined up his first [Power Strike] and let it loose on the elemental. Before it could even shift to face him, he hammered it with a second one. Loose dirt and stone rained down across the pass, and the elemental lost a good ten feet off its height. By the time it shifted its face to see him, Luke was already in the air, mace raised overhead and held in both hands, and ready to unleash the third blow.

It came down hard on the elemental’s face, blasting its features to pieces and tearing another huge chunk out of its body. Luke rode the attack all the way down to the ground and left a gaping fissure in his wake. The elemental itself fell forward, trying to rebuild itself and losing more of its size in the process.

Luke had one more in him. He knew he did, but when he tried to pull on the skill, it didn’t respond. Wearily, he realized that doing four of them in a row was not the same as doing four of them in a minute, and that despite his earlier tests, he’d overestimated how far his stamina could carry him.

The elemental was much smaller now, more of a fat, squished hill than a looming monstrosity, but it wasn’t dead and he wasn’t in much of a position to follow up with another attack. Fortunately, the other guy had been holding onto a trump card too, and he unleashed it while the elemental was still recovering.

The elemental rocked forward and a rolling wave of dust and dirt washed over Luke. He coughed and stumbled back a few steps, momentarily off-guard. Thankfully, not-so-jumbo was no longer in any condition to follow up. Whatever the stranger was doing, it was carving huge chunks out of the elemental.

And then, so abrupt that Luke wasn’t even sure when it happened, the hill collapsed into a pile of loose dirt that rolled out in every direction. A ding sounded in his mind, signifying the end of the fight. Or rather, he realized grimly, the end of the biggest of the elementals, but not the many smaller ones approaching. Normally, Luke would have regarded them as easy XP. Right now, he really needed to take a five-minute breather. When the first one reached him, he swatted it away, but he barely had enough strength left in his arm to send it tumbling backwards when his attack would normally have broken into rubble.

The stranger didn’t look like he was in much better condition. In fact, he was down on one knee, leaning on his sword to stay upright. “Hey, we can’t stay here,” Luke said. He knew the guy wouldn’t understand the words, but he hoped the tone would convey the meaning.

He jabbed a hand down the trail back into the valley. “Come on, we’ve got to go.”

The elementals closed in on them, but together, the two of them stumbled their way through. Luke pushed aside anything that they couldn’t get around, and after a few tense minutes, they outran the small elementals and rounded the boulder that marked the end of the trail.

“Okay,” Luke said between breaths. “I think we’re safe now. They don’t ever seem to come past here. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to get a bit farther away though.”

The man regarded him blankly, then said something in that strange language of his. He pointed at Luke, first at his coat, then his pants and his shoes. “What?” Luke said. “Yeah, I guess you wouldn’t know what denim is? Why?”

Luke idly wondered what kind of materials humans used on Aros. He only had the goblins to judge off of, and he hoped that their crafting techniques left something to be desired. Then again, considering that the system just dumped knowledge into their heads, maybe it was a lack of material that held them back.

Or maybe they just didn’t care, considering the human in front of him was wearing some sort of combination of cotton and leather, with actual metal armor over top of it. The armor itself was stamped with some kind of symbol, a circle made up of a bunch of different colored lines woven around each other. The same symbol was set into the crossguard of his sword. He’d had a cloak once upon a time, but it was so torn up now that it barely hung down to his waist.

The man kept jabbering, but now it sounded more like he was talking to himself than to Luke. “Uh, dude. You okay there?”

The muttering stopped, and the man forced himself upright. He lifted his sword, regarded Luke grimly, and then lunged forward, point first.