Chapter 270 - Three Leaves: Rocky Road I (1/2)
The Hinterlands – Five days out from the western coast of the continent
”Suppressive fire, Az!” Sylvie shouted as she hid behind a dented boulder. She breathed heavily, feeling the rough, rocky ground beneath her and the dry, almost burning air s.u.c.k.i.n.g into her lungs and cracking her lips.
A dozen meters to her side, beneath another boulder, Azhar took out his skeletal bow and slipped out of his cover. His quiver was empty, having long since been drained in this hours long battle. But his bow could manifest arrows of bone, and he did so now. Three long, sharpened femurs materialized between his fingers.
He nocked the arrows, wreathing them in a film of black magical energy, and fired. The arrows split into a total of twelve identical copies – the effects of the [Split-Shot] skill – and sailed in beautiful, neat arcs before boring into the stony skulls of kobolds.
The kobolds were thin, misshapen creatures with humanoid bodies and draconic heads dotted with beady yellow eyes. They were made out of grey rock, looking entirely like artificial constructs, and indeed they were, created as familiars by the real threat up ahead.
Sylvie bit her lip as she pressed her back against the boulder and began to think, assessing the situation. She had always prided herself in her perception, her eyes capable of perceiving so much at once, and she prided herself even more in her ability to process what she saw so efficiently.
To the point where when she explained to Jeanne how she kept her mind apace in even the most tense and deadly of battle situations, Jeanne had teased her by saying that maybe her hair had gone silver from overthinking stress.
In a way, Sylvie wished she could be like Jeanne. Just shoving and smashing her way through life with enough strength that she did not need to think much about what she did.
The half hero stood ahead out in the open, wielding her priest's staff as a bludgeoning weapon, shattering the bodies of kobolds that escaped Az's keen eye and showers of arrows.
The earth rumbled, and Sylvie peeked out from her cover to watch Jeanne dash to the side, narrowly escaping a stomp from an enormous, grey scaled dragon foot. In retaliation, Jeanne roared as she swung her staff straight into the foot in a brutish show of force that hardly any other priest would ever be able to replicate.
But this was Jeanne, blessed with heroic blood, and her staff exploded into the scaled foot in cracking impact as metal crashed against rocky, scaled skin. Her hit blew back the foot just a little, lining a scale with cracks, but that was about it as far as damage went. Spurts of lava poured out from the cracks, but when they spattered on Jeanne, they did not burn her skin, only warping the metal of her armor.
”Jeanne, do not waste energy trading blows!” shouted Sylvie. ”The rock hydra's scales are aurichalc.u.m-infused! You will only strengthen it!”
”I know!” growled Jeanne in frustration at the fact that she could not beat the towering hydra to death. Sylvie could understand, for after all, for if the rock hydra's scales were infused with any other metal aside from perhaps adamant, Jeanne could smash through it easily with her prodigious power.
But aurichalc.u.m was special, capable of converting half of all physical damage into mana. And rock hydras were already among the most durable of dragonkin.
”Then focus on evading!” shouted Sylvie. ”You'll burn us all alive at this rate!”
Sylvie squinted her eyes and parted some sweat matted hair from her forehead, looking up. It was night, but there was so much light that it might as well have been day, and the source of that lay floating in the sky, right above the huge bulk of the fully grown rock hydra.