Re: From Elf Mage to Overlord Slayer-Chapter 37: The Janitor’s Gambit

Chapter 37: The Janitor’s Gambit
The Maw didn’t bother with a roar.
Too mainstream, I guess.
Its attack was pure, weaponized silence.
A wave of emo grief-magic washed over the Blade teams.
Seriously.
Gandalf was on his knees.
His face was a mask of raw agony, probably reliving some tragic backstory nonsense.
Seraphina was frozen solid, her perfect posture rigid as a board.
Her sapphire eyes were wide and unseeing, trapped in some private princess hell I couldn’t even guess at.
They were wiped.
Total party kill.
The best of the best, taken out by a single, silent area-of-effect debuff.
Pathetic.
The monster’s swirling, chaotic form swiveled, its dozens of scattered bug eyes focusing.
They landed on the weakest, most terrified person left on the field.
Of course.
Elara.
She let out a tiny, hopeless whimper, her body trembling so hard I thought she might just fall apart.
The Maw coiled its mismatched legs, digging into the ashen dirt.
It was getting ready to pounce.
Our useless Rank 4 team leader, bless his cowardly little heart, managed to stammer out one last, heroic command.
"H-hold your ground!"
What a moron.
The Maw moved.
It didn’t run.
It didn’t leap.
The world just sort of... folded.
Like cheap laundry.
The skeletal trees around us bent like they were made of cheap rubber, and the space between us and the monster just vanished.
"THWUMP!"
With a sound like a wet towel hitting a wall, the Rank 4 leader was just... gone.
Poof.
The space he used to be in was now empty.
Erased.
The monster’s swirling vortex of broken light was now inches from Elara’s face.
She let out a thin, piercing scream, a sound that cut right through the chittering static in my head.
This was it.
This was the moment.
The cold, logical Slayer protocol in my brain provided the optimal, efficient solution.
<ASSESSMENT: Asset Elara is non-essential.>
<Combat effectiveness: negligible.>
<Morale liability: significant.>
<Recommended action: Allow asset to be culled. Conserve energy for primary objective.>
Basically, let her die.
It was the smart play.
The raid leader play.
But my mind wasn’t just a raid leader’s anymore.
Damn it.
It was haunted.
My vision flickered.
For a split second, I didn’t see Elara’s terrified face.
I saw a different face.
A girl with amethyst eyes, giving one last, sarcastic smirk before being deleted from the world.
Don’t screw this up, moron.
My System flashed with red warning signs.
<ERROR! ANCHOR-RELATED TRAUMA DETECTED!>
<EMOTIONAL STABILITY COMPROMISED!>
The protocol was screaming at me to let it go.
To let the past die.
To be the efficient, cold weapon I was designed to be.
I told it to shut up.
The world screamed as I moved.
"FWOOSH!"
Reality tore like cheap paper, dissolving into a flash of black-and-white static.
[Phase Step]!
I appeared in the space between the Maw and Elara, a solid, defiant wall where there was nothing a second before.
Surprise, bitch.
The monster’s psychic attack, the same one that had crippled Gandalf, washed over me.
But my furnace was already built.
The grief was already contained.
It hit the cold walls of my will and just... fizzled.
My mind was a fortress, and it had already weathered this exact storm a thousand times in the Echo Chamber.
Boring.
Elara gasped behind me, her scream cut off by pure shock.
The Maw paused, its chittering static hitching for a microsecond, like a machine that had just encountered an unexpected line of code.
It had expected a screaming, terrified victim.
It got a quiet, empty wall.
"Hey," I said, my voice totally flat.
I raised a hand and fired a pathetic, low-power Mana Bolt that splashed harmlessly against its chaotic form.
It did zero damage.
But it was a taunt.
A good, old-fashioned taunt.
"You overgrown server bug," I said, my eyes locking onto its central vortex.
"Aggro’s over here now."
The monster’s full, horrifying attention snapped to me.
The pressure in my skull doubled, the chittering turning into a deafening roar of static.
Good.
I had its attention.
Now for the rest of the raid party.
The morons.
I didn’t turn around.
I didn’t need to.
My voice cut through the air, cold and sharp with the authority of a thousand sleepless nights spent leading idiots to victory.
"Seraphina!" I barked.
Far behind me, I felt her flinch as my voice snapped her out of her stupor.
"Your divine lances are useless!"
"You’re trying to damage a concept!"
"Change your energy type!"
"Raw kinetic force!"
"Not light, not fire!"
"Just pure, stupid impact!"
"Can your princess brain handle that?!"
I heard a choked sound of outrage, but it was followed by the hum of her re-gathering her power.
Good girl.
"Gandalf!" I roared next.
His name was a tool, nothing more.
"Stop trying to punch it!"
"Its physical defense is a spatial warp!"
"You’re hitting an illusion!"
"Your job isn’t to damage it!"
"It’s to disrupt its focus!"
"Its legs!"
"Target the crystal leg clusters!"
"They’re the anchors that hold its form in this reality!"
"Break them!"
He let out a ragged gasp as he fought his way out of his own grief-fueled nightmare.
He was a soldier.
He understood orders.
Finally.
Now for my own team.
My "team."
"Hilt Two!" I yelled.
"You are not warriors!"
"You are a distraction!"
"Spread out!"
"Form a perimeter!"
"Throw rocks!"
"Yell insults!"
"I don’t care!"
"Just make noise!"
"Be annoying!"
"Draw its attention in every direction at once!"
"Elara!"
"You stay right behind me and don’t move, or I will let it eat you!"
She let out a terrified squeak but didn’t move an inch.
Smart girl.
The Chittering Maw, faced with this sudden, coordinated defiance, let out a screech of static that made the ground vibrate.
It was confused.
It was angry.
It began to shift its form, its dozens of crystal shards and rubbery tentacles writhing and re-arranging themselves.
It was adapting.
Crap.
It was getting ready for a new attack.
A shimmering, transparent dome of distorted reality began to expand from its central core, warping the trees and rocks around it.
It was casting a wide-area, reality-bending field.
A total party wipe mechanic.
Of course it was.
The other Slayers were still scrambling to follow my commands, their faces a mixture of confusion, terror, and dawning hope.
They didn’t have a leader anymore.
They had a janitor.
A janitor who had just told them exactly how to clean up this mess.
But we were out of time.
The dome of distorted reality was expanding fast, threatening to swallow the entire battlefield.
It was a problem I couldn’t solve with orders.
It was a problem that needed a tank.
A real tank.
My face remained a blank, emotionless mask.
But inside, I felt a familiar, bitter pang.
The irony was just suffocating.
I reached into the cold, quiet place where my shadow lived.
And I gave the order.
"Shadow," I whispered, the word a puff of cold air.
"Tank."
The world held its breath.