The Fusionist Book 4 -- Chapter 56

Chapter 56

“They’re endless! Why are we doing this again?”

Larek looked at the shouting and complaining Drekkin group leader as he sliced through the neck of yet another Night Wolf, the familiar, black-furred monsters not looking too much different from the first time the Combat Fusionist had seen them back when he was traveling to Crystalview Academy. Even as the Wolf fell, Gharix spun and stabbed into the back of a second monster that was trying to sneak by to get to the Mages, activating the VEGS Fusions on his knives simultaneously. The Night Wolf suddenly exploded from the inside as whirling spheres of ice suddenly appeared among the inside of the monster’s abdomen, killing it instantly.

Despite the adept attacks and execution of the two Wolves, Larek could see that the pace they had set as they entered the main tunnel leading toward the Aperture was starting to wear him down. Not just him, but all the others were looking a little ragged, having fought near-constantly over the last few hours as they determinedly moved foot by foot down the passageway.

All except Larek, who was still in pretty good shape. It wasn’t just because his Body stat was much higher than theirs, which it was, but because he hadn’t needed to be anything but an additional long-range attacker for the most part. He had been physically attacked a few times over the course of their battles, but it was typically only by stragglers that managed to get through the front line of Drekkin and were easy enough to dispatch with his axe. It was those few times that he was able to use the Variable Elemental Gust Sphere +7 he had added to his best friend, and was further pleased at how effective and destructive it was.

But to say that it had been a challenge, for Larek at least, would be a lie. Having the six Drekkin with him had taken the responsibility of killing every single monster off his shoulders, meaning that he was holding up much better than them as a result.  An outsider might say that he was taking advantage of them or even using them as a shield against the hordes of monsters they fought… and they would be partially right. However, they would be discounting the fact that all of them, including the Mages who stayed out of any close-range combat, had gained something from the endeavor: Skill Levels.

In short, the constant fighting and use of their Skills, whether it was Bladed Weapon Expertise, Dodge, or even Body Regeneration when Abarcen had been temporarily overrun and suffered a number of bites to his lower legs by a cluster of Rabid Beavers or Spellcasting Focus and Mana Control when the Mages cast their hard-hitting spells, they had all gained Skill Levels faster than they ever had before. At least, that was what figured out as they excitedly shouted it out whenever it happened; Larek knew that his own prevalence for rapidly increasing his own Skill Levels was highly abnormal, but the Drekkin were getting better at something approaching his own prodigious rate.

But what did Larek get out of it? Unfortunately, he hadn’t increased any of his Skill since they had started fighting, as he was simply in the background using his staff to inflict long-range damage on the incoming groups of monsters. What he did get out of it was an absolutely disgusting amount of Aetheric Force – and that was only from the monsters he directly had a hand in damaging, if not killing outright.

Over 20,000 AF up to this point, and as the Drekkin group leader had stated, the monster hordes seemed endless; if they continued on for another few hours, he was sure he could double that amount, if not more. Unfortunately, his observations of their current exhausted state meant that the likelihood of them holding out was extremely low.

It was with good reason, of course, as their entry into the main tunnel had been fraught with one fight against relatively weak monsters after another. At first, the Drekkin had been almost excited to test themselves against their opponents, absolutely tearing through the Thorny Tumbleweeds, Shambling Zombies, Acidic Slimes, Slowgres, Vampiric Bats, and dozens of other monsters that were either ones that he’d seen elsewhere or were unfamiliar to him from his days at both Academies. Regardless of whether he knew what they were, they were all weak enough that even if the Drekkin hadn’t received the upgrades in the form of the Fusions they were using, they would’ve been perfectly capable of defeating a half-dozen of these groups back-to-back. They would likely be injured and exhausted afterwards, but they could do it.

Now, though, they had already fought at least 150 different groups of monsters over the last few hours, and it was weighing upon them. They had made forward progress, at least, which was a good thing since they were using hefty amounts of ambient Mana to power all of their Fusions almost constantly, and only by staying on the move could they stay ahead of the drain in the local Mana density. The latter was going to be important soon, as Larek had already seen a few of the Martials falter and their Automatic Ice Repulsion Fields were activating more and more frequently; any more frequently would mean that they would either start taking more wounds from the attacks or they would drain the Mana density dry.

Long story short, they needed a break.

Sadly, it wasn’t as if they could duck into a side passage and hole up somewhere for a few hours. For one, as he had told them before, the more monsters they killed now, the fewer would be able to rush back and defend the Aperture once they began to close it; halting their constant slaughter of the monsters heading down the tunnel would set them back significantly in that endeavor. Secondly, and most importantly, there weren’t really any side passages to enter in the first place, and even if they did, it was unlikely they would be left alone for long.

All of that meant Larek would have to find a way to give them the break they needed. With that decision made, he finally responded to Gharix’s question. “It’s necessary so that we don’t have to face them later!” he shouted at the Drekkin group leader. “But I agree, they feel like they’re endless right now because you’ve been fighting nearly nonstop for almost five hours, and you need a break! Once the last of these Wolves fall, I’ll take over!”

“What? No, you can’t—”

“Don’t worry, I’m more rested than any of you, so it isn’t that much of a hassle.” He figured he would be fine, especially since he hadn’t used any of special Fusions quite yet, as there hadn’t been any need.

The fact that there wasn’t more argument coming from any of the Drekkin only proved how tired they were, and as soon as the last Wolf was killed, they all practically collapsed in exhaustion where they stood. Meanwhile, the bodies of the shadow-formed Wolves disappeared, and the Aetheric Force that Larek gained from the fight filtered into his body. Looking ahead, he saw that the next group was approximately 2 minutes away from reaching them, which they’d found was around the standard distance in between monster hordes. It was also at this point where they would advance their progress in navigating their way down the tunnel, but for now the others had taken his advice and were getting some rest. They even began to pull out some food from some hidden pockets in their armor, quickly munching it down while they looked at Larek moving past them.

“What are you going to do?” Gharix asked.

He looked over his shoulder as he left the Drekkin sitting where they were. “I’m going to clear the way for an hour or so; use that time to rest up and rejuvenate, because we still have a few miles to go.”

“All by yourself—” Hakkin started to ask, but he cut himself off as Larek pulled an innocuous-looking stone from his belt pouch. “Never mind.”

He knew what the Weaken Fusion was, after all, or at least had heard Larek’s explanation of it.

The Combat Fusionist jogged forward approximately 100 feet before he stopped, prepared his staff to fire out of his left hand, and then slowly juggled the stone in his right. When he saw the approaching tightly packed horde of 300 Walking Skeletons – almost identical to the horde outside of Draverdin, which his Air Skimmer had bowled over – approach 200 feet away from his position, he threw the stone in his right hand. As it sailed in an arc away from him, he mentally activated the Weaken Fusion on it, making the stone extremely fragile.

Throwing has reached Level 14!

It wasn’t a perfect throw, he thought, as it was slightly to the right of where he had planned it going, but the resulting explosion as the Mana was released from the broken Fusion was more than satisfactory. Landing just to the right in the middle of the horde, the force of the detonation ripped apart dozens of the relatively fragile skeletons and sent their dark-grey colored bones flying out in a spray of shrapnel that destroyed or crippled dozens more.

Before the could even figure out what had happened, a second explosion rocked the left side of the horde, a result of a second Weaken stone that he had pulled out from his belt pouch a second after throwing the first. Even more of the Skeletons were destroyed by the force of the explosion, killing many of the ones that had been damaged from the first as they were caught by the second. He couldn’t tell exactly how many he had killed with the two Fusions, but he estimated it more than 100 of them, or just over a third of their total.

As much as he wanted to simply throw another Weaken stone, he limited himself to only two for the time being; if he was going to be killing these monsters for an hour, he was going to have to pace himself.

Running forward, he held his staff under his left arm as he used his left hand to aim it toward the disorganized Skeletons, and then activated a Mag 2 Flaming Ball Effect from the VREP Fusion. As he strafed it back and forth along the left-hand side of the Skeleton horde, he pulled out a Binding Thorns Fusion and gently tossed it toward the right-hand side. As it landed just ahead of the first ranks of Skeletons, it activated and was ready to go. The first of the undead monsters passed through its area of effect and triggered the roots that immediately emerged from the solid stone underneath their feet, wrapping around their legs. The thorns that sprouted and tore into them didn’t do too much as they didn’t have any flesh to bite into, but that didn’t matter; it was the strength of which they tightened around the fragile bones of the Skeletons that made all the difference as the first of the Skeletons had its legs shattered from the constriction of the roots. As it fell forward, the top half of the monster hit the ground, only to be crushed by the power of the additional roots that rose from the stone.

The best thing about it, however, was the fact that the walking undead were essentially mindless monsters, as none of them behind the first victim saw any reason to switch from their original heading, and so passed through the deadly Fusion without any thought to their own safety.

With a portion of his flank taken care of from the offensive Fusion, Larek didn’t stop as he waded into the depleted front ranks of the Walking Skeletons keeping his staff firing out balls of flame to his left while he pulled out his axe and treated the monsters ahead of him as a forest of trees that needed to be felled. Chopping left and right with his best friend held in his right hand, the Combat Fusionist cut them apart with great speed and very little actual combat technique, as it wasn’t really needed. The Walking Skeletons were numerous, but they were actually rather fragile, so all it took was a single swipe of his axe to sever their spine, where they fell in pieces to the ground – but Larek didn’t stop to finish them off. He kept wading through their reassembled ranks, destroying them as quickly as possible with a rapid stream of Flaming Balls and incessant strikes by his Logging tool.

Before he knew it, he found nothing else standing up to slice apart, and he turned around to see the devastation he had wrought behind him. With a little more than 100 dead in the original Weaken Fusion explosions, another two dozen were killed by his Binding Thorns, while at least another 100 were burnt to death or had suffered from a force impact by the Flaming Balls. That left another 60 or so he had personally chopped in half – and their upper halves were now doing their darnedest to crawl toward him with just their hands. Putting his axe away, he took the staff out from under his left arm and held it with both hands in order to aim a little better.

That’s when he switched to a Mag 4 Water Stream and used it to drill through the heads of the crawling Skeleton torsos, which finished them off completely. Once they were dead, he jogged over to where Binding Thorns was located, turning it off from a distance, picked up the Fusion, and placed it back in his pouch. As he looked back at the astonished Drekkin, who had temporarily paused in their consumption of a snack, he realized that only a little over a minute had passed from the start of the battle to the end. That meant that he had some extra time to move forward, advancing further down the tunnel.

“Catch up to me when you’ve rested enough!” he shouted at them as the Aetheric Force from the slain Skeletons finished being absorbed by his body, before turning his sights on the next group of monsters. He could seem them a distance down the passageway, and he jogged forward to get closer to them. Once he was close enough to identify them as Pinchy Crabs, which were 2-foot-tall, 4-foot-wide, black-shelled crabs with sharp and powerful claws, he pulled out another Weaken stone and threw it, followed quickly by a second. The Crabs weren’t as clumped together as the Skeletons had been, but the explosions still killed at least two dozen of the Crabs – which wasn’t too bad, considering that there were only about 50 of them in the first place.

From there, he had to experiment with his attacks, as Flaming Balls weren’t as effective against their shells, now were Icy Spikes. In the end, he used Water Stream at Magnitude 6 to effectively punch through their hard shells to damage their insides from a distance. Thankfully, a Frozen Zone Fusion was super effective against them as their insides froze and cracked their shells from the inside, making them practically burst in response to the freezing cold of the offensive Fusion’s Effect.

It took an extra minute to finish off the Pinchy Crabs when compared to the previous Skeletons, but it was still fast enough to give him some time to move down the tunnel…

…before starting all over again with another set of monsters.

Larek managed to progress a total of 2 miles down the tunnel by himself over the next hour, when the Drekkin finally caught up, appearing refreshed and even chuckling amongst themselves when they saw how far the Combat Fusionist had gone. After watching him absolutely devastate the monsters he faced, most of the awe and disbelief had faded, leaving them to simply take it all in stride. Considering that they could now do many of the same things, Larek could tell that they now had something to prove as they ran ahead of him to engage the next group of monsters, leaving Larek behind for a moment as he caught his breath.

It wasn’t so much that he was physically tired, as he barely felt like he had done much melee fighting when compared to the Drekkin Martials. But the constant battles, despite the satisfaction of receiving just as much AF fighting solo as he had gotten while in the group, was tiring on his mind. He needed to stop for a few minutes and regroup his thoughts, before joining them again.

Once he joined them, he jumped straight into his previous role as a long-range attacker, which helped to return his equilibrium after being so focused on large-scale combat for the last hour. Eventually, he began throwing one of his Weaken stones into the groups of monsters to help thin their numbers before the others engaged, which was fairly accurate now that he had increased his base Throwing Skill up to Level 18 over the last hour.

Throwing has reached Level 15!

…..

Throwing has reached Level 18!

Over the next two hours, they fought and continued to progress down the tunnel, killing thousands of monsters in the process. About an hour into the battles, Larek took a more active role to reduce the stress on the others, because he could tell that – despite their break – they were already starting to suffer from exhaustion. It helped to spread the work around with him on the front lines, where he could use both his staff and his axe to great effect, though all of them were getting overly tired by the time they finished their latest monster group, only to look up and see… nothing.

It wasn’t nothing, per se, but for once, they couldn’t see another monster horde moving toward them. Instead, distracted as they were by the progress they were making down the tunnel, they arrived in front of a completely dark tunnel, which had been marked earlier on Gharix’s map as being unexplored, and which had been the source of the monsters as they streamed and attacked Larek and the Drekkins. Now, though, there was only silence and not a sign of any others emerging.

“What’sss going on?” Pyluxa asked, the weariness in her voice as she spoke matching what everyone else was feeling at that point.

It only took the others a moment to realize what the stoppage of more monsters attacking them meant.

“They know we’re here,” Gharix said softly, but it was loud enough that the others easily heard the group leader, which prompted Larek to nod in agreement. “And they’re inviting us in.”

“Well, we don’t want to be rude, so let’s go say hello, shall we?”