Daniel and Corvax drop through my portal and land in a building a few streets over from the main horde of undead. The bear is slowly moving its horde toward me while forming large groups to try and surround me. At this pace I can easily stay ahead of the bear and its horde while also giving overwatch to the other two.
“The horde is starting to split up, and I placed you guys near the smallest group. I need you to take them out fast. I’ll give you directions.” I say into the amulet after I close the portal. “Be aware you are near the edge of my spatial perception, so if something comes from further out, I won’t have much time to warn you.”
***
POV Daniel
“We’ll be fine. Just point us in the right direction and we’ll take care of it.” I answer back.
As if we’d need help with a few measly undead. I’m surprised at how calm he is, though, with that tracker stuck to him like glue, but if I could leave at any time, I’d be pretty calm too. I hope his plan works out. If we take this bear down today, we can push even harder the next few days until Merrick returns.
“Good luck, Ray. May we all live to see the sun rise on a new day.” Corvax speaks into his amulet before Ray’s voice comes back through.
Ray gives us directions to cut off the nearest group of undead, about twenty of them, he says. Once we are about twenty to thirty feet from them, my passive skill [Stone Sense] lets me feel all of their footsteps on the smooth gray stone that makes up this city. As far as I can tell, the ground of this city is one huge chunk of stone, which lets my skill work a bit better, slightly extending the range and clarity.
I leave Corvax ahead of the group and quickly reposition to the other side after a brief conversation where we decided on doing a pincer attack from two alleys at the same time. Once I’m in place, I stop for a second and close my eyes, focusing on the impacts the footsteps make on the stone. I try to count how many feet hit the ground so I can get an accurate number of undead, but it all just feels like a jumble of noise entering my brain, giving me a headache. I don’t know how Ray is able to process all the info his skill gives him without his brain exploding. I sometimes wonder if some of us on that bus were just dragged along with those who were chosen.
“I’m in position. Move on three.” I whisper into the amulet before starting the countdown. On one, both of us leave our alleys, weapons swinging toward the undead.
My hammer smashes into the top of a skull, the spike piercing through into the brain, killing the zombie instantly. My left hand holds a tube filled with small round balls, one of my scattershots. I aim it down the street toward the center of the undead group and away from Corvax. [Metal Manipulation] roars to life as I feed it mana, causing energy to build up in each of the pellets.
I let go of my control over the pellets, and a crack rings out as they break the sound barrier and spread out, tearing through the closest undead. I pull my hammer out and swing it at the next closest undead, killing it with a practiced ease.
Ten seconds later, Corvax splits the last one in half with his axe, swinging it one last time to clear off the viscera.
“You guys have a big group heading to you. I’ll guide you out.”
I look at Corvax, who nods at me and begins following Ray’s directions. I give one last look over my shoulder to the street filled with carnage we are leaving behind. In less than fifteen seconds we managed to take all of them down with pretty minimal effort on our part and no injuries. A smile comes to my face as I realize just how powerful this place has made us, and this is just the beginning, apparently.
Ray leads us through a few alleys and into another building, where he has opened another portal on the floor. He has me shoot a few scattershots through some rifts before we head through the portal, using up the rest of the mana in my gauntlet. Jumping through, we find ourselves in another building, probably nowhere near where we just came from. [Stone Sense] immediately fills my mind with a map of all the stone in its range, causing me to stop and recollect myself for a second.
Once again we follow Ray’s directions to another group of undead. He says this one is starting to move towards the largest group, and we need to take it out before they can recombine and become too much to fight head-on. Corvax will attack them from the front with his rage, and I will come from behind them in another pincer attack.
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It’s another massacre for the undead as Corvax and I meet them with the fury of a storm, wiping out the group much slower this time to save a bit of mana, almost a minute from the start of the battle to the end. I’m about to give Ray the all clear when I feel several light impacts on the stone behind me in very quick succession. I dodge to the side as quickly as I can, even using [Metal Manipulation] to grab onto my armor and shove me out of the way.
I barely make it in time, dodging just as the footsteps are about to reach me. I slam into a wall but recover almost immediately, never losing track of the footsteps with my passive skill. Whatever it is is invisible and moves past Corvax faster than I can warn him, leaving a knife implanted in one of his arms.
“It's invisible!” I shout at Corvax, who is swinging his blade around, keeping whatever stabbed him away. A few moments later I feel its footsteps retreat down an alley.
“Fuck! We just got attacked by something invisible, Ray. Did you see it?” I say into the amulet as I run toward Corvax.
The knife sticking out of Corvax’s lower right arm is almost pure black, and even I can tell it’s no ordinary blade. Corvax rips the blade out with one of his free hands after seeing the wound, not even wincing from the pain. The sunlight in his body starts to dim as the area around the wound starts to glow.
“I saw nothing there, which means it can hide from me. Fuck. The bear is starting to pull back all of the undead, gathering them around itself. I’ll open another portal for you guys. I need you to take out one last group of undead that is cut off. I’m dropping you just one street over from them.”
“Ready when you are.” Corvax says, now wielding the knife in the lower arm that wasn’t wounded.
The blade has something seeping out of it, probably a poison of some kind. We have some healing potions if Corvax can’t deal with the poison himself. Hopefully those cure poison and not just treat injuries. The portal opens between us just as I’m about to ask Corvax if he can fight poison with his sunlight energy, and he drops through almost immediately. I follow quickly so as not to waste Ray’s mana.
***
POV Ray
I close the portal just after Daniel drops through and give them a few directions for the group they are about to engage. I can’t afford to concentrate on them too much, however, as I just learned that the bear probably has at least one undead that can go invisible and hide itself from my spatial perception, just like Halon and Elsine.
The bear has stopped moving toward me after Corvax and Daniel took out those two groups, and I was able to take out a few more with the help of Daniel's shots, but it still has nearly a hundred undead left with it. I still think this fight is winnable, even with what I am calling the rogue coming after us. I just need to adapt. Merrick said that hiding from spatial senses is tricky to pull off, so hopefully the bear is an amateur at it.
I close myself off in a building, ensuring that I’ll notice if any of the doors are opened and something tries to sneak in. I put all of my focus into my spatial perception, trying to alter whatever I can to break through the Rogue’s cloaking. The first thing I do is try to change the frequency of the spatial perception field like I can with my mana. I can’t change the whole field at once. It’s far too large for that, so I do small sections at a time, slowly working out, section by section.
When I get halfway through, I get a flicker of something on a rooftop between me and the other two, but it quickly vanishes. I lock on to the area and quickly flicker the frequency again, feeling my spatial senses dig deeper into reality and revealing a leg right at the edge of this new area, which quickly leaves, as though it were running toward me.
I activate [Condense] with the target being my spatial perception field, reducing the area of it while increasing how effective it is, I think. Now that I know the general area of my target, I start to change the whole field at once, ignoring the strain it’s putting on my mind. It takes me nearly ten seconds to get the whole spatial perception field to change frequencies and dig deeper, revealing the rogue running through an alley a few streets over. After a few steps, I can feel some kind of field or barrier around the rogue shift, and it disappears again.
I push [Condense] to its limit, and I feel it level up several times, letting me push it even further, shrinking my field while looking even deeper into the space around me. I shift frequencies again, faster this time, and break through the cloaking once again, right when it reaches one of the doors to my building. It starts shifting its field, but I am just barely fast enough to match it as it changes, and after a brief battle of it trying to hide again and me not letting it, I feel it give up on hiding entirely as the field around it vanishes.
I stand up from where I was sitting, noticing that my nose is leaking a good amount of blood and my head is absolutely pounding from the strain currently on my mind. I stop feeding mana to [Condense] and pull back my spatial senses to just the few surrounding buildings, letting my mind have a break. The undead puts its hand on the door, near the lock, and starts activating some kind of skill. The door starts corroding at a visible rate around its hand, and my best guesses put it at about a minute before it gets through.
I have to fight this thing, here and now. I can’t focus on fighting and tracking this thing at the same time. If I leave now, it’ll just backstab us later when we least expect it.
I pull my enchanted bone dagger into my left hand and run a little mana through it, ensuring it’s as sharp as possible for the upcoming fight. In my right hand I start to make a new weapon, one I hope I have time to finish before that thing breaks down the door.