Broken

Chapter 58

Taking down the snakes took time, but the group managed to make it though without Aiden having to ply his craft at all. In fact, I only saw him move once, and that was to dodge a chunk of ice from a casting snake. Otherwise, the healer didn't move an inch, nor did he even look the slightest bit worried.

"A shame that John kid isn't with us." grumbled Argus, kicking aside one of the snake corpses. The blood splattered all over the once clean snow. "Then we could just skin these bastards here and now, take their crap back with us..."

"Well, he isn't entering the instance until the collection team comes in." stated Bryce, scanning for anymore snakes. "He has all the base camp materials taking up his inventory right now, so he won't be any good to us until we get that set up."

"True."

"The faster we clear the lake, the faster we can get him here." Kuro said, flicking his sword to get rid of the blood. "Lets keep moving."

"Right. I bet we beat the B-Team there by half an hour." grinned Nick as he started to back-walk towards the forest.

Argus snorted. "I say we beat them by an hour."

Getting to the shore was fairly easy now that we were practiced in dealing with Ice Snakes. The instance wasn't about to let us get comfortable, however. It wasn't long until another monster started to appear, seeming to spawn in closer to the forest. They were something called Ice Phantasms.

According to Aiden, they were weaker than the snakes, but harder to kill due to them being immune to  physical damage. Only elemental spells could take them out. Even Kuro's shadow coated blades were ineffective. That meant that they were all left to Alex, and his myriad of spells. Looking like immaterial, floating, ice jellyfish, they were almost pretty, if they weren't so murder-y.

I was left thinking that this strike team was woefully lacking in spellcasters, once again. This pack of meat-heads didn't seem to let that fact faze them, however. And even though I was pretty sure Alex was one of the only sane ones, even he looked as if he were enjoying the pressure.

All that said, we made good time making our way along the edge of the forest. A couple times I thought I caught a glimpse of some monster or another between the trees, but so long as they didn't emerge to harass us, we let them be for now. Clearing the lake needed to be our priority.

"Finally!" groaned Nick, kicking a snow drift. "This freaking lake did not look this big when we first got here..."

"At least the trip back should be much faster." stated Carson with a smile.

It had taken nearly the whole day to get to the larger than average pine tree, the designated meeting location for the Chaos guild's two strike-teams. It was easily twenty meters tall, and as big around as Argus... which made it quite large. It was a good landmark. And clearly- given the lack of fifteen other guild members- we beat the B-team here.

"You said half an hour, right?" sighed Bryce, taking this rare moment of rest to check his gear. "I don't see them, which means they must be getting close."

The way the lake was shaped, the forest extended out, blocking our view of a large chunk of the west bank. We wouldn't be able to see them until they rounded a corner, about one-hundred meters from us.

As it turned out, Argus won the bet. It was nearly and hour before we saw Greg lead the B-Team around the bend. They seemed about as easy-going as the main strike force, and both teams joined up with a lot of high-fives and bragging.

"Men..." sighed one of the three women on the secondary team. Her name was Olivia, but everyone just called her Vixen. She was one of the few healers, besides Aiden, in the Chaos guild.