[Lumbricina Siege-Breaker Hydra. Level 40 Monster. You know, it's actually pretty rare for bugs, worms, and other little things to become monsters. Most of the time when they absorb mana by accident, it burns them up from the inside. There are just so many bugs around that enough of them survive anyway. This guy went with the dead-standard bug advancement path; it got bigger. Normally, it would have gotten killed long before it got this big. Even other monsters fight the big clumsy bastards. But this one was lucky enough to have the Hydra trait! If you don't know what that means, don't worry! You'll figure it out.]

  Monsters with the Hydra trait regenerated when bits were cut off. If they were really unlucky, it would be an Advanced Hydra, and the severed bits would grow into a whole new Hydra. Of course, the description didn't bother making the distinction clear.

  It was also level 40, which usually meant it had resistance to many damage types, with mundane physical damage almost always at the top of that list. They'd need magic to fight this thing. Josh's combat art should be able to hurt it, but then they came back to how cutting a Hydra was a bad idea. The only good news was that they were slow, and still far away. The closest one was a good hundred feet away, maybe more, and even as he watched, it crushed other monsters under its bulk.

  Josh took this all in instantly. He barely even saw “Hydra” on the description before he grabbed the nearest soldier on the wall. “Have every fire mage start hitting that worm!” he said, pointing to the closest one. “It needs to be ash, understand?”

  The man nodded. “Well, yeah, but we have to keep the sharks off the line!”

  “I'll deal with the sharks, you just get those worms dead! If they break the walls more the sharks won't matter!” Once the man nodded again, Josh cast his eyes down to the monsters on the front line. He needed to confirm what he was dealing with. There were a couple walking trees, plenty of boar monsters of varying shapes and sizes, and those meerkat monsters he had seen underground.

  God, the meerkats seemed like forever ago. It had been, what? A couple weeks? A month, max? Regardless, he focused on one of the monsters he didn't recognize to make sure his plan would work.

  [Selach Hammerhead Land-Walker. Level 33 Monster. Yep, walking hammerhead shark. Well, technically it's a winghead shark, but that's a type of hammerhead, so who cares. Basically, imagine that guy who always stood on the other side of the fence, watching you and your friends play cricket, but he never joined in for some reason. Maybe he's in a wheelchair or something? Then one day he shows up in a mecha-wheelchair that lets him stomp around and starts killing people. That's basically what every Land-Walker is.]

  The sharks were very clearly hammerhead sharks—or winghead sharks—with legs and arms, walking upright and humanoid. They were brown, as if they were made of bark, but other than that they seemed almost like normal sharks. They roared and slashed with their bare hands, trusting their strength and skin. Every once in a while, they managed to grab a defender and tried to bite down on them. Thankfully, the people on the walls usually managed to save them.

  Usually.

  The important bit was that the description hadn't mentioned anything about resistances. Level 32 was typically when monsters started evolving those sorts of annoying abilities, but sometimes you got lucky and they went another advancement or two before picking anything up. These sharks were clearly more focused on offense than defense, as was normal for shark monsters, and most of the other monsters were lower-level.

  This would work. Probably.

  He dumped out all of the biodiesel containers from his storage ring. He'd picked up a few more from Darius before heading over here. Darius could have directed the throwers to do something like this, but their aim was imprecise, and there was too much danger of hitting the defenders. Even standing here, throwing the liquid just a few meters down to the ground from the top of the wall, Josh was worried about hitting his own allies.

  Once he was sure that the breach in the wall was thoroughly soaked, along with all the monsters trying to push through it, Josh dropped a lit match.

  Everything went up like a torch. Everything. As the sheer wave of hot air forced Josh back, he was suddenly all-too aware that the wall itself was made of wood. Oh, he had been well prepared for the wall catching on fire. Jungle wood was resistant to flame, and water mages doused them on a regular basis to keep them even more so, but he had still expected that wouldn't be enough. He had determined it was a small sacrifice, and gone with his plan anyway. They would have needed to fix this bit of the wall anyway.

  The burst of hot air—the explosion—still caught him off guard, though, and he nearly went ass over tea kettle off the side. Thankfully, one of the villagers on the wall grabbed him by the arm before he could fall.

  “Thanks!” he called over the noise, because of course lighting a horde of monsters on fire hadn't made them quieter. He started throwing [Empty Chops] into the howling horde, aiming for the ones up front that looked like they just needed one more good hit to go down. He didn't let his mana and stamina go down to zero, since Darius would kill him if he took another potion. Instead, he took his time, letting his [Meditation] skill slowly refill his mana and taking shots when he could.

  “We got it!” someone cried. Josh looked up to see that one of the giant worms had curled up on itself, a scorched and blackened husk. He was just about to remind them not to let their guards down when a burst of red mist seeped out of the corpse. It slowly turned white, then flowed up into the shooters on the wall. It wasn't a huge amount of experience. A level 40 monster gave a decent amount, but significantly less than what you might expect from a creature of that size. Still, he could see from the reactions of several people that they had leveled at least a bit.

  If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  “Congratulations,” he called over to them. He wasn't getting much real experience here. At level 48, most of the monsters were at least two advancement ranks below him. Some of them were only giving him a single point each. Even with the sheer number of kills he was getting credit for due to the fire, it wasn't adding up to much. He'd be surprised if he was level 50 by the end of the battle.

  Josh wiped sweat off his brow. The heat was rising. The wall was well and truly caught now, and it was going to be a pain to put out. Less than staying and burning, though. Just as he was about to turn and run away, another fireball hit the wall from outside the town.

  Oh, right. That little issue. He checked to make sure that most of the villagers on the wall were fleeing, then poked his head up to see what he was dealing with. Then he had to blink and check again.

  It was a plant monster. Not a monster that appeared plant-like, but an actual plant with stalks woven together to create strong limbs and a torso like a green wicker basket. It was about the size of a bus, with six legs and a long head like an alligator. This was common for high-level plant monsters, which tended to take on monstrous forms paralleling normal animals.

  More worrying, it had a fire burning inside its torso, the red glow of banked coals. This glow brightened and dimmed with a slow rhythm, and Josh realized it was matching the beast's breath. There was a pungent, burning scent in the air, so strong that it took him a moment to actually identify it. Was it... garlic?

  [Allium Sativum Pyro Rampager. Level 51 Monster. Fun fact! Plant monsters have a reputation for being weak. This is mostly because your farms are pretty good at killing them before they get too strong. But when a village falls, there's no one around to cull the monster crops. Then a minor little garlic monster finds a couple bloodstones, ambushes a few travelers on the road who were unwisely also carrying bloodstones, and next thing you know you've got a mid-level elemental monster that can throw fireballs at people. Glad to see that Gilroy is still continuing its old tradition of exporting garlic whether people want it or not.]

  Yep. Giant garlic monster. Well, garlic plant monster. It was mostly stalks and stems; he couldn’t see the bulbs anywhere. They were probably hidden inside, serving as something like internal organs. He wanted to see this as silly and ridiculous, but he couldn't. He knew full well how dangerous plant monsters could be. God, he was too tired for this.

  The normal way to deal with high-level plant monsters was fire. It would have been difficult to deal with a monster this big, even with that weakness. Attacking a fire monster with fire was just suicide with extra steps.

  He scanned the beast again, searching desperately for any weakness. He found none. Oh, it was clearly a bit slow, but that wouldn't be much use if they couldn't actually damage it. By this level, most monsters were basically immune to physical damage. Unless people had a lot more magic weapons hidden away than he thought, then there was little they could do to prevent this thing from breaking through the walls again.

  It took a deep breath and belched a fireball towards the town again. It splashed against the wall, the only upside being that it had hit the bit that was already on fire. No, wait—a few other monsters had been caught up in the blast. So, it didn't care about collateral damage. That was something, at least.

  Still, it wasn't enough to let the thing live any longer than it had to. Josh put his fingers in his mouth and whistled sharply. Then he waved his arm around his head in a circle, held up one finger, and pointed in the direction of a monster. Another circle, then he held up two fingers, and pointed again. He kept going until the first bomb flew over the wall and hit the monster square in the face.

  Josh had fought in a few large-scale battles in his life, and the biggest problem was always communication. Darius had set up a few simple signals to make sure they could direct his attention where it needed to go. Such as, for example, to tell him to start bombarding a specific target with every alchemical weapon Sarah had managed to make.

  The first bomb was fire, which was understandable, but completely useless. Thankfully, they didn't wait to see it wash over the monster like a wave upon the beach before launching their next one. The next bomb exploded in a burst of alchemical frost. A liquid that looked as simple as water turned to solid ice seconds after hitting air, seeping into the plant monster's joints and freezing into sharp white spikes.

  The beast howled, an impossible sound like a thousand trees breaking all at once. The light in its heart flared, and fire gathered in its maw.

  Josh signaled, and they hit it again.

  Twice more, in fact. Now that they knew what worked, Darius wasn't messing around. Josh didn't think it would take longer than a few more moments. The monster was already dead; it just didn't know it yet.

  Unfortunately, it could do a lot of damage in that time. It stumbled forward, the ice cracking, and one of its legs broke off with another screech of tortured wood. It bashed into the wall, which was still on fire, and started tearing through it like a pig rooting for treats. The breach in the wall widened, and some other monsters slipped through the gap. Their line of villagers had to retreat or be crushed. They managed to do so in a somewhat orderly manner, but they still left gaps in their defense. More monsters poured in.

  Josh didn't try for anything fancy. He didn't need to leap from the top of the walls and drive his ax into the monster's skull. All he needed to do was hold it here, to minimize the amount of damage it could do while the rest of its body finished freezing.

  In the end, it was almost anti-climactic. He threw out a few [Empty Chops] to keep attention focused on him. He yelled, the villagers yelled, and the monsters roared. But in the end, the giant plant monster moved too far, too fast, and cracked the ice that was spreading throughout its body. It ripped itself in half, and the fire glowing in its heart died like old coals. Josh was left standing on top of the wall, panting, ax in one hand and grenade in the other, waiting for something else to happen.

  It almost felt like a joke. After all the build-up, all that worry, the monster just... fell apart.

  Of course, it hadn't actually been easy. The walls that had kept the monster out had cost time and resources to make. The villagers had risked their lives holding it back, and more than a few had died. The alchemical weapons that they had thrown at it were the product of long hours of experimentation on Sarah's part, then longer to actually produce the substances in large enough amounts to be useful. Even Darius training the villagers had taken time out of everyone's schedules. Josh had seen Baara struggling to fit everything in. It had taken effort.

  But still. Standing there, his adrenaline having finally spun up and chased out his exhaustion, it felt too easy.

  He collapsed.