Chapter 468 - Fifty Steps

Chapter 468: 468 - Fifty Steps

Lohan counted the steps before doing anything else.

Those weren’t the steps of a small group. The sound arrived in layers, with several heavy boots striking the stone at different rhythms, and he sharpened his perception of vibrations to separate one pair from another, like someone trying to count raindrops on a roof.

Ten. Twenty. Thirty, and the number kept climbing.

Even with his high perception, Lohan still had a lot of trouble working out how many pairs of footsteps were approaching, which in itself already said a lot.

’More than forty,’ he concluded. ’Maybe fifty.’

"How many?" Lisa asked over the mental link, her ears turned toward the corridor.

"Forty something, maybe more... And they’re all coming together."

Lisa didn’t answer right away, but Lohan felt her body adjust beneath him, her weight shifting to her front paws, repeating the same reflex she had before every serious fight.

This would be the first time the two of them faced a group this large.

Against two, against six, or even against a little over ten enemies at once, they already knew what to do. But against fifty was another matter, and even if the average level was low, the sheer number by itself was a risk.

All it would take was one poorly covered flank, one string of bad luck, for everything to descend into chaos.

But even against such a big risk, neither of them thought about retreating.

Behind them was a chained creature who had asked for the one thing she still wanted, and Lohan had promised. And inside his head there still was that half turned key, unlocking a sensation he had never felt before and that he wasn’t going to let go of just because someone was arriving.

"Give me ten seconds," he said.

"For what?"

"So I don’t leave any bodies behind."

He sent clones over what was left of the five corpses that still remained, and this time he savored nothing. The digestion ran wild, fast, since the bottleneck that used to limit his digestion speed no longer existed, and in a matter of seconds there was nothing left but stained stone.

With each body, that door inside his mind creaked a little more, giving way, and when the last one vanished, a notification flashed in the corner of his vision.

[Evolution available.]

Lohan felt the urge to open it right then, to see exactly what was in there, and had to use all the discipline he had to save the window for later.

But even without opening it, the mental clarity he felt in that instant was incredible.

’I’ll read the description later...’ he thought. ’First we need to deal with these people.’

"Ready," he said, going back onto her back. "Let’s hide."

"Hide?" Lisa raised an eyebrow. "I thought we were going to wait for them at the door."

"Fifty against two, head on, in a corridor? I’d rather pick the first strike."

She smiled, agreeing with that, and dashed toward the left wall of the chamber, where a column of rock formed a dark nook, far from the reddish light of the fissures.

At the same time, Lohan spread completely over her body, his gelatinous mass flowing down her back, her flanks, her paws, covering every centimeter of white fur in a thin layer that hardened on contact, until she was completely enclosed in a smooth black armor, the same color as the shadow she blended into.

Next he kept on camouflaging, changing his pigmentation, absorbing the gray and reddish tone of the rock behind them, and the darkness of the nook was pulled into the armor, erasing any glow. Lisa’s spirit fire, which usually lit up her claws, receded until it vanished.

’All good?’ he asked over the link.

’Perfectly,’ Lisa replied, as still as the rock itself. ’I feel like a statue.’

’Great. Don’t move.’

The two of them stayed there, still, and waited.

In the center of the chamber, nothing had changed.

The offspring kept writhing around their mother, piled on top of one another, red, glassy eyes fixed on a single point and the constant mental hum filling the air.

None of them had noticed six siblings were gone. None of them had noticed there were now two intruders in the nook of the wall.

The footsteps grew too loud to ignore, and then the group appeared at the mouth of the corridor.

Seeing who was arriving, there was no surprise there.

Lohan recognized a few faces easily even from a distance. No one whose name he cared to remember, only their features, like the man with the axe, the woman with the daggers, the mage with the carved staff, the two identical swordsmen.

All alive again, unharmed, their armor gleaming new, and with an expression far worse than the one they’d had the moment they died, but subtly, you could tell the aura they gave off was weaker.

Behind them came the rest.

’Fifty,’ Lohan counted, and this time the count was exact, because his precise vision picked out each one of them in order. ’Fifty, not one more.’

They had done what any guild would do after losing seven members to a monster attack. They gathered everyone who was online, and Lohan heard this from the conversations echoing through the crowd.

"Kaldur sent a notice on Syn to everyone," someone was saying, still adjusting a shoulder guard. "I was at work, man, I had to make up that I had a stomachache."

"I left dinner on the table," another replied. "My wife is probably still yelling right now."

"Who heard about the monster wave?" a female voice asked.

"From what Reeve said, they’re two Players with monster bodies. A white fox and a blue slime."

Lisa went even stiller when she heard that, and Lohan felt her laughter pass through the link, short and dry.

She commented. ’Well, at least now they know we’re Players too..’

’Yeah... not like that would change anything.’

He used the time to analyze the whole group.

Analyzing every detail of those Players, he saw Level 11, Common. Level 13, Uncommon. Level 12, Common. Level 14, Uncommon. Most of them were made up of Common and Uncommon Players, humans with simple classes, an average level between 12 and 13, with a handful of level 14s scattered through the front lines.

The two walking in the center, clearly the leaders, wore heavy armor decorated with black horns, a man they hadn’t seen yet.

The first was a broad shouldered man, apparently Level 15, Uncommon. The second was a short haired woman with a hard stare, Level 15, also Uncommon.

’Uncommon,’ Lohan thought, connecting the dots. ’Even the leaders are Uncommon. They probably don’t recruit Rare Bases because they know that, in a guild where the spot is secret and the leader is weaker than half the members, whoever has the better Base takes over within a few weeks.’

’Makes sense,’ Lisa replied, without moving. ’They built a whole business on top of a secret. The last thing they wanted was someone capable of taking it from them.’

It was a considerable force, even so. Fifty Players with an average level of 12 and 13, armed, organized and with a reason to be furious, were no joke for any ordinary group.

But the two in the nook weren’t ordinary. Lohan was at Level 17, Lisa at 16, and their Bases, one Mythic and the other Legendary, widened that gap far beyond what the numbers showed.

’Four or five levels of advantage, plus Bases they can’t even imagine,’ he calculated. ’Worst case, it’ll be a lot of work. Best case, it’ll be fun.’

That eased a good part of the tension he was still carrying, and on the other end of the link, he felt Lisa breathe a little deeper.

The group spread out across the chamber, taking position, and that was when the first reaction came, like a chorus of irritated voices.

"Where are they?" the man with the axe roared, swinging his head from side to side. "Where are those bastards?"

"They’re not here," the woman with the daggers replied, spitting out the words. "They probably ran off after killing us."

"Why would they run?" the broad shouldered leader said, his deep voice cutting through the chatter. The others called him Kaldur. "Look for tracks, they have to be somewhere."

A few Players spread out across the platform, examining the floor, the walls, the chains. One of them walked past the mother and patted the side of her thin body, lightly, like someone giving a pat to a cow in the pen.

"Production’s holding steady," he commented, laughing. "At least she didn’t die."

Inside the armor, Lohan felt his own core clench with rage. The mother didn’t react, didn’t even move, her thin, blind body motionless as if she had nothing left to lose.

’Easy,’ Lisa said over the link, her voice firm. ’Soon.’

The Players kept searching, and that was when the group started to get truly confused. There was no blood on the floor, no corpse lying around the chamber, no fallen offspring, no sign of a fight.

The monsters they kept there were exactly as they had been, an agitated, piled up mass that looked the same as always. With so many dozens of them, no one managed to notice that six were missing.

"This doesn’t make sense," the mage muttered, his eyes fixed on the offspring. "If they had come through here, there’d be some damage."

"Maybe they just killed the guards and left," one of the swordsmen suggested.

"Killed and left?" the vice leader repeated, with contempt. "Without touching anything? Without taking anything? That’s not logical behavior."

They looked at one another, and for an instant suspicion grew among them, their gazes beginning to turn toward the walls, toward the dark corners, toward the places where someone could be hiding.

Lisa opened her mouth behind the armor mask.