Chapter 197: Chapter 196 – Bringing a Bow to a Swarm Fight

With Peter along for the ride, their days go by quickly. While he isn’t directly helping because of Peters constant travels, he had upped his stamina stat enough that traveling on a road was like a dream. The miles flew by as they passed a waystation and made it to the next just as night was coming. An impressive distance to cover when you take into account the waystations are placed two to three days of normal travel apart. Over just one day the group had covered half a week's worth of travel, just because an elf tagged along.

Though the next morning dawns with a more somber mood. Last night the group had asked around about the swarm cats. Apparently they had last been seen right past the next stop. None of the people here are worried because that is still three or four days away. For the group, that means they will have a fight on their hands right after lunch.

Plus, if they are going to be fighting, the group won’t be traveling. Either they have to backtrack to the next stop or camp out. Back in the woods that was bad enough with a semi-normal monster presence. Swarms on the other hand are a whole different kettle of fish. Going from a few monsters attacking at night to a swarm is more than just adding monsters.

As Courtney explained to the group last night, monsters don’t just become a swarm if enough gather. To count as a swarm, the monster has to have a certain level of connectedness to the other monsters in the group. For the players it could get confusing when a swarm of bees isn’t actually a Swarm of bees, but blame pen and paper rpgs.

The three glance at each other as they set out. Peter was behind them, looking around like a tourist. Taking him into account it wasn’t a choice. They would retreat tonight. For now, though, the group gets to watch the terrain fly by. Jason had experienced this sort of thing on a smaller scale with his movement skill. For the others, though, even the second day of it is quite the thrill.

Of course no plan survives contact with the enemy and even before they reach the next waystation monsters attack. To their left is a large patch of brambles and out of it scrambles almost a good fifty or so cats. Each one with a tail at least twice as long as its body.

Though with how fast the group was traveling, they could have ignored it. By the time the cats had made it to the road, they were already past them. Peter looks back at the cats and laughs, “looks like there are still more than three quarters of that swarm left.”

Rosha rolls her eyes, “it’s not our fault we are going so fast they can’t catch us in an ambush.”

The three turn around to face the swarm as Peter steps back to watch. He even pulls out a three-legged camping stool to sit on. Jason ignores this nonsense and charges out ahead. Behind him, Rosha takes aim while Courtney channels a spell.

As Jason reaches the swarm Courtney finishes her spell and he can feel his skin toughen as it takes on the look of bark. An arrow flies low at his side piercing one of the cats. It falls, but the rest of the swarm ignores this and jumps at Jason.

Ready for this Jason pivots and lets loose a sidekick. While the kick slams into one of the cats, it doesn’t end there. With how many enemies were attacking, Jason had gone right to one of his more area based skills. The kicked cat bursts apart as an uncountable number of translucent threads fly into the cats behind.

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Momentum carries them into Jason, but they are dead before they can even attack. With his arms up, he swats them away as the next wave of cats reaches him. They swarm over him, biting and clawing at his skin, but it resists most of the damage. Though through the magic of swarms, some of the attacks still get through. With enough attacks, they will find some weakness.

-2

Rosha continues to fire arrow after arrow into the cats, one shoting them. Behind her Peter shakes his head, “first bit of advice. When fighting a swarm your arrows aren’t going to be doing all that much. Look at the cats you killed. Notice how that first one has stood up? Yeah, they aren’t dead. Swarms have a shared health pool because why not?”

“Jason’s attack took care of the ones he killed. Honestly, I am surprised he has access to a skill like that. To be able to tear them apart like that is generally limited to special spells in your level range. Anyway, you would be better served using your weapons staff mode. Not because it would necessarily do a better job on any one cat. Rather, you can use it to sweep multiple enemies at once. Even if the damage is reduced to each single target, you deal more overall.”

“Oh, and Courtney, splendid choice to buff him. Illusions aren’t exactly the best choice against a swarm. Too many minds effectively fool. It just takes one of them saving against your illusion to break the entire swarm out of it. This is actually part of why the kitsune here developed the illusion variant you want. While they are already good with illusions in general there are a ton of swarms in the area.”

“These swarm cats just happen to be the active species on the road we are taking. Go another direction and you might run into bat swarms. Not swarm bats, mind you. Just normal bats, which have formed a true swarm. Come down this road another time of the year and you would get to experience phrenic frogs. Lucky for the country, their psionic abilities are limited to inter-species telepathy.”

“Though if we let their swarms grow too big, they form a hivemind which sucks. Not because they are harder to kill. Rather, we have to go through the effort to determine if they have developed sapience or not. One way we can just deal with them and the other we have to deal with them.”

Peter was going to continue rambling when he noticed the group had stopped paying attention. He shrugs and sits back again to watch.