My Overpowered Bunny Girls

Chapter 95: The Storm’s Eye (2)

The Floor 3 portal deposited them into a world drowned in grey.

Thick, oppressive fog immediately pressed against Nathan’s face like a damp rag, cutting visibility down to less than a sword’s length. The air was heavy with the scent of ozone and wet decay, a deep saturated dampness that instantly seeped through their cloaks and settled into their bones. Beneath their boots, the ground was a treacherous slope of loose shale and petrified tree roots.

Somewhere in the blinding whiteout, a high-pitched whistle echoed. It sounded like wind whipping through a narrow canyon, but the cadence was too rhythmic. Too intelligent.

Nathan’s [Hunter’s Insight] flared, painting the mist with faint thermal silhouettes. "Multiple contacts!" he barked, tightening the formation. "Small, hunched. They’re moving in a wide perimeter. Twelve... no, fifteen of them. Pack hunters."

Shadows began to flicker at the very edge of the fog. As they darted between the petrified stumps, the fog around them noticeably thickened, fresh mist billowing directly from the creatures’ bodies.

The Tower dossier called them Fog-Touched Scavengers. Grumps. Goblinoid creatures with hollow, glowing eyes and mist-generating pores that allowed them to weaponize the environment. Singly, they were weak. In a pack, they were a nightmare.

The ambush triggered from three sides at once.

To Garrett’s left, three Grumps lunged from the mist in total silence, crude stone knives slashing at his hamstrings. Red instantly pivoted, catching the lead Grump on its armored horns and throwing it backward, but the other two dragged their blades across Garrett’s greaves before vanishing back into the fog.

Behind them, Dillon cursed. Shink-shink. Two shallow cuts bloomed across his forearm. He spun, his katana clearing its sheath in a blinding [Quick Draw] that cleaved a retreating Grump in half, but the others were already gone.

"Hit-and-run!" Dillon yelled, pressing a hand to his bleeding arm. "They’re using the fog to blind us, scoring grazing hits, and resetting!"

Nathan drew Moonlight, tracking a cluster of thermal signatures. The creatures were impossibly erratic, darting in jagged zigzags. He loosed a [Mana Arrow], catching one cleanly in the shoulder, but the whistle of the pack immediately rose to a frenzied, mocking pitch.

Three more swarmed Mirko’s flank. Her [Impenetrable Fortress] flared, the heavy green barrier slamming into the creatures and sending them tumbling into the dirt.

"Cowardly little gremlins!" Mirko roared, her pink eyes ablaze as she swung her greatsword into the mist. "Face a Knight directly, you damp rodents!"

"They won’t," Elise said. She stood perfectly still in the center of the formation, her icy blue eyes scanning the whiteout. "They only engage when they have the environmental advantage. The mist is their armor." She raised her staff, the crystal at its peak glowing a vicious, pale blue. "So we strip them of it."

The Frost Golem materialized beside her with a sound like a collapsing glacier.

The nine-foot-tall crystalline construct radiated an aura of absolute zero. Acting on Elise’s command, it raised both of its massive fists and slammed them dead-center into the stone floor.

CRRRRACK.

A radial shockwave of pure, unadulterated cold erupted outward. The temperature didn’t just drop; it plummeted past freezing in a fraction of a second. The dense, saturated fog instantly crystallized. Billions of microscopic water droplets froze mid-air, glittering brilliantly for a split second before crashing to the ground like a heavy rain of diamond dust.

The battlefield was instantly swept clear. Fifteen Grumps stood fully exposed in a wide circle around the party, their mist-generating pores sputtering and freezing over. They shrieked in sudden, naked panic.

"Collapse the perimeter!" Nathan ordered. "Don’t let them run!"

The party exploded outward.

Dillon vanished. [Flash Step] placed him directly behind a cluster of four panicking Grumps. [Thunder Edge] ignited, and with a single, massive, horizontal sweep, he chained a blinding arc of lightning through all of them. KRAK-BOOM. They dropped, twitching.

Mirko charged the opposite flank, her blade a silver blur. "You wanted the front lines! Here I am!"

That is a deliberate misinterpretation of their tactics, Kuro noted dryly. She dropped from the shadow of a petrified stump directly onto the largest Grump’s back. [Assassinate] sank into the creature’s spine—SHINK-SHINK—and it dissolved instantly. But the execution is satisfactory.

Garrett and Red became an impassable wall at the rear. Any Grump that tried to scramble up the loose shale found itself face-to-face with the Mad-Sheep’s horns or the thermal blast of Volcan, which flash-vaporized the remaining pockets of frost on impact.

From the center, Nathan provided ruthless overwatch. THWIP-THWIP-THWIP. He picked off the stragglers with clinical precision, his [Mana Arrows] finding heads and chests. The new Capacitor on his wrist thrummed, feeding a steady, vital stream of mana into his veins, keeping his core from dipping into the red.

In less than two minutes, the last Grump dissolved. The chamber fell dead silent, save for the distant rumble of thunder.

[Floor 3 Cleared!]

[Level Up! Kuro: Level 29]

Nathan checked his wrist. The Capacitor was down to forty percent. The Leyline Ring was pulling its weight, but tracking fifteen erratic targets through the fog with [Hunter’s Insight] had been a massive drain.

The Frost Golem’s deployment was the deciding factor, Kuro observed, hopping onto Nathan’s shoulder in her rabbit form. Without stripping their cover, this would have become a battle of attrition.

"Good call, Elise," Nathan said, rolling his shoulder to loosen the tension. "You saved us a lot of time and a lot of blood."

Elise gave a crisp, single nod. "The Golem is designed for environmental dominance. It would be a tactical error not to exploit that." She paused, brushing a fleck of ice from her sleeve. "Also, they were incredibly irritating."

"That is the closest she will ever come to admitting she enjoyed crushing something," Dillon grinned.

"I implied no such thing."

"Tone Four," Dillon whispered loudly to Garrett. "Satisfied Destruction."

Garrett let out a tired, genuine laugh. "Let’s keep moving. I want to be out of this Tower before I grow gills."

---

Floor 4 was the canopy of trees.

The portal spit them out onto a massive, slick branch of black, petrified wood. The sheer drop on either side vanished into the grey mist far below. But it was the wind that hit them first—a relentless, screaming gale that carried needles of freezing sleet, threatening to scour the flesh from their bones.

Above them, the canopy was a chaotic, vertical maze of intersecting black limbs, stretching up toward a ceiling of flashing blue thunderheads.

Perched high in those branches, staring down at them with intelligent, cruel eyes, were the Squall-Talon Harpies.

They were predatory, avian humanoids with wingspans of storm-grey feathers shot through with veins of crackling yellow. Their talons were the length of short swords, and they moved with the twitchy, coiled energy of raptors waiting for the kill.

The first volley rained down without a sound.

"Incoming! Scatter!" Nathan roared as his Insight caught the distortions in the air.

SHING-SHING-SHING.

Crescent-shaped blades of hyper-compressed wind screamed through the sleet. Garrett raised his shoulder just in time; a Wind Blade sparked violently against his pauldron, carving a deep groove into the heavy steel. Another slammed into Mirko’s [Impenetrable Fortress], the sheer kinetic force making the green hard-light violently ripple. A third sheared the petrified wood entirely in half right where Dillon had been standing a second prior.

"They have the high ground!" Nathan shouted over the gale. "They’re going to snipe us off the branches! Elise, we need altitude!"

Elise slammed the butt of her staff against the slick wood. "Golem! Path!"

The Frost Golem stepped forward, driving its fists into the massive branch. A cascading staircase of thick, glowing blue ice erupted upward—CRRRRACK—weaving a spiraling, crystalline ramp through the canopy toward the Harpies’ perches.

"I will anchor the bridges!" Elise called out. "Dillon, take the airspace! Mirko, ascend and crush! Nathan, Garrett, suppressive fire!"

"Finally!" Dillon laughed. His Cloud Serpent launched from his shoulders, shrieking as it absorbed the ambient storm static. It spiraled directly into the canopy, becoming a missile of chained lightning that disrupted the Harpies’ flight paths.

Dillon rode the chaos, using [Flash Step] to chain-teleport up the ice staircase. He materialized mid-air beside a diving Harpy, [Thunder Edge] igniting the gloom. With a brutal downward slash, he cleaved through its wing, sending the creature plummeting into the mist below.

Mirko took the stairs like a siege engine. Her [Quick Reflex] allowed her to read the slippery, uneven ice perfectly, her heavy boots finding purchase where there should be none. A Harpy swooped low to rake her with its talons, but Mirko stepped into the dive. She triggered [Aegis Strike], slamming the flat of her blade into the creature’s chest. KRAK-BOOM. The shockwave shattered its ribcage, turning it to dust before it even hit the ice.

From the shadows of the high canopy, Kuro was a ghost. [Invisibility] masked her entirely as she leaped from branch to branch. A Harpy raised its wings, drawing in air to form another blade, but Kuro dropped directly behind it. SHINK-SHINK. Two daggers severed its spinal cord, canceling the spell instantly.

On the lowest branch, Nathan and Garrett locked down the airspace.

Every time a Harpy tried to dive on the climbing team, Garrett swung Volcan. The heavy thermal pulses acted like flak cannons, detonating in the air—KRAK-BOOM, KRAK-BOOM—and violently disrupting the atmospheric pressure the Harpies needed to form their Wind Blades.

Through the thermal explosions, Nathan threaded the needle. THWIP. THWIP. His [Mana Arrows] were flawless, piercing wing joints and throats. But with every shot, he felt the Capacitor draining. Thirty percent. Twenty. The crutch was giving out.

The final Harpy, desperate and bleeding, banked hard toward the thunderheads to escape.

Dillon’s Cloud Serpent intercepted, wrapping around its torso and shocking it into paralysis. From the ground, Nathan pulled Moonlight back to a half-charge and released. The arrow punched cleanly through the Harpy’s chest, dissolving it into fading storm-light.

[Floor 4 Cleared!]

[Level Up! Garrett: Level 38]