Unfortunately, his earlier plan to sneak his way to the statue of Oocile met the snag of an increasing number of patrolling crabs. Inevitably, he'd have to fight his way through. But he wouldn't just blindly charge into a bunch of those as he did with the undead warrior, instead, he retreated further back and waited for one of the more regular patrols.
The three crabs passed by him, their clattering steps almost deafening. Axl carefully held up his stolen sword, regretting not having also taken its sheath, and softly fell to the ground behind his targets. He took a second to let the slightly disturbed mist around him blend into his [Mana Shroud], then slowly approached the straggler.
He couldn't maintain the Skill and empower his weapon with Mana at the same time, so he didn't try, and only made a powerful stab at the creature, aiming for a seam where the back's armor met a leg joint.
His earlier chest wound reopened at the effort, but he focused on the attack. He worried the blade would bounce right off, the creatures' armor more potent than his ability to do damage. But the weapon slid right in as the crab uttered a subdued wail, its legs flailing. A trickle of foul, brown fluid sputtered out from the body, splattering against him.
Axl felt the surge of Karmic Energy entering his body, far less than when he killed the undead soldier, which was a relief, since that confirmed these creatures were much weaker.
The other two creatures turned quickly, and Axl swung widely to hit both at once, the first crab still stuck at the end of the sword. Both creatures were pushed from the middle of the street all the way to the side of a crumbling building, feeling far lighter than they looked.
The strike failed to dislodge the crab corpse from the top of his sword, so Axl swung again, the body finally sliding away. The two crabs took this time to regain their bearing and face him, seemingly uninjured, their two front legs up and hissing.
Axl prepared for them to attack, but they simply kept this posture for a moment, allowing him to release the shrouding function of [Mana Shroud] and start channeling ambient Mana into his sword. The amount he could absorb and send to his weapon greatly increased, Mana rolling out of the blade in small rivulets.
He heard other chittering noises, rapidly converging from both ends of the street, and kicked himself for not pressing the attack. Clearly, the two crabs weren't engaging in some defensive posture, they were calling for reinforcements.
The sword made a broad arc, aimed at one crab's legs and up to the body of the second. He hoped the Mana in the blade would let him kill both at once, but he wasn't so lucky. The blade buckled the two legs, snapping one at a joint, and continued to slam squarely into the body of the second crab.
Their hissing cry was interrupted, however, and the two creatures were pushed aside, the first barely able to stand, the second now charging at him. Luckily, the creature wasn't nearly as fast as the undead elf, and the long reach of Axl's sword let him strike the creature squarely in its underside, cutting halfway into its body.
Another bolus of Karmic Energy entered his body, and Axl extracted the crab's twitching corpse from his sword with a swing to the side, then approached the last crab. It was trying to crawl away with its two remaining legs, its hissing more intense and urgent.
Axl stabbed it with a downward stroke, shocked that even the fully-powered attack didn’t manage to cut into its knotted back carapace, but a second stab into the base of a leg finished it off.
The chittering reinforcements were close now, one just around the bend, so Axl retreated to some boxes he carefully piled up to the side in preparation for his ambush. Concealing his entrance with a section of wood, he activated [Mana Shroud], fully focusing on covering his body with the mist's Mana, lowering his stance so he was almost lying down.
This was not an ideal test of the limits of his stealth capabilities, with nearly a dozen crabs descending onto his location, but he didn't have time to scurry back up to a higher vantage.
Soon, other crabs arrived, and the clicking of their sharp legs stopped right at the corpses of their dead. Axl couldn't see them from behind his carefully arranged pile of boxes and loose tarp surrounded by the rest of the litter on the side of the street, and he couldn’t use the Mana-sensing feature of [Mana Shroud] while fully focused on hiding himself.
For over a year, he tried to do both the sensing and absorbing function of [Mana Absorb] back in the mining fields of Ost, and sometimes he barely managed, greatly improving his mining efficiency for inspired bursts of activity. But now it felt like the Skill was even harder to control, his use of it clunky and broad, like using one of the general-purpose rigs instead of his own.
The crabs lingered around the corpses for quite a while, their chittering legs stopping here and there. Luckily, they didn't start to hiss, but they did start to spread out in an uneven circle, climbing over the random refuse lining the streets and even climbing the walls of the nearby buildings.
Axl held his breath and redoubled his effort on [Mana Shroud] as the clicking noise reached the boxes surrounding him. He cursed himself for not making the makeshift retreat sturdier, only a thin layer of torn cloth above him. If one of the crabs stepped on it, it would fall right through and land on top of him.
The creature stopped right at the edge of the tarp, however, and leapt to the wall beyond it, the clicking continuing up the building. Axl softly exhaled, but slowly, so as not to disrupt the mist.
He stood still for several minutes, even as the next batch of seven crabs arrived and fanned out in a similar fashion. Even after a full ten minutes, they never returned, the clicking sounds of their soft steps long having dispersed into the distance. After another few minutes, another batch of three crabs walked down the street, ignoring their fallen completely as they continued their patrol.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Knowing what to expect now, Axl took the opportunity to attack this new group in a similar way to the previous, but not giving them a chance to start their hissing call. The first went down as before, and this time he was careful to be able to extract the sword from its corpse before attacking the other two.
He stabbed at the underbelly of the second crab, killing it as well, as he struck the other with a fist, pushing it on its back. The attack didn’t kill the creature, but seemed to daze it, as it flailed randomly with its legs, one scratching against his arm.
Barely a second later, the last creature was dead, stabbed through the belly. His breath heavy at the flurry of activity, Axl paused, trying to listen for reinforcements, but after a few seconds, none came. He returned to his crates and waited for another set of patrols, and was reassured when the next batch didn't react to the new dead.
Letting this set go, Axl returned to one of the abandoned upper floors to reassess. His new [Mana Shroud] was the big winner of the day so far, since he'd for sure have been overwhelmed by waves and waves of crabs without it. His [Mind-Soul Bulwark] was completely set aside for now, since it required him to spend focused concentration on creating a mind-shaped defense for his soul, and that wasn't an immediate priority.
Even the attack of the crab that landed on his forearm barely managed to scratch him. This was a real concern of his, that these creatures could have very little in the way of defenses and limited Agility, but really powerful attacks with their long, sharp legs. But that turned out not to be the case, the creatures just seemed rather weak overall.
The only real problem was that his weapon felt awkward in his hands. It was a longsword nearly a meter and a half in length, and while the reach was useful, attacking in close quarters when he closed the distance was difficult, as was keeping the crab bodies from sticking to his weapon. He was even entirely caked in the goopy brown blood of the crabs at this point, and would've appreciated a change in clothing, at least.
Still, he had no other options on that front, all the buildings he tried to plunder being entirely picked over. Only corpses of various types of elves remained, with the rare undead body in the mix, but none with any useful gear. Even the corpses were stripped bare, only torn and bloody rags remaining.
The annoying mystery of where everything went was partially solved when Axl noticed one of the crab patrols approach a broken-down box and extract a small piece of metal from a corner, one crab taking it in its tiny mandibles to carry it away with them. Not only were these things scouts, but they also doubled up as scavengers.
"My venting luck," he couldn’t help but mutter to himself, even as he appreciated the efficiency of the Undead Legion.
In a way, this was also good, since it could mean that their main forces had in fact come and gone already, with nothing valuable left behind. And that was important, since he remembered the power of the undead he fought, even when severely injured. Axl doubted he'd do well against an entire group of those at peak strength.
And this was the heart of his biggest worry, that there would be reinforcements streaming into the area to join the crabs, perhaps to transition into taking over the city. Even a single undead soldier added to each patrol would make his approach much, much harder.
Axl also wondered if he should wait for nightfall, which was barely a few hours away. He could imagine that his [Mana Shroud] would be even better at hiding him in the dark, but those crabs barely had pinprick eyes, so it might just as easily not hinder them as well. Overall, the more he waited, the more the situation could change for the worse, so he decided to make a final push to the statue.
He took another glimpse at his Status screen, hoping to also gain hints on when he'd gain another level, as he didn't seem able to sense that from the influx of Karmic Energy from killing the crabs.
Name: Xel-389b (Roken)
Level: 11
Class: (none)
Lineage: Water Elf (G)
Attributes
Strength: 10
Endurance: 10
Agility: 12
Perception: 8
Intelligence: 6
Wisdom: 6
Charisma: 8
Luck: 4
Free Points: 0
Skills: Mana Shroud (Rare), Mind-Soul Bulwark (Rare)
Titles: Last Human of Luna (Terrania)
Quests: Establish the Terrania Nexus (Terrania, updated), Oocile Infiltration (Terrania)
Achievements (Consumed = 2): Karmic Enmity (Vikam Elves)
Axl paused at the note next to his Terrania Nexus quest, confused as to what could have been updated about that one. He mentally clicked it open, and his eyes widened in shock.
>>Terrania Quest (Ultimate Priority): Establish the Terrania Nexus.
>>Establish a Foundational Nexus for the Terrania Sub-System. Necessary attunement: Water, Earth, Metal, Void. Deadline: 3y, 02m, 29d <<
The deadline for founding the nexus jumped down by almost five months. What the slit?
Suddenly, the years allotted to the quest felt far less safe. He didn't even know what caused the lost time, something back on the home front? Or maybe something he did, like killing the undead soldier? He took a moment to calm down and recenter himself.
This situation felt worse than the catastrophic defeats in the Lunar militia. At least there, it wasn't all his immediate responsibility, he was only one of countless millions. But just the thought of this mission failing before he even got a chance to get it started felt worse than hiding under a thick pile of his banner's dead. At least then, he only needed to focus on the field repairs to his armor and try to add another number to his killcount.
Now he simply didn't know how important his quest was. He'd never heard of Ultimate Priority, with the obelisk setup quest back in Luna being of a higher priority than even his banner commander knew existed. Axl could use her tactical brains right now, and he felt a pang of grief at how Cas Kaltan died, killed by some sort of madness attack when they were reduced to barely a handful. She deserved a better death than that, and she should've been the one selected for this mission, not him.
But Axl just shook that off, all he could do now was grit his teeth and keep an eye on the countdown every once in a while, if only to check what could cause this and how to keep it from happening again. He would not let humanity down.
No longer wanting to sit around, he released the pressure on his shallow chest wound, reassured it had stopped bleeding again, and headed back towards his goal. This time, he rushed through the streets, not stopping for the patrols, using [Mana Shroud] to hide his presence. Even when he passed them entirely, they didn't notice, and barely a quarter of an hour later, he was at the rooftop overlooking a continuous line of crabs, all walking in a circle, the orb of Oocile peeking out behind the rooftops ahead.
An entire ring of houses around his goal was torn apart to create a no-man's land between him and his target, nearly a hundred meters wide, a neat line of evenly spaced-out crabs moving in unison long the middle. When first seeing the barrier, Axl had briefly checked if he could go around it, but the gap neatly encircled the square, as if the crabs wanted to quarantine the statue within.
He spent another hour or so seeing if he could find a way to sneak around, say with some unevenness in the rubble, but there seemed to be nothing, the houses dissolved entirely by the moss that now sat on the ground, releasing mist.
This was, in fact, one sliver of good news, the entire area being blanketed in a denser covering of mist that could almost reach his head when he stood. The crabs were still barely visible within, the mist not being fully opaque, and the Mana sensing feature of [Mana Shroud] confirmed there were far too many to fight. If he killed one or two in the chain, certainly the others would charge in, and he couldn't fight off dozens of the creatures.
Axl wondered if he could distract them with some treasure, forming a gap he could sneak past, but he had nothing other than his sword, and he certainly wouldn't continue unarmed. So instead, he simply activated [Mana Shroud] and left his hiding place, hoping his stealth was enough to sneak past the cordon.