Boreas and Raleigh came at us hard, leaving Astara once it become clear that her wound wasn't going to get worse. There was no bleeding because the tear in the flesh had been cauterized shut with poison fire, which while excruciatingly painful, was actually helpful in terms of keeping her alive. Can't bleed out if your wound is seared shut, and her body was more than capable of fighting off the poison, though the process of purging it would take a few minutes.

Boreas, despite being shorter and less imposing was the bigger threat, since elemental abilities had some range and Raleighs weight trick only worked by touch. Cark, knowing we needed to settle him down or he would shred us all like tissue paper, stepped up to engage the shorter man, hands alight with blue flame as he took up a boxing guard with his staff tucked behind him in a tube he brought for just such an occasion.

The smaller green haired man didn't seem to take my friend seriously and came in at him with a fist wreathed in a swirl of green wind that Cark tanked with both an upraised arm and a flare of his power that burned off most of the air around the punch, dispersing the effect in a burst of fire. It was amusing to see the wind user's green eyes widen as Cark flicked out a jab that he had to catch with both hands, coating them in wind to try to disperse that flames in the same way as Cark had managed to blow away his attack.

Sadly for him Cark had clearly learned from that experience and condensed his flame more around his fist, the resulting explosion of flaming air actually blew the smaller man back from our team's pyrokinetic. He caught himself easily enough unfortunately, shaking off the heat which, while dangerous had been dampened enough not to actually do much more than give him a light red burn across his face.

Cark didn't give him a chance to recover, using his much larger range to dash in and pin the green haired man with a blistering storm of jabs coated in blue flame. Boreas spun up his wind strikes again and did his best to weather the storm of attacks, using the spin and the explosive force of the collisions to try to deflect most of the force as the air cracked with explosions of heat and force at their continuing exchange of punches.

I wanted to keep watching because it was fucking awesome, but Raleigh was coming around the battle to engage with the rest or us. I knew we couldn't possibly take him head to head. He was G rank but he was Might focused and further along than us. I didn't know how much of his progression had gone into Might, but I wasn't willing to make the same mistake I had with the Dullahan again.

I dashed in to attack, but I went in at an angle, trying to strike as I went by and triggered Flurry of Blows so I could land a series of fast hits, knowing my poison fire would do most of the work if I could hit him enough times. Raleigh deflected about half of the strikes off those huge bracelets as he tried to bring the hammer around to hit me, but was interrupted by a massive black sphere on a chain coming around from the other side to slam into his head right in the blind spot staggering him.

I grinned at my girlfriend from behind my mask as she pulled his focus, slamming my cane into the back of Raleigh's knee when he turned his head to pay attention to her, it buckled and he aborted his turn to deal with me before freezing with indecision, not sure which of us to go after, leaving him open for Jin and Rallia to dip in from behind and try to bite down on his calves only to evade as he kicked out to try to get them.

Given Callie had taught me how to use Balam and was higher level and my Balam style had been influenced heavily by the wolves, the four of us synergized pretty well when we started circling around him and baiting him out to create openings for the others. While fighting two wolves (even with goblin riders) had been a pain in the ass, fighting four different combatants his own rank with a massive slow weapon like a hammer, even with his ability was giving this guy a huge problem.

Callie and I were moving like a single unit as she matched her speed and style to mine with her superior affinity for Balam and the two wolves fell into our pace pretty quickly. I slammed my cane down on Raleigh whenever I could get a clean shot, and while the first and second blows didn't do much, the more I landed the slower the big man got and the more openings he left for Callie, the wolves and I.

In the meantime I spotted Jessie and Benny out of the corner of my eye as they headed for the temporarily downed teleporter who had managed to get to her feet. Benny came in at her with a devastating drop kick and I was shocked to see her manage to teleport out of the way. She appeared behind him, only to be buried in an avalanche of fangs and claws as a trio of wolves perfectly coordinated by our healer fell on her, only barely managing to teleport out after they hit her hard enough to tear a scream from the redhead.

She appeared just in time for Benny to attack from behind, but I didn't get a chance to see any more as my vision was taken up by a massive fuck off hammer moving way too fast for something its size. I got my arms up in the way, making sure my cane was laid across my forearms so it took more of the impact. Even with that and my armor soaking some of the impact my arms were on fire as I was sent flying, barely managing to tuck myself up and over into a tight back flip to get my feet under me again and land without flying tail over teakettle.

Raleigh had noticed my distraction and tried to make me pay for it. Luckily my cane absorbed force, because I was pretty sure if it hadn't leached off some of that strike I'd have broken both arms with that block, costume or not. Luckily he wasn't able to follow up because the wolves and Callie had laid into him from behind when he committed to an attack, and he was currently howling with pain as Jin tore a chunk out of his thigh on the way out of a vicious attack. Callie landed that huge shadow ball in the back of his skull as he tried to wheel around to attack my wolf and then backed off.

My arms hurt. A lot. Not enough that I thought they were broken, but enough to confirm that even with Raleigh heavily poisoned and with all the mitigating factors, that asshole hit hard. I was guessing he lightened the hammer a ton and then snapped it back to being heavy as fuck once it built up momentum. I kind of got why he used the thing now. I needed to do some damage here, and I knew one surefire way to manage it. I stacked Mercy Kill and Flurry of Blows before charging in at Raleigh, using Lead on the Wind to come in from above.

I swung my cane down straight at the bastards collarbone. I wanted to seriously fuck him up but not kill him, and the collarbone hurts like a bitch when you break it, but it's pretty much never fatal. As I swung I used Afterburner, massively boosting the damage of the whole skill. Afterburner was my finisher, and while it was exhausting and left me weakened it also had a uniquely powerful effect. Afterburner boosted the power of an attack in totality, which meant each and every part of it.

It increased the speed and power I got from my active skills even further, and increased the heat and acidity and power of my poison fire, and it even increased the force damage I had stored up in the cane, as little as it was. The amount of that last hammer blow it had soaked up wasn't that much, but multiplied with Mercy Kill and then increased again with Afterburner the entire strike was a fucking whopper. The silver skull head smashed down on his collarbone, releasing a massive burst of power into his torso and fucking shattering the bone with the impact.

Raleigh threw back his head and howled, the incredibly powerful burst of poison fire connecting to the stacks already on him and driving him to his knees in a surge of venomous flame so deadly I was forced to cancel the damn skills because I was pretty sure it would have killed him. He fell forward, literally smoking, but alive and on the mend, and hit the ground staggering in exhaustion from literally all of my energy bottoming out after Afterburner faded.

Afterburner was an extremely potent skill for me especially because I relied on DS Mastery so much. The skill caused an explosive increase in overall power, but it did it by increasing the power of every aspect of the next action. Of course it didn't need to be an attack, I'd used it to increase my speed during our escape from the undead fortress, though it had been a bit of a strain to fit 'escape' into the definition of the skill. Still, what it meant was the more skills I could pack into a single attack the more effective Afterburner would be.

I stopped staggering as Callie appeared next to me, steadying my footing and slipping under my arm. "Easy there. I've got you. That was a hell of an attack just now. I was impressed. I didn't know you could hit that hard." She helped me over to a nearby rock to let me lean against it. "Agria should be able to juice you back up when she's done. She and Clockwork are in the middle of finishing off Astara." She gestured over to their fight, and sure enough Astara looked like she was about to drop.

Benny's damn tranq punches didn't do much to G rankers as a one off (the original device had been H ranked after all) but stacked ten or twenty deep and with the enemy already fighting off a dangerous poison and injured, plus obviously not high in Vitality, it was enough to whittle her down. I looked over in time to see that wolves pin her down for Benny to punch her in the face with his tranq hand, finally putting her out before slumping to the ground in exhaustion. Jessie came over and pushed a surge of life force into him, healing any injuries and getting him back on his feet.

She headed over to us, the wolves dragging Astara by her feet, not having to be too careful because of her costume. She had them drop the girl off next to Raleigh and then headed over to me. "Wow, that guy looks like shit. Congrats on the win, come here." I stumbled to my feet and she slapped both hands down on my chest, flooding me with a pulse of warm green energy that revitalized my flagging body. I gave a sigh of relief as the aftereffects of Afterburner were mitigated, though from Jessie's expression that was harder than it should have been.

We all turned to look at Cark, who was still beating the shit out of Boreas, but the green haired man was flagging already. Their Might may be similar, but Cark was a pyrokinetic. He was resistant to his own heat, and those blasts of fire that kept going off when flame and wind met weren't doing nearly as much damage to him as to his opponent. Finally Cark landed a brutal right cross that put Boreas on his ass and we all headed over to where he was tying the green haired man up. Once we had all three subdued we triggered their emergency beacons as we started sorting through the materials and artifacts they had on them while Jessie healed them up. Callie was right. Loot WAS fun.