Varkas gripped the bone staff so tightly that the joints of his scaly hands cracked.
His reptilian eyes burned with fury as he watched the one-sided slaughter of his army.
"What the hell is this?! Where did that black figure come from?!" he roared, watching his Metal Lizards being immobilized and devoured by dozens of small neon-blue masses.
Brant and Stig took a step back, feeling the superior mana pressure emanating from the armored fox in the center of the clearing.
"Varkas, the level 8 and 9 lizards are getting wiped out! The [Synergy Link] is sending me mass death alerts!" Stig shouted, cold sweat dripping down from under his helmet.
"Shut up! I didn’t spend three weeks in that miserable Novata Village doing hidden quests just to be humiliated by a fox and a little jelly ball!" Varkas hissed, raising the bone staff, the [Staff of Blood Desolation], the reward he received for a secret sacrifice mission.
He drove the base of the staff into the ground of Petal Village and uttered a guttural command.
A sickly green shockwave expanded, acting as a long-range magical beacon.
"Come to me! All the reptiles of this cursed forest! If I cannot control you, I will bring you by blood!"
The intensity of the call was such that Varkas relinquished his absolute authority over the lizards in exchange for double the range.
Deep within the woods, the sound of hundreds of metallic claws and hissing flames echoed.
The lizards already on the battlefield entered a state of Indiscriminate Frenzy. They stopped focusing on the fairies and began biting everything that moved, including each other, but the main focus of their irrational aggression was Lisa’s golden light.
Lohan, operating through the [Parallel Processing Core], noticed the change instantly.
"Lisa, he’s throwing the whole board in our faces. My clones can hold off the lizards that are here, they have the level advantage to handle frenzied monsters, but depending on how many lizards arrive, I don’t know if I can control them all while protecting the fairies."
In fact, Lohan’s Slimes acted as immovable anchors, using [Selective Viscosity] to trap and digest the level 8 lizards advancing blindly, turning the enemy’s frenzy into constant fuel for his biomass reservoir, but the number of Clones he could spawn and control was limited.
Before Varkas could laugh at his "horde," Lisa vanished.
Using the Spectral Step, she distorted the visual perception of the three Players.
In the next millisecond, the air in front of Varkas exploded with heat as Lisa appeared out of nowhere, like an obsidian specter shrouded in white-gold Spiritual Fire.
She delivered a side kick, and tongues of pure flame licked at Brant and Stig’s mana shields.
Lohan, acting in perfect sync with the Living Armor, fired six strands of Magic Weaving simultaneously. The bluish filaments glowed with the power of Holy Light, zigzagging through the air to bind the scouts’ wrists.
At the last moment, Lohan concentrated her mana and applied the Mark of Rupture to Varkas’s shoulder, setting the stage for Lisa’s next piercing strike.
"BY THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH!" Stig shouted, using the [Synergy Link] to share an agility buff that allowed the three of them to roll backward, escaping the fire and adhesive webs by a hair’s breadth.
Although he lacked powerful offensive abilities, Stig’s Class was full of extremely useful buffs that he could share with the group.
Varkas stood up, wiping the soot from his face. He looked at Lisa and then at the creature he thought was a Slime, though it looked nothing like one, which he finally recognized on the fox’s back by the second pair of eyes on it and the powerful magical energy it exuded.
He noticed that despite being monsters, those two creatures acted with extremely high intelligence, with the fox even displaying human expressions on its canine face.
Suddenly, Varkas began to laugh. It was a maniacal laugh, laced with an extremely irritating superiority complex.
"Hahaha! They aren’t monsters... Brant, Stig, just look! These creatures are Players too!" Varkas pointed his sharp claws at the pair. "What kind of unlucky trash must you be in real life, huh?! You must have been born with such rotten genetics that the Elysium system gave you the most useless forms in the game to match, hahaha!"
He tossed the staff to Stig and flexed the muscles of his Lizardman body, the scales of his Rare Race gleaming with a density he believed to be unsurpassed."I am a Lizardman, a race made for physical supremacy! And you? A cute little fox and a blob of snot?!
You may have somehow surpassed us in level, but you don’t have my qualitative potential!" Varkas roared, his claws growing and glowing with acid-green mana. "I’m going to shred this fake black shell and use your cores to level up to Level 13. Get ready, you worms!"
Varkas charged at the duo, confident that his racial advantage as a Rare bipedal predator would overcome any trick a Slime might pull.
Stig and Brant looked at Varkas in confusion, but knowing they had no other choice, they also began to help as best they could.
As Varkas charged, the ground began to vibrate intensely, and suddenly, dozens of monstrous lizards of varying levels appeared, ranging from Level 4 to Level 10, and in the center of that group, acting in a confused and suspicious manner, was a larger lizard. Although it wasn’t being controlled like the others, it followed the group to see what was happening.
Looking at the large number of lizards approaching and the group of players also advancing, Lohan was at a loss for a moment, unsure of how they should act.
After all, they had been hired to save the fairies, what would they do if they kept fighting and let the fairies die?!
Just then, Pip charged forward, flying at high speed alongside Lohan’s clones, and an good idea popped into the Slime’s head.