Ruth really needed to learn to enjoy herself less in mass battles.

  People were dying. Even if she could just ignore the screams of pain from the enemy, her own people were in serious danger! Hunters and delvers who she had been fighting with for weeks now!

  But beneath all the genuine worry, beneath all the genuine fear, there was that spark of thrill. There was a battle, and people needed her help. Not as a support class, but as a warrior on the front lines.

  She got to fight a tank.

  Ruth jumped off the wall, using her Vareo runes to lighten her weight and increase her distance. It wasn't anything like flight, and she wasn't sure she could ever use gravity magic to achieve that. But it was enough to make her heart pound harder and her stomach to rise up in her throat.

  It was the best feeling in the world.

  She raised her hammer above her head, and at the top of her arc activated her [Meteor Smash] technique. It was one of those bizarrely specific techniques that most people never discovered. In this case, it was a hammer technique designed for people who liked to leap up in the air and slam down like a meteor.

  Ruth's [Meteor Smash] technique was at rank 8. She really liked using it.

  She activated the runes on her hammer at the perfect moment, suddenly increasing its weight a hundredfold. Even with her increased Strength, she would never be able to swing it with these runes active. But since she was already falling, she didn't need to swing it. All she had to do was keep it on target.

  As she fell towards the tank, she poured more mana into her runes with her [Overcharge Rune] spell. She had built more capacitors and redundancies into the rune-chains than in her previous hammers for exactly this purpose. She could keep going, break the runes and turn the hammer into a massive bomb, but that wasn't what she needed right now.

  The wind rushed past her as she fell. The shouting and the explosions rose up from below. No one had looked up and seen her yet. Not that it would matter even if they did. They didn't have any serious anti-air capability. No one really bothered with that. It was why she was so fond of this trick.

  This moment, when she was falling, always felt like it lasted forever. The wind in her hair, the ground rushing up to meet her, the magic thrumming in her hammer. She fell so fast that the g-forces pushed against her like a massive hand against her entire body. She felt numb, the wind too cold for her to feel anything.

  She felt nothing, except her heart beating in her chest.

  She felt nothing, except her grin on her face, so wide that it hurt.

  Then she hit.

  She had aimed for the tank that didn't have any fire on it. Her hammer impacted the hatch at the top, the turret with the massive cannon attached. It was crushed like tin foil, crumpling around her hammer's head. Ruth knew in a second that the cannon was useless. The tank itself might still be operational, but without the cannon it wasn't a threat.

  Then Ruth landed face-first on the tank's armor, belly flopping onto solid steel. Her shroud, the high-level magic item that Darius was so proud of, shattered like glass. Thankfully, Ruth was fine; shrouds were good at letting people survive falls from truly ridiculous heights. But she doubted her shroud would recover any time soon. She might have strained the enchantment so much that it was permanently damaged.

  That was fine. Ruth had prepared for this, and had a spare.

  She leveraged herself off the tank, spitting out the taste of steel in her mouth. She swapped out her shroud focus for the one in her pocket. You couldn't wear more than one at a time without them interfering with each other, but she had just put the second in a lead box and it was fine.

  She got the second focus on and activated just in time, as bullets started sparking off her shroud. She tried to rip her hammer out of the tank, gave up, and jumped down to the ground as more shots were fired. Once she was using the bulk of the tank as cover, she saw that she had a new notification. She was surprised at that; she hadn't been close to leveling. As an [Attacker], she received some experience for fighting, even against humans, but that shouldn't have been enough to push her over the limit.

  More curious than she should be in an active warzone, she mentally clicked on the notification. A blue screen folded out in her vision.

  [CONGRATULATIONS! New art learned: Gravity Meteor Smash. Combine magic and skill to slam down from a great height onto the ground. Does not require a weapon. Certain bonuses can be applied by channeling this art through a weapon. Damage of attack is influenced by Strength and Power, speed of attack is influenced by Dexterity and Flexibility, size of attack is influenced by Constitution and Capacity, and cost of attack is influenced by Perception and Sensitivity.]

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  A slow smile spread over Ruth's face. She suddenly wasn't worried about her hammer being stuck in the tank. She was curious why she hadn't earned this art before, though. She had certainly used her [Meteor Smash] technique and [Overcharge Rune] spell at the same time before. Still, she knew that gaining new abilities could be inconsistent.

  She checked her stamina and mana levels. Mana was a bit low, and she took a few deep breaths to activate her [Meditation] skill and absorb some more magic from the air. The mana in the area was starting to get thin, a common problem in large battles. Still, with all the rifts and dungeons scattered around right now, the local mana was higher than normal. This battle could last for a good long while before it ran out.

  “She's over here!”

  Some idiot decided it would be a good idea to give her a nice, loud warning. A mercenary came around the side of the tank with a small pistol. He leveled it at her, and fired.

  When Ruth was eight years old, when she first gained access to the System and her father had “suggested” she take the Mender class, his traveling group had been beset by bandits. It had been early in the reset, so the bandits had assumed that they would outlevel their victims.

  Her father had no trouble with them, of course, but he couldn't be everywhere. A bandit had cornered Ruth, and pointed a gun at her.

  She had frozen, then. Of course she had. She had been a child, and she knew just enough about guns to be terrified of them. Her father had been very careful about not letting her play with his guns.

  Once the bandits had been taken care of—years later, Ruth was pretty sure her aunt Jael had been involved more than a little—her father had decided to train her with guns. Not on using guns, of course, that would obviously be too much for his delicate little baby. But on dealing with guns, on facing guns. On having guns shoved into your face from a few feet away while you were unarmed.

  Ruth rushed forward, taking the bullet on her shroud. The mercenary didn't get a chance for a second shot before she was on him. She wrenched his arm up—another shot fired, but it went wild—and then kneed him in the groin. When he went down, she made a double-handed fist and slammed it down on his head like a hammer. He collapsed like a sack of non-monster potatoes.

  She wondered, briefly, why he didn't have an active shroud, before she saw the light burns all over his body. It seemed like Darius and his terror campaign were having a real effect after all. Shrouds were notoriously weak to sustained damage, such as from fire or electricity. They were much better against single, sharp attacks, unless they were designed otherwise specifically.

  Even as she had that thought, there was a whistling sound. She looked up to see a firebomb coming down straight at her.

  Ruth activated her [Leap] technique.

  [Leap] was one of those techniques that anyone could get if they tried hard enough. As far as Ruth knew, it wasn't attached to any specific class or role, though Josh had claimed that [Explorers] tended to learn mobility abilities like that much more easily.

  Ruth had learned the [Leap] technique every year for most of her life. It was one of the few non-support abilities her father encouraged, since it let her flee from a fight more easily. It still wasn't easy to learn, though. As she understood it, you had to leap a decent distance into the air before you even had a chance to learn it, but no one was quite sure what that distance was. And even then, it took more than a few tries to get it. Sometimes it took days of jumping off tall objects like a maniac to get it.

  Ruth got it in less than an hour when she used her gravity runes to extend her jumps.

  There were a lot of little loopholes like that in the System. Not glitches, per se, but mistakes that apparently no one had seen fit to correct. You had to jump a certain distance to get a chance to learn the [Leap] ability, and it didn't matter how you jumped that distance. As long as you put in effort with your legs and ended up higher than when you started, you were good to go.

  Ruth's [Leap] technique was currently rank 10. She used it a lot. Sometimes she thought she used it more than walking. She could use it to jump forty feet straight up. Jumping sideways was a bit trickier, but better than jumping headfirst into a descending firebomb.

  Of course, she didn't exactly have time to check her landing, and ended up bowling through half a dozen mercenaries as flames exploded behind her. They were too confused to stop her when she leaped again, this time jumping up and away from them.

  From the air, she was able to confirm what she had seen before: Mercenaries were swarming the wall like ants, pouring towards the breach. There weren't as many as she had thought at first, maybe a hundred or so, but that was still a lot for a small village to handle. Even without the tanks.

  Ruth didn't have to think twice about her decision. They had prepared for mercenaries. Darius had multiple backup plans. They could deal with that. What they hadn't prepared for was tanks, and that was something that she was uniquely suited to handling. She might be the only one who could handle them, at least without doing something truly crazy.

  Before she had even fully reached the apex of her leap, Ruth focused on the closest tank—not the one with her hammer still stuck in it—and activated her new [Gravity Meteor Smash] art. As gravity magic wrapped around her, protecting her and accelerating her towards her target, she wondered briefly what kind of life she lived where this didn't count as “something truly crazy.”

  An awesome life, obviously. Far better than a boring old Mender.

  When Ruth hit the tank feet-first hard enough to dent the hatch, she was grinning like a madwoman.