Outrage of the Ancients

Dietrich’s fist met the revolting tentacle as it passed through an arrowslit and he triggered [Titan Strike], the magic now inherent to him overriding the normal rules of nature and how such an action would normally have gone.

A field of force wrapped around his gauntlet, gripping the flesh around the site of the impact, allowing him to shove the entirety of the invading limb back as one while adding immense amounts of additional force. There was a disgusting squelch as Rotforged’s tentacle bunched up on the inside of the hole it had come in through before something tore, splattering stinking fluids across the ground.

The effect on the monster was not to be underestimated, though. The limb he’d punched flew back out like a catapult stone, hammering into the monster’s main body and sending it sliding halfway across the plateau outside.

“This is my position now,” Dietrich declared, taking position right in the middle of the mess the tentacle had left behind. He was more than tough enough to survive in the soup of disease and pestilence, but the others probably didn’t.

Someone gagged. Someone else threw up. He studiously ignored both those things, Mia tossed him the bow and quiver he’d left behind when he’d sprinted over here from his previous spot, and fired an arrow into the mass outside, striking a skeleton on the head and shattering his skull.

There was another brief moment of silence, and then the gunfire picked up again.

“Single shots only. Take your time, and aim well, there is only a single spot where you can hurt them, and out munitions are highly limited,” he reminded them, though they’d obeyed before he’d even finished the first sentence.

Those firearms were powerful, but he preferred his familiar bow and arrow. Besides, the armory had far more munitions for those. In fact, it only had replacement arrows, their supply of bullets and other modern tricks was limited to what people had brought with them.

The regular monsters were falling by the dozens, but there were hundreds before the doors, thousands on the plateau, and likely millions around the mountain.

But there was far more out there than just regular animated corpses. The Rotforged, specifically, was already pulling itself back together, spitting out the various lesser creatures that had been squished into it when he’d thrown it back.

And now, his [Dangersense] was really blaring away, seeming to have finally decided that particular creature was worth highlighting even amidst all its fellows. What was that modern idiom about people who made obvious and therefore superfluous statements? Ah, right, Captain Obvious. That was what this Skill was.

But he was limited in what he could do from here. His Sword Art could be used at range but would be difficult to employ through an arrowslit, throwing a sword felt like a pointless exercise in futility even if he used [A Sword Borrowed] to ensure he didn’t have to go look for it later.

At least it was moving slowly enough that [Titan Strike] would be available again before he needed to remove the creature once more. But how many times would he get a full minute between attacks? And how long before his efforts to remove the invader filled this space with enough rotten flesh to kill them through sheer proximity?

Mia tapped him on the shoulder, making sure to stay out of the puddle of filth he was standing in.

“Yes?” he asked, barely managing to avoid snapping at her. It was probably important if she was disturbing him.

She pointed at the big Enhanced Skeleton closest to the entrance.

“Do you know where the skull controlling it is?”

“Dead center of its chest,” he said while unleashing another arrow into the horde. Not at one of the big suckers, though, his bow didn’t have the power to penetrate their exterior, and ripping them apart with his sword would require them to come far closer. Though it seemed like Mia had an idea …

Space twisted and warped before his very eyes as her sword flashed through the air, a silver ray of death striking the large monster and carving through it from top to bottom … and doing absolutely nothing. Until the monster simply toppled over, dead.

How had she … right. Her Sword Art bypassed armor, and while the bone that covered the skull was immensely thick, it was only a single layer. So if all that counted as armor, she could effectively destroy anything out there with a single hit, every ten minutes.

Though now the next time they sparred, it’d be hard to concentrate on anything save figuring out how to block that ability.

“Good job,” he told her and out of the corner of his eye, he saw her grin broadly despite the situation and the stench in the room.

“Monsters at the gate!”

And there was the warning he’d been dreading. Dietrich turned around and took two steps back, then looked down into the murder hole positioned there. Dozens of undead were already there, banging against the stone slab that pretended to be the fortress’ door, and dozens more were coming in every second, piling on top of the existing attackers, both increasing the pressure against the gate and rapidly gaining height. About ten minutes until they were literally boiling up through the murder hole.

“Use the gasoline, then drop stones in two min- …” Dietrich was in the middle of ordering when his [Danger Sense] blared even louder, warning him of something that wasn’t merely a threat in the area but a clear and present danger.

He whirled and met the next invasion attempt with another [Titan Strike], blasting back the Rotforged.

Next Challenge, hell, next wave, he’d better have a place where he could fight with his sword, because being cooped up in here was a nightmare that locked him out of using any of his big attacks.

Because outside, the Rotforged was once again pulling itself back together, the skull binding it frustratingly intact.

***

Tristan

That thing was absolutely terrifying, its tentacles continued to pull itself back together every time Dietrich punched it. I itched to open a portal and pour fifty liters of napalm over it, but I’d hold off until our “general” told me to. The knowledge he’d shared with me had already highlighted it as a major threat but there might be a reason why he was holding off. There was certainly a part of me that revolted at the idea of using a trump card this early in the fi- …

“Mr. Vogt, burn the Rotforged,” Karl ordered.

… Or maybe I’d been right, and the expert had merely taken a couple of extra seconds to eliminate all other options.

I stepped a few meters to the side, raised both hands and held them out, palms facing towards the ground, and triggered [Guide’s Shortcut]. Suddenly, the floor was replaced by a horizontal portal that sat flush with the ground, a circular hole that put me far closer to the action than I’d ever wanted to be.

My head instantly started swimming, both from the stench and the sudden shift in perspective as I was suddenly standing next to a five-meter drop, staring down into oblivion.

Though I’d already been doing what I had to by the time the nausea hit me and that was enough. As far as actions taken purely through not letting yourself distracted because you’d already been in the middle of doing it, this wasn’t quite as metal as walking several steps after being decapitated as the legendary pirate Klaus Störtebecker had managed. But honestly, I was still quite pleased with the fact that this worked.

Napalm manifested beneath my hands, pouring out in a thick sheet that splattered across the monster below, which immediately began to thrash, the stench of gasoline briefly overpowering the smell of the corpses.

And then, he pulled a road flare straight into my hand from my [Diplomatic Pouch]. It was one of those that could be triggered purely by yanking on a string, with all the various safety locks already removed before I’d stored it. So I pulled on the string and dropped it, slamming closed the portal before anything could come through.

Then, my head snapped up to stare at the row of monitors, watching the seemingly invincible boss become engulfed in flames until the voice of the System distracted me.

[Global Ambassador of Myth Lv. 16 -> Global Ambassador of Myth Lv. 17]

[Skill gained: Piercing Gaze]

So, apparently using my Skills to fight also gave me XP, even if my Class wasn’t geared towards that. Or maybe it had merely been a matter of experimenting with Skills boosting me?

You may see the true allegiances of anyone you gaze upon, directly or through mirrors, scrying spells, or video conferences, as long as you are seeing them as they are, not as they were.

Oh, that would be very useful, though I’d have to experiment with it to see just what it did. And this wasn’t exactly something useful right at this moment. Or something I felt like focussing on under these circumstances.

Not with the monster barbeque going on outside. The flesh golem was engulfed in clouds of nasty-looking black smoke as it thrashed and flailed. That stuff might not have been proper military-grade napalm, but it burned hot, clung like glue and there was a lot of it. I thought I could even see the monster drying out, bits and pieces of it completely falling off while its movements left behind fewer rancid smears on the ground.

Then, the creature tried to surge right back into the main “shooting gallery”, only to be blasted back one final time by Dietrich. This time, it didn’t merely go “splat” but crashed into the ground, breaking apart into multiple pieces. Still moving, but largely disabled.

The fight continued on from there, being basically a continuation of what had happened so far. Undead marched against walls, some got shot, many more reached the walls and or, in the case of the main entrance, the door, and started clawing at it. All the while, most bosses seemed content to stay back, waiting.

But the monsters as a whole kept moving, kept coming, piling up against the walls, rising higher and higher until their corpses became a ramp.

“[Righteous Fury]!” Charlemagne suddenly thundered and a wave of gold washed out from him, passing through the surrounding rock and hammering into the undead outside, hurling them back and clearing the area around the walls, but that was all. We’d taken down maybe a quarter of our lesser foes, and that alone had been enough to practically breach the walls.

The next shockwave would only be pushing enemies and corpses against the point where the first “ramps” had been pushed back to, and judging from the look on the emperor’s face, he wouldn’t be able to do that again anytime soon.

That wasn’t even touching most of the big fuckers. Dietrich or Ogier could likely easily kill them individually, or even three at a time, but four or five plus a zombie horde could easily be beyond even them.

And Karl der Große, well, he didn’t have too many combat powers. His military was based on forging his forces into a deadly weapon through logistics, promoting effective officers, and ensuring high morale, then going on well-thought-out campaigns. Not tactical brilliance or personal combat power.

Now, his Class and Skills reflected that. Given a few weeks or even months to work his magic, he’d have been more useful than Dietrich and Ogier put together by an order of magnitude. But he’d barely had five days, and that was counting the time it had taken for people to come to him in the first place.

So we were left with the current situation.

I could see it now, the various “firing bunkers” dotted around the perimeter of the mountain being overrun eventually, with the people manning them collapsing the tunnels behind them as they retreated.

Until the main door was eventually breached too.

We’d be able to lead the monsters on a merry chase through the mountain, we had seventy square kilometers of rock to run around in and possibly even win, eventually, but it would be a disaster.

The signs were already there. It had barely taken a couple of minutes before people had resorted to burning the corpses at the bottom of their fortifications and they’d started dropping the anvil-sized rocks meant to further break down the ramps, but neither of those resources was in infinite supply.

“Next time, we’re using your portal to deploy or retrieve Ogier,” Charlemagne said. “But that incendiary of yours is impressive, make as much of that for the murder holes the next time you have the chance. Do you have enough to repeat that portal trick if this lasts until tomorrow?”

I shook my head. “I have a little napalm, but that was my only road flare.”

While this entire mountain being automatically and magically lit was amazing in general, but this would have been so much easier if I’d just had access to torches to chuck down there.

“Here,” Reinhart said, handing me something from a belt pocket and I nearly dropped the grenade in shock.

“It’s a flashbang,” he explained. “Don’t know how hot that road flare was, but I guarantee, that’s hotter. At least at the point of ignition.”

“Thank you,” I said and carefully tucked it away in my storage Skill and went right back to staring at the monitors, watching corpses pile higher and higher until I had a lightbulb moment.

Skills were all about visualization, weren’t they? They could be used outside of their intended purpose, they could be abused, and their identity could be shifted until a relatively innocent transport ability became a devastating fire bomb delivery system.

So I focussed on the piles of corpses outside. They were no longer animated, they were dead, they were, disrespectful as that was to say, trash marring the previously pristine surface of the mountain. And I had a cleaning Skill.

[Restoration of the Old] washed out from me, encompassing the entirety of the mountain, and began to, well, clean. I’d managed to figure out how to modify where the Skill deposited the trash yesterday when mucking out the kitchens, collecting all the refuse in the trash can rather than my hand, so I threw in that concept as well, compressing the re-killed corpses into small blocks around a liter in volume and stacking them as far from the mountain as I could … until I felt my knees buckle and my head start to throb.

For a brief second, I held it, maintaining the connection, but it seemed like I’d hit a hard limit, and it snapped, leaving many blocks to drop out of the air mid-transit. The walls were clear, though.

“Ow,” I groaned. “I think pushing Skills too far might be a bad idea.”

“It’ll get better at higher Levels. I think,” Charlemagne said. “My [Righteous Fury] was clearly meant for personal protection, not … that. How long until you can do that again?”

I checked and sighed at the number that stared back at me. So that was the kind of stunt that was required to hit the maximum cooldown. The highest I’d previously hit was an hour when I’d fixed up Dietrich’s hidden armory.

“Twelve hours,” I replied.

And with that, I went right back to staring at monitors. This was a frustrating situation. I wasn’t built for combat, I literally didn’t have the build for it, in role-playing terms, I was “the face”, important for social interactions but not combat. But that didn’t make staying in the command center fun.

Being able to stay away from combat didn’t feel like a reward. Or a boon. Or any other synonym for “good.” Strange as it was to say, it felt like a punishment.

Admittedly, I could charge in, but I wouldn’t make much of a difference. Any real difference.

Dietrich was a beast even stuck in what basically amounted to a medieval pillbox. Ogier too. Mia had managed to figure out how to one-shot Field Bosses and was using that trick every chance she got.

Me? I was just like any of those volunteers. No, actually, I was worse, not being able to use a gun. Well, I knew which end the bullets came out of, knew about the common-sense rules of handling them like always assuming they were loaded, never pointing them at something I didn’t want to shoot and keeping my finger off the trigger until I was ready to fire, but as far as reloading or even switching off the safety went … nope.

The most I could do was use [Diplomatic Pouch] to ferry around supplies.

“Where is the German army?” Charlemagne eventually asked Reinhart. “Shouldn’t this be the best target for modern bombers, with all foes clustered in one place?”

“Probably,” he admitted, then opened his mouth to reply and froze, unsure of what to say.

“The Bundeswehr is currently undergoing a massive overhaul,” I said. “Only about half of any given vehicle type are operational at any one time and due to strong military allies, supplies are generally limited. We can probably get bombers dispatched if we need them, but they’re probably hard-pressed to safeguard the rest of the nation.”

Not to mention that there were numerous issues with modern weaponry that made it useless against ground-based swarms. Anything meant for anti-air use would be hard to bring to bear, precision missiles would likely have a hard time locking onto bosses simply due to not being designed for that and I sincerely doubted the Bundeswehr had too many extremely powerful bombs for wiping out groups since there wasn’t much call for that in this modern world.

But I’d already explained all that to him, I wasn’t going to repeat it.

And then, Charlemagne began to swear. I couldn’t see the issue on the monitors, however, so this problem was probably new.