The Shatterplate War Chapter 53 (Patreon)

“Just to double and triple-check everything, you sure you can make that shot?” Kay asked the assembled group in front of him. He turned slightly to point down at the Ancient’s nest.

Lauren held out her hand, and blood flowed up into a bowstave. With an elegant motion, she drew back the string, drips of blood collecting at her fingertip and solidifying into a slightly translucent red arrow. She stood there, still as calm water, for a long moment. Then she nodded once, and the bow and arrow dispersed into a mist of red droplets that floated back into her armor. “I can make it.”

Kay looked back over to the three other members of the Blood Guard, who had voiced their confidence in long-range attacks. Two of them made longbows out of blood like Lauren had, while the last one had a massive crossbow with them already. Kay didn’t know how their Blood Manipulation Line Classes worked with the weapon, which was almost a small ballista being as big as it was, mostly because the Blood Guard had gotten large enough that he didn’t know the entire skill set of every member. They were reaching a point where they needed to start appointing more officers and divide the organization more to allow better efficiency. What was once a force of roughly two dozen people was now pushing closer to a hundred and fifty.

The three of them all gauged the distance on their own and nodded back at him. 

“Yes, sir.”

“I can hit them.”

“It… might be close?” The crossbowman muttered. “My bolts are heavier, so I’d have to arc the shot more to get that distance. Even if I hit, it’ll definitely take longer; we won’t have all our attacks hit at once.”

“The point isn’t to kill them at long range.” Lauren reminded them, “Just to get them to come to us.”

“I don’t think we can kill them with one attack, let alone from this far off.” Kay turned to look back down at the nest, almost half a mile away, when you combined the straight distance with the space from the top of the cliff they were on to the nest. “We really just want to piss them off.” He turned back to the crossbowman, “Do you think you can do enough damage when they’re up close?”

The heavily muscled man shrugged and turned his weapon to face the sea. He pulled the trigger working the action with nothing to fire, then grabbed the lever and yanked it back with one quick motion. The mechanism snapped into place with an audible thunk, and he fired it empty again; only a few seconds had passed. He readied it again and loaded a forearm-length bolt made out of blood into the weapon. “I can shoot her pretty fast.” He said with a grin, “I’m not as speedy as folks with a traditional bow might be, but the blood I’ve got infused in her lets me reload twice as fast as anyone at a similar level to me. I can fire a shot off and be ready by the time they can make it here.”

“Then I think we’re ready.” Kay turned and nodded at Lauren, “You know what to do.”

She turned and saluted, with the other three following suit. “We’ll make it work, my lord.”

“Good.” He walked over to the illusionist who was keeping the small group hidden. “Ready?”

“Yes, my lord. I drop the illusion on them when the Commander gives the order, then I run back to the main group before they fire.” She saluted quickly before dropping back into a ready position, her eyes closed with concentration.

“Good.”

“Right, Lenias, you fire first, and we’ll time our shots to try and match when yours should land,” Lauren instructed the others before glancing over at Kay. “My lord, you need to get moving now.”

He nodded and started jogging away from the cliff, towards the trap and where the rest of his forces were gathered. When he cleared the scattered rocks that were clustered near the cliff and made footing uneasy, he started sprinting. He darted into the path they’d already carved through the brush and small trees that dotted the area and started using his Blood Booster Skills to push himself to even higher speeds. He threw out his legs and literally skidded to a stop as he hit the end of the pathway, throwing up dirt and small rocks from his feet. “Ready!?” He bellowed.

“Ready!” The amassed forces of his personal troops shouted back.

Over a hundred men and women stood in a rough circle in a large empty patch of bare dirt, all of them armored and armed in various shades of red. They’d spent days planning and then getting ready, ripping up trees and moving rocks to create a large open space to fight in. They all readied their weapons or began preparing their various spells or abilities.

Thirty or forty seconds later, the illusionist slipped to a stop on their knees and threw her arms out, breathing heavily as she threw up another illusion to cover everyone.

“My mana is a bit above three-quarters, my lord.” She reported, panting. “I can hold this for another half an hour if we need it.”

“We shouldn’t need that long.”

Immediately after Kay said that a painful cry tore through the air. That same, almost avian, roar that had rung out during the last time they’d fought these two particular creatures.

Squoooooooooooooooonk!

“That still sounds like a demented goose,” Kay muttered as he flicked his hand out, sending a spray of his own blood into the shallow pool that had been waiting for him near the center of the artificial clearing.

The droplets landed throughout the pool, the accuracy helped along by Kay’s Blood Manipulation, and the blood started to ripple from each impact. The ripples continued as the blood started to bubble as it started to collect together. Small masses started forming and taking shape as the blood conglomerated, humanoid shapes rising from the pool. Moments later, the shallow basin was empty as ten humanoid figures made out of blood strode out of it.

The blood simulacrum would have been exact copies of Kay were it not for their completely blank faces, and they stood ready at the center of the empty space.

The four who’d gotten the monsters’ attention ran into formation just slow enough to be tracked by the monsters and were covered by the illusion as they made it into range.

Kay flicked his hand out again, a drop of Lauren’s blood landing in the other container, a small pot large enough for one more simulacrum. He waited until he heard the distant sounds of flapping get close enough that he felt like the wind should be wooshing around him from the downbeat of the Ancient’s wings before making a copy of Lauren as fast as he could, which he sent sprinting towards the rest of his simulacrum as soon as it was formed. It turned and made its own copy of Laurens’s bow as it reached the formation and fired an arrow at the monster that was just coming over the edge of the ring of trees they’d left up to cover their prepared arena. 

It cried again as the arrow punctured a few inches through its hide, this time more in rage than pain, and Kay and his people staggered a little as the powerful sound buffeted them. Kay made his creations launch their own attacks, the pressurized blasts of blood barely knocking its hide as the weaker copies couldn’t manifest the magical force the real Kay could, but it was enough to keep the monster’s attention on them.

 The creature took off higher into the sky, a burst of wind magic sending it upward at high speed, and its mate followed it a moment later. They floated in the air for a moment, wind twisting around them as they gathered their power to strike.

“One of them’s only tier six!” Eleniah hissed from her spot near Kay. “The one with the mottled pattern on its face! We need to target the other one more!”

“Try and spread it around, but here they come!”

A noticeable shockwave erupted from behind the closer Ancient as it dove, the same wind magic that threw it into the sky, speeding up its dive bomb attack. As it reached the halfway point between where it started and the ground, the other one followed behind it.

In the split second that it took for the creature to dive and pierce its beak through one of Kay’s blood simulacrum, Kay let the Skill drop. The humanoid figures collapsed into liquid blood. There was just enough time to see the monster’s eye widen as it passed through the floating film of sanguine liquid and slammed into the cover of the pit trap. The false top that the simulacrum had been floating above cracked into pieces and shattered as the monster dived into a pit full of days worth of blood, magically regenerated at a speed that would have been impossible for anyone without the Classes of Kay’s Class Line. The creature slammed into the thick pool, moving at such speed that it submerged itself almost completely, only the tips of its wings sticking out.

Its mate, with only a half-second to spare, almost managed to avoid the trap entirely. Another burst of wind shot out from its wings, shifting it from a full dive to almost entirely upright, almost faster than Kay could blink. It wasn’t entirely enough to avoid the pit, however, and it started to be dragged down as the pit of blood rose up and began the slowly draw the monster deeper.

A huge bubble rose to the surface of the pool and burst, revealing the head of the other Ancient as they both struggled to get out.

Then, the illusion broke as the true Blood Guard charged into battle.

Kay and several other strong Blood Manipulators shoved their will into the pool, using their mana and Skills to restrain the monsters for as long as possible. Ranger attackers sent bolt after bolt, arrow after arrow, and magical attack after magical attack into the pair as close-in fighters dashed across the pool, some of them making a shell of solid blood across the surface as they ran closer.

Ranged attacks flashed across Kay’s field of view, weapons rose and fell, and combatants dashed back and forth, trying to attack while also not being struck by the flailing limbs and haphazard magical attacks as the two pterosaur monsters tried to not drown or be dragged any deeper into the clutching red pit. All of this was secondary in Kay’s mind, however, as he spent all of his willpower trying to clutch even more of the monsters’ bodies with his blood and drag them even deeper into the hole they’d dug just for this.

The tier six monster with the mottled pattern across its beak and crest started to tire, sinking all the way under the blood and having to fight against more force for longer had finally started to tire it, and slowly its thrashing began to slow and it sunk an inch here that it didn’t recover, and then another.

Seeing its mate being to fail, the tier seven Ancient made a desperate move. It pulled its wings in close and let itself be dragged farther down into the blood, inhaling deeply. Right before its eye dropped below the liquid, it opened its mouth and screamed.

It wasn’t another squonk; it was too powerful to be called that. It was simply an attack, a powerful wave of vibration that erupted from its throat, blasting the blood away in a circular wave that washed over the edges of the pit, sending the melee attackers flying into the air, and even the people farther back were knocked off their feet.

Kay trembled as he tried to push himself up. The pit was half empty, the blood that was knocked out of it covering every inch of the clearing and his people as the tier six monster started clawing its way out. “Recover!” He screamed, staggering to his feet and throwing out his hands, using the physical force of thrusting his arms forward to focus his will on the blood that remained.

The stronger Ancient began ascending into the air, flapping its wings normally instead of using magic and ascended a few dozen feet at a time with each beat of its wings. It cried out several times in anger as it watched the Blood Guard make their way back to their feet and keep attacking its mate, but none of them had the sheer force of its previous attack. It began to gather increasing amounts of wind around it as it rose up, and by the time it stopped rising, it looked like it was coated in an armor of swirling winds that wrapped around it hundreds of feet in the air. It let loose another angry cry and began to descend.

Unlike its previous dives, this was not a bolt of lightning coming to pierce through them; this was a deceptively slow fall of an atomic bomb coming to disintegrate them. As it got closer and closer to the ground, more and more wind began to dance around it, spinning madly, until a colossal tower of tornado-like wind followed it down.

“Scatter!” Kay screamed in an echo of that previous rout by these monsters, fear making his voice harsh. We can’t take an attack like that! We won’t be able to keep fighting afterward!

“Don’t worry.” Eleniah said calmly as she stepped up next to him, “This is why you brought me, remember?”

She stepped right into the monster’s path, walking along as if she didn’t have a care as she stopped right where the Ancient was going to strike.

Kay choked as he tried to tell her to run.

“I said don’t worry!” She turned to look over her shoulder at him for a moment with a grin, “You’ve only seen one tier five fight, and even then, it was more of a light spar than a real fight. You’re about to see what kind of power you’re striving towards.” She looked back up at the creature and crouched down, holding her clenched fist. “[Indomitable Fist].” Her voice shook with [The World’s Voice].

The monster began spinning at the last second, turning its slow dive into an enormous drill coming to rip through them all, big enough to have been wielded by ancient titans from old Earth myths. The shriek of the hurricane-force winds drove almost everyone off their feet as the monster descended to strike.

Eleniah threw a punch into the air, the simplicity of it showing the skill she’d honed throughout her life as her glowing fist struck the tip of the Ancient monster’s beak.

The massive attack, enough to take out every single person there, strong enough to end armies if they weren’t prepared, stopped dead. The monster crashed into Eleniah’s single fist and stopped dead, unable to move past the simple, efficient punch that the much smaller elven woman had thrown at it. Like a speeding car hitting a street pole, it crumpled, its beak snapping as it ran into an unmovable wall.

Eleniah pulled back her hand, and the creature began to drop, the sheer surprise Kay felt making the entire thing seem like it was happening in slow motion. She drew back her left hand to her chest as she dropped her right hand and invoked another Skill. “[Unstoppable Fist].” The glow around her fist this time was slightly different in color and the feeling it gave off as she almost casually backhanded the monster.

The pterosaur, which was larger than most city buses from Kay’s life back on Earth, snapped in half where she struck it and tumbled through the air, crashing through trees and bouncing off the ground before it landed hundreds of feet away, near the edge of the cliff.

Kay stared in shock, his mouth literally gaping.

Eleniah glanced over and grinned very widely, “Shouldn’t you be dealing with that?” She nodded towards the pit.

Kay spun to see the other Ancient dragging itself out of the pit again. Once more, he reached out with his Skills and started to drag it back down, members of the Blood Guard joining him as they recovered, and together they started to drown the last remaining monster they’d come to kill.

Eleniah strode over to him and leaned against him as the monster’s struggles slowly weakened. “That’s why us sapient beings rule the world and not the monsters. High-tier monsters are strong within a certain band, strength, durability, magic, etcetera. They do get stronger in that band, but they don’t even seem to grow that much in anything else; once they hit tier five, they stagnate in everything but their specialty. People are different. We have Classes and Skills that we can keep growing, plus there’s nothing limiting us to only grow in one direction; we can pick whichever Classes we like, within our own personal limits. And when we get to tier five…” She trailed off and held up the hand she wasn’t leaning on Kay’s shoulder with, clenching it into a fist, “We get Class Skills, which are terrifyingly powerful. There’s a very good reason why you never want to fight anyone tier five or higher without someone else tier five or higher. Or more than one army.” She looked down at him, her eyes burning with curiosity and interest, “I wonder what your Class Skill is going to look like? I’m really excited to see.”