Chapter 144

Chapter 144

Alice stood on the wooden walls of Cyra, looking at the giant pack of wolves that sat at the edge of the forest while throwing giant fireballs at the wall. Their bodies were half-hidden by the trees, making it easy for them to dodge the stray arrows and missiles that the other Mages on the walls were throwing at them, and while some wolves occasionally fell, the number of wolves that died each second was alarmingly low. The distance between Cyra’s walls and the wolves was simply too great for many of the [Archers] to easily hit the monsters with arrows, and while the Mages were having better luck, there weren’t that many of them, and their mana was limited.

That wasn’t the alarming part of the whole scenario.

The alarming thing was that there seemed to be two different kinds of monsters out in the forest below them.

Every single time Alice had seen two different species of monster near each other, the monsters had reacted the same way they did when they saw a human. They would immediately attempt to eat the other.

Now, there were two monster species close to each other, and neither species was interfering with or attacking the other.

The second kind of monster didn’t take any action at all. Alice had no idea what they were doing. They looked like what would happen if one took an ordinary crow, added a few extra eyes to their wings, and then surgically removed its torso and replaced it with a mirror. The mirror crows weren’t a species Alice recognized from her monster biology classes, and they weren’t doing attacking the wall yet. Alice didn’t know if the monster species were working together, or had a non-aggression agreement, or what. But the prospect of monsters working together was terrifying.Ñ00v€l--ß1n hosted the premiere release of this chapter.

Alice narrowed her eyes, and turned towards Ethan, who stood on the wall just a few meters away from her, and Illa, who stood nearby and directed the [Archers] and Mages.

“The wolves are trying to burn down the wall,” said Ethan, after a few moments. “Since the wall is mostly made of wood, they’re trying to turn it into charcoal. And the crow monsters aren’t attacking the wolves, or helping them. It feels like they’re waiting for something. I don’t like this.” He turned towards Illa. “What do you think?”

“Ignoring the fact that two different monster swarms aren’t eating each other... the monsters are intelligent enough to stay out of range and use the trees for cover?” said Illa, sounding genuinely shocked. “This situation could certainly be better. Do you see either monster Alpha? If we can take them out, the monsters might stop using tactics and just charge like they usually do,” said Illa as she looked around the area, frowning in concentration. After a moment, Alice did the same.

Normally, monster alphas were pretty easy to notice. They were bigger than their subordinates, usually by quite a large margin, and they usually sat in the center of their pack and glowered at nearby food sources.

However, this time, it was hard to spot either of the alphas. Either they were hiding in the trees, or they were hidden among their subordinates – but either way, Alice couldn’t see either target.

“How long can the wooden walls last under this bombardment?” asked Ethan.

“The wooden walls have enough Perks backing them up that they are flame-resistant, but we need to kill the alpha sooner, rather than later,” said Illa, also frowning. “They can probably last fifteen to twenty minutes before giving way. Maybe half an hour if we thin out the swarm more.”

Then, she frowned further. “{Locate the Leader} isn’t picking anything up. I can feel my Perk activating, but... nothing is happening. I can’t find a result. It’s like...” Illa frowned. “Alice, that rainbow mana cascade that we saw a few days ago... it looks like the mana that you’ve spent so much time studying, right?”

Alice nodded. “It’s System mana, yes.”

Illa simply took Alice’s words in stride, nodding as she looked over the monsters.

“The feeling I’m getting from my Perk is similar to the time I tried to locate a [Nomad Commander]. He specialized in stealth and movement Perks, and he was a massive pain in the neck. Eventually, one of the [Assassins] in the group I was with managed to {Locate Target} and cut him down. But my Perk kept failing to find the [Nomad Commander], even though I could feel it activating each time.”

“Is your Perk high level?”

“No. It’s actually mostly used to find my own commander. I used it back when I was a more normal part of the army. It’s not that useful against anyone that has any sort of defense at all against it, and one of the ways [Commanders] send signals to the troops during combat. For example, my old [Commander] made sure we knew that ‘if I move west a lot, swap to ranged attacks and start harassing.’ If he needed to move for other reasons, he would use a Perk to disguise his location from perks like {Locate the Leader}. However... the problem is that monsters shouldn’t have a defense against this Perk, even if the Perk is useless against humans,” said Illa. “I’ve found the Perk pretty useful for hunting down any spidercrab alphas that pop up too close to the farms. And now it’s failing.”

Alice felt a worm of anxiety start to crawl through her guts.

The wolf alpha and crow alpha were shielding themselves against Illa’s searching Perk?

Alice started wondering if the monster alphas for these particular types of monster specialized in stealth in addition to the fire attacks of the wolves. Or perhaps the Crow alpha, wherever it was, was using cloaking magic on itself and the wolf alpha? Alice found herself dearly hoping that this was some sort of innate, biological ability that some of the monsters here had.

Because if it wasn’t a normal species trait...

Alice started to have a very bad feeling about what that meant for the world as a whole.

And, as if to corroborate Alice’s fears, a moment later, she saw something that sent chills down her spine.

One of the monsters pulsed with a type of mana none of its brethren had.

The monster didn’t use rainbow mana. Not a single fleck of the mana inside of its body resembled the insanely complex, detailed constructions that the System routinely created for its basic routines.

However, Alice still felt that the mana was completely different from the mana the rest of its brethren were using. It was like a severely dumbed down version of the System’s mana – far more basic, but still at least somewhat effective.

For a brief moment, Ethan’s volleys of stones seemed to disappear into thin air.

Then, all of his attacks were suddenly reflected right back at him, Illa, and Alice.

Ethan frowned, and his 40 mana tendrils suddenly multiplied, until he reached 140 in total. Then, he easily stopped the wave of flying projectiles in midair.

Then, Ethan pointed at one of the wolves, before Alice saw him activate his electromagnetic seed.

A blast of lightning slithered out of his hands and leapt towards the nearby wolf. Several of the wolves reacted immediately, activating their own magic as they glared at Ethan’s lightning bolt. Ethan’s lightning bolt seemed to slow down, as if it were crawling through molasses. A few moments later, Ethan’s lightning bolt fizzled into nonexistence, failing to harm a single wolf. Apparently, lightning was close enough to fire that the wolves could control it, which was an ability that was far more generalized than the magic seeds humans had access to.

Alice grimaced.

Experimentally, Ethan heated up a few of the stones with his thermal seed, until they became closer to magma than proper stone, and then tried tossing them at the crows in the distance.

However, the globs of magma were reflected back towards the wall, and the heat from the globs of magma were absorbed and removed by the wolves.

Alice felt her heart sink further.

The monsters were definitely working together. The crows were handling physical attacks, and the wolves were handling light and heat based attacks. Meanwhile, the wolves seemed unwilling to give up their assault on Cyra’s wall.

Before Alice could stew in her dread any further, Ethan suddenly grinned, and then a few of his magic tendrils reached towards the ground. Normally, any magic performed more than a meter away from somebody required exponentially more mana to activate than before, getting worse the larger the distance was.

And Ethan didn’t seem to care about that at all, as the grass on the ground outside Illvaria’s gate quickly slithered together like dozens of tiny snakes. In moments, they formed a giant set of vines, which then lunged towards the wolves and began ripping into them.

The light wolves seemed to realize that they were outmatched after their fire beams failed to do anything at all to the vines, and giant reflection didn’t stop the vines from moving forward at all. Alice squinted at the giant reflection that still hovered in the air in front of the forest, wondering why the giant mirror stopped the stones but not the grass and vines.

“Whatever they’re doing, it can’t stop living things or non-physical objects,” said Ethan, seeing her confusion. “Not sure why, but that’s what my perception Perk is telling me.”

Wolves started to howl as the vines ripped them apart, and after another few dozen wolves were ripped to pieces by the vines and grass, the wolves started howling at each other. Then, without another sound, the pack of wolves and their crow allies turned around and began fleeing at full speed, leaving Alice feeling unnerved.

“They can’t win, so they’re running away?” she said.

Monsters did sometimes run away – but it was rare. And it was usually never when the monsters were in a pack.

However, despite Alice’s disbelief, the horde of monsters seemed done attacking the town. The fled for the woods as Ethan started launching volleys of stones at them again and the [Archers] and other Mages tried to kill the fleeing monsters. However, the distance and the tree cover made hitting the monsters difficult, and in a few minutes, the massive horde of monsters started to fade from view.

Ethan grimaced. “Down a lot of mana,” he said. “But at least we got rid of them.” He glanced at the forest, before turning towards Illa. “Any chance you have the forces to pursue?”

Illa glanced at the [Archers] and Mages assembled on the wall, and then shook her head. “Too many of them left. The monsters have already shown remarkable intelligence. If they resort to ambush tactics, or another monster swarm attacks the town, the results could be catastrophic. I don’t think it’s worth pursuing given how few competent forces I have.” Illa sighed, and shrugged. “There just aren’t enough people in Cyra to support a big army.”

“Figures,” said Ethan, with a sigh. “Alice, you’re our System expert. What do you make of the monsters this time? This all happened right after that giant burst of rainbow mana. Any connection there?”

“Well... probably. My best guess is that when the monsters came into contact with raw, uncontrolled System mana for the first time a few days ago, something happened. The monsters are using Perks, which they’ve never done before, and they’re also using tactics, at least on a rudimentary level. Normally, a monster swarm wouldn’t flee unless the pack leader died, but this time the monsters fled without being nearly exterminated first.” Alice shivered. “If that’s the case, I suspect that this isn’t a problem that is localized in Cyra, although I dearly hope I’m wrong. If not... we’re going to have yet another problem to add to the pile.”

Ethan frowned. “Do you think it’s possible to figure out what’s happening if I capture a few spidercrabs for examination and experimentation? Or some other species of monster? I can get a few boxed up pretty easily for experimentation, and I think we need to know what’s happening as soon as possible. This might be even more important to figuring out how to keep mana from driving people insane.” Alice felt some of her fear dissipate as Ethan returned her focus to experiments. She had never seen monsters acquire Perks before... but they could prove viable experimental subjects for figuring out what was going on. And she could also use them to experiment with Alice-brand System mana, whenever she got it working.

Of course, Alice first needed to make sure that she didn’t somehow empower the monster species ten orders of magnitude beyond their current level and start the end of the human race. However, since she had just seen a pack of monsters use a bunch of perks and intelligent tactics in a battle, the genie might already be out of the bottle on that one.

Alice twitched.

As much as this sounded like another catastrophe in the making, at least Alice didn’t have to worry about using experimental subjects if she used monsters as test subjects. Considering how many spidercrabs had tried to eat her when she first arrived on this planet, she didn’t feel an ounce of sympathy for them – and by every single observation made in the last few hundred years of recorded history, nobody else had ever seen monsters do anything but try to eat people.

Since that was the case, Alice was more than happy to murder monsters in her pursuit of a way to fix this whole mess. Understanding how monsters interacted with complex forms of mana and how monsters could change and evolve had suddenly become a topic of utmost importance.

And Alice needed to figure out what was happening with the monsters as quickly as possible. If this problem wasn’t a local one, then on top of people being unable to select Perks without help, levelling up potentially driving people made, Mages failing to create new magic seeds, and the internal disorder of the church of the System, Illvaria needed to deal with intelligent, tactics and Perk-using monster swarms.