* Chryla – I suggest you pull everyone back to the village and reorganize your defenses; the Beasts broke through the perimeter and several Rangers are already retreating. Although they are holding the line here at the secondary entrance, I don’t know how long that will last. And I’m sorry to say, two of your fellow Rangers didn’t make it as a result of the breakthrough. *
The young Ranger sucked in her breath at the last thing Sandra said. “Who was it?”
* It was Grehre and Lowan. *
She sobbed once, briefly wiped her eyes, and then straightened up before announcing, “Spread the word. We’re going to pick the others up and retreat back to the village.”
Sandra did her part and let those fighting the Slimes know that help was on the way and that they would be retreating soon. All of them sighed in relief and started fighting even harder, using all of their stored supplies and energy with impunity. Flashes of fire, light, and even shards of ice accompanied the remaining bolts as they shot out from their compound bows, shearing through Slime bodies, and shattering their nuclei with unerring accuracy. Just as they were all running out of all available projectiles, the others arrived and took over with efficiency, looking like they practiced the maneuver. When the Slimes had been beaten back nearly to their entrance, everyone retreated in good order, climbing on the backs of their Wyvines as they raced back to their village.
The Slimes and Beasts still kept streaming out of their entrances for another 5 minutes, getting larger and deadlier-looking as time went on as they chased the Elves out of the forest. The last Dungeon Monster from each of the Cores that stomped or rolled out of their dungeons appeared to be some sort of “Boss” Monster because of their size and sheer presence.
From the Beast-Classification dungeon, a monstrous bulk of a Beast strode out on two legs, reaching at least 50 feet tall and half of that wide. It had long, shaggy fur that had a greenish tint to it, which covered its chest and four arms; its head, though, was strangely hairless and the skin was a tree-trunk brown, wrinkled as if with age. Three glowing green eyes were centered over its mouth which comprised nearly half of its head, full of dozens of sharp teeth likely capable of shredding one of the Elephants she saw earlier without too much trouble. On the end of each of its arms was a four-fingered hand that had foot-long claws extending from them.
Sandra watched it stride forward on massive legs and was almost immediately blocked by a tree in its way. A casual swipe of its right-side claws was all it took to slice entirely through the tree’s trunk, which was then knocked out of the way so that the massive Beast could advance. The way it acted, Sandra got the feeling that it considered the tree to be no more than a minor annoyance, and swept it away just as easily as the Dwarven villagers harvested the wheat they were growing.
Another few measured strides and another tree was knocked out of the way, which made her assume that the Beast was relatively slow; however, after seeing it move, she realized that it was extremely fast and it was only because it was impeded by trees that it wasn’t at the forest’s edge already. She was proven right after a fifth and then a sixth tree was chopped down and knocked out of the way, when the 50-foot-tall Beast decided that it had enough of the delay and just charged ahead; it slammed into everything in its way and cracked tree trunks while rebounding off unhurt, before squeezing through wherever it could.
As for the Slimes, their “Boss” monster was unlike its smaller brethren. Those tended to be relatively blob-like, spherical or ovoid-shaped gelatinous masses that moved by rolling forward with a nucleus that basically counted as a brain inside of it. Some were larger and could extend parts of themselves out like long arms, some had multiple nuclei that had to all be destroyed to kill them, and even some had abnormal properties to them that were nearly elemental in nature. However, this Slime barely looked like a Slime at all based on its shape when it finally emerged.
While it rolled out like a 40-foot-wide dark-green Slime, as soon as it touched the outer part of the entrance it transformed. No longer a gelatinous ovoid shape, it suddenly shrunk in places, grew larger in others, and extended itself so that it was longer. When it was done, it looked like an 80-foot-long gelatinous lizard with hardened claws and teeth and 12 different nuclei inside of its form. Oh, and it had wings.
Uh, oh. That’s not good.
“What? What’s not good,” Winxa asked worriedly.
Uh…nothing. Just a big boss slime that looks difficult.
“Don’t give me that, just tell me what it is.”
Sandra hesitated before describing it because she had a feeling about what it was she was seeing, and watched as all the color left the Dungeon Fairy’s cheeks. “That-that sounds like a Dragon Slime!”
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking, too.
Winxa had a thing about dragons, so Sandra hadn’t wanted to tell her – but the Dungeon Core wasn’t going to deliberately keep it from her. Without another word, a portal opened in her Home room and the Fairy disappeared while a scream started to emerge from her tiny body, obviously scared enough about dragons to want to leave the entire realm for a time.
Moments later, she was back, looking a little more composed. “It’s ok, it’s ok – it’s just a slime. Nothing to worry about,” Winxa was muttering to herself.
While she didn’t have anything to worry about, the Elven village certainly did. There was enough space near the dungeon’s entrance to allow the Dragon Slime to lift off the ground with large beats of its wings, and when it gained enough altitude it glided forward towards the edge of the forest and the village beyond. When it got to the edge, it stopped and gently set down right past the treeline for some reason. It was confusing at first, when she realized it was waiting.
The Elves had already escaped the forests and were currently holed up in their village, getting ready for the inevitable assault, so the Dragon Slime wasn’t waiting for them. No, it was waiting for the rest of the Slimes to arrive – just like the Beasts across the way were waiting just past the treeline for the rest of their number to gather, including the massive 50-foot-tall beast that could chop down trees like it was harvesting crops. It took nearly 15 minutes for them all to arrive, but when they did they…sat there, unmoving. Both the Slimes and Beasts were unnaturally still, as if waiting for some sort of signal to attack. It was both strange and worrying.
Are you absolutely sure they cannot communicate with each other? Because this seems entirely too coordinated for simple coincidence.
Winxa just shrugged, still a little shaken at the mention of the Dragon Slime. “There shouldn’t be, but then again I’ve been wrong before when it comes to some things around you.”
She took that to mean that they certainly were working together, despite the fact that they shouldn’t be. It was bad enough if they were going to be attacking the Elven village one at a time, or even staggering their attacks, but if they were coordinating their efforts, the whole situation went from bad to worse.
Great…just great.
Chapter 31
* Chryla, I don’t know how they’re doing it, but I’m convinced these Dungeon Cores are working together. I’m readying some transportation in case you have to flee. *
That…wasn’t good. Chryla had thought that it might have just been coincidence that they both emerged from their dungeons around the same time, though from what she was seeing she couldn’t help but agree with Sandra. It seemed impossible and she hadn’t heard of anything like that before, even in legend; there was no denying that something was up, though, and the strange way that both hordes of beasts and slimes were just frozen into inaction had to be an indication that there was coordination of some sort. Unfortunately, that inaction didn’t last long, as a minute after she and the other remaining Rangers got prepared to defend their village.
She briefly thought about Grehre and Lowan and their sacrifice as both hordes of monsters streamed forward at the exact same time, though it wasn’t a full-out rush. Instead, the entire group stayed relativel
y together, moving slow enough that the slowest members of each horde could keep up. It showed an intelligence that she wouldn’t have thought possible before she created the bond with Sandra, which just made the situation even more frightening.
She checked her bow again for the twentieth time, a nervous habit she couldn’t quite break. Not that there was anything she had to check on it, because the “string” was technically a line of invisible Spirit energy, but she couldn’t help herself when she became nervous. To take her mind off the hundreds of monsters headed their way, she looked around at their defenses, nodding when she saw that everything seemed as prepared as it was going to get.
They all returned with fewer Wyvines than they had when the day started, after losing 10 of them in the breakout from the dungeon entrances. Still, the 32 remaining weren’t something to just brush off, as they could be extremely deadly when they worked together as a team. In addition, 60 of their overly loud, spinning blade constructs from Sandra had been destroyed by the beasts, but they still had 60 left to help defend the root wall they had grown the day before, which were split up between either the northwestern or southeastern sections, where the monsters were coming from.
They also had a handful of metal snakes that Sandra had provided which had done awesomely against the slimes, but they were few and far between now; the 5 they had left were now hiding in the field around their village outside of the walls, so that they could strike and attack anything that got close enough to threaten their wall. Beyond them were more roots that were sharpened at one end that stuck out of the ground at an angle, making a defensive circle that would hopefully do some damage; if not, it would hopefully slow down their enemies enough that they could attack them.
Then, of course, were Chryla and the rest of the Rangers. Their new bows that Sandra provided were extremely powerful and could shoot up to 500 feet away and perhaps beyond, but even their skills in shooting had trouble being accurate in anything farther than 300 feet – and that was pushing it even then. To ensure they hit what they were aiming at, the root spears were placed about 200 feet out from the root wall, signaling to the Rangers when it would be ideal to shoot. Fortunately, there was no real worry about running out of bolts because Sandra had provided thousands of them, though there were only about 50 explosive ones for each of them – though Chryla had at least twice that at her disposal.
Not because she thought she was special, but she had recently learned how to manipulate her Fire energy to enhance the size and power of the explosion caused when the bolts impacted something. It wasn’t world-changing or anything, but she estimated that she could double the effectiveness of the explosive bolts at the cost of about 5% of her Fire energy. It was expensive, but the red orb embedded in her palm helped it to regenerate quite quickly, as well as the external one hanging around her neck. Unless she drained it unthinkingly, she could fire another enhanced explosive bolt every minute without suffering any loss to her normal energy levels.
The others all had something special to add to their attacks, though how effective they were depended on what they were attacking. Some were more suited for beasts as opposed to slimes, where the opposite was true for others, so they had already separated themselves so that they were attacking what they were most effective against. Chryla could utilize her explosive abilities with either and be effective, so she was positioned in between the two approaching forces.
At about 250 feet away from their root wall, the measured pace of the two hordes suddenly broke as they rushed forward, surprising her and the other Rangers for a moment, but they were prepared for whatever surprises they had in store. The beasts on her right smashed into the root spears without even trying to avoid them, leading with a trio of large grey monsters with long noses and what appeared to be hard bony armor covering their bodies. Their weight and protection snapped the roots off at their bases, leaving the way clear for the others to follow behind.
That would’ve been a minor disaster if they hadn’t been ready for it. At the first sign of the charge, four Elves popped up on top of the wall and flung out their hands and their Natural energy, regrowing the root spears just as a wave of more vulnerable beasts slammed into them, impaling themselves on the sharp defenses. Dozens were trapped on the spears and died, but because it took a few seconds for the beasts to disappear and free up the defense to impale others, the spears didn’t kill as many as they’d hoped.
She and her fellow Rangers weren’t about to allow them to get any farther though as 20 bows released their projectiles, many with some sort of additional elemental effect, at the initial wave of the grey armored monsters that broke through originally, her own explosive bolt slamming right into one’s forehead before exploding in spectacular fashion. The impact and extra power was able to both shatter the bony plate protecting its brain and shove the fragments of bone inside, killing it near instantly. The other two went down as well, their legs filled with bolts that burned, froze, poisoned, or otherwise severely damaged their limbs.
She looked over to the other side of the field and saw that the slimes were just now getting to the root spears and using their amorphous bodies to squeeze through without harm, melting the roots with their acidic nature. However, another four of their villagers popped up onto the wall and sent out their Natural energy towards their defensive line. The root spears regrew inside of many of the slimes trying to slide through unharmed, at least half of them piercing their vulnerable nuclei and causing them to dissolve into death. Even with 50 of their number destroyed in that manner, many more made it through unscathed and more followed right after even as their brethren died.
She shot her next bolt joining 21 other Rangers aiming at the slimes, a normal projectile this time while she waited to use her Fire energy again. She managed to score a lucky strike as the bolt sped into the middle of a 3-foot-wide green blob of acidic goo and pierced its fist-sized nucleus. More than half of the others managed the same feat, though a few others had some additional effects that helped to slow them down. One slime was half-frozen from a bit of a Water-based spell being cast on their bolt before it was shot, while another was being eaten from the inside by a dark cloud of Nether-based energy. Neither of those would necessarily kill the slimes, but they were certainly slowed down by the effects.
She turned back to the Beasts and released another normal bolt, striking a large wolf racing ahead through the ribs but not killing it, unfortunately. She fired a second bolt which slammed into its eye and she smiled as she congratulated herself on such a perfect killing shot. Of course, the smile went away as she turned back to the slimes, who were advancing steadily without any direct opposition, and in much greater numbers than the beasts. If she had to guess, she would say that there were nearly 1,000 of them streaming inexorably towards their root wall, a seemingly impossible amount that frightened her a little when she stopped to think about it.
She shot her next explosive arrow at the slimes, intentionally landing it in between four of them. When it went off, the shockwave and the heat from the explosion slammed into their forms, disrupting their stiffer outer layer, and burning their bodies with a powerful blast of fire, destroying the nuclei inside all of them. Four down; just 996 more to go.
“Chryla, need your help!” screamed Mistal, another Ranger facing the beasts. Her voice rang out over the root wall easily, and she immediately saw the problem. There was a massive 40-foot-tall monster near the treeline that was starting to run towards the defensive line, and she could’ve sworn she felt the root underneath her tremor a little after each of its steps.
“We have incoming, Chryla!” shouted someone else she didn’t immediately recognize from the slime side, and the young Ranger whipped around to the other forest to see the green winged lizard-slime they had seen land earlier taking off and turning toward their direction.
Chryla was struck with indecision; her explosive bolts were in demand as heavy-hitting attacks, but she would have to concentrate on only one of the massive monsters at
a time to have any chance of killing it – and that was just a chance. None of them were Elites, and even with the advantages given to them from Sandra, they weren’t exactly equipped or trained to withstand a full-scale dungeon invasion. They weren’t used to killing anything larger than what they normally saw throughout their local forests, and these giant monsters weren’t exactly on the list of “normal”.
Fortunately, the decision was made for her as the green-furred beast moved at least three times as fast as the slime-based winged lizard that was still rising into the sky. The 50-foot-tall monster closed the distance to the root spears with frightening speed before it planted its feet in mid stride and pushed off of the ground, leaping at least 30 feet above the defenses and landing on top of a large wolf halfway to the root wall, crushing its back in the process. Even though the smaller beast died, that didn’t seem to faze the gargantuan four-armed beast as it barely slowed, overtaking the other beasts around it as it raced towards her village.
There was no holding back now as she unloaded one, two, three, and then four explosive bolts with an enhancement spell on them in as many seconds, draining her reserves rapidly from the expenditure. She wasn’t the only one that fired their explosive bolts in rapid succession, and over 50 of the bolts impacted the massive beast, staggering it from the sheer force of the explosions. However, other than her more powerful ones that managed to hit it in its right arms – which drew a little blood and scorched the fur enough that it was black in places – none of it seemed to do much.
The Crafter's Darkness: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 4) Page 34
