Novel Full 328 It's time to deploy
“They are coming,” Norbert muttered while opening his eyes.
The entire fighting force of Mathew’s camp was currently gathered at the north part of the fence, with several pieces of broken furniture stacked in a way that allowed them quick access to the other side of the barrier.
As she never participated in the fight and had no means of doing so, Beatrice was the only one who stood a considerable distance away, here only to learn more about how the fight would look like.
From the front, there were Leila and Nadia. Behind them stood Daria and Mathew, with Norbert and Carol holding the rear along with all the hunters of Carol’s squad.
‘Just a little bit longer,’ Mathew thought, pulling out both of the scrolls from the inner pocket of his clothes before quickly scanning their content.
As soon as his eyes lay down on the runes on the scroll, the items instantly crumbled into dust while Mathew’s brain froze for but a second.
A string of bit-type of data surged into his brain, instantly translating into knowledge and the ability to procure the spells the scrolls described.
“You will be going first,” Mathew muttered, raising both his eyes and his hands only to rest his fingers upon the shoulders of the two girls at the front.
‘APV,’ he uttered in his thoughts, calling forth the spell of ‘Anchorable Protective Veil’ by its acronym.
The mana within Mathew surged towards his palms. It then formed into some sort of complex circle of runes right below his skin before phasing over and imprinting itself into the neck of the girls’ clothes.
“That applies to you too,” Mathew said as he turned around, passing the barrier over to Daria as well.
According to the plan, Carol would remain within the fortress during the initial attack so there was no need for Mathew to waste the precious little mana he had to construct a protective veil for her as well.
‘I’m the only one that will go out without it,’ Mathew thought, turning his attention back to the street. ‘That means, I will have to suck some of the stones dry to recover, it’s pretty damn hard to move around with no mana at all!’
Due to the restrictions of his system, Mathew’s stats were all effectively topped at a hundred points, even though they were actually much higher than that. As such, after using the APV spell three times and with each cast of it costing twenty-five points of mana, only a quarter of Mathew’s total mana pool should be left.
‘But just in case, let’s check…’ Mathew thought, summing the system window with a single thought.
[Mathew Karian]
[Mathew Karian]
[Level – 2/2]
[Vitality – 447]
[Brawn – 335]
[Agility – 309]
[Mind – 100(202) [277]
[Arcane – 310]
[Total 1678]
[Accumulated Levels – 38/43]
[Avaible points: 90] > [Avaible points: 70]
‘Huh?’ Mathew shook, his face tensing up a little.
There were three numbers within his mind statistic. The number within the square brackets reflected his theoretical level, the number within the round brackets showcased his current state of mana while the number outside any brackets at all described the total amount of mana he could possess.
And just like one could see from those numbers, there was something wrong with them. Because for some reason, Mathew’s current mana was more than twice as high as his maximum effective mana!
‘Maybe it means I can’t use any spells that take more than a hundred mana at once?’ Mathew put forward a guess…
Only to shake his head and get rid of all those thoughts when he heard the noise from the street reach a certain level of volume.
The group of the fastest evolved zombies has come.
“Nadia, Leila! Stall them!” Mathew called out, right as the monsters emerged from the cloud of dust they kicked up by running.
Yes, monsters.
Norbert called them zombies, yet they were no longer anywhere near human-like to be called zombies.
Their legs were three times as long as they would be in an intact corpse, consisting of far more bones and muscle mass than it should be theoretically possible. Their arms were twice as long too, making them run in a hunched forward position and on all fours.
As if to compensate for their longer limbs, the monster’s torso shrunk down to a mere third of its usual size, leaving nothing but a massive, horse-like mouth filled with three rows of razor-sharp teeth in it.
‘Disgusting,’ Mathew thought right as the two girls from the front jumped over the fence and rushed toward the zombies.
There was a total of seven of them, three of which heralded the group from the front while the remaining front kept on running down the street, clearly set on jumping over the barrier.
“I’m leaving the front ones to you!” Nadia shouted, kicking the ground with all her strength and passing by the two attempts of the nearer monsters to slash her with their long and blade-like front limbs.
“On it!’ Leila jumped forth while unsheathing her saber.
The monsters were quick to change their target, with one raising its back legs in an attempt to pin Leila down with its front limbs while the other two swung their front, blade-like arms at her at different heights.
‘They are cooperating,’ Mathew noticed as soon as he figured out the bigger picture behind those three seemingly separate attacks.
Two attacks from two different sides and executed at a different heights made it impossible for Leila to dodge to the sides nor to jump over or duck below the attacks. Those two slashes weren’t aimed at hurting her, though.
All those two monsters wanted was to immobilize her, holding the girl in place for the third, downward-pierce attack.
“Heh,” Leila chuckled.
She then dashed to the right, jumping up and swinging her new saber right against the incoming slash.
The girl’s body turned parallel to the ground and only an inch above the cut coming from the left.
Yet, as if that wasn’t enough, Leila’s counterattack not only managed to break the stability of one of the monsters… but her saber went through the blade-like leg of the monster as if it was butter, cutting it in one, clean swoop!
The attack from the right ended up failing short to reach Leila’s body, leading the monsters to slightly stumble due to the lack of expected resistance. In the end, however, it struck right at the leg with which the third monster attempted to pierce Leila’s head, breaking both of those elongated arms in a single, unplanned crash!
‘They are coordinated,’ Mathew thought, repeating the line that appeared in his mind before. ‘But they are not at all capable of using this coordination to its full extent!’
With one of the four legs of all three of the monsters now broken, Leila leisurely went around their bodies, slashing at their front and back legs with ease.
In the end, the greatest challenge that she faced was about avoiding the falling body of the monster once three of its limbs would be cut off, threatening to bring the scary-looking mouth of the monster to the level of Leila’s body.
“That was quick,” Mathew muttered as he moved up on the improvised ramp and looked down at the bloody scene right beside the barrier.
Leila took just a single minute to completely rid the world of her three enemies. And as Mathew looked up, he could see Nadia standing by the pile of rotting meat with a bored expression on her face.
“And that means,” Mathew blinked his eyes a few times before looking back.
“It’s time to deploy,” Beatrice finished what Mathew wanted to say.
She took a step forward and tapped Carol’s arm.
“Everyone,” the woman raised her eyes and looked at all the combatants of Mathew’s group before casting a quick glance at Marcus hiding in the nearby bush to observe the situation. “Good luck.”