“My party spent forty minutes losing to a boss that could not die until we figured it out. Requesting an addendum, I can provide details.”(Resolved: customer satisfaction survey issued.)— Diver feedback, SMB11
I went down.
The shield came up over me a half-second ahead of Cecilia’s word, and the light the King had gathered at the tip of his forelimb arrived as sound.
A single flat note the size of the room, pitched somewhere under hearing and felt instead in the sternum and the wet behind the eyes, and the Michalski plate caught most of it and shoved the rest straight through me.
I grunted, slid back a body-length on my heels, and stayed standing mostly out of spite.
In the corner of my eye, the needle’s display ticked the battery down from sixty to forty-two without being asked. The shield had eaten the note and paid for it with mana, and the part it hadn’t eaten had still been enough to walk every joint in my arm sideways.
“Okay,” I said. “Not a fan of the King.”
I brought the coilgun up anyway, because doing something beat doing nothing, and put a slug into the nearest Elite Royal Guardian where its shoulder seam should have been soft. The slug skipped off the gold like I’d thrown a coin at a tank.
The chitin didn’t even mark.
Across the room Cecilia hit the same Guardian three times in the space it took me to register she’d moved, a white blur and steel and the small flat sound of an edge finding a seam; and the seam closed behind her as fast as she opened it, the gold running back into the cut like water filling a footprint.
She came back around to me with her composure intact and her patience visibly thinner. “It’s healing.”
“Both of them are.” I watched the second Guardian shrug off a cut that should have taken its arm. “And the King’s wearing the same trick. You’re hitting them. Nothing’s sticking.”
Cecilia’s eyes went up past the King on his shelf, into the dark where the vault climbed away past the seam-light. “Then it isn’t their hide. Something’s holding them up. I want to know what’s singing.”
I’d been hearing it the whole time. The hum. It had been building since we walked in, and now that I went looking for the reason of it instead of the noise, it was coming from the walls and not the floor, from up high where the cells ran thickest and the gold pooled in the seams.
I pushed my aim up the wall and found one.
What I’d taken for a sealed clutch was a thing folded into the cell, soft-bodied and pale, head tipped back, and where its face should have been, there was a mouth held wide open and pouring that low gold note into the room. The hive’s whole protective racket, sung by a thing that didn’t have edges and didn’t fight and just opened up and gave the King his armor for free.
A panel bloomed obligingly in the corner of my eye, smug about it.
[Brood Chorister][Level 12]
“There’s a choir,” I said. “In the walls. They’re buffing the boss.” I traced the gold and counted them. The vault was studded with them, recessed and singing, mouths open all the way up into the dark. “There’s a lot of them.”
Alice’s head came around, ember star blazing. “Can you shoot them?!”
“I can try,” I said with a shrug.
I put a slug into the nearest chorister center-mass, into the soft pale body that should have come apart like wet paper, and the slug thumped in and stopped, lodged a finger deep and going no further, the wound already pursing shut around it. The thing didn’t even break its note.
“...Of course,” I said.
My enchanted slugs were Piercing and Force and at level one. I was so proud of it at the time. The slug carried all that into a soft target and just sat there, because it couldn’t open a hole to spend the force through.
Note to self, assuming I lived: visit the moon and bump up the runes.
Until then, the slugs went where the body was soft and already open.
The mouth.
I adjusted aim thanks to the trace in the air, and put the next one through an open mouth. The chorister jerked, the note guttering; and the wound sealed, slower this time, the gold crawling back across it grudging.
Oh, come on!
So I put a second slug into the same mouth before it closed, and that one finished it. The body sagged in its cell and the note died with it, and somewhere across the room the King’s healing stuttered for the first time, the gold in his nearest seam dimming a single notch.
Two slugs. One mouth. Nine targets I could see, and a feeling there were more I couldn’t.
“Ceci,” I called, already swinging to the next one. “Keep them off me and keep them busy. I’m turning the music off.”
“Take your time,” Cecilia said, meaning the exact opposite, and went back to making the Guardians work for the privilege of healing.
I went to work on the choir.
It wasn’t sniping the way the range taught it. It was sniping in a wind tunnel, because every fifteen or twenty seconds the King wound up and screamed, a wide flat wave that swept the whole vault, and the shield caught it and grunted it through me and walked my aim a clean foot off the mouth I’d been threading right as I fired.
The slug would sail wide into chitin and waste itself, and the battery in the corner of my eye would shed another chunk, and I’d reset my feet and find the mouth again and try to fire in the gap between his screams.
Two mages.
The gold dimmed a notch.
“Alice—” I started, on the fourth scream, the slug gone wide again, “—can you reach the high ones, the wall, can you just hose the—”
“Fire doesn’t thread, Dash!” She didn’t even look over; she was knee-deep in a fresh wave of soldiers boiling out of a side-vent, painting them gold-to-ash four at a time, and there was a genuine offense in it. “I can’t put a fireball through a little mouth from across the room, that’s a you thing, I’d cook the whole wall and miss every hole! And I am busy, there are so many of these, why are there so many—”
Fine. A me thing.
Three mages.
Four.
The vault dimmed another shade each time, the choir thinning out of its own harmony, and the King’s screams started landing a touch softer as fewer voices held him up.
Five.
I burned through the first translucent mag and seated the second, and the stupid math got loud in the back of my head; eighteen slugs minimum if I never missed, and I was missing one in three to that scream, and I had fifty enchanted total and a battery sliding toward the thirties.
Six.
I caught that one clean between screams, both slugs into the mouth before the King even wound up, and allowed myself a half-second of feeling preem about it.
Seven was high and far and tucked behind a rib of chitin, and it took me three tries and a scream-walked miss and a grunt and the battery dropping to twenty-eight before I threaded both slugs home.
The note died.
The gold ran noticeably duller now, all across the room, the King’s seams holding their cuts a beat longer every time Cecilia opened one.
Eight.
I was down to my last full mag.
Nine was the last open mouth in the dark, and the King screamed as I fired, and the shield grunted it through me, and I’d learned the wind by now and led the mouth into the shove instead of fighting it. The slug went home on the walk. Second slug into the same hole. The note cut out.
And the vault went quiet. Just the King on his shelf and the Guardians and Alice’s fire crackling.
Cecilia said nothing.
She just stepped into the nearest Guardian and opened it along the shoulder seam, and this time the cut stayed; the gold didn’t run back; the arm came off and hit the resin and stayed off, and the Guardian folded around a wound that finally meant something.
The second one went the same way a second later, two clean lines, and then it was just the King.
She turned her blade on him, and the first cut bit deep and held, gold welling out of it and staying welled, and the King reared up off his shelf with a scream that had nothing protective left in it, all rage now—
— and the shelf stood up.
The dais he’d been perched on this whole time, the shelf of fused chitin I thought was throne, shuddered and unfolded and rose, and it had legs, and it had a head, and it had been under him the entire fight.
Bigger than the king.
Darker.
The gold ran in her like blood, and she came up out of her own floor with the King bleeding above her and looked at the three small things that had silenced her house.
[Brood Queen][Level 15]
So that was where the queen had been. The chair?
“NOVA,” Alice breathed, somewhere off to my left.
Cecilia took one step back, drew her second sword, and didn’t look remotely worried. “Alice. The small ones, all of them, every one that wakes up. Dash—” she didn’t turn her head, “—stay alive and put rounds in something soft when you can. I go all in; I have these two.”
Then she went in on both of them at once, and I finally got to see what ‘all in’ meant.
The King was slow and huge and screamed; the Queen was fast and came at her in a flat sprint of too many legs.
Cecilia stood in the exact spot where both of them wanted to be and made it cost.
One blade kept the King at bay, turning his bladed forelimbs out wide, riding his recovery, opening a new line in him every time he over-committed to a scream.
The other carved the Queen, ducking under her reach, skating off her rush, drawing white lines down a black hide that bled and kept bleeding. She moved between the two of them like she was the only one allowed to, never planted, never caught flat-footed, two monarchs swinging at a girl in white who was somehow always a half-step into the gap neither of them had thought to cover.
Then the Queen got a hit in.
A full-weight sweep that should have folded anyone, and it caught Cecilia across the side and threw her four meters, and she hit the cell-wall and came off it already moving.
And the whites were spotless, without any smudge or tear.
She’d been thrown into a cell-wall by a level fifteen and come off it without a tear; and a whole fight spent opening monarchs that bled hadn’t left a fleck on her. The ichor that should have soaked her slid off the white and found nothing to hold. I stood there with a near-empty mag and a battery in the twenties and remembered asking her, hours ago, whether white stained.
It didn’t.
This was a real fight. A level-fifteen fight, two of them at once, and I wasn’t in it.
Kavish had said it at Sublevel 35, when a Reaver put me through a wall. I’d hated him for it. He’d been right. I needed experience and not that which increased the level. Battle experience fighting enemies.
In other words, diving shards.
One shard at a time, I’d decrease the gap between me and the twins. Between me and Erika. One day I’d be standing shoulder to shoulder with them.
The Queen reared to scream, mouth gaping wide, and there was something soft and open I could reach.
I put a slug through it.
It didn’t kill her, it barely scratched her honestly, but it hitched her, half a second, the scream dying in her throat and her head snapping with the impact, and in that half-second Cecilia put a full line down the Queen’s exposed side that she would not have had the room to draw earlier.
Her eyes flicked to me for a quarter-second. “Amazing, again, please!”
So I did it again.
The King wound up to scream; I put a slug through his open mouth and bought the hitch, and Cecilia took it, opening him along the throat-seam while he was still choking on it.
The Queen lunged; I caught her gape and stalled it half a second, and Cecilia was already there.
I couldn’t kill either of them, but every time one of them opened up to make that noise, I could take the noise away for half a second and hand the half-second to the magical girl, and she spent every one, and the lines on the two monarchs stopped closing and started adding up.
I was nearly out of enchanted slugs by the time it ended.
The King went first, throat opened one cut too far, folding off his feet with the gold guttering out of him.
The Queen lasted four more exchanges and one last scream I shot the front off of, and then Cecilia stepped inside her reach on the off-beat and put both blades through her at once, and the Brood Queen came apart around the white and went down on the resin she’d been pretending to be.
[Trine Concord LP gained!][Trine Concord LP progress: 31%]
[Scenario cleared: Kill the King]
Alice strolled out of a drift of cooling soldiers, ember star bright, blowing a strand of hair off her face. “Okay. That was nova. Did you see Ceci do the both-swords-through thing? Tell me you saw it.” She rounded on her sister, delighted. “It’s so unfair, you’re so OP—”
Cecilia let both blades slide home, finally a little out of breath, the blush starting somewhere under the collar of the spotless white. “It was close.”
“It was not close, you’re so—”
“The buff being up was close.” She said it to me, not to Alice. “Before you turned it off, we couldn’t have taken either of them. You know that.” She couldn’t hold composure anymore and grinned brightly and jumped into such an energetic hug, which I could mistake her for Alice. “Thank you. The mouths at the end too. You made it easy.”
“I need to level up,” I said.
Alice blinked. “Well, yeah. Obviously.”
“So you’ll level,” Cecilia said simply as she pulled out of the hug. “And you’ll improve. That’s the whole point of the dive.” Then, because Alice had already drifted toward the loot, gacha-drunk, “Collect everything first. We are not walking back up for it a second time.”
“Not it,” Alice said immediately.
“Damnit, Alice,” we both said.
Author's note: Okay, so today's chapter should be tomorrow's one. According to the bonus chapter calculation, we need to be 31 chapters ahead, which we are, but I didn't want to leave today's blank without a warning, so I pulled tomorrow's chapter to today.
So the next one is on Tuesday.
Also, in book three I want to introduce something like "gamey" style. You have a main story-line, but then to progress further in the main story, you need to pick one of the diverges, and according to which you pick and in which order, the main story changes.
At this point we unlocked these diverges and you can pick more than one:
Omar's problem: Omar mentioned he was working on something. Well, we get to learn what it was and maybe help.
Erika's race: Erika may finally managed to get into the finals and Dash can go see her racing. Maybe Roy won't be there.
Padawai concert: Padawai are in the town (City)! Comma asked Dash to come and maybe there could be some work for him to do.