Chương 78: Gamble

The stray mana projectile missed the plant assassin entirely, tearing clean through the dense foliage to detonate against the massive tree trunk right behind me. The sudden concussive blast wave caught me off balance, launching my helpless torso straight out of my wooden perch, sending me tumbling downward until I crashed into another heavy branch. I let out a miserable, pathetic groan while pulling myself up, massaging my freshly abused ribcage as I forced my boots back into a stable stance on the bark.

"Good heavens," I muttered under my breath, shaking a layer of charred leaves off my knuckles.

"Why on earth am I so incredibly attracted to this specific flavor of self-sabotaging combat tactics?" I aggressively scanned the immediate canopy, my high intelligence statistics working overtime to pierce through the heavy purple smoke. Even with my vision somewhat blurred, my mental radar easily locked onto the fast, shifting distortions of the three remaining Creepers as they circled my position, their long limbs twitching as they tried to find a fresh angle to finish me off.

"Well, look at the bright side," I said, forcing a thoroughly unvarnished smirk across my features while my breathing remained shallow and fast.

"At least I have successfully managed to secure the undivided attention of all three of these little monsters." The three remaining Creepers finally stopped their high-speed erratic zip-zags and slipped out from the dense purple smoke, perching themselves on the surrounding branches to stare straight at my battered torso. A funny little feeling in the back of my mind was telling me that these plant assassins were harboring a deeply personal, highly unprofessional grudge against my magnificent persona specifically.

With a quick mental command, I let the heavy iron handle of my Hand Mortar dissolve into stray pixels, instantly manifesting the rugged, plain mass of my Deck Sweeper blunderbuss back into my grip to brace for the next round of close-range chaos.

"Is this truly the absolute best performance your little garden club can pull off?" I asked, throwing my hands out in a highly provocative gesture while looking around at the trio of bulbous violet faces.

"I was honestly expecting a great deal more from a synchronized squad of elite ambushers. I mean, this was a perfectly stacked four-against-one scenario. Well, it was a four-against-one scenario, because one of your companions is currently a pile of dead trimmings on the forest floor." I twisted my lips into a massive, thoroughly amused smirk, mocking their frozen stance as I adjusted my weight on the rough bark.

"Are you three just going to stand there loitering all afternoon, or are we actually going to get this dance started?" I barked into the heavy atmosphere, keeping my iron sights locked onto the center of the pack.

"I am on a very strict schedule here, and I have a date with a giant, corrupted piece of broccoli named Wiwiboo the Foulsoul to completely delete from the active server." Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings. It seemed my highly creative reconfiguration of their grand leader's name had deeply wounded their sensitive plant feelings.

The trio of Creepers simultaneously shivered from head to toe, their vine-wrapped frames trembling with immediate anger before they launched themselves off their branches to rush straight toward my position.

"That was an incredibly poor tactical configuration on your part," I remarked, watching their high-speed trajectory through the purple smoke with a massive grin.

"You little menaces might possess high agility ratings, but you are still remarkably stupid." Right at that exact microsecond, a surprisingly small, familiar silhouette descended straight from the massive canopy directly above my head. It was Fiona, who had apparently scaled the upper branches in total silence while I was busy occupying the local hospitality department.

Before her feet could even touch the wood, her tiny human form completely dissolved mid air, her physical structure violently expanding and reshaping itself until she manifested into a gargantuan, roaring red bear. Our newly transformed grizzly savior did not waste a single millisecond. She opened her massive jaws to let out a guttural, bone-shattering roar that echoed across the entire treeline, immediately spending a single point of her mana pool to activate Wildheart Surge.

The resulting Primal Tremor effect did some absolutely spectacular damage numbers on the ambush squad. The sheer kinetic force of her heavy paw slam sent a massive shockwave of raw magical energy ripping through the branches, causing the wooden bark to literally explode upward in a wide circle. The violent eruption slammed straight into the three airborne plant monsters, not only draining a massive chunk of their HP but also leaving them entirely stunned out of pure, unadulterated shock.

To be completely fair with the monsters, if I happened to be in their exact situation and a giant red bear unexpectedly fell out of the sky to crush my spine, I would be profoundly shocked too. Our newly transformed grizzly savior did not waste a single millisecond of their stunned confusion. Fiona lunged forward on the heavy branch, violently slamming her massive front paws down onto the skull of the closest plant monster, completely crushing its vine-wrapped frame into a flat pancake of dark wood.

Without missing a beat, she whipped her heavy head sideways and unhinged her jaws, biting the second stunned Creeper clean in half with a sickening crunch that brought its brief career to an immediate end. The third and final remaining Creeper realized its entire ambush squad had been deleted, so it decided to launch a desperate, suicidal counter-offensive, aiming its razor-sharp wooden talons straight at my neck to drag me down to the grave right along with it.

I did not bother trying to dodge its final frantic leap. I simply hoisted the rugged mass of my Deck Sweeper blunderbuss, pressed the wide barrel directly against the center of its bulbous violet face, and squeezed the smooth trigger to let loose a point-blank basic attack. The short-range wave of magic power erupted from the barrel with a deafening roar, and the creature's entire head exploded into a massive shower of burning splinters and purple slime.

The headless corpse went completely limp and dropped into the thick foliage down below. Once I cast my gaze around the upper canopy and was absolutely certain that there were zero active plant assassins left breathing in our sector, I let out a long, heavy exhale to clear the toxic purple smoke from my lungs.

"That whole dramatic sniper bait strategy was way too much of a high-risk, incredibly stupid gamble," I said, leaning my torso against a sturdy branch while shaking the lingering adrenaline out of my palm wraps.

"I seriously need to stop treating my personal survival rating like a joke, or my poor skeletal structure is going to end up thoroughly buried under the dirt next time around."