Mantle of the Gods

Mitchel was slow.

I pulled up his stats on the party tab to see what they looked like.

Mitchel Zarboe - Level 2

Age: 18, Hair: Blonde, Eye color: Brown, Height: 5’8”

102.5 Exp

Tank

6 Power 10 Defense 2 Speed

4 Magic 8 Recovery 7 Aura

Stat Points: 0

Look At Me

The first thing that caught my eye was that he was an abnormal. The second thing was that he apparently put his stat points from leveling up into Aura instead of Speed. With a Speed score as low as his, he was going to have to put some points in it, or he’d be slowing the entire party down considerably once he got to Tier Two or higher.

The second thing that caught my eye was his experience. With how many things we’d beat today, there was no way that he had more than a hundred experience when we started today.

“Atlas!”

I closed the menu and drew my pistol. The monsters on this floor looked almost like the ones from the previous floor, except these seemed to use the environment a lot more than the others. Any time Fray tried to get close, it would splash her, which had led to the fights taking a little longer as they seemed to do it as a reaction to being attacked.

Justia had yelled for my help because somehow the crawler had managed to knock Fray over. This one was much bigger than the ones we’d been fighting, which meant it was an elite. It was hovering over her with its tentacles holding her arms firmly against her sides. She was also having to work to keep her face out of the ankle deep water and I remembered Gesai’s warning about the monster trying to smother people.

Mitchel was trying to push the monster off of her, but he wasn’t having any luck.

I pulled the trigger and hit the monster twice between the eyes. I had an Earth Shot magazine in the pistol because I was worried that Electric Shot might have a backlash on us, since we were standing in water

It took half the magazine to reduce the monster to smoke. Mitchel tripped over Fray and went face first into the water.

The homely brunette sat up and tried to control her breathing. I walked over and knelt down next to her while Mitchel tried to get up.

“What happened?” I brushed wet hair out of her face. "Are you okay?”

She nodded and wrapped her arms around me, almost knocking me over. I held her until her breathing slowed down, then pulled back and repeated my question. “What happened?”

“It wouldn’t taunt.” Mitchel looked ashamed as he stood in front of us. “It started out like normal, then got a lot bigger and wouldn’t taunt. I kept trying, but it wouldn’t take its focus off of her.”

“There are monsters that can’t be taunted…” I mumbled under my breath, “good to know. It probably had something to do with it changing into an Elite partway through the fight, but I’d have to ask Gesai or Trent about that.” I looked at Fray. "Sorry I wasn’t paying more attention to the environment. Are you going to be okay?”

A nod and another long hug was all the response I received.

We were a little over halfway to the boss room and we’d been walking for almost ninety minutes. I looked back towards the entrance and could see the outline of the other group. More than an outline really, they’d catch up to us in less than five minutes.

“Why don’t we take a break and wait for them?” I nodded towards the other group, then pointed at the beach trail a few hundred feet away. “We can sit over there so we don’t spawn anything else.”