Steel Wolves of Craedia (Realm of Arkon, Book 3) (34 page)

Seventy or so yards from us stood several packs of hyena-like creatures. Gnolls! Now what were these foul creatures doing here, and how were they connected to the Twice Cursed god? There were ten packs in all, each numbering about twenty mobs. The gnolls were all level 175, standing close to seven feet tall and
boasting around 400,000 HP
. Mobs inside raid instances were especially tough, with roughly five times as much health and often twice the size of their ordinary kin on the outside.

Standing tall on the third terrace was an enormous solitary tree. This would be the dungeon's first boss, named Upasus. Clearly a reference to the upas tree of Earth, the milky sap of which was used as arrow poison and for ritual purposes. An obscure reference, to be sure, perhaps only appreciated by botany enthusiasts and
Jeopardy!
contestants. I wondered which category I fell into... With a command to Elnar to split the party into two previously established groups, I continued surveying our surroundings.

The rocky walls were plastered with colonies of albino weeds, casting patchy shadows on the ground that bore unsettling images of headless humanoid creatures. Even more unsettling were the two massive stone statues with gigantic bellies and erect phalluses, the length and girth of which rivaled the clubs those freaks were clutching with their tiny rickety hands. An expression of pure bliss was fixed on the strange creatures' bulldog-like mugs. 

"Rather fascinating specimens! Would you agree?" Vaessa chuckled, following my eyes. 

"Young ladies, and even those pretending to be young ladies, mustn't be ogling those things, you know," Reece answered in my stead in a mentoring tone. "Young ladies ought to blush and look away in shame at such an obscene sight." 

"You're just jealous, boy," the magus snickered. "I highly doubt that you measure up." 

"Damn right I'm jealous," the mage didn't bother denying it. "If my thing were that big, I'd have no need for a staff! I would slay all kinds of fiends with it, fighting in the front rows alongside our valiant leader!" Reece made a scary face, smacked the shin of his chainmail boot with the tip of his tail, and took a few sweeping swings with his imaginary weapon. 

"Yeah, OK," Vaessa nodded. "Only all of Xantarra's females would be jumping the tallest city walls at the sight of you, powered by sheer horror." 

"Enough!" I snapped at them, putting a quick end to the mirth their exchange was generating. "Reece, hit our endowed friends with something from afar—what if they come alive? The rest of you, pay attention! We've split up to take out packs with two groups simultaneously! Salta heads up the first group, James the other. I'm with the first group, Vaessa is with the second. We need to move fast, but that doesn't mean taking needless risks. If I see anyone acting foolish, I'll have them on horse guard duty in an instant. Don't pause to loot the bodies—we really don't have the time for that right now. Save your form for when we get to that tree—that's the boss. Mages, don't forget about Morph! Any questions? Then buff up! Salta, James, you're up!"

It was hard not to be satisfied with the clan's development, seeing the damage we were doling out—a little over one million per second, and that was without combat form and with an average of two rare quality pieces of equipment per unit. But more than anything I was pleased with the way my demons behaved in battle—obeying orders without questions, moving and reacting swiftly, and using the right attacks.

The truth was, I was incredibly lucky that physical attacks weren't at the core of any mage build, so that using them cost me minuscule amounts of energy. With my 6% regeneration, I could execute one special attack after another and not worry about running out of energy. My clanmates, however, had no such luxury. Some of their abilities consumed not only a fixed amount of their core resource but a percentage of it. Take, for example, a mage with 10,000 mana and 10% mana regeneration per second. The mage has four spells he can cast once every second: the first costs 500 mana, the second 1000 mana, the third 13% of his maximum mana, and the fourth 40%. The uninitiated might look at those figures and think, no problem! Use the first two spells and ignore the other two, and your mana will regenerate to full instantly. But, as with most everything else in life, there's a catch!

If your first spell deals, say, 500 damage, and the second deals 1,000, spells three and four probably deal in the neighborhood of 5,000 and 8,000, respectively. Suddenly the strategy isn't so clear. And then there is the matter of all these spells working on different cooldowns... Mine was the only fool-proof rotation: I couldn't attack more than once every second, which is why I'd originally picked only two special attacks to build on, each of which had a two-second cooldown. But what should a mage in the above predicament do? There was only thing left to do: try to come up with an optimal rotation of attacks that would result in maximum damage over a particular period of time.

In the old games, when a character's maximum level was limited, everything was simple. All builds (a character's intentional designation of stats and talents to suit a particular style of play) and rotations were easily accessible online. But today, with such a tremendous amount of talents and potential paths of development, it was the AI that determined each player's rotation based on their unique build and equipment. The problem was, I hadn't been able to find a way to manage it in my options. Either it had disappeared with the patch, or I simply didn't know where to look. The average DPS I was seeing in the menu currently was calculated from our fight with Nerghall. I didn't know whether or not the AI had taken combat form into account, but I wasn't itching to complicate the numbers even further. At the same time, the morning after killing the Lord of Darkness, I gave serious thought to potentially increasing those numbers even more.

I'd used Reece, Salta, James and a few more demons as guinea pigs. Taking the troops to the training area, I asked them to attack the tattered training dummy for exactly ten minutes without changing form. After recording the data, I dismissed them, returned to my room and immersed myself in calculations. Because I hadn't given my soldiers more than three-four attack talents, preferring badass specialists to jacks of all trades but masters of none, it wasn't very difficult to arrive at a rotation for each class. But to my great surprise I discovered that they were already employing those exact rotations! I couldn't explain it, but there was no point arguing with facts. Moreover, I realized that Salta had altered her rotation significantly after getting her scalable bow. This meant that the young woman had switched up her attack talents purely on instinct! Even professional gamers would take time to optimize their strategy after an upgrade, but not her! I couldn't know for sure, but I suspected the effect was a carry-over from her past, back when NPCs were governed by AIs. Upon this discovery, I felt disappointment, since there really wouldn't be a way to increase our damage output, but also great relief. Because any intervention into my demons' combat tactics would only cause harm, this was one less problem for me to stress over. 

All the gnolls were put down in under nine minutes. The main problem in these scuffles was keeping focus on the right targets—as a result, our archers and mages had no choice but blast the mobs at near point-blank range. It took quite a high skill to aim and fire from behind the tank's back, assuming the tank wouldn't twitch at the last moment and catch your arrow. We could have taken out the packs with a frontal attack, but despite the rush I'd decided not to take risks and play by the rules. 

On my command, ten gnolls from the pack before us were transformed into miscellaneous creatures of roughly the same size, and another seven into blue blocks of ice from the archers' freezing spells. That left only five, who roared with outrage and charged right at us.

Only three made it to the tanks, and then the slaughter began. Morph and Icing had a minute long duration, and we only needed three volleys from twenty archers to take a mob from full health to zero. By the time the crowd control spells broke only seven bipedal hyenas were still standing, only to be turned back into icy sculptures a moment later—each squad had eighteen archers, but the freezing shot was only used by seven at a time. This Icing ability was kind of OP, meaning overpowered. An instant cast that completely put the target out of action and, most importantly, could be used in combat, unlike the mages' Morph. The only downside was the long three minute cooldown, but our two squads more than compensated for it with sheer numbers of archers.

In the end, aside from the few gnolls that had made it to our melee fighters, we were left completely out of work, letting the archers and mages finish off the remaining mobs at their leisure.
This is a bit too easy,
I thought to myself, watching the last few ice boulders get smashed to pieces. I knew better than to get complacent, and was bracing myself for the worst. 

"Everyone on my target!" Salta's sonorous voice boomed in the channel. "Mages, wake up! Where did that fat rat come from? Your handiwork, Reece?" the head archeress chuckled as the last gnoll collapsed onto the stone tiles.

"Why are you always blaming Reece for everything?! I'll have you know that your 'rat' was actually a hamster, our commander' sacred animal. After wolf and boar, naturally. So take it up with Krian!" 

"You're the hamster," I smirked and looked to my right, where Elnar's squad was finishing off their own pack of mobs. They had been lagging, but not by much. A bit closer to us, in the rear of both squads stood Iam, his face somber and his chin raised high, his left hand clutching the flagstaff on top of which the clan's banner streamed in the wind. I couldn't have dreamed of a better candidate for our standard-bearer. With his sense of duty, I didn't even feel the need to keep the banner under guard during peaceful activities. Then again, why risk it? The clan treasury, regardless of level, came with a secret area that no thief could break into—something akin to a player's private room. It wouldn't store much, but it was perfect for relics such as this.

"On to the next pack! Leave the corpses! Look alive, mages! Coordinate your targets in advance! Wait for the cooldowns to reset. Attack on my command!"

After earning her tail and promotion to officer, Salta's resemblance to a panther had grown even more. I often found myself admiring my sworn sister: her narrowed jade eyes, her tail swaying side to side, its tip ornamented with three silver rings. Even her slightest movements breathed determination and purpose. She looked nothing like the taciturn girl that had approached me alongside Iam barely over one month ago, but had turned into a majestic, deadly predator entering her prime. And now with that massive epic bow in her hands, she could have easily been tapped for the main role in some superhero movie. Catching me looking, the girl winked at me and nodded in the direction of the moving squad.

"Need a special invitation, Krian?"

"Coming, coming," with a chuckle, I Jumped to catch up to the troops who were forming up in their new position. 

"Straighten out your ranks! Reece and the mages, take three steps to the right! Tanks ready? Begin!"

The boss tree looked fairly ordinary. Some thirty feet high with a trunk circumference of around ten feet, it stood at the center of a rectangular tiled platform that measured roughly forty by forty yards. Its leaves were narrow and dull, but the flowers blooming on its branches were a vibrant raspberry color. It would actually make for rather a pretty sight if not for the skulls and bones scattered around it. And then there were the translucent cobweb-like threads that stretched from the tips of branches down to the ground, blocking our path. And by the looks of them, getting through without wings would be highly problematic. Otherwise I would have simply ignored the wooden bastard and pressed forward, since I doubted he had anything of real value anyway. The boss' two hundred million HP wasn't going to be a problem—even with 50% physical damage absorption he wouldn't last more than ten minutes. But I was still wary of surprises. Besides, for the life of me I couldn't tell the tree's front from its back, since, as any tank worth his salt, it was on me to turn the boss' rear to the rest of the raid. One would assume that all I needed to do was draw aggro and assume the correct position, and the boss would turn to me automatically. Still, it would be nice to know what to expect from the encounter beforehand so as to formulate some kind of strategy. Oh, but a demon can dream...

"Amazing," Vaessa's awed voice broke the silence. "I had no idea such huge specimens existed!"

"Come again?" 

"This is the Tree of Hatred," she said, admiring the flowers growing from the branches. "But no one has ever seen a tree of this species taller than four-five feet!"

"You do understand that we're going to need to cut it down, right?" I inquired, just to be on the safe side. 

"Well, yes, of course, the tree won't let us pass otherwise. But would you look at the size of those buds!" 

"Vaessa! You can discuss the birds and the bees with Reece all you want, but after the fight! Agreed?" I cut the magus short before she could turn this into a scientific conference. "Right now I'd rather you tell me specific things about this nature's wonder. For instance, what can we expect from it?" 

"I honestly don't know, Krian. Once I was able to get my hands on a few buds from a barbarian visiting Xantarra. Its petals can be transmuted to an essence that's used in lots of alchemical recipes. But not even he knew where the buds had come from or how to get more. I know from ancient books that the Tree of Hatred waylays its victims, entangling them with sticky threads, much like a spider would, and devours them. And if a regular-sized tree is known to devour horses without trouble, I shudder to imagine what this fellow is capable of," the magus concluded.