My plan is stupid. Nothing else summed up how Rydr felt more than those four words once the rock left his hand.

Half an hour after, their team decided on a plan found Rydr a hundred meters away from the pack of wolves. He preferred to be much farther away, but a hundred meters was the maximum distance he could stand at and still have a clear shot at the pack of wolves.

The distance seemed tiny once the plan began.

So, Rydr carried a large rock, about the size of his own head, in each hand. The first rock left his hand as if his arm was a canon instead of flesh and blood. It blurred across the clearing, shredding leaves and small branches in its path.

The large, dark alpha looked up like it sensed what was about to happen. That minute shift in position made the flying rock miss its head, brushing past the whiskers on its snout just before it slammed into the wolf lying behind it.

*40 damage*

The rock struck the wolf with such force it shattered on impact. The wolf flew backward, releasing a strangled yelp audible across the clearing, into the underside of the rock outcropping the pack used as a temporary den.

The alpha's head snapped around to follow the short flight of its comrade before it turned and, with unerring accuracy, met Rydr's gaze through the dense foliage at the edge of the glen.

Rydr hefted his second rock and fired it off as hard as he could. It soared across the intervening distance at a blistering pace, the wind howling. This one was thrown wildly, without care for aim, but even as Rydr turned to run, he was gratified with a second yelp. He managed to hit something through sheer luck.

Then Rydr flew through the forest as fast as he could. There was a brief debate over who should play bait; Syrna believed that her bow would offer the best advantage.

Urginok suggested that Rydr chuck a rock at the alphas head, but his reasoning proved itself once Rydr started to lead the wolves to their trap.

Rydr was strong enough to bull rush his way through the thick plants, even bowling over small trees in his haste with his arms crossed in front of him to protect his face.

The giant imagined Syrna bogged down, trying to find a usable path without more time to prepare. Rydr abandoned all concepts of grace and silence to create his own path.

Rydr risked a glance over his shoulder to see if the pack was following him. Oh boy, were they ever.

The alpha closed the distance Rydr's surprise attack put between them.

The rest of the wolves traveled in a tawny brown wave a ways behind their alpha, rushing over fallen trees with fluid motions only a quadruped could use.

Rydr realized his mad dash through the forest made a super easy path for the pack to follow, but if he traveled in anything other than a straight line, they would have caught him already.

Perfect. Only a bit farther...

Confident that their aggro would hold, Rydr put his head down and focused on running. Each footstep thundered underneath him, shaking leaves from nearby trees as his bulk tore through the forest.

Rydr learned something then, once he put the pedal to the metal. If all he had to do was travel in a straight line, Rydr was fast.

He lengthened his stride and put everything he had into kicking off the ground, almost trying to shove the dirt backward. Each footstep ripped clods of earth and vegetation from the ground.

Then he burst from the trees, bright light blinding him for an instant. In that moment of searing light, he heard air splitting by his head and the meaty thud of Syrna's arrow hitting something right behind him.

A furious growl, rather than a yelp, told him exactly what almost caught him.

As Rydr's eyes cleared, he saw Urginok ahead of him, with Syrna twenty paces behind him readying another arrow.

The knockback effect from Syrna's Strength-based archery forced the Alpha back, so Rydr felt its hot breath on his neck instead of its teeth dragging him to the ground.

Then the shirtless giant charged past Urginok, who performed a smooth sidestep and slid into the space Rydr passed through, already swinging the warhammer with all his might.

Rydr needed to make a decision quickly.

Half an hour ago, they agreed to make a kill-box for the pack. After they discussed how Rydr and Syrna were surrounded and killed last time, it became all about controlling the fight.

With Rydr's absurd strength, they dragged two giant, fallen trees and aligned them with an earthen berm to create a long lane with only one narrow entrance. At Rydr's speed, he would run out of road in their kill-box in approximately two seconds.

Syrna fired another arrow in front of him, but Rydr first had to stop before helping his team. The original plan called for him to use the tall, earthen berm behind Syrna by simply crashing into it to arrest his momentum.

Urgency caused Rydr to ad-lib a little. Rather than slam into the earthy barrier, Rydr angled toward the right, then immediately cut left and jumped.

Rydr arrested all his momentum with his right leg. For an instant, he hung perpendicular to the wall of dirt before he kicked off in the mother of all power squats and shifted his kinetic energy left instead of straight.

He fought against inertia and brought his left leg up to take the second step in his sudden wall run. Somehow Rydr managed that second step, his thighs and knees screaming. A third step brought his foot in contact with the crux of their plan.

Rough bark provided an even better grip than packed dirt as Rydr bounded across the surface of the enormous tree he dropped into place twenty minutes before. "Above" his head, to Syrna's left, was a second tree used to create the lane in the forest.

With a final kick off the tree, which rocked it in place despite the boulders placed on the other side, Rydr landed on the ground slightly ahead and to the right of Syrna as she fired another arrow.

Without a moment's hesitation, the giant threw himself forward, bending down to scoop a small boulder from atop a pile of "ammo" they stocked for his use.

Urginok struggled to hold his ground against the Alpha, and Rydr watched as the rest of the pack poured into the entrance of their kill box.

Another arrow whizzed by Rydrs shoulder and slammed into the Alpha, halting it with its knockback right as the wolf would have scoured its claws across Urginok's stomach.

Urginok recovered from his previous swing at that moment and started to bring his hammer back around to hit the Alpha's suddenly vulnerable head.

In the same instant, Rydr crossed left, exchanging the boulder from right to left, and pivoted on to transfer his forward motion into a monstrous left hook. The boulder in his hand exploded as it crashed into the Alpha's head simultaneously as Urginok's hammer hit the opposite.

*CRIT 90 damage*

*CRIT 75 damage*

*Alpha is stunned!*

Rydr and Urginok were shocked. Their damage numbers stood out to the player that caused them.

Urginok was stunned to see that Rydr dealt more damage than him, even though he had a +15 damage war-hammer!

On the other hand, Rydr was amazed by how much damage his Strength of 98 netted him, even with the critical hit.

They all realized a potential future for their teamwork if they could combo their abilities like that on command.

But, this setup was a million-dollar lucky shot.

There was no way they could reproduce that teamwork again, not in their first-ever fight together. Not only that, but Rydr now had no weapon at all. The boulders he collected couldn't stand up to a single blow during a fight of this level.

Besides, his pile of ammo was behind them, with Syrna. The rest of the pack was stuck on the other side of the Alpha during its stunned state. A timer appeared above its head with a small star-flash symbol, counting down from eight seconds.

Rydr gritted his teeth and activated his new skill, [Peerless Physique].

According to the description, his Strength score was increased by half again for the next minute. That meant his Strength jumped from 98 to 147! When Rydr activated the skill, he didn't glow, but his body swelled noticeably, muscles straining under the skin.

An arrow flew over Rydr and Urginok's heads, knocking back a smaller brown wolf that tried to climb over the fallen trees to get to them.

Then Rydr stepped forward into the Alpha's space and punched forward so fast and hard that the wind split audibly across his knuckles. His fist met the Alpha's jaw hard enough to be felt in Rydr's shoulder, and the wolf's head exploded upwards, lifting the beast's front paws off the ground.

*30 damage*

Rydr stepped forward with each punch, and, powering each fist into the Alpha's head and neck, he pushed the beast up into the air. With each step, Rydr tilted the creature up onto its hind legs.

Urginok stepped to the side where he could make room for a swing and crashed his hammer into the Alpha's unprotected ribs.

*35 damage*

*28 damage*

*25 damage*

Without the counter-force from Rydr's blow, Urginok dealt far less damage than before, but even Rydr dealt less than a third of his previous damage without their lucky shot.

Out of options, Rydr and Urginok laid into the Alpha as hard as they could, trusting Syrna's unique archery to keep the rest of the pack off their backs.

They had no idea if they could get out of their own kill box without it turning into their grave.

[Alpha Wolf (Rare)]

Level ???

HP 1331/1644

*stunned* 00:00:08:05

For the first time, in-game, Rydr thought to [Inspect] the monster. The three of them removed 20% of the Alpha's health, and there were seven seconds left on the stun timer.

However, thanks to the stun timer Rydr realized his current attack speed was roughly 6 punches in a second if he wasn't concerned with defense.

If he assumed his weakest hit, 20 damage, was his baseline for barehanded attacks, he could guarantee at least 800 more damage! Rydr threw caution to the wind and trusted his teammates to cover for him. After all, that's what they planned for when they bottle-necked the Alpha and its pack. He started to concentrate his punches on the Alpha's jaw, doing his best to hit the same spot each time.

With each punch that landed, he became more confident. His damage numbers were growing.

*23 damage*

*25 damage*

*CRIT 40 damage*

*CRIT 52 damage*

*CRIT 65 damage*

*CRIT 70 damage*

In just one second, Rydr dealt 17% of the Alpha's health. Since the third hit to the alpha's right side, Rydr found a "soft" spot in the ribcage where his punches pulverized its ribs. With over 1000 health remaining and five seconds left on the stun timer, Rydr threw every punch at the wolf's broken ribs.

Urginok peeled off the Alpha to handle the wolves squeezing by the huge, black wolf.

Syrna's archery had only one weakness. She fired much slower than a regular archer. Usually, players would try to black out the sun with arrows, darting around the battlefield, but Syrna fired methodically, picking her shots.

Therefore, once the wolves started to climb over, the blonde could no longer handle corralling the smaller wolves independently.

Urginok and Syrna trusted their enormous teammate would handle the Alpha. If not, they would all die. Once Syrna used Analyze on the smaller wolves, she learned something.

[Brown Wolf]

Level 5

HP: 418/562

Buff: [Strength of the Pack] (Alpha)

"Red, take out the Alpha! It's buffing the rest of the pack!" Syrna screamed to Rydr even as she shot a wolf in the chest, knocking it behind the Alpha. She had no idea what it buffed, but their chances of surviving would shoot up if they removed the effect.

"Does..it..look..like..I'm...drinking...tea?" Rydr grunted his rebuttal between punches.

I literally can't attack faster than this!

For now, their plan worked, but they all felt the pressure from not having a healer in the party. More than anything, their plan revolved around controlling where combat happened so they could get by without a healer.

The colossus pummeled the beast with everything he had when his vision spun dizzyingly, and RYdr found himself on the ground. The Alpha, held aloft by the diver's punches, fell beside him in a pose similar to a much friendlier canine.

Rydr's HUD flashed a new, bright yellow color. The warning pulsed in time with the pounding disorientation that assaulted the titan's senses. A bar that he previously ignored, since it only appeared when used, ran dry in the middle of his barrage.

The noob's first time in an extended fight, and he'd burnt through his stamina bar in a flash. While six punches in a second were his maximum output, the stamina cost he ignored consumed the finite resource.

On top of that, without a class specialty or formal training, Rydr's punches were sloppy and wasted too much effort.

If the Alpha survived the stun timer with six seconds left, then they were all screwed. Neither Urginok nor Rydr could effectively tank against it. They didn't have enough health to do so. Urginok wore no armor, and Rydr's wouldn't help him.

[Alpha Wolf (Rare)]

Level: ???

HP 123/1644

*stunned* 00:01:11

With one second left on the timer, over 100 health remained in the Alpha's pool. Rydr's stamina bar finally started to refill itself. The drunken stupor and weakness lasted a full five seconds in the middle of a fight!

Normally it would be a death sentence. Rydr was blessed to have the stun timer to wait out his weakness against.

Right now, if the beast recovered, Urginok would die almost instantly. The tank stood in between the massive wolf's front and back legs, playing whack-a-mole with the tawny wolves on the other side.

Syrna desperately helped hold the wolves back with her arrows, but they were about to be overwhelmed.

Rydr leaped from the ground onto the Alpha's back with only a half-baked idea and straddled it like a horse. He gripped its shoulders with his legs as best he could and bent down, wrapping both arms around the monster's thick neck.

Then the stun timer wore off. The Alpha surged to its feet, nearly throwing Rydr, and instantly went after Urginok.

Rydr's eyes met Urginok's, both pale-faced and panicked, right before the Alpha lunged for the tank. With next to no leverage for his plan, Rydr squeezed the Alpha's neck as hard as he could. He didn't even know if the beast needed to breathe.

When the monster instead lunged past Urginok and shoulder-checked the left side of their "lane," using Rydr as an enormous doorstop, he figured it did something. The enormous tree rocked against Rydr's back.

Air rushed out of Rydr's chest so fast it made him cough, but all that came out of his mouth was the unmistakable beached whale impression that humans made when their breath is knocked out.

*-50 HP*

For a moment, Rydr's grip loosened on the wolf's neck, and black spots danced in his vision. His back burned where the rough bark scraped bare skin.

Then the Alpha howled, deafening Rydr, whose head was next to the monster's, and started to thrash around. Rydr held on with all his power, but the wolf was no longer concerned with him. A second howl ripped from the monster, and suddenly it was tugging at the ground in a downward dog pose.

Even as he slid up the Alpha's back, Rydr saw why the beast suddenly behaved strangely towards its head.

Two arrows were visible on top of the Alpha's paws. The arrows sunk so far into the beast that only the fletching was in sight. Syrna had pinned the Alpha's front paws to the ground.

The shots stunned Rydr in the middle of his cowboy impression.

Syrna's timely assist gave Rydr the opportunity he needed to get his knees under him. The Alpha thrashed and made it difficult. The arrows wouldn't pin the beast down for more than a moment.

With that in mind, Rydr hauled back on the Alpha's neck as soon as he was in position. The monster did its best to keep its head down, to resist the inexorable pressure Rydr exerted on its neck and head.

However, Rydr's strength score was too high for the monster to defy. Slowly the beast's head was forced back. Rydr wrapped his right elbow around the Alpha's throat and braced with his left hand.

Then Rydr tried to bend the terrifying foe into a pretzel.

More...more...use my strength more effectively. Rydr chanted inside his head, imagining how he wanted to use his power. He needed to be better than anything he faced. There would be enemies so fast that he couldn't touch them, and so far away, he died before he reached them.

Rydr wanted to overthrow that way of thinking. He promised to find a way to use raw power and conquer the game.

In the last year, Rydr spent preparing for Frontier Online he hardly had time to study MMOs. The time spent outside of school was at his new job or commuting across the super-city Apostle. Therefore, the student was forced to conduct "research" from his Com-Ring on the mag-lev trains.

So the Titan tried to focus his research on things he felt would directly affect him.

After Rydr's research over the past year, he learned that common sense in the gaming world disdained "pure" builds. Both casually and in the competitive scene, guilds and sponsors wanted to support balanced specialists. Any DPS needed to weather a few blows. All tanks counted as sub-DPS during their rotations.

The idealists who dreamed of an all-powerful caster, immortal tanks, and peerless strength or speed got crushed under the stigma against their favorite builds.

As popular opinion spread, people stopped inviting these sorts of players to their parties. Eventually, no one saw players who sported those nostalgic, pure builds.

Something in that struggle for recognition struck a chord in Rydr. He believed that [Frontier Online] made it possible for those underdogs to step into the light again. More than anything, Rydr wanted to be the diver that put pure builds back on the map, with something that he created.

As luck would have it, Rydr found a team of oddballs that dreamed of those bygone days. Rydr knew that no one else would give them the time of day.

That meant that this fight, this moment where everything balanced on the precipice of disaster, predicted the fate of their avatars. They would always fight the uphill battle, outnumbered and laughed at by the meta players.

Deep inside himself, Rydr knew that he chose the difficult path because he wanted to prove them wrong. If he made something useless into something extraordinary, then maybe he could change himself too.

I can't afford to fail here, now, or ever again. I won't die. I'll continue clawing for every scrap of progress until no one can look me in the eye and call themselves my equal. Rydr vowed to himself that nothing would stand in his way. If he failed his teammates now, the giant feared that he would stand still forever, letting others continue to use him.

Through eyes squinted with effort, Rydr saw Urginok whirling around to smash his hammer into a wolf as it leaped at him, somehow managing to clock another wolf on the side of the skull with the haft of his weapon, like a batter bunting a baseball.

Syrna's arrow arrived in time to knock back another wolf as it bore down on the tank's vulnerable side, but still more poured over the sides of the kill-box. They're both so much more experienced than I am...

So Rydr pulled harder and stopped using just his arms to fight against the Alpha's strength. He found the wherewithal to engage with his stomach, back, legs, and every part of his body that could help him gain leverage against the monster.

Rydr ground his knee into the Alpha's shoulder blades and, using that spot as an anchor, let go of his arm with his left hand and stretched back.

Without both arms, the Alpha halted the slow rise of its head, but Rydr clenched his side, forcing every muscle on the left side of his body to respond to his will. Slowly, like the sun rising in the East, the Alpha's head started to rise again. Rydr extended his right arm, keeping a savage grip on the beast's throat like a handlebar, and stretched out until he lay almost flat on the Alpha's back, arms spread-eagle in opposite directions.

The giant's HUD started to flash again, warning Rydr that his stamina was about to run out. He ignored its warning- it was far too late to back out now.

Try as he might, Rydr failed to wrap his left arm around the monster's midriff. Unbidden tears of frustration leaked from his eyes as he watched the last 20 seconds of [Peerless Physique] start to count down. He was so close...