The Shatterplate War Chapter 52 (Patreon)

The Ancients sat in their massive nest in a rocky crag partway down into the enormous whirlpool that spun dizzyingly as the ocean was sucked into the pit below.

"No wonder it took us so long to find the damn thing." Tyuah muttered angrily, "I thought these weren't the fishing kind?" She shot Kay some side-eye as she lowered the spyglass.

Lauren gently thumped her on the head, "Be professional!" She hissed.

"He said we could drop the formal stuff with him!" Tyuah insisted back.

"When we're in private!"

"Guys." Kay sighed, "Arguing about it makes it worse."

"It's not that bad," Eleniah chimed in, "I'm the only one in earshot, and I certainly don't care how professional you are with him. I mean, the two of you are going to be working with him for a long time at this point."

"That's what I said, but Lauren is right about being professional in public." Kay commented before giving Tyuah a look, "Also, I didn't say they weren't the fishing kind; I said they probably aren't based on their beak shape, and I also already told you I could be totally wrong! I'm not a dinosaur nut, and half the crap I read about them was as a kid." He turned to stare down at the nest where the two adults were napping while their child looked around, seemingly bored. "That third one got damn big, though."

"We did leave them alone for quite a while," Lauren pointed out, "It had the time to grow up."

"I'm surprised that the parents haven't kicked it out of the nest, as big as it is," Tyuah muttered, "Most predators don't want to keep potential competitors around."

"Monsters are weird," Eleniah replied, "They can be smart enough to know that sticking in groups can be safer, or they can be total morons that attack anything in sight. Obviously, these seem to be the latter, but this kind of creature might act like this without them being monsters." She shrugged, "Who knows?"

"Are there any Ancients that aren't monsters?" Kay asked, "I know there are regular animals that have monster versions but are there any normal dinosaurs out there?"

"I don't know; they mostly live on the northern continent, remember? These ones are probably only here because they can fly."

"I thought there was a chance of running into them all over the place?"

"Sure, there's a chance, but it's not very high. Every once in a while, you might find one that swam over or got teleported or some other set of circumstances, but if you want to see lots of them, you have to go north across the sea."

"Huh."

Tyuah rocked off her heels to standing and brushed off her pants. "So, what's the plan?"

"The whole point of this is to get me and the Blood Guard more experience fighting monsters and to level up my Skills, so part of me wants to just wait till they're somewhere we can get to and then attack." Kay's mouth quirked to the side as he thought it through, "But on the other hand, they can fly, and we can't… Fuck it. I'd rather take longer to tier up than potentially lose people. We've seen the younger one flying by itself more than we've seen them all as a group, so let's set up a trap and then bait it once it's by itself. Let it hit the ground in one of those attack dives we've seen them use, then lock it down and kick its ass."

"Right!" Tyuah turned to face him directly and saluted with her palm flat over her heart. "I'll grab the scouts and find a good spot for it."

Kay nodded, and she turned back towards where they'd set up camp, her two direct subordinates flanking in behind her from where they were waiting some distance away.

"Do we have what we need to make that kind of trap?" Eleniah wondered as they continued to watch the three monsters in their nest.

"Worst case scenario, we cover the thing in waves of blood and hold it down while we stab it."

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Kay carefully peeked up at the circling pterosaur for a moment before ducking back under cover. It was getting closer and closer as it flew spirals and circles over the forest, so he nodded to the Guard standing next to him. They nodded back and slowly began crawling their way through the underbrush toward the illusionist stationed nearby. Some time passed, and the monster flapped a few times, rising higher into the sky before it continued circling, staring down at the ground. As it looped enough that it couldn't see the small clearing Kay and the Blood Guard had decided to commandeer for their plan, the illusionist finally worked their magic.

A small group of woolly horses that they'd already seen the monster hunt walked out of the forest and started grazing, very deliberately not looking up the way the real creatures that lived in this area had learned to do.

The Ancient continued circulating as it scanned the ground, sometimes moving closer, sometimes farther away as it searched for food before it finally started to move to a spot where it could see down into the clearing. Kay could tell it had noticed the bait when tiny wisps of cloud began to form around the creature, and it began to float directly overhead without moving its wings at all. As the new cloud started to float in just the right direction for a massive flying lizard to drop like a lightning bolt on its prey, Kay internally cursed the thing. It had taken them almost a week of watching to actually find the damn things and learn their hunting pattern, as the adults spent almost the entire time they were in the air disguised as clouds. Thankfully their young adult child apparently didn't have the mana to be a cloud all the time, so they eventually spotted it when it was hunting on its own.

A giant pterosaur being an ambush hunter was odd to the bit in the back of Kay's mind that remembered any dinosaur facts at all, but as he kept reminding himself whenever he encountered a new weird thing, a world full of magic and Classes was going to have odd things in it. It also explained why they had been hit so suddenly by the very first attack all that time ago, when Tyuah had been injured; they literally couldn't have seen the attack coming, not at the level they'd been, at least. Thankfully this time, they'd had an illusionist to cover their group as they traveled, so they hadn't needed to worry about ambush before they knew to watch for suspicious clouds moving against the wind.

Kay's thoughts drifted as he thought about the illusionist. As a member of the Blood Guard, they obviously had Blood Manipulation as a Skill and probably had the Class as well, if not an evolution for it. What's their build like? Are they going to try and combine their illusion stuff with their blood stuff if they get in tier five range? What would that be like?

The cloud drifted closer, and Kay quickly shook his head as he reminded himself to stay focused. He just had to wait.

And wait.

Ever so slowly, the cloud drifted into place.

Then, in a literal flash, as it moved faster than Kay could track, the young Ancient used its wind magic to launch itself downward like a spear dropped off a mountain, rocketing downwards at its target. It slammed into the ground with enough force to shake Kay's footing, where he stood under the tree cover almost fifty feet away, its beak piercing through the woolly horse, killing it instantly. Or it would have, had the horse been real. Instead, the Ancient's beak dug into the ground, and it staggered as its feet slipped through the illusion instead of planting itself on top of a corpse.

The illusion shattered, the horses vanishing and the clearing instantly revealing its true form, a dripping abattoir drenched in the blood of dozens of Blood Guard members and Kay himself, each of them able to lose copious amounts of blood and regenerate it in time to fight thanks to their Skills and Classes.

Kay dashed forward, armor forming around him as he shaped the blood he carried in his storage items into protection, and a bastard sword appeared in his hands. From all around the clearing, fighters poured out into the clearing, charging towards the monster with weapons drawn or taking shape as they ran.

The creature's head whipped around as it recovered its footing, and it spread its wings to take off, the numbers and ferocity coming its way enough to make it retreat instead of fighting.

Sadly for it, it didn't have time to gather its wind magic and launch itself into the air as the blood coating the ground rose up in sharp geysers that pierced the membranes of its wings, shredding its ability to fly. It shrieked in pain and rage as the spears shifted into grasping tendrils that circled around it and then pulled toward the ground, slamming the creature flat.

Kay dropped his free hand and grabbed the pommel of his sword, letting go of the blood, strapping the monster down, and letting others take care of that part as he finally got into melee range. It had only been a few seconds, but it felt like a vast swath of time had passed, and he finally struck out at the creature.

He stabbed forward, driving his blade at the Ancient's eye, but it had just enough freedom to jerk its head away, and he only scored a cut across its crest. The melee-oriented Blood Guard members arrived and started striking at it as well; hammers, spears, swords, and more started piercing, slashing, and beating the creature to death as it struggled to get free.

With enough injuries being inflicted on it in such a short time, it wasn't able to dodge Kay's second strike, which went through its eye and into its brain. It continued to thrash for a few moments more before its desperate thrashing to get free of the bindings holding it down stilled.

Kay took a step in and slashed again, separating its head from its neck and making sure it was dead before he started quietly throwing out orders. "Get the illusions up!"

"Done!"

"Good job! That's for everyone; this went exactly as planned! Now get this thing dismantled and ready for transport! We need to get this cleaned up and get out of here before its parents have a chance to realize it's not coming back!"

People started gathering up the blood splattered everywhere as others began pulling out knives, hooks, and other tools to skin and gut the massive lizard. Kay strode towards the edge of the clearing where he'd be out of the way, and Lauren, Tyuah, and Eleniah joined him.

"That went basically perfect." He told them, "Which means the next time's going to be a clusterfuck."

"That's not really how it works," Eleniah complained, "Just because something went according to plan doesn't mean the next thing we do isn't going to go according to plan!"

"Really? What tier was that?" He asked, hooking a thumb over his shoulder at the dead pterosaur.

She clicked her tongue at him, "Tier five."

Kay nodded firmly, "And at least one of its parents is tier seven, if not both of them. They also can stay disguised as clouds for longer, have more mana, are older and more experienced, are most likely stronger physically, and probably have better magic than this one did. A bunch of tier fours and threes ganging up on a tier five monster is not the same as the same group teaming up on two tier sevens."

"So what, we shouldn't attack the parents? Why did we cancel the contract with those monster hunters and come out here then?" Eleniah demanded as she threw her hands up.

"I'm not saying we don't go through with taking all of them out," Kay rebutted, "I'm making sure we drill it into all our heads, mine included, that the next step is going to be way more dangerous. We threw together a plan and a trap in a few hours and took down the weaker one. I don't want us taking on the parents without a lot more planning and a lot more preparation. Thankfully we're fighting monsters, not people, and for monsters a tier gap of this level is surmountable."

Eleniah's expression shifted from exasperated to proud as she listened to him. "Good," She said happily, her modd shifting too fast.

"I knew you were testing me." Kay grouched, already expecting this. He was honest;y surprised she hadn;t started doing it earlier.

"Eh," She made a face, "Less testing and more looking for reassurance. You haven't actually fought any monsters of this level, outside of maybe that eldritch thing a while back, and that was solo. I'm just checking that your head and, by proxy, your planning are in the right spot to make sure we come out of this intact and alive." She stepped forward and dropped her hand on his shoulder, "And don't worry, you've got me here this time, and I've killed monsters way stronger than two tier sevens."

"Like what?"

"Well, I didn't do it alone, but we killed a tier eight sea monster once while I was still with my cousin's crew. It was a bitch of a fight. It was tier eight equivalent in its actual physical strength, so we managed to overpower it magically. These Ancients look more like they're tier seven in magic, not their bodies, so we just need to not get hit and then beat the shit out of them."

"They can fly," Kay added. "It's going to be a bitch actually hitting them.:

"That's more of a 'getting to them' problem than it is a 'are they too strong' problem, though. We just need to get them to come to us."

"What happens if you end up super high in the air?" Lauren asked, "Like they throw you or pick you up or something."

"Please, the only way that's happening is if I'm riding them into the air while punching them." She grinned, her body language confident, "And if that happens, it means I'll get to show off when I come back down!"