Chapter 19 [Unedited]

Joon cale silvia astrid

I sat back down in the same spot, now along with the party of 5 and started chatting.

"Valia, are you in a mercenary group?" Asked Raven.

"No, I just started, this is my first mission. So far I've been traveling alone."

"Oh so you're completely new. Must be tough. The start is always the hardest. What did you do before? I mean your gear is too nice to buy when you just start out." Asked Raven.

"Hmm if you want to know where the money came from, I killed a bunch of monsters and sold them and raided bandit camps." I answered her casually.

Raven nods and from the corner of my eyes, I see Silvia pull out something akin to a blunt and start smoking it. So I turn to her and ask her what it is.

"This is dried Thai leaves, it helps me relax." She points to her blunt and takes a puff. "Want a hit?"

"Haha, I'd rather not take substances before a fight."

'This crazy bitch is smoking fantasy weed before a mission and she's a fucking archer. I really want to see her shoot now haha.'

"Don't worry about her, she smokes that so often, it barely has an effect on her anymore." Raven chuckles and says.

"If you say so. Do you get ambushed or sneak attacked?" This was one of the things I wanted to find out.

"It has happened a few times, but usually if you travel in a party, someone will spot the ambusher before they attack and it doesn't really happen if you don't have assassins on you, or a bounty." Raven answers.

We keep chatting, talking about different topics and joking around. The feeling I get from them, is that they're definetly not good people, who would randomly help out a newbie. Which means I've gotten mixed up in a potential problem.

We chat and the hours pass by, until finally someone takes the stage. A man who looks like an official steps up on top of a table and calls out to all the mercenarys.

"Gather around. I will explain your squads and stations." All the mercenarys start gathering around him, including us. Once we're tightly packed around him, he starts talking.

"You all recieved a number on your guild cards, under the mission. After I finish speaking move to the flag carring the same number." He points to a direction, where there are a bunch of flags with numbers on them. Under each flag is a person.

"The people waiting near the flags will be your leaders. You will be divided into platoons, aka groups of around 40 people. The rest of the information or commands you get from your leaders. This is it from me." He steps down from the table and leaves.

I look at my guild cards mission slot and see that I have the number 7.

"I have the number 7, you?" Raven asks from beside me. Since they are a party, they all have the same number as their leader, Raven. I look at Raven with my dark eyes for a second and respond.

"Same." She nods and we start moving toward the flag with 7 on it. The person under the flag is a wolf beast-man. He has black hair/fur, with a handsome face and a muscular body. He is wearing leather armour and has a sword on his hip.

"Hey, my name is Joel Ortega, knight B-rank. I'm your commander. I'll say this only once. Don't disobey my commands if you don't want to die." He says to us nonchalantly and pauses for a few seconds.

"Now. We are tasked with clearing out a village, that was overrun by undead. Most of the enemies you'll be facing are zombies, ghouls or wraiths. There are also mutated versions of these running around, so don't bite off more than you can chew. I'll assign you to squads and teams. The idea is to let our weaker members fight the riff raff and if a stronger foe shows up, the team, or squad leaders will take care of it."

Next he split us into 4 squads, 10 people per squad, and assigned the strongest as squad leaders or team leaders. I was in the same squad as Ravens party and in my team I had the pot smoking archer and a random guy.

"Let's move out." Joel says and starts jogging. We follow him, keeping pace.

We run for about 30 minutes and arrive in the outskirts of a farming village. The smell of rotten flesh hits you even from far away. We stop, just before entering the village grounds. Joel looks back at us and signals for us to divide into teams and move in. 3-4 person teams start mkving together and enter the village.

I move in with my team as one of the firsts. The undead are on stand-by, but as soon as they sense us, they start running toward us.

'Luckily they don't have time to group up.'

The enemies rank between F and D. Picking them off in pieces is easy. The only threat they posess, is attacking us in mass, as a swarm.

I run through the piles of undead, casually swinging my sword. I split their heads or decapitate them. There is no reason to go all out, so I conserve my energy.

It's not like the undead are completely helpless. I see a few F or E ranked mercs have some trouble, here and there. But my combat skill is so high, that their amateur movements don't even slow me down.

I continue to run around and casually mow them down, like cutting grass. I am getting a bit bored. There is around 2000 undead here. Everyone is attacking, to get rid of them faster. It smells like vomit here, so it's no suprise.

In 10 minutes, the last undead falls. Joel pops up like a notification and looks around with a satisfied expression.

"Good job. If everyone keeps up this pace, we'll be able to clear out every undead by the end of the day. Let's move on to our next location."

We move on from point to point, doing pest control. I'm really bored, but unlike when I'm alone, here I don't dare to mess around. In addition to the the undead, I have to keep an eye on the other mercs and Ravens party. It's really stressful being on guard all the time.

Hours pass by and we're now in the middle of some sort of old stone ruins. We met up with another platoon, who got lost and Joel is talking to their commander right now.

I'm just waiting around and looking at them. Suddenly I see Joels wolf ears perk up and he looks toward the forest. He continues staring at it for a while. Then he turns towards us with a stern face and yells.

"Enemies incoming from the forest."

Everyone snaps out of whatever they were doing and looks toward the forest, getting ready for battle.

20 seconds pass by with nothing but quiet. Some even start thinking it was a false alarm, but then we see zombies and ghouls pouring out of the forest. Their numbers easily in the hundreds. More and more run out, breaking in to a thousand and still increasing.

"Shit." I hear someone cursing, but I agree with him. Even a swarm this big is nothing much, since you can blast them away with magic.

What really evoked that reaction is the variants that started coming out. Higher grade zombies, higher grade ghouls, some zombie wolves and skeletons with bows or staves. Even some revenants pop out, which are at the minimum C ranked.

The platoon commanders start yelling out commands. I've never fought in a militaristic formation before, so I'm quite exited.

Our whole platoon is fighting together. The tanks hold up the front and everyone else is placed in their respective positions. My position, is close range combat, to support the tanks, so Bruiser/DPS/Rogue.

The long range fighters hurl spells and arrows at them, to thin them out. The long range enemy undead also start fireing at us. It's a big fun snowball fight with lethal weapons, until the first wave hits us.

*BAM* *BAM* *BAM*

The undead collide with shields. The tanks focus on stopping them and the close range fighters focus on killing them, along with mages and archers.

I run into the heat and start slashing. Some mercs are throwing big slashes of sword breath with their sword, slicing apart dozens of undead at once.

'Puhuu fuckers, why don't I have something like that'

I start throwing around spells, to get more kills. It's a limited Exp buffet, that is running towards you. So I plan to greedily consume as much as possible.

I start unleashing spells. I unleash about 5 lighting bolts per second, aiming at their heads, while simultaneusly slashing with my sword.

We kill and kill. Evetually the weakest of the undead start to die off and their higher grade forms take their places. I'm most worried about the revenants that are just watching right now. If there is a B ranked revenant, it could wipe us dregs out with just a spell. The problem is, there is 5 of these fuckers. I don't know what rank they are, but even if they're all C, there are still a ton of other undead, some others also in C rank.

My rampage skill is fully stacked, so I'm in the low D rank right now stat wise. We keep killing everything that comes at us, untill I see one of the revenants move.

I immideately fall back behind a C ranked merc. To make things worse, as soon as one of them started moving, all of them started running toward us.

Revenants have similar intelligence to humans. A C ranked one will be as smart as an orangutan and an A ranked one the same as a human.

When the revenants started coming toward us, all the other higher ranked undead also started to move.

The battelfield became chaotic in an instant. When the first revenant reached us, it killed 2 frontliners immideately and then got stopped by a C ranker. To be honest our 2 platoons aren't qualified to deal with this group of undead.

The revenants and some of the higher unranked move so fast that I can barely see them. But where there is a will there is a way. Basically, I'm about to do something quite stupid.

I position myself so that I'm surrounded by C or B ranked mercs. The fighting is going on all around me and the battelfield is in complete chaos. Our formation has been broken and people are dying left and right. Joel and the other commander have ordered a tactical retreat, but it's just too chaotic.

I quickly inspect all the higher ranked enemies around me, who are engaged with mercs.

My only choice right now is to go all out, otherwise I am not even qualified to participate. I use lighting magic to boost my speed. Then I quickly pick up some momentum and use (Dark phase) to phase slightly above a revenant who is engaged in battle with a C ranker and winning.

Just before the revenant deals a finishing blow, I appear above him and stab my sword in his head with all of my strength. The blade pierces his skull and lodges into his head, but he is still not falling, which I anticipated.

I apply my bodyweight to tilt him forward and unlodge my sword. Before he can recover, I phase under him and stab my sword into his jaw, piercing deep. But he is still not falling down. worse, now he has his eyes on me.

I unlodge my sword and target his legs ligements with my dagger. I manage to slice the back of his knee, but he slashes at me with enough force to split me in half easily. I phase behind him, all he hits is dark mist. Next I try to cleave off his head, by using the momentum from turning my body 180°.

I slash into his neck, but only manage to slice half of it.

'What the fuck kind of vitality does this guy have.'

In a desparate mesure, I imbue my sword with lightning, as powerful as I can make it. The bastard growls at that and grabs my blade. I quickly let go of it and he throws it away. As soon as he takes my blade out, I stab my dagger, that's already coated in lightning, into his cerebral vertebrae. At that, he finally falls and I see the exp coming in. 55,000 exp per head.

As soon as he dies, another undead attacks me. This time a D ranked one, which I quickly kill. Most of the mercs are either dead or have run away. As soon as I see that, I phase to my blade, pick it up and phase away. I bolt away, full throttle, running and phasing in tandem.