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Chapter 172: Tea of Sustained Defense
🕑 Added 2024-07-30 16:18:50 +0000 UTCArthur jetted around the wall, distributing tea. The town’s wall was much smaller than the city’s had been, which meant he had no need for helpers to get that part of the job done. He balanced a couple trays on his hands as he made his way to far right of the wall for the last group of un-boba-enhanced defenders.
“Oh, there you are. I was wondering if you forgot us.” Skal grinned and freed up his hands with a no-look rock-chuck at the monsters that had piled up against the gate. It wooshed through the air, flying much faster and straighter than Arthur thought was possible from Skal. “Glad to see you didn’t. These old bones need all the help they can get.”
“Someone had to be last.” Arthur set down the trays on the lip of the wall, handed Skal his drink, then went to work distributing glasses to everyone else there. “Figured it might as well be you, since you were going to complain either way.”
“Fair.” Skal took a sip of his drink, making a small, refreshed ahh sound after swallowing it down. “Tastes good, anyway. You getting much out of the prep work you did?”
“A bit.” Arthur was understating things. The tea he had made for the city during its monster wave had helped, but that was mainly because there were so many people to drink it and because their defense system was already so optimized. Even the tiniest of buffs could make a difference.
This time, he was going for something bigger and it turned out that the majicka he had stored in each of the boba pearls was abundant enough that it was almost overkill for his plans. His back-of-the-envelope calculations said that he had enough of the pearls for at least two days of siege, and during that time his majicka consumption for general drinks would be basically nil.
And now that I’ve covered the group, it’s time to zero in on the key people.
The first group that he could give exceptional, targeted drinks to were the warriors down on the ground. Arthur ran at a dog’s trot pace back to his equipment and cracked open his box of unenhanced ingredients.
In his mind, he carefully balanced an image of what he wanted to make for the warriors. He wanted them to feel confident without feeling out of control. He wanted them to feel like he had sometimes felt on Earth when he had done exceptionally well at a game of pool or foosball, like his muscles just knew what to do. Into that impression, he mixed feelings of how he felt after a good night’s sleep, an experience he had plenty of lately.
The results he got were pretty good.
Tea of Sustained Defense
This tea makes the drinker capable of fighting just a little harder for just a little longer while experiencing a slightly higher level of focus than they would normally be capable of.
While under the effects of this tea, the drinker will have an increase to their vitality and dexterity stats, as well as a generally easier time keeping their full attention on a task. The effects vary drinker to drinker, but should generally range between a slight and moderate increase to each affected stat.
Arthur would absolutely, one-hundred-percent take that kind of an increase. Between his new prepped ingredients and the kind of specialized drinks he could dump his remaining majicka stores into, he was a getting a best-of-all-worlds effect.
“This is really good, Arthur. I can feel the effect over the pills and I’m not even that sensitive to that kind of thing.” Onna thrust her halberd through a hole in the wall, eliciting a shriek from some distant enemy that had made the mistake of standing in front of Coldbrook’s not-yet-famous stab points. “Everyone, drink up. We can afford to take a break right now.”
“Is it just me or does everything seem to be going surprisingly well?” Arthur asked. “It seems like we’ve kept the wall mostly clear so far.”
“Don’t be fooled.” Onna shook her head and looked grimly at the writhing mass of monsters just outside. “It’s always easy at first. Right now, we’re dealing with the fastest cohort of monsters in the wave, which means they are lighter and easier to kill once you get them crammed up into one space. Later, the big ones are going to pile in.”
The ground near Onna’s foot started to stir, which she reacted to by drawing a short sword and plunging down into the dirt. “Oh, yeah, one piece of good news is that we’re probably getting to the end of the small burrowers. We got more of them than we thought, I guess.”
With the melee fighters tea’d up and stabbing happily through their wall, Arthur was free to make a more dexterity-heavy version of the same thing for the archers, which came out just as well.
Tea of General Ranged Combat
With no muss and fuss, this tea enhances the dexterity and perception of anyone who drinks it by a slight to moderate amount. In addition to the raw stat increase, anyone wielding a ranged weapon consistent with the intentions of their class will see an increase in any other effects the drink produces. Effects will vary from drinker to drinker, but should range between slight and moderate.
A slight-to-moderate increase was among the biggest effects Arthur had ever produced, but the fact that it was then multiplied by the ranged slight-to-moderate buff meant that there was a math problem to be solved here in just how effective the drinks were. Leaving that work to some post-battle version of Spiky and Leena, he delivered the drinks to the various archers working the wall, who liked them just fine.
“Don’t give that one to me,” Lith said, as Arthur tried to push a drink on him. “Give it to her. She’s got a thrower class. I’m already taking down the biggest monsters I can and your tea won’t change much.”
“You sure?” Arthur asked.
“I’m sure.” Lith leaned on his bow. “Hunter classes are nice for smaller prey, or non-monster beasts. On this crowd, the main way I’m better than a normal rock-throwing crafter is that I can pick my shots. Onna has me looking for burrowers that would dig down into the ground. It’s the best I can do but enhancement won’t help me do it.”
“No problem.” Arthur handed the tea to the rock thrower, whose eyes went wide as she drank it. She immediately launched into an ever-so-slightly better round of pelting monsters with stones. “How do you think it’s going?”
“Good enough. This layer of rock should last today, at least,” Lith said.
“Not longer? It doesn’t look like it’s taken much damage at all,” Arthur said. The wall seemed as strong as before.
“Looks are deceiving.” Lith inspected his bow, smiled in satisfaction as he found it intact, and then pulled another arrow from the ammo-barrel nearby. “Ask Karra about it. I need to make sure a few mole-looking monsters don’t make their way to our nice warrior friends down below.”
“Shift!” Arthur heard Onna’s voice from down on the ground. “Second level!”
Arthur poked his head over the inside lip of the wall and watched every warrior abandon the ground-level line of stab points they had been using, then run up a short staircase to a wooden scaffolding about an average demon’s height above the ground. From there, they immediately started stabbing through a second, higher line of holes. It had been something that Onna and Karra had dreamed up together. As dead monsters piled against the base of the wall, it would make the holes useless. Making a second line of openings meant they could keep up the attack longer, even though the monsters would eventually pile up against that too.
Having pushed as much tea as his majicka could fuel, Arthur joined the other mundane attackers on the wall, chucking rocks with all his might and counting on gravity to make up the slack his own soft muscles left wanting. It mostly did. Arthur was never sure what his individual rock was hitting, but each wave of thrown rocks would leave a section of monster-attackers battered or broken. The warriors at the bottom were doing a lot of good work, but cumulatively, the town and gravity probably had them beat for sheer violent capacity.
Of course, that was only good so long as the wall held up and the monsters were piling against the base faster than Arthur had ever imagined they would. Even though it took a lot more monsters to block the second line of stabbing holes than it did the first, soon the pile of monsters was so high it had almost done that. Once it did, the speed they could eliminate the attackers would be halved, and the wall would fall that much faster. Arthur didn’t see any way around it.
And if the first wall falls that fast, there’s no way we can hold out the entire time. Is it done?
Luckily for the town and Arthur, none of their surprises had been activated yet. He still didn’t know what the first one would be but a yell suddenly alerted him to whose surprise would be revealed first.
“The chute!” Milo yelled. “Activate the chute!”
The warriors on the ground all ran as one to a series of large levers on the ground, pulling them with all their might. A creaking sound issued from the front of the wall as the road broke apart, broken by some unseen mechanism to reveal a long, polished chute of stone beneath the level of the ground. As it did, dozens of monsters fell in amongst the fragments of road, hitting the chute and madly trying to scramble over the wreckage of the bricks and Slapstone.
They didn’t do a good job.
“The monsters are pretty coordinated, but there’s no way they planned for this. It’ll take them a bit to adjust.” Milo grinned as he watched the crush of the monster wave pushing more and more monsters in the front into the chute, where they fought against the monsters already there for priority in escaping the confusing space. “They’ve only got a dim sort of intelligence.”
“Like you!” Rhodia said. “I wondered how you got so deeply into their psychology.”
“Har har, dear. Har har. The point is, we’ve probably got a full minute of them knocking each other into that hole before they figure out they need to jump over it. And in the meantime, the rest of them are getting shoved down the chute,” Milo said.
“Which goes… where?” Arthur craned his neck, but the actual path of the chute went underneath the ground again once it got past the space the road had once covered. “Some sort of pit?”
“You could say that.” Milo grinned again. “It dumps them into the ocean.”
Some monsters could swim, Arthur knew. Most couldn’t, and those that were very good at it generally were so specialized to water that they didn’t join a dungeon break event. Still, some of the monsters might have survived, if into the ocean was the only concept they were dealing with. But Coldbrook was built on the edge of the ocean in a region laden with cliffs. The two cliffs which bordered the town were higher than the rest of the terrain, but that didn’t mean the space off to the side of them was a gentle slope down to the beach.
Arthur heard distant roars as the first of the monsters hit the end of the chute and began their hundreds-of-feet fall to the water below.
“Okay that’s a pretty good surprise. The chute won’t get clogged?” Arthur asked.
“Not unless something bigger than the chute falls into it. We carved it pretty steep. The poor masons were terrified they were going to fall in,” Milo laughed.
“Warriors! Push!” Arthur heard Onna yell below as the warriors ran back to the first, ground-level layer of holes in the wall. From the ground, the warriors picked up long poles connected to big blocks of wood, a kind of blunt spear-thing that looked more like a ramrod than anything else. In teams, they went to each opening and shoved the rods outwards, straining against the weight of the piled-up monsters.
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Chapter 172 is also available on snowingpine.com for those able to log in. You can read it here.
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