It's a trap!

The sky was blackened by a swarm of fast moving creatures that he hadn't noticed so far. He wasn't exactly sure where they came from, but they probably had hidden themselves behind one of the floating islands.

John focused on the black cloud and the computer in his helmet zoomed in on the area he was looking at. Suddenly, rather than the black blur he was looking at, a red one appeared as the tactical assistant tagged each dot as a possible target or threat and circled it in red for better visibility. It made it too indistinct for him to identify anything more than hundreds of winged shapes from this range.

A quick look around made him realize that long range combat wasn't the specialty of their group. Moira and Kim were both melee fighters, even if they had some powers that could be used at close to medium range. Tricia had two of her drones with her, but they would need to stay close-by to provide assistance and heals, especially with Lorelei being a non combatant amongst them. It only left him with a few of his spells that were long range and Cali who now wielded the repaired dwarven crossbow in addition to her axe.

"Newman, any clue what those are?" asked Moira over the idling sound of her massive motorcycle.

"No idea, but there are dozens of them, hundreds maybe. And they are coming for us, fast," he replied, trying to get a better image of what was coming for them.

The swarm wasn't made of only one kind of creature but a lot of them. He spotted two familiar shapes in the midst of it, even if their size and color didn't match what he remembered. One looked a lot like the winged serpents living on the floating islands, except a bit longer than most he had seen and neon pink. The other was the ridiculous blimp toads; he hadn't figured out why or how the living balloons that those critters looked like worked, but they were not usually that big nor clad in a mish-mash of psychedelic colors. The rest of the swarm was made of things too small for him to discern from this range.

"Newman, it's your call. Do we fight it here? Retreat to the castle? Push on?" asked Moira, as used to lead as to follow orders apparently.

"I don't think we can get to the castle before they get us, they are moving fast. Do you think we can keep Lorelei and Tricia safe, while we fight them up?"

"We don't really have a choice. Whatever happens I'm oath bound to protect them. Do you have a plan?" she asked him.

"This is as good a defensive position as we will find in the plains. And besides in this place it's almost impossible for me to run out of mana, this is one of the power nodes of my kingdom," he explained as he used his helmet interface to text Anna and tell her to get everyone safe in the castle and ready to evacuate if need be.

He equipped the Dungeoneer Amulet and threw a party invite at Moira, Kim, Tricia and Cali; as a test he also sent one to Lorelei. There was a cap of 5 people for the bonus of the amulet but he wanted to see if having one more would cancel it or it would just not apply to the last one added.

"Incredible," said Kim before accepting.

"Still as strange as last time," confirmed Moira. Tricia and Cali didn't comment before accepting.

"This is… I see it… How? And this aura… Lady be praised. I accept," declared Lorelei, visibly shocked to be able to see the party invite despite being blind. It also surprised John, but he knew his interface was far from ordinary considering who it came from.

As expected the xp and loot bonus didn't apply to the seer, she didn't have the small buff icon in the party interface. But he could still see her health and mana (not that he knew that she directly used mana, her powers were a mystery to him) as could the other members.

John got his sword out and stayed just beyond the edge of the stone circle, flanked by Kim and Moira. The other girls were just inside the circle protecting Lorelei and offering support.

The swarm was closer and John could now see more closely the bulk of the cloud was made of birds that at some point might have been crows. The mutated creatures had a weird number of heads, eyes, wings and legs, as if they were in the process of splitting into two birds. The winged serpents had changed too but went another way. They were bigger and the upper part of their bodies had taken more humanoid characteristics; some had almost human-like faces or sported multiple pairs of breasts which made no sense in creatures half bird half reptile, nor did the fuzzy pink fur that had replaced their scales.

Kim drew her long curved sword, and after some hand movements from her free hand, slashed the air in the direction of the swarm.

"Northern Wind, third move: Deadly Gale," she announced as a long blade of wind was emitted from her strike. The attack made some of the blimp toads explode in clouds of glittery smoke and cleaved through a dozen of the birds, crippling one of the winged serpents.

John was distracted by the trickle of xp notifications, and before he could attack, something else took him by surprise.

The ground around the sanctum exploded, revealing the large scarabs that had been hiding underneath. Moira leaped forward, and in a big downward strike, she pulverized the front half of a dog sized insect with her glowing hammer and knocked half a dozen of the closest ones on their backs with the blast.

"I'll deal with those, focus on the flyers. Lady grant me strength to smite these abominations!" she declared. He could see her entire body glow with golden light and he could feel the power pulsating from her.

John cast Voltaic Surge on himself and felt the world slowing down around him as his speed and reaction time increased. Looking up at the sky, he picked 3 of the largest winged serpents and rapidly cast Chain Lightning on them. A single spell wasn't enough to kill those but the electric arcs jumped to more targets in the swarm.

Tricia's drones were firing shots with lasers at the swarm, dropping some of the crows, and kept healing whoever got hit to keep them at full health. Cali was sniping the winged serpents with her crossbow, but she had a limited amount of bolts and it was unsure if it would last the whole fight.

John continued to spam his Chain Lightning on the swarm, quickly getting a notification that it and Voltaic Surge got to level 2. He was too busy to read the descriptions but the effect was obvious as the arcs were jumping to more targets and inflicting more damage. All the while he was keeping the creatures at bay with his sword and dagger. He got weird feelings warning him of attacks from behind that didn't come from the computer in his helmet. As he turned around to react to one of those attacks, he noticed Lorelei kneeling in the middle of the sanctum and the glowing of an ethereal halo.

Moira was covered in the gunk that the mutated scarabs were spitting, as well as the ichor from the ones she was busy splattering with large swings of her hammer. Tricia had told them to use piercing damage for those enemies, but brute concussive **** worked as well.

Kim was fighting in a mesmerizing sword dance where not a swing nor a step was wasted. The dead creatures were piling around her. The mutated serpents seemed to focus on constriction rather than venom like their original counterparts, but it made it hard for them to grapple the kind of opponents they were facing. The crows were more of a nuisance than a threat, except for a point. While they were only inflicting minor cuts on their targets, they seemed to be expert at shredding their clothes and armor.

And then the glittery smoke of the dead blimp toads reached and engulfed the entire party. Kim’s slashes quickly got sluggish and began to miss, Moira was slower too, and Cali missed her first shot since the start of the fight. The girls around him were blushing and panting. Something was wrong and the environmental hazard icon flashing in his helmet made it clear what it was.

"This smoke is dangerous, can someone get rid of it?!" warned Tricia before putting on a breathing mask she had in her bag of equipment. Only she and he were protected from the effects.

"I got nothing against that!" He didn't have anything that could deal with that kind of problem and the fight had almost drained all of his mana. Slashing the birds in his way, he retreated to the sanctum and put a hand on one of the pillars. He immediately felt power surge through him, refilling his mana pool. He continued to zap more of the flying menaces, seeing his spell level up to level 3.

Kim recovered a silk fan from her belt and began to dance around with it in hand.

"Ten Winds Typhoon," she announced, as a huge tornado built up around her. The strong winds sucked up the smoke. Thankfully the blimp toads were weak targets dying at the first hit and they were almost all dead; the last remaining ones were shredded as their content was sucked high into the sky.

The spell had dispersed the swarm, smashing a lot of the creatures into each other, forcing those still in fighting condition to fly back to the fight, but it came at a heavy price. With it being so powerful, John wondered why Kim hadn't used it from the start, that was until he saw her collapse on the ground. John and pretty much everyone else in the party had just leveled up from the influx of xp, but even if the system healed him and restored his mana on level up, mental exhaustion was something it didn't fix.

Cali had run out of bolts and was using her axe to stop scarabs from entering the sanctum and Moira was surrounded by more of the insects as well as the remaining flying serpents strong enough to resist the wind.

John dashed forward jumping over the dead scarabs littering the ground, dodging the few flying enemies coming back towards him, and slid on the ground to end up next to Kim. The party interface kept telling him that she still had most of her health, but she was lying ****, defenseless and clad in torn, bloodsoaked robes.

He lifted her from the ground with one arm wrapped under hers; his sword whose description extolled the near indestructible nature was chipped and pitted. The antimaterial effect of the crows had been worse than he had first noticed. His armor was also covered in many nicks and cuts, keeping the auto repair systems active constantly. He put it back in his inventory and activated Storm Claw for his right hand.

He charged back to the sanctum, vaulting over the last scarabs, gouging their carapaces as he went, dodging the last flyers who were trying to get him. After a few close calls, he got to Tricia and laid down Kim next to her. The healer immediately popped a vial in her injection pistol and pumped it into Kim, putting an oxygen mask on her face before continuing a deeper scan of her head with a drone.

"She'll be ok, good job on the quick retrieval. Now focus on the fight!" she instructed him.

Cali was about to collapse too. Putting his hand directly on the runestone on a pillar inside the circle, despite the overload warnings of his armor, he let go of a massively overcharged Chain Lightning that fried the wounded creatures surrounding her. Tricia and her had managed to keep Lorelei safe for the whole fight, but Cali was just a strong elf, she didn't have real powers and she was at her limits.

The enchantment on her new armor had spared her from most of the effects of the scarab gunk, but the exhaustion and the gas attack had taken their toll. He helped her towards Tricia too, where she also got an injection which apparently was designed to fight the effects of the gas as she got better in seconds. Still, she couldn't stand on her feet at this point and slouched, sitting against a pillar.

The last remaining crows washed away by the storm were not trying to come back to the fight. John used Magic Missile to shoot down the ones that were still in range before turning away to help Moira finish the last scarabs.

Her armor was in tatters, the leather bodysuit that she wore under the plates of her armor was basically gone, some of the plates were missing where the straps holding them in place had given up, and John wondered how she wasn't rolling on the ground scratching herself with the amount of scarab gunk on her skin. Around her was a true carnage as she had attracted to her most of the land based enemies and enthusiastically pulped them with her warhammer or bashed them with her shield. But her shield was now propped on dead scarabs so that she didn't have to lift it and her hammer blows were more parries than attacks.

The fight was almost over and it wasn't a minute too soon. John might seem like one of the most unaffected of the fighters, but he had been ignoring the alerts of his armor for a while now. Being sped up and fully emptying his mana before cycling it by channeling a power node through his body wasn’t exactly recommended, neither for the armor nor the user.

Storm Claw now active on both hands, he leaped and bounded into the fray, putting his training with Kim to use. He was gouging carapaces and ripping legs away. A fluffy winged serpent managed to wrap itself around him, trying to crush his ribcage while suffocating him with its tits. Thankfully the creature didn't notice that John didn't need to breathe, and with that he was able to remove it by stabbing its back with ten crackling fingers and casting a Chain Lightning from inside of it, seeing it level up again as the arcs of energy jumped from the limp creature and fried its last brethren.

Now able to move freely, he rejoined Moira, and fighting back to back, they finished the last opponents, before dropping on the ground sitting back to back. John's mana was empty again, and with the fight over he canceled Voltaic Surge turning the world into a blurry, slow mess as his senses adjusted after being sped up so long.

An undetermined but probably short amount of time later, Tricia joined them, giving Moira the same injection she had given the others. One of her drones was scanning John.

"Your helmet," she instructed him. Without moving he put it back in storage. She slotted a vial of a different liquid in her gun and pressed it against his neck.

"There's one thing to say, Newman, things are never boring when you are involved. What kind of abomination have you unleashed this time?" asked Moira. Her divine artifact shield was the only part of her gear that was not covered in cracks, scratches or completely destroyed.

John was texting Anna, checking whether everything was alright at the castle. He quickly got a reply reassuring him. The attack had been targeting the hunting party.

"I have absolutely no idea. I'm still new at this stuff, it's why I called for help. I didn't expect it to change so many creatures so fast. Thankfully we killed almost all of them," he explained.

"We're not in condition to continue this hunt. I'd advise to try again, more prepared with more people and more ranged capabilities," said Moira.

"Should we go back to the castle? We are more than halfway to the forest, a dip into the Fountain of Life would put everyone back on their feet and spare them lengthy recovery. And I'm worried about Sylvia, I need to check whether she's ok," he asked.

Moira looked at Tricia, obviously deferring to her in matters of healing.

"It is an invaluable resource that we would be foolish to overlook. I haven't finished completely analyzing it but it provides near miraculous recovery from most conditions but the most dire. I would advise that we pay it a visit if it is safe," explained Tricia.

"The path of the Glade is safe and the Mother still slumbers as do her many daughters. The foe is beaten but not defeated; we need to purge it for it shouldn't have been freed," declared Lorelei. The seer in her immaculate dress was standing in the middle of the carnage of the battlefield, her blind, white eyes were now glowing of the same golden energy as the runestones of the Arcane Sanctum.