Defiance of the Fall

Chapter 87: Spectral Wolves

Ogras was quick on the uptake and he immediately shouted down the other side of the wall, where Janos stood next to a large crystal. The illusionist immediately activated the array with the help of a pile of Nexus Crystals, and with a deep hum a shimmering dome grew out of the ground, covering the whole inner area of camp Atwood. It reminded Zac of a large soap bubble, with prismatic colors covering the whole shield, slowly swirling about. But the observant watchers could see that the swirls weren’t really random, but rather followed some pattern, and that the stripes of colors were reminiscent of fractals.

It was the [E-Grade Medium scale Town Defense Array]. It was Zac’s first purchase with his wealth gained by the crystal mine. The town planners had gone over various other solutions, such as purchasing a defensive and offensive arrays separately, but the Town Defense Array simply gave an unparalleled bang for the buck at these low tier battles. In the future an established force would likely have tens of arrays available, each designed for a specific defense or attack, but with their limited resources they went with the generalist approach.

The only downside was that it cost quite a lot of crystals to operate. But with a crystal mine in his possession Zac wasn’t too worried about consumption. Initially, its radius was roughly 50 meters shorter compared to the wall, creating an inner death-zone between the wall and the barrier. But after some adjustments, it grew to stop ten meters outside the walls, not allowing the spectral wolves access to the fortifications.

Zac took a few quick steps backward with [Loamwalker], allowing him to cross over a hundred meters almost in an instant. He smoothly passed through the barrier without creating a ripple. The shield wasn’t intelligent enough to distinguish friend from foe, but as the owner of the array he had some perks.

Normally he would have preferred to keep the array at its original size and test whether the wolves could actually run through the wall, but there were too many tired demons up on the battlements at the moment. They were changing shifts with this wave, and everyone hadn’t left their posts yet. Instead, he had to expend some money in order to ensure the group of demons heading further in to rest wouldn’t be assaulted by these ghost wolves. They were wrung out and didnʼt have the energy to resist anymore.

Soon the beasts heedlessly slammed into the shield, some even dying from the impact. The shield was a product of the System itself, and didn’t even flicker from the impact. The wolves weren’t disheartened, and started to claw frenziedly at the translucent barrier, but it had no effect at all. After a few seconds it was obvious that these beasts’ only strong point was their incorporeal state.

Zac didn’t want to waste even more crystals by activating the offensive component of the array as well, and instead took out out his axe and headed out through the array once more. Attacks from the wall also started to fall down at the wolves through the barrier, as it only stopped things from going inside and not the other way.

It immediately became clear what worked and didn’t work with these things. The arrowheads helplessly embedded themselves into the ground after passing through the transparent bodies of the wolves, with a few exceptions. Any arrow that was imbued with some skill, such as lightning or darkness, had no problem killing the beasts. Meanwhile, the mages had no problems at all and gleefully peppered the wolves full of holes.

Zac saw the same results. His axe just passed through the wolf it targeted, and it responded by trying to bite his free arm. Zac actually let it in order to see the result, and surprisingly it managed to grab a hold of the small of his arm. Its bite had no effect on Zac, and he felt that its power was only equivalent to the beasts on the 200th wave or somewhere around there.

He charged a minimal amount of cosmic energy into the fractal on his hand, and a small edge from [Chop] appeared. It was barely as long as the normal edge, but it costs almost no cosmic energy. Normally there would be little benefit to using it like this, but with these particular wolves it was very effective.

The wolves were like normal beasts to the edge created from cosmic energy as its head was split in two. However, no blood spurted out and the beast simply broke down into motes of darkness before it was completely gone. Next he tried using only the Dao with his axe, and it worked as well in letting him kill the monsters. Obviously, the beasts would be extremely dangerous to normal humans, but against skills they were pretty weak.

Still, the speed of whittling down their numbers was quite slow, as not all the demons possessed ranged skills. Those who were melee classes usually helped out by throwing rocks or shooting arrows from the wall when the battlefield was too dangerous, but now they could only helplessly stare on.

Very few demons dared to pass through the barrier to fight head-on. It wasn’t like the wall that had the gates or ropes hanging from it that would allow the demons to quickly retreat if needed. If they passed through they would be stuck on the battlefield until the barrier was lowered as they couldn’t come and go as they pleased like Zac.

The longer the barrier stayed active the more crystals would be consumed, and Zac felt the need to end this battle quickly. He started to charge up his [Chop] skill until it was five meters long, then with a mental command the edge multiplied into five identical parallel edges. They were right next to each other with less than a centimeter between them, making the edge look like a thick block of fractals.

Zac rapidly swung his axe horizontally five times, and with every swing one of the edges flew out in a different direction. Each blade created a huge path of death, and Zac felt a constant torrent of cosmic energy enter his body as a large part of the battlefield turned into black motes of light.

The new attack was the result of constantly being in pitched battles for weeks. Both his [Axe Mastery] and [Chop] had improved once again, reaching Late Mastery. According to Alea the mastery stages of skills were Early-Mid-Late-Peak before they reached their limits and needed to be upgraded, meaning the skills were close to completion.

The improved [Chop] currently held stable at five meters instead of at one, and now allowed for multiple blades to be created. Initially, he had only managed to create two, but as his control over cosmic energy improved from constant battle, the number of blades he could maintain stably increased. The extra blades had no purpose when they were attached, but greatly improved his area damage when he shot them away.

[Chop] was more and more turning into an area skill, but it didn’t really improve the power of his strikes. He would have to imbue his Dao into the blades in order to improve the lethality compared to a normal swing. Luckily area damage was just the thing he needed with the monster hordes, so he was quite happy with the improvements.

Initially he wasn’t sure what the point was of creating five blades in this new manner since he could just create them one by one and shoot them out in succession instead. But he realized that the Cosmic Energy consumption was a lot lower for copying an existing blade rather than creating it from scratch for some reason. Creating five blades the new way only required half the cosmic energy compared if he created them one by one. East blast he shot out usually killed a good amount of beasts, so being able to launch twice as many was a huge improvement.

He hadn’t really explored the effect of [Axe Mastery] yet, as he didn’t have the luxury of spending cosmic energy on the training system with the hordes constantly requiring attention. He hoped he’d get some days off where he could try it for a bit after the first horde was finished with.

Zac spent a decent chunk of cosmic energy in quickly reaping the lives of a large part of the wave, which allowed the melee warriors to head out and help out with the remainder. Soon only a few stragglers remained and Zac could deactivate the shield. The shield was only active for roughly 30 minutes, but Zac knew that it cost him over a hundred thousand Nexus Coins. Even with his large number of kills from using his area attacks he knew he took a loss from this wave.

That’s why he had refused to use the shield thus far, even though it cost the lives of a couple of demons. It might seem callous, but no one was stepping up to share the cost of maintenance, with everyone trying to amass as much wealth as possible from the waves.

He could force them to hand over some the earnings, in a manual shakedown of sorts. But he didn’t feel the need for that as of yet, and saw their gains as a salary. But if it came down to it he wasn’t above commandeering everything they had in order to protect his base. The demons were aware of this fact, and many even braved the dangers of the wolf hordes in order to burn all their cash at the Thayer Consortia when their pockets became heavy.

Apparently Calrin was well aware of the situation and had hiked up the cost of the herbs needed for medicine baths to twice its normal prices, citing the troubles of restocking during war-time. Zac suspected was all baloney as the Gnome had access to the Mercantile System, which allowed him to easily restock the supplies at any time.

The demons could only grit their teeth and cough up their hard-earned Nexus Coins. Zac really looked forward the shareholder’s meeting of Thayer Consortia in two months when he would get his quarterly dividends from the proceedings. He had a feeling that the little gnome should have squeezed out an extraordinary amount of coins from the poor demons by then.

Since the ghost wolf wave was largely dead the System quickly pumped out the next one, and the army went back to business as usual. This time it was large lumbering things that looked made out of rocks, and some even had moss growing on their wide backs. The wolves were easily the largest kind so far, each reaching over three meters tall, with the leader towering over five meters. It was a bit troublesome as the walls only stood at 8 meters, meaning that the huge thing might be able to reach the top, if it stood on its hind legs.

The saving grace was that there only was a bit over a hundred of them, but each felt like a walking siege machine, and Zac started to wonder whether he should erect the barrier again before these hulking things started to break down the fortifications. Imagining the cost of maintaining the barrier with these monstrosities charging at it quickly helped Zac arrive at a decision, and he charged toward the wolves after the customary rock throw which only elicited an angry growl this time.