The System wishing him luck was strangely off-putting. As far as he could remember, it never had before, so breaking that pattern worried TJ more than he'd like to admit. Looking around, he could see anything, but given that it was past 10 pm, it was raining, and the Boss fight didn't begin for a couple more minutes, that didn't mean much. The other Participants were standing, and many of their grim faces showed determination and a cold sense of defeat in equal parts.
"Lailani, Stanton, are we sticking with our previous plan?"
"Couldn't think of anything better to do." Stanton affirmed. "You, Lailani?"
"No." She shook her head. "We'll be depending on you to take care of keeping it from killing everyone back here."
"Ok." TJ agreed. "Everyone, come join me as I do a really fast ritual. This way, if you're staying back here and not using many of your resources, I can draw on them to keep myself in the fight. In the off chance that I'm doing fine and you all are struggling, I can move resources around as necessary. If you don't want to be a part of the ritual, step back right now."
Nobody did, and TJ quickly spoke the strange yet familiar words necessary to effectuate the ritual. A minute later, he cut his hand and began anointing everyone with his blood. He was maybe three quarters of the way through when the timer to the Boss fight finished, as was apparent by the bone-chilling roar that rose up in the forest to the north.
TJ couldn't say anything, instead focusing on finishing what he was doing. Stanton, who was already done, bolted to the shattered remains of the north wall. Just as TJ finished with the second to last Participant, Stanton began to curse sulfurously. With his heart in his throat, TJ finished the ritual and ran to the same wall where the rest of the Participants were going. As he watched, he, too, swore in every way he knew.
Dozens of decapitated wendigo heads floated out of the forest, nothing carrying them. While TJ watched, they settled onto corpses, where the jaws of the wendigo distended until they could devour the body's previous head and, with a crunch, they did just that. The skulls' eyes began to glow as they settled over their new bodies. With dozens of cold blue eyes lighting the night, TJ's blood ran cold and he shuddered. Then, another thought occurred to him.
"Shit. We need to get the Copper corpse out of here. If it manages to revivify that…"
He didn't need to say any more than that, and Sarah bolted off with Connor in tow. The two together immediately hauled the body through a gaping hole in their previous defences before they threw it into the store.
"Do we hold the line?" Laura asked, her voice terrified.
"I want to kill the fucker." Seth hissed, his crossbow, as ever, held at the ready.
A chorus of opinions grew as the people there tried to decide what to do, but Sarah's voice cut through them all as she shouted, "I'll trust the Coppers with this. But… let's be fast, huh? I can see them coming closer."
Lailani shrugged, looking lost, and Stanton met TJ's eyes. "I'll leave it to you, kid."
TJ sighed. Of course it came down to him. Looking around, he saw the dozens of people, three dozen people. In the end, it might come down to him, Stanton, and Lailani to kill the wendigo. Appraising the people around him, none were lower than level 21, and TJ suspected most of them would evolve to Copper tier as soon as the System allowed them. He wished there was time to talk, to cool down, to be just… human. But there was no time.
"We have two options, as I see it." TJ said to the assembled people. "One is to sit tight and try to defend from these monsters. They're not coming straight for us, so there might be limits to how many of them the wendigo can make at once, or it's going to take more time to make more and more until it can bury us in hundreds of them. This first option would result in just sitting here and dealing with it as it comes. There has to be limits to what the wendigo can make, and maybe this would exhaust it before we fight it personally.
"The second option is to charge it. We don't give it time to do anything, and just blitz forward. We can—"
"Kin killer!" The wendigo screamed. Its voice made TJ's ears tremble in pain, and the lowest leveled Participants' ears bled from the cry. "You will finally die at my hands! Now come, and lay at my feet for a swift death! If you fight back, I will slaughter every one of your weak friends and torture you until your soul becomes a delicious treat! I will use your bones to conquer and I will ascend to the Throne!"
Everything went silent as the hoarse, raspy voice's declaration died.
"Well, there goes that." Stanton said. "Sounds like it's coming and doesn't want to wait."
The winds whispered to TJ and he felt a massive creature's approach. "I'm gonna fill up my resources that last little bit from the Disciples' Stamina and the Zealot's MP, if that's alright. It'll be about 40 from each of you. Any complaints?"
Five seconds passed without a word. With no disagreement, TJ filled himself back to full before activating Divine Transformation and slithering over the remnants of the barricades. He called back as he went, "I'm not sure how strong this thing is going to be. The other Copper was an Elite as well, and it was beating me around while I was transformed. Zealots, I don't want you to get close to it unless you need to. Try to get it from afar, but I don't know what it'll do with the ice."
"We get it. You don't know. Now get in there and kill a Boss, will you?" Stanton grumbled, though there was a tired twinkle in his eye.
TJ continued moving. The killing field before him was still littered with the dead bodies of the monsters from every wave that came before and the thick iron scent of blood filled the air and his mouth. Fortunately, the enhanced sense of smell from his coatl form didn't mind it. As he wriggled forward, the squishy, icy mud prickled his scales, and TJ waited for the monsters' approach.
The dozens of mendigo-headed monsters charged forward, javelinas and Gila Monstrosities in the front. As he watched, something tried to ambush him, only to be shot down by Stanton and Farid. When TJ risked a glance backward, he saw the falling bodies of two mountain lions.
"Comin' out the shadows." Stanton grumbled. "Everyone, come up here! Never be alone!"
TJ was sure they listened, but he needed to focus on what was in front of him. The wendigo approached, but the rest of the recently revived monsters stood between them. The first to arrive would be more of the wendigo-bred coyotes, but Connor and Sarah were there first. Connor's shield glowed for a moment as he smashed it into a coyote's slavering jaws. It yipped in pain as he continued forward, shield and weapon both batting aside the vanguard.
"If we're not killing the Boss, then we're killing all the rest of these." Connor said. "I've gotta be worth something, right?"
"Damn straight." Sarah chuckled. Her glittering axe exploded with power as she struck through a javelina's bony skull. "I'm gonna hit Copper after this, so I'll show off now before I evolve."
The two Zealots weren't the only ones to charge forward. In fact, every one of the 16 Zealots ran forward and exhausted themselves destroying everything they could reach. The javelinas and coyotes were easy enough, but as the Gila Monstrosities and wendigo-pukwudgies came close, they needed to work together as pairs. Even so, they swiftly reduced the monsters to nearly nothing and TJ felt his heart soar. After all, they could destroy this creature with minimal effort, since he'd killed a Copper Elite himself without support. This was a Boss, but it wouldn't be that much harder, right? They'd already negated its bonus Skill.
As soon as the thought crossed his mind, TJ cursed himself. Regardless, the wendigo, still rushing forward, didn't seem to care about the deaths of its new subordinates. Instead, as its silhouette became much clearer in mist, it waved a staff, or something like it, through the air. In the air where the staff moved through, ice crackled in the vague shape of a sphere before shattering into skulls. This new mass of two dozen skulls raced out of the staff's trail and into the nearest monster corpses.
Before he could decide what to do about it, TJ saw and heard three shots from behind him rocketing into the skulls. All three that were hit immediately shattered into ice on the ground, and Stanton called out, "Not too hard for me to break like that. Seth, Farid, how was it?"
"Only took a regular attack!" Farid supplied. TJ didn't quite hear Seth's response as the remaining skulls devoured the heads of their new bodies. He didn't pay attention to them, instead looking at the Boss wendigo for the first time. The first time TJ had fought a wendigo, he'd been about 40 feet long and it had been a bit over six feet tall. How fitting that this time he was more than twice as large, and so was the Boss.
As every wendigo he'd fought and seen thus far, the creature's legs were mostly humanoid, if a human walked on its toes and its feet were several feet long. Its emaciated figure could be barely distinguished from the dark forest behind it. Its mouth hung wide open, drool and slobber dribbling from between its teeth which had been filed to fangs. The skeletal face was framed by its curling ram's horns, its sunken eyes glowed with an icy blue flame. Instead of the usual dull flame, though, the Wendigo Ritualist's eyes blazed with an inhuman fury.
Different from the rest, though, the flesh that covered the monster's body wasn't rotten. Instead, it had crystallized to either a stone or ice, and as it drew closer, TJ realized he could see its bones inside its body through the flesh, whatever it was. The cold fog that seeped off its every limb crackled just like the trail of ice crystals it left with every step. Then, there was its staff. The thing was taller than the wendigo, maybe 15 feet long, and made from what were very obviously human bones.
Looking at the grotesque item, TJ couldn't help but notice that, because of how large the wendigo was, the shaft of the staff was made from complete ribcages. How they'd managed to make the bones stick all together, TJ didn't know, but the frost that coated the thing certainly didn't help. The tip was made of three skulls, but it was obvious there was a place in the center of them for a final capstone. TJ wasn't going to take more than one guess to figure out whose skull the monster wanted there.
When it was a mere hundred or so feet away, it swiped its staff through the air three times in quick succession. At least 100 skulls burst into existence over its head, and though Seth fired an explosive bolt and the rest of the Acolytes fired as best they could, dozens of monsters fought to regain their feet.
"I'm glad you're fighting. I wanted to hunt you, you know." The wendigo cackled. Then, without further ado, it planted its staff in the ground and leapt forward, massive claws threatening and jaw gaping. There was nothing TJ could do except to respond in kind, activating Divine Manifestation on Divine Transformation and locking himself in battle.