Aerial Scouting

Keeping our new familiars a secret was not that hard, all it required was a solemn Blood Binding that increased our connections and exchanged our abilities. I could not speak for the others since they both kept them as secrets with proud smiles, but I alone granted twenty-nine and twenty-eight Agility and Intelligence respectively for a return of sixteen and twenty-one Willpower and Agility.

[Agility has reached 300]

[Acquired Agility Perk: Speed=Force]

[Speed=Force: After reaching 300 points in Agility and achieving a personal MVSPD at least twice that of the standard average human, all physical attacks that reach your character's top speed does 50% true damage as blunt force impact and inches of knockback regardless of defenses]

My Strength alone was currently two-sixty without temporary stats, a punch that reached the peak speed of my overall combined one-seventy-five-percent movement speed would do sixty-five damage even if I punched a shield with my naked fist.

With my current gauntlets that did around fifty damage, my full-speed punch would deal ninety damage and inches of knockback to a shield-blocked punch. Ninety inches was seven-and-a-half feet or almost three meters. A full-speed sword swing with a minimum of seventy damage from the sword would deal one-ten damage and inches.

Eventually, everybody would be receiving such skills if they did not already commit every stat point to a single stat by my level. I was lucky enough that I was receiving all of the classless level two hundred perks while I was still under level one hundred. My next three hundred point perks would not be long from now for Intelligence, Endurance, and then Willpower.

The next day after everybody awoke from our group nap, my small scouting party and I simply climbed up to the plateau to meet up with our new familiars. Because the bees were not that big, only the three of us could go for a ride and even then we had to move much of my character inventory into my player inventory to lower our weight.

Once we were actually riding the bees at the base of their thorax with a light saddling of crude cordycep silks, the bees were able to rise up about ten yards above the ground before flitting forward over the plateau. I personally was only able to reach a relative height of about ten meters while riding my 'Crystallized Infection Harvester'.

Lil, as the lightest among us, was able to reach about fifty feet in the air even with her weapon out and practicing attacks. Go, being the heaviest with his poleaxe as a mounted weapon and two-meter body, could not quite reach thirty feet even on the biggest bee.

After we caught Lil getting ahead in their mastery skill, Go and I were both forced to fly lower to the ground to compensate for the weight and balance shifts caused by our own practice swings and casts.

Our flight speed was also slowed down because of this, but it was for the best because of our altitude and the uneven sloping and breakage of the plateau. Every few dozen yards there would be a massive boulder rising high overhead to shadow the surrounding frozen plateau. Even when there was nothing ahead of us to steer away from the ground itself would dip down or rise by a few yards in different areas and creature pockets of differently pressured air that would force our bees to bob and weave at random.

It was probably due to this more than our actual practice strokes that we slowly accumulated experience for our new aerial mastery. Luckily, all of this was not that hard to get used to thanks to the default acquisition of our riding skill. Since the riding skills were cataloged as miscellaneous skills, having my combat assistance systems turned off did not affect my current mounted flying movements. While in combat, though, that may change.

For the time being I focused on how it felt to ride in these shitty saddled while my body automatically adjusted for the different changes in the bee's movements. The bee itself flew so smoothly for the most part that my automatic adjustments rarely even took place. Unless of course the bee randomly dropped about five feet in the air.

By the end of our first half hour of flying and practicing we had all gained our first level in Aerial Combat within a few minutes of one another and I even received a level in my riding skill. We did not gain anything else even after a full hour of playing around, though, so we soon put a stop to our efforts to gain both speed and altitude.

Checking our maps after having flown for a full hour without confrontations, we found that we had traveled out five miles from camp. Camp itself was less than a mile out from Melpomene's icon on the map and we were now halfway to the center of the heart from the upper outer side.

Since we were not exactly high up in the air, we could only see a few miles ahead. However, only a few miles away toward the east was a lowly dipping area of the plateau that was currently falling out of proper view. This change in the landscape was more or less in line with the middle area of Melpomene's marker.

Deciding we had more or less done enough for now, considering how long it would take to actually to reach the depression in the plateau, I make Lil and Go mark the edge of the depression on the map before sending them both back to camp. Lil was still one of our main mages, she was needed for construction duty.

Go was also the party's speed tank, one of our main enforcers during conflicts who could be put to use anywhere in a fight and be anywhere with a swiftness. I played the roles of a tank, damage dealer, ranged fighter, and general leadership. I would be fine by myself even in the Winter Wood while the others needed to stick together.

After watching my companions zoom away out of sight back the way we came, I decided to fly deeper into the quest territory to see what the exact location might be. This depression area could cover multiple miles by itself and managing through it could take a day or two by itself. It was better to know what we were getting into ahead of time.

Flying alone seemed to make a difference to the game because I had barely made it half of the way to the depression in the plateau before my vision flashed red. Looking around and even up above, I found nothing at all.

Then, looking down, I spotted a small flock of over a dozen ice birds of large adult sizes flying up toward the bee and I from a patch of rubbled forestry off to the side in a pitted area of the plateau.

The ice birds began attacking before they even arrived, launching volleys of icy feather blades ahead of and around the bee to restrict its movements. The bee responded quite simply, dropping to know more than ten feet above the ruined plateau and out of reach of the initial barrage. It honestly felt like my stomach had bolted up into my throat from the gravity.

I could tell in an instant that some of my riding skill's settings had changed, my body no longer leaned or shifted its weight to compensate for the shifting balance of the bee but at least my legs still hugged on for dear life on their own. Actually fighting in this condition would be hard but at least it would not be impossible. I hoped.

As the ice birds got closer their ranged attacks became not only more accurate but even more numerous, forcing the bee to constantly shift its altitude and adjust its direction thanks to its natural fleeing reflexes. The bee was honestly bigger than the birds by at least half a bird but bugs would always be the prey of birds. Especially when there were more than a dozen birds.

Left the struggle through a crash course I maintaining stability during evasive maneuvers, it was a long time before I was able to actually return fire. Despite the sheer number of ice feathers shooting at us at once, only three or four birds were attacking at a time as the rest took advantage of the bee's burden to fly ahead and around for better positions. Then, while they took turns shooting off over a dozen feathers apiece the previous attackers would catch up.

My Crystallized Infection Harvest was nothing short of a flying ace, bobbing and weaving out of the line of fire while forcing the birds to constantly shift their positions in the air to compensate. Then, I finally managed to unleash an electric cutter through an upward backhand slash. Two of three birds in the attacking party managed to escape the range of my skill but the third soon found itself falling more than twenty feet down to the rocky ground and snow below

Finally picking up the skills to not only accommodate the movements of the bee but also anticipate them, I was soon able to swing out and purely cast an assortment of ranged slashes and basic magic skills.

Only a handful of these attacks actually manage to hit their targets, but when they did no less than one of the birds at the very least would be rendered incapable of flight. This was mostly due to overwhelming electrical attacks, but I was more than happy just to land any attacks at all!

Even after two minutes of this fleeing combat through the air only half of the birds had been defeated and the other half were all split up to surround us while using their attacks to try and force the bee to land. I had spent almost a third of my mana already and, unless I was lucky, would probably have barely enough to finish the small flock. It did not seem like the bee would be able to help in the fight while carrying me, either.

Normally I would just capture these weaker winter mobs with my cordycep silk but that was in a normal fight on the ground. Up in the air while in a constant state of fleeing, the enemies were simply too far and too fast to catch with webbing. I would simply be wasting the ten or so mana per foot of thread it took to try.

Now, as the bee was being forced closer and closer to the ground, I was left with only two options. Go to the ground and protect the bee or fight the height restriction to gain more maneuvering room. I clenched my knees around the bee's thorax and abdomen joint section before leaning back and lifting with my legs.

We were both flying straight up into the air just out of the line of fire of a new set of ice volleys. On the way up, I cast out a Spirit Slash that shredded one bird's wing and sent it careening out of the sky from just under thirty feet in the air. These heights were not usually enough to kill one of these large magical birds.

However, after eating one of my attacks, hitting the ground from our current height was truly a death sentence and I soon acquired not only some experience but also another level in Aerial Combat as well as Aerial Riding. Once there were only four birds left in the air while the combat buffed harvester was flying over forty feet in the air, the tides turned in our favor.

Moving twice as fast as before thanks to sharing my Imperial Order as my mount, the bee was able to flash through the air like a beam of light. Instead of fleeing the bee had chosen to attack of its own accord, launching itself bodily onto the closest bird to shoot three rusty crystalline stingers into its gut and chest before it started eating while flying.

While the bee was eating after have disoriented the other birds with its speed, I used good old fashioned St. Elmo's Fire to send two of the last three birds spasming and shrieking to the ground with smoking feathers. "Looks like you're the lucky one," I say while spitting silk from both hands to ensnare the surviving ice bird even as I receive notifications for ice magic affinity and a 'Frostingale Call' to attract ice birds from my infected harvester bee.

Once the last ice bird was captured, I received my rewards, which included level sixty-three, and tossed the bird into the clan store with over two dozen other birds all lined up being the crowned elite bird.

Checking my surroundings to find that the birds had chased us for more than a mile from the point of contact, I look ahead back toward the plateau depression to find that I could see into the deep hundred-foot pit that contained a rough and uneven icy floor.

From my new vantage point I could see almost to the middle of the depression with some clarity and could gauge the size of the depression to be about three miles from one side to the next. Scattered around the middle area were what looked like large but broken stone structures made of leaning boulders that had been broken apart and put back together with space inside. Surrounding each of these structures were dozens of smaller outlying buildings.

All of these 'natural' structures or settlements seemed to be arrayed in a circle around the actual center of the depression where a deep and dark hole seemed to open up just at the edge of my view. That deep dark hole probably led down to where the original town or village was sacrificed and turned into an army of undead and demons. By this logic, the surrounding area was almost certainly home to undead and demons.

However, there were three things in clear view that made me very unhappy. Even though I could not yet see the entire area I could already see what looked like three large military-like outpost camps set up less than a mile away from the settled areas around the hole. Small drafts of smoke from campfires could be seen rising up into the air and then being blown into obscurity once the reached the top of the depression.

Each camp seemed to contain anywhere from thirty to a hundred people surrounding a few pavilions with dozens of tents. They even flew flags or banners that droops lazily in the lack of wind within the depression. As well, the largest of the three camps seemed to be fighting with a large mass of bodies a few hundred yards out from the camp that stretched forward from the closest cluster of earthen structures.

Curious, I spurred my bee forward once again to continue the scouting run.

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