Chapter 35

The battle kept going on endlessly. I felt so tired, and my weapon felt heavier than before. But somehow I was hanging in there.

More students were wounded, and dying.

But on the plus side of things the brethren of the orcs’ blood and guts made trudging up the slope much harder and more dangerous for them. They were trying to overcome this and push harder but had to look for the rocky spots instead of the sandy spots. Not all of them had good shoes or boots either, so that hurt in other ways. Some of them had cheap sandals it seemed, which were also stolen from previous prey.

This helped slow down the gap of them trying to get at us. But it still didn’t stop them.

Akira yowled like a wild demon and was everywhere kicking with his feet and swinging his log. For about an hour after that he’d found he could do really fast sharp power kicks with his hoofed feet and managed to use the lethal move on at least a dozen orcs that way, while Yuriko was in tow protecting his back as he roamed. The kicking spree also saved his arm strength for later while he fought.

Sometimes I’d hear Yuriko remind him to not leave her alone. But that only increased his kicking spree.

It seemed that without realizing it, Akira’s extra strength had blinded him to how much the rest of us were suffering however. So while he roamed about hitting the larger resistance orc pockets he was helping out a ton of people and holding our defense line together, but he’d also forgotten the core group of us who had helped him and been with him from the start and how vulnerable we were all feeling.

I was on my own.

We were on our own.

And I had to keep Asakura, Rina, and even sometimes Yuriko alive to cover Akira’s weak spots and my teams.

“Don’t leave us Shun!” I’d sometimes hear Asakura cry out. Or sometimes it was Rina. The massive death and carnage had made both of them afraid I’d abandon them to save myself.

I’d been near the front ironically near Akimoto of all people to my astonishment. He stayed close to me, with his aides while I was protecting Rina and Sensei. But it seemed to be the most bizarre situation that I could never have possibly imagined ending up fighting with him cooperating with me. We covered each other despite the fact that we were both still angry over what had happened and I could see he was still going to be upset for probably weeks or even months; but he also respected strength that would help him survive.

Of course I still felt he should be punished, but right now orcs were worse than he was? (I think…) Would he turn on me and go after the weak again?

“Where the hell is Kenji? He should be here fighting too,” Akimoto suddenly asked while we kept hacking at orcs. He seemed expectant like I might know something, watching for a reaction.

“Kenji? Good question,” I said. As long as he wasn’t by Rina it was OK; but I didn’t want to say that because I didn’t know what kinds of secret deals Akimoto, and Yuta had made with people already.

“Eh? What brought that up?” I replied.

“I thought he was with you. Kenji probably can’t fight worth a darn, but his zombies might be able to. If you are trying to hide him from us it won’t work. We already know he’s been doing more of his ‘recruiting’ the dead,” he said.

He just said zombies; as in meaning more than one zombie? Uh oh…

I glanced back to make sure Rina was close, but it was just my paranoia. Whew. I wiped the sweat off my brow with the back of my wrist.

“Why would you think that? He’s creepy and scares the hell out of women everywhere. I think he even did that before we were pulled to this world. He also wants to turn my sister into one of his minions,” I said.

“Crow said he was with you guys,” Akimoto growled and confused.

But he could only think that if...no way! I could see why Crow might think that if he was following us! What a discovery, but not the good kind.

I was momentarily petrified with fear at the thought. “How long does Crow say he’s been following us around again?”

“At least a day.”

“Eh?! That long? And you said zombies, as in more than one?” I asked.

But the only way he could have more zombies is if…

*Gulp*

“Yeah, you didn’t know?” he replied. He was trying to study my face trying to tell if I was hiding something. I couldn’t blame him, because he’d been dealing with Yuta up until now.

I resisted blurting out loud. Now I was afraid to know anymore. How many did he have? Were they orcs or …people we knew and cared about? That would make people pretty upset.

It wouldn’t be good to show weakness in front of Akimoto, or even perceived weakness. I had this awful feeling around him, until I realized inside me deep down I didn’t trust him still. Akimoto seemed a bit too quiet about it, but it was almost like he was gauging my reaction too.

We were both stabbing at orcs every chance we could to add to the gooey slopes of blood below us.

Thanks to everyone’s cooperation, somehow we’d repelled the first block of orcs mostly, with a few stragglers left to kill up here. But as usual there had to be some kind of twist for things to somehow not work out the way we wanted them too.

The problem was that the ones that were the stragglers were also the toughest and strongest, since the grunts were put in the front. There weren’t very many people who didn’t have any wounds either. You could also see some of them had grotesque tattoos or carved victory markers of previous battles on their own bodies.

But while we’d been fighting I caught glimpses of a few people that weren’t members of my group that had a blue screen popup here and there, though none of us could read them. Even if we could read the Egyptian hieroglyphics we couldn’t stop to take a look. It made sense that they wouldn’t all appear at once and that they’d be spread out over the several days that we’d been here, I felt.

One of them was clearly a defender job though. We were excited about that thinking they are good for everyone to increase survival probability above and beyond that of other jobs, but this time it was a boy who I didn’t know the name of and since we didn’t know him we had no way of knowing if he would lean more to our way of thinking or Akimoto and Yuta’s factions. However, I was sure that I’d seen his face around the senior year classes, and he was a bit taller than I was.

He had a spiky hair style with some blonde highlights added in and was also a little bit muscular. But his clothes instead of the school uniform were some type of soccer outfit. Before being kidnapped to this world, he’d been going to a school sports activity maybe?

So much had happened since then, that it seemed like that was a different life even; like I was a different person.

Still, from this we suddenly discovered there were minor differences in the jobs and how they worked with the new discovery. For instance, Yumi’s version of the defender job’s energy shield had an arm guard and shoulder anchor for anti-grappling, and stress resistance built in, but this guy’s energy shield had spikes on the outside of his shield instead, which were also made of energy.

Did that mean there were upgrade options? Or were they related to element types within mana or the person individually?

Akimoto naturally borrowed him to help as his bodyguard with the promise of a position in his future kingdom. It worked with this guy however…the kid was overly excited about becoming a superhero now though, and easily blinded by enthusiasm.

I resisted the chance to yell at him, since it would sour things with Akimoto and I didn’t want him to think that I disapproved of his lack of ethics. Of course I really disapproved and probably wasn’t hiding it very well with my eyes. But I made a note to myself that in the future I’d need make sure I didn’t back down around him.

We kept attacking this one straggler orc, who had scars all over his body and who was a tough son of a beach. It was obviously some kind of veteran with even his own retinue. He’d hidden at the back of the block of other orcs but was obviously different somehow. He’d blocked all kinds of various types of attacks, and I felt reluctant to get close to him before seeing how he moved. I would be vulnerable trying to fight him without seeing his pattern of attack.

Defender boy blocked his attacks and that of one of his minions with the energy shield absorbing the blows effectively with the shield giving off big blue spark showers. But then he’d use the spikes on the shield to sort of hop up and jump with a bash, putting his weight into it, hoping to deflect some of the damage back on them. This worked against one of the scarred orc’s guards wounding them, but then they’d already adapted to account for our defender.

After the initial surprise now he wasn’t gaining any ground against them.

The angry scarred orc was clearly a veteran! He had a lot of killing potential unfortunately. At one point he’d probably been in slave pits of some kind and he had iron prison cuff links with heavy slave chains attached to a ringlet piece in the iron cuffs, which were all made of an old black heavy type iron.

Unfortunately for us, the chains were longer than we’d liked. He liked to whip out the chains fiercely in quick jerks that were almost like sword slashes, especially against exposed wrists, arms, and ankles while the muscles in his arms looked nearly as hard as the iron. Then he’d jerk the person off balance while his guards covering him, momentarily shifted and tried to finish off the prey with spears of their own. This was also the first time I’d been able to see real cooperation among the orcs, and they did it with deadly efficiency.

It proved orcs could be smart too. I didn’t like that idea.

Ironically I’d been so preoccupied with the scarred orc that I’d missed the fact that his face resembled a skull because at some point in his past someone had cut off his nose, and he had scar tissue covering a third of his head on the right side from some kind of bad burns in the past. He was ugly even for an orc, but it only made him scarier!

Several students had tried to approach him unsuccessfully to cut him down. He’d deflected most of their attacks easily with his mighty chains. With terrible strength he could whip the chains around to block with heavy force, or in other ways he’d hold the chain extending it against the blow in the middle with the outer edges of the chain being held by each hand. But his guards were holding back on attacking us so they could focus entirely on blocking for him while he was continually shifting between blocking and attacking.

It was a terrific defense plan to buy time for other orcs to swarm in on us it seemed.

A lot of us were lured into a false sense of security with this type of approach thinking he was blocking because he was weak and boy were we wrong in underestimating him. It was a purposeful lure to get people to get within attack range, and then stomp out our lives quickly and nearly instantly.

Around that same time he’d snapped the chain around a kid’s neck and then before we could react he’d pulled the kid up close to him and broke his neck before we could even blink. In similar manner taking effect with how the other three had died; two girls and a boy. But what made it so dangerous even though three isn’t very many people is how quickly close together they all were.

Just like that the defense line is starting to fracture!

Strangely enough I found out from seeing this that when a blue screen popup showed, if the person was knocked unconscious or killed right after a screen popup then the blue screen turned an evil looking black and after that the text color became a jagged red script spilling over it. This happened to one of the girls, right in front of us. She probably never even knew what her new ability was yet.

I felt a lot of pity for the dead girl and was sad that she was slain. But emotionally I had to steel up my willpower so I could also survive the battle, not dwelling on her death.

Briefly I wondered if they had died because of not respecting his strength; because of mistaking his ugliness for weakness. I’d also been edgy and overconfident, also almost getting in range but jumped back as the chain whipped right up where I’d been standing. Akimoto’s eyes went wide as he’d been right next to me.

We also couldn’t use Akira or Yuriko either at this time because our defense line was divided into two groups; the ones holding the hill defense line, and the second engagement that was holding up this tough orc that refused to die.

Unfortunately with Yumi missing, I had to rely on Akimoto and his rangers. But that meant assuming I survived the first fight, I’d have to make sure he didn’t see an opening in me to get rid of a competitor.

Where was she? This was a perfect Yumi job.

We ended up circling around the chain guy it seemed. He tried to advance on us, but he was also trapped with wanting his back against an area that no humans were behind him. So he could only pursue us so far but kept wanting to try to flank us or look for a position that could be exploited.

“Have the rangers do range bombardment on him. They’ll have to also watch for him charging them. We can’t get too close to the chain guy after all,” I said to Akimoto.

Surprisingly Akimoto listened, while keeping Defender Boy close. This didn’t stop the scarred orc from attacking us however. But it did keep him from moving forward.

This type of quick thinking, actually saved us since he’d been about to charge us. Instead his guards were forced into doing snappy spear movements and using small wrist bucklers to block rock and sling attacks, while the chain user just spun his heavy chains with such force that the air was singing and flinging away any rocks that were directed at him. The wind and sound was so strong it sounded like if the chain were to hit you, it would break a bone in one strike.

Still we kept up the bombardment. Mostly for every ten rocks thrown not even one got through. It wasn’t until about forty rocks had been thrown that even one hit him. This guy’s defense was just unstoppable…period.

“This guy is is a freaking monster,” Akimoto gasped after we’d managed to prevent ourselves from getting killed for several minutes of resistance, and even parried a few attacks by the skin of our teeth. We were sweating like crazy now. My stomach felt like it was eating itself from not having good meals over the last few days either.

I just wanted this to end.

“Rina and Sensei make sure you stay back. This guy is a one shot kill boss,” I warned.

We tried again, even throwing spare orc weapons from fallen comrades like missiles but they kept bouncing off the whirling chains of death. Because his chains could grapple I was also afraid of trying to even get close to block.

The rangers still pelted him, however as best they could and it became a match and dance of footwork of retreating, moving forward, faking to one side, and other movements for everyone including the orcs. Even they were tense against us.

“Need to have someone come in from behind and for Defender Boy to stop his chain from grappling and providing an opening,” I coached to Akimoto, referring to his team’s new member.

“Do it,” he encouraged confirming the order.

“Eh?! Why?” Defender boy said.

“If your shield is like Yumi’s it should have shock absorption and something to help with grappling,” I said.

“Eh? That sounds useful,” Akimoto leered.

“His doesn’t look like Yumi’s though,” one of the rangers said nervously.

Oh?

“Hmm, that could be true. If that’s the case you’ll have to just like touch and go, edge in slowly to feel it out with shallow blows and blocks first,” I said hurriedly while keeping my eye on the scarred veteran beater orc.

Still he cautiously moved forward, testing it. The orcs surged forward all three of them bashing the shield, which held, but he was pushed back but not before we threw sand and dirt in the orc’s eyes. The rangers managed to land a couple of rocks on the orc’s chest, which his guards didn’t cover in time.

He hissed and screamed at us in fury of course.

“Good idea,” Akimoto said. “The rest of you try to blind him and provide cover.”

The rangers got dirt ready but the orcs saw what we were doing. One of them tried to gut a ranger with extending his spear full length. We were pushed back again, but then someone managed to get a few rocks through the opening.

Around us we could still hear how bad the fighting was in other areas. I could only hope things would work out.

The orc then tried to lunge at Akimoto, recognizing he was some kind of leader. The ranger aides near him blocked with their spears trying to protect him and shaking off the chains, while defender boy rammed the orc with his shield. But the two impenetrable guards had seen the movement and rushed in trying to stab at him. We blocked one, but there was a wound in the defender kid’s off hand arm and he stumbled away. Somehow the kid managed to avoid being paralyzed with pain, but just barely made it out of range alive.

Thankfully he could still keep the shield up with his good hand.

“This isn’t going to well,” I muttered.

“ARRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHH!” he yelled again retreating as they tried to press the advantage. He apparently wasn’t quite as coordinated as Yumi. It was confirmed too that not all the defender’s shield’s had the shock absorption. That surprised me greatly.

It also confirmed that there were upgrade options.

Did agility also affect being able to get the shield up in time? There must be some kind of science to it after all.

More rocks thrown were thrown with very little effect. We were getting nowhere fast. The chains kept going faster and faster with their singing effect, and the spears of the guards blocked everything. This was hell. The rangers were getting bone tired, but hanging on but their aim was getting sloppy from fighting all day.

But then we were shocked by a sudden break through for the orcs when another kid died, getting too close to the chains and being one shot so hard his body bounced off the ground with horrifying violent force like three inches while a few of his teeth were knocked out and scattered on the rocky ground. His sightless eyes stared into space.

It was a nice kid, named Yu that I liked back home. He was a nice kid and his death was a waste. Until now I hadn’t even known where he was.

The other kids got angry though, and just like that we were shocked when there was suddenly a rumbling sound and suddenly a narrow but deep pit appeared in the middle of nowhere and one of the orcs had fallen in. The orc screamed, like mad though we couldn’t see how deep the hole was. Then there was the sound of a lot of thrashing around and then a still quiet from the hole.

Corresponding with the hole, someone else had a popup. It was then confirmed as some kind of magic skill, but I’m not quite yet which one.

She was the one that had opened up the hole, I realized!

“Eh?” a girl cried out in surprise.

She was kind of an odd tall girl that was into gangster wannabe culture back home with a tan and hair bleached blonde, and usually dressed to show off her figure. I didn’t know her name, but had seen others avoid her before. Her hair was pulled back into French braided pigtails that were long flowing down her back that didn’t quite match her dark gangster look and leather jacket. It was very elaborately done and gave her a mysterious look. She had on some kind of leggings with the school uniform skirt on over them and a good pair of sneakers for running. Overall she had a pretty and skinny face but I didn’t like her eyebrow earring. She also looked like she was possibly mixed blood and Eurasian it seemed.

She stood out a lot too with her look. I’m surprised I hadn’t seen her before. I had forgotten that she was probably friends with the kid that just died, since I’d seen them together at school more than a few times.

Somehow his death had apparently triggered some kind of negative emotional response in her. We all could see that she was the reason for the hole. She was looking at her hands, “did I do that?” she said aloud confused.

She tried it again, but it didn’t work, stretching out her hand at the scarred orc. Then the third time the existing hole rumbled a bit, but nothing else happened.

Scarred orc and his remaining guard stared back unsure about continuing. They hadn’t believed someone could get one of them up until this point because of their impenetrable defense. And it had only taken one shot to completely remove the one orc defending the veteran scarred boss orc!

“I think I did that. But hell I feel so freaking tired now,” she said feeling weak.

“Hmm,” I said. If she felt extreme fatigue afterwards…it was probably magic and confirmation that it was her. Someone else had a magic job it seems. I just hoped it wasn’t someone like Yuta or Kenji.

“Oh no, she’s a bad kid,” someone said.

“Well aren’t we all bad kids for being punished by being brought to this world,” the second ranger aide girl said.

“Who said that?!” gangster girl lashed out angrily. Nobody owned up.

“Is this? Earth manipulation of some kind? Or do you mean like earth magic?” Akimoto suggested.

Earth magic?

I suppose that could be what had opened up the hole. Although truthfully, there were other things that could do something similar also. However, in this case, I agree it’s probably an earth element!

“Is there a difference between the two?” the aide girl asked in response.

“Who knows. Could be she might be a bit weak still, but we can’t be too sure,” he replied.

“It’s something like that. But if she misfired it after the first time it’s either like a simple version still or she’s probably not got a lot of power,” I said agreed. Thinking about how my skill worked, it had a lot of limits right now that were extremely hard to push against.

By now the orcs were scared. After all nobody had ever gotten through their impenetrable defense. Now the prestige of the veteran mini-boss scarred orc was working against them because no had thought it possible to even wound him or his guards! Chain using scarred orc was getting desperate and acting erratic. He swung around more desperately and had to cover the defense of the other guard. They seemed to be pulling away towards ground where there were less humans suddenly.

Seconds later ranger javelins had sneaked in behind and suddenly his other guard was dead with two javelins having pierced his back through the heart.

The scarred orc suddenly ran though, before we could stop him. He was skidding down the hill pretty quickly; before anyone could hit him with rocks.

“Don’t let him get away!” we screamed but it was too late. He’d slid down the hill in retreat.

But what was even more surprising was there was a strange tiny little man’s bearded head with a brown cloth cap similar to a Santa style like cap sticking up out of the ground. He appeared to be looking at all of us strangely. He looked like he was about three feet tall by the look of him, but we could only see from the shoulders on up.

“…the fudge is that?” someone said.

“Now which one of you fuckers wrecked the roof to my home?!” he said angrily in a whiny high pitched voice.

His face was turning beat red. He didn’t look human, being too small, plus his beard was too big to be an elf. He didn’t look anything like an elf actually, as we stared at him. Not only that his sharp nose was pointed more than any other type of nose I’d seen so far and a little longer than a normal human’s despite his size with little nose whisker hairs the same gray color as his head sticking out the bottom. A full nostril mustache; I didn’t know there was such a thing until now. It was clear the whiskers weren’t even attached to the lip, but to the nostrils themselves.

Disturbing…

Gangster girl turned earth manipulator had already ducked behind a bunch of rocks to hide. After all she’d run from the law before this and knew when it was time to hide. We could see her desperately trying to hand signal us not to rat her out.

We all stared at him.

“Is that a gnome? Oh wow! It’s a gnome isn’t it?” Sensei asked behind me suddenly very excited. She looked like she’d found a new kitten.

I was just glad to be alive so I didn’t answer her right away while I was trying to catch my breath.

We’d just discovered gnomes!