Chapter 437: North

“Keep distance, keep distance.” Booker exhaled. “God dammit.”

To run away meant to compromise the mission. If this had been him, Jules, and Matty, this mission would have gone off without a hitch. If this had been Kazi, Jules, and Matty, it would have been even easier.

Bang, bang, bang!

Here he was with his twin guns, killing away and getting a giant demon whale to follow him on a lake. A lake. In his old life, he learned to not underestimate the size of lakes. They could be deceptively huge.

Bang, bang, bang! Bang, bang, bang!

The Ibong Adarna suddenly jerked back. A fireball nearly struck its left wing. Shit, the monster birds were getting through…!

The Anostos Birds fought valiantly. They appeared to act on instinct rather than with a strong mind like the rainbow bird of the Philippines. The dark birds tore through the swarm. However…the sheer number of enemies was too overwhelming. One fell—

Bang, bang, bang!

He tried to cover up for their mistakes. He tried to kill faster. Alas, even Booker Davis Jr could not stop the second Anostos Bird from passing, the body torn apart by beaks and becoming one with the wind. That left one Anostos bird. Like it mattered. The scales had officially tipped. The Japanese monster birds could attack him directly now. The Bake-kujira could focus on him now.

Five seconds. Five seconds later and the last Anostos Bird vanished within the storm. If it died, he wouldn’t have been able to tell.

The Ibong Adarna let out a piercing cry and hurled itself up. It was suddenly faster and stronger and glowing with colours. It let out a shriek and spat on the enemies below.

“Huh?”

They were…turning to stone? Interesting! It was a contagious phenomena too! Just touching led to the other being infected. The process was catching it was instant although the spread of stone itself was not. It was a pained, prolonged process and it helped.

Bang, bang, bang! Excellent work from the rainbow bird.

Except…

“Hang in there, bird buddy,” Booker said, reloading his pistols. The effort of the stone spitting left the bird visibly strained. On top of that, his pistols were smoking black from all the shots.

Pistols of the White Abyss ran on a gunman’s mana. Therefore, like a sword or a shield, the gun itself could wear off. Break, or more specifically, overheat. Luckily, smoke did not mean the pistol was near the end of its life cycle. Booker made sure to buy pistols that would be effective for this battle. All the gun needed was a second.

Three fireballs shot out from the army underneath him. The Ibong Adarna dodged while Booker dropped and clung to it.

“Sorry, buddy.”

Bang, bang, bang! Reload!

Booker fired shot after shot, hovering at a distance and sniping at the birds that learned to avoid the falling stone birds. Coming from several different directions and not as one, Booker had to react faster and the Ibong Adarna had to strike when he couldn’t.

It was clear the Ibong Adarna couldn’t keep this up.

He counted the time. They were at the six minute mark officially. Four minutes had gone by and that was when it happened. Something faster and stronger and formless emerged. A shadow-bird who caught them off-guard, reached them, and raked its claws across the Ibong Adarna’s side. The legendary bird shrieked in pain—

Bang!

Booker shot the strange dark bird. It didn’t matter. The Ibong Adarna’s wings faltered as the two began to plummet.

“No, come on…!”

They were diving head-first into the hungry monster birds. ’So many of them…!’ Shit, shit! Pursing his lips and saluting, he leapt off the bird’s back.

He closed his eyes. Below him were monsters. In some seconds, he was about to be surrounded by them. The language of death roared in his ears.

The Bake-kujira. The sea. The bird of healing.

“Counterflow Stance.”

A hundred and thirty-two monsters were about to rip him and the Ibong Adarna till they were nothing. They would kill and move on without a care in the world.

Booker killed every single one of them with his gun.

He was Level 50 and equipped with the Gunman Class. He could do this. Only he could do this.

He was diving, diving, diving. Not stopping. Head-first and parallel to the Ibong Adarna.

For a moment, he was weightless, suspended in the air above the avenging whale and the monsters shrieking and charging up at him. Then, with a burst of incomprehensible power, he flipped himself over and kicked downward—once, twice, three times in rapid succession. Each kick generated a concentrated shockwave, propelling him upward as if he were running on solid ground.

It wasn’t flight, but it was close.

Flight without wind, without magic.

What Booker was doing was stepping into the dominion of the gods. He kicked and flew, catching the Ibong Adarna and then hurling it away like a baseball.

“Go back to your master!” Booker yelled. “I got this!”

He propelled through the air, then kicked off again and hurled himself into the swarm of monsters.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

His pistols barked with each flick of his wrist. He cut down enemies not with an ancient weapon of the samurai but with modern tools. Indeed, he had not charged in willy-nilly. No, he saw a gap and he went right for it. Like in a tunnel, he dove and shot everything in sight.

It was a risk.

It was well-worth it.

He almost thought they were going to overwhelm him. They didn’t.

Because in the next beat, half of the monster army was split apart. Their commander, the Bake-kujira, ordered them to chase after another target. Many targets.

Metals in the water.

It worked. The plan was working.

Down below on the waters, Remmy and the fishermen’s metal scraps were catching onto the whale’s magnetic sense. Like a central server, the monsters were given orders and followed them, regardless of logic.

That left Booker to deal with half an army of bird monsters. One hundred of them.

Counterflow Stance. His muscles tensed up and time slowed for the smallest period of time. Then, his feet kicked down and halted his falling momentum. He was not Kazi or the Wizards or any of them who had massive area-of-effect attacks. He had his guns, he had his fists, and he had his mind.

So to dive anyway and attack the bone whale head-on was suicide. An army was between him.

“Looks like I’m going all out after all.”

Blink, blink, blink.

Blinkbkinkblinkblinkblink—!

Faster than the eye could see, he destroyed the army of a hundred in ten seconds.

CRACKLE! SLAM!

The butt of his pistol made contact with the whale’s skull and shattered upon contact. The white bone was hard and…hot? Oh no.

Blink.

He appeared twenty feet away. He kicked the air to keep himself afloat. From where he was before, steam erupted. That was when he heard it. A series of twangs. Arrows soared underneath where Booker kicked himself up and struck the Bake-kujira’s skull.

Among the fifty arrows, several were flaming. Boom! The fire arrows that made contact with the steam imploded.

’That must have been Remmy. Excellent.’

He relaxed a bit. With a long-range archer like Remmy as well as everyone else, reaching the north would be a cinch.

Like Kazi said it would.

Bang!

Booker shot his gun in the same moment the boats rowed back and shot arrows. The Bake-kujira’s magnetic sensors were thrown off. It did not summon steam to block it.

Arrows kept flying and striking and breaking. The damage was pathetic, save for what Remmy and the select few players on board delivered.

It was enough for their purposes. Enough to distract and guide it. Booker made sure to keep himself precisely thirty feet away. That way…

Bang, bang, bang!

Small amounts of steam cloaked the birthed monsters. Booker and everyone assumed it birthed the monsters on its underside, in the water, but no. It could create them anywhere. The water and the chaos merely masked that fact.

Which was actually more convenient because it meant the Bake-kujira could think and consider where it wanted to create its monster. With its magnetic sensors going haywire, it decided to create monsters on its upper side.

It wanted to kill Booker as fast as possible. Its instincts were its folly because it did not understand that this was a mistake.

Indeed, emerging directly from bone made it not at all hard to kill the moment they took their first breath. Booker had an excellent angle to spawn-kill the monsters. He had excellent back-up too. When the arrows of those below were too slow…

Blink.

He went right in and killed everything. The steam was too slow to catch up to him. The Bake-kujira Bake-kujira was a behemoth of a thing and it did not swim in and out of the water. It was a titanic ship, steady and mighty. Booker and the ones on the boat could see its ribcage.

Through the crashing of waves and killing of monsters and twangs, he heard laughter. Booker glanced down.

Ah, they were here. North.

Running along the water was a maniacal sword-swinging pink blur.

“Mission accomplished.”

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