Mia emerged from a Spirit Blink, her feet landing softly on the damp stone, too quiet to hear over the sound of the battle outside the small room she’d found herself in. Her wand rose, aimed at the back of the ogre’s head as it commanded its goblin archers and orc warriors from the safety of this cavern carved into the cliff face.
A goblin’s ear twitched and it started to turn, but Mia’s Arcane Blast finished forming and zipped off with a sharp hiss that blossomed into a sudden boom. Violent arcane energy tore into the ogre’s head, ripping apart flesh and soft tissue before doing the same to its unnaturally thick skull.
Shouts and screams echoed in the small confined space as goblins whirled around, turning away from firing slits in the opposite wall. Bows and arrows turned towards Mia, but not fast enough. Sparkle had zipped away the moment Mia’s feet touched the floor and by now he was back amidst her party’s defensive formation.
Mia latched onto her ephemeral Bond and activated Spirit Blink again, unable to stop a smirk from forming on her lips at the outraged, furious looks she earned from the goblins. Then the world disappeared as she slipped free of its shackles, her Wisp Form stepping sideways and dashing off, racing across her Bond before stepping back and reforming into Mia.
“That was risky,” Brent grunted by way of a greeting, only sparing her an examining glance over his shoulder before returning his focus to the next suicidal goblin rushing at him. It was just enough to make sure she had managed to escape unharmed from her little raid behind enemy lines.
“It was,” Mia said offhandedly, still a bit jittery from the adrenaline coursing through her veins. Helene and Camie sent her disapproving glances for her stunt, but she weathered them both with some effort.
Mia wanted to grow comfortable using her abilities to their fullest extent, and while Gabe said to act as if he wasn’t there to save them, to act as if death was in the cards, Mia still felt more willing to test her capabilities than usual. Using them in spars with Camie was one thing; using them against monsters was another entirely.
She knew she would one day have to use everything she had just to survive. Maybe it would be inside a Rift where Gabe couldn’t enter. Maybe she would be separated from the others. Maybe Gabe would be too busy to accompany them. Who knew? But it would happen sooner, rather than later, with the way things were going.
Mia didn’t want to die, and she’d already promised herself that she would give her all in her training and in combat. That was the only way to get better, to become powerful enough to survive this mad world.
The soldiers were hanging back by then, having been told to keep their ammo for the final battle instead of wasting it on this prelude in the underground ravine. They all had about a dozen mags in pouches hanging from their belts, or even carried on a bandolier in the case of Specialist Fritz, but more than half of them were used up by then. Mia could tell it miffed the lot to hang back and have the ‘civvies’ do the fighting for them, but they didn’t complain out loud. They just … sulked, which was a weird thing to say about a group of thirty-something battle-hardened soldiers.
But their help was unneeded anyway, the greenskin force gathered inside the ravine had gone from a group numbering in the three digits down to a score of them, just a handful of holdouts holed up inside caverns and burrowed-out rooms like the one Mia had just ganked. The battle was already over in all the ways that mattered, but it wasn’t like they could leave any holdouts behind them. That was just asking to have them ambush their party once they engaged the greenskins in the final chamber where the ex-Guardian was probably waiting.
So they were going ‘door-to-door’, as it were. Traversing the serpentine ledges carved into the cliff walls, hunting down every greenskin Mia, Camie and Chris could find one after the other. The process was made even easier by the fact that, during the fight, nearly everyone else in the party — except for some of the soldiers from the fireteam and Chris — joined Mia at Level 11.
Which was good, because the Level Up soothed their strained Spirits and let them go on casting spells for longer. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case for Mia and as such, she had to take things easy after that last mana potion she’d downed. If she had to guess based on prior experience, the vague feeling she got was that she could take one more, maybe two as an absolute maximum before the strain became too much.
And she couldn’t let the strain reach the tipping point. It was her Spirit she was overtaxing, the same Spirit that moulded spells, shaped her mana and kept it subdued inside her Core. If her Spirit grew too exhausted, her internal mana would start rampaging, or just flow out of her. She’d stop being able to cast spells at all until she rested, both for the lack of fuel and her spiritual muscles refusing to cooperate.
So yeah. She had to be careful with these low-quality mana potions Zeigler’s alchemists were making. Sure, a tiny vial could recover about half her reserves, but the spiritual strain was nearly five times as much for the same amount of mana when compared to System-made potions. Added on top of the lingering spiritual exhaustion from her morning excursion, Mia had to be careful if she didn’t want to be utterly useless for the upcoming final fight of this delve. But being careful didn’t mean sitting out the fight, as shown by her stunt earlier.
Slowly, over the course of long minutes that stretched on for what felt like hours but was no longer than fifteen minutes, they reached the lowest ledge. Above them, in the caverns, tunnels, burrows and fortifications lay only corpses and broken bodies that weren’t long for this world. Brent was panting slightly as his eyes gazed upon the now-silent ravine. Helene, Lina and Mia all looked slightly ruffled, a thin sheen of sweat covering their faces, while Camie looked like she’d just spent the last quarter of an hour rolling around on the damp, often dusty stone floor … which wasn’t far from the truth.
“That was the last of them,” Mia said, her azure eyes flickering towards the end of the ravine where the underground river broke into a large open chamber and curled out of view. “All of them retreated to that chamber.”
“Then, a small rest is in order, I believe,” Brent said, taking a larger breath as he visibly forced his tense muscles to uncoil. “Fifteen minutes, but Chris, you keep an eye on what they are doing, and I want the Sprites to scout ahead as well if possible. It would be good to have eyes on our Elite monster before engaging it too.”
‘Sparkle?’ Mia asked as she glanced at her sprite, who was currently lying atop the wide brim of her witch hat like it was a bed.
‘May your humble servant get five minutes of rest before you throw him back into the jaws of danger, oh you most cruel mistress?’ Sparkle whined, his pitiful voice echoing dramatically inside her mind. Mia rolled her eyes but relented, feeling like there was at least a tiny kernel of truth beneath the Sprite’s theatrical whining. He must have been tired.
“Sparkle’s tired, but I’ll send him ahead in ten minutes; he can get the scouting done in just five minutes,” Mia said, and Brent nodded.
“My Bond is going to need the full fifteen minutes and maybe a bit more,” Helene said with a wince. “He pushed himself a little too hard in that battle.”
“Alright,” Brent said easily, nodding at them before turning towards Chris.
“I’ll, uhm, get started on scouting then,” Chris said hastily, then paused and warily continued. “ … sir?”
“Yes?” Brent asked, raising an eyebrow as he slumped down on a stone outcropping carved into the vague shape of a bench and started clearing off the murky blood coating his weapons with a rag.
“Uuuuhh … is that what I’m supposed to call you?” Chris asked. “‘Sir’, I mean.”
“You call me whatever you like,” Brent said halfheartedly. “Now sit down and get to work.”
With a hasty nod, Chris … probably did just that, considering his eyes glazed over and the few Mage Eyes of his that were still within range of Mia’s perception sped off and disappeared from it a moment later.
Mia plopped herself down on the floor, her legs hanging over the ledge as she leaned forward, peering down at the languidly moving waters now only a handful of metres below. It was beautiful, crystal-clear, and dancing with the flickering lights of dozens of torches hanging from the ravine's walls.
She reached into her spatial pouch and fished out a handful of granola bars, offering one up to Lina and Camie when the two plopped themselves down beside her. Without a word, they just sat there, snacking on the old, dry bars as they watched the waters below. Mia’s eyes lingered on the greenskin corpses floating in the river, or the pair of heavy ogre corpses that had sunk to the bottom of the water. Their blood, viscera and grime floated away from their corpses like a fog of miasma tainting the clear waters.
Mia’s lips curled in distaste, and not because her granola bar was drier than the Sahara desert and threatening to break her teeth with every bite — it was old but hardly inedible, and people couldn’t allow themselves to let food go to waste anymore.
Monsters, Rifts, Dungeons, monster nests. They were all like those corpses down there, radiating miasma and tainting the world around them. Monsters that eradicated the natural wildlife, magical plants replacing the flora, maybe even highly invasive species of both totally upending the local ecology. These monster nests were even worse, replacing regions of the Earth outright, overwriting them.
The stone around her was alien, just as alien as the greenskins, the pitch-black dirt on the surface or the trees with pastel-white bark and onyx leaves. None of it belonged … but what was done was done. According to Gabe, monster nests weren't some magical effect that could be dispelled or reversed. They were a 'done deal'.
All we can do is prevent them from coming into existence by destroying as many Rifts as possible. Mia mused to herself, picking up a pebble from the floor next to her and idly flicking it into the water below. She stuffed the now-empty packaging back into her spartan bag, then washed the dry taste from her tongue with a sip of water.
“A penny for your thoughts?” Gabe asked, and Mia glanced up at him with a blink, only then noticing him floating a few meters up in the middle of the ravine. “You have that broody frown on your face. Big thoughts?”
“Yes, big heavy thoughts,” Mia said with an amused huff, rolling her eyes. “I was just thinking how we are going to have to try and destroy every Rift if we want anything to remain from Earth’s previous biosphere … if it’s not totally fucked already.”
“Yeah,” Gabe said with a wince. “But it’s somewhat inevitable. We can’t stop what’s coming, we can only weather the storm and protect what's around us. Focus on a small slice of the world … and these monster nests aren’t all bad, you know?”
“How so?” Mia asked, her eyes narrowing as she crossed her arms reflexively.
“Errr, for example, see this?” Gabe asked, flitting over to the cliff face and tapping his fingers at a … was that a discolouration in the stone? Another type of rock rather than the bland grey one they’d been seeing everywhere down here? “This is Black Iron ore, a pretty useful low-rank material for enchanters and blacksmiths once properly refined. The rock too, this bland grey rock, once the miasma fades from it, it will remain a mana-infused rock that’ll be harder, tougher, more load-bearing and it might even take some simple enchantments. Those trees up on the surface? If I’m not mistaken, that’s Ivory Hardwood, an excellent low-rank crafting material for spellcasting focuses and its leaves can be used in an array of different alchemical recipes. This place is a treasure trove just waiting to be harvested and put to use. It will help the city arm itself and prepare better for what’s coming.”
“Once the miasma fades?” Lina asked curiously, latching onto a crucial detail Mia’d missed. “That’s important? Is that why we never bothered harvesting stuff from Rifts? Because they are too full of miasma?”
“You can harvest from Rifts, but even then you still have to wait for the miasma to fade,” Gabe said, floating away from the wall and down to eye-level with them so they wouldn’t have to crane their necks just to stare at him. “But this? The breaking of the Rift had already scattered a large portion of the miasma it held. What remained will fade from this nest in a year tops, maybe as soon as a few months considering the wildly flowing and extremely dense ambient mana currents Earth has, and especially here so close to the Dragon Vein.”
“The Dragon what now?” Mia asked.
“The largest Leyline on the planet." Gabe waved her off. “It’s just a colloquial term, dragons are the biggest, meanest creatures around so the biggest, meanest leyline is called the Dragon Vein. Something like that … anyway, the fifteen minutes are up in a bit so I’m going to fade away.”
Mia blinked owlishly at the spot Gabe had been at just a moment ago. He had fizzled away like a mirage, which was probably another one of his higher-rank Warding spells. Could Wards do invisibility too? Or maybe invisibility was tangentially related to the ‘warding’ subschool of arcanism?
Mia shook her head to banish those thoughts; she could think about that later.
“So,” Lina spoke up. “How are we going to carry these guys … and Brent too, I guess, down there?”
The floor of the ravine was still nearly five metres down, and there was no ledge going down there, no ladders or stepstones carved into the wall either. The riverbank was largely uneven, too, looking natural rather than man… goblin-made? Was that the proper word? Anyway, did the greenskins never use those parts? Maybe it was too damp, and they always slipped?
“There are tunnels leading directly into that chamber,” Mia mused.
“Tiny tunnels that they are going to be watching the exits of,” Camie said with a frown, her gaze fixed on the massive opening at the end of the ravine. Even the riverbank opened up near it, stretching wide enough for five people to walk on it side by side comfortably.
In the end, Helene ended up carrying Brent, her arms under his armpits like he was some unruly toddler picked up by his mother. She almost dropped him, probably because he was a man weighing nearly twice as much as her, with his armour that was hardened leather in places and actual steel covering his vitals.
Lina hopped down, skipping on short-lived air discs, while Mia ended up being carried by Camie. She could have made the jump; five metres would have been hardly the end of the world usually … but the landing zone was a thin stretch of uneven rock slick from water. More than likely, she would have broken her ankle or, at the very least, would have slipped and fallen into the river if she tried to make the jump.
Then again, she could have used Spirit Blink too, but conserving her mana was super important. So she had to bear the indignity of being princess carried by a hot vampire. Truly, a fate most horrible.
The soldiers had fixed a rope to a stone column serving as a doorframe in one of the greenskin wall-burrows and were grappling down on it, one after the other. Which Mia firmly ignored and refused to acknowledge its existence. All in hopes of getting to play princess, but seeing the pretty blush on her silly vampire’s face as she scooped Mia up into her arms made it even better.
Mia only had roughly a minute to bask in the feeling of the moment after Camie plopped her back down on the floor. Of course, the vampire had made the jump without effort, dropping five meters and landing perfectly even on the uneven, slippery rock, her knees bending until she was almost crouching to bleed off the momentum.
Once everyone was down, they lingered for a moment, and at Brent’s prompting, Chris gave his report on the results of his scouting. Sparkle was still away, skulking about in the chamber up ahead and based on what Mia was sensing through her Bond to him, he’d found something that interested him. Something worth exploring properly.
“Well, that entire chamber looks like the inner courtyard of a castle, or maybe the middle part of the colosseum,” Chris started. “We’d be entering the ‘arena’ and be surrounded on nearly all sides by high walls topped by parapets, dotted with firing slits and of course there are pitfall traps and other openings on the floor. Then there is that small fortress in the middle … they are doing something to it; a bunch of those robed goblins are dancing around it, having drawn up some nasty-looking ritual circle around it onto the floor.”
“Have you found the Elite monster?” Brent asked pointedly after taking a moment to digest everything.
“No … “ Chris said, trailing off with a wince. “But I probably know where it is. Three of my Eyes got destroyed the moment they tried sneaking inside one of the rooms inside the fort. It’s probably there, whatever it is. It should be … at the very centre of the ritual circle, actually.”
“Mia?” Brent asked, turning to her.
‘Sparkle? Found our big bad guy yet?’ She asked in turn.
‘Sure did, it’s one ugly repulsive thing,’ Sparkle replied with a slightly winded huff. ‘Very angry too, apparently it doesn’t like company. Too bad its spellcasting is atrocious and slower than a … what were those slimy worm-things called?’
‘ … slugs?’ Mia asked with a raised eyebrow.
‘Yeah, slugs! This thing’s slow as a slug!’ Sparkle said triumphantly. ‘Anyway, it’s an Ettin.’
‘A what now?’ Mia asked, her pink eyebrows pulling together into a worried frown. ‘Are you safe? It destroyed Chris’ Mage Eyes apparently.’
‘Meh, even if this stupid thing could hit me — which it can’t — its mana control is too flimsy, I could tear it apart before it hit me,’ Sparkle said. ‘And it’s a two-headed ogre, which somehow makes them good with magic. Compared to other greenskins at least. It’s still terrible, but it can at least shape mana and use spells more complicated than an elemental bolt or shield.’
Mia was surprised Sparkle even knew what this monster was called. He’d called every greenskin so far some variety of ‘goblin’. Fat goblin for ogres, muscular goblin for orcs, sneaky goblin for redcaps … speaking of, where did those absolute menaces disappear to? Not a single one has tried anything ever since the party stepped into the ravine. Nor did they meet any Trolls since that initial battle up on the surface. Maybe they ran out of redcaps with all those ambush attempts … and maybe the troll was the Guardian from before this Ettin thing?
“Sparkle says it’s an ‘Ettin’,” Mia said aloud after recalling where she was. “A two-headed ogre spellcaster. It’s probably busy chasing Sparkle around the fort at the moment.”
“Alright,” Brent said, taking a deep breath before unsheathing his proper longsword, which lit up to Mia's senses with his vibrant vital energy. “Anything else anyone has to do, say or want to talk about before we head in? Some final preparations?”
“I could top off the few diminished Wards,” Mia said, raising her hand subconsciously before her mind caught up with her and she hastily lowered it. She wasn’t in school, answering the teacher’s questions. The amused glances she got didn’t help calm the warmth gathering in her cheeks, but she bore with it stoically.
“Does anyone have it near the breaking point?” Brent asked.
“Nope, just those two guys who got hit by one or two arrows,” Mia said, hooking a thumb over her shoulder to point at Specialist Fritz and one of his men.
“Then conserve your mana; that Arcane Missile of yours is our hardest-hitting tool against anything that’s even mildly resistant to magic,” Brent said. “Be ready to use it, or those Arcane Blasts to blow open any magical defences we run into. And if you can somehow disrupt that ritual they are trying to do, that’s even better. Any other questions? … No? Alright then, let’s go kill some monsters!”