Enter System, page 19
part #1 of Natural Laws Apocalypse Series
At the same time, he saw the other one thrusting with its claws at his side. Wishing fervently that his Phantom Shield had been in place to stop the blow, he was amazed as the shield responded to his thoughts.
I didn't know it could do that! I wonder if Rob can move his around also, or if that's just me as the caster?
For the moment, he just tried to keep his mind on the thought that the Phantom Shield would stay attached to his arm like a real shield would, while splitting his thoughts to pull his pilum out of the corpse of the kobold and thrust at the one that had tried to claw him.
He grinned as he had a thought, then moved his arm like he would with the Shield Bash skill while willing the Phantom Shield forward. The kobold was taken utterly off-guard. Bashed with a nearly invisible shield, he went flying. As he slammed into the seats alongside the aisle Marc followed the bash with a thrust from his pilum that finished the creature off.
With no-one else coming from up top, he spun to where Rob was fighting, barely holding off five kobolds. Two of them had almost made it past him and Felicia was swinging her tire iron at the one on her side.
Letting the Phantom Shield drift away from his arm, Marc scooped up his real shield and slid it into place.
“Coming up on the right,” he called.
Rob shifted left, towards the side Felicia was on, and the kobold on that side was blocked from advancing past Rob. Marc trotted the few steps to come up alongside Rob, activating his Shield Bash again on the kobold that was trying to flank on that side. The kobold went flying back into the others behind him and Marc took his spot alongside Rob, thrusting his pilum on a kobold that was about to slip an attack past Rob's defenses.
They settled into a line battle, only interrupted when the larger kobold from the stage came down and started pushing its way through the smaller kobolds from the auditorium. Up on the stage Jeff was fighting with the last of the other kobolds who had been up there. There were three corpses on the stage with them and Marc assumed Jeff had killed two of them since the other corpse was from Marc's spells.
The large kobold swiped another small one out of the way, drew its sword, and stepped into the front line in front of Rob. It grunted something as it swung, Rob catching the blow on his shield but staggering back a step.
Marc didn't feel like indulging the kobold's whim. It appeared that it wanted to test itself against Rob alone, but the smaller kobolds it had swatted out of the way had backed off, so Marc was left alone for the moment. He quickly tossed another pair of Mana Darts at the larger kobold, who spun and glared at Marc when they impacted. Rob took advantage of his opponent's inattention and slammed his shield into its head, leaving it moderately stunned.
With that action the balance of the fight shifted. It had appeared that the two were closely matched with the advantage going slightly to Rob. While the kobold was still shaking off Rob's Shield Bash, Rob drove his pilum into it again, Marc joining him in attacking the kobold since the smaller ones were still backed off, watching.
From there it was only a few more strikes until the larger kobold dropped, its sword falling from its hand to lay in the aisle as it bled out. Marc and Rob turned and advanced on the smaller kobolds, who all broke and started running. With the loss of their champion, or whatever the larger kobold had been, they'd lost the will to fight.
There were still somewhere around ten of the smaller kobolds and they darted every which way. Some of them managed to escape despite the best efforts of the group to round them up and kill them.
Once all the kobolds were either dead or fled, the party sat down for a moment, keeping an eye on the different entrances to the auditorium.
“You and Doug oughta be happy,” Jeff said. “At least two of those guys up there were casters. I got this on my looting run and no-one else has gotten to them yet.”
Jeff handed over a scroll and Marc broke into a grin.
“I'll check it out later. This probably isn't the best time to try to learn a new spell,” Marc said.
Jeff shook his head.
“The one I got this one from was one of those curse dudes. I think he hit Rob with one before I managed to drop him.”
Rob nodded.
“They seem pretty fond of the weakness version of the curse,” he said.
“Hmm, I wonder if I'd be able to reverse it, if I just reverse the sign on the curse portion, would it change into a blessing?”
Marc was starting to drop into his meditation skill to consider that alteration when he was snapped back to reality by a slap on the back of the head.
“Hey, I thought you said this wasn't a good time to learn a spell,” Jeff said. “Probably even worse to get all analytical in the same situation.”
“Oh, um, yeah... right. Sorry, you're probably right about that, but I need to remember to check that out later on. If this is that curse? And if I can change it around to be a buff instead? That would rock,” Marc replied.
Jeff just shook his head. Felicia, on the other hand, gave him a pencil and paper.
“Write it down, then you won't forget it,” she said.
Marc smiled up at her and he started scrawling on the paper, then tucked it into his inventory and gave the pencil back to Felicia.
“Shall we finish looting here?” Jeff asked. “So we can get moving? Not exactly my idea of a relaxing break knowing that four or five of those things got away and know where we are currently.”
The rest of the group hurried up and finished looting, Marc breaking into yet another grin as he got a scroll from the caster he'd dropped with his Mana Darts. Rob had claimed the sword from the large kobold and was wearing it in its scabbard on his belt.
“I'll check it out later, but it's nice to have another melee weapon in case I have to throw my pilum,” he said. “I know it did some decent damage with the kobold wielding it. Hopefully it was the weapon and not the wielder.”
He rubbed his side where he'd been wounded fighting the large kobold. Felicia had taken care of the wound at the end of the battle though, so Marc thought it was probably just a memory of the pain that Rob was remembering.
* * *
They headed out of the auditorium and started to make their way towards the gym, checking and clearing classrooms as they went. Only a few minutes after they'd started that, they heard screams, human screams, and a cry for help.
“That's the other group,” Rob said.
“But where are they?” Felicia asked.
“Back this way, we can narrow in on it when we get closer,” Jeff replied, sprinting down the corridor.
The other three followed and within two minutes they'd discovered the problem. The other group had headed into the gymnasium to try to clear it.
“No clue how many, just lots,” Jeff said.
From what they could hear there was still fighting going on in the gym, so they rushed in.
“Standard, Rob and I up front, Felicia in back, Jeff Stealth,” Marc called out.
They got inside and found what the problem was. The other group was still up, but they were heavily wounded. Olivia was flailing about with a length of wood she was using as a club.
“Is she out of mana or something? What happened to the staff of healing?” Marc asked.
“She got the one with less durability, so she may well have used it up,” Jeff replied. “Gotta go.”
Felicia pulled out her own staff and started throwing heals across the gym, the other party shimmering green one after the other. They looked up and settled back into their fight with a renewed vigor.
Unfortunately the heals had also caught the attention of the kobolds, and now a large number of them turned to attack the group that had just entered the gym. Fortunately, Jeff had already gone into Stealth and Marc assumed the kobolds hadn't seen him.
“Backs to the wall,” Marc cried out. “Felicia take the spot between us and focus on defense and healing.”
The three of them backed up to the cinder block wall of the gym, twenty or more kobolds advancing on them. On the far side of the gym, Marc saw what the other group's problem was. With only a single defensive person, Jayden was having a problem keeping the hordes of kobolds away from the rest of his group members.
Jack was trying to make up for the difference with rate of fire, and it had worked for a while. Marc didn't even try to count how many kobolds lay dead with an arrow sticking out of them, he was too busy with his own fight.
I know there ought to be some more powerful ones in here. I haven't seen any of the congregations of spawns without some leader types. So where are they? he wondered.
He knew they were around a moment later, because a ball of fire raced towards him and Rob. This one was larger than the earlier one he'd seen.
“Problem,” he hollered, taking a split second to point his pilum towards the ball of fire.
Then he had to return his attention to the kobold in front of him or get raked by the creature's claws.
Felicia evidently took his gesturing with his weapon as a suggestion. She took a step forward, body slamming the kobold in front of her, then took a stance like a batter in a baseball game. As the ball approached rapidly, she eyed it and swung her tire iron like a short, metal bat.
As she struck the ball, it exploded, growing in size to almost three feet in diameter, but it also started to reverse its direction so the expanding ball of flame only lightly scorched Felicia. The same couldn't be said for the kobolds whose heads it had traveled over earlier. With its reversed direction and expanded diameter the kobolds that it traveled back over for a split second after its momentum was reversed were burned badly, many of them simply dropping where they stood.
“Heh, and they said softball league was for losers,” Felicia said, before groaning in pain and treating herself to a healing spell.
That seemed to be the turning point for the fight. Jeff had seen the caster and had moved over to backstab it. With that caster gone, the fight rapidly got easier. The lower kobolds were as likely to run away as to stand and fight once their leaders were killed and it looked like the leaders were all gone now.
A lot of the kobolds fled, but Marc was pretty sure they'd be able to clean those guys up one or two at a time like they'd been doing in the classrooms.
Although we'll have to go over the whole damned place with a fine toothed comb to find all the little buggers, he thought.
Once the fight was over, he found out that Jayden had actually taken out one of the leaders first. The kobold had actually had armor, a shield, and a sword. Then Doug had spotted a caster cursing Jayden with weakness and focused on it with his Mana Darts, leaving only the caster using the fire spells. Those same fire spells had caused Olivia to use the rest of the healing staff and all of her mana to keep the group up. The yells and cries for help had come when the kobold caster had started dropping fireballs on the group after she was low on mana.
“Well, that should be all the larger groups. We'll need to clean it room by room though,” Marc said.
“Just another bug hunt,” Jeff said. “Don't worry, mostly they're in ones and twos by now. At least all the ones not in the larger rooms have been.”
“Yeah, well, we'll help. But first we're going to regen mana and health.”
“And loot,” Jack said. “Rule number one: Always loot the bodies. Besides I need to see how many of my arrows I can recover.”
The two groups settled in to loot their respective kills and then regen up to full before continuing to clear the school.
* * *
Working their way through the classrooms was monotonous and yielded little experience for Marc and his group. Individual kobolds just weren't worth that much to them any more, but the small amounts of copper that each had added up to make it worthwhile. The leader types' corpses had some silver on them and Marc had picked up another scroll from the caster in the gym. They needed coinage enough for a variety of things that it was worth it to them to continue.
Marc knew that he had the auctions for the gold bullion ending soon, but unless they did better than he thought most of that was earmarked for expansion efforts, although he did plan to split whatever was leftover after purchasing his recycling machine with the rest of the group.
I just don't think it'll be that much unless there are collectors out there that like getting the first gold coins from newly claimed System areas, he thought.
They were rummaging through another nest after clearing the kobold from the room when Jeff stopped and put a finger to his mouth.
After everyone had shushed, he nodded.
“We need to go down into the basement,” he said. “I'm hearing thumps and bangs down there. Don't know what it is, but we probably ought to check it out.”
“Well, this is our last hallway, so we'll finish clearing it then head down there,” Marc said. “That work for you? There's only two more classrooms left.”
Jeff nodded.
“Ought to do, I don't know what the noise is though and that's got my curiosity going.”
They cleared those two classrooms quickly, then made their way to the basement stairs. The door was open a crack, although normally kept locked.
“Huh, someone broke the lock off,” Jeff said. “Let me go down and scout it out.”
He shimmered and disappeared, only to reappear less than a minute later.
“Nope, nope, nope. That's a hard nope, I'm having nothing to do with those,” Jeff said.
“What's a nope?” Rob asked.
“Big insects with lots of legs,” Jeff replied.
“Big insects? You mean like the size of my hand?”
“No,” Jeff said, face pale, “I mean like as tall as you are with little razor legs running all along both sides.”
“Insects that are standing up?” Felicia asked.
“No, the legs are small, they're bent up with about two feet of their length on the ground and the other four feet lifting up into the air like they're standing. There's a kobold that looks to be in charge of them, too.”
“What about the bumps and bangs?” Marc asked.
“Who knows, who cares, we're not going down there. Serious nope down there.”
Marc turned to Felicia and Rob.
“So, no Jeff. Three on three then? Think we can take them?”
Rob grinned.
“Sure, no problem.”
Felicia turned to Jeff.
“Anything else about these bugs we should know?” she asked.
“Pincers on their faces, razors on their sides, and six feet long. What else do you need to know? Are you crazy?”
“Hmm, sounds like centipedes, except massive ones. Yeah we can probably do it. If they poison you, keep going. If I can get a sample of their poison I can use it with the Antivenom spell I got back at level three and cure you, got it?” Felicia asked.
“Got it,” Marc and Rob replied in unison.
“Okay, let's get to it. Even I heard that last bang,” Marc said.
He had a sneaking suspicion of what it was, especially after having seen the menu they were serving in the cafeteria.
He refreshed his own armor as well as his and Rob's shields, then they went down the steps. They had to go single file, but Marc moved up alongside of Rob as soon as they cleared the steps.
The cement floor of the basement was not intact. Half of it had been torn up and piled against the wall. On the revealed dirt were the two insects Jeff had reported on.
Yup, centipedes, Marc thought. And just as big as Jeff said.
He couldn't help it. Despite not having any phobias regarding insects he still shuddered at the sight of them. Then he saw the kobold that was over near a door in the wall, a door that was kept shut with a bar on this side.
Definitely keeping someone prisoner in there, more than one someone from the sound of things, he thought.
The kobold barked something and when neither Marc nor Rob answered he looked towards the centipedes and said something else in a commanding tone. The centipedes, who'd been 'standing' as Jeff called it, dropped their entire lengths onto the floor and raced towards Marc and Rob, one on each.
They were much quicker than Marc had expected them to be and he almost got struck with a pincer straight off. He'd lowered his pilum to try to flip it over or something, but he'd been too slow, the blade simply scraping along the segmented carapace along the centipede's back. He jumped aside quickly, but the pincer still managed to scrape along his Arcane Armor, very nearly penetrating it.
He scrabbled farther to the side, trying to drive his pilum into its head. The centipede pulled back as he thrust down and the blade of his pilum scored the concrete.
How do you kill these things? I mean with normal ones even if you stomp them it doesn't kill them all the time. So probably a Shield Bash isn't exactly going to help, unless it rears up again. Then I might be able to knock it on its back.
Rob grunted in pain and Marc looked over to see that his centipede had manage to drive its pincer into his ankle.
“Shit!” Rob exclaimed.
“Screw it,” Marc said, then he proceeded to dodge the attacks of his own centipede while hammering Rob's with Mana Dart after Mana Dart. It took five of them to finish it off, and that was with Rob managing to stab it once. Meanwhile, Marc was barely staying ahead of his own. He was pretty much out of mana, having used all of it he had left after the armor and shield spell by casting on Rob's centipede. If he hadn't been regenerating it right along he wouldn't have even had enough to finish off the one centipede.
Rob was staggering a bit, not heavily wounded, but the poison seemed to be causing it.
“Felicia, I'll try to keep this one busy, can you Antivenom Rob?” Marc called.
“Just a minute, I'm busy here,” she called.
Marc pulled his attention away from his centipede to see that Felicia was fighting the kobold in charge of the centipedes. He stared at it for a moment before getting a system readout on it.
