Fighting Them There

###Fighting Them There: Chapter Twenty-Two###

"She's really D-tier?" James pondered aloud. They were all horribly filthed with blood and mud, and every one of them was looking forward to the impossibly deep cleaning they would receive by stepping out of the dungeon through the final door. The dungeon was a maze of sandbags and wet clay, defined by walls two meters high. Or perhaps by trenches that were two meters deep, depending on one's point of view. After some cautious experimentation, it was decided that the clay was slick enough that it made more sense to travel through the troughs rather than along the raised areas. Falling down was a frequent enough occurrence that it just made sense to stick to the portion of the maze where one couldn't fall very far.

Perhaps they would have felt different about it if they had had ranged supremacy over the opposition. But they did not. Their whole party only had one member who had decent ranged attack capability, and Fiona's shadow magic was much better suited to support the four front liners when they were engaged in melee. She could damage enemies and heal allies at the same time, but only if both were obligingly within the confines of her spell. The corpse constructs, on the other hand, seemed to have atlatls. Travel on the raised portions of the maze was hampered by spears being thrown from over fifty meters away. Chaeryn would have been content to trade fire with her crossbow, but for the party they actually had, it would be a severe drain on Halendir's mana to heal the durability lost to the medium ranged harpoons.

Travel through the trenches was not without peril, however. Visibility was dreadful, leading to a constant threat of jump scares from every corner. Miriam's presence was sorely missed, as corpse constructs could wait indefinitely in total silence, to be detected only when brought face to face by the turns of the maze. But they could have been sussed out immediately by the Geomancer's stomp, had she been available. As it was, every blind corner potentially had a grinning skull or a bloated corpse face around it. The maze of trenches turned and branched frequently, and it was emotionally exhausting to come to each junction ready for battle.

Ulzhari was silent, of course, wearing as she was an Essence lock in her mouth that prevented her from making any noise. Alice was as well, moving through the muck without a sound because of her Ninja skill. Between the two of them, they were able to check around T junctions without first giving away their presence - essentially being as much jump scares to the corpse constructs as the enemy was to them. Ulzhari and Alice proved much faster on the draw than lurking skeletal warriors, and so the skirmishes were brief and one sided. Emotionally draining, but never in doubt.

What had provoked James' outburst was the results of having come into a more open area where they were set upon by sixteen bony corpse constructs. The results being that Ulzhari had silently and efficiently smashed though half of them herself. Fiona's shadow magic hadn't been necessary, because none of the team had taken damage. They were tired, jangled, and filthy, but they weren'tinjured. And they largely had their Berserker's incredibly rapid dismantling of fleshless monsters to thank for it. Her battleaxe had become a blur, and shattered bones had become clouds, Ulzhari was a whirlwind of destruction that had leveled half the battlefield.

Some of the sandbags were piled loose in the middle of the arena they had fought in, along with a few barrels of javelins and other supplies not immediately identifiable. "Yeah, she hits like a truck because she's a slayer, and her upgraded skills make her practically a," Fiona was in the middle of her reply when she found something among the sandbags and weaponry, "hey! There's achestin here!" It had an iron sigil, and was intended to be opened by a vanguard.

James looked decidedly mopey, despite the fact that he had a piece of dungeon equipment coming his way. "It hardly seems fair. I'm not pulling my weight at all. I'm supposed to be avanguard, and I'm more like therear guard." It was true that they'd been sending Alice and Ulzhari to check the blind corners, and had Chloe charge forward with her shield whenever they had more than a single enemy to deal with. James had the lowest kill count of the front liners, a fact that he was finding mortifying.

It wasn't that he was being shown up by a bunch of girls. Well, it wasn'tjustthat, anyway. If he was being shown up by Kaitlin or Lupe, he wouldn't be bothered at all. They were higher tier than he was, and second line classes. He wouldn't be expected to compete directly against them, and if a direct comparison was made anyway he would expect to lose. It occurred to him that the C- and B-tier front liners in their crop were Sophie and Glyffildir, both vanguards like himself. Thus, women he had never and could never be in a party with. He'd just sort of gotten used to looking cool in front of any of the women in his party, and without that opportunity he felt worse than he'd expected to. When Alice had floated the idea of him joining a mission with all girls, he'd jumped at the opportunity. It really seemed like he wasn't going to get what he had imagined. What he had imagined was that he was going to look cool and have a chance at sleeping with Alice. Everyone said she was kind of a slut, and the odds seemed good if he was literally the only man present. They didn't seem good anymore.

The chest had a belt in it. An iron sigiled belt. Black leather-like material with a shiny metal clasp. A good piece of equipment that increased his strength and speed, but a subtle slap in the face. He was the one to wear the belt because he opened the chest, but it was abelt. Chloe or even Halendir could wear it, just by pulling it tighter onto their smaller waists. It wasforhim, but he couldn't help himself from wondering if one of the women could wear it better. He put it on without even trying to be cool, which ironically was genuinely the coolest he'd looked since the mission began. There is truly nothing as rock and roll as when giving no fucks ceases to become an act.

"Mmmph!" Ulzhari vocalized, startling everyone. She took the gag out of her mouth. "Mission take too long. Master's Essence has run out." The Essence lock extended the duration that Max's semen would protect and invigorate the orc, and it increased the amount that his semen protected her while it was active. It also increased her physical strength and tenacity while making her completely silent almost no matter what she did. It was an incredibly powerful object, but it wasn't hers. It belonged to Max, and when he wasn't available to refresh it by pumping more Essence into Ulzhari's mouth, it stopped working.

Fiona cursed. "Fuck! That means Chloe's Essence lock is going to run out in a few minutes." She turned to the Hoplite and put her hand on the shoulder of the brunette's breastplate. "If you want to take your tail plug out now, you can. It's easier to do it when we're not on the move." Given its similar duration, the Night Caller took the opportunity to unclamp the chain from her own nipples, and sighed in relief. Her nipples throbbed and stung from the tugging torment that the mana conduit had inflicted upon them. The mana tether around her neck didn't have such a duration, so she intended to leave it in place.

The offer created a blush of embarrassment on Chloe's face. "Um... no thank you. I'd rather leave it in until Master Max can take it out. Even if it's not doing anything, it still reminds me that Master Max owns my butthole." The tail hanging out from her pteruges was still accelerating her healing, but it wouldn't continue to do so for very long. The truth was that Chloe liked it when her master put things up her butt. Her master's penis was the best, of course, but if he was going to put one of his Essence locks up her butt, that was pretty good too.

James did his best to imagine absolutely none of what was being discussed. Actively attempting to avoid thinking about specific things is a doomed enterprise. Just as the act of telling someone tonotthink of a pink elephant was an order that would not and could not be followed. James regretted many things at that moment.

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The slimes of Jotunheim were a reason to miss Stephen's presence. The Weather Wizard could produce both ice and thunder, and no color of slime could survive both. And storm magician who could produce both shadow and fire or ice and thunder could easily clear all slimes. Without an appropriate kind of storm magic, the slimes needed to have their nucleus torn with a physical attack, and no one really wanted to use their own magic weapons on the caustic sacks of digestive goo. Fortunately, many of the Jotunheimers had brought weapons of various sorts. Sophie and Alex werestrongenough to swing weapons made for frost giants, but such items were comically mis-sized and awkward to employ.

Chaeryn had the easiest time, since her ability to find weaknesses made even the nearly invisible nucleus of the black slimes easy for her to target. Every dummy arrow she used was basically destroyed by the process, and using mana to create crossbow bolts was kind of a waste to take out an individual slime, but it got the job done. Mrowag elected to use spears taken from vaetti. While they had seemed large in the hands of the diminutive vaetti, in the orc's meaty fists they were practically toys. The vulnerable centers of the red and blue slimes were visible enough that he could stab into them with precision. Both Sophie and Alex took the more expedient route of simply smashing the slimes with the enormous weapons of giants. Even with their tremendous strength, it was a time consuming method that sprayed clumps of caustic goo all over the lacquered walls.

Noisy. Slow. Stephen would have done it quickly and efficiently, but the team that Yalena had put together had succeeded. The slime room was perhaps theleastappropriate portion of the Jotunheim dungeon force for her team and they had been successful at clearing it. Alex continued to dish out tremendous damage and burn through his own durability at a tremendous rate; and recalculating it back up with Mrowag to draw upon remained an efficient use of their skills and temperaments. The boosted hunters from Max's team were, of course, overperformers. Yalena was happy with the team layout that she had selected.

The door ahead of them was fancy, a great iron plate that was slid to the side in order to open. Set into walls of gray wood and black metal, it didn't seem like there was a lot for Miriam to work with. As it happened, the floor tiles themselves were enough for her to get a good echo on her stomp. "They've stationed a lot in there, this is the exit room." the Geomancer had learned something of how the Nemesis Worlds were constrained in their deployment, and worked the knowledge she'd gotten from Max'sTartarian captive into the conversation frequently. Alex resented it, and Yalena found the tidbits fascinating. With the different colors of caustic slime splattered all over everything, Miriam had plenty to work with to draw diagrams with a splinter of wood. "The floor in there is made of sand with a thin layer of pebbles on top of it. It's probably set up to catch invisible hunters, so they are going to be unprepared for Chaeryn and Sophie to be able to run in without disturbing their patterns." She scooped some blobs of blue slime onto her map. "There are four giants, and at least a dozen vaetti."

Yalena contemplated the diagram. It was a crude map if one were interested in the precise distances between things, but it was more than adequate for her purposes. She wasn't calling in an artillery strike, she was directing hunters to take positions in a battle. Getting such information was crucial to her calculations, making Miriam almost as significant a find as Sophie herself.

The sideways opening of the door was going to take time. Plenty of time for the monsters to prepare ranged attacks to suppress the hunters. Any of them standing in the opening would be in plain view of a deadly barrage. Thrown spears? Bows and arrows? Large rocks? Yalena didn't know, but she knew that standing in that doorway was suicide. "Miriam," she decreed, "you're going to need to put one of your dolls in the doorway, helping to push the door open." It would be destroyed before it made five steps, but that would take a lot of threat away from the other hunters.

The door panel was set onto a smooth track, and would slide adequately despite its weight. At six meters high, four meters wide, and nearly six centimeters thick, Yalena estimated that it weighed over eleven tonnes. Even on the low friction surface, it would take enormous strength to put it in motion. Presumably the giants of Jotunheim could open it easily enough, but it was going to be quite a strain for even hunters as strong as Alex and Sophie. It would be most efficient to push and pull on it, but anyone on the pushing end would find themselves subject to attack from within. Any member of the team on the pushing end would be in horrible danger, not a position Yalena would put her troops in for an advantage as minor as a faster door opening. Miriam's puppet was perfect for the task, a decoy that would draw out the enemy's prepared attacks in a manner that wouldn't risk the lives of any of the hunters.

An advantage crossbows have over bows is the amount of the body that can be kept behind cover while firing at a near target. Chaeryn was able to fade from view and peak just a very small amount of her body out to take a shot at one of the enemies. This proved very helpful, as the moment the iron curtain began its slide into irrelevance, it was revealed that a dozen vaetti had bows trained on the entranceway. The power of a bow is related to its draw eight and the draw length. Yalena had no idea what the draw weights were of whatever alien wood and bone they were using for their bows, but the draw lengths were obviously very short by Alliance standards in the hands of the small enemies. Chaeryn's crossbow required a much higher draw weight to match the damage output of the longer length bows used by Oscar and Thelenia, and that extra draw weight made it absolutely incomparable to the small bows wielded by the vaetti. A dozen arrows would still be a withering barrage for a hunter's durability to endure. Chaeryn had no intention of enduring even one, instead popping out to deliver a precision crossbow bolt to a vaetti archer and then popping back around cover. Since she had faded from view, no arrows had been sent her way until after her bolt had been unleashed; and by then she was already behind a wall.

The clay puppet was in a much worse position for the entire short period that it existed at all. The moment the iron plate began to slide, the small arrows of the vaetti began picking away at it, and the opening was not even a meter wide when the puppet was completely ended by a spear. It had been thrown by one of the four meter tall giants, and it was longer than Mrowag was tall. The force it impacted with was tremendous, knocking the puppet away from the opening before it had even had the chance to begin crumbling to dust.

Yalena ran across the gap, another spear whooshing behind her head. It hadn't been a long look at the enemy layout, but it was enough of a glance to register them in her calculations. Chaeryn sniped another vaetti as she considered her opponents, and then there was one less opponent to consider. The largest of the giants had tied a belt over his eyes. The Calculator thought he wasprobablyblind, but he presumably had another means of locating enemies. The spears were being thrown by the second largest, a giant who was still nearly four and a half meters tall. He had at least three more spears to throw, maybe more. It was unrealistic to think they could bait out the rest of his ranged arsenal. The other two were more conventional melee warriors, one carried a two-pronged spear and the other a curved sword.

It was a difficult problem. Yalena directed Sofie to go in first and to come in from the top of the doorway, where the enemy wouldn't be expecting a human hunter to be. Mrowag to go in second and draw fire. Miriam to hold down the giants with sword and fork for as long as possible. Only then would Alex be allowed to charge in. He wasn't happy about it, but there was only so much recalculation she could do for his durability.

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"Mahax z mw mahastr!" Kwrtzl exclaimed happily. The æ sound was the first of the English vowels that the Tartarian had mastered. Or, if not actually mastered, then at least become able to use consistently. She was making a sort of strangled sound in the back of her throat, and it was possibly a bit closer to gargling than it was to the way Max put the a in 'cat' or his own name.

Leticia was all smiles. "Well, it's no Spanish weather report, but that was a pretty intelligible English sentence." Her phonetics joke didn't even merit a groan, and that disappointed the gate technician. Neither Hunter Max nor Lieutenant Cortes seemed to understand the reference. Kwrtzl also did not understand the reference, but that was less surprising because she had apparently been raised in an orphanage in the middle of a salt flat on Tartarus. No rain on that plain, no sirree. That wasanotherversion of that joke that she wanted to drop, but would absolutely have to wait until she was around some other phonetician heads.

"It is something closer to English," First Lieutenant Cortes conceded, "can you ask her how old she was when she moved to the tower?" The orphanage was a tower, or at leastcalleda tower.

Put on the spot, Leticia consulted her pad, moving her fingers up and down, right and left until she had collected the words she needed to make such a sentence. "Khlgng rtsl ngf Kwrtzl mbmrt zlspng?" It was intended to be inflected as a query, but to Leticia's own ear she simply sounded unsure of herself.

The gist of the question did seem to get through, because Kwrtzl answered. "{I was disavowed by my parents when the first stage of my Conqueror Rune was revealed, and the priestesses of the Thirst Tower cut me down from the Hill of Exposure after I had revealed my weakness three times thrice. So I was about ten flowerings old.}" She came from the Salt Shell, where apparently they did not tell time by any star, but by the flowering cycles of a plant that sounded like a cactus of some sort. It was like Ithil in that way.

The math was now second nature to Max. Conceptually similar with comparing time in calendars from different worlds in the Alliance, but from their discussions, it sounded like a new flowering cycle happened a little less often than once every two hundred and eighty Earth days. "She got taken in by the Thirst Tower when she got her blank hunter's rune. And that was when she was about seven and a half Earth years old." As Earth reckoned time, that was six actualyearsyounger than a member of the Alliance was given notice that they had been selected to be a hunter. When Max was that age, he hadn't even considered that he might be a dungeon raider,he'dwanted to be a firefighter.

The implications were staggering of course, but Lieutenant Cortes looked faintly nauseous. "Seven!How old is shenow?" That was literally thefirstthing that Max had worked out when they had started translating Tartarian time to Alliance time. Kwrtzl was twenty-one or twenty-two years old as humans reckoned things, something that he'd already told the Lieutenant on an earlier meeting. After being reminded of that fact, the implications started implicating for her. "So Tartarians know they are going to have hunters runes for more than twice as long as Alliance hunters do."

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