The sudden appearance of the four magic boars is certainly something new that we had never encountered before. These rank 1 magic boars are not that hard to fight, we can dodge the earth spikes, and their charge attack easily with our agility as advanced zombies, but we usually hunt them one by one as a team and never encounter 4 magic boars working together.
The Zombie Crew are all rank 2 monsters, so we should be able to deal with the rank 1 magic beasts easily, but I'm afraid if they're working together, added with the rank 2 rhino. It will be quite troublesome and we can't do our kill as cleanly as the other ones we've done, but the most important thing for us right now is to abide master's order which is to stay alive, kill all the enemies here, and level up.
The beaten-up rhino backed off from where he was and retreated to where the magic boars came from. And following the retreat, the 4 magic boars blocked the way to where the rhino is going so it can flee after receiving many wounds after the fight with us. It received quite a severe wound from all the beating we've done to it, but it's still not fatal because the intended last hit from Ben never reached it, making it still able to live despite the injuries it suffered.
We shared what we thought to each other and decided to just deal with all of them because six of us rank 2 monsters should be able to deal with four rank 1 magic beast and a severely wounded rank 2 magic beast.
The fight this time was quite straightforward, there is no ambushing or excessive planning, we just go ahead and confront the magic boar head-on..or that was what I thought how the fight should go
With four of the magic boars working together, there are so many more earth spikes coming out of the ground trying to pierce our body with its sharp point. And I don't know if this is intentional or not, but it seems that their attacks are coordinated and not just randomly placed. The placement of the earth spikes is thought out and the magic boars did not just popping out earth spikes here and there, but it seems like the earth spikes are purposedly limiting our range of movements and setting up something to come and hit us. I shared my thoughts with the other and after (sort of) discussing what we should do, we decided to split the boars from each other and deal with them separately. I'm glad that we agreed on separating the boars from each other because for some reason I felt something is wrong when fighting against the group together.
We decided to fake a retreat to get the boars to chase us and we will go into separate directions in teams of 2 thus dividing the group of boars.
We started running away, but not too fast so the boar will be able to chase us. I grouped up with Ben and we waited for a boar to go after us, but the boar never chased me and Ben, in fact, they didn't chase us at all!
It is very confusing to me, we never had a magic beast just let us go after we attacked them. Is it normal? I think we need to ask master later about this situation, for now, me and the group should go back on hunting magic beasts to accomplish master's order to level up.
We got back on traveling the forest in search of magic beasts particularly rank 2 magic beast because we just failed in killing one and Ben is already at level 9 and maybe killing another rank 2 magic beast will give him the needed experience to reach level 10 and rank up.
After searching for some time, we finally met another rank 2 magic beast, this time it's a rank 2 magic bear! According to what master had said in our early times going hunting, a rank 2 magic bear has a strong physique and capable of conjuring earth magic.
We proceed as usual in fighting the magic bear, but we have to be more careful of its earth construct that is more advanced than earth spikes and earth walls such as conjuring an earth box to trap us and limit our movements, making us have to split up and be ready at any time if Edgar warns us about mana gathering near our feet. But with the six of us working together, we are still capable of dealing with the bear.
Continuing our exp funneling plan, we left the weakened bear for Ben to finish. As ben swung his halberd and strike the bear from behind before jumping up to the bear's head, suddenly another warning from Edgar told us to dodge. Ben in the middle of the jump, uses his halberd to propel him by pushing the halberd onto the ground making himself shift into another direction to dodge.
As we are wondering what kind of attack that makes Edgar told us all to dodge, it came again. Earth spikes sprout out from the ground, once again keeping us away from the magic bear.
And as I guess, not long after that, 4 magic boars appeared again from the forest, protecting the magic bear to retreat and once again making us fail our hunt.
Those magic boars are so damn annoying! What problem do they have with us? We attempted to rush in and quickly deal with the boars before they regrouped and start conjuring their annoying earth spikes.
Unfortunately, they realized what we are going to do and fled without giving it a second thought by running away and conjured earth walls to hinder our movements.
Unless we are stupid, we realize that these boars definitely are doing this on purpose. The Zombie Crew had another strategy meeting and we decided not to be played in the boars' palm.
What we are trying to do is, remember that Husk is now a zombie thief? And he didn't only get the silent steps skill but also a skill called ' Create Trap' which enables him to make traps using magic. Although its level is not that high due to it is not Husk's style to use traps, but he still uses it sometimes just to see what it is capable of. And in this situation, it seems to be fitting to put that skill into use.
The low level version of create trap can make simple traps such as pitfall with earth magic and small explosion with fire magic when the trap is triggered, the higher the level of the skill the more complex the traps that we're able to create.
Husk's create trap skill is now level 2, even though he still can't make a box trap such as the one the magic bear had made earlier, we can still make earth spikes or walls when triggered. To effectively use the trap, we went back to another strategy meeting.
Thinking about how to trap the boars is quite tricky because in the first place they don't chase after us so baiting them to run after us is impossible unless we kill all the boars in the forest making us the magic boars' mortal enemy, but that option is not available right now and it is not experience effective for us to do that so we refrained from doing that.
So the problem with using the trap is to make them walk onto the trap to trigger them. Because of the low level of the skill, the available traps to make by using the skill, only have the activation sequence by directly walking onto them, giving us a few options on how to use it.
And of course, we can't only depend on the trap to deal with the boars. We only need to use the trap to create an opening for us to go inside their formation and break their harmonized earth spikes conjuring so the rest of us won't get our movements hindered and able to attack them.
With the trap problem is still not solved, we decided to hunt rank 1 monsters while we're thinking about a solution so we don't waste our time idling around, because we still had Edgar who is under-leveled, we can give the rank 1 monsters experience to him since giving it to either me, Zayn, or Mark doesn't give much difference at this point.
While fighting a rank 1 magic dear, I almost got my body-slammed by its antlers because I was spacing out thinking about how to use the traps. I need to be careful and remind myself, even though it is only a rank 1 magic beast, it still chases me and can hurt me.
Wait... Chase me?
The magic beast chases us and the magic boars protect the magic beast...
Hmmm...
HMMM...
'GUYS I HAVE AN IDEA' I shouted loudly in my mind sending the intention to the others.