Chương 15

My brain ran calculations at a speed I didn't know it could. When I saw the two more gnolls running for the group, I knew that we were fucked. I had just used Judgment of Raziel, and unless I wanted to down one potion while running toward a fight against two Alphas, I had to make a difficult choice.

"Hailey!" I shouted.

"Stabilize Lucas! Marcus, engage! Tina, behind Marcus!" I started running back toward the group. But Marcus would engage the gnolls before I got there.

"Marcus, Taunt on one! Tina, Empower — fucking kill the second! Use all your mana!" I prayed as I kept running. My chest felt half caved-in after taking a spear. Even at reduced power, the two gnolls threw their spears at Marcus. But the tank barely shook as his large shield deflected both.

"Fuck yeah," I muttered between my teeth. Marcus Taunted one gnoll, which — instead of throwing its spear — took out its dagger with a ravenous snarl and pounced on him. Thankfully, when Marcus Shield Bashed the creature, which had dived head-first for him, he managed to stun it. Banging the shield on the head of the creature stopped it dead in its tracks. Tina, meanwhile, got a shot at the second. Her staff shone impossibly bright, and a fist-sized mana bolt left it like an arrow from a longbow.

I prayed while I watched the gnoll get shot. Tina immediately fell to the ground, groaning, half fainted. Because of the night, I couldn't see much, but the gnoll fell to the ground without a word. I finally reached them. With my Sphere of Intuition, I saw what Tina's target had become. There was a fist-sized hole where the gnoll's heart should have been. Holy fuck, Tina. But I didn't waste any more time. The second gnoll was shaking its head like a dog, about to pounce on Marcus again.

"Hey, motherfucker." I speared it in the chest, and it snarled at me. But I had enough Strength to lift the thing mid-air and then slam it down again. With nowhere to grasp, the gnoll simply slammed its back into the cold earth. I removed my spear and pierced its head while it slashed at my belly. Once again, the Armor of Raziel saved me from being eviscerated. Without the S-Ranked piece of armor, I would have died twice tonight.

This immediately made me think, as I killed the gnoll: whoever is crazy enough to face these things at night is the fucking king of lunatics. Finally, the prairie was silent. I immediately took out the hyena anal glands and smeared them on me, Tina, and Marcus. Then I ran toward the other two, and while Hailey was kneeling over Lucas's half-conscious form, I did the same to their legs.

"How's it looking?" I asked Hailey.

"Is he okay?"

"The bleeding stopped almost immediately — almost before I could even use my Heal," Hailey said.

"But the arm…" I saw Hailey pointing at the stump. I looked around and found the forearm, thinking that maybe we could reattach it. But the throw had destroyed half of it. I held what was left of Lucas's forearm in my own hands, and I looked at Hailey.

"You don't think we can do anything with this?" Hailey wordlessly shook her head. Not knowing what else to do — thinking that perhaps it could come in handy at some point, helping us reattach Lucas's forearm — I put it in my inventory while Hailey finished sealing the wound and healing Lucas. Then she put a hand flat on my chest, where the spear had caught me, and the ache went out of it. I went through the loot. I had three kills to my name. Holy. Gnoll Throwing Spear — E-Rank.

A throwing spear that is the favorite weapon of any Gnoll. I got six of those — two per corpse. And they also carried one line in their description that made me jittery. This spear can be taken out of your inventory during battle.

"Holy fuck, yes," I muttered.

"That's exactly what I needed." Then I found, surprisingly, some Alpha teeth and a Stamina Potion.

"All right," I muttered under my breath, looking at Tina, whom Marcus had carried right beside Lucas. We had to wait now, but it was already two fifteen. We only had three hours and forty-five minutes left. Fuck. They had all exhausted their mana. Both Tina and Hailey — having more mana than me, but not regenerating it that much faster — now had to wait more than two hours to be at full tank. To be precise: two and a half hours.

I considered feeding them one potion each, and then only waiting for my own Judgment of Raziel mana. After my Willpower had gone up, it only needed about thirty minutes to regenerate the next charge. While running these calculations in my head, I heard Hailey sob.

"Don't worry." I turned to see that Lucas had awakened.

"I should have used a shield," Hailey cried.

"I'm so sorry, Lucas. I'm such an idiot. Your arm — I tried, but John has what's left of it. Maybe we can do something with it. Maybe…"

"Hailey," Lucas said, smiling.

"It's all right. I can maybe shoot bolts even without my hand. It's a magical bow. I'll just— we'll figure it out. Don't worry." I looked at Lucas, and he looked at me with serious eyes. I didn't say anything, because I didn't know what to say. What did you say to a guy who had just lost a limb? I didn't think they ever taught me that in engineering school. I wondered for a moment what army soldiers said to each other, or to their subordinates, when something like this happened on the front lines.

But Lucas just looked at me, raised his stump, and said, "Well, sunk cost being what it is, we gotta get fucking moving, John." The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement. I laughed, almost choking on my saliva while bending forward on my knees.

"Fuck, Lucas. We're gonna have them fucking pay for that hand."

"Yeah. We're also gonna find a way to fucking reattach my arm," the man said, slowly getting up.

"But before that — um, do you have any cloth? Anything made out of cloth? I want to try something." We spent the next hour doing our best to cut some strips of leather from the loot we'd gotten from the wild hyenas. Thankfully, some of them were long enough that we managed to create the ugliest, stinkiest, but very functional harness for Lucas's longbow. He attached it to his stump and shot a bolt, despite me telling him to preserve his mana.

"I need to fucking see if this works before we walk into another mortal battle," he had said.

"Fair," I had replied. And it did hold, surprisingly. I had thought the last hour might have been for nothing, but the bow held and did not move one centimeter.

"This thing is sort of cutting off my blood a little, like a tourniquet. But I'll just make sure to take it off every four or five hours to, you know, let my blood circulation go," Lucas said.

"At least they shot my left arm."

"You kinda look like you have a crossbow arm, now that I look at it," I said to Lucas.

"It's kinda creepy."

"Ah, shut up," Lucas replied, looking at his arm.

"If you ask me, this is less work than carrying the bow normally. Now — what are we gonna do? Are we going?" I looked toward Tina and Hailey, who were still sitting on the ground.

"We gotta wait for their mana to regenerate. Tina's Empower is super strong, but we're gonna run out of mana in that fight. There's two Alphas. I have two potions, so I can reasonably shoot, what, three Judgments of Raziel? But if anything goes wrong, we'll need Tina. And we'll also need Hailey's healing." Lucas sighed and sat down on the ground.

"We're gonna cut it fucking close, aren't we?" he asked.

"Yeah." I sighed.

"We are." We walked toward the pyramid at around four forty-five, with one hour and fifteen minutes to go. We had spent all that time reconvening and running dry runs on how to approach the next fights. I told Hailey that her main spells would have to be the Shield and the Attack Plus — to cast Attack Plus on me if things went wrong, and otherwise on Marcus, so that he could put more strength behind his Shield Bash. The pyramid was large — larger than it had looked from afar.

And I really, really didn't wanna enter the pitch-dark pyramid where at least two Alphas waited for us. It was really at the bottom of my wish list. But one does what one has to do, and so we entered the place. As soon as we did, the walls at our sides lit up with hieroglyphs that brightened the place.

"I'm not sure I like this that much better than the dark," I muttered.

"Uh, shut up," Tina said nervously.

"You're making me afraid."

"Yeah, it's me. Sorry," I replied.

"Not the undead pyramid. And remember — there might be more fear effects. If you feel any fear, just shout, do something, snap out of it." Everybody nodded. We moved forward and spent a couple of minutes walking down a long, narrow corridor, which opened into a giant burial chamber. The unsettling part about the burial chamber was the corpses. There were rows and rows of them, nailed to the walls and slowly bleeding out.

The scariest thing was that there were hyenas, there were humans, and there were even gnolls, nailed all over the place. They had the same glazed-over look as the three crucified men we had found back at the Haven.

"What the fuck is this?" Marcus muttered. I got closer to the wall, and through the Sphere of Intuition I saw that the hieroglyphs on the wall were drinking the blood. They looked ominous through the Sphere, covered in dark smoke.

"So, the hieroglyphs," I said, "are apparently drinking their blood. This is probably some kind of spell the boss uses to get stronger. So I think it's just— yeah, that." We were about to move forward when some shambling undead came off the walls. They were corpses of hyenas, of men, and even of a gnoll, that had just been killed and were now reanimated. We all felt the fear effect. But having escaped it once, we shook it off almost immediately.

And most importantly — the zombies were sort of pathetic without the fear. Even the gnoll barely moved, at one-fourth of its normal agility. I told everybody to preserve their strength, and I made short work of the undead myself with my spear. They made a disgusting squelching noise when I pierced them, and I got splashed with rotten blood and flesh fragments. We moved forward, into a corridor that sloped downward.

Here, too, there were creatures of all kinds — even several Alphas: wild hyenas, boars, and the horned zebras we had killed earlier on the second day. Some of them reanimated, and we had to fight them. And by we, I mean I put a spear through their heads, and we moved forward. This went on for about ten minutes, until we reached a much larger chamber, with so many creatures nailed to the walls that I asked, "How the fuck did they do this in less than forty-eight hours? What the fuck?"

The answer to that came right after. On two columns had been standing what I had thought were statues of mummies. It turned out they were not, indeed, statues. They jumped down and stared at us — two terrifying-looking zombie mummies that had, over their heads, the tag: Undead Priest of Anubis. I looked at their long, straight ceremonial headgear, at the little ceremonial sickles and daggers in their hands, and swore out loud. They really ripped these off from The Mummy, didn't they? Then they lunged at us.

Despite being Alpha undead, they were level ten — much, much less scary than the goddamn gnolls we had just faced.

"Taunt!" I shouted, and Marcus Taunted one while I went for the second. What surprised me was that it jumped, trying to go for Hailey and Tina instead. Motherfucker is smart. But I immediately activated Judgment of Raziel and threw a Gnoll throwing spear at its back. The first Alpha exploded in a shower of undead gore. Marcus was struggling — his Shield Bash had not stunned the mummy.

I was about to shout at Tina, but Lucas, whom I had perhaps mentally written off for the fight, headshotted the thing with a mana bolt. The undead corpse crumpled to the ground.

"Well, this was easier than I imagined," I said, immediately drinking a Potion of Clarity and returning to maximum MP.

"Yeah, this felt too easy," Marcus said.

"Ooh, don't say that," Hailey shushed Marcus.

"That's bad luck."

"I agree with Hailey," I said.

"But where is the…" I cut myself off as I saw that there was a set of stairs and a little door — one so small I had to hunch over to cross it. I went there. On the other side stood a large sarcophagus, and even more corpses.

"Okay. The boss is here," I said.

"Everybody get ready." They started climbing the stairs, and I went through the door thinking, please let this be easy. This is a boss, but it's a weak boss. It was like I was praying for it. And of course, as soon as I crossed the damn threshold, it snapped shut behind me, leaving me alone in the boss room.

"John!" I heard Tina shout. I kicked the door, but nothing happened.

"I'm okay," I replied.

"I'll blast this damn thing down!" Tina replied. I looked at the stone, which shimmered faintly.

"Tina, don't do that. This thing is probably enchanted or something. Don't waste mana."

"But John," she shouted back, "what are we gonna do?"

"Just stay there. I'm the one with the exploding spears anyway. Let me deal with the boss." I turned toward the large sarcophagus, and a terrifying aura rolled off it. Ooh, shit. This thing is already very powerful. Many Alphas were nailed to the ground itself. I circled the sarcophagus. Right behind it lay a gigantic lion. Holy crap. I could still read its tag. The Noble King of the Jungle - Level 20 (Boss) The undead had even lured a damn boss in, and bled him dry? I turned to the sarcophagus, and I read.

Reincarnation of Amon - Level 30 [Undergoing Evolution] (Boss) All right. I blew on my hands, and actually recited a little prayer. Probably no one was listening, but you never knew. I grabbed a throwing spear and cast Judgment of Raziel on the sarcophagus. It was gold and blue and covered in gems, and I hated its opulence — I hated its richness, while we were stuck in this death trap of a tutorial. All right. Get fucked, bastard.

I threw the Gnoll spear, and the sarcophagus was enveloped in the explosion of Judgment of Raziel. I breathed shakily, waiting for the aftermath. As soon as the dust settled, the sarcophagus stood there again. There wasn't even a scratch on it.