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A fighting force needed to either have overwhelming firepower that others would consider overkill. Or the fighting force needed to enforce their will on the enemy through purposeful aggression, sometimes to an unreasonable degree, to knock the enemy off balance and keep them reactive instead of active.

A reactive enemy was more predictable than an active enemy.

The soldiers of the Eternal Garden Kingdom had neither the overwhelming firepower nor the purposeful aggression. They had numbers on their side based on what Zarian could tell as enemy arrows rained down from slits in the towered trees on the right and left of their path.

With the shadows growing longer between burning orange rays of the setting sun, he guessed there were thirty to forty shooters in the tree towers. Then he looked ahead of their path and spotted huge, furry, and frenzied figures that looked like hyena-men. There were about ten of those that fought on the ground with barbaric clubs covered in spikes and large swords carved out of bone.

The soldiers had a four-to-one advantage against the gnolls. But the gnolls were absolute savages.

They were combining superior positioning, the element of surprise, and absolute aggression to wreck the garden soldiers in the first exchange of combat.

Barely half a minute went by and at least thirty soldiers died with two dozen others injured. It was like watching a gang of children face off against a smaller gang of wild dogs, and the children were getting mauled and brought down.

I can’t stand idly by and observe, Zarian realized. I don’t really care for them, especially when they want me dead, but this is just sad.

Besides, Hannah looked like she wanted to jump in and help. The other party members were in the thick of fighting at this point.

“Come, Hannah, let’s take the towered tree on the left,” Zarian said, after receiving a quick dance from a spectral spider reporting on Naomi, Gilbert, and Bianca.

Those three were going for the towered tree on the right to dismantle the gnolls’ arrow-shooting superiority. Thankfully, the spectral spiders were adapting quickly to the problem and have already started dismantling traps in the right towered tree.

The spectral spiders even thought ahead to send members into the left towered tree. They were already dismantling traps for Zarian and Hannah.

The Summon Spectral Spiders skill was a highly versatile and intelligent power. It was probably high in quality, most likely rare. Its next advancement would be interesting to see.

Having the spectral spiders roll the red carpet treatment for his party put Zarian in a good mood. Even when surrounded by violent deaths and screams of injured young men crying for their friends and family at home.

There were no guards remaining around Zarian. They were in the thick of the fighting by this point.

The big and heavy gnolls fought so ferociously the officers struggled to keep a brave enough line of soldiers to hold at the front. Other soldiers took up their bows and arrows and shot back at the gnoll archers at the top of the towered trees. They weren’t doing so well, but at least they were providing pressure on the enemy archers.

Zarian moved at a brisk walking pace with Hannah and the Roller Golem behind him. His Parasite Cloak swung out tendrils of flesh and bone to bat aside arrows flying down at them. The gnolls’ attention on him wasn’t so bad since the garden soldiers were at least trying to fight back.

But the longer he moved in a straight line while remaining unbothered by the fierce and bloody fighting, the more attention he gained. Even the garden soldiers looked perplexed as he strode casually past them. Eventually, one of the gnolls fighting on the ground split off and ran straight at him and his companions.

Zarian used Identify:

The gnoll stood at least eight feet tall with cordial muscles that rippled with strength on a stooped, bent-over frame. It had spotted hyena-like features, milky white eyes, yellowed teeth, and a foul air that stank of rotten flesh and feces fuming from its mangy fur.

Other than the loincloth, it wore necklaces, bracelets, and even anklets on its brawny arms and digitigrade legs. All of its jewelry held trophies from those it had killed: teeth, fingers, ears, or pieces of rib bone.

It was a horrible creature that wanted nothing more than to batter and break its victims with the big, one-sided bone sword it held up with a single clawed hand.

Oh, sweet, something perfect for my special fire spell that I haven’t finished learning yet. Zarian kept his walking pace and direction the same, only turning his head. Show me how tough your vitality is, won’t you?

Zarian shot a blunt beam of darkness straight into the gnoll’s gut and stopped its charge. The berserker stumbled back, its surprise clear on its bestial face from feeling the force of Zarian’s magic.

Meanwhile, Zarian had a good idea of how much padding the creature had after that test shot.

Just to be sure, he shot the gnoll a few more times on its chest, arms, legs, and even groin. He forced it to stumble back while holding its big bone sword defensively to ward away attacks.

“Not bad. It’s pretty tough, but not as tough as the lost knight,” Zarian commented. “Try hitting it with Roller, Hannah. See if you can kill it with one shot, or I will.”

“Yes, sir.”

Hannah reached out with her gauntlet-clad hand. Runic symbols flashed bright pale blue from both the gauntlet and the surface of the two-foot-wide ball of marble-like stone.

Roller Golem released a pulse of kinetic force into the ground, striking down with a heavy thump and jumping to Hannah’s outstretched hand.

Zarian watched in amusement as Hannah’s gauntlet captured the Roller Golem while negating its obvious weight. Then she swiveled around and aimed the heavy stone ball at the berserker. She took a few seconds to apply some runes, giving the berserk a chance to roar in rage and charge forward.

“Go, go, Roller,” Hannah said under her breath as Zarian slid behind her before she finished her magical artillery preparations.

The force from Roller’s launch didn’t affect her or Zarian who hid behind her. Instead, the shockwave pushed outward in every other direction. The ground in front of her rippled, and the cobble stones and dirt shuddered. Twigs, foliage, and dust flew with a roaring whoosh.

Roller turned the berserker’s bone sword into ivory splinters and smashed the gnoll’s face into a splatter of gore.

The Roller flew in a downward arc and crashed near the other berserkers. It kept rolling, striking a berserker’s legs, knocking it down, and turning to roll over them.

“It’s on autopilot, set to disruption and killing of enemy units,” Hannah explained, smiling at her rampaging golem. “It’s incredible. Like sophisticated intelligence that uses magical runes for coding instead of any programming language from the old world.”

Zarian nodded as he led them into the base of the towered tree. A spectral spider revealed itself and gave a report with its dance: the traps were cleared, the enemies were accounted for.

It was tower climbing time, and Zarian could already hear the gnolls running down from the top of their fortification to meet him on his rise.

“I’ll hurt them, and you kill them, Hannah. Can you handle that with your gauntlet?” Zarian asked, finding a set of ancient stone steps covered in roots and vines.

It was nice and mostly dark here. A few blood-red rays of sunset beamed through gaps in the walls.

Hannah picked up a twig and used an enchantment to turn it into a magical light torch. She raised it over her head while staying behind Zarian, then she said, “I’ll try, but sending off Roller like that took a big bite out of my aura.”

“Then try to shoot between the eyes with the least amount of power needed for a kill. Now here they come.”

Two gnolls came crashing down the stone steps, appearing smaller but quicker than the berserker version. They were six feet tall, much skinnier and mangier than the berserkers. They had Tribal Archer Grunt as their classes, Level 25 and Level 24, but they armed themselves with bone hatchets for melee fighting.

Zarian figured the other gnoll archers would be weaker in levels than the berserkers while still posing great dangers to most soldiers and adventurers. They weren’t much of a danger to Zarian when he was ready for them.

The Parasite Cloak ensnared them, catching them by the ankles with tough leather lines covered in sharpened bone shards. She wrapped them up with more thin threads that were as tough as steel wires, slicing into their mangy fur and flesh.

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The more they thrashed and tried to fight, the more Para entangled them, cutting, slicing, and digging to the bone. Then Para spread her strands like long, flexible needles through their bodies. That was when the real screaming started, their voices bouncing off the walls of the towered tree.

Hannah moved carefully around them and aimed down the palm of her gauntlet. Her face was stony, business-like, and pinched with focus. She emitted a sharp kinetic bolt straight through the eye, one after the other.

“Go ahead and eat, Para,” Zarian said, pressing his elbow to Hannah’s back to guide her up the steps beside him, the aura cuffs remaining latched onto his arms. Their suppressive effect made the fighting more interesting for Zarian.

The Parasite Cloak dragged her meals along from behind, chewing, gulping, drinking, slurping, indulging herself. Zarian didn’t feel the drag or weight, since the living cloak could offset any inconvenience for him. She was a superb cloak.

More footsteps thumped down the steps from above. The gnoll archers yipped and growled with promises of bloody savagery. They even spoke limited English, their words reserved as a chant for something – or someone – they revered.

“Killall! Killall! Killall! Killall! Killall!” chanted the horde of gnolls.

“Zarian, a thin line of darkness from here to here, please,” Hannah requested, pointing from one staircase wall to the other.

Without question, he delivered, then watched her place a quick enchantment on the thin dark line.

The gnolls were on them a second later. Four of them this time. Zarian took a cautious few steps back with Hannah retreating with him.

He prepared some dark tactics to bar downhill momentum of the rushing gnolls’. Unfortunately, one of the gnolls moved faster than Zarian had expected, abusing a speed boost skill.

Zarian saw a blur of spotted, mangy fur with teeth and an axe nearly on him.

Then the blurry form split around him and Hannah and splattered against the walls, blood spraying everywhere. The other gnolls behind the first suffered similar fates, splitting at the torso or losing their head, their downhill momentum used against them when they ran into the line of darkness Hannah had enchanted.

Zarian formed dark tentacles to clear the body parts out of their way.

“Brutal, Hannah,” Zarian complimented.

“I’m growing more familiar with how the Star System operates. I’m almost scared of who I’ll become when I think of more efficient ways to remove animated and/or living problems of all sorts.”

“I’m interested to see that as long as you don’t hurt yourself in the long run. That’s more my speed.”

“I suppose, Zarian, I suppose.”

They continued upward, entering a floor that had dismantled traps lying all over. Spectral spiders saluted them as the two outsiders kept their upward march. Another spectral spider appeared around the bend of the stairway wall and waved its legs frantically in warning.

Zarian stopped as an arrow covered in thorns passed inches by his face, ricocheted off the wall, and struck Hannah’s side.

Sucking in a sharp breath, he examined the damage. Hannah was fine, if not bruised.

Her medium spider armor resisted stabbing damage, which included arrows, and it had the Reinforcement +1 enchantment on top.

Still, Zarian felt a little annoyed at the close call and was glad Para finished eating and was happy to spread her threads ahead. She caught some living prey and gave a vibrating purr, saying that it was okay to continue upward.

Zarian activated his Bloody Lifesteal spell while the grimoire remained inside of him, filling the next floor with crimson light from the blood spill unleashed by Para’s flesh-eating threads and tendrils. The gnolls screamed in horror as parasitic strings and threads ripped the flesh off their bones while their life drained into Zarian, which gave him quite the high.

Hannah moved with a quick, ruthless stride and put a sharp kinetic hole through each of the gnolls’ skulls. She looked a little more cold, a little more apathetic, after taking a solid hit to her ribs.

The dead eye gaze on her face reminded Zarian of a woman wiping a dirty mess off the counter tops with a sanitizing napkin. The gnolls were nothing but a mess for Hannah to wipe away.

“Let’s go faster,” Zarian said.

“Yes, sir,” Hannah replied.

Zarian’s Parasite Cloak took on the form of an eldritch spider with tentacles made from flesh, bones, and teeth. Para snapped out threads and tendrils to tether to the ceiling of bark and stone. She wriggled her feelers into the gaps in the wall where the fading light of dying day still beamed through.

More and more of herself extended, ensnared, and built a moving web of tangled flesh while keeping Zarian’s body cloaked. Then Zarian half-crawled, half-slithered, half-swung up the next set of stairs, with Hannah running in pursuit.

Less than ten archers remained. Zarian and Para steamrolled over the ones that tried to rush them from the top of the stairs.

The gnolls screamed as a storm of bone-tipped whips, toothy tendrils, and bladed strands tore across their bodies and stripped pounds of flesh and fur off their bones. They were barely standing before Hannah hit them with the equivalent of a pure energy icepick to each of their heads.

Zarian found five remaining gnolls. Each one was Level 30. They shifted fast and carefully around Para’s reaching limbs and spurs of bone. Arrows soared in return despite the limited space and time.

The Parasite Cloak withdrew and hardened around Zarian’s body, soaking all the hits for him. Changing tactics, Zarian withdrew Para’s flesh even more and let her become an indomitable wall of leather wrapped around him.

The daylight finally died out like a snuffed flame. Darkness swallowed the top of the tower except for a soft light emitted from the twig Hannah held in her free hand. She waited on the last steps of the staircase.

Zarian let out a deep and foreboding sigh. He pulled back his hood and revealed his face.

The gnolls growled, one speaking ahead of the others: “Your bloody death will honor the best god, Killall.”

“Killall! Killall! Killall!” chanted the other gnolls.

“I don’t serve a god or goddess. None of them gave me a decent enough deal to represent them. At least not yet.” Zarian shrugged. “So your death will only serve my whims. And my current whim is feeding more levels to my brilliant enchantress.”

“We will eat her!” replied the lead archer.

Zarian shook his head. “No, you won’t.”

The gnolls had quick and dexterous alpha skills. They were much faster than Zarian in a foot race. Their vitality was higher than his even if the archers weren’t frontal fighters. They already had their bows up and their arrows drawn. And he still had on the handcuffs that suppressed his aura.

By most means, he was at their mercy.

The Honored Outsider filled the entire room with dark spikes rising from the floor and falling from the ceiling. It happened so brutally fast the archers didn’t have time to maneuver to the stairs. The arrow slits were too narrow for them to escape through.

Their last attacks struck Para’s hardened leather without leaving too much damage except for one arrow that had some solid power to it. That one knocked the air out of Zarian, throwing him back to bounce off the stem of a dark spike.

“Are they all dead?” Hannah asked.

Zarian wheezed a little before he let out a chuckle. Beyond him, the sounds of painful groaning and raspy breaths from the gnolls answered Hannah’s question. It wasn’t easy, but Zarian managed to puncture all the gnolls without killing them.

He slowly disengaged the spikes and dropped the quickly bleeding bodies on the floor.

“I’ll need some heavy training to make up for these quick levels, Zarian,” Hannah said, cold and analytical. “I appreciate the privilege of your support, of course.”

She killed them off one by one, executioner style. The way she held the shining twig before releasing a spike of kinetic energy made her look like a merciless phantom of death drifting through the darkness.

When she reached the last gnoll, it sputtered fearfully, breaking the usual savage character of the gnolls.

“Wait, please, I don’t want to die,” the gnoll said, gasping for air. “I’ll serve you. I’ll kill for you. Let me live, please, my mistress.”

The angles of light coming from the twig shrouded Hannah’s eyes in darkness, making her appear unreadable and scary. She raised her gauntlet without uttering a response.

The gnoll screamed for mercy.

Hannah blasted its brains out.

Zarian couldn’t help but smile the whole time, feeling warm inside. He was very proud of Hannah and her growth.

Turning away, he looked out the arrow slit and saw the other towered tree the gnolls occupied had gone still. There was a broken hole in the wall with a thick branch sticking out, and standing on it, high above the cobbled forest floor, was Naomi.

She jumped off the branch and dove toward the berserkers still fighting below. Zarian held his breath until he noticed the near-translucent lines of spectral spider webs working for Naomi like a bungee cord.

With her momentum killed, she broke free of the webs and gave the last berserkers down below a fight for their lives. Roller was still rolling into the enemy’s legs, breaking digitigrade joints and bones, acting as a great assistant for a magic ball-shaped golem.

“We’re winning,” Zarian said.

“Will we take control of the soldiers?” Hannah asked. “I don’t think these children are very much capable of leading themselves. Someone must’ve sent out the most incompetent unit, or the Eternal Garden Kingdom wouldn’t exist.”

“Take control, huh?” Zarian raised his cuffed arms. “Nah, we won’t take control. We’ll … make suggestions.”

He felt Hannah staring at him in confusion. He turned to look at her fully, waiting for her to speak her mind.

“My blood is running high, and I’m filled with adrenaline. So what I say next might not come from a rational mind. But I think if we want to make it to Bramblevale with fewer casualties, we should drop the pretense and simply commandeer their unit.”

“No,” Zarian said.

Hannah let out a frustrated sigh. “You can crush them even with that thing on you. I can see how the aura cuffs are stressed to its limits, straining to contain a fraction of your power. You are practically a demigod compared to the rest of us … why are you playing by their rules?”

Damn, Hannah, you’ve become a little authoritarian really quick. The Star System had truly worked wonders on the formerly meek woman. Or was that his fault?

Or was Hannah always capable of this and didn’t have the right outlet until now?

Zarian laughed, thinking back to his conversation with Ariana. He was glad that he’d acted to help the soldiers instead of standing back. He would’ve looked like a hypocrite if he hadn’t helped.

Even if they were jerks, they hadn’t done enough bad to deserve complete eradication like the gnolls. Even if he could take over, he had no reason to assume that much responsibility. He wanted to direct his focus on more personal matters.

“Honestly, Hannah, I don’t have a grand strategy.” Zarian shrugged. “I just find it amusing to play pretend.”

“You are a devil, Zarian Darkrun. And I feel like I’m becoming one of your sinners.”

Zarian’s smile grew even wider. “Isn’t it fun?”

Hannah didn’t answer.

She didn’t say no.

Zarian led them down the stairs while Para picked up a few corpses and items to store away for later. After some thought, Zarian said, “Play your role. You did all the killing. And I was just there as your support, barely scraping by. They’ll listen to you all far more now. And that’s without them feeling taken advantage of because you and the others are their gnoll-slaying heroes.”

Hannah was probably fuming at this point.

Zarian hadn’t exactly lied. Hannah had done all the killing, and gained a heap of levels because of that. She could claim to be the hero of the left towered tree even though most of the credit should go to him.

He stopped at the bottom floor near the exit. “Remember what I said? Crouching tiger, hidden dragon? Maybe it’s unnecessary and everything will work out fine while I get a chuckle here and there. Or maybe you’ll think of me as a genius when it turns out I was right to hide and wait.”

“You’re relying on luck.”

“It’s called Wonder in this universe, Hannah. Gotta get with the program. Now, go on. Head held high. Atta girl. The soldiers already look like they want to worship the ground you walk on. Own it, Hannah. Own it.”