It was almost exactly the agreed-upon fifteen minutes later that Mia stiffened again, the deep frown that had been marring her face for the last five minutes as ambient miasma continued to climb, morphing into an outright grimace. Right at the very edges of her perception, there was something deeply wrong with the earth.
Miasma was everywhere, clinging to the earth, to the trees, and to a much lesser extent, even to the air itself. It wasn’t as bad as the inside of Rifts, not even close, but it was like that entire region was drenched in miasma. Said region stretched far and wide, more and more of it falling under Mia’s perception as they approached.
“What the fuck is that!?” Mia hissed in a whisper, turning towards Gabe questioningly. She watched him blink in surprise as his eyes took in the expression on her face, then he grimaced.
“Ah, that’s … what we came here for,” he said a bit awkwardly, scratching his cheek as she glared at him. Why was there a region that looked to be about a kilometre across defiled like that!? Did some idiot cultists do some profane ritual there? That was a thing in RPGs, right? With her life practically turning into one, she couldn’t rule it out- “Sorry about that, I didn’t think about how sensitive you are to miasma, I should have warned you. But to answer your question, that’s a monster nest. You can think of it as the final stage of a Rift’s life cycle. Most Rifts disappear when they run out of ambient mana to gobble up, maybe a third become monster nests, and in extremely rare cases, they can even turn into Dungeons. This here is a monster nest, as I’d said, a phenomenon where the demi-plane housing a Rift’s inner world gets superimposed over the outside world, essentially replacing whatever used to be there before.”
The edge of the ‘monster nest’, as Gabe called it, came into view a few minutes later, and the sight of it was jarring. It really did look like someone had just carved a circular hole in the landscape with an extremely precise tool, then put a chunk of some other world into it that fit perfectly. The ground shifted from the lively brown dirt covered with grasses and fallen leaves to black soot, interrupted only by the occasional tree with pastel-white bark and matching obsidian leaves hanging heavily from low branches.
A single step and you stepped from Earth into an alien world, not entirely unlike how Rift Gates worked, except there were no spatial shenanigans involved here … or rather, the spatial phenomena that had left this region changed, swapped out for a Rift’s inner world had done its job already. It was a done deal, and practically irreversible.
Mia gulped as the implications of such a thing existing settled into her mind. All the Rifts that had appeared in Graz could have turned into monster nests, couldn’t they? That wolf Raid had been massive, and Mia doubted any of the others had been particularly small. Would even a single building have remained of Graz had they all been allowed to mature and turn into such nests?
How many cities all around the world had already been erased in such a way, with not even the ruins remaining behind for later generations to find?
It was a chilling thought. Somehow, the thought of all signs of human life and civilisation being erased by the Rifts was even more horrible than all of humanity falling before the tide of monsters. All their struggles, history and culture forgotten, all memories of it: erased. It was impossibly cruel, even if that likely wasn’t the intention. A more practical part of her whispered how useful it would be to have the inner world of Rifts permanently materialise in the real world. Magical plants, ores, monsters with useful parts and other reagents for enchanting and alchemy. Earth had none of that, but Rifts? They were filled to the brim with such materials.
“What’s a dungeon?” Lina asked curiously, her eyes tracking the alien landscape.
“Well, you could say that a monster nest is essentially a dead dungeon,” Gabe said. “This thing here has no core, the miasma will fade away, and no new monsters will spawn here, not unnaturally anyway. A dungeon is very similar to a monster nest, but it has one crucial difference: it is still alive. It’s superimposed over a region out in the prime plane in the same way a monster nest is, but the original Rift’s core is still kicking somewhere within its depth. Dungeons keep spreading, spawning monsters and growing stronger with every dead invader dying within their area of influence. You could compare a Rift to a … caterpillar or a coccoon, a monster nest would be a stillborn, while dungeons are the fully mature specimens that shed off their cocoons. That’s a horrible analogy, but you get the gist of it, right?”
Mia nodded absently, her ears twitching every so often as she listened to dozens of small feet thumping on packed dirt. The noise was muffled and came from … underground. Burrows? Did goblins live in burrows? Was this even a goblin nest, or were those five that ambushed them just monsters that escaped the battle that saw the rest of their kind killed in the city?
“I’m hearing a bunch of things moving around underground,” Mia said, changing the topic back to the matter at hand. “Probably some kind of a burrow, or an underground tunnel network? It’s not giant ants in an anthill, right?”
No, she couldn’t hear that characteristic chittering, and the sounds she heard were too … soft, for lack of a better word. Ants had chitin exoskeletons, and what she was hearing was more similar to the noise made by soft padded feet, or maybe feet wearing shoes, or footwraps? Something like that.
“The whole place stinks of goblin,” Camie said, her nose scrunched up in distaste.
“Well, that answers that,” Lina said, the small dome of swirling air magic she had around the group thickening a bit. “So? What plan do you have for us, our glorious pint-sized leader?”
Mia rolled her eyes and huffed. She wasn’t that short, 152cm was a perfectly normal and respectable height for a woman.
“Well, I’m not sensing any magic being used to reinforce their tunnels, so just collapsing the whole hill on top of their heads is probably out,” Mia said, crossing her arms as she thought, her fingers tapping idly at her elbow to distract herself from the four pairs of expectant gazes boring into her face. “We need to find all the exit holes, set up traps or collapse them the old-fashioned way, maybe put a boulder on top of them to block them off. Then we could send my summons, Sparkle and mom’s sprite inside to cause enough havoc to make them rush out of the one exit we’ve left open? I wish we could just flood the tunnels or something.”
“You’re not even considering going inside?” Lina asked curiously.
“Hell no, those tunnels are probably so small that we’d have to crawl to fit through them,” Mia said, vehemently shaking her head. “Besides, small, dark and confined spaces benefit the goblins. They might have traps as well. It’d be best to face them out here, not where they have the home field advantage.”
“Shouldn’t Rifts have a clearly traversable route to the core?” Camie asked. “I thought that was a thing?”
“No, we had to climb up those vines in the Raid to get to the floating island where the Guardian was,” Mia said, shaking her head. “There has to be a route, and a tunnel we’d have to crawl through would probably count. Still, it’s worth it to check; there might be a proper cave opening or something leading inside.”
Sparkle zipped away to do just that a moment later, and Mia vaguely felt him circle around the miasma-infected landscape a few times before returning.
“Found three larger tunnel entrances, maybe large enough to fit Mia, but the rest of you’ll have to crouch or walk hunched over,” Sparkle said, perching himself on Mia’s shoulder, tiny feet swinging back and forth. “Found larger footprints, so they probably have some bigger Greenskin variants. Maybe a troll or a hob.”
“Oka-“ Mia started, then paused.
“They’ve noticed us?” Camie said uncertainly, then blinked. “Yeah. They did … and-“
“They’re moving strangely, so yeah, probably,” Mia said, slumping a little in defeat. She had no idea what gave them away. Lina’s air bubble should have kept their voices and approach silent while containing their scent. “Well, this works as well, I guess. It looks like they are coming out to chase us off. Get ready. Sparkle, scout out the tunnels. I want to know what types of monsters are in there and what exactly they are doing. Be quick.”
“What about us? We just line up here and wait?” Lina asked, looking fidgety. Whether that was from nerves or just pre-battle jitters, Mia couldn’t be sure.
“No,” Mia said, breaking into a sprint as she ran up to the nearest tunnel entrance. Sparkle zipped off her shoulder and into the dark tunnel hidden under a sprawling bush.
The spell circle she wanted clicked into place inside her runic model right as she all but stabbed her wand into the soft dirt in front of the hole. Mana rushed into her wand at her prompting, and the spell circle that appeared at its tip widened to cover a bit more than a metre diagonally before it practically seared itself into the ground. That was one Warding Glyph — aka magical landmine — ready to ruin a few goblins’ lives, now she just had to see how many more she could place down before the goblins started flowing out of their hidey holes.
Mia hopped back, running over to the next tunnel entrance while keeping an ear out for the approaching goblins. Most of them were just milling about, doing something weird in a cavernous room at the end of the tunnel system, but she could hear at least a dozen pairs of feet padding and crawling up the tunnels in haste. Their chittering language was still just as unnerving as ever and took Mia back to a time when she had to hide away in fear from a single low-level goblin.
She didn’t let it stop her, placing down three more Warding Glyphs while Camie shadowed her before she ran back to where the others were staying. They’d picked a larger open space between the chalk-white trees, and Lina had been clearing away the few bushes that’d obstruct the view. Mia checked on everyone’s Wards of Protection quickly, only turning back towards the goblin mound when she was sure they both had enough juice to stop a few strikes even from a Level 20 goblin. At Rank 1, there wasn’t much that could be called ‘Lesser’ about that spell, especially with how it became reactive to incoming damage with the upgrades Mia’d chosen to add in, thus extending its lifetime greatly by not wasting energy on trying to protect the wearer from the kinetic feedback of their footfalls or from every breeze. Neither of those took much energy to negate, but over time? They ate away at the Ward’s internal mana reserves for no good reason.
“Okay,” Mia said, gathering her thoughts. “Mom, you’re our primary firepower, so try to take out big clumps of them whenever you can. Lina, you’ll be responsible primarily for keeping projectiles from hitting us or from dispersing larger groups if they can get past our spellfire. If you have the leeway, you can join in on the ranged goblin slaying. Camie, you’ll be … getting up in their faces. Stay nearby in case we need help, but otherwise go wild. Just try to stay out of our line of fire. Everyone got that?”
“Got it,” Lina said, while the other two just nodded. Helene’s sprite flew off into the distance and came to float above one of the larger tunnel exits while Mia prepared her Arcane Blast spell circle. She’d tried being economical with her mana by using that piercing Bolt variant before, and it almost earned her a shiv to the guts, so overkill as an Arcane Blast might have been against goblins, she’d use it all the same.
Besides, if there was something nastier than goblins in those tunnels, the extra firepower would be more than welcome.
Their footsteps grew louder, less distant and with it came their eerie high-pitched warcries delivered in that chattering tongue of theirs. It sounded like a bunch of preteens trying to make insect noises while screaming and hollering on the playground, except this was a mob of bloodthirsty monsters that wanted nothing more than to gnaw the flesh of a living human’s bones.
Mia heard the first goblin step out of the hole in the ground, its small body crouching low under the bush as it scampered out. She felt the thrum of mana as the simple trigger mechanism of the Warding Glyph triggered, and it would have been harder not to feel or hear the loud explosion that followed. It was quick, violent and powerful, tearing the goblin apart in a chaotic storm of raw arcane energy, along with the bush that had been covering the tunnel’s exit. By the time the fizzling pink energies cleared up enough to see there was a small crater, maybe two metres across, where the tunnel had been, and while Mia couldn’t understand the goblins’ words, their terrified voices and panicked screeching bypassed all language barriers.
A brave or maybe crazy little goblin stuck its deformed, bulbous head out of the newly widened hole, beady eyes wide as saucers and large, ragged-looking ears twitching as it turned its head this way and that.
Mia wasn’t one to let such an opportunity go, and in an instant, the monster’s head disappeared in a pink blast of arcane energy and gore. The shockwave sent the headless corpse slamming back into its more craven kin still hiding inside the tunnel, making them squeak, only for their voices to be silenced by another Warding Glyph exploding off to the side. Mia couldn’t see the results herself, but with the amount of mana those damned spells took to cast, she hoped it got at least a few of the little buggers when it went off.
‘Found a big one,’ Sparkle’s voice buzzed in Mia’s ears. ‘Can I? I wanna kill it, just a little bit.’
‘Go ahead, but get back here after; they are going to get past my Warding Glyphs any moment now.’ Mia replied in a hurry, her focus snapping back into the present as bloodlust finally overcame the goblins’ wariness, prompting them to scamper out of the small crater with screeching war cries. They rushed ahead the moment they were up on solid ground, their bodies hunched so low their knuckles brushed the dirt as they ran.
An arc of yellowish-blue lightning snapped out, the air thrumming with power as it passed next to Mia, and it slammed into the fastest of the little monsters before chaining to three more nearby ones. They dropped to the ground, their bodies sizzling and convulsing as their eyes popped. The ones behind them scrambled over their corpses, only to be met with Arcane Blasts and downward blasts of concussive air bursts.
The first Blast erased a head, the second obliterated a torso so thoroughly that its four limbs flew in four separate ways, the third left only a pair of legs behind, and the fourth-
Mia hissed, flicking her wand upwards to send the unstable fourth Arcane Blast up into the canopy as she banished the spell circle. It trembled in her white-knuckled grip, taking the backlash onto itself, holding back the worst of it without even cracking or forming fracture lines, letting only a small jolt of pain slip into Mia's hand. As for why she sent the Blast upwards? Well, that could be easily explained when one looked at how the spell spun and twisted through the air like a hummingbird on a sugar rush. It was just as likely to hit one of her friends as it was to harm her actual targets. It would have been best to banish it entirely, but she wasn’t sure her wand could have taken it without cracking.
But where her spells failed, Lina’s magic didn’t, continuing to send goblin after goblin slamming into the dirt, flying up into the canopy or just crashing into each other. It wasn’t the most deadly way of fighting, but it kept them out of melee range and, better yet, it clumped them up into neat little groups. Helene’s lightning bolts arced out one after the other, snapping between three, four or even five goblins once, then three more times before the first group was left lying dead or broken.
The rest of Mia’s Warding Glyphs had exploded during the short battle, echoing in the background and heralding in the next few groups of goblins pouring out onto the surface. There were more than twenty of them now, just by what Mia could hear, and with a thought, she summoned her two pseudo-spirits, keeping the Guardian at her side while she sent the Black Knight off to fight the largest group of goblins that came pouring out of a tunnel exit she’d failed to put a Warding Glyph on.
Thunder rolled in the distance, the sound echoing over all other noises of battle, and it told Mia that something nasty must have come out of the tunnel her Mom’s sprite was keeping watch on.
“Is it dead?” Mia asked quickly while realigning her runic matrix and starting to gather mana for another spell.
‘It sure is!’ Sparkle giggled into Mia’s mind, and she could feel him zipping up from deep underground, emerging on the other side of the mound.
“It is,” Helene said, panting slightly at Mia’s side. “I- it’s a lanky goblin, looks like someone stretched it out to be two metres tall, but it’s hunched over like the rest.”
Mia blinked; she’d been aiming that question at her mother, but this was fine as well. A lanky goblin that was two meters tall? That didn’t fit the image she had in her head about orcs or hobgoblins, so maybe a troll or some withered orc shaman? Those goblin shamans had been all skin and bones, so maybe?
A new group came into view, cresting over a small hill with screeching warcries, but it was joined by a deeper, much stronger voice that had Mia snap her head around to stare towards it. It was like a goblin on steroids, then stretched to stand at two metres tall with too long limbs and a misshapen, angular head characterised by a pair of thick ivory tusks emerging from its lips. Still, lanky as it might have looked, its thighs and arms were thicker than Mia’s waist, and the way it bounded across the ground, its long legs eating up the distance, made some primal instincts in the back of Mia's brain scream. It might have been hunched, and that might have made it look much shorter than it truly was, but just watching that much pure muscle charge towards her had the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. Even with her Mage Armour on, Mia didn’t want to test just what that creature could do if it ever got within melee distance.
“Camie?” Mia said, and that was all she needed to say, the vampiress already leaping into action and dashing off towards the new group while Mia’s Black Knight went through another, more numerous goblin group like a scythe through wheat.
There had to be more than thirty goblins just within Mia’s line of sight, with a dozen more already dead and scattered across the ground, their blood turning the coal-black dirt of the nest a muddy brown. The Black Knight added ten more corpses to that count in just a few seconds. It was a force of nature, moving on and through any obstacle the goblins could put in its way. Once it was done there, Mia called it back to stand in reserve, waiting for another of those trolls to show up while she herself conjured up a pack of wolf-like Mana Familiars and sent them ahead to rush the disparate groups of goblins coming from up ahead. Most of them fell to Lina’s and Helene’s magic, but some would have eventually gotten close enough to force Mia’s White Guardian into action.
Sparkle returned a moment later, bypassing the few remaining goblins to land on Mia’s shoulder. At the same time, Camie had just finished killing all the goblins following the troll, and Mia was just in time to watch her girlfriend weave around a vicious stab with a stone machete.
Her breath caught in her chest despite herself as she saw the sharp blade tear into Camie’s side and come away coated in fresh blood. The vampire didn’t slow, she didn’t even twitch from the agony she must have been feeling, and her right hand snaked forth, fingers held out like claws. In a blink, they closed around the troll’s neck and crushed it in her vice-like grip, rending its windpipe and tearing its arteries, but missing its spine.
Camie leapt back as a wild swing tried to cut her throat in vengeance, and she just watched for a moment, watching the troll as it clutched its throat, trying to stymie the fountain of blood that still seeped through its fingers. It stumbled, taking one step, then another, murderous hatred burning in its sunken, beady black eyes while its thick, worm-like lips peeled back into a snarl. Even with its throat crushed, it still wasn’t going down, and Mia wondered for a moment whether this creature had the ridiculous healing factor of its namesake or just its name.
Camie didn’t seem intent on finding out as she lunged forward in an instant, going from deathly still to already plunging her hand into the side, fingers held straight and together like a blade, the crimson magic humming around them, making sure they had both the sharpness and toughness of a sword. What had once been a crude mana coating had become something much more refined as a result of Camie having chosen a Secondary Skill to handle it from her own Quest Rewards back when Mia’d gone for Spirit Blink. That Secondary Skill, which had since become a Subskill of the vampiress’ Class Skill, could turn her limbs into lethal weapons and make use of her Spirit Subattributes even when she was in a physical fight.
The troll lashed out again, though this swing of its one free hand was slower, heavier, the beast having to put its entire body into it. Still, it looked sluggish from the outside, a dying beast’s last attempt at lashing out at its killer. It wasn’t enough, not nearly enough, seeing as Camie just caught it on her forearm.
The force of the blow still sent her stumbling back a step or two, but that was the extent of its effect. The troll collapsed on its knees, the final shred of strength it’d conjured up for that blow fading away. The monster clutched the new gaping wound on its side, which had already coated its leg and rugged greenish hide in slick crimson. A moment later, with a final hateful growl, it collapsed on its face and went still … but Mia could feel that it still wasn’t dead, something only she seemed to be aware of as she saw her girlfriend relaxing just a metre away from her defeated opponent.
Mia flicked her wand, the Arcane Blast spell circle she’d constructed after sending her Familiars into the fray, thrumming with power as mana flowed into it. The pink missile zipped off, devouring the distance in a blink and crashed into the fallen monster’s head with a resounding boom.
“It was still alive,” Mia said a bit defensively when Camie sent her an inquisitive look after leaping away from the arcane explosion like a frightened cat. “You always double-tap.”
“Ah,” Camie said, blinking owlishly at the now headless corpse before jogging back to Mia’s side with a sheepish look on her face. “Right, trolls, they can regenerate, can’t they?”
“Indeed,” Gabe said, making Mia jolt as she’d forgotten he was even there despite him standing right behind her. He panned his gaze across the battlefield, his gaze lingering on the few remaining goblins as they tried to tag-team one of Mia’s Familiars. Two had already fallen to getting mobbed like that, but they’d served their purpose as a distraction quite well, and this last one seemed to be handling its pint-sized opponents without help. “Trolls have rather ridiculous regenerative capabilities. They can grow back entire limbs in a few hours, or just a few minutes when they are doped up on something. A crushed throat would have healed in a few minutes; that one was likely planning to ambush us from behind once we left it behind and unsupervised. They can be crafty like that.”
“So now what?” Lina asked, panting slightly as she glanced back at Mia. Her sky blue eyes shone with excitement despite the sheen of sweat glueing locks of her blonde hair to her face. “Into the belly of the beast, or what?”
“We’ll see,” Mia muttered, her brows furrowing as she listened intently to what she was hearing from the depths. Just what the hell were the goblins and trolls that stayed behind doing down there, and why weren’t they coming up to chase away the invaders? That didn’t seem like regular monster behaviour to her, and it was making her worried. “We need to know what we’d be walking into first. So, what did you find, Sparkle?”
“One big fat goblin, it was the size of a boulder and looked like one too, with rugged muddy brown skin and a bald head,” the sprite said. “The small ones were carrying it around on a table or something, too bad I blew its head off. Hehe. Ah, but there were others! Big, bulky goblins, not like those ugly, hunched ones you saw up here, but proper ones that looked all warrior-like. I didn’t go into the deepest caverns, but there were more of the fat ones and the muscly ones, with only a few of these lanky ones you killed with lots of the tiny ones mulling about like slaves, scampering around under their feet.”
“Ah, damn,” Gabe said, breathing a sigh as he scratched his chin while putting on a worried frown. “Well, it’s good that we found them early, because that sounds like Orcs and Ogres. We’ve got a whole Greenskin army in the making under our feet.”