Erin quickly jumped up and revealed herself on top of the roof of the tiny shelter. Since she was hiding on the other side of the slanted rooftop, she couldn't see what was initially going on as the Dogleos started sprinting towards Mako, hoping to tear him apart and burn him into ash.
When she stood up and saw the sheer number of Flame Dogleos that were frozen in place inches away from Mako's position, she couldn't help but gasp at Mako's crazy yet effective strategies.
Mako was busy dealing with the few Dogleos that were at the very end of the pact and weren't in the range of Electrical Discharge. The Dogleos were smart enough to realize that Mako's weapon was a great weakness to them and so they maintained a safe distance and started firing a barrage of strong fireballs from their mouths.
Mako was able to dodge most of them but he couldn't get near the Dogleos who were attacking him from afar. Even though the Dogleos were paralyzed, they weren't frozen which meant that their skin could still severely burn him, and since there was a litter of them all over, Mako couldn't run past them with ease and reach the Dogleos that were attacking.
Mako couldn't use any other tactic such as running around the crowd of paralyzed Flame Dogleos to reach them because they could just run opposite to him to avoid him which wouldn't gain anything rather it would leave the shelter a bit more exposed for the Dogleos to target.
He couldn't use High Jump to cross over the sea of paralyzed Flame Dogleos to reach them either because the Dogleos were attacking him nonstop which didn't leave him time to charge his skill and even if he did, the Dogleos could just target him in midair and he wouldn't be able to dodge well which wouldn't be good either.
So for now, Mako was only doing his best to keep the active Dogleo at bay by making them keep their focus on him while occasionally fighting back with his lightning strike skill which was the only ranged skill he had that could do any damage to them.
While all of this was happening, Erin was pulling small amounts of water from the lake near the shelter and condensing them using her Ice ability into small shards of ice.
Once she had made a dozen or so ice shards, she pulled a skill out of her Water Ability which was called Water Bullet where Erin would just concentrate her Water aura on a small amount of water and shape it into a bullet that resembled a 9mm bullet and using all her strength blasted it forward towards her opponents.
The skill was totally dependent on the level of the Water ability that she had and her own physical strength, but now since she was stronger and had the ice ability which was kind of like an advanced version of the water ability, Erin decided to try and use the skill with ice instead of water.
The skill took longer to perform than doing it with regular water since the water bullets had to be frozen first but after they were frozen, Erin just had to aim and shoot. She quickly extended her arm and all the bullets lined up one after the other up to her shoulder like an invisible magazine.
The first bullet moved forward toward the tip of Erin's pointer finger and once she had selected the target, she began powering the bullet with as much ice aura as she could and while she focused on doing that, her eyes started to weakly glow white again.
This whole sequence of events took just a couple of seconds, but Erin was now ready, and she blasted the ice bullet at the head of the Flame Dogleo that was at the very front of the pact when they tried to attack Mako.
The bullet traveled faster than any bullet that Erin had fired before and it easily tore into the Dogleo's head, shocking Erin herself.
The moment the bullet fully entered the Dogleo's head, its fur completely lost its color and it went from being vibrant red to a deep purplish blue; however, the ice bullet wasn't done as once the bullet had penetrated deep inside the skull, it released all the ice aura that it had stored inside of it creating a small circular icy blast that erupted outwards and completely covered the Dogleo in a layer of ice.
"Well if he ain't dead before, he dead now," Erin commented as she was surprised by the power that her new ice bullets contained.
She had no idea why her ice bullets exploded after impact since the water bullet skill didn't do that and since she was following the steps of the water bullet skill, it was quite an unexpected thing to see.
Erin hadn't learned any skills regarding the Ice ability and was just using it however she could think of as that came under the skill that every ability user has since they receive their ability and that is the manipulation of that ability's aura.
All the moves that she had done up to this point were just making things out of ice that were reinforced by mana.
The difference between a regular use of an ability and a skill is that skill has an added effect to it that wouldn't normally happen if the user was just manipulating the element. Bill's sand spikes wouldn't explode on contact, Mako's electrical discharge wouldn't release like a pulse that didn't do any damage and only paralyzed enemies, etc.
What Erin had just done was create a brand new skill using the ice ability all on her own called "Ice Gun" and it was far superior to its predecessor, water bullet is everything including damage, range, and an added bonus of exploding into a mini ice storm upon impact.
Even though Erin didn't fully understand what was going on, she didn't slow down for even a second as all the bullets moved down one time down her arm and the next bullet was loaded atop her pointer finger.
She immediately began loading ice aura into the next bullet and shooting it at another paralyzed Flame Dogleo.
With her new skill, Erin continued to fire ice bullets at the Flame Dogleos, quickly taking them down one by one. As the ice bullets exploded upon impact, sometimes surrounding Dogleos would also get caught in the blast radius, freezing them in place and leaving them heavily injured and vulnerable.
Mako, realizing that Erin was providing him with much-needed support, began to move more aggressively. The active Dogleos were momentarily stunned when they witnessed ice forming out of nowhere on so many of their kind which was turning them blue all of a sudden.
Since the bodies of the dead Dogleos were still paralyzed, they didn't fall over dead when the bullet penetrated them and covered them in ice, instead, they remained in their initial position.
The Dogleos were confused for a bit but quickly understood what was going on as they observed projectiles attacking the paralyzed one from on top of the building and they quickly identified it to be another person.
After seeing that Erin had abilities that were able to wipe them out in a single blow, they shifted their priority to Erin as she was a bigger threat.
While Erin was conjuring a new round of ice bullets that took about ten seconds to do, the Dogleos, stopped firing fireballs at Mako and instead started to charge their attacks aimed at Erin.
[High Jump has been activated]
Using this opportunity to his advantage, Mako quickly activated his High Jump skill and quickly crossed over all the paralyzed Flame Dogleos. Just as the Dogleos were about to fire away at Erin, Mako interrupted their attack by impaling his combat knife deep into the skill of the first Dogleo.
Mako had no need to activate his active skill as it was a one-time use thing before it went on a cool down which didn't do much for Mako as the Flame Dogleo would die just by being stabbed by the thing.
However, this time Mako had to activate the skill as unlike Erin's ice bullets that killed the Dogleos instantly, his blade took a couple of seconds for it to kill the Dogleo. This was bad because Mako was in midair and after stabbing the Dogleo, he was going to fall right on top of it and if he touched its skin while it was still barely alive, it would have been game over for him.
He quickly activated the active skill and the blade instantly became a lot cooler as it began forming a layer of ice on top of the head of the Dogleo. The formation of ice triggered the Dogleo's weakness even faster killing it and turning its fur blue just as Mako landed on top of it and luckily he didn't get burned.
While Mako picked himself back up, one of the other Dogleos attacked him from behind but before Mako could even turn around to dodge the attack, a bullet penetrated its belly in mid-air killing it in an instant.
The active Dogleo put their focus back on Mako now as he was now closer to them and a bigger threat. Erin resumed firing at the paralyzed Dogleos, killing the majority of them while they were still paralyzed.
With Erin's ice bullets and Mako's lightning strikes working together, they quickly thinned out the pack of Flame Dogleos.
As they fought, Erin couldn't help but marvel at the power of her new skill. She had always been creative with her abilities, but this was something else entirely. It was like a whole new world had opened up for her, and she couldn't wait to explore it further.
Finally, after what felt like hours but was probably only a few minutes, the last of the Flame Dogleos fell to the ground, frozen solid by Erin's ice bullets. Some of the Dogleos had survived the paralysis but by that time, they were so low in numbers that it didn't really matter.
"Haha! Finally! We did it!" Erin cheered from on top of the roof as the last Dogleo was defeated.
The two of them were quite exhausted after that intense fight but it looked like Erin was exhausted a lot more so much so that she couldn't even stand straight on top of the roof and eventually fainted, resulting in her stumbling and falling to the ground.
