Chapter 258: Weak Spot

“I’ll keep them focused on me. Try to find their weak spot, okay?” Aegis asked Lina, and turned to see her nod back hesitantly. Despite her change in demeanor, he could still see the fear in her eyes. “Hey, it’s okay - I won’t let them hurt you.” Aegis tried to reassure her, and she nodded back again, with slightly more confidence.

As the creatures closed in, both of their tails reared back and their fanged maws opened wide, smiling at Aegis with their uncomfortably circular eyes. Once close enough to strike him, Lina shadow stepped away into the shade of the trees around them and Aegis jumped backwards, allowing the tails to pierce into the forest floor and melting small acidic craters into the dirt upon impact.

Lina reappeared around them in several different spots, striking at them with her mithral daggers. Aegis could see them getting distracted by her movements and losing interest in him, so he lunged forward and bashed one in the head with his shield.

“Challenging roar!” He shouted, though not thinking it’d do much to get their attention due to the enemies being elite. It did have some effect, though, as despite being stabbed on various parts of its body, the female sounding one ignored the strikes in favor of swiping at Aegis with its claws while the one he’d shield bashed on the nose retaliated by chomping out at him. He avoided both of their strikes with great difficulty.

“Their bellies are taking extra damage. I am dealing a lot of damage to them.” Lina called out as Aegis was forced to block the chomp with his shield, and the swipes with his guard.

You take 14,332 Slashing damage.

You take 15,193 Slashing damage.

You take 12,775 Piercing damage.

“Greater heal. Aura of Healing. Aura of Beauty.” He called out quickly after blocking the strikes, casting the heal on himself while erupting his auras outward from the heels of his feet, both of which easily encapsulating Lina and granting her the effects. “Good, keep it up, I’ll try to handle their attacks.” Aegis said in response to Lina.

“Shadow Dance!” She cast a familiar spell to Aegis. She began rapidly teleporting around the manticores and striking at their stomachs - anytime one looked to be drawn to her movements, she swapped targets. Still, not fast enough to completely avoid them as one managed to eventually predict one of her jumps and sting its tail out at her. Aegis reacted by projecting his shield in front to absorb the blow with the protection, however.

You take 10,932 Piercing damage.

You take 5,989 Acid damage.

“Jeez.” Aegis groaned while quickly healing himself. “I thought, given how much we’ve trained with each other on PvP movement, that monsters would become a joke. Not only are these things incredibly fast, but they’re keeping up with our movements too.” Aegis commented in disbelief as he was forced to dodge and block several more strikes.

“Well…” Lina began replying, but paused as she jumped around. Her voice started coming from random directions, echoing off the trees as she rapidly teleported mid-response. “Monsters in this game have stats like ours, and in higher levels they begin to scale to superhuman levels. That is why the majority of players who handle higher level content need to do it in a group. In addition, don’t forget that they are AI that are a part of the game in which we are inputting commands. The AI can cheat a bit and read our input, making it easier for them to predict what we are going to do next and react to it.”

“Ah. Yeah. I guess that makes sense.” Aegis nodded as he pondered her words. “Tch. Cheating creeps.” Aegis shook his head disappointedly at the Manticores.

“I aint no cheat, partner.” The second Manticore replied in his heavy southern accent.

“Sure you aren’t buddy.” Aegis grumbled back at the beast as it swiped its claws at him with incredible speed. “Still, to keep up with shadow dance… isn’t that the fastest movement possible in the game?” Aegis asked, trying to confirm something he’d researched.

“Mhm. I mean, I’m not fully buffed, so I could still go faster.” Lina replied.

“Could we fully buff you?” Aegis asked curiously.

“Nope. Need a bard and a support-type wizard, and some elixirs. But this is okay for these guys.” Lina replied.

“Got it.” Aegis replied, nonchalantly dodging another tail strike. It took a bit of time, but eventually he fell into a rhythm of dodging their strikes when he needed to, and once he’d done that, he began blocking their strikes on purpose. After 10 minutes of fighting, the two Manticores went down due to Lina’s massive damage output on them.

Level Up! Shield Mastery has reached Level 156!

Level Up! Greater Heal has reached Level 153!

Level Up! Leather Armor Proficiency has reached Level 152!

Level Up! Aura of Healing has reached Level 152!

Level Up! Aura of Beauty has reached Level 152!

Almerak Manticore x2 Slain!

You gain 1,125,730 Experience!

“Damn, Quinn wasn’t joking. Those two alone granted about 5% of a level…” Aegis said with wide eyes as he looked at the notifications that had popped up in his peripheral vision.

“Mhm. Now imagine we had a small guild helping us killing them, and letting us get all the experience for ourselves.” Lina replied with a smile as she eyed a pair of item orbs that rolled out of the bodies of the Manticores.

“I guess that’s how Feng and Makaroth are the highest levels in the game, huh?” Aegis asked, with no attempt to hide the resentment in his voice.

“Yeah…” Lina answered weakly. Aegis walked over the orbs and tapped them as the pair watched two strange chunks of blue jagged stone pieces roll out.

“What is that?” Lina asked curiously as Aegis leaned down to inspect the item cards of the stones.

Name: Relic of Almerak (117)

Type: Relic

Description: Once a piece of something greater, now destroyed and broken apart into 231 fragments, scattered throughout the ruins of Almerak.

The second fragment listed itself as fragment 81. Once he’d read the item cards, he held one in each of his hands and looked at the jagged stones curiously.

“I think if we collect all 231 fragments of these stones, it might be possible to fix it and find out what it is. But it says the fragments are scattered about the ruins.”

“231 could be hard. Did it say that they all drop from the Manticores?”

“Nope, wasn’t specific about that.” Aegis shrugged back at her. He then looked up to see the sun moving through the sky, its position indicating it was closing in on the evening. “We’ve only got about 36 hours left to grind before the preliminaries start. It’d probably be hard to try to find them all before then…”

“Yeah…” Lina replied as she eyed a giant smile growing across Aegis’ face. “Probably really hard. We’d have to pull a lot of manticores… while exploring all these ruins…” She added as his contagious smile slowly spread to her.

“Mhm… Would have to be stupid to mass pull mobs like these, though…” Aegis raised his eyebrows at her.

“Yeah, really stupid.” Her eyes lit up with excitement. Aegis pulled out his harvesting knife and quickly got to work on the manticores, obtaining crafting parts from their fangs, tails, and leather which looked impressively sturdy, far beyond what was given by the Salamanders.

“Even these materials are great… If we could gather enough before the tournament we could maybe upgrade our armor… too bad there’s not much time.” Aegis said, though not with a dejected sounding voice.

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“Well…” Lina saw in his eyes what he was planning to do. She was quickly reminded of her first day of playing with Aegis, where he had her kite a boar king around the forest so that it’d knock down trees for him to harvest.

“You go that way, I’ll go this way, then we meet around the middle.” Aegis pointed out opposite directions as he gave his instructions.

“‘Kay!” Lina cheered back excitedly.

Darkshot was proudly staring at his character sheet as the sun began to set that evening, noting his level now sat at 152 and many of his skills had leveled up. He was resting on a rock in front of the corpse of a manticore, eying a relic fragment that he had obtained with the number 47 on it. He bit into a kebab that Aegis had given him in his supply back to boost his stamina recovery before standing up and dusting himself off.

“I’m making hella good time.” Darkshot said to himself as he opened up his friends list and checked in on his party members. Rakkan had reached level 152 as he had, Pyri was at 153, and Aegis and Lina were both still at 151. “Well, of course Pyri’d be faster. At least I’m beating Aegis though.” Darkshot rubbed his hands together before pulling his bow out, getting a coo of acknowledgement from Darkwing on his shoulder. He began prowling through the forest under the darkening sky, until he spotted tracks of a nearby Manticore.

Using his class skills he was able to easily track down the Manticore to its resting place without alerting it to his presence. He got a good position up in the canopy of a nearby tree before pulling back an obsidian tipped arrow in his bow and was preparing to fire - aiming at the vulnerable part of its belly that was visible as it lay sleeping on its side.

“HOWDY PARTNER!” Aegis suddenly shouted, running out of a nearby ruined structure towards the Manticore. He wasn’t speaking to Darkshot - he hadn’t even noticed Darkshot hiding in the tree. He was yelling at the Manticore to wake it up and get its attention.

“Yo whaddup homie?” The Manticore replied with heavy slang as it suddenly jumped up to its feet. It went from slumbering peacefully to aggressively baring its fangs at Aegis in less than a second.

“Not much, homie!” Aegis called back to it, though now sure he had its attention, he started running in the opposite direction.

“What the hell Aegis, that one was mine!” Darkshot shouted down to him as Aegis barely heard him over the sound of stampeding manticores. As Darkshot shouted, he saw several pairs of bat wings flapping above the trees, in pursuit of Aegis. In addition, several were stomping after him on foot. Seeing the amount - 11 Manticores in total, prompted Darkshot to quickly throw his hands over his mouth in an attempt to take his words back. The fear of accidentally drawing aggro from the manticores onto himself sent a chill down his spine, but luckily none seemed to notice that he’d called out due to the variety of weird voices coming from the manticores mouth - it sounded like a party of the most diverse group of individuals ever as they all called out at Aegis with various accents.

“Man…” Darkshot sighed to himself once he was sure he was safe. “What the hell is that idiot doing?” Aegis asked Darkwing, who simply cooed back in equal confusion.

Pyri, who was also alerted to the commotion, used her fly spell to soar above the trees until she spotted a newly formed opening in the forest. A total of 23 manticores were gathered by Aegis and Lina, and the pair were now battling them in the clearing that’d been formed due to the manticore attacks melting through the surrounding trees.

From her point of view, she could make out Aegis skillfully maintaining threat on them as Lina shadow danced through the area, releasing tendrils of shadows from the darkened areas that aided in her dealing damage.

Pyri then spotted Darkshot climbing to the top of a tree not too far away, taking in the view as well. Finally, due to the commotion, Rakkan was also spotted as he’d made his way to the top of a ruined structure - one of the few still standing high enough to protrude out of the forest canopy.

“I thought we couldn’t AoE grind these?” Darkshot said through the party interface so that everyone could hear them.

“Well, it’s kinda hard, but I wanted to collect all those ruins fragments before the preliminaries.”

“They’re elite, though, right? You can’t really hold aggro on them.” Rakkan asked.

“Yeah, it’s pretty hard…” Aegis replied with his voice strained.

“Should we grab some more and join in?” Pyri asked deviously.

“That’d be great, thanks.” Aegis answered her with no hesitation, causing Pyri and Rakkan to chuckle.

“One day. Someday, maybe, we’ll be able to just have a nice, relaxing, easy going grinding session.” Darkshot grumbled as he began eying the surrounding forest for more Manticore tracks.

Two hours later, long after the sun had set, a giant portion of the ruined forest had been decimated. A large, roughly 100 square meter area had been cleared of all trees and ruined structures. It was littered with craters of sizzling acid, and corpses of manticores.

At the very center of the clearing was Aegis and his party, eagerly sitting and standing in a circle. At the center of the circle was a pile of blue stone fragments, and the group was quickly shuffling through them.

“I’m missing 32. Anyone got 32?” Darkshot asked.

“Here.” Lina pulled it from the pile and handed it to him.

“Thanks.” Darkshot replied excitedly as he took it from her and placed it in his pile of fragments. The group was each taking on a numbered range of fragments and were then attempting to puzzle them together, but it became clear after a short while that they were still missing a good number of them.

“Do you think we need to kill more manticores?” Rakkan asked as the group gave up for the time being and began adding the fragments to their inventories.

“Nah, not likely. A lot of them didn’t even drop a fragment. I bet some are just laying around the ruined buildings.” Aegis replied.

“Okay, I’ll start searching.” He answered with enthusiasm. In an instant, he created several echoes of himself and headed out of the clearing and back into the overgrown ruins.

“Yeah, I think I’m gonna take a break and get some rest before the match. Level 153 aint bad, right?” Darkshot asked.

“Nope. That’s not a bad idea though. We’ve been going non stop for awhile now.” Pyri replied while eying Aegis specifically. Once their eyes met, Aegis nodded along.

“Alright, yeah. I’m just gonna harvest all these manticores and cook them, then I’ll take a rest.” Aegis replied to her.

“Good. I’m going to hop out of the Simbox for a shower and a real meal, then.” Pyri said as she began fidgeting around with her interface. A few seconds later, she vanished from the game world.

“Later,” Darkshot waved.

“Cya tomorrow.” Aegis answered.

“Bye.” Lina smiled, and Darkshot promptly logged out as well, leaving the pair alone. “Should I make a campfire for you?”

“That’d help, thanks.” Aegis replied as he pulled his harvesting knife from his inventory and got to work on the manticores. He counted the corpses as he made his way around the clearing, totaling 83 that the group had slain. In the end, he managed to hit level 152 but was close enough to 153 that he was sure he’d get it in the morning.

Level Up! Creature Harvesting has reached Level 157!

Once he’d finished, he had several manticore flanks that he brought with him back to the campfire where Lina was seated on the remains of an acid-melted log, watching him curiously as he eyed the meat in his hands.

“It’s got really strong recovery properties, but I don’t think it’s going to be easy to cook.” Aegis said as he sat down on the log beside her without thinking. After he’d pondered a few ideas on how to cook it, he handed the flanks to her to hold for him without speaking, and she took it with no complaints despite the gooey texture of the meat on her hands and the strange clear liquid dripping out of it. With his hands free, he took out his cooking tools and began setting them out around himself, near the fire.

By the time he’d finished, the meat goop had covered her knees and hands, and she was looking down at her armor uncomfortably.

“Oh, sorry,” Aegis quickly took the meat away and placed it on a large cutting board that he’d brought out of his inventory. “I just made you hold it without thinking.

“No, it’s okay.” She smiled as she stood up and started wiping the goop off of her salamander leather leggings. “I’m happy…”

“You’re happy I handed you goopy meat?”

“No…” She chuckled as she caught his awkward smile at her. “I’m happy you handed it to me without thinking. Like we’re a pair. My mom said that when you really like someone, you don’t need to talk as much…” Lina explained herself, but as she did she got flustered from her own words.

“Oh. Yeah…” Aegis awkwardly broke eye contact. “I guess that’s true.” He turned away and began cutting the meat into smaller slices so that it'd fit on the tiny grill of his cooking toolkit that he had brought out. “We’ve been playing together for a few months now, so I guess I feel really comfortable around you. I trust you. But I shouldn’t just plop goopy meat on you.”

“No it’s okay, you can plop your goopy meat on me whenever you want.” She replied eagerly, but afterwards repeated the words to herself in her head as Aegis let out a chuckle. “Ah, I mean…” She anxiously began to fidget as her face went bright red. “That’s not what I meant. You know, I only meant, manticore meat is okay to give to me, definitely not the other thing.” She continued, but Aegis’ lack of immediate response caused her to go over her words again. “Ah, I didn’t mean definitely not the other thing, though, because, well…” She got stumped and stopped talking, letting out a nervous sigh.

“Hah, it’s okay… I know what you meant.” Aegis turned back and smiled at her, trying to reassuringly calm her down as he saw her cherry-red cheeks. She avoided eye-contact, though, and instead sat back down on the log and began fidgeting with her fingers. Once he’d gotten over the cuteness of how shy she was, her words and what she was saying slowly sank in.

His eyes, almost against his own will, wandered down her body, following her female form as it was concealed in tightly fitting salamander leather armor. Her black hair, tied back in a pony-tail with the bangs hanging over the front of her face as it tilted downward. He paired this image of her beautiful avatar character with her real body, in the real world, which he thought equally beautiful, and suddenly his heart began to beat faster within his chest.

At the mere suggestion of it by Lina, hormones that’d been suppressed by Aegis due to his focus on his goals began to bubble up inside of him, and he quickly broke eye-contact from her to focus back on slicing the manticore meat, while breathing heavily for no particular reason.

“Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooh.” Hae-won let out an extremely long drawn out, whispered cheer as she watched Aegis’ expression intently through Shinji’s camera work. “C’mon Aegis, be a man!” Hae-won shouted at the display of his livestream from within her broadcasting simulation, the chat zooming past her with random heart emojis.