“Showoff” Mark went back to focusing on his battle with the warrior. He noticed that the explosions snapped it out of its daze of not cutting through his arm. It immediately pulled the axe back and got ready for another swing. Mark had different plans though, he kicked the orc’s knee in, making it roar in agony as it collapsed. He then forcefully pried its axe out of its hand and decapitated it.

“Took you long enough,” Noah called out from behind him with a smug smile on his face.

“You know that smile makes me want to punch you, Mr. Showoff,” Mark replied

“What a coincidence! I felt that way earlier about your smile! Great minds really do think alike, hehe.”

“Uhuh, but seriously, that was one hell of a spell. A bit slow though, but that can be remedied by me being the one to physically throw it at stuff.” Mark could imagine it now, Noah conjuring those spears and him throwing them at full strength. It would surely make for a devastating combo. “Guess I’m going to be adding spear-throwing to my list of things to practice.”

“Yeah, it’s that orc warchief’s ticket to hell.” Noah smiled brightly. “Anyway, let’s continue hunting these orcs. If we’re lucky, we can get them all in the same spot, throw a few bombs, and finally be done with it.

“Yeah, let’s,” Mark replied

With that, they wandered around the encampment and pulsed Noah’s radar from time to time but they never found any hunting parties.

“You think they finally noticed that they were being hunted?” Noah voiced out his concern as he furrowed his eyebrows.

“Maybe. Let’s get closer to the encampment and pulse the radar there. It should give us some answers.”

“Okay.”

A few minutes later they arrived at the general area of the encampment. But, what was then just a collection of tents, it was now a walled-off village with logs set side by side acting as the walls. Noah and Mark looked at each other and said at practically the same time.

“Well, crap.”

Mark then had a thought and hurriedly checked his quest window.

Eradicate orc invaders 81/81

“Crap, they somehow got reinforcements, check your quest window,” Mark said

“That’s not good, not good at all, guess we’re going to have to speed up the cleaning operation.”

And so, they decided to brainstorm for a few minutes and came up with a simple strategy. They plant a mana bomb and some fragmentation grenades in front of the gates and blow it up. Then wait until the orcs rush out, blow the mana bomb as soon as some of the orcs step over it so that they get stunned and hopefully cause the orcs coming up from behind them to trip over them. They called it Operation Dogpile.

A few minutes later, they began executing their plan.

BOOM

One of the frag grenades blew up and took the wooden gates along with it. Mark whispered to Noah “Phase one complete, now we should start hearing a mad scramble for the gates.” But, instead of the mad scramble of orcs that they expected, what they heard was marching. Rhythmic marching, like that of an army.

“Crap, I have a bad feeling about this,” Mark stated with an obvious nervous tone in his voice.

Noah’s brows furrowed “We stick to the plan for now, if it doesn’t work, we run.” And so they waited until the marching got closer and closer. What greeted them was what they estimated to be all the remaining orcs. The normal orcs led the march, the warriors followed and then the archers. But, instead of the one warchief that they expected, they saw a smaller orc beside it that was wearing a robe and holding a staff. Noah immediately used his [Analyze] skill on it and had a chill run down his spine.

Orc Shaman – lvl ??

“That’s not good,” Noah mumbled to himself but saw that the normal orcs were already on top of his bombs. “Detonate”. In a split-second decision, he made all the bombs blow up at the same time. “Hopefully my theory about the mana bomb is right and it does interfere with mana.” He thought as he looked at the dust cloud that his bombs caused. He then pulled up his quest window to make sure that he’d at least killed the normal orcs.

Eradicate orc invaders (33/81)

He breathed a sigh of relief, he may not have killed all the normal orcs, but at least he killed a good chunk of them. He then checked his notifications and found that he’d leveled up twice and was now level fourteen in his main class and level three in his subclass. He didn’t think about it much and put all his stat points into intelligence, bringing it up to one hundred and sixty-seven. With his mana now double that, at three hundred and thirty-four, he had three shots of his explosive spear skill. He conjured two spears at once and handed one to Mark.

“Throw this at that robed orc at the back there. I’ll throw slightly after you from a different angle, hopefully, it’ll be enough to kill that monster.”

“Monster? How high is its level?”

"High enough that my skill only shows me question marks.”

“Crap.” Mark then grabbed the spear and got into running position. He activated his three new buff skills, essence of the bear, monkey, and cheetah which gave him plus forty in strength, twenty in constitution, and another forty in dexterity. “Hopefully the added dexterity can help me control my newfound strength.” He thought as he ran up so fast that Noah could hardly follow him with his eyes.

“Hup!” Mark exclaimed as he threw the spear at the shaman with all the force he could muster. Noah immediately followed up with his own spear which was much slower.

A moment later, Mark’s spear arrived at its destination but instead of hitting the shaman. The orc warchief, with a thick red aura around its body, quickly reacted and almost instantly intercepted the spear with its body. The spear destroyed the red aura and penetrated deep into the orc’s torso. “Detonate.” Noah whispered

BOOM

The spear exploded and bits of earth went everywhere, most importantly, the spearhead was pushed deeper and deeper into the warchief until it went right through it, making it collapse to the ground, and flew in the direction of the shaman. Suddenly, a blue spherical shield came to life around the shaman making the spearhead stop mid-flight. It smiled, cackled, and pointed at Mark as if it was looking at a fool. But, out of nowhere, another much slower spear came and stabbed the shield. It was stopped mid-flight too but Noah just smiled. “Detonate” The shaft blew up and drove the spearhead through the shield and into the shaman’s chest making it collapse to the ground.

“Hot damn! You killed it!” Mark said

That was when they saw the warriors move to surround the shaman.

Noah saw this and checked his notifications “Not dead yet, no notification. Let’s kill the other orcs before it gets up. I’ll take care of the normal orcs while you go for the archers, I doubt their arrows can penetrate your skin now with all your buffs active.”

“Of course.” Mark smiled then rushed into the midst of the archers in the back with two axes in hand.

Noah followed up with a fire bomb thrown at the area where the normal orcs were and immediately detonated it as soon as it landed. That managed to blow up most of the orcs and set fire to the ones that survived the initial explosion. “Now onto the hard part.” Noah looked at the archers who all had green auras surrounding them trying to run away from Mark while they shot at him. They failed of course, with all his buffs active, Mark was faster than all of them. Still, Noah decided to help Mark kill them to make it faster. He decided that in order to save on mana, he would just only use earth spike on the archers. But, before he could start casting, he saw a flash of lightning then a resounding clap of thunder as Mark summoned lightning to strike multiple archers at once. “Guess he didn’t need my help after all.”

Noah then turned his attention to the warriors surrounding the collapsed shaman and started to think. “How am I gonna do this?” He thought as he looked at the clumped up warriors with red auras surrounding them. “Bombs are the only way but do I gamble and put all my mana in one bomb?” He thought hard for a few seconds then another clap of thunder resounded through the area, he looked over and saw that Mark had finished off the last of the archers. “Okay, that makes things much easier.” He gathered almost all his mana, leaving just enough so he didn’t collapse, and pushed it all into [Fragmentation Grenade].

“Mark!” He shouted

“YEAH?!” Mark looked over to his cousin and saw that he was holding a bomb the size of an award-winning watermelon. “WTF?! Are you trying to get us killed?”

“Of course not! Just throw this into the middle of those orc warriors and make a run for it, I’ll handle the rest. Besides you can heal yourself anyway!” Noah smiled and held out the massive bomb.

Mark’s eye twitched but he still went over and took the bomb. He grumbled all along the way of course but he did it anyway. “You owe me for this.” He said as he turned around and headed for the orcs at top speed. When he got close enough, he jumped and dropped the bomb right next to the collapsed shaman and then immediately ran away at full speed not even turning back to see the explosion.

When Noah saw that Mark had run far enough he didn’t hesitate any further as the warriors were already investigating the bomb. “Detonate,” he said with a snap of his finger.

BOOOOOOOM

Noah suddenly heard a trumpet sound in his head and a bunch of notifications forced their way into his vision.

Completed Quest! -Eradicate invader Orcs-

 

Completed Quest! -Kill Orc Warchief-

 

Completed Bonus Quest! -Kill Reinforcements-

 

Calculating contribution… Contribution 65%... You have been awarded 19.5 levels… Please select where you wish to allocate them… -Elementalist- -Child of Mana-

 

You have been awarded the EPIC title [Invader Boss Killer]

 

You have been awarded 3 Medium-grade Mana Stones

 

Noah swiped the notifications away as he needed to think about it first, maybe even buy a few information packets before deciding. He walked toward the crater made by his bomb and scoured the area for the bits and pieces of the orcs’ bodies thinking that he could just feed them to the boars.

While sifting through the remains of the orcs, he was surprised to see that one thing survived when all others didn’t, the staff. Even though it was practically at the center of the blast, it remained unscathed. “This is definitely some good stuff.” He immediately tried to cast [Analyze] but discovered that it didn’t give him any info. He then tried to push mana into the spell to empower it, but he hadn’t recovered enough to make a difference. “Guess I’m gonna have to do this later”

After sifting through the blood-soaked area and taking everything of worth to them and the piglets, Noah went into the village to look for the child. He went through every tent, when a few tents later, Mark arrived and helped to look around. They looked and looked and eventually got to the center of the village where they saw it, a statue the size of a normal orc but with a much more ferocious face. It had tusks disproportionately bigger than its head and scars all over its body. It had its arms outstretched to its side where the little girl was tied up, mimicking a crucifixion. Her wrists were slit with tubes inside of them which lead the blood to an altar at the foot of the statue. Noah used [Analyze] on the altar to see if he could garner any information from it.

An Altar to the Orc God Vakgar

He tried pushing all his recovered mana into the skill but no matter what he did, that was the only information he received. Then suddenly, the girl’s chest rose and fell.

“Mark! Cut her down she’s still alive!”