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Mia hated goblins from the moment she’d first laid eyes on one. They might not have been the first type of monster she’d met — that honour going to that ass of a metallic bird that divebombed through her window minutes after the Apocalypse started — but they were a close second. She still remembered hiding under that windowsill in her apartment block while goblins slung rocks and shot arrows at her whenever she poked her head out to throw a spell. She remembered their evil little cackles, their sadistic, beady little eyes. She remembered their stench.
All monsters had that stench only she or other Faeblooded could sense, but goblins were worse. They were intelligent, more so than regular monsters. It went beyond the base animal cunning other monsters had. That hatred grew with every corpse she found with a goblin dagger sunk into its flesh, with every comrade that fell to their arrows, but now? Now, as she and her party travelled down the labyrinthine network of tunnels? After hours spent watching every step, proceeding at a pace even a snail would find slow?
Mia wasn’t sure what name to put to the emotion searing through her insides, that burning hatred that went beyond the norm. Loathing? Contempt? Revulsion? Abhorrence?
No, she couldn’t put it into words, it went beyond words. It could only be felt. In every accursed pitfall trap that she almost fell into. In every collapsing tunnel, she barely escaped. In every ambush from abhorrent Redcaps bursting forth from thin fake walls.
The goblins were waging war, and they had decided to wage it like guerrilla fighters. It was dark, the damp tunnels too tight for any proper formations, and every surface could hide a trap or an enemy. The earth and stone served her enemies for some reason, and the greenskins made frustratingly good use of it.
The worst part was that she couldn’t take it out on anything. The Redcaps were too fast for her, and only her Mage Armour or Camie’s lightning-fast reflexes saved her from one or two managing to sink their nasty little daggers into her heart. She could maybe react if she saw them coming, but when their presence blended in perfectly with the lingering miasma infusing the rock and stone that surrounded her on all sides? When they could burst forth from any surface she had to practically brush against as she walked, due to how thin some of the tunnels were? Yeah. Her reflexes weren’t that good. She didn’t have her Guardian either, nor the Black Knight. Both of them were far too fat — aka wide and tall — to be of any use in the tight confines of the tunnels, if they could even crawl through them without getting stuck.
They would have gone down the wider tunnels, but all of them were primed to collapse, and despite three attempts, Mia had failed to prevent it each time. The ceilings in those tunnels had been altered, their structural integrity utterly compromised, so they would collapse the moment anything interfered with the miasmic magic, just barely managing to hold them in place. The spell was so flimsy and weak that it all but collapsed the moment she poked the activating mechanism on the floor. When she tried to erase it with Chaos aspected arcane energy? It just collapsed even quicker. The entire thing was a single spell; the moment she poked one part, the entire thing collapsed, and the ceiling would follow soon after. It was as ingenious as it was infuriating.
It’s been hours since they started their descent into the tunnels proper, and Mia was on a hair trigger, with the unquenchable urge to murder something growing with every careful step she took. Her Spirit Sense had been working overtime for every second of every single minute of their delve, trying to find the next ambush or trap before it happened. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes she found decoys. Yes, decoys, because the goblins just loved to fuck with her by making clumps of thicker miasma in random places. Or maybe it was natural, she didn’t know, but it was annoying all the same. Chris wasn’t much help either, since his floating eyeballs only saw what a regular eye would have seen. He had made a near-perfect 3D map of the entire tunnel system by now, building on the one Sparkle had made and using it as a basis, but that only helped them choose which tunnel to take. It didn’t show traps or ambushes.
One such clump of miasma was coming right up, lingering inside the wall her left shoulder would have to brush up against if she wanted to pass through a thinner segment without turning her back to either wall. Decoy or trap? Her fingers twitched, arcane energy crackling on her nails as she took a step, then another. She heard a faint intake of breath and then a crack.
It came from the right wall, and Mia only had a moment to curse every god she knew before a Redcap burst forth from the right instead of the left. The repulsive creature latched onto her side, and its jagged ivory dagger flashed forward, its tip flying towards her heart.
Too bad it skittered across the surface of her Mage Armour as the film of solid energy shimmered into view. Some vile miasmic magic on the dagger tried to eat through it, but it was a proper Rank 1 spell and one at least twice as powerful as the standard Wards of Protection she could give out like candy. Plus, one of her Traits made all her solid mana constructs much tougher. She wasn’t sure exactly how much, but apparently more than enough.
Unfortunately for the surprised little blight upon existence, her right hand was just in place to drop on top of its crimson hat-covered head. The Chaos-aspected arcane energy crackling at her fingertips surged out in a tidal wave as Mia met the repulsive creature’s malignant black eyes. It tried to jump away, but five separate streams of arcane energy burrowed into its tiny skull and vaporised much of what went for its brain before intent could transform into action.
As it dropped to the floor, dead as can be, Mia felt a pleased grin form on her lips. It wasn’t a nice smile, it was mean, vengeful and unduly pleased, but she didn’t care. She deserved that much after the preceding hours of frustrations.
Brent, who walked ahead of her, noticed the scuffle, but by the time he finished turning around, Mia was stepping over the monster's corpse. These tight tunnels were even less accommodating to his skillset, he had a dagger so he wouldn’t have to resort to brawling, but his skills with the longsword apparently outpaced every other combat related melee skill he had by a significant margin. Still, he could be fast, so he had managed to stab one or two Redcaps before they could test the Ward protecting him.
“Just a little more,” Brent grunted. “Let’s not stop now.”
“They are waiting for us,” Chris said from the far back.
“We are not turning back now,” Brent said. “We can take them.”
Mia could feel them too. Her Spirit Sense was not as reliable for noticing ambushes as she would have liked, but it could certainly feel the vast open space right up ahead and the numerous miasmic signatures scattered across it. She could hear them too, the chittering voices, the deeper voices grunting and clicking their tongues in what must have been the orcish or ogre dialect of the greenskin language.
It annoyed her something fierce that her hearing was almost better at noticing ambushes than her Spirit Sense was. No, it was better. Even if the Redcaps could somehow slow their hearts and hold their breaths for a long time, she still caught it at least half the time when they took a breath right before attacking. The thin rock walls they hid behind muffled it a bit, but not entirely, and when they cracked, she heard it too. Hopefully, adding more stat points to sensitivity would help. It was already just about her highest stat, and certainly the highest effective stat due to her Base Sensitivity being the only one of her Sub-Attributes at 11. That meant every point of Sensitivity counted as 1.1 points when put to work.
Which made the fact that she still couldn’t sense most of the Redcaps more than just merely frustrating. Sure, all of them were technically higher levelled than her, but she doubted the monsters had their Gained Attributes nearly capped… then again, Redcaps seemed to be extreme specialists in being sneaky, fast and agile. Hmmm. Still, maybe they had some sort of a buff on them? There were some kind of spellcasters in the greenskin ranks, considering the numerous magical traps, so it wasn’t out of the question. Goblin Shamans, maybe? Something worse?
We’re about to find out soon. Mia thought, her frustration and anger simmering away, still kept at bay by her focus. They reached the end of the tunnel and stepped out onto the ledge running across the face of a deep underground ravine. The bottom of it had to be dozens of metres down, nearly a third of the way to the edge of Mia’s Spirit Sense range, which put it at around 60 to 70 metres.
All the way across the two parallel cliff faces ran serpentine ledges carved into the rock, walkways made of magically summoned stone or shoddily crafted wood planks. Rope bridges hung between the walkways, arching across the yawning chasm, with the occasional stone bridge here and there serving as a more solid path across. Tunnel entrances dotted every surface, burrowing into the stone every few dozen metres on every walkway. Some of them were probably just living spaces for the goblins inside, but some led away, up to the surface, linking to other holes in the wall, or just away somewhere yet to be mapped.
Their destination sat at the bottom of the ravine, at the furthest end of it. The underground river made a reappearance, flowing down at the ground level of the chasm towards the final chamber. The vast hall at the end of the ravine looked like an underground town in miniature centered around a large fort visible even from as far away as Mia was.
Then there were the goblins, perched upon every ledge, peering out of every dark tunnel, hanging from rope bridges, crawling up the near-vertical rock surfaces. Orcs and ogres gather at the bottom, or on the larger ledges near the stone bridges, eyes narrowed, faces set into grim lines filled with expectation and bloodlust. There had to be hundreds of the greenskin menaces put together, maybe as much as three hundred and more still beyond Mia’s perception, including whatever monstrosity was hiding in that stone fort.
“That’s a lot of green cunts,” one of the soldiers said, shouldering his rifle a bit nervously.
“This is what we call a target-rich environment, private,” the Corporal said, wasting no time pulling the trigger and sending a bullet through the first and bravest goblin’s skull as its ugly mug poked over the ledge.
The ledge went only two or three metres out from the tunnel’s opening, which sat in a deeper indent in the cliff face than the rest of the ledge. Well, it was a pretty well-defensible position, as far as such things went down here, given that nothing came at them from behind, but they’d taken this tunnel exactly because it led upwards without any nearby intersection leading to another tunnel down here. Meaning, flanking them would take quite a bit of time, and Chris would let them know well in advance with the Mage Eye he’d left behind to watch that nearest intersection.
Mia’d also left a few magical landmines — though the proper name was something like ‘Warding Glyph’ even if it totally was just a mana landmine — back there, just to ruin the day of any greenskin trying to get smart. Luckily, she’d made sure to choose the version of the spell that activated upon sensing active miasma, and not pressure or lifeforce like the other two available versions, so she and her party could safely run over them without getting blown to bits.
“It’s time to see what those vials can do,” Brent said, his longsword still in its scabbard due to the limited space, as he instead pulled a shortsword from the spatial satchel fixed to the small of his back. It didn’t take in his Ki like his longsword did, but this new blade, along with the combat dagger held in his off hand both held some magical effect. Probably durability and sharpness to avoid breaking on him like his previous sword. “Go wild, thin the herd. We will keep them out of your hair. Fire team, pick them off from afar if you can. There are a lot of them, and the fewer that get to us, the better. Lina, focus on chucking the ones furthest up the walls off into the chasm. Mia, Helene, I’m seeing some mage-y looking ones, I want them dead yesterday. Carmilla, we keep them safe.”
Of course, the greenskins hadn’t spent all that time idle, letting them prepare or waiting for them to ‘pull aggro’ like this was a game. They’d been screeching and shouting since the moment they appeared, and crude arrows were shattering across the cliff face above them one after the other. The fire team was already working, their rifles shouldered, dropping single rounds into every goblin crawling up the ledge or trying to rush them from the sides, hugging the wall as they ran along the ledge towards their position.
‘Sparkle, go wild on any mage-y looking greenskin you see,’ Mia said, prodding the lazy sprite out of her core. He didn’t need much encouragement, zipping forth and hopping into a Mana Familiar Mia conjured for him a second later before hopping off the ledge with a cackle that echoed across their Bond.
Mia dropped the spell circle while inwardly shaking her head in bemusement at the silly sprite, switching over to her trusty Arcane Blast while palming her wand. She peered over the ledge, through the open gaps between Brent and Camie’s ever-moving forms as they fought off the two small groups of goblins. They had little trouble by the looks of it, especially Camie, who seemed to be having fun punting the monsters off the ledge and into the chasm with throws, punches or even the occasional roundhouse kick that had the goblins bouncing off the opposite wall of the ravine, leaving oily red marks of blood wherever they struck it.
Mia caught sight of one of her targets: a skeletal figure shrouded in a ragged, patchwork robe, clutching a wooden staff adorned with bone fetishes hanging from withered branches at its top. From beneath the hood, a pair of dark eyes stared, gleaming a sickly yellow, flashing brighter as the figure raised its staff, which spat a ghostly bolt of repulsive energy that raced towards Carmilla.
“Camie, duck!” Mia shouted in warning, her wand already raised to counterattack. Thankfully, her wonderful girlfriend didn’t hesitate to obey, falling flat on her stomach in an instant and thus managing to evade the miasmic bolt by a sizable margin. It struck the stone above Mia’s head, vanishing with a wet sizzle that felt repulsive on a level Mia couldn’t put into words.
Her own spell snapped out in return, racing above Camie’s prone form and crashing into the hooded figure hiding within a dark tunnel burrowed into the opposite wall of the ravine. The arcane explosion tore through its ragged robe, devouring the top half of the small monster and leaving its legs flopping forward by themselves, tilting over the ledge and dropping down into the underground river far below.
Her next spell blew a hole through the goblin trying to take advantage of Camie’s unfavourable position, removing a good quarter of its torso. It even tore a sizable chunk out of the monster behind it, which was greedily pressing itself into the first one’s back, trying to crawl over it to get to Camie faster.
The vampire surged up, shoving the two freshly made corpses aside and tore into the next few goblins, going through five in just as many seconds like a damned human-shaped lawnmower. Except the grass was goblins, which made the process much more … gorey.
Mia ignored it, focusing on her own task. She didn’t know what in the Nine Hells that yellowish bolt had been, but it gave her the creeps, and her instincts were rarely wrong. It had to be something incredibly nasty, not something she wanted to test her Ward or Camie’s healing against if she could help it. Not getting hit was always the best play with unknown spells.
Brent was keeping up, his two weapons always moving, taking off limbs, raking across legs, decapacitating monsters. Mia had no real way to tell whether he had any real skill with the blade or just made excellent use of his improved speed and reflexes, but he sure looked like some master swordsman straight out of an action movie.
The vials arced over the two’s heads, and Mia followed their descent with a part of her attention while looking for other spellcasters among the enemy ranks. Sparkle had already torn apart four, and Helene’s own sprite was also busy zipping across the ravine and zapping any it found. That left Mia with no easy targets, thus free to focus more on the falling vials.
The first one struck a ledge on the opposite wall roughly three meters down, right under the feet of a score of greenskins waiting for their turn to cross the rickety rope bridge. It exploded with a loud boom, the shockwave hitting the monsters like a physical wall, throwing them through the air in every direction. Some struck the wall with such force that they broke, while others were thrown in the opposite direction, falling down the ravine, though the lack of screams probably meant the shockwave had done significant internal damage that wasn’t immediately visible.
The next two were similar in both their effect and target, landing among larger groups of greenskins and exploding with immense concussive force.
Three more exploded into violent spheres of fire that snapped out, extending into a flaming orb five metres across before collapsing back upon itself, leaving behind the charred remains of dozens of greenskins. Most of the orcs hit by it were dead, instant incineration proving to be too much even to their powerful regeneration, but some on the fringes of it were still just barely hanging on, looking like they were moulting off coal-like black shells. The ogres survived, those tough bastards; they were certainly annoyed, and some no longer had eyes, but they were certainly alive.
One exploded mid-air prematurely, throwing out a small storm of arcing electricity like some magical EMP grenade that struck only a handful of goblins hanging from a rope. The last one hit the river far below, and Mia felt the familiar burst of Ice mana as it rapidly froze over with spikes of ice jutting out of the surface in every direction. If there were any goblins that survived their fall into the river, probably from among the handfuls Lina had been prying off the walls, then that took care of that problem before they could crawl out of the water and become a nuisance again.
Mia quickly realised that while their position wasn’t the greatest, it also wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been. With how thin the ledges leading to the tunnel they’d come from were, the goblins could only come at them two at a time from either side, and ogres would have to hug the wall really carefully if they didn’t want to fall. The wide open space opened them up for ranged attacks, but they were high enough that only enemies on the top quarter of the opposing cliff face could actually aim at them. Even then, rifles and magic vastly outperformed crude bows, slingshots or just straight-up rocks some goblins were throwing at them.
It was … sustainable. Mia couldn’t see them getting overwhelmed, especially because the only foes she had worried about, the robes spellcasters, were either too dead to cause problems or panicking as a pair of Sprites went about getting them there with all due zeal. The zipping pink cat with claws sharp enough to leave marks in the stone walls was one thing, but the tiny lightning storm throwing the occasional bolt of lightning was another. Each lightning bolt hit dead centre, snapping out too fast to react to and with enough power to blow fist-sized holes into even the ogres’ tough flesh. The squishy spellcasters stood no hope, even the few that coated themselves in hastily crafted shields of miasma.
Mia frowned, noticing a few calling on magic to mould the stone around them, closing tunnel entrances before they could be killed and then running off, out of range of her perception. Those ones would be trouble, she just knew it, but she had to focus on the enemies trying to kill her group, not on the ones running away.
All in due time.