Sss Awakening I Can Class Change At Will Chapter 695

[ … words ]

She looked at Moon’s back, then at the others. “And the horde will follow us when we run. Less than twenty beasts we can handle. We thin them out, gain the lives and the experience, and come back stronger instead of dying uselessly here.”

Vela didn’t waste time debating it. There wasn’t any to spare.

“Understood.” She hefted her hammer and jerked her head toward the others.

“Moon. Take care of yourself. Do not die on us.” A grim, tired almost-smile on her face before she said, “We’ll handle the beasts. Regroup when you can.”

The team broke away, retreating fast across the snow.

Moon didn’t wait for the archer to react.

The instant his team turned to run, he rushed the elf, blades blazing with ice and lightning, throwing himself into its space to seize its attention and deny it the chance to loose a volley at the retreating team’s backs. If it wanted to command its horde, fine. But it wasn’t getting a free shot at his people while they were exposed.

The archer simply smiled.

And it did exactly what Moon had predicted. It raised one hand, and issued a command in its foreign tongue, and the reserve horde moved to life, the beasts breaking from their holding position and thundering off across the snow after the fleeing team.

Its beasts would chase the Evolvers.

Just Moon and the Surpasser now, alone on the churned red battlefield.

Exactly the way Moon needed it to be.

Alone on the battlefield, Moon took stock, and his options were thinner than he’d hoped.

Life Burn was still there, the one card that could close the gap outright. He kept it in reserve, a last resort, praying he wouldn’t have to reach for it.

Checking his status screen, his eyes caught the fifteen unallocated attribute points, banked from his level-ups and never spent since.

This could help. A little.

It wasn’t going to transform him. Fifteen points wasn’t the difference between an Evolver and a Surpasser. But every little power-up mattered against a gap this wide, and the additional strength might be exactly the margin that kept him alive long enough for the racial skill’s timer to run dry.

He pulled the screen fully into focus.

[Name: Moon]

[Race: Human]

[Class: Classless]

[Level: 42] [4%]

[Lives: 271,519] [Super Lives: 0]

[Strength: 170] [Agility: 230] [Constitution: 262] [Mana: 284] (+20 to all stats)

[Attribute Points: 15]

Moon glanced at his four options, and didn’t hesitate long.

Part of him wanted strength, the raw physical power to deal more physical damage and match the archer’s brutal force.

But strength alone wouldn’t carry him. Almost everything keeping him alive right now ran on mana.

His healing, elements use, assimilation which he was burning mana to sustain on his blade every single second of this fight. If his mana ran dry, he lost the healing that patched his broken bones, the assimilation that made his sword bite, and half his arsenal all at once.

Mana was the resource this fight would live or die on.

He dumped all fifteen points into it.

[Mana: 298]

He instantly felt the surge of mana, a cool flood of energy rushing through his mana channels, his reserves expanding.

Moon rolled his shoulders, resettled his grip on both blades, ice and lightning humming back to full, and fixed his eyes on the archer.

“Just you and me now.”

The Surpasser raised its bow and released an arrow.

Moon was already moving, rushing forward in an unpredictable sequence, but the elf fought exactly the way an archer wanted to fight. It gave ground as he advanced, backpedaling, keeping the distance open, loosing arrow after arrow to wall him off.

Every time Moon gained a meter, the elf took one back, and the arrows came relentless, forcing him to parry with great difficulty, dodge and burn momentum he couldn’t spare.

It never let him close, controlling the range as it pleased, keeping Moon in the killing zone where a bow ruled and a sword was useless.

Moon waited for his Air-step cooldown to end before activating the skill.

He kicked off the air itself, launching sideways and forward in an angle the archer couldn’t wall off with a straight shot, and the burst of unexpected movement carried him inside the elf’s range at last.

His ice blade came around and struck into the archer’s side, the assimilated cold pouring into the wound, and the Freezing Cold debuff activated.

This was his first solid strike since the racial skill activated.

Unfortunately, it didn’t come without a cost. Even as his blade landed, the archer twisted and released an arrow at point-blank range, and Moon couldn’t fully clear the shot. The arrow grazed his shoulder, ripping a chunk of meat away in a spray of blood.

Moon hissed through his teeth and threw himself back out of range before the follow-up could take his arm off entirely.

I almost lost my shoulder, a finger’s width closer and that arm’s gone for good.

He landed hard, casting Minor Mend and Cleanse into the wound on reflex, the healing knitting torn muscle back together.

Thankfully, Cleanse was an epic-rank healing skill that could deal with such injuries. Had he lost his arm, even Cleanse would have no effect besides forming a stub and stopping the bleeding.

The pain stayed like a deep grinding fire in the joint.

The trade had been one shallow cut on the elf for a shoulder nearly torn off him.

The northern commander stared at him with a massive grin on its face, before drawing its bow once more, ready to tear his shoulder completely off his body this time around.

Moon immediately began to move, making himself a difficult target to hit whilst clutching his healing left shoulder.

Once again, Moon was forced on the retreat.

‘It’s been a few minutes since it activate the skill… how long is this going to last!’

Moon hoped that it wouldn’t last ten minutes, but he wasn’t sure whether he could hold on for that long.