I pushed forward, the left hallway had a group of three. Two of which were in the second tier. I allocated a few minds to keep track of both Lea and Jazz. Jazz was taking care of his hallway by just sending a flood of slightly smaller spikes down the hallway, making it impossible to dodge and difficult to block.

Lea had five opponents that she was handling, and was dealing with them in expert grace. I directed a couple of other minds to assist her, playing support by tripping people or occasionally shooting a spell into their back.

In the meantime, I launched forward into melee against my three opponents. One of the tier 2’s dropped backward to start peppering me with spells from a distance.

I just created a wooden tendril to spear him from behind going straight through his heart. He was completely unprepared at the moment to deal with it. The other two were a rogue and a fighter respectively, the tier two using double daggers and the fighter using a sword and shield.

I activated [Lightning’s Guidance] and began catching their individual blows and parrying them with expert precision. The rogue was decently fast for a tier two, but lacking the advantage of having a third class was really putting a damper on what they were capable of.

I left it at one sword to handle deflecting the blows of the two daggers from the rogue and one sword deflecting the sword of the fighter. With my many minds, it was quite easy to keep track of both of them. The only problem I was having was that I could only deflect the blows from the fighter. His strength was well beyond mine, if I tried to stop the attack he might end up breaking my arm.

With every one of his powerful swings, I had to repair the damage done to my sword. He wasn’t going to be able to cut through it unless he used a skill. But the issue was that he could more than likely cut through it with a skill.

I narrowed my focus and unleashed my full repertoire. [Storm Points] covered the ground and I began haphazardly activating them, giving off the appeal of active ground wires. I then started spawning tendrils out of the ceiling and wall to shoot spells and then began jumping through them rapidly. The only reason I was able to keep track of where I was, was the fact that I could centralize my view from an outside perspective.

They did not have that luck. I bounced around the room and combined with all the lightning filling the lightning they didn’t stand a chance of telling where I was. I sent out a couple of [Storm Explosions] covering the view before appearing in the middle of them, my swords flashing and cutting through their necks, not fully decapitating them, but causing their neck to hang only by a few inches of flesh and muscle.

My minds keeping track of Jazz showed me he was fine, but Lea was… not fine. She had a few cuts, some of them looked pretty deep and were bleeding profusely.

Quickly running through the memories I had apparently come to the decision that she would be fine until I dealt with my opponents and I should now prioritize her instead. Nodding I melded the minds watching her back into the main consciousness and started hammering off a veritable storm, pun intended, of spells at her opponents.

I jumped through one of the spells, pincering Lea’s opponents. She had already dropped two of them, so only three remained. Between the two of us, they didn’t stand a chance.

I activated [Lightning Stream] my world speeding up just a little bit more as I did so. The guy in the back had some sort of danger sense because as I prepared to hit him his sword suddenly appeared under his arm, aimed straight at my face. I reflexively activated [Dodge]something I hadn’t felt pressured to do in a long while, my world immediately slowed down as I sped up.

At my speed, 1 second was a long time. I dipped under his sword, cut through his leg, and stabbed him in the heart while he fell. Moving to the next target I flipped one of my swords so I was holding in an underhanded form and then pulled back, hurling it like a lightning-infused spear. It blasted straight through another guy's chest leaving a blackened hole where a lung used to be.

The other guy, now thoroughly distracted by me, was dispatched quickly and easily by Lea. Jazz appeared next to us around the same time, the invisibility on his magic item finally timing out, bringing him back to visibility.

Lea held onto her side as she walked up next to us, “We don’t have time to stop,” She said, “we need to keep going.”

To her surprise, I didn’t argue with her, and instead just nodded.

“Jazz, take lead. I’ll guide you and let you know if we’re coming up on anyone.”

To my subsequent surprise, he didn’t argue with me and instead stared for a single second before nodding and following the path I indicated.

Before Lea could even try to refuse I scooped her up into my arms in a bridal carry, she let out a slight squeak of surprise but calmed down when I explained.

“Don’t struggle, I know this is awkward, but I need to heal you now or you might be in trouble. You’ve already lost a lot of blood and it’s going to take a lot of time to heal you already. You’re also right that we need to keep moving, this is the only way. When you can walk I’m dropping you.”

She belatedly nodded as I started directing Jazz telling him which of the winding curves and turns to take to avoid patrols and make it back to the surface as quickly as possible.

It took a decent amount of mana and effort to heal Lea’s wounds, but we got there in the end and in good measure too.

“Stop!” I called out, Jazz immediately coming to a halt.

“Fuck,” I swore, “We’re stuck. They already have the ladder completely blocked off. There’s probably… twenty-five guys there, and we’ve got a horde catching up to us, twenty behind us as far as I can see with more surely following.”

Lea’s lips pursed her eyes rapidly flicking back and forth and something only she could see. I did the same, quickly scanning my skills to try and determine the best way I could utilize my skills to burn through the enemies.

I was already down to just half mana after healing Lea and the two skirmishes we had already had.

Just around the corner in front of us was the ladder, it was completely cut off from our reach. I started scanning the levels of the people blocking our path.

[Level 32³]

[Level 25³]

[Level 10³]

[Level 55³]

[Level 42⁴]

…

“Well fuck,” I said out loud.

“What?” Lea asked quickly.

“There’s a tier four hidden amongst that group. We genuinely might just be fucked here.”

Lea shook her head, “No, let’s double back and loop through the base. We’ll commit to guerilla warfare if we need to. This base is large and with your omniscience, we can keep from running ourselves into a dead end and take the fights we can actually win. We’re well rested so we won’t need to sleep for several days if it comes down to it.”

I nodded, that was honestly our best bet. Right now we just couldn’t handle tackling so many guys at once as it stood.

We stood up and turned to go back the way we came. We still had a little while before the people behind us caught up.

“I know you’re there,” A voice called out to us, causing us to come to a stop.

It was the tier four. Had he heard us whispering? I had thought we were far enough away to avoid being heard. This wasn’t good.

“If you surrender now, this will be a lot easier for all parties involved. I might even let you live,” He said mirthfully, a tone that left no questions about the fact that he definitely did not plan to let us live.

“Move,” Lea ordered, quietly, but firmly. We started running and making our way back. Letting one of my minds keep track of the tier four, I could see him sigh and stretch as if loosening his muscles in preparation for exercise.

My eyes widened, “Tier four, incoming!” I said while spinning around and taking a defensive stance. We had no chance in hell of outrunning him if he decided to get serious. Thoughts of my fight with Firebird came to mind, the way she candidly toyed with me during our fight.

Fuck, this was a completely shitty situation all around. There was really no good way out of this. I could easily teleport to the surface, I hadn’t been able to see into the base for some reason, but I could see out of it and that allowed me to easily see the surface.

“Jazz, Lea, you two go ahead and get around him. Try to push your way past the people guarding the ladder. If you can make it out, I can easily follow behind you by teleporting to the surface. Then I can carry us and try to flee, hopefully, he won’t be able to fly.”

Lea pursed her lips, looking incredibly anxious. I could see her trying to work the plan through her mind, see if there was possibly a better idea that had a higher chance of success.

There really wasn’t anything though, from what I could tell she didn’t have [Parallel Minds] so she couldn’t reach conclusions as fast as I could. I could daisy-chain my minds together to increase their thinking power, allowing me to process information much, much faster than normal.

And I had already tried to come up with tons of plans. Unless Lea or Jazz had some bullshit magic item hidden away that their rich families had bought them, we were screwed and had one chance of success. If the tier four hadn’t been here, we might’ve had a chance as well.

Eventually, she nodded, “I have a magic item that will help clear them out. If you can distract him long enough for us to get by and deal with the rest of the members blocking our escape, we’ll have a sure shot of succeeding.”

Maybe she did have some bullshit magic item then. I would’ve normally been angry at her for not being upfront about something like that, but I could understand not wanting to tell people you, essentially, barely knew that you were walking around with hundreds of thousands of gold worth of magic items.

That’s the kind of thing that got you disappeared and your gear sold on the black market.

I nodded, acknowledging what she said before closing my eyes and focusing myself on the fight ahead. The other two stepped back to give me space to work with. They also didn’t want to get caught up in the fight that was about to happen.

Checking behind me I could see that our chasers wouldn’t get here before the tier four did, and hopefully, they didn’t try to join in. More than likely they would see their boss, or whoever he was, fighting me and back off letting him handle it.

Hopefully, this guy would also toy with me, the longer he did so the better it would end up being for us.

I started placing [Storm Points] down across the hallway. Wood started growing in the hallway creating a thick blockage both in front of us and behind us, making it impossible to get to us without using overwhelming force.

I placed individual tendrils down across the ground to control and try to trip up my soon-to-be opponent. I trapped the hallway to hell and back using obscene amounts of mana in the process.

I still feared it wasn’t near enough. But it was going to have to do. The bandit boss launched forward, the stone beneath his feet cracking underneath the force of his push-off.

He hit the first branches of wood and tore through them like paper, the second he touched them I slammed down every last one of my ramparts in between me and him in a near futile attempt to slow him down.

Every time one broke, I placed another at the end of the line. He slowed marginally, but not enough to make a meaningful difference.

The tendrils of wood snapped as feet as the hallway exploded with lightning as I poured massive chunks of mana into hurling spells into the hallway in a vain attempt to do anything.

He pushed out the other end of the explosion, his arm outstretched as he reached to grab my neck. He had slowed down as he got closer, probably because he wanted to capture me rather than kill me by instantly pulping everything from my neck up when he connected with me.

This worked out to my advantage.

I activated [Dodge] as he got closer, and it put me just above the speed that he was moving at. It allowed me to grab both Jazz and Lea with tendrils before they could react and fling them down the hallway past the bandit boss.

His eyes widened in surprise as did Jazz and Lea’s as they soared past him. I took advantage of his momentary distraction and activated [Lightning Stream], both of my swords exploding with power as they moved forward with blinding speed, faster than they’ve ever moved before with the extra agility I was receiving from [Dodge].

If it were anyone else they wouldn’t have even been able to see the swords coming. They would’ve died without knowing quite how it had happened.

Unfortunately, I was hopelessly outclassed. The bandit boss’ eyes narrowed and he deftly slipped under one sword, then the other, and lashed out with a lightning, pun not intended, quick punch that literally broke the sound barrier.

A sonic boom thundered through the hallway as his fist connected with the armor covering my chest, practically causing it to disintegrate and launching me backward at high speeds.

I felt multiple bones in my chest practically powderise as I flew backward. It was at this moment that the bandits following us turned the corner and ran directly into my flight path.

I slammed into one and a ping resonated through my brain. I was already pumping healing through my body as I had been flying, I watched my health take a massive hit as the guy I collided with died instantly.

Thankfully the collision broke a lot of my speed, allowing me to hit the ground and roll with minimal damage. After tumbling for dozens more feet, I collided with the back wall of the hallway, my head slamming against it with a sharp crack.

Looking at both my health and mana, I was below half on both. I might have enough mana to heal me all the way to full, but I wouldn’t also be able to escape if I did that as well.

I detached one of my minds from the pain wracking my body and had it start [Resting] in an attempt to recover any minuscule amount of mana that I could. I detached another mind to look at both Jazz and Lea. The ladder room was a scene of carnage and destruction. I hadn’t seen what had happened, but the people who had been guarding the room were in multiple pieces or bloodstains on the wall.

Whatever Lea had done, it was extremely effective. They were now outside the base and running. Lea kept glancing over her shoulder, looking for where I was. I spent a teeny tiny bit of mana to spawn a lily under her feet, just to at least let her know I was alright.

I wanted them to be further away before I joined them. As it stood now, if I tried to leave now, the bandit boss would easily be able to catch up with us. I needed to hold his attention a little longer while they put more distance in between them and the base, once that threshold was crossed…

Well, I could worry about that if I lived beyond the next five seconds.