Rebirth of the thief who roamed around the world (BOOK 1)

Chapter 29 - Book of Order

「Stop dawdling! Hurry up and cast Meteor already!」Nie Yan pestered through voice chat.

「Meteor takes ten seconds to cast! By the time I finish casting, it’ll already be too late!」Tang Yao anxiously replied. He estimated he would be overrun by spiders before he could even finish casting the spell.

「I don’t care, just start casting! C’mon, hurry up!」

Tang Yao clenched his teeth and unravelled the Talisman. After brandishing his staff, he began casting Meteor. Soon, large amounts of fire essence from the surrounding area began converging at his location.

As the fire essence gathered, the sheer heat from the scorching blaze caused the temperature in the surrounding air to rise.

Tang Yao watched as Nie Yan led the twenty plus Rock Spiders through the passageway and into the cave intersection. As spiders surged into the intersection like a massive wave, Nie Yan ran into to the narrow passage where Tang Yao had retreated. The passage was so narrow that only a single spider managed to squeeze itself through, but in doing so, it blocked off access to the passage for the rest of the spiders behind itself.

“Concussive Blow!” Nie Yan turned around and struck the leading spider in the head, causing it to enter a dazed state and stop the movements of the spiders behind itself.

Eight seconds… seven seconds… six seconds… five seconds…

As time slowly ticked by, the fire essence which was steadily gathering around Tang Yao became increasingly intense.

For the most part, the spells that required a set of syllables to cast were also the ones that had a relatively large area of effect. From Nie Yan’s knowledge and experience, Meteor was the only area of effect spell that Elementalists and Arcane Mages could learn at Level 0, and it was quite efficient at killing many monsters. However, even if you were to gather up a thousand Elementalists and Arcane Mages, you still might not necessarily find one that possessed Meteor.

After three seconds passed, the spider woke from its dazed state and immediately pounced towards Nie Yan. In reaction, Nie Yan raised his dagger and began skirmishing with the Rock Spider. He kept the spider firmly in place and prevented any of its attacks from reaching Tang Yao, so as to avoid interrupting the spell.

Ten seconds—whether this moment was long or short depended on one’s perspective. The truth of the matter, however, was that the moment would simply be over once you counted from one to ten.

While in a trance-like state, Tang Yao raised his staff and chanted lines of strange syllables that even he didn’t know the meaning of. When he finished casting, an enormous fireball fell from above「Boom!」A deafening explosion echoed out as the fireball crashed into the group of spiders. The fireball resembled a heavenly maiden upon impact—scattering fiery blossoms in every direction. These blazing flowers didn’t immediately extinguish upon landing on the ground. Instead, they continued to burn, dealing a fixed amount of damage every second to the spiders that were caught in the explosion.

「Scritch! Scritch!」The twenty plus spiders caught in the explosion were in a state of upheaval as they cried out in agony. No matter what kind of state they were in, however, they were still unable to attack Nie Yan and Tang Yao.

So, he had already calculated everything. No wonder he dared to aggro so many monsters at once.

Nie Yan and Tang Yao were only able to kill monsters like this by taking advantage of the unique topography of this intersection. Attempting to use this tactic and unleash a fireball upon a large group of enemies would’ve been suicidal if they were out in an open field. Normally the destruction caused by Meteor would be extremely limited in narrow spaces such as this. As it turned out, however, the intersection within the cave was quite suitable for casting the spell.