BT - Book 1 - Chapter 52 (Patreon)

Micah tried not to fixate on the six nightwasps whirring toward him.  His spear was planted, butt first, in the soft forest soil.  It comforted him to have the weapon within arms reach, but against six enemies it was little more than a talisman.  He might be able to bat one out of the air and stab another before they reached him, but ultimately, a swarm of small mobile monsters was the bane of an unsupported spearman.

“Shit they’re fast!” Trevor shouted from the other edge of the clearing.  His spear moved quickly, a haze of green energy coating the tip as it plucked a wasp from the air, the mana from the blow shattering chitin.

“Focus on your defenses,” Micah called back, his eyes not moving from the oncoming monsters.  “You don’t know any area attack abilities yet and neither of us have thick enough armor to hold back their stingers.  If you try to engage one, they’ll swarm you.”

The insects darted toward Micah as one.  Apparently, they took his responding to Trevor as a sign of distraction.  With a deep breath, and a downward motion of his hand, Micah cast gust in a wide radius, slamming all of the lighter bugs into the grass of the clearing.

Before the nightwasps could react, Micah intoned a word of magic and grasped, clenching his hand into a fist.  Root spears leapt from the ground, a collection of wooden stakes impaling all six of his enemies.

“GODS!” Trevor screamed.

Micah whirled around, frowning as he saw his brother stumble, a pair of nightwasps pumping venom into his chest and shoulder.  Trevor hadn’t been idle, the remains of two or three insects, smoking chitin and wings, littered the ground around him.  Still, Micah could practically see his brother’s HP ticking downward as he writhed in pain underneath the wasps’ stingers.

An air knife slipped from Micah’s extended left hand as he grabbed his spear with his right.  The spell clipped the wings off the wasp on Trevor’s shoulder.  Micah’s face twitched as he ran toward his brother, he’d been conservative when casting the spell to avoid accidentally hitting the thrashing man.  Apparently, his aim still needed work.

The spear whistled as two quick stabs plucked the nightwasps off of Trevor’s body.  A second later, his hands were on the angry red wounds, mumbling the words to a litany of healing spells.  Trevor bucked under his grasp, sweating and cursing for almost a minute before Micah’s magic cleared out the venom.

Micah slumped down next to Trevor, breathing heavily.  The injured man stirred, opening his bleary eyes and groaning.

“Trevor,” Micah tried to keep his tone neutral.  “What was the first thing I told you before we hiked out here to fight the nightwasps?”

Trevor closed his eyes and threw a forearm over his face.

“If there are more than five monsters, wait for me to thin their numbers before you engage,” his brother quoted Micah studiously.

“I know that you skipped out on most of your math lessons with Mother,” Micah stood up, using his spear to steady his balance, “but that looked like more than five nightwasps.  Did you get a count on how many there were Trevor?”

“A dozen,” Trevor responded testily.  “Micah, you don’t have to be an ass.  I know I fucked up and everything hurts like hell right now.  I just thought that you’d need help given how many of them there were.  Plus, I got four.”

“You did a good job with that opening air knife,” Micah nodded, reaching down with his free hand to help pull Trevor to his feet.  “After that you should have listened to me and adopted a defensive stance.  Spears aren’t great for swarms.  Until we can find a proper area attack or a way for you to keep yourself safe while attacking, getting surrounded is your greatest weakness.”

“I thought you said these things were easy,” Trevor picked at the thumb sized holes the nightwasps’ stingers had ripped in his tunic.  “We were doing just fine fighting the boars.  Maybe we should go back to that.”

“They are easy Trevor,” Micah sighed.  “You just need to approach them with some strategy.  As you found out, one sting is painful, and two is excruciating.  Unless you can rip the wasps off, they keep pumping venom into you until it paralyzes you.  If you aren’t careful, your lungs seize up and you die.  On the other hand, they have low hit points and it’s not terribly hard to kill large numbers of them if you prepare the battlefield.”

“Doesn’t sound easy to me,” Trevor muttered, picking his spear up off the ground.  “Next time, let’s fight something without a stinger the size of my wrist.”

“Check your experience,” Micah rolled his eyes.  “Nightwasps are proper monsters.  Given how easy they are to kill, they’re one of the best ways for beginning adventurers to level up so long as you take proper precautions.  Armor and area effect spells make them almost laughably easy.”

“Level four already,” Trevor gave a low whistle, his mood brightening noticeably.

“I have you working on wind shield for a reason,” Micah continued.  “Nightwasps can’t fly through the barrier.  Of course, there’s no way you’d be able to cast another spell while the shield is up.  On the other hand, if you invest a little bit of mana into your spear, it returns to you when you throw it.  All you’d need to do is erect the spell and pick off the wasps one by one.  As long as you have enough mana, you’d be invulnerable.”

“I guess,” Trevor scratched the back of his neck.  “I just wish you’d explained the battle strategy before the nigtwasps attacked.”

“By the Sixteen,” Micah trailed off into muttering before turning to his brother incredulously.  “As soon as you spotted the gods damned wasps you shouted to get my attention.  Of course they swarmed us before we could put together a battle plan.  If we’re going to make this work, you’re going to have to put SOME thought and effort into what you’re doing.  If you pulled that sort of stunt in a dungeon, we’d both be dead.”

“Nah,” Trevor winked at him.  “I know I’m a bit out of my depth, but I’ve seen how you work Micah.  I don’t think you’ve been in a fight that you didn’t have completely under control.  I mean, I didn’t exactly like screwing up and getting stung.  It felt like my veins were filled with hot coals.  Still, I didn’t doubt that you’d save me for a second.  I’m sure that you could fight us out of any dungeon you might drag me into.”

“Trevor,” Micah shook his head.  “You do realize that I’ve screwed things up so badly that I’ve been forced to restart as a teenager multiple times.  I might be strong compared to a beginner, but I’m far from infallible.”

“I think we need a bigger team,” Trevor replied.  “If it’s only the two of us, it’s too easy for us to get swamped.  Even if we’re able to fight a monster or two without much trouble, as soon as there are three, they start flanking us.”

“Neither of us are wearing proper armor,”  The older man shrugged, a hint of mirth in his eyes.  “It’s almost impossible for us to dodge attacks from behind.  If we had a couple more fighters, we could watch each others’ backs.  Even if you patch me up afterwards, I’m not a huge fan of getting sucker punched by some monster I can’t quite see.”

Micah opened his mouth to disagree and then caught himself.  Trevor had a point.  The last two weeks of leveling were a storm of frustrating mistakes and complaints, but it hadn’t been completely in vain.  Day by day, his brother was beginning to fight smarter.  His spear skills improved, and Micah needed to rescue him from fewer rookie mistakes.  

The battle today was a bit of an outlier, and even then Trevor didn’t act all that illogically.  True he’d gotten excited and disobeyed orders, but there’d been a lot of nightwasps.  Not quite enough to overwhelm Micah, but enough that his brother’s help would have been appreciated if the man had managed to finish the battle standing up.

It was easy for Micah to forget that Trevor was as green as the grass they were standing on.  Hells, his first monster kill was only about fifteen days ago.  As impatient as he was to start raiding major dungeons, his brother needed the combat experience.  Even if Micah forced the man to level up unnaturally quickly as Brenden had done to him, it would likely only lead to a critical mistake in the heat of combat.

Quietly, Micah checked his status.

Age 13 [ERROR] / 28

Class/Level Divine Candidate 5

XP 1200/8000

HP 36/36

Attributes 

Body 9, Agility 8, Mind 19, Spirit 18

Attunement

Moon 24  Sun 1  Night 12

Mana

Moon 29/183  Sun 60/137  Night  35/159

Affinities

Time 10

Wood 6

Tier I - Refresh 10, Mending 9, Plant Weave 9

Tier II - Augmented Mending 13, Root Spears 12

Tier III - Heal 8, Paralytic Sting 3

Air 5

Tier I - Gale 8, Air Knife 16, Air Supply 4
Tier II - Wind Shield 7, Sonic Bolt 11

Tier III - Updraft 3, Pressure Spear 7

Blessings

Mythic Blessing of Mursa - Blessed Return, Ageless Folio

Skills

Anatomy  7

Arcana   11

Enchanting  16

Fishing   1
Herbalism  5

Librarian  5

Ritual Magic  25

Spear   12

-Wind Spear 8

Spellcasting  31

He suppressed a low whistle at the improvement.  The gods weren’t screwing around when they directed him to this class.  He gained three times his body attribute in hit points with each level up, a number comparable to most close combat classes.  Better yet, he gained a point of body each level.  It was only a matter of time before he could, if he so chose, fight in the front line like a vanguard or a champion.

As for his mana, that improved as well.  Each level up added roughly two and a half times his spirit attribute to each mana pool.  The number wasn’t even and there was some rounding, but it was still a twenty five percent improvement over what he’d earned as a thaumaturge.  That didn’t sound like much, but thaumaturge was a mythical class that most adventurers didn’t even hear about.  Even a slight improvement over the absurd numbers granted by that class was impressive.

“Micah,” Trevor frowned, his previous levity gone.  “You didn’t get stung or something there did you?  You just kinda spaced out on me.”

“Oh,” Micah blinked, shaking his head slightly.  “No, I’m all right.  I was just thinking about our next steps and I think you have a point.”

“Thank you,” Trevor replied, his dour expression immediately replaced by a broad smile.  “Even if you are somehow older than me now,  you have no idea how annoying it is to have your kid brother constantly correcting you.”

“I know I’ve been hard on you,” Micah shrugged, slightly sheepishly.  “Just trust me that it’ll be worth it.  In the meantime, how do you feel about acquiring some enchanted gear and making a new ally.  I think our stats are finally about where they’ll need to be.”

“Why would our stats need to be high to make an ally?”  Trevor asked suspiciously.  “Wait, I thought you said that enchanting was barely connected to your attributes.  Why would you need to level up to enchant our gear?”

“We didn’t have a high enough body stat before” Micah smiled impishly.  “Even with magic they’d have escaped before we could turn them out of energy.”

“That doesn’t sound-” Trevor frowned.  “Actually, I don’t think I need any qualifiers.  Are you purposefully trying to make yourself sound like some sort of serial killer?  It’s seriously creepy coming from the mouth of a kid.”

“Maybe,” Micah replied with a laugh.  “Just be ready to jog.  Even with me using refresh to replenish our stamina, we’re going to be moving for a long time.”