While Sabrina, Eclair, and Ed worked on their temporary shelter, Sigma kept making arrows and meditating. It was quite a boring and repetitive process, but he just endured it silently since he knew that it would help the group more than a little bit. In fact, he couldn't even imagine the plan failing.
Still, he would need more than a few hundred arrows, and the others would be busy for a while so that they couldn't attack that day. They could only keep working and wait for the perfect conditions.
One day later, Sigma had five hundred arrows ready to be used, and the others finished digging the rock, and the shelter was basically a house now. Still, all of them kept going. Sabrina made more Stone Shields for Ed; Sigma made more arrows now that Meditation reached higher levels. Ed and Eclair took turns watching things outside. The enemies didn't show any changes in their behavior, so they didn't have to hurry that much.
"I never expected that only us would do this much. Usually, we would need the entire force of Geolia to bring down an army of monsters of this size," Ed said.
"Well… our group is pretty balanced, and we aren't getting hurt, so I guess the efficiency went up a bit," Sabrina said.
The world was in some dire straits if only a bit more than one thousand enemies were a problem for an entire city… It was troublesome that only a small fraction of the people wanted to fight. Still, humans should be creatures that adapt and use their ingenuity to survive… at least, that was what Sigma thought. Maybe they grew spoiled since the gods looked after them for so long. Then again, the current generation didn't know how things were fifty years ago, and they didn't experience it. They only heard about it.
Once again, Sigma didn't voice his thoughts. He couldn't find a good reason to complain about others, and it was better to focus on improving himself and doing the things that he could do to solve the problems he had to deal with.
The preparations were finished at the end of the second day, so the group readied themselves for the fight. To make things as convenient as possible, Sigma would leave the shelter and then lure the enemies toward the area. He was the fastest of the group now by a large margin, after all. While he couldn't outspeed the Verdiris, their attacks were slow, and he could dodge them, so that it would be fine.
"Follow the plan, and don't do anything reckless," Sigma said once he left the shelter.
Sigma was also by far the most reckless of the group, so they furrowed their eyebrows when they heard that. In any case, Sigma took his time running toward the enemy territory since he had to save his energy. Despite that, he already had his bow and some arrows in his hands.
As he approached the territory, Sigma wondered if he could take a lot of the evolved beast that Ed mentioned, but he didn't have the chance to do that… right in the middle of the enemies territory, there was another massive rock, and he assumed that they were using that to hide their leader.
Regardless, that was just a minor issue… once Sigma entered their territory, a shit ton of enemies stopped flying in circles and then moved toward them. Sigma smirked and then began to run in the opposite direction, but even while he could run at almost one hundred kilometers per hour now, his stamina dropped like crazy, and he paced himself… at half of that speed, his stamina didn't drop at all, so he kept at that.
When Sigma heard the sound of the enemy's attacks, he suddenly jumped with all his might while spinning his body a bit. For a second, he turned and then fired multiple arrows toward the enemies, and he quickly killed four of them. That was just a small amount considering the massive cloud of enemies chasing him, but Sigma was fine with that much for now. He killed the fastest ones, after all.
When he landed, Sigma sped up for a short while since the enemies slowed down to attack again, and then he gained some distance. He managed to repeat all that two times until he reached the shelter, and then Ed blocked the entrance with his Stone Shield.
Sabrina didn't waste time and began to make Fireballs explode on the monsters' faces, and when she saw wind arrows being fired toward her, she hid behind the shield for a short while, and then Sigma's turn to attack came again.
Sigma saw the beasts flying without moving while others flew around the rock and used their magic to attack, and he targeted those aiming at him and also repelling their attacks… thanks to that, the first line of attacks soon fell to the ground with arrows on their heads and the second group approached to attack. They didn't obtain more results than the first group, though.
Sigma and Sabrina tried to cover for Ed as much as possible, but since he was blocking dozens of attacks every second, his stone shield was starting to crack, and his entire body was trembling… each one of the attacks was laughable, but together, they were making him suffer some damage in his arms. Eclair quickly began to heal him, but it was clear that she would have to do that more than once and very often.
Thanks to the numerous attacks, the shelter trembled now and then, but no signs of it falling apart could be seen… at first, the beasts saw Ed changing shields, and they assumed that they would soon be able to kill all of them, but soon they changed their minds when they lost two hundred of their allies and Ed grabbed his third shield.