"Tch! Thorn Missiles!" Rialyne wasted no time launching a counter attack. She leapt into the air and heaved a semi-transparent energy vine into the cliff ledge on the other side of the serpent. With the vine anchor, she propelled Kyferne's body around the serpent while the thorns shot.
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The serpent ignored the pricks as its eyes glowed happily at the airborne target. It thought for sure that this stupid ant had flung itself into the distance of its maw. But when it lurched forward with its two oversized fangs and smaller needle-like teeth, Rialyne tugged forward on the vine and plummeted toward the cliff ledge in escape.
Kyferne's eyes glistened at the clever maneuver. Indeed, the serpent would be unfamiliar with a tree's style of attack. It wouldn't think that a lousy vine could be used in such a manner.
Five seconds had passed since the start of the battle, and the serpent's back was to them as they were about to land.
"Magic Blast!"
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Surprised and annoyed that the ant had escaped, the wyrm swiveled its body and peered angrily yet thoughtfully at the strange insect with hidden tricks.
That shadow sphere skill negated any defenses temporarily increased by skills and damaged based on the original defenses. Although the brunt of the attack was avoided, Rialyne's Iron Bark duration was still reduced.
With the monster's eyes boring into them, the duo shivered in dread, wondering what plans it was hatching up next. But not daring to waste time, Rialyne fired basic magical attacks while she waited for her skills to cool down.
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Seeing the minuscule damage, Rialyne was marginally frustrated. It was expected, but disappointing nevertheless. She needed to kill this monster asap because now that Iron Bark's duration was reduced, steadily grinding down the serpent's HP was no longer an option, especially if she was hit with the skill again.
Rialyne also felt that the wyrm had taken it easy against them so far. It hardly saw them as worthy opponents; even though, she could reduce its HP by 1% every five seconds. After all, right now it was just letting her attack it while observing her. At this point, the monster had 656,158/672,800 HP. She had barely made a dent.
So although it was risky, she took advantage of this moment to close in and deal physical basic attacks in order to gauge the strength of her attack to its defenses. In figuring out this proportion, she would know which attack types were most optimal.
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Backing away, Rialyne noted that both of its defense stats were relatively weak. So the question laid in how high its attack stats might be. She assumed that the earlier sphere attack was a magical one. Most likely, its physical attack wouldn't be any lower than its magical. Just the vicious, thorny, and agile appearance of the serpent alone indicated this.
Meanwhile, the serpent decided to fight seriously and annihilate this trivially interesting ant. And thus, with no room for Rialyne to dodge the attack completely, arrow-pointed scales showered upon her.
「 - 13503 HP - 13503 HP - 13503 HP - 13503 HP - 13503 HP - 13503 HP - 13503 HP - 13503 HP - 13503 HP - 13503 HP - 13503 HP - 13503 HP - 13503 HP - 13503 HP - 13503 HP - 13503 HP - 13503 HP 」
The amount of HP lost made Rialyne nearly dizzy from an agitating, rude awakening that hell, they had definitely messed with the wrong monster. This was obviously a physical based attack! It had been reserving its true strength all along after all!
"Ria!!" An urgent voice cried out to her. It was Cardisys who noticed that her HP had shockingly fallen to less than half in an extremely short amount of time. 175902/413253 HP. 42%. She barely had over 40% of HP left.
"What's happening?!! Why is your HP less than half?!! Who're you fighting?!!"
While she evaded a single stream of physical basic attacks from the wyrm on the left, Rialyne sarcastically noted that Cardisys was only missing the last one of the "four W's."
"An Archaic Stygian Wyrm of Destruction, level 49 Monarch."
Five seconds, Rialyne's battle-engrained, automatic timer reminded her. At this, she pondered whether she should do another Magic Blast to keep up the facade. Ah, proficiency, might as well.
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"A WHAT?! I have no idea what monster that is, but based on its level and rank, are you crazy?!" Cardisys couldn't believe the nonchalance he heard in her voice.
"You should be asking Kyferne that, not me."
She was surprised. She could activate skills without verbalizing them? Why this Cardisys…
"You know I can't do that!! And why're you calm enough to joke—you could die!"
Speaking of which, Rialyne ducked a wheel of shadowy needles and rolled to the edge of the precipice and barely hung onto the ledge with just hands and wrists.
A strange smile enveloped on Kyferne's face on behalf of Rialyne. "Keh."
"KEH?!?!" Both Cardisys and Kyferne unknowingly screamed the same thing in their flummoxed minds at the girl who supposed was the "smart" one yet nearly rolled off the edge of the cliff to her most certain demise. Or should Kyferne add, to their most certain demise because now his body had just lost its grip!!
"Rialynneee~~!!!!" Kyferne hollered as they plummeted, "Who's the crazy one now?!!""
The girl merely giggled in a light, haughty manner as Kyferne's eyes goggled at the sight of the serpent's tail streaking up to meet their fall.
"See ya, snaky."
BOOM!
An explosion of violently vengeful energy collided with the tail as Rialyne shot a vine toward the nearest tree on her right.
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Literally yanked from the grip of death, Kyferne felt his lungs give out, leaving him breathlessly bewildered at what had just happened.
As the dirt and grainy smoke settled, all Kyferne saw was a dead Stygian Wyrm. It was dead. DEAD. "What the f*** did you just do to it?!"
In a millisecond of life or death, they had just brilliantly escaped death while inflicting seemingly impossible death. It was absolutely ludicrous.
"Oh, my bad," she directed this simultaneously to Cardisys and Kyferne with a little cough at the end. "Ahem, Vengeance~!"
Cardisys instantly pieced together what must've happened and paled. His scheme had been inadvertently uncovered. "Wait, I can expla—!!"
"See you in five hours." Rialyne disconnected the communication. Let's just make him suffer a little, shall we? Her thoughts snickered moodily.
"What's Vengeance? A passive life-saving skill?" Kyferne questioned, perplexed.
In the moment that she had seen the three hit damages from Magic Blast, not only had she realized that she could cast attacks at will, but she had nearly forgotten about her true most powerful skill that dealt 3x retaliation damage, Vengeance.
Since Rialyne had never encountered enemies of greater size and strength as the wyrm, it had never crossed her mind that Vengeance could be used this effectively in closely matched or outmatched battles.
Although the Lord-ranked Stone Golem had forced her to use Vengeance as a finisher, she wasn't about to purposefully stand in the way of fire until she knew the monster's true prowess. She was going to use it as a trump card once she had reached the right amount of HP from multiple small attacks, but she hadn't foreseen it happening so suddenly. It was merely fortunate that the density of the huge scales compared to a human's surface mass was just minimal enough for them to survive the AOE skill.
"Nah, it's just a regular active skill. I just found out that someone had played a trick on me and said I had to shout skills in order to use them."
"Really? Haha! I always wondered why you shouted skill names when you didn't need to. I thought it was just a weird, personal battle style or something."
"…"
Rialyne wavered on whether she should stay a few more hours in the valley and torture the chartreuse cell a little longer.
"Anyway, I'm glad that it worked out in the end. But you lost so much HP now, so how will we use that same tactic against monsters of similar strength?"
"Easy, I'll just heal myself with Synthesis."
"That is both comforting and concerning to hear. If you're going to pull another stunt like that, please tell me in advance because you are definitely no longer allowed to call anyone else crazy."
Rialyne twiddled his thumbs in reply.
Kyferne's face turned stony at the gesture. "…"