"Varkas, don’t let the Fire Lizards burn the central roots! Our intel says the item is hidden at the base of the mother flower, right?" Brant shouted, adjusting the visor of his stolen helmet, completely ignoring the pain and suffering they were inflicting on those fairies.
The three were Low Zone Players who had managed to change the fate of their miserable lives by intercepting an illegal shipment of Elysium helmets.
While most of the Low Zone residents on their planet were dying of respiratory failure, they were lucky enough to awaken Uncommon Bases and a Rare Base.
Varkas obtained the Rare Lizardman Race, while Brant and Stig unlocked Uncommon Classes that, on their own, would be mediocre, but together were devastating.
Brant possessed the [Cold-Blooded Sovereign] class, which allowed him to influence beings of the same species with lower levels and limited intelligence more easily. Stig, on the other hand, was their support with the [Synergy Link] class, capable of sharing passive and active abilities among members of a linked group.
"Relax, Brant. With the command bonus you’re passing to me through the Link, these lizards are basically extensions of my own arms." Varkas hissed, his high-pitched reptilian voice laden with greed. "That intel we bought was worth every penny... If we get the ’Essence of the Green Controller,’ we won’t just command lizards, we’ll control the very flora of this world. Imagine how much those rich corporations in the Upper Zone would pay for a weapon like that? We’ll finally be able to get out of that hellish planet."
They had discovered that Petal Village held an Epic item capable of granting dominion over plants. To them, Level 6 and 7 fairies were nothing more than weak, useless monsters they easily killed in Newbie Village.
-xXx-
In the village, the scene was desolate.
The fairies, desperate, tried to use their pollination spells and gusts of wind against the scaly tide, but their attacks merely ricocheted off the Metal Lizards’ shells.
Peoni and Pecan, who had led Lohan and Lisa there, let out screams of agony as they watched their kin being devoured or incinerated by the flames of those monsters.
A young fairy tried to protect a mana flower with her own body, firing a small sphere of light that barely dimmed a Level 8 Fire Lizard.
The reptilian creature roared, preparing a jet of lava to silence her permanently.
The village Elder, Basil, struck his staff against the ground, trying to create barriers of roots, but before those roots could take shape, Varkas’s control took effect and the lizards focused on attacking that spot, completely nullifying the defense, with the roots being severed by the metallic claws before they could even fully form.
"It’s the end... the Tear of Flowers will be stained with blood..." Basil muttered, closing his eyes as the lizards closed in on the Elder and the surviving fairies.
It was then that the air crackled with a near-sonic explosion.
A pearly white light streaked across the battlefield at insane speed.
It was Lisa, utilizing her Spectral Step at Level 12, becoming a blur that defied the physics of the forest. As they flew among the lizards, Lohan, acting as the symbiotic armor, executed a mass dispersal maneuver.
Through Partial Division, Lohan didn’t just release three clones; he expelled dozens of small neon-blue spheres that rained down on the tide of lizards like jelly bombs.
As soon as the spheres touched the metallic carapaces and steaming scales, they transformed, instantly expanding into 15- to 20-centimeter Slimes.
With Selective Viscosity set to maximum adhesion, the clones stuck themselves to the lizards’ joints and eyes.
"What... what is this?! Where did these Slimes come from?!" Varkas bellowed, trying to regain control, but the lizards began to squeal in agony.
As the clones were attacked by the lizards trying to shake them off, Lohan smiled, feeling the Hemolymphatic Tissue activate in all his fragments, and then the digestion rate jumped to a terrifying level.
Suddenly, the ground of Petal Village was filled with the hissing sound of metal scales being dissolved, and the screams of pain and agony shifted from the frightened little fairies to the screams of the monstrous lizards.
The level 8 and 9 lizards, which Brant commanded with such confidence that he believed them to be perfect war creatures capable of destroying this village with ease, began to wither away before the fairies’ eyes.
The harmless "little blue ball" that the fairies had always despised as monsters that destroyed life and the forest was now acting as their savior, using the destruction they caused to the plants to destroy the village’s invaders, converting Varkas’s army into raw biomass for Lohan’s reservoir.
Lisa stopped in the center of the clearing, her white fur glowing with a golden hue from the vitality that Lohan extracted from the lizards and injected into her.
She stared at Varkas and the two humans with golden eyes and a small smile that appeared at the corner of her mouth.
"Well, well, well, Halon, I think we’ve found a reward even better than the one we’ll receive from the Fairy Village!" Lisa said in an excited tone, not caring one bit about the war raging around her.
She had already learned to trust Halon and his clones as they fought monsters of a higher level than their own; now that the clones were dealing with lower-level monsters, she didn’t even look.
Lohan vibrated his mass over Lisa’s back, changing his pigmentation to a shade of absolute obsidian as he intently studied the bodies of those people ahead, looking for where he could apply the Mark of Rupture to them.
But the Players, watching that strange white fox suddenly turn black and take on an armored appearance as it hurled Slimes around, didn’t stand idly by and began consuming a large amount of Mana while using every ability at their disposal.
The danger they sensed from that black creature was the greatest they had ever felt up to that point!