Chapter 60: Guns Lead to Glory ~ 2
As soon as Irvin had muttered the word of the ability, a sheen of blue rapidly swirled around his figure, and within the next moments of the second, he had disappeared right before the attacking gnoll.
When he activated his cloaking ability, he immediately broke to the right, circling wide, and thus the gnoll grabbed through empty air.
The gnoll stopped, and its head turned slowly, nostrils flaring and its head whipping around, growling harshly.
He came in, attacking it from behind and jumped as he drove his knife toward the back of its neck, but the blade barely sank in before the gnoll’s arm whipped around and caught him across the chest.
The blow sent him skidding back across the concrete, and the cloaking dropped as the mana cost spiked from the impact.
Irvin immediately cussed under his breath. He had been hoping to kill it immediately with a single attack; without that, there was no way for him to defeat the damn thing easily.
And now that it had seen that he had Shroud, it would more than be on alert for him to use it again.
"Hurry it up over there!" he shouted down the street as he skidded back, bracing the arm that he had used to help block the impact, deeply wincing.
He got back to his feet and tasted blood in his mouth.
The dagger was still in his hand but the cut he had landed was shallow, and the gnoll hadn’t even reacted to it. His grip on his dagger tightened.
’Not even a vestige is breaking through its skin that easily?! Jesus, these damned things!’
Then, his eyes snapped wide, and his head snapped back urgently for a brief moment. Three zombies came sprinting around the corner of the building towards the back side of him.
"Fuck!"
In that opening, the gnoll had rushed for him. Irvin wrenched his head back forward, and with zombies behind him, he could only go forward.
Shroud used too much mana for him to use it more than a few times, and right now, it wasn’t what he needed the most.
He ran forward to the gnoll, coming in low from the left. This time, he increased his speed with his Enhancement.
The burst allowed him to duck swiftly under the creature’s raking claw and leave a slash across the side of its torso as he ran behind it.
The cut had been shallow, but he was a beggar who could not choose right now; his teeth clenched hard, and his brows furrowed as he had to swiftly pivot, throwing his body into a roll far off to the side.
The gnoll had thrown another claw-raking arm at him right after his attack, and in his retreat, his back hit the tall street lamps.
Three of them came sprinting around the corner of the building at the far end of the street, drawn by the noise, and two more appeared from the adjacent direction.
He could see Anton and Madeline moving toward him now, the first gnoll on the ground behind them.
But they were still too far, and the zombies were closing while the gnoll in front of him hadn’t taken its eyes off of him.
Then, suddenly, as he was hurriedly pulling himself off of the ground, something dropped from the roof of the gun shop.
A loud thud and crash echoed throughout the street, and the figure hit the gnoll from above, driving it face-first into the road.
The concrete cracked under the impact, and a burst of air tousled Irvin’s hair as he stopped, raising his hands to block the whip of wind.
The gnoll’s head had fallen sideways against the concrete, and one of its eyes was still open, staring up at him. That motherfucker!
Its jaw was snapping into a bite that had tried to eat through the foot that had crashed into its face, but its teeth ground against nothing, and a low rattling growl was leaking out of its throat.
Dion stared down at it forcing more of his strength into his foot, his face chilled so cold and sharp that the air felt thinner; he looked nothing like anything the three behind him had seen from him in the shop, even if they could only see a portion of his face.
His strength was still less than a gnolls s o even with all his malicious effort, he could feel the thing pushing up against him. But that didn’t matter.
Using his one free hand, he had, the moment that they landed, straightened his hand into a spear and drove it down through the gnoll’s skull.
Bone cracked and gave way under the force, and he pushed deeper until his forearm was buried to the wrist, and he ripped out as much of its brain as his fist could hold.
The growling stopped instantly, and the eye that had been watching him went dull. He pulled his hand free with a wet sound, and the gnoll’s skull caved in on itself under the strength of his foot, now dead.
A message from the chronicle slightly eased his malice as soon as it had died, lingering at the corner of his vision.
{You have felled a Level 23 Destitute Gnoll, harvesting its essences. Your Strength and Endurance have been nourished.}
{You have earned the preservation of a Vestige: Gnoll-Bone Longsword.}
Dion blinked the messages away, and his hand had whipped down hard, throwing off the chunks of brain and its blood.
He stood upright, and his other hand that hadn’t been free raised the weight that had been in its hand.
The modified shotgun he had taken earlier was already in his other hand, and he levelled it, aiming at the nearest zombie that was closing in.
Dion pulled the trigger, and the blast shot off a large chunk of the side of its head entirely, the body running two more steps before it folded and hit the ground.
The second one was right behind it, and he turned on it and fired. It dropped as close to him as the first had.
The remaining three had spread out as they came, two from the left and one from the right.
He turned on the closest and fired, and it went down short of him.
The last two closed in fast. He fired again and put the nearer one down at barely an arm’s length.
Then, Dion pivoted, swiftly stepping past its body, and he grabbed the other by the throat.