"Incoming!" one of the Tankers shouted. The three Tankers quickly raised their shields at a forty-five-degree angle to block the descending strike. They pushed their Mana outward, and thick Auras coated their heavy iron defenses.
The log smashed into the shields, and the crushing impact pushed the three men backward for five feet. The Swordsmen did not wait. They rushed straight toward the main body of the Titan, easily bypassing the chaotic crawlers
They swung their lightweight blades, and the steel pierced through the thick outer armor. The Swordsmen retreated immediately after dealing the damage.
They remembered the mistakes of Team A, so they refused to linger in the danger zone. Once the Swordsmen stepped back, the two Thieves rushed forward. They drove their daggers into the exact same damaged spot to inflict even more pain.
The Thieves then began to retreat, while the three Mages finished casting their second wave of fireballs and ice blocks.
Suddenly, a few rogue Mud Crawlers bypassed the vanguard completely. The beasts reached the backline and lunged at the Mages. The jagged teeth were about inches away from landing a fatal bite, but the Mages completely ignored them.
Lumina Frost stood her ground. Two crawlers leaped right at her face, yet she did not even flinch. She released a concentrated fireball of red, yellow, and orange flames. She did not aim at the beasts threatening her life. Instead, she fired the spell directly at the Titan twenty-five meters away.
The crawlers closed the gap to a single inch. She was about to get bitten.
Then, one of the retreating Thieves flashed past her. He sliced the beasts across their backs before their claws could ever touch Lumina's skin. The dead monsters hit the ground, and Lumina simply pulled a piece of dried meat from her pocket. She popped it into her mouth, chewed slowly, and started casting her next spell like nothing had happened.
The three Mages launched a continuous magical barrage to exploit the physical opening. The Thieves climbed up the huge body of the Titan to stab their daggers deep into the fresh blast craters.
This was Team B's specific battle strategy. They maintained a regular rhythm. The Titan would send crawlers and attack from above, so the Swordsmen and Thieves would step safely behind the heavy Tankers. The downward strike would hit the shields. The Swordsmen would then move forward to attack the main body, entirely ignoring the crawlers. They would retreat, and the Thieves would hit the exact same spot. The Thieves would step back to kill the crawlers near the backline, and the Mages would fire their heavy spells. The agile fighters would then scale the monster to strike the fresh magical burns.
It was a risky tactic for the Mages to drop their personal defenses, but they did it anyway out of pure trust. The Mages trusted the Thieves to use their explosive speed to protect them.
Even with this deep trust, the two Mages beside Lumina could not stop their bodies from flinching. They felt a natural fear of getting bitten.
However, they watched Lumina stand perfectly still with monsters an inch from her eyes. She lacked any visible reaction, showing no fear or hesitation.
The female Mage watched her chew the dried meat and cast again.
What the heck is this girl? the female Mage thought while her hands shook. Are her nerves made of steel? She is so young, but she possesses a terrifying mental fortitude.
Thorne gripped his staff and just stared at the black-haired girl.
Unbelievable, the old Mage thought. Is she completely insane? Does she have zero sense of danger?
The Titan eventually stopped moving after the heavy barrage. The twelve Adventurers stepped back to a safe distance. The three Healers raised their wooden staves.
They waited two full seconds for their internal Mana to push outward and form an Aura. The floating energy produced a warm green light, and the spell washed over the Adventurers within a fraction of a second.
This specific magic was called a Flush. It aggressively cleansed the fighters' lungs from the poisonous gas. The Healers cast the Flush right then because it had been fifteen minutes since the last cycle.
A sharp piece of falling rock suddenly hit one of the Healers, and the debris created a small cut on her arm. She quickly cast a healing spell on herself. The flesh knit back together in 0.8 seconds.
Normally, the biological law of Aura Delay forces a caster to wait at least two seconds. But healing your own body does not force the Mana to exit the skin.
The Healer did not need an external Aura. She simply used her internal Mana as direct fuel. The magic did not need to travel through the air, so the travel distance was basically zero.
Veterans call this self-healing magic. It takes time to heal an ally, but self-healing only needs between 400 to 900 milliseconds.
Yet, even with this incredible speed, the body still registers the injury. If a Healer pre-casts the healing magic, the physical repair takes 800 milliseconds, but the human nervous system sends pain signals to the brain in about 30 milliseconds. It is a strict biological race.
Because 30 milliseconds is faster than 800 milliseconds, the pain always registers first. The Healer still feels that sharp agony before the brain realizes the wound is gone.
The Titan groaned and started moving again. It produced another massive wave of Mud Crawlers.
"Here we go again," the female Mage complained loudly. "They are coming. My heart will never get used to this crazy strategy. I hate ignoring the crawlers and leaving our lives to the Thieves."
A nearby Thief named Chris overheard her and laughed.
"Why don't you just use flying magic to escape the ground?" the Thief joked. "The crawlers can't reach you up there. Plus, the air is clean above the ten-meter mark. I always read about those flashy moves in fairy tales when I was a kid."
The female Mage glared at him.
"Don't be absurd," she scolded. "It is not the time for jokes."
Thorne slammed the butt of his staff onto the ground.
"That's enough!" the veteran yelled. "Focus on the mission!"
They resumed the exact same cycle. The Mages kept their boots firmly planted in the muck.
When the Thief joked about his childhood storybooks earlier, he was remembering colorful illustrations of a wizard fighting a gigantic monster. In those pages, the wizard hovers majestically in the sky, unleashes a powerful fireball, and his body stays perfectly still in the empty air. It looks undeniably cool.
However, those comic books and fairy tales are telling absolute lies.
Flying magic actually exists in this world, and while not all Mages are capable of casting it, all six Mages of the raid team had mastered the spell.
A Level 7 veteran like Thorne could fly for at least seventy kilometers if he moved constantly, but simply staying afloat was different. The spell required little energy to keep a person suspended in the air, allowing him to hover for hours.
If the Mages used flying magic here, they would definitely look heroic fighting the Miasma-Titan from the clouds, but this was a brutal hunt
If the three Mages decided to use the flashy spell, they would gain three distinct advantages.
First, the grounded Mud Crawlers could no longer reach them.
Second, the attack distance would become much shorter. The math follows the Pythagorean theorem. Aiming diagonally from the ground up to the monster's head creates a long flight path.
The Mages could fly up to eye level with the target. The straight horizontal line would be much shorter, so their fireballs and blocks of ice would strike the bark faster.
Third, the atmosphere above the ten-meter mark was completely clean, so they could avoid the toxic fog entirely.
In cheap storybooks, readers often marvel at illustrations of Mages hovering majestically in the clouds, unleashing endless barrages of explosive magic against giant beasts without moving a single inch.
It looks undeniably cool. But those storybooks completely ignore a fundamental law of physical reality: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
When a Mage fires a high-energy sequence of spells, the raw forward momentum generates a massive, violent backward recoil.
Down in the mud, a Mage can plant their boots deep into the earth, using their physical weight and the sheer friction of the dirt as a solid brace to absorb that shock. But up in the empty sky, there is absolutely nothing to anchor them.
If a Mage hovered in mid-air and fired a concentrated fireball, the heavy recoil would instantly launch their fragile body backward out of control, sending them tumbling helplessly through the air.
To prevent this, they would have to constantly waste precious Mana casting continuous counter-thrusting spells behind their backs just to stay in one place. That brutal physical limitation makes an aerial bombardment entirely impossible.
If a storybook shows a Mage floating in the air and casting an attack spell without any backward recoil, that story is a lie. It violates the Law of Action and Reaction. In a real fight, that Mage would be sent tumbling through the sky the moment the energy left their hands or staff.
Beyond the uncontrollable recoil, the other disadvantages were absolutely catastrophic.
Mid-air vulnerability was a big flaw. If the Titan launched an attack at the sky, the heavy Tankers would be stuck on the ground, entirely unable to block the blow with their shields. The Mages would have to constantly perform evasive maneuvers, losing their offensive focus because they had to worry about their own defense. Furthermore, the strict battle formation.
Having the Mages in the sky while the vanguards and Healers stayed below would completely ruin their teamwork. Communication would become a nightmare.
If a flying Mage took a hit, the grounded Healers could not reach them quickly enough to save their life.
The third disadvantage was the steady Mana consumption. Floating required little energy, but a fifteen-day marathon would turn that slow drain into a fatal tax. The Mages weighed these factors and chose to reject the flashy aesthetic.
In the storybooks, flying wizards look amazing. But this is a real fight. In a real clash against monsters, the ground remains the most practical battlefield for a caster.
In the current battlefield, the Adventurers continued fighting without realizing their bodies' dire situation.