Skill-Eater: Prison World Saga-Chapter 136: Acid
While Edge stopped to catch his breath, the crew began firing at the swarm, doing their best to whittle down their numbers from range.
Their attacks were more effective than he had feared, since the hunters were skilled with their weapons of choice. Their shots landed in the gaps in the monsters’ armor, targeting joints and other weaker areas. The barrage of missiles took down a dozen blightlings as the crabs began scaling the stone rise leading to the crest.
Riller’s poison arrows and Sasha’s flame imbued shots were particularly effective. Riller was uncored, so he didn’t have enough magicytes to use anything that wasn’t incredibly mana efficient. On top of conditioning his Control to improve his aim, he’d spent long hours ranking-up his skills, advancing them along a path that made them effective despite his limitations.
Each glowing green arrow was coated with a glob of poisonous mana, spread out along the arrowhead. Thanks to eagle eye and his natural ability, Riller rarely missed, even when firing from the maximum range of his long bow. The stricken creatures moved sluggishly, and some collapsed outright, bottlenecking the advance of the monsters surging behind them.
Sasha couldn’t match Riller’s experience or precision with her short bow. Instead, she fired into the thickest part of the press, where each flame imbued arrow was bound to hit a monster. The close quarters let her magic spread across several creatures before the mana powering her skill ran dry. The burning blightlings ran erratically, streaking back into their own line while trailing flames like a meteor.
Now that he had recovered enough to join the fight, Edge looked over at the crew’s leader, who was lining up a shot with her massive magtech crossbow.
It was his first time watching Trapper’s crossbow in action. He had seen it fire regular bolts, but not the aether-infused shots the woman was unleashing now. She had mentioned that the device could switch between four different elements, and right now, she was using lightning.
Each glowing bolt crackled, hissing and popping as she loaded it into the crossbow and fired. Wreathed in electricity, the magic missiles went streaking across the battlefield, leaving the scent of ozone and a thin trail of smoke in their wake. When they landed, the elemental-aspected aether discharged, sending intense voltage arcing through the air. Each tendril of lightning kept on jumping to another target until the bolt’s aether was expended, killing three or four monsters at a time.
Trapper fired off a dozen shots before switching to fire rounds, which created intense explosions when they landed. I really need to pick up a weapon like that or ranged attack skill. Edge unlimbered his polearm and took a stance beside Blue, helping to calm the irate beast as best he could. “Easy, girl. Our time is coming. Be patient while the others do their part and then it will be our turn to shine.”
The crabs were scaling the hill rapidly, now that they had cleared the pits. He kept expecting them to encounter another layer of traps, but they kept getting closer and closer. That was when he realized that Trapper had stopped firing her crossbow and was standing still with a look of intense concentration on her face.
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“She switched her traps to manual activation,” Sasha said when she saw the confusion in his eyes. “She’s waiting to trigger the inner layer until more monsters will get hit.”
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Sure enough, when the leading wave of crabs was twenty feet out from the party, a surge of mana flew out from Trapper’s hands and into the ground, tripping dozens of traps at once. Devices that she had painstakingly set while Edge was busy fetching water and running for his life.
He was going to ask what kind of traps they were, since they were set on solid stone instead of dirt. But it all became clear a few seconds later. Dozens of round objects that looked like stones, but were actually fluid-filled sacks, burst, discharging their contents across the approach.
Each liquid load spread out in a circle, spraying some manner of electric yellow goop that was a few inches deep in the middle. Edge wasn’t sure what he was looking at until the first group of crabs ran across it. They were able to advance six or seven feet before stopping dead in their tracks—limbs bound by what was revealed to be a viscous, incredibly sticky fluid.
At first, he thought that it was some manner of adhesive trap, which indeed it was. But that was only half the story. He realized that the crabs’ shells were bubbling and smoking—tissue softening before running like wax. That’s not glue, he realized. It’s some kind of acid.
The stricken monsters began to shriek. Wailing and shuddering and the caustic goop eroded their shells and liquefied the soft tissue inside. But even that lethal deterrent wasn’t enough to stop the swarm. Scores of monsters died over the next few minutes, but more kept on coming.
Edge was confused. It doesn’t make sense for them to sacrifice so many, even for a meal of our size. Why are they willing to kill themselves to get to us? But then he remembered that these weren’t beasts. Weren’t creatures that had evolved with a natural sense of self-preservation. They were abominations created by the System to plague all who dwelled on Ord.
Just like the first shadowreaver he had encountered in the ruins at the start of his adventure, when Edge stared into the blightlings’ faces, he saw only madness and loathing. These foul things were driven by hatred, not hunger. A need to kill that had nothing to do with the need to feed, although they would be happy to dine on his flesh.
That didn’t mean monsters couldn’t be cunning. There were plenty of species that would play tricks and lay traps to slaughter their prey. But these crabs weren’t that smart. They only understood the direct approach, relying on swarm tactics to overwhelm their prey.
While the monsters forced themselves through the acid field, Edge turned to regard the crew’s leader with a newfound respect. Trapper must have burned through a ton of magicytes to make all this. No wonder she goes out of her way to collect mana-seeds during a big game hunt. I can’t do anything on a scale like this. Even if Overdrive was available, it wouldn’t be much use.
That was when he caught sight of three monsters in the back of the bunch that were bigger than the rest. They were almost half the size of Blue, and their claws were large enough to cut him in half in a single snip. Those ones must be early stage-two. They seem tougher and smarter than the rest of the swarm. They are letting the little ones break through the trap field before risking the climb themselves.
By now, the swarm had begun to gain ground once more. Trapper’s crew had killed at least a hundred of the cancerous blightlings, but there was no end in sight. The chitinous horde kept right on coming, using the bodies of their fallen as a bridge over the acidic glue. That substance is powerful, but it isn’t that thick. It won’t slow them down for long. They will push right through the center and attack our position.
The swarm was closer now, so Edge grabbed a short bow from the wagon and started firing off arrows. He had gone through basic training in the weapon before coming to Ord, although he looked like a clumsy child compared to the rest of the team.
His aim was shit, but there were plenty of arrows to spare, and every monster he killed was one less that the crew had to fight. He just prayed that their efforts would be enough to survive the melee that would ensue within a fleeting handful of heartbeats.
