Fighting Them There

###Fighting Them There###

###Fighting Them There###

###Begin Chapter 18###

###Begin Chapter 18###

"It's like an ocean." Fiona remarked, staring at what was above her.

"Yeah," Max agreed, looking at something completely different, "how far do you think it goes?" He was at the shoreline, watching waves come from a seemingly endless sea onto the beach on which he stood. The will-o-wisps only fluttered about fifty meters or so out to sea, so while he could tell from the incoming waves that there was more plenty water to be found in the blackness beyond where he could see, he didn't know whether it was to be measured in tens, thousands, or millions of meters.

Fiona's black eyebrows crumpled with her furrowed brow. "It's the whole ceiling. So I guess it goes all the way?" She was pretty sure that their trains of thought were ships passing in the night.

That assessment was shared by Max. "I'm sorry, Fiona, what are you talking about?" After a moment's consideration, he decided that he should go first. "I'm talking about the fact that we're on a beach. There's like, anoceanout there, and I don't know how far it goes." Dungeons were generally surrounded by stone, and no team that had set out with the intention of digging more than a few meters through that rock had ever come back through the portal, leading to some pretty far fetched ideas of what might beoutsidethem. Dungeons were sometimes referred to by portal technicians as 'conflict geodes.'

Fiona looked out from the shore. Her magical night vision did not require the presence of will-o-wisps to allow her to see with reasonable clarity, and so her opinion on the matter was more valid than Max's or that of anyone else on the team. "Um, yeah. The real sky is over there, covered in clouds." She pointed out to sea. "There's a horizon. So I guess the water goes at least as far as the curvature of whatever planet we're on would allow us to see." That revelation was terrifying in its own way: it implied that they might have to do trigonometry. It was also a blunt reminder that theywereon a planet, presumably somewhere in the same galaxy, and almost certainlynoton any of the Home Worlds. "But there's also oceanaboveus. That has a horizon too, and I donotknow how the geometry of that works."

"Maybe," Miriam speculated, "it's not a true horizon, and there's just awallthat's far enough away that itlookslike a horizon. A painted wall on Earth that was five kilometers away would do a pretty good impression of the horizon. At least, until you got closer to it." She felt a little odd suggesting that they were in a giant roadrunner cartoon, but it actually seemed less insane than it did to think there were two actual planets just a few hundred meters apart, ready to grind them like millstones.

Alice looked at the hunters she was with in awe. The things Fiona was telling them about their surroundings were wondrous in the extreme, and the others seemingly took it in stride. Their tolerance for the weird seemed much larger than her own. Not wanting to be left out or thought to be basic, she offered up the most far fetched speculation she could imagine. "What if... the ceiling ocean and the floor ocean are like... thesameocean, and we're just seeing it through a space portal or a mirror or something?" There was a moment of silence, which seemed reasonable to her. She kind of expected people to ask if she washigh, but that shoe didn't drop.

"If so," Max pondered aloud, "that would mean this tower is also sticking out of the ceiling somewhere. If we can only see five or ten kilometers, it could even be in hiking distance in one direction or another." He looked around to see ifhecould see any clues in either ocean, and of course he could not. There was some kind of twinkling lights from within the water, but whether it was glowing fish or something stranger than that, they weren't going to be able to go out on a boat with a net to get better eyes on any of it. "Actually, Sophie," he said excitedly, "youcould test Alice's idea. If you flew up there, you'd see if gravity flips around for you." Alice was stunned, the party was seriously treating her idea as something to work with rather than as a funny joke. She wasn't sure whether to be flattered or pissed off.

For Sophie, it was time for neither of those things. "Of course, Master Max." She smiled, and it wasn't clear to Alice or Max how serious she was being. Regardless, her rainbow step ability took her into the air until she was just about the height the will-o-wisps stopped ascending. She seemed to tumble awkwardly in the air for a few moments, and then came back down with her superheroic grace reinstated. "It looks like Alice was right," she said levelly, "the down flips about halfway to the other sea. Seems like we're on an island, there's water in every direction. The enemy tower looks like it extends a bit past where the gravity changes, so I think that we can expect everything to flip upside down right around the final room."

Everyone nodded like that was a reasonable thing for scouting to have uncovered, and Alice received several thumbs up and a literal pat on the back. She decided that she needed to expand her horizon of the strange. It seemed everyone else in the party already had. As the eighth member of a six hunter dungeon raid, she probably should have expected that to be the case.

With no obvious way to make any headway with the ocean, they decided to go to the megalithic structure up the beach. There was a brief discussion about whether they should first go all the way around the tower to see if there were other entrances, but that was discarded as giving the enemy too much time to prepare.

There were great megalithic stones embedded in the sands that looked like they had once been part of the megalithic structure they were approaching. The entrance was grand, and decorated with carvings of tentacled creatures. It was five meters tall and over six meters wide, big enough for modern trucks to drive in and out. Though the doorway opened up to a sandy beach with long forgotten carved stones jutting from it, so the hypothetical truck couldn't go very far. The insides appeared cavernous, will-o-wisps dancing slowly in the air and illuminating just enough to reveal that there was a long way to go inside.

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The massive stone blocks made a staircase of sorts, though at over a meter of rise, it would be a staircase for giants that were eight meters tall or more. If the opposition had been Jotunheim, Max would be prepared to expect exactly that, but as there were Tartarian imps on the raised area they led to, he assumed there had been ramps at some stage that had been removed to maintain the high ground for the defenders. Admittedly, clambering up one stone after another while being pelted by imps using javelins and thunder magic sounded horrible and potentially deadly, but Max's party had no need to do such a thing.

It was tempting of course, to simply allow Sophie to fly in and start wrecking the imps. She was powerful enough that she could probably take them all herself. Her equipment even resisted thunder magic specifically. Max just didn't like the idea of probables in bets involving his girlfriend's life. "Breach! Turtle! Deep! Shade!" He gave orders in quick succession, releasing his hold on the chain attached to Sophie's neck so that she could follow hers. Miriam immediately began shaking her chalice as rocks and pebbles flowed into the shape of a functional ramp. Ulzhari went up the ramp at what was for her a glacial pace, because she was following Chloe, whose shield led the way. Sophie took the shortcut available only to her, and flew toward the enemy's back row at high speed. Fiona waited until contact had been made and then dumped her leeching darkness right into the fray.

It was a massacre, the skirmish tactics of the imps were scarcely able to chip away at Sophie's durability faster than Fiona's leeching darkness was giving it back to her, and their hurled missiles were grossly insufficient to dissuade Chloe from scaling the ramp. When Chloe reached the top, Ulzhari was released to swing her ax with wild abandon into the flanks of imps that had been trying unsuccessfully to take down the party's two shield holders. Imps were cut down like weeds before power tools. When one of the imps attempted to jump off the platform it was impaled in the air by one of Chaeryn's dummy arrows. The enemy hadn't been prepared for their defenses to be undermined so quickly and totally, and had paid for their poor planning with their lives.

"Holy shit," Alice exclaimed, "are your battles always like that?" She'd barely readied her scimitar to potentially cut an opponent down from behind and there weren't any enemies left to cut down.

Max shrugged. "I mean, not always. But this battle wasn't like,weirdor anything." Alice seemed unconvinced. The fact that one of his shrugging arms held a leash that attached to a collar on Fiona's neck possibly undermined his claim.

She seemed like she was about to say more but Sophie called down from the upper area. "Hey! There's gold up here!" Alice, Chaeryn, and Miriam came running up the ramp.

It was more complicated for Fiona and Max, because the mana tether was still attached to her neck. "Master Max," she said coyly, "would you walk your slave up the ramp?" The Vietnamese American turned this way and that, causing the chain clamped to her nipples to clink. She made a bratty expression that was clearly intended to rile him up.

"Um," he temporized, "sure. Slave Fiona, it's time for walkies." The way she smiled told Max that he had definitely said the right thing. She preened and walked in front of him with a prancing gait that drew his attention to her legs and butt. By the time they caught up to the rest of the party, Max had a bit of swelling in his pants to deal with. His other party members all checked out his crotch, and he was the recipient of several winks and eyebrow raises. He wondered what Fiona actually wanted him to do for her at that moment. Itseemedlike she wanted to have sex, or at least have semi-sexual contact such as spanking; but of course they were in an uncontrolled area of a dungeon so there wasn't really an opportunity to do any of that.

Everyone had been pretty enthusiastic about coming up, basically because it sounded like there might be a ridiculously high-grade chest among the bodies of the slain imps. This turned out to not be the case. Rather than the gold-sigiled chest that their hunter's mission had primed them to be thinking about, there was actual literal gold. Three statues of what looked like frogs or perhaps lizards without tails, a couple of C-bands that might be intended as bracelets or anklets depending on the size of the intended user, a broach that had been made to look like a clawed fish, all works of art. Even without checking their weight to see if they were solid or merely gilded, it was clearly a haul that would be a tremendous amount of wealth if it could somehow actually be taken to one of the Home Worlds. That it literallycouldn'tmeant that everyone who had come up was disappointed.

In response to Max's vaguely curious but also slightly annoyed expression, Sophie found herself feeling defensive. "These bracelets have octopi on them, like the front door. And these frog statues look aquatic too. There's a whole sea-creature theme to this place." She hefted the statues with ease, which didn't say anything one way or the other about whether they were solid gold or not.

"Makes sense if we're on an island," Max conceded, "they're not dungeon equipment, are they?" If they were, Sophie would be getting a status window. She shook her head.

Chaeryn pointed her fingers in two directions. "I thought the plural was octopuses?"

Both Sophie and Chloe were about to say something, but Miriam cut them off. "It is. Octopus comes into English from a different ancient language than the words that get an I at the end." She shrugged. "Greek instead of Latin." She added the clarification as if it clarified anything. To Chaeryn, it absolutely did not.

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The hallway had stone ribbing, giving the impression that they were inside the skeleton of a snake. It was an effect that Alice could vaguely recall being in a horror movie she'd seen once. Much more cramped than other places in the dungeon they'd been, there was really only room for Chloe and Sophie to walk in front. This had proved sufficient, as while the nightmares had proven themselves capable of hiding behind the ribbing of the hallway, the tentacled monstrosities accomplished little by unfolding themselves to bring their hooked appendages onto the Valkyrie or the Hoplite. Ulzhari was tall enough that she was able to swing her ax over Chloe's head, and the result was that the closet sized battlefields were much more like their team ambushing the monsters than the other way around.

The first ambush had been drawn out by Miriam summoning an earthen doll to walk ahead of the party, but they'd found the expected ambush to be sufficiently underwhelming that for the next two they'd just had the front line crash into them. Alice had suggested that she and Chaeryn might sneak on ahead and take out the lurking nightmares from behind, but she'd been shot down for the plan being too risky. Chloe and Sophie being pounced on repeatedly being consideredlowrisk because it didn't split the party.

"So what's your long term plan?" Alice asked Miriam. "You're C-tier, so you have a meal ticket wherever you want to go. I mean, except whatever elite black gate task force thatMaxandSophieare going to." She let out an attempt at a laugh. She didn't think she managed to sound nonchalant at all.

"Well," the redhead ruminated, "at some point Master Max is going to breed me." Her reply so surprised the Ninja that she stumbled and nearly fell, though her move silently skill ensured that she didn't make any noise against the stone floor. "He's going to breed us all, ya know?" Miriam continued without calling attention to Alice's misstep. "And when he does, we're going to raise his children together. The whole harem. We're all going to be orc married, I think. Ulzhari says it's pretty rare for more than three or four women to be in a harem together, but it's not unreasonable for a powerful hunter to have ten or more wives." She stopped herself from carrying on and turned toward Alice. "Max isloyal, you know. Ifyoujoined the harem, he'd keep you. Forever. And breed you, of course. And when you give birth to his child, we'll all help raise your son or daughter."

Alice was struck dumb long enough that their party came to a stone door before she'd formulated a reply. It was engraved with curling tentacles and images that were presumably stylized waves. Sophie held up her hand and everyone - Alice included - swallowed whatever they were going to say. "It's a threat. I mean,obviously, but also it's triggering my doom seer skill." Everyone looked with various levels of expectation at Max, who seemed to be slightly uncomfortable under the attention.

He sighed. "It's made of stone, right? So Miriam's stomp should tell us what's what." No one moved or said anything for several heartbeats. Part of him wanted to ask if they werereallydoing that, but of course they were. "Fine. Miriam: Iorderyou to use your stomp skill to check behind that door."

"YesMaster." Miriam sighed with a giddy expression on her face, feeling the progression of her seal as she stomped on the ground. The others, even Chloe, looked at Miriam with envy, as if every one of them wanted to be the one commanded by Max at that very moment. This dynamic wasn't missed by Alice, who gulped in trepidation. The Geomancer's echoing stomp skill had provided a lot of information, and it took her a few deep breaths before she had collected enough of her thoughts to start describing it. "There's Tartarian there. Real ones. At least three. Five nightmares, I think they are the furry mop things we ran into outside. Eight imps on the ground, maybe more in the air." Her skill wasn't very helpful at finding or describing enemies that werenotin contact with earth and stone. "And they have barricades set up to take cover behind, and a big chunk of floor behind the door is primed to drop into a tank of water." She described it soberly, with most of the members of the team taking it soberly in turn.

Alice's eyes got big. "Are youserious?This isn't even the final room!" The final rooms of tower-type dungeons were almost invariably at the top, so they were all expecting the final room to be the as-yet unexplored upside-down room. Miriam had described a truly horrendous battle room, one which she wasn't sure her previous teams would come out alive against. And heavily implied that the dungeon had at least one battle that was even deadlier. The blond Ninja was terrified.

"I know that Miriam's skill can't identify whether any of those Tartarians are attractive women," Max acknowledged, "but there's a very good chance that one of these enemies is going to be our target for capture. So Chaeryn, I want you to be ready to use Faleryn's Arrow." The black skinned elf put out her hand in a gesture he was pretty sure meant agreement. "We're going to need to cross the crumbly bit, so Miriam will break down the door and turn it into a bridge that spans the whole trapped portion. Then that flooring can fall away if it wants. We don't want to exchange ranged attacks with any enemies we don't have to, so Fiona should shut that down with night fog on the left flank. You don't have to maintain that forever, we'll want leeching darkness as soon as our front liners make contact with the enemy. We have to assume there will be a lot of ranged attacks, so Chloe and Ulzhari will be advancing turtle style." It wasn't the Berserker's favorite attack pattern, and not one they would use if the enemies weren't doing ranged attacks from heavy cover. She saw the wisdom in his suggested tactics, and silently assented to them. "And Alice, are you OK with going full submarine mode and trying to sneak up on the right flank barricade?" She wasn't happy about it, but she cautiously nodded.

Chaeryn took up a static position long enough that she faded completely from view. Fiona and Sophie both were attached to Max by leashes, Fiona to the side of the doorway, Sophie right in front of it. Releasing Sophie's chain was the cue for Miriam to turn the doors horizontal. She raised her chalice, and the stone walls cracked and buckled as the door became a drawbridge. If they had used hammers or dynamite, there would have been an explosion that created an obscuring cloud of dust, but because the combat engineering had been affected with geomantic magic, it came off clean. Max honestly thought it looked like a cheap special effect from a TV show. Like the chunk of wall coming off hadn't been attached in the first place. Sophie flew into action, with Chloe and Ulzhari charging in at her heels.

The enemy were ready for them. Perhaps they hadn't expected the wall to literally fall down and patch the floor, but they had prepared for hunters to come charging in one way or another. Imps gathered magical flames around their hands and began throwing them at the interlopers. One of the barricades turned out to have buckets of sharp gravel, which were kicked over to form an area of treacherous ground in the middle of the room. Sophie simply flew over, but it made the goings much slower for Chloe, which in turn limited the speed Ulzhari could manage while remaining under the protection of Chloe's shield. The shaggy and slightly amorphous nightmares seemed to have no issues whatever with stampeding over sharp rocks, and were able to engage Chloe and Ulzhari on their own terms.