"Two more coming up on the left!"
In the middle of an abandoned quarry a prolonged battle was taking place between monsters and a group of adventurers. These adventurers weren't the kind one would usually see working easy jobs protecting merchants or slaying goblins for drinking money, this group consisted of trailblazers, elite adventures usually busy charting the uncharted, be it dungeons or uncharted territories.
"Liz!"
One of the adventurers currently locking his sword with an ogre twice the size of him called on his older sister as he spotted two more ogres at risk of breaking the adventuring parties' encirclement.
"I see it!"
Responding to her brother with a confident smile, Liz finished off the monster she was fighting by first driving its weapon into the limestone before cutting off its head with her sword.
(There sure are a lot of them today… And it looks like we won't be getting any backup like the guild promised.)
Although Liz and her group of 5 adventures were currently outnumbered 4 to 1 none of them were hardly breaking a sweat. Centering herself, Liz took a short, deep breath as she pushed mana into her legs, then she cracked the limestone beneath her as she launched forward towards the pair of ogres who were starting to wander off instead of facing her group. These ogres were 3 metre tall, green skinned humanoids, though their size would be a problem for less experienced adventurers, Liz wasn't just anyone.
Stabilising herself with a mid air spin, Liz added momentum to her blade and cut straight through the first ogre's skull, splattering chunks of brain and bone as she landed 5 meters from the second with a roll, then launched again and cut into the second one with a low slash that impacted around its belly and cut all the way to its heart. Letting go of the blade mid way though her slice so as to not damage it too much, Liz did a few more aerial spins before landing a bit away.
"They're done!"
Standing up as she reported, Liz turned around to see another 10 ogres was starting to appear in the quarry doing the time she had taken to deal with just two. With a flash of magical light, bone quickly blinked into existence, then it was rapidly flooded with muscles and tendons before meat was wrapped in thick green skin, creating monsters already armed with shoddy weapons and a maddening fury in their minds.
"Tch."
This was Liz and her group's current issue, for every ogre they cut down 5 more seemed to appear, and while they weren't a great threat to them, they would be lethal to any of the villagers who lived around this abandoned quarry and were currently evacuating.
This monster surge had come out of nowhere, and Liz's group had been pulled away from their original plans to deal with it until the surrounding villages and farms evacuated.
That was 8 hours ago, and while these largely insignificant monsters were easy to deal with it was impossible to continue fighting forever.
"Boss lady, are you sure you don't need us!?"
At the moment it was only Liz and her brother Carl fighting, their stamina was more of a function of their weapons durability than anything else, so the rest were taking a break as the promise of reinforcements seemed increasingly unlikely.
"No, we're fine!"
Retrieving her sword as her brother finished taking a rest and sliced the ogre he was dealing with in two, Liz inspected it and found a few new chips in the blade.
(2… No, just 1 good strike away from breaking.)
"I need a new sword!"
In no time Liz was tossed a new sword that she picked out of the air. Wielding a shortsword in both hands she rushed forward, warning her brother of the path of carnage she was about to unleash.
"I'm taking your left!"
"Okay!"
Rushing in low, Liz took out the first ogres leg out with her new sword, then switched things up and jumped, kneeing the second target in the head and shattering its skull as she tossed her old sword at a third target in mid air, spinning with the power of her toss and landing as she broke into another sprint. Meanwhile her younger brother Carl raised his sword to meet the approaching hoard, although calling the hulking chunk of metal a sword would be stretching it. With a confident step into the approaching ogres charge, Carl bisected the massive creature in a single cut, slightly lifting off the ground as he handled the recoil of his stupendous sword, turning the momentum of his spin that he launched himself with towards the approaching monsters.
An hour later Liz and her brother finally got a moment to breathe as the rest of their party members had taken their break and recovered.
"Any idea why this is happening all of a sudden? This area isn't supposed to be able to surge like this."
Mages much smarter than either of the siblings had spent most of their lives on mapping the world, figuring out where monsters would spew out of the ground or dungeons in surges, and this abandoned quarry in the middle of buttfucknowhere wasn't one of those places.
"You know I'm not much of a thinker Carl."
Glancing out at her party members fighting as she reminded her brother of her fight first mentality, a terrifying possibility seemed to reach both the siblings at once.
"... You don't think this is happening everywhere?"
"It might be, that would explain the lack of reinforcements that were supposed to help us."
"Don't be thinking too hard now boss!"
"I'm not thinking, just worrying out loud. Don't worry Dexter!"
Interjecting with a quip, the ranger Dexter let an arrow fly with a smile on his face. Although it seemed like the ranger didn't take this whole fight serious with his lax actions and loud mouth, nothing could be further from the truth if one looked at his actions, not a single arrow he had fired so far had missed, and even the one he had just fired found its way into the eye socket of an ogre.
"Don't be mean now Dexter, you can try to be funny all you want, but demeaning others isn't very nice."
Blocking a hit from an ogres crude stone club with a steadfast determination, the shield and mace wielding warrior with a white beard Jack continued playing the peacekeeper as he smashed the ogre's kneecap out through the back of its joint with his mace.
"Dexter continues to be an ass, this isn't news worthy of commenting on."
With a silent fury barely contained in her voice, the final member of Liz's adventurer squad, the mage Ula spoke up as she tapped her large wooden staff on the ground, in response spikes made of compressed rock shot up from the exposed limestone rock around her, impaling a group of ogres that had been charging her.
"But the mana in this area shows no signs of calming down… What should we do, boss?"
With her eyes glowing from the spell she imbued them with, Ula saw the violent fluctuations of mana in the air and ground around them were still as turbulent as the moment they arrived at this intersection of lay lines.
"... We can keep working like this in shifts with an enemy of this level basically as long as our supplies last."
Liz knew her group well, they had faced far harsher monsters than ogres with no trouble. Their current limitation was instead the lack of food they'd brought with them for this emergency dispatch.
"How many swords do I have left Carl?"
"5 more, but they aren't the best quality."
Taking the state of their supplies and her own weapons into account, Liz estimated they would need to retreat in a little over a day.
"Okay, then if nothing changes we'll need to leave tomorrow, during that retreat I'll set the surrounding area on fire to contain the monsters, but we'll still need to draw them away from the villages, so prepare yourselves for a day of hungry hiking back to town!"
"Yes Boss!"
"Sure Boss lady!"
"No problem, Elizabeth."
"Okay sis!"
[EVENT-221 SLIPPING OUT OF CONTAINMENT. DELTA-921 FIRETEAM MOVE TO CONTAIN.]
[Yeah yeah, thanks me. I'm already on it.]
It had been a while since Mac had fragmented his mind of 'multithread' issues, so he was a bit rusty. Still, the level Mac operated at was far and well ahead of what anyone else could do, if he was going to start counting the instances of 'himself' it would take a while, even if the process was multithreaded.
[BAZINGA.]
"Stop that please."
Mac was still fragmenting himself, so some of the fragments were fragments of his own mind and refused to contribute; thus taken out behind the metaphysical woodshed and shot.
[Vega 9-9 firemission, salvo fmm-99s in half metre sep, rig for airburst, 2 meter fuse.]
[Vega 9-9 rifle.]
(This sure is a surge in monster activity… what the fuck is going on?)
"Modify route 39127, road conditions have deteriorated, issuing redirection notice and updating FLAC."
(No need to figure that out, just treat the symptoms.)
"Yeah, that's what I'm doing, but ammunition isn't free, or well it is bu-"
[Save the bandwidth please.]
Having fragmented himself into 2096 pieces, Mac completely saturated his uplink with orders, directives, fire missions and movement commands.
Each of his fragments spent an average time of 0.2 seconds on each station before moving on to the next pressing issue.
[LIGHTHOUSE-01 DISPATCHING ECHO-22 FIRETEAM FOR RRF CONTAINMENT.]
"Bravo-091 needs resupply, tasking FLAC."
[Vega 9-9 reports good effect on target. Fire for effect.]
(Red transport service hash 991 and 329 will be moving into hazardous territory, tasking sanitation elements for suppression.)
The Victoria dukedom and surrounding areas were currently seeing a massive monster surge, and while Mac needed to make it look like he was acting out of self interest he made sure to extend his outer cordon as much as possible, so forces were spread thin and mostly operating without support.
This didn't make them outgunned however, as Mac had unleashed his other Lynx variants with their own detachments of drones, deploying them with direct oversight of his fragmented self.
Shooting down a dirt highway a Lynx IFV let out a sensor growl as it launched another UAV drone for spotting the targets it was currently hunting down. Swerving through a tight turn, the IFV fired its reaction control system to stabilize as its turret came alive. Letting out another growl to lock targets, the Lynx's 41mm main cannon spewed fire before its turret snapped to another target and let out another burst before the ejected brass of the first burst even hit the ground.
2031 meters away another Lynx was also prowling for targets under Mac's direct control, it scanned the surroundings while screaming down a half abandoned logging road, with its controls directly under Mac it performed way over usual specs and eventually managed to reach an abandoned quarry with a group of adventurers fighting large green humanoids. Releasing a sensor growl to get an idea of the situation, the Lynx released a few observation drones as it loaded its coaxial 6.5mm and main 41mm machine guns. Firing up its external speakers, the IFV released another sensor growl before issuing a directive.
[THIS IS RED CONVOY SECURITY; LYNX UNIT 224. ANOMALY IS CONSIDERED A THREAT TO RED TRANSPORT SERVICES. CLEAR OUT FROM THE MONSTER SPAWNING ANOMALY OR BE CONSIDERED AN ADDITIONAL TARGET, YOU ALL HAVE 30 SECONDS TO COMPLY.]
With an audible warning given, the Lynx IFV immediately started firing on the monsters, delivering concentrated bursts of 6.5mm machine gun fire to the head of each target in order of proximity till they stopped moving.