The Raid Pt2

"You guys can't handle this many by yourselves?" I ask curiously with mock concern after letting Mistress and her group hold off the secondary reinforcements released from the fort once we had passed it into the eleventh outpost field. I was actually forced to lend them Cweeper and Hermes while my team handled the eleventh outpost itself.

"There's only ten…" she starts t cry out angrily until she remembered who she was talking to and how many people I had actually brought to the territory. Albeit, I had no idea this would be a raid location at the time. "Of us," she finishes lamely a second later, unable to meet my innocently inquisitive gaze.

This was honestly something I had been curious about and wanted to use for comparing my team to regular players. My team did not have all of the same buffing titles and stats that I did, but Mistress' clan was a craftsmen clan. They should have long since received all the free points possible from crafting various goods with or without magic.

Even though they were a crafting clan, their levels were all upper sixties and lower seventies so they should have had several hundred points on top of the few dozen from crafting. What were they missing that my team had? Even if our stat accessories achieved twenty points when I made them with proper pristine mana crystals, they were a crafting clan!

They should easily have the same level of accessories or even better since their focus was on crafting! Contrary to my beliefs, though, this clan leader and her elites could only barely survive facing two hundred trolls alone. Could it have been low skill levels because they were craftsmen?

Of course there were a few training methods we used that others probably did not, such as fleeing confrontations for free Agility and Endurance points. As well, there were the even more unorthodox methods of practicing dodging arrows and the like. For a crafting clan, these and similar training methods probably never even occurred to them.

Nodding my head slowly, I simply shrug and say, "No worries, just try to keep up. You paid us to carry you, anyway, so it would be rude if I left you to fight for yourselves. My friends can handle the trolls by themselves."

With that said, I leave my familiars flanking the crafters and return to the front of our swiftly walking group where the others were almost leisurely discussing the potential for a raid boss. Our experience with bosses in this game was not exactly extensive, the first was the goblin chieftain from the Elder Oak Passage followed by the minis and the main boss from our own Silk Spitter's Sepulcher and then the elite mobs we have faced in the wild or random instance event here in Winter Wood.

All in all, none of these bosses that a single party- or player- could bring down were comparable to a raid boss. The troll numbers alone spoke of the usual difficulty of a strange raid such as this one. Its boss must easily be worth a thousand trolls in order for it to be considered an actual boss.

By us, anyway. In my mind, a raid boss was supposed to be a being far beyond any singular person's strengths whether in the size of their health or mana pool or in the devastation brought by a single attacks. A raid boss was somebody who had to at least be able to wipe the floor with my hulk form.

Anything less than that would not be capable of helping me to grow in anything but levels.

Even the PVP of my most recent clan wipe had taught me several valuable lessons. First among them was to trust my reflexes so that even opponents who could maintain the movement speed of my own Quick Step could be dealt with using preemptive movements. Of course, of course, there was also an insane amount of luck involved in successfully predicting which directions and when they would be coming from them.

Eleven soon became twelve and twelve turned to thirteen before a notification suddenly went out almost by coincidence while I was studying the two different teams fighting as necessary.

[Congratulations to the clan: Thirteenth Incorporated for being the first to clan subdue the trollkin armies defending The Lost Divinity Raid Territory. All other participants currently facing the trollkin armies have until the end of the current hour to complete their raid attempts to achieve the best rewards they can]

There it was, the head's-up that Little Thirteen and his group had reached the end of the road. This would officially be our final run of this lane-based territory raid. Honestly, I would be more than happy to finally end this and go back to Sierra so that I could move on with my life.

Sadly, I could not do that until we completed the dungeon raid at the bottom of this territory because of the annoyingly long and drawn out quest that Lady Mara had sent me on. If I had known ahead of time that I was being sent to such a huge and complicated event that was already underway I would probably still come here but instead just rushed through my own lane without making an alliance. The alliance had been the most time consuming part.

One wave of trolls after another came and went, cut down in the prime of their artificial intelligence lives and converted into fuel for the strength of my party. Even though they rarely fought unless reinforcements found their way forward from the fort, Mistress and her group were also receiving plenty of experience from our actions.

It was almost as though we were power leveling a group of younger players because of the obvious disparity in our abilities.

Once we reached the sixteenth outpost my group received yet another surprise in the form of a notification about Duality Resistance's completion of their own lane and then the appearance of a new mob. This troll stood almost nine feet tall and wore and ice and bone plated armor that decorated their body like an old school knight from the medieval ages. In either of the troll's hands were a large sword of ice and a giant ax of ivory.

"Hack!" Go calls out as the two hundred and sixty trolls from the outpost rush onto my party like a tidal wave of large furry bodies and sharp ivory. "Eat that giant some of a bitch!"

Rushing into the fray while gathering seismic earthen elemental energy in my hand with Force Strike, I punch straight out ahead of me without even making contact with anything and release the pent up energy with a Spirit Wave. A massive storm of energy erupted from my fist, filling the air ahead of me with a thirty-yard radius of raw kinetic and spiritual force.

[Acquired Skill: Spirit Eruption]

[Spirit Eruption Uninitiated: Through augmenting spiritual energy with natural mana and pure offensive power, you can now unleash an explosion of pure force that deals 100% of True Damage with a knockback of 1yd per 20 Strength. Cooldown: 3min. To initiate, successfully knockback one hundred enemies in a single strike]

[Spirit Eruption has been Initiated]

For a brief moment it looked as if the trolls had suddenly learned to fly and chosen to run away when faced with my attack. However, they flew randomly in every direction and many of them were tumbling wildly through the air without any control whatsoever.

Looking through the parting in the now red sea of bodies as blood fills the air from smashed and torn limbs, I race forward through the newly opened space as the behemoth tagged 'Troll Chief LV69'. Assuming my hulk form in mid-stride as the chief troll seems to accept my unspoken challenge and rushed forward with weapons readied, I simply throw my giant body forward while drawing back a single crude fist.

"Ha!" I find myself exclaiming as I cry out with my punch to compress my body and channel all of my strength into my fist. Usually I tried really hard not to grunt or yell with my attacks because it could give away an attack pattern or it just looked bad like a kid's super hero show. This time, against such a big enemy, I did not seem to be able to control it.

My first struck froward as their ax hammered down, both attacks connecting with either the troll's chest or sinking into my shoulder only a few inches away from my neck. The troll was thrown off of their feet but remained in reach, gripping the handle of their giant bone ax like a climbing piton attached to my body so that they stayed within reach to thrust out with their ice sword.

Matching their follow-up attack with a thrust of my other clawed hand, I sink my fingers up to my knuckles in the troll's belly as their sword punches through the crystallized flesh over my solar plexus and simply dives several feet in to burst out through my back dangerously close to my spaced out spine.

My health bar was drained down to sixty percent in two just two attacks but the chief troll's health dropped below fifty from the exact same number. This guy obviously had the strongest combat AI that I had faced so far in a mob due to its sheer willpower and adaptability. Even I might not have been able to hold onto the ax like he did if I were in his shoes.

Ignoring the weapons buried in my body as the troll slams their head forward to bury half a dozen spikes in my lower face and throat I simply slash out again and again with my free hand. I could not see where most of my attacks landed as the troll continued struggling tooth and nail to kick and punch about my body but I could clearly see its health bar draining away almost twice as fast as my own. Finally, whipping my body around to the side, I ram my knee up into the dying troll's sternum and finally send it somersaulting the hell away from me.

"Fuck!" I cannot help but cry out as I rip the sword and ax from my body, finding loot notifications for having acquired the troll's weapons pop up before my eyes as the troll with less than twenty percent of its health remaining staggers defiantly up to its feet. Now, wielding the troll's own weapons, I lunge forward and feint a thrust of the sword that the troll dives to the side and rolls away to evade.

Sticking close to the evasive behemoth, I chop its own ax down across the back of its shoulders as it struggles to stand and send them sprawling uselessly to the ground as the last of its health simply vanishes.

Taking a moment to catch my breath as my natural regen begins adding two and three percent of health every other second, I look around to find that most of the regular trolls were nearly done away with already under the combined firepower of my clan and Mistress' party. A brief glance showed that I was only just nearing half-health again while a small epiphany occurs to me.

If I did not have Imperial Order to buff my stats and abilities during combat, this Troll Chief could have killed me and still have around thirty percent of its health left like I had. Against such a boss my team would not have died out, but if it got to our ranged members then it was likely more than just me would have been sent out of the lane.

Worse, still, was the fact that there were still several more outpost to go and I would not be surprised if all of them turned out to have a chief augmenting their numbers. Healing spells were cast by more than just my own party as I stood their contemplating the ways in which I could have handled the situation with greater efficiency.

Once I was fully healed again, though, I simply turned to look at my followers and say, "Just try to keep up, alright?"

*