Fighting Them There

###Fighting Them There: Chapter Nineteen###

###Fighting Them There: Chapter Nineteen###

"Can you ask her why they aren't all fighting us in one place?" Miriam's question cut to a fundamental issue that had been speculated about for generations. It was simply a fact that when hunters entered dungeons on raids, they met monsters throughout rather than wandering empty halls and being confronted with a mighty battle against all the monsters in one place. While that was sometimes an effective strategy, especially when hunters were relying upon powerful storm magic, the hunters themselves optimized their training for the series of skirmishes they expected. Because the monsters did not appear to change their strategies of deployment, they left themselves at a tactical disadvantage.

How toaskthat question wasn't easy. Her answer to why a soldier was here instead of there was always that orders had been given. And he couldn't even make a universal condemnation of the practice, since once the invaders got to the Home Worlds, the propensity of monsters to split up and cause mayhem was muchmoreeffective at killing people and causing terror than congregating into a mass to wait for a pitched battle. "Quirky," Max put his hand on his new slave's shoulder, "for this battle, do you knowwhyyou were deployed in different rooms of this dungeon? Do you know why you weren't all ready to fight us in one place?"

As he had kind of expected, her answer was one of confusion, and he had to repeat himself with different wording several times. The magic of the seals allowed them to understand each other's words, but it gave no special insight into each other's culture. When she finally gave an answer that he felt was directed to the question he had asked, it left him with more questions that he didn't know how to ask. "{Master, the critical points need to be stationed to open the gate. Obviously, we can't over-station any of the critical points. New critical points can only be opened with regular patrolling. We wanted more critical points to support a larger expedition.}"

Max stared at the Tartarian for several breaths while the gears in his brain ground out an attempt at understanding. "OK," he reasoned out to his compatriots, "they have a system that's like Mancala or a worker placement game. Distributing their members between certain places gets them whatever currency they use to launch the invasion, and I guess something bad happens if they over congregate. And moving their people around lets them have more of those places, and I guess that in turn allows them to bring in more monsters." He checked his description with Kwrtzl, and she cautiously agreed with his assessment.

"Oh," Fiona seemed humbled, like that answer was much larger than she was, "we really need to get Kwrtzl back alive. If the deployment of monsters has rules, and she knows what they are, then she's worth more than our lives." Fiona was the only member of the team who seemed to be able to say Kwrtzl's name comfortably. "Maybe we shouldn't do the full gauntlet like we normally do, and just make for the exit."

"I get where you're coming from," Miriam said in the tone of voice one uses to be more polite than simply saying No, "but her knowledge ofthis placeis so substantial that we owe it to the Alliance to look at more things. Ask questions. Get a report that people can work with. So... let's look at some food."

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Food was always a question as regards the dungeons. Where did it come from? Where did it go? Some of the dungeons they had been through had had places where food was to be prepared, eaten, or thrown away, yet strangely none of them could recall seeing all three together in any single dungeon. At Max's insistence, Kwrtzl had brought them to the kitchen, such as it was. It was like a prison for the imps that worked there, baking dense loaves of what Kwrtzl identified asgrzhtl,and whether that word referred to the baked loaves, the crumbly dough, the sticky flour, or whatever grain or nut the flour was milled out of - Max didn't even know enough to ask.

Three ovens that reminded Max of the kind of thing that was used to make pizza had the glow of flame and the nauseating stench of dirty burning coal. The finished loaves were singed and the surfaces impregnated with partially burnt fuel. The working conditions looked appalling, corruption evident on the ground, in the water, and through the air itself. Water that was both filthy and salty was all over the floor, the loaf preparation process seemingly involving a dunk into buckets of sea water, which apparently splashed out with some regularity. The air was thick with steam and smoke, but also with soot and flour. Even that was preferable to whatever caused the air to cling to the nose with the fetors of sulfur and rot.

Three imps had been in the process of making some more of the loaves, a process that had more than three steps. Their broken bodies made the kitchen only slightly more of a disaster area than it already had been. Grzhtl in various stages of preparation were heaped in semi-segregated work areas of dubious sanitary status. Sacks of the crumbly flour mixture, big basins for mixing that mixture with water until it became a questionable dough, a large counter for separating the dough into loaves, a dunking station where loaves were brined, and finally the ovens. Max was never into making bread himself, but none of that sounded dramatically different from what humans on Earth had been doing for thousands of years. The food preparation area was not something that Max wanted his own food to have experienced, and that reinforced his commitment to avoid claiming the dungeon he was in as his domain.

"I think Chaeryn should take a bite of the grudgtul," Miriam mused, "she's the best suited for this."

The elf gave a burnt loaf a careful sniff. "Wouldn't it make more sense for a human to eat some? I've seen our master eat blister berries on his food by choice. The resilience of the human gut is the stuff of legends." The deep incongruity between her reverent tone and the fact that she was talking about pickled jalapeños from a can almost threw Miriam completely out of the conversation.

Picking up the threads of the point she was originally making required giving ground. "Yes, um, that's true. But this stuff is obviously food, right? The Tartarians eat it, apparently. The only thing we're looking for is whether it's poisonous to non-Tartarians. Since you've become an Assassin, you've acquired quite a bit of poison resistance, so you should be OK even if it turns out this stuff isn't edible to the Alliance races." Miriam gestured expansively, her point made in full.

Accepting the logic, the dark skinned elf grabbed one of the apparently finished loaves. She selected one that seemed less charred than many of its kin. She ran her choice by Kwrtzl, and Max's newest convert seemed to agree that it was a good grzhtl. The crust was thick and hard, the middle was mealy and had the consistency of a hard boiled egg's yolk after it had been allowed to cool and dry. Chaeryn was not a fan of the taste. "I think if you are used to human food," the Shadow Elf mused, "this stuff is going to be pretty disappointing." She thought about how to describe it, and latched onto a food that was once eaten very commonly in the Shelflands. "My people used to drill up into the ceilings to core out tap roots of the sticky thread trees. After grinding and blanching and pounding, they can be made into crumbly dumplings that are kind of like this. Some elves are really upset that no one drills for root paste anymore, but it's because we don'tneedto do it anymore. If I didn'thaveto eat this grizihitle, I would not choose to." It was the most brutal food review any of them had heard uttered by Chaeryn's mouth.

No one doubted the accuracy of the Assassin's assessment. And yet, with the exception of Ulzhari and Kwrtzl, every member of the team tried the grzhtl. It was mealy and salty, it was bland and yet the taste clung to the inside of the mouth. Max likened it to licking cardboard. Miriam suggested that it tasted like the smell of wet carpets. Chloe said it was simply unacceptably bad. Alice suggested that it was the taste of a paper straw left too long in salt water. Fiona's description was that of tasting mud from the river bottom of brackish water. After consideration, it was decided that Chaeryn's assessment was probably the best. "Yeah," Max agreed, "if I didn't have to eat this, I would not choose to."

The loaf they had opened wasn't finished even after everyone had had as much as they wanted. Or as much as they intended to eat, as it were. Fiona contemplated the remains. "Master Max, could you ask Kwrtzl where the waste is supposed to go?"

Max had to ask a couple of times in slightly different ways, the initial answer pointing to foul smelling brass urns being obviously an interim proposition rather than an end result for trash and excrement. "{Yes Master, after it's collected in the urns, it all gets thrown in the well.}" A few more cautious questions from Max confirmed that she was referring to the very same well that the Tartarians had intended to dangle captives into. He translated her answers to the others, and the mental images that ran through his party members' minds painted their faces with sour expressions as if they had eaten something unacceptable. More unacceptable than the grzhtl.

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The tower became noticeably thinner as one climbed the stairs. The stairs in question really did need to beclimbed, as each block was nearly crotch height even for Max and Ulzhari. On Chaeryn it was nearly up to herhip. Neither Kwrtzl nor Sophie needed to touch the stone to ascend, because they could fly, but for everyone else it was something of an ordeal to clamber up the cyclopean blocks on the inside of the megalithic ziggurat. Indeed, if they hadn't had magically enhanced stamina reserves, Max was pretty sure that it would have been incredibly strenuous for all of them. Even as it was, he relied on helping hands from Ulzhari and Chloe more than he would prefer. Alice needed almost as much assistance as he did, and this did nothing at all for his self esteem. Intellectually he realized that as the only members of the team without vigor enhancing seals and stamina conserving Essence infusions, they were necessarily going to be having more difficulty with an athletic task of that nature, but that didn't negate his shame at coming dead last in an obstacle course. He'd routinely come top three in tests of athleticism foryears, and that was all dust on the road when he was striving alongside hunters with active classes and dungeon gear.

While Max was considering how humiliated he should be that Chloe was wearing dozens of kilograms of bronze armor and still having the zest and pep to helphimup the brutal incline, Sophie was solving problems. The steps were large enough that there was ample space for nightmares to lurk. They were the tentacled creatures with hook claws that they'd encountered lurking in the ribbed tunnel. According to Kwrtzl, they were the result of {Kraken grafts}. The monsters were utterly unprepared for a hunter to be spotting and attacking them from the air. Max decided that he should just be glad that he was having an ordinary interaction of hunter camaraderie with Chloe, with no one being dominated or sodomized. It was almost like he'd pictured dungeon raiding when he was in high school, although of course in those fantasieshe'dusually been the defender helping the support to climb up onto a ledge. And the support in his imaginations had been Sophie or Michelle.

The double doors to the final room was set into the ceiling, heavy stone things set to open up. The Tartarians had a mechanism to winch it up from the inside, but pushing it open by force of muscles while under assault from the defenders sounded like a tall order even for hunters as physically strong as Sophie and Ulzhari. Fortunately, Max's team had no absolutely no intention of going through the door at all.

"OK everybody," Max channeled his inner basketball coach, "once Miriam makes our new entrance, everybody knows what they're doing, right?" The lingering voice inside him that said he was being ridiculous gnawed on his soul like a rodent with new bedding material, but the women seemed to get genuinely pumped up. "There's four Tartarian invaders in there, let's crush 'em!" Sophie cheered loudest of all, and only Ulzhari made her excited hand gestures in total silence. Even Alice seemed to get at least a little bit into the spirit of the moment.

Four Tartarians. The room with the door had been the invasion's first {critical point} seized, and it was more advanced than the others. Kwrtzl said that meant its {carrying capacity} for {stationing} was higher. The enemy forces were more numerous, better equipped, and had a more defendable position. The expedition leader was supposed to be in there, a {Malefactor} named Lgwsht with {Roc grafts} and {Aurochs grafts}. Even with the fact that Max could magically understand Kwrtzl, he still didn't really understand what she was describing. His takeaway was that the guy had big horns and big muscles and was very dangerous in close combat.

Kwrtzl had less to say about the other three of her previous expedition members. There was a {Taint Spreader} with {Typhon grafts} that sounded to Max like she was equivalent to an Alliance controller or storm caster. One of them was a {Cremator} augmented with {Phoenix grafts} who seemed to be a reasonably close approximation to a Fire Mage, which he supposed would make the guy a storm caster. And finally there was a {Pillager} whose augmentations included {Kek grafts} and {Roc grafts} that increased her mobility and probably made her better as some kind of flanker. It was tactically useful to get all that information about the enemy capabilities, but it was also overwhelming. There were a lot of aspects of Tartarian war preparation whose significance Max did not understand. More disturbingly, while the invaders wereterrorists, and what insight he had received into their plans and methods confirmed that completely, they did have names and friends and goals for their lives. The Tartarians he was planning the deaths of were people in their own way, learning more about them made their deaths feel more like murder and less like war.

Imps were treated as interchangeable by Kwrtzl, which Max suspected was a sign of bigotry within the Tartarian society. Max hated them because they came to the worlds he treasured and committed atrocities, but they spoke a language, they used magic skills, they used weapons, they baked terrible bread. He was reasonably positive that they had names, or at least individual identities. He wasn't sure how alien they really were, and Kwrtzl's dismissive attitude toward them wasn't answering his deeper questions. They had firing platforms erected to near the gravitational switch (which Kwrtzl described as the {rift of reflection}) so that they could easily throw things into the faces of incoming hunters.

A stone ramp came into being under Miriam's direction, running from the great stone stairs up to an arbitrary point on the ceiling. Sophie and Chloe stood shoulder to shoulder, shields raised above their head. They were ready and eager to breach the enemy sanctum as soon as Miriam created the new entrance. "Thank you for taking me seriously," Chloe spoke sincerely to the blond Valkyrie, "it means so much considering how powerful you are. And how you're Master's favorite." Sophie's reply was quiet enough that Max didn't hear it. Then it was again Miriam's turn in the spotlight. The redhead glowered intently at her goblet, and the ceiling became an open passage. Brilliant white light shone through as the glitter cloud and will-o-wisps swirled about each other in the final room. It was Go time.

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Sophie and Chloe entered a world of pandemonium. The enemy might not have expected their entrance point, but they were more than ready for the hunters to arrive. Burning oil and shards of ice came hurtling down from the inverse towers, shattering and crackling against their shields and also striking their limbs and bodies from the sides. They were durable hunters, but neither one of them wore armor that protected the entirety of their arms and legs. It was a withering onslaught, and they could not afford to loiter long within it. They split up and began moving quickly, Chloe toward where Kwrtzl had described the stairs and Sophie leaping up into the air to smite the imps that were so tormenting her.

The room was divided roughly down the middle with about seven meters of space above and below where the gravity changed direction. The actual line was relatively obvious if one were expecting it, as banners hung on the wall in opposite directions near the line. The Tartarians hadn't expected the hunters to come in with knowledge about the gravitational shift, so the banners weren't considered to be a security threat. Kwrtzl had not been able to hide her surprise or admiration when Max asked her about the {rift of reflection} before she'd mentioned it. The Tartarians were completely baffled when the hunters sprung into action as if they were already prepared for the very concept of down to alter its course in such a fundamental manner.

Only one staircase spiraled up from the floor to a landing where an inverted staircase could take one down to the other floor that visually appeared to be the ceiling. The far floor had four other towers that simply dangled as five meter stalactites from which imps could hurl their magic and their weaponry at the floor below them. The floor that was the ceiling above them in their own reference frame, because they were standing just on the far side of the point of reflection. It was a position that gave them the higher ground against almost everything that could be in the room, but was decidedly less optimal as Sophie began flying in to meet them at their own level. They couldn't ignore her, but neither could their attacks strike a flying target with any accuracy. They didn't figure out they'd been taken by a deliberate distraction until one of the towers was covered with a cloud of visually impenetrable darkness. The rest of Max's team had taken the opportunity to ascend the ramp and take up positions in the now contested room.

Their original plan of defense in tatters, the four Tartarians leapt into action. One had red and purple feathers on his wings and cruel talons on his clawed hands and feet. He flew into the center of the room and ignited his hands. A surprising aspect was that the flames he threw came in small balls of flame, like he was throwing gasoline doused baseballs. Among the Alliance, fire magic had the largest effect areas of all the storm magics, but the forces of Tartarus used magical flames to attack individuals. Max had miscalculated the effects the Cremator's magic would have, but he'd been spot on as to what would happen if Chaeryn plugged a poisonous magic missile into one of his wings. The wing grafts, whether bat-like or bird-like, required magic rather than aerodynamics to keep the monsters aloft; but they still needed to move and beat in order to function. As the Tartarian plummeted to the ground he was met by Ulzhari's ax. The fires in his eyes dimmed and the flames on his clawed hands sputtered to embers.

Two other Tartarians had wings, though their plumage wasn't nearly as brightly colored. Nor did either of them loiter in a position where they could be dropped like a wine glass, preferring to stay close to surfaces which they could support themselves on. The Pillager had weirdly sticky limbs and she climbed the walls hand over hand and foot over foot. Her path was circuitous, but it didn't take a tactical genius to realize that her target was Fiona. The other was a great bull-headed beast that had the look of a classical demon about him. His brass spear had two prongs, as did the horns on his own head. The enemy leader's wings were tiny, almost vestigial, and Max had no idea what they were for. The Malefactor took to the lone stairs that made the entire height of the room, and bounded up them to switch to bounding down them in order to clash spears with Chloe on the staircase.