Jaune makes a keikaku

 I came to my feet quickly, reaching out with my senses to find all the bloodlust being directed at me, checking it against my memory of the forest around me. A glance to the side showed me my MP bar, basic division told me how many attacks I had in me, and Wisdom and Intelligence together plotted a path.

I had to be careful both in situations like this and in what may be to come. Bai Hu's art gave me tremendous power—but only for a short time. The idea was to give yourself such power that you could destroy anything in your path in that time frame and maybe that had even been the case for Bai Hu, but for me…I had to make every blow count, stretch things out as much as possible, and use all of my advantages. With my power, I could make up for weaknesses with other strengths, like I was trying to do with Sense Danger and Detect Bloodthirst now and my other combat skills. Still using short bursts of power, but with precise application and between other attacks.

For now, this was the way I needed to fight, because it was the only method I could use to fight at this level. It should be enough as I shouldn't need to fight if things went well—which they almost certainly wouldn't, granted—and all I needed to do was make it through whatever I was faced with until Adam and Blake could assist, if it came to that.

But since my luck was so amazing, I was trying to extend my fighting ability as much as possible. All I needed to do was buy time or escape or, if neither of those were possible, make an opening.

Kind of like this one.

Thirty-four targets, I thought even as I moved in a Lunge, landing atop one of the downed Beowolves. I slid the clawed finger of my right hand in at an angle, driving it deep under its ribcage, up towards a heart I seized tightly in my hands and tore free as I moved away, flipping in the air to land behind another creature that had been charging at me, before landing a smashing blow to the back of its neck and bearing down hard to crush it.

Six more were reachable in a single bound and died swiftly, but then it got more complicated. In ideal conditions, I could have gone from one to another in Lunge after Lunge. With the power of the White Tiger, the boosts from other skills, the Grimm Slayer title, and Crocea Mors making my claws diamond hard despite being razor thin, I could take down a Beowolf with one good hit, but conserving energy was the issue. With Razor Wind and Magic Bullet as they were now, it wasn't yet possible to kill opponents of this level with one hit yet, either, so I couldn't use them to cheaply slay hard to reach opponents until I trained more. I had to make do with conventional jumps or, when they didn't work, expensive Lunges.

In this case I had to use the latter to get in position fast enough. I bounced off one tree to make a normal leap to another before falling hard in the midst of eleven more of them, just a slight ways away from the Alpha. I roar again and the sound caused the Beowolves to reflexively draw away—and then they died, fast and brutally. I crushed and tore out organs, throats, and whatever else I could get a hold of, flying between them with the speed of my Air Aura as I ripped them to pieces. I kept an eye on my steadily depleting MP bar all the while, flashing between trees, back across to the other side, hunting the Grimm down one by one until my MP was close to depleted and only the Alpha remained.

I'd done the math and taken some guesses and I wasn't going to be able to take the much large Alpha down in one shot the normal way, but I had the choice of either killing him and leaving a dozen little Beowolves around or taking out all the small fries with maybe just enough left over for this.