Chapter 102

The lesser guardian’s snapped off arm regrew before Luke’s eyes, a process that took a second at most. High stamina wouldn’t account for that, so he was guessing it was some weird skill the monster had. He just hadn’t seen it before because the squirrel folk were shielding it from harm.

Luke was confident he could overcome that regeneration, either through a thorough and extended beatdown or by finding just the right spot to pummel. Before that could happen, he needed to get rid of the rest of the weaklings. There were still a hundred or more squirrels eagerly throwing themselves at him, completely heedless of all forms of danger from friend and foe alike. More of those squirrel folk had shown up too, probably ten or fifteen at least. It was hard to tell with them hiding in the trees.

There was always the possibility of more druids arriving to fuck things up, but Luke figured he was probably past the point of them helping the stick monster. That didn’t mean they couldn’t pelt him with exploding acorns or make the trees come to life, so he decided to move the fight back out into the clearing where there’d be less for them to work with. The cover provided by fighting in the woods was helping his enemies more than him anyway.

The fight turned back into a running battle, with him doing his best to put distance between himself and the stick monster while he killed off the various flavors of hostile squirrel as quickly as possible, and the monster somehow passing through the underbrush like it wasn’t even there. Seriously, nothing that clumsy had any right to move through the forest that easily. He was almost certain he’d seen an arm literally phase through the loop of a low hanging vine without disturbing it.

Druid magic was such bullshit.

More squirrels died, sometimes when he palmed them by their heads and squeezed, sometimes when he snatched them by a tail or leg and threw them into trees. Every now and then, he managed to stomp on one or give it a good kick while it was coming in, but the squirrel folk were watching for the openings those breaks in his footwork gave him.

They were smart enough to hang back too, and ruthless enough to continue letting their smaller cousins sacrifice themselves. At the rate they were going, there wouldn’t be a squirrel alive anywhere within a hundred miles of Luke. If he wasn’t so pissed about how rabid they all were, he’d have laughed about it.

One good thing he had going for him was the stamina boost. Luke was not even a little bit tired, not even after all the times he’d dropped a [Power Strike] already. If anything, between that and the extra AP invested into agility, he was going even harder now. The whole fight really put into perspective why everyone was so afraid of someone hitting level 50 and just snapping.

This fight was something like five hundred on one, and as far as Luke could tell, he was winning. A lot of the squirrels were under level 10, but some of them weren’t. The worst part of it was, it hardly mattered if they were level 5 or level 20. Either way, he hit them once and they died. Only the squirrel folk, all significantly smarter and for the most part keeping their distance, presented any challenge.

And the stick monster, of course, but Luke was saving it for last. He wanted to fight that without any distractions, and until it was just the two of them left, fully planned on keeping it chasing after him. Eventually the squirrels would all die or they’d break and run. His money was on genocide. They obviously weren’t behaving like normal animals, and it felt like a safe bet to blame that on their squirrel folk handlers.

The numbers were thinning now. [Twitch Reflexes] was in top form, always keeping Luke moving as he dodged and darted, while [Counter]and [Unarmed Martialist] teamed up to take care of most of his killing needs. The only things his skills weren’t helping him with was slaughtering the squirrel folk who were still shadowing them.

He was getting close to the edge of the tree line now. They’d have no choice but to make a move if they wanted to keep their terrain advantage, and Luke was ready for them. The squirrel army was barely a trickle compared to the flood it had been, too few to really tie up his attention at this point. The bigger, smarter squirrels were either going to attack in the next few seconds, or they’d wait for the stick monster to catch up and try to mob him as a group.

Considering how casual it was about killing squirrels who got in its way, Luke thought it would be spectacularly stupid to fight side-by-side with the monster. But if a few of them got themselves killed without him having to put any effort into making it happen, he wasn’t going to complain.

The squirrel folk didn’t disappoint. A bare fifty feet from freedom, they attacked en masse. Luke quickly found that his earlier estimates had been woefully low, with more than twenty of them appearing to attack all at once. Luke had about four seconds before the lesser guardian of nature caught up to him, more than enough time to thin the numbers.

His mace lashed out, left and then right, while he spun and drove his foot into one of the squirrel folk’s gut. More fell on him, spears leading. More landed behind him and attacked his legs, intent on tripping him up and bringing him to the ground. More attacked from the sides, knives held ready to slice into him.

Luke exploded into a spin, his mace infused with a [Power Strike] that tore through seven different victims before he completed his rotation, only for him to spin a second time. Spears stuck out of him, in his arms, back, and chest as the vicious bipedal rodents took the opportunity to make clean strikes at his back.

When Luke was done a second later, twelve squirrel folk were dead. He ripped the spears out of his body without a second thought, then kicked his way through the horde that were trying to keep him in the trees while throwing each spear one-handed. Some of them hit their mark; some missed. Luke didn’t care.

By the time he broke through the trees and back into the open, the stick monster was less than ten feet away from him, but almost all of the squirrel folk were dead or dying. The ones that remained stopped at the edge of the tree and threw baleful glares at him. None dared set foot into the clearing.

“I guess it’s just you and me, big guy,” Luke told the stick monster.

Its response was a lumbering tackle, really more of a body slam. Just going by the numbers, Luke should have been able to throw himself right back at the monster and win easily. There’d been a bit too much fuckery for his tastes in this fight already, however, and besides, there was no reason to do that when his agility massively outclassed his opponent’s.

Luke dodged, quite nimble with all his various skills working in tandem to keep him out of harm’s reach. Then he started hammering the stick monster as it stumbled past. Rapid-fire strikes landed on its back and arms as it turned to face him, each one tearing away chunks of mud and wood, only for it to regenerate a moment later. That didn’t deter Luke; he’d expected something like that.

They went back and forth, the monster trying to smash him with flailing limbs while Luke used his superior speed and reach to stay out of range while he peppered it with a barrage of light blows. Every hit did damage, and that damage was instantly reverted. The stick monster made no effort to defend itself either, which Luke took to mean that he could wail on it all day without actually hurting it. He needed to figure out where it was actually vulnerable at.

It didn’t care about its limbs. Busting up an arm just meant it turned itself sideways to get maximum effect out of the other arm. Breaking off a leg caused it to balance in what looked like some sort of weird Yoga pose for a moment while it regrew the missing limb. Even its head was left unprotected, as he discovered when he took a risky shot and decapitated it.

Well, if none of those spots did it, that just left its torso and its crotch. Once he started looking for it, Luke noticed that while the stick monster did nothing to protect itself from attacks that struck its limbs, it did always seem to twist in some random way that coincidentally protected its chest.

Getting a solid shot in was further complicated by the fact that the squirrel folk were not content to just sit back and watch. They wouldn’t leave the trees, but that didn’t stop them from hurling rocks or sticks at him. That didn’t hurt so much as it was distracting, since [Twitch Reflexes] didn’t differentiate between an arrow and a twiga. That combined with the occasional individual squirrel still heroically charging to its doom added a level of difficultly Luke didn’t need to be dealing with.

Thus far, he’d managed to avoid taking even a single hit from the lesser guardian of nature, if only because he didn’t trust the numbers [Analyze] had given him. That had been the correct move when he was dealing with hundreds of other squirrels and at least two druids that were buffing the monster up. Now, it was on its own, and no matter where he hit it, he wasn’t doing lasting damage.

Luke charged up a [Power Strike], waited for the stick monster to lunge at him, then stepped in under the swinging arm, and blasted the monster for all he was worth. He took a blow to his shoulder that was hard enough to drive him down to one knee, but not before he cracked the chest cavity of the monster wide open.

There was something in there, a sort of seed bigger than his fist that glowed with green light and had a hundred little roots connected to it. Even as Luke watched, new sticks grew like ribs around it and mud started pouring in to fill the gaps.

“I don’t fucking think so,” Luke snarled, reading another [Power Strike]. The stick monster couldn’t react in time, apparently dazed from the first real hit to do it any damage, and when Luke hit it again, everything from its chest on up exploded. Wood shards, mud splatters, and shredded vines went in every direction, and the seed fell to the ground.

It immediately started sucking up new mud, but Luke scooped it up before it could rebuild anything. Then he shot the squirrels a look, gave them a nasty grin in response to their angry chittering, and tossed the seed up into the air.

Luke liked baseball. He’d played varsity in high school until his grades had forced them to drop him off the team. A light toss of a round, spherical object straight up five feet into the air followed by a two-handed swing of something roughly shaped like a baseball bat as it came back down was second nature to him.

The seed burst into a million pieces and shot gunned the tree line. Luke heard a ding in his mind, and he stared defiantly at the remaining squirrels, daring them to come closer. Instead, they vanished deeper into the forest, and soon he could no longer feel their XP. Even the smaller ones stopped coming.

For the first time in about twenty minutes, Luke was completely alone. The fight was over, and he was the last man standing.