Chapter 4: No Time to be Rusty When the You're Facing Certain Death

"[Sanctuary]: Block all incoming attacks in front of you for the next three seconds. Attacking or using an offensive skill will prematurely end this effect," Lucas read aloud from his skill sheet for the others to hear. The trio - Ben, Lucas, and Cara - stood together at the wooden gates of an abandoned monastery atop Mt. Takao looking tired as dogs. Cuts and bruises decorated their bodies and faces, turning them into grotesque Picasso paintings. A white stone staircase of a thousand steps extended into the misty valley below.

The monk who bestowed the skill upon him was already halfway down the mountain, but Lucas felt like he should chase him down and demand a refund. "What the hell is this? A defensive skill where I just sit there? We cleared out this entire desecrated monastery for a useless defensive skill?"

"You shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth," Ben reprimanded Lucas as he pulled up his own skill sheet. He still looked a bit funny wearing glasses. He had insisted that his character appear as close to reality as possible, so after reaching their first town a few days ago he asked a silversmith to create a pair for him with the schematics he provided. They didn't even have lenses. Ben had mentioned something about bridging the mental divide and all that. Lucas didn't really understand - the system corrected everyone's eyesight when they entered the game, so why did he need glasses?

"[Way of the Wind]: All arrows fired for the next ten seconds ignore the effects of wind," Ben read aloud. He didn't voice it, but his face seemed to droop a hair in disappointment. The skill didn't sound all that great to Lucas, either. Most of their fights would probably take place in dungeons. What kind of wind did a ranger need to avoid underground? His mood turned even more sour as two out of their three rewards seemed to be bust.

The two men looked over at Cara. She was seated on an overturned log beside the staircase, staring out at them from behind her skill sheet.

"I think you two are being overly pessimistic," she lectured.

"Great," Lucas said sarcastically. "The only thing worse than all three of us getting something useless is Cara getting something useful and lecturing us about our useless skills." She folded her arms and furrowed her brow at his inciting words.

"I'm being serious!" she continued. "Even though it won't help you kill things faster, [Sanctuary] sounds great at baiting out powerful attacks to create an opening. Plus, it doesn't say you can't do _anything_ while it's up; you just can't attack. I know your brain is simple, but you can't think of anything to do that isn't attacking?" Lucas wanted to retort, but her points made sense. He didn't like it, but she was right… again.

"And sure, [Way of the Wind] won't help us much underground or indoors, but it would allow us to ambush an outdoor enemy from afar with much greater accuracy. Once I start learning some serious magic we could hit the enemy together before they even see us!" Cara finished with a wide smile and a sweeping gesture with her hands.

"Alright, I'll agree that perhaps, in the right situation, I may get some utility from it," Ben acquiesced. "I just want something OP, like in a webnovel. Is that so much to ask for? Why do we have to work so hard?"

Lucas wanted to be mad, but their optimism was so sincere he couldn't help but lighten up a bit. Cara even laughed a little.

"By the way, Lucas, if you don't think protecting yourself is important, you could always use it to protect a beautiful woman," Cara said as she batted her eyes dramatically.

"Great! Now we just have to find a beautiful woman," Lucas retorted, drawing a bark of laughter from Ben. Cara didn't take the joke quite as well. Her eyes became dark, and she wiped the smile from her face in an instant.

"Wanna know what skill I got from the monk?" she asked the two men menacingly. Lucas and Ben looked at each other and gulped loudly. Cara held out both of her hands towards the men and ignited a dancing flame in each palm. "Any last words, boys?"

"[Sanctuary]!" Lucas yelled as he activated his skill.

A transparent wall of opalescent energy the shape of a castle's gatehouse erupted in a shimmering explosion of light in front of Lucas and Joten. The mutated plant monster's giant thorny vine slammed against the barrier with such force that the shockwave rustled the branches of the pines behind the two men.

"Oh my god!" shouted Joten, his voice raising an extra octave. He was right to be afraid. A golden border outlined the monster's name in his vision, indicating it was of Legendary status. The might of this monster would rival that of the Demon King's closest guards. Despite Joten's stats being higher than every other NPC, he would likely die to a single hit from the mutated abomination. Lucas would need to go all out if he was going to stand a chance of defeating it.

"[Sanguine Sacrifice], 99%!" Lucas said as he activated another skill from behind the Sanctuary wall. In an instant, the bar containing his HP at the corner of his vision dropped to a tiny red sliver, displaying 1/89.

[88 Points of Sanguine Damage Taken!]

He collapsed to the ground in a heap, feeling as if his soul had been torn from his body. A red glow seeped from his chest and surrounded him in a roiling aura of bubbling energy. At the same time, his Dexterity and Strength were both doubled. His arms and legs rippled with incredible power, even as he struggled to gather the energy to lift his face out of the dirt.

[Sanguine Sacrifice]: Active Skill. Sacrifice a percentage of HP for an equal percentage of Strength and Dexterity for 5 minutes.

Just before his [Sanctuary] skill ended, Lucas's [First Strike Recovery] passive skill activated and topped up his HP, filling the bar back up to a healthy 89/89 before going on cooldown for the duration of the fight. It was like a shot of adrenaline straight to the heart. He jolted from the ground back to his feet like lightning, just in time to watch the twinkling shards of his [Sanctuary] skill come tumbling down.

[First Strike Recovery]: Recover 100% of the damage from the first injury you sustain in a fight. Only applicable once per fight.

This combination was his bread and butter in high level fights for maximizing his DPS. It required being safe and prepared for a battle so his [First Strike Recovery] was not wasted too early, and also required the battle to last less than five minutes, lest he lose his benefits. Also, he had to be unarmed while activating the combo, otherwise an errant tick from his vampiric blade could spell death. There were a lot of pre-requisites, and dropping to 1 HP in a Death Game was insanely reckless, but when the plan came together, Lucas was an unstoppable force.

It was this combination that had earned him his most popular name among players in Savior Online: "Death Seeker".

Lucas unsheathed his legendary sword [Nevermore] from its black scabbard and faced the towering behemoth blade-first. The giant mutated plant creature stood three times his height, and as least as wide as he was tall. A single swipe from its myriad of writhing thorny vines would spell trouble, so he would need to be exact in his movements. Frigid black smoke fell from the black steel of the longsword and rolled down the mossy earth like advancing storm clouds.

"Now it's my turn," Lucas announced before advancing toward the mutated creature.

The plant monster reared back with two thick vines and slammed them down vertically toward Lucas. He leapt deftly to the right with a single bound, and after gathering his weight onto his right foot, leapt again to the left over the vines as they drove into the ground. Lucas flipped in the air and spun with his blade, slashing into the grounded appendages and severing them cleanly. Black bile sputtered profusely across the ground from the lifeless stumps.

[1 Point of Sanguine Damage Taken!]

As he landed on the opposite side of the vines, Lucas swung his sword in a wide arc in front of him to sever two more counterattacking appendages that shot forth from the creature's base. Their green husks fell limply to either side of him as the black smoke from his blade froze the bile exiting the creature's wounds into dark crystals that clattered against the rocky forest floor.

The plant was slower than some enemies he had fought in the past, which was a blessing for Lucas. It had been half a decade since he had needed to push his limits like this. Thus far in the fight he had relied on falling into old patterns, but he knew a resilient and intelligent enemy would not be so easily punished. He cursed himself for being lax in his training regimen while in exile. He had been foolish to believe that avoiding a fight meant that fights would avoid him. Was he truly so selfish that he intended to live out the rest of his days in isolation while others still suffered? A part of him knew all this time that selfishness would not bring him peace, but did he have a choice when grief threatened to overwhelm him at each waking moment?

His self-indulgent musings were interrupted by four more lashing attacks coming down at him. Lucas batted them away with ease, dismembering the vines with a smoke-filled arcing slash. He had taken two more points of sanguine damage to fuel [Nevermore], but aside from that the plant had yet to land a strike. It had immense power behind each attack - enough to crush a middling player into paste with a single hit. However, it moved as if it were a novice, unsure of its weight and sloppily slow in execution. Lucas continued as he had before, baiting out attacks by the cumbersome vines and cutting them as they came in. Eventually he would whittle it down.

Over four minutes had passed, and around half of the creature's larger vine-limbs now lay motionless on the forest floor. Lucas gripped [Nevermore] with both hands and prepared to advance for the final attack when an arrow suddenly plinked off the plant monster's petals near the top. Before the first could hit the ground, a second arrow bounced off its thick reinforced skin with another *tink*. Lucas turned his head to find Joten peeking just over a mound around 20 feet behind him, firing arrows at the creature.

"I've got your back!" he yelled to Lucas, fear filling his voice as his ineffectual arrows rained haphazardly around the creature. He was definitely Ben's son, attempting to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The plant behemoth realized the easier target was Joten, and reared back two of its massive vines in a desperate Hail Mary attempt at attacking the humans.

Lucas scrambled backwards to get Joten out of the way when he noticed a notebook on the ground between Joten and the plant creature. He must have dropped [Cara's Botany Journal] after the first attack. Time slowed as he looked back and forth between Joten, the journal, and the plant monster's vines. In that liminal space of uncertainty, before he could make a critical decision, Lucas's mind went back to another time.

"Cara, did you forget that we are LITERALLY in a DUNGEON right now?" Lucas asked the red-haired girl exasperatedly. Cara knelt down in front of him with her journal resting against her left wrist while she sketched a small thistle-like plant that grew from a crack in the dungeon floor.

"What's the hurry? Is the dungeon going somewhere?" she asked Lucas without skipping a beat. Her pencil sketched a precise outline of the plant's small pink flowers that somehow bloomed without sunlight deep within the underground dungeon. They were on hour four of their dungeon crawl through this spider-riddled crypt beneath the desert, and Lucas was eager to leave. Not that he was afraid of spiders or anything. There were just better things to do. He turned to Ben for support.

"Don't tell me you're okay with this," Lucas pleaded to Ben. He was lounging on his back atop a sarcophagus with his forearm over his eyes. Ben must have unlocked a hidden skill at some point in time that allowed him to sleep in any environment because no normal person could sleep in the places he had. "Never mind, I'm surrounded by morons," Lucas quickly added after seeing Ben's state. He could scarcely believe they had been traveling together for nearly a year now.

"You know, Lucas, I think there's something to be said here about stopping to smell the roses," Ben said without uncovering his eyes. Cara chuckled under her breath and continued to write notes beside her sketch. Lucas huffed angrily. He was pushing himself to his limits every day in training to be powerful enough to join the Vanguard, and these two were already inducted with attitudes like this? It wasn't fair, and he wasn't going to stand around while they made light of his efforts.

He reached down and grabbed at the botany journal, but Cara held on tight.

"What are you doing?" she shouted at Lucas.

"Give me the stupid journal! I don't have time to waste like you two slackers!" he shouted back. The two engaged in a tug-of-war over the journal until a small tearing sound cried out from the pages. Suddenly, in a fit of rage, Cara sent a bolt of [Lightning] traveling up Lucas's arms, sending him flying backwards into the wall of the crypt.

[15 Points of Lightning Damage Taken!]

Lucas felt his muscles tense up and lock together for a moment as the breath in his lungs escaped. Shock rushed through his veins as he forced his body to begin moving again.

"What the fuck? That was a third of my hitpoints!" he shouted at Cara, though his face dropped all pretenses of anger when he saw her.

She was sniffling on the floor, trying desperately to piece together a ripped page in the journal. Tears rolled off her cheeks and were absorbed by the sandstone of the crypt floor.

"What is wrong with you?" she screamed. "This is the only thing keeping me sane in this hellhole! Just because you're a miserable person doesn't mean you have to make everyone else feel bad too!"

"I…" Lucas began, but felt a catch in his throat. "It wasn't..." he whispered. Ben, who had been watching out of the corner of his eye throughout, replaced his forearm over his eyes as silence fell over the crypt.

"[Fleet of Foot]," Lucas said under his breath. He was filled with a renewed determination as green wind sprites whirled around his feet. His whole body became lighter as he dug his toes into the dirt and pushed off, sending rocks and moss flying backwards into the air.

[Fleet of Foot]: Double your Agility for 30 seconds.

The monster's vines above seemed to fall in slow motion as Lucas bounded forward toward the journal. He hopped dexterously over fallen vine-limbs, through thick ferns, and around puddles of black bile with the speed and precision of a fleeing rabbit, his brain working on overdrive to avoid obstacles while still moving at an olympic sprint. A looming shadow grew on the ground before him as he dashed forward, but he ignored it. Only a few more steps…

Just as the vine came down from above, Lucas reached down into the underbrush and whisked the journal away from danger. He leapt into the air to meet the creature's attack. [Nevermore] cut cleanly through the first vine, but his increased Strength from [Sanguine Sacrifice] ran out as he hit the second. The black blade dug into the next vine with a vicious bite, but halfway through it became stuck fast in the plant's flesh.

"Oh, fuck," Lucas cursed as the vine slammed into his chest and sent him flying backwards over Joten's head. He hit the ground with a loud thump and skidded through the dirt for twenty more feet before coming to a stop, thankfully avoiding all of the trees in the audience.

[57 Points of Bludgeoning Damage Taken!]

[New Status Effect: Broken Bones]

Lucas tried to take a deep breath but coughed in pain as he realized his ribs were broken. The system masked most of the pain thankfully, but he had sustained enough injuries in Savior Online to know when a bone was broken. The bar in the corner of his vision had become yellow and displayed [25/89] hitpoints.

The rustling of twigs and dirt let him know that Joten was rushing to his aid. Good lad.

"Lucas, are you alright?" he yelled as he crested the hill. Fear filled the young man's face, but Lucas couldn't blame him. He just watched one of his childhood heroes get flung a hundred feet by a giant mutated plant monster. He was allowed a little bit of fear.

Joten set down his bow beside Lucas as he helped him sit up. Lucas groaned as his ribs protested, but he didn't have any internal bleeding status effects, so he figured it was fine to ignore the strain in his chest.

"It's coming up here, Lucas," Joten added quickly. "How do I kill it?"

Just as Joten had said, a growing noise of trampled brush and cracking branches sounded from just down the hill. The loss of so many of its writhing limbs had probably slowed it down, but the behemoth was too determined to be stopped outside of outright death.

Lucas sucked in the deepest breath he could muster and flicked to open his inventory. He scrolled down with a few swipes, his eyes scanning the list for a particular item. It had to be here somewhere…

There.

He clicked the screen in front of him and a flash of light materialized a wand in his hand. It was made of gnarled blue Fairywood and fitted with a brilliant diamond on top. Each flourish of the wand left blue sparkles behind the diamond's path that floated in the air for a moment before slowly fading back into nothingness. It was one of Lucas's most beloved possessions, and the first time he felt confident bringing it out in nearly five years.

[Cara's Brilliancy]

Lucas pointed the tip of the wand toward the edge of the hill in front of him and waited for the monstrosity to rear its ugly head - or flower, or whatever. He wasn't very proficient in Magic, but with an item like this multiplying his abilities, even a novice could produce legendary spells.

The tip of a dark purple flower peeked over the hill as the creature advanced. Just a little bit more and it would be in range.

A green blur shot over the crest of the hill toward Lucas, and he moved his head just in time to dodge the piercing vine's attack by a hair. He heard a tree some ways behind him explode into a thousand splinters as the errant attack went wide.

The full flowering head of the creature was visible now. Lucas lined up the wand with the center of the flower and released a spell:

[Fireball]

Flames encircled the wand in Lucas's hands for a split second before forming a small marble of flame like a miniature sun that hovered just beyond the diamond focus. Immense heat and light radiated from the ball, forcing Lucas and Joten to cover their faces with their arms as it grew in strength until it was the size of a basketball. Then, like a shot out of a cannon, it launched itself forward, sending a shockwave of superheated air backwards that rippled violently through Lucas and Joten's clothes and hair.

They lowered their arms from their faces just in time to see the ball of flame impact the largest flower on the mutated behemoth and explode in a brilliant flash. Liquid magma seeped from the point of explosion and melted the plant where it stood, igniting it in fits wherever the molten magic dripped and pooled. A small congratulations message appeared above Lucas's head indicating his first level up in three months, but he could hardly bring himself to care.

[Magic Leveled Up to Level 39!]

"Amazing…" Joten noted, his eyes wide with awe as he watched the charred plant monster collapse into a burning heap.

Lucas's eyes glistened as he returned the wand and journal to his inventory. She had saved him again, but this time he would never be able to repay her. He could never repay any of the Vanguard for their sacrifice no matter what he did, yet they continued to provide him with more borrowed time even from the afterlife.

Would others have said the same for him if their roles were reversed, or had he been too selfish while they were alive? Lucas found himself wishing he had been more attentive during those four years of adventuring with Cara, Ben, and the others in the Vanguard. At the time he had written off his time in Savior Online as a temporary distraction from his real life, but looking back it had been a significant and formative time.

Is this how Ben had felt at the end? He, at least, deserved better than that.

Lucas would find closure for Ben and solve these strange mutations if it was the last thing he did. If he could not escape this world, perhaps he could make a lasting impression on the other survivors who lived in it.

It was time to come down from the mountain.