AN: Sorry for the late update. I forgot to schedule the chapter, and then I fell asleep.
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“Do we really want to go inside there?” Mia asked apprehensively, looking at the Hole of Doom. It sat at the wall of a gully, nestled between the roots of a large tree, and was just barely tall enough for Mia to theoretically walk inside without having to hunch over, and roughly wide enough for two people to walk abreast, though barely.
“Well, what else are we supposed to do? Let them just breed down there until a proper army of them is just sitting under our feet?” Lina asked, though she also looked rather queasy at the idea of walking into the damp dirt tunnel to fight a bunch of goblins and worse.
“I mean, it’s not like they can invade Graz with Gabe sitting there,” Mia said. “Also, we could just drag Mark out here and have him collapse the whole mound on top of their heads.”
“But it’s going to make clearing up the surrounding forests much more difficult if we let a group of intelligent, organised monsters have the time they need to set up shop this close to the city,” Helene said, then glanced at Gabriel. “If it was such a huge problem, you’d take care of it, wouldn’t you?”
“Yeah,” Gabe said reluctantly, crossing his arms. “But this is a training opportunity, and I’m not going to take that away from you. You need to handle this yourselves, because I won’t step in until it becomes an actual existential threat to the city. I can’t be everywhere. You need to learn how to deal with problems when ‘let Gabe handle it’ isn’t an option.”
Mia just nodded in agreement, mostly to herself as she frowned thoughtfully. Even as she listened to Gabe and her mom talk with half an ear, her mind was hard at work brainstorming ideas. Was flooding the tunnels possible to drown them like she used to do with molehills in the garden? Where would she get enough water? Divert it from a nearby river? Was there even a water-elementalist powerful enough to handle that? Probably not. Maybe the fake mana-water some of them could conjure up would be of use, but Mia doubted any of the rare few Water Elementalists that could conjure that faux-water would be able to conjure enough to flood the entire tunnel system.
Then what? Collapsing it was still an option, though the tunnel network was massive and went down deep enough that Mia could hear claws clinking on stone floors. Collapsing a stone cave network would be much harder than collapsing dirt tunnels.
A battle of attrition, then? She’d just picked up a perfect spell for that, Mass Summon: Mana Familiar, and she could also send in her Black Knight to wreak havoc. She could just sit at the entrance, drink mana potions and keep sending in her summons day after day. Without a Rift Core to replenish the monsters’ numbers, they’d probably die faster than they could breed if she did that. It was a viable strategy, though possibly extremely slow and even more exhausting.
If enough of those bigger goblins, Orcs, and Ogres managed to mob her Black Knight, it could get overwhelmed. Mia grimaced at the memory of when Gabe had forcefully un-summoned her Black Knight by tearing it in two with his Greater Arcane elemental. A phantom migraine rippled through her skull at the memory of the absolutely horrendous backlash that was made even worse by the fact that not a smidge of the mana she’d invested in the Knight came back when it got destroyed.
Usually, when she dismissed it, the majority of the mana summoning it had taken up in the first place flowed back into her Core. When it did get destroyed though? That mana vanished, and the pseudo-spirit was left in a comatose state, licking its wounds and unable to be summoned again for a while.
What other alternative did they have, though? Maybe they could call up the military guys and ask them for some explosives? Maybe Zeigler’s eggheads had cooked up some nasty alchemical bombs they could use to either smoke out the greenskins or blow their nest to kingdom come?
Hmm, that’s actually a good line of thought; it might be worthwhile following up on it. Mia mused, her eyes narrowing at the shadowy tunnel. Her eyes could see just fine in dim light, but in the utter darkness that would preside over the deeper parts of that tunnel network? Yeah, no. If nothing else, they needed lights of some kind, maybe some of those hardy glow rods they made for fishing. She could strap a few to her belt; that should give her enough light to see even without another light source. Yeah. I think a quick trip back to the city is a must. We could probably handle them out in the open, but not in their tunnels while fighting blind.
“We need to get back to the city and prepare first anyway,” Mia said. “Get some glow sticks for light and maybe see whether Zeigler has any alchemical or mundane explosives he is willing to part with.”
“Glow sticks?” Lina asked, and then her eyes widened. “Right. Light. Makes sense.”
Arcane had spells that could make light, but they were in the illusion school of arcanism, which wasn’t among the ones Mia had picked up runic lexicons from. Either way, why waste mana on a Mage Light spell when you could solve the problem with a bit of extra preparation?
“We can do that, right?” Mia asked, glancing back at her brother. “This isn’t some stupid test where we’re supposed to handle this nest with only what we have on hand?”
“It is a test … of sorts,” Gabe said, shrugging his shoulders. “But not one where I’ll limit you in any way. Going back to the city and getting more gear, allies or tools to be more equipped to handle your problem is certainly a choice you can make. I just want to see how you fight and how you handle a monster nest, no matter how you choose to actually do it.”
Mia narrowed her eyes at him, but he had a carefully carved innocent smile plastered onto his stupid face that gave nothing away about his true feelings. Was he judging them for not preparing well enough? For not being brave enough to just charge inside and trust in their own powers and skills to handle whatever may come their way? … no, not that one. Bravery was all well and good, but only so long as it didn’t dip over into recklessness and stupidity. If Gabe thought otherwise, he was an idiot as well, though Mia didn’t think that was likely. He’d always been the more careful and patient kind.
*****
“Okay, so,” Mia said, after roughly two hours had gone by and they returned to the monster nest from their quick trip. “Everyone’s ready?”
Camie nodded, and Helene quickly mirrored her, while Lina felt the need to verbalise it with a quick, “yep.”
Mia patted her side, doing one final check of the straps securing her spatial pouch to her left hip. It had two belt-like straps to keep it in place: one that went around her hips and a smaller one that locked the bottom of the pouch, tied around her thigh. She stuck a hand inside, mentally going through the catalogue of tools she had inside. A dozen glow rods thick as her thumb, ending in hooks she could use to link them up to a clasp hanging from her belt. There were also a few packs of smaller glow sticks that children used as toys or made bracelets out of, just in case. All of them also had flashlights and headlamps, just in case.
Aside from those, she had a handful of new potions Zeigner had provided without pay: a few health potions, a mana potion, a stamina potion, and two experimental potions. One of those supposedly released a cloud of alchemical sleeping gas, and the other was basically napalm in a vial. He also made sure they knew that if push came to shove, he could have a platoon of soldiers accompany them, but Mia decided to hold off on that idea.
Even now, Zeigler’s troopers were in dire need of manpower. They were going from door to door, clearing out the abandoned parts of the city and making sure no monsters were squatting in empty houses. They were going to allow civilians to settle in. They were also still hunting down the escaped beastkin and scattered Evergreen monsters, and cleaning up the absolute mess that had once been the stronghold of the Werewolf King. Brent had said they should have just blown the entire hill to kingdom come, which told Mia everything she needed to know about just how horrid what they found there must have been. She’d made the decision not to get involved in that at all right then and there.
The militia Brent was training up would probably help the overworked military guys out and give them some breathing room, but for now, Mia didn’t want to impose. They could handle this now that they knew what they were up against and had made the much-needed preparations.
After making sure everything was in place, she grabbed one glow rod, smacked it against her wrist, and shook it up a bit so it started glowing along its length. With that done, she fixed it to the clasp on her hip. Then her wand flicked out, a simple Mana Familiar spell taking shape, and Sparkle jumped into it at her slight nudge.
“Okay,” Mia said, willing her racing heart to calm down with less than stellar success. This would be her first time leading a party in actual combat. The previous goblin ambush had barely been a skirmish, but inside those tunnels, they would have a fight on their hands no less intense than a Rift delve. “My Black Knight goes first, clearing the way and drawing the monsters’ attention. The Guardian takes the lead, acting as our main ‘tank’. Then me, Mom, Lina and then Camie in that order, with Sparkle taking up the flank. Camie, your job is to protect the three of us from any flanking manoeuvres and to keep Sparkle from being overwhelmed if they manage to circle around. Any objections? With how tight these tunnels are, we should get the formation right.”
Changing it up would be annoying and dangerous. What if there were goblin shamans in there that could manipulate the dirt and stone walls? Squeezing around each other to change who goes after whom would leave them vulnerable.
She didn’t just pull the order in which they’d advance out of her butt either; if she was the first one behind her two pseudo-spirits, she could dismiss and re-summon them in a hurry. If she walked behind Lina and Helene, then they’d be left largely unprotected if she summoned the Guardian to her side.
Then, Helene because she had the most trouble keeping her magic from being a friendly fire hazard. In comparison, Lina’s abilities wouldn’t be hampered overly much by one more person being between her and her target. Then Camie and Sparkle on the flank to make sure they could always retreat, even if those two had to carve a bloody path through a small army of flanking greenskins.
It seemed like a pretty solid lineup to Mia, at least.
Nobody objected, and soon they slowly took their first few steps into the tunnel. It was sloped, but just barely, and by some miracle, it hadn’t rained for weeks this late into summer, so the dirt was dry as well. It would have been a pain in the butt if it were slick mud and they all ended up tumbling down right into the middle of a bunch of goblins.
They had seen neither hide nor tail of a goblin since the last of their initial attackers fell more than two hours ago. Mia wasn’t sure what that meant, but it made her extra cautious. Her ears were peeled, listening to the cacophony of echoing little noises making their way up the tunnel network while Lina kept the sound of their own approach from travelling back into the goblins’ ears.
The light of the outside world disappeared after a few twists and turns, leaving the glow rods' dim light as their only source. It was more than enough for Mia’s halvyr eyes, and she was sure Camie had no trouble seeing in the dark either, but the other two were much less well off if their occasional stumbling and Lina’s increasingly frequent mumbled cursing was anything to go by.
“If you have trouble seeing, you should put on your headlamps,” Mia whispered, even though she didn’t need to with the barrier of air magic in place. “I’d rather they notice us sooner than have you two fight practically blind.”
A flashlight was much more obvious than a glow rod, after all. The goblins would notice the dancing shadows cast by the brighter, more directed beams of light much sooner than the dim glow of the glow rods.
“Just slow down a bit,” Helene whispered back. “I need to watch where I’m stepping.”
“Oh,” Mia mumbled, tightening her mental grip on the overeager Black Knight. It was like trying to hold back a bloodthirsty dog on a leash once it’d sighted prey. Was she subconsciously speeding up her steps to lessen the strain of restraining the stupid thing? … maybe. Her own feet always fell on each protruding rock and twisted a bit of dirt just right to maintain her balance with no conscious effort required on her part, but the others were not so lucky. Doubly so because, as previously stated, they were also struggling to see where they were stepping on top of, lacking Mia's instincts. “Okay, sorry. Let’s slow down. We aren’t in a hurry.”
Lina just grunted softly in annoyance, not verbalising her likely unkind thoughts. Mia decided to take that as agreement to keep going as they were, just slower.
The tunnels widened deeper inside, where the dirt was overtaken by hard black rocks that made up the floor, the walls, and even the annoyingly low ceiling that forced Mia to forgo wearing her witch hat if she didn’t want to walk hunched over. Mia ran her fingers over the surface just inches above her head, and the texture reminded her of the feel of softer igneous rocks. Uhm … pumice? Was that what it was called? The rock that looked like a petrified sponge?
It didn’t matter; the echoes would have made it nearly impossible for a regular to tell whether their source was just beyond the next bend or hundreds of meters away, but whatever magic made Mia’s pointed ears work as they did was putting in the work. She slowed even more, eyes narrowing as she palmed her wand in preparation. Up ahead, she could see the faintest hint of long shadows dancing in some distant, reflected illumination.
If her ears were right, there was a larger cavern three bends and roughly fifty metres up ahead, with about two dozen goblins and a few of the larger goblinoid creatures. More importantly, she could clearly hear the crackling sound of burning wood. Did they have a bonfire going down there? That was … not very smart of them. Then again, they were goblins.
And they have magic. Mia chastised herself. For all she knew, a goblin shaman had put up some magic totem that sucked up the CO2 like an industrial vacuum cleaner. Wouldn’t be the weirdest thing I’ve seen this month.
“Try to keep the sound of battle from spreading to the other caverns if you can,” Mia said, her runic model swirling before it snapped into place. “We don’t want to get swarmed if at all possible.”
“Got it,” Lina said seriously. “I can’t promise anything, but I’ll try.”
Yeah, maybe Mia was asking too much, but it was worth a try, anyway. They slowed even further as the dim light coming from up ahead led them down the tunnel. There were some splits and intersections in the path, but Mia followed the dancing lights, having to put most of her focus into keeping the Black Knight from rushing ahead as it strained against its leash, practically vibrating with bloodlust and killing intent.
“Fifteen goblins, two of them are probably one of those ogres if I had to guess,” Mia whispered once she managed to differentiate the cacophony of chittering voices into three separate groups. The orcs and ogres had deep, rumbling voices, but the one she guessed was an ogre had an even deeper tone and spoke in a slightly different way from the other two. What that difference was, she couldn’t really say, but it tickled her instincts a bit, and she’s learned to trust them by now. “On your signal, Lina.”
“We need to get closer,” the blonde whispered, and Mia just nodded, sneakily creeping closer to the final bend leading into the wider cavern up ahead. The tunnel widened even further as they approached the entrance, so much so that Mia pulled her two summons back to her side and walked shoulder to shoulder with the two armoured giants.
Only once they were so close to the cavern that Mia could smell the monsters did she finally feel Lina’s air magic flow out. Tendrils of air mana snaked ahead into the cavern, slowly crawling their way over to the three other tunnel openings leading out of the more spacious cavern. Once there, they spread out to form thin films of mana, flexing like a membrane that wouldn’t be able to stop anything but sound.
Lina gritted her teeth, the effort to manifest effects this subtle, from this far away, and this many of them all at once, while trying to keep her mana tight so as not to make what she was doing too obvious, clearly straining the upper limits of her control. Then something snapped into place. The fluctuating mana didn’t stabilise or even out; it froze instead as Lina slumped, panting for breath from the exertion.
Mia’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully. That must have been the Aeromancer’s new Subskill in play again, something that maintained magical effects Lina put into place? Like, could she outsource the maintained concentration part of her persisting air magics to her Subskill? Was that what it was? That was pretty useful.
“Done,” Lina said between gasps.
Mia nodded and finally loosened her mental grip on the Black Knight’s leash, letting the psychopathic pseudo-spirit lunge into the cavern. Mia and the White Guardian followed behind it warily, stepping into the large open space with Mia a step behind her protector.
Her eyes swept out, her gaze sliding over the panicking goblins currently being turned into finely scattered chunks of blood and viscera. Her eyes landed on what must have been an orc, a massive, bald goblin with the physique of a bodybuilder on all the steroids. Surprisingly, they were barely taller than Mia herself, looking almost as wide at the shoulders as they were tall. In contrast, if the orcs looked like bodybuilders, the ogre was undoubtedly the strongman of the group. It stood nearly two metres tall, its facial features holding the characteristic traits of gigantism, with limbs thick as trunks and a torso built like a fridge.
The cavern itself was maybe twenty metres across at the widest and nearly four metres tall at the centre, and only had the monsters inside with no sign of furniture or anything else. Not even cots or indentations where they would sleep. Did they even need to sleep?
The ogre opened its mouth, showing off lines of thick, ivory tusks thicker than Mia’s fingers that lined its maw. It let out a sound not unlike a truck's horn, a deep, bellowing roar reverberating from its massive chest and crashing through the entire room and everyone in it. The stone under their feet quivered, and Mia felt the roar vibrate in her bones. She gritted her teeth, suppressing the urge to clutch her aching, ringing ears and instead yanked the Black Knight’s leash.
Without pause, the black-clad armoured blender in human form left its previous targets behind and leapt at the ogre. Mia activated her prepared spell at the same time, conjuring up a Spectral Blade, which she quickly grabbed after holstering her wand and feeling glad that she had at least one proper spell for melee to short range. Arcane Blasts and the like weren’t really suitable for these tight tunnels and small caverns.
The White Guardian stepped forward, meeting the savage charge of an orc, stopping the creature in its tracks. More than two hundred kilos of pure muscle bounding towards it, and the Guardian didn’t even budge, instead slamming its shield forward and sending the orc stumbling back while its other hand slammed out and backhanded a goblin trying to make its way past it into the wall. The smaller creature struck the solid surface with a wet crack, slumping down only a moment later and showing no signs of getting back up.
The Black Knight was handling the ogre just fine, already having left several deep gashes, pouring blood all across the massive monster’s body, though nothing lethal just yet. The goblins tried to swarm it, leaving the rest of them alone for now, but the Knight was truly like a blender in humanoid form, its claymores always swinging, always curling just right to bisect the more courageous goblins and keep the rest from touching it.
That left the second orc to contend with, which the Guardian allowed to charge past it at a slight nudge from Mia. The creature’s worm-like lips pulled back into an expression halfway between a snarl and a gleeful, mocking grin as it levelled its massive fist, cocking it back in preparation to punch Mia’s head straight off her shoulders.
It was big, tough, and probably strong as hell, but it seemed to have forgotten to put much focus on speed. In contrast, Agility was Mia’s highest Body Subattribute. After training with Camie for weeks and having pushed her reflexes to the limit just yesterday against Gabe’s stupid elemental, Mia easily danced around the telegraphed blow. Her Spectral Blade came up as the massive monster swept past her, its mass a bit too large to stop or change its vector on a dime, and she raked it across its thigh.
To her surprise, her blade tore through its thick, leathery hide, its iron-corded muscles and thick bones. By the time it had fully passed her, it was short a leg and crashed onto the floor, its stump fountaining blood as the creature roared in pain and rage. The sound cut off suddenly as Mia’s spinning Spectral Blade slashed through its neck, letting the orc’s head roll free of its body.
“Anything behind us, Camie?” Mia asked, watching her two pseudo-spirits fight, flinching a little when her Mom’s telltale yellowish-blue lightning bolt arced over her shoulder and struck the ogre across the back of its head.
The creature stumbled forward, part of its skin and flesh scorched away by the strike, but it remained standing, roaring in rage as it spun around. Not the smartest move, considering the Black Knight took it as an opportunity to cleave into its slide with a savage swing. The blade didn’t go even halfway through, but it still cut a gaping wound into the ogre’s side.
“None that I can hear,” Carmilla replied absently, her ruby-red eyes tracking the clashing fighters with a predatory intensity.
“Okay, help kill the orc then,” Mia said, and Camie leapt into action the instant the words registered in her mind. “We should not waste too much mana here if it’s at all possible. How are you holding up, Lina?”
“The sound-proofing was focus-intensive, not mana-heavy,” the blonde replied with a wan grin that looked far too relaxed for how much strain maintaining her magical weaving should be placing on her. “It barely costs any extra mana to keep the effect going, so it’s altogether negligible. Maybe a per ócent of my mana per minute.”
“New skill?” Mia asked, not taking her eyes off Camie as she watched her girlfriend kick the orc’s leg out from under it, sending the beast crashing onto the floor. The Guardian didn’t waste the opportunity, switching gears from defence to offence in an instant and slamming the base of its tower shield down on the prone monster’s head, crushing it into paste with a stomach-churning wet crunch.
“Yep,” Lina said smugly. “Pretty neat, isn’t it? If I can get a magical effect going manually, even for just a moment, I can have the Skill maintain it in perpetuity without any active effort on my part, given I have the bit of extra mana to pay for the Skill’s cost on top of the magic’s base cost. It’s awesome.”
“Is there a limit on how many effects you can have active simultaneously at a time?” Mia asked, dismissing her Spectral Blade as she watched the Guardian and Camie join in on the fight against the ogre and the few remaining goblins that’d been skulking around, looking for an opportunity to shank the Black Knight when it let its guard down.
Speaking of the Black Knight, it looked a bit worse for wear. One of its swords had gotten stuck in the ogre’s side when the monster clenched its muscles, leaving the Knight with just a single blade to fight off the opportunistic goblins, all the while having to defend against an absolutely livid ogre. Something that became a non-issue when the Guardian took that task off the Knight’s shoulder, and Camie started harassing the towering monster with lightning-fast jabs and kicks. It was only a matter of time until the ogre fell.
“Sadly, yeah,” Lina said. “It scales with both my Mind and Spirit stats, and I have enough of them that I can have up to four different effects active concurrently. It's pretty neat.”
“It didn’t work on the thing you had going to muffle our footsteps on the way here?” Mia asked. “You said you could only hold that for fifteen minutes.”
“It has trouble with dynamic effects,” Lina said, looking a bit sour at that. “I can’t anchor it to anything or anyone and have it follow them. I just have to drag each separate effect along like luggage, so yeah, it’s far from perfect.”
The ogre went down not a minute later, bleeding from dozens of open wounds, one arm barely attached at the shoulder, and its jaw hanging off a thin stretch of muscle. The lethal blow, though, came from the Black Knight’s blade that was still buried in the monster’s skull, going in through an eye socket.
“Well, that’s one cavern cleared,” Mia mumbled, trying to breathe through her mouth to spare her nostrils from having to suffer the stench of death and viscera that was hanging thickly over the room. “We just have … four or five more to go. Should be doable if we’re careful.”
They just had to avoid getting swarmed and exterminate the greenskins piecemeal, one room at a time. Mia blinked, her eyes dragged over to the insistent system notification at the edge of her vision, and a message she hadn't seen in what felt like ages unfolded before her eyes.
[Level Up!]
[Level: 10 -> 11]
[Free Attribute Points: 0 -> 3]