Fighting Them There

### Fighting Them There ###

### Fighting Them There ###

### Chapter Twenty-Eight ###

### Chapter Twenty-Eight ###

Rosalita was glad that her ridiculous dress provided resistance to cold. The white and blue number barely covered her butt and nipples at the same time, but it did keep her from freezing to death because of the magical protection. Huddling in the frost, she was not comfortable, the damage prevention still allowed her to know that she was in danger without it, but she did not actually freeze. As the only member of the team who did not strictly need to conserve heat, it had fallen to her to do most of the scouting and all of the warming of the drinking water. Such were the vagaries of magic that her protection allowed her to warm ice from the stream to thirty-seven degree drinking water with nothing more than intense discomfort on her part. They were in desperate times, and so desperate measures needed to be employed. The ice felt like frozen fire against her skin, and every one of her surviving team mates needed to drink from her hand. Each of them was freezing, they needed to do everything in their power to keep from freezing to death.

Meditation and rest were helpful in restoring mana, but there was little chance of her getting any of that. They'd made camp in the ravine, where they had access to water and shelter from the wind, but it was cold and wet and miserable. It also gave them just two directions to guard against counterattack by the dungeon denizens. Two probing attacks had been beaten back at severe cost, and the Jotunheimers hadn't mounted a third. She thought that the enemy could have easily overrun their position with a concerted attack, but perhaps they thought they would win a longer siege. The remaining hunters weren't starving, though wolf meat was only technically edible. Amino acids or vitamins or something meant that a human could actually starve to death living on meat from Jotunheim, though it would take a lot longer than three days for that to happen. Water, calories, minimal shelter; all told, things could definitely be worse. But it wasn't comfortable. Roslita hadn't slept more than an hour at a time for days. Her mana reserves weren't even half full, and it had been some time since the last attack.

Their own scouting had been enough to establish a perimeter, but also to dash any hope that they might be able to push through to the end. A stone fortress stood at the far side of the chasm. Its walls were patrolled by vaetti and Rosalita couldn't see how they'd even manage to open the front door. The drawbridge was drawn, the gates were down. She didn't see how they could get inside without even more losses, so they waited. They waited for rescue, or for death. Whichever came first.

The stream sparkled in the dancing blue light of the will-o-wisps. Ice glittered and reflected blue sparkles all over the rocky ravine. Where a chasm on Earth would usually be darker than the higher ground around it, in the dungeon the diffuse light sources were channeled and amplified by close terrain. With no sun or moon above them, it was actually darker up on the hill. At least, that's how it was until she saw the white flash. A source of light with many more colors than the will-o-wisps provided briefly appeared above the ravine. For a narrow moment, the bodies of Jack and Baethiel were exposed in their true colors, and were much more nauseating because of it. The frozen body of a human or elf looked no stranger than anything else in the shifting blue light of the dungeon, but when the light of truth was available, the horror of the situation revealed itself. Linda retched, and Rosalita did not blame her.

Stripped and partially covered in snow, their fallen comrades would never get a proper burial, nor would their ashes ever be returned to their families. As soon as the life left their eyes, they were no longer considered hunters. Their bodies could not return to Camp Acheron, but neither did they dare leave the bodies where the Jotunheim scouts might find them. They'd dumped the weapons and armor of the trolls in a pile next to the corpses. Not as a sign of respect, but merely to keep them out of enemy hands. Maintaining the secrecy of their reduced tactical capabilities required the naked bodies to be protected in their camp site, and preventing the enemy from recovering their toys was just as important.

Their orcish teammate smiled, taking the light as a reason to be optimistic. "Do you think light is hunters?" She wasn't disrespectful about the loss of their slayer and controller, but she wasn't as torn up as Linda or Thomas. Gorgra was more sanguine and practical about death than any of the humans. She'd told them that on Nurn it was considered normal for warriors to die if they did not return in glory. "Three cycles done now." She was probably right, as the only member of their team who was able to successfully sleep for more than a few fitful blinks in the frozen ravine. On a normal day, it was easier to track the passage of time while awake than asleep, but Rosalita had long since passed the horizon of fatigue where time lost meaning. With several naps under her belt, Gorgra was comparatively sharp.

"Are they?" Rosalita wouldn't know, her internal cycles were a complete mess. The Shieldbearer's ability to sleep under the circumstances was enviable, as she was the only one of their team who managed real naps. But if she was correct, then the light might indeed be a rescue team. The Thunder Mage certainly hoped it was. She desperately wanted to be warm, and she desperately needed to sleep. The light sputtered out without any sound to mark its passing, leaving the ravine in the shifting blues of relative darkness once again.

####

Even after days of exposure, the blood of humans did not look very much like the blood of vaetti or trolls. Humans, elves, and orcs all had blood that wasalmostclose enough to transfuse from one to the other. The vaetti and trolls had blood that was blue or green in complete light, not something that could be easily confused for something that bled from an Earth mammal. That was why it didn't take the skills of a ranger to identify that both Jotunheim and Alliance blood had been spilled on that frosty hill. Badgerdidhave the skills of a ranger, and he could analyze the frozen battlefield in quite a bit of detail.

"One of the human front liners went down here," he said, pointing at the scuff marks and blood stains, "and the body wasdraggeddown the hill. Footprints are ours, not theirs." He knew the shoes sizes of everyone on Team Eight. "So the team lost their slayer right here. Then they went down there." He pointed at the chasm near the base of the hill. It was a somber declaration. There was no appetite for hoo-yahs, any hope of a happy ending had been crushed.

The others surveyed the damage and came to similar conclusions. Their classes didn't give them them tracking skills, but they were professionals with hunting experience in many types of dungeon terrain. Rooster made a flare. Used offensively, it could blind enemies, but invoked farther away it could merely be a source of white light. The light of the will-o-wisps was patchy, but more importantly the light they shed was entirely blue, leaving any purely red, green, and yellow objects indistinguishable from black ones. Shedding light on the situation, the White Wizard was able to see where ice had refrozen and made a remarkable pronouncement. "Our baby Thunder Mage here cast chain lightning." No one had expected such a statement, but the Z-shape of smooth refrozen soil was hard to argue with.

Chain lightning was a spell that Rooster was able to cast. It was one of his most powerful spells, inflicting devastating damage with a very sculptable area of effect that could strike multiple enemies in most tactical situations. It was not, one would suppose, a spell that an E-tier Thunder Mage on her first tour as a conscript would have access to. Of course, even E-tier hunters got extra skills if they gained enough levels, and it obviously wasn't impossible for those to include spells that were rare and powerful. But the fact that such a superficially weak hunter would have such a powerful spell available to her was even more surprising than that the dungeon was powerful enough that it had been necessary to cast it.

Some of the bodies had been removed, but all of them had been looted of weapons before they'd been left to freeze to the rocks. It was a good sign, because it implied that the remaining hunters had realized that they couldn't go on and had taken steps to prevent the Jotunheimers from retaking the weapons. It was also a bad sign, in that it implied that the Jotunheimers had had weapons that the hunters had suspected of being dungeon equipment that was more threatening than whatever random weapons the remain enemies might already have in their hands.

The best way to confirm such suspicions was with Gadget's vindictive prayer. A spell that gave seals of increasing value based on the amount of damage that had been inflicted on enemies. Useless in the early stages of a dungeon raid, Gadget could do a pretty good imitation of a support caster with enough battles in a row. The magenta light of the seal's formation suffused Knuckles and the whole team looked at him while he calculated the bonus he'd received. "Yeah... wow. Either that giant was a fucking beast or Team Monster had a couple of hunter-tier invaders among the vaetti and trolls. Fuck." As a Paladin, Knuckles had a healing touch ability, but it wouldn't do anything to someone who'd actually died

Nodding, Badger knew which answerhe'dput money on. "If we look at how much attack power they dropped into those trolls, I think we got pretty good guess. They took the troll weapons, so they were obviously worried about the enemy rearming. They also away took their own dead. The survivors kept their heads in all this." It was praise that had been earned, although it likely wouldn't do them a lot of good. Praising a fallen warrior didn't bring them back, and even the survivors were all going to get honorable discharges after such a fiasco. It was a grim thought, and one that every one of his teammates turned their minds to similar dire prophecies. Subdued, but galvanized, they followed the direction of his gaze. Down the hill, where the footprints of hunters had tread. Where Jack's body had been dragged.

There had been survivors, at least from the battle on the hill. There had also been at least one casualty of that same battle. That gave the rest of the mission a heightened sense of purpose. Bubbles took off down the hill at speed, and the rest of the party followed. If any of the other members had selected themselves to take point, Badger would have told them to chill the fuck out. As it happened, there was no reason to stop their team's Sentry from pressing on ahead, she had the best perception and durability on the team. She strode confidently down the hill, doubtlessly covering the ground much faster than Team Eight had done.

There was a path into the ravine, one which by Badger's reckoning the enemy had come up, and the hunters had gone down more than once. That was an excellent sign that they were getting close. The remnants of Team Eight wouldn't have been retracing their steps if they hadn't been camping. As they descended, they passed more evidence that humans had come through. There was even an elementary alarm made of stacked rocks. It seemed that a group of winter wolves had been repulsed, with their shattered bodies lying at the base of the rocky path. The base of the ravine had a stream running through it, enough that the hunters wouldn't be dehydrated. Any human, elf, or orc could go without food for a lot longer than they could go without water.

Bubbles stopped and tapped her nose. "They're close." No one bothered to ask her how she knew, with her enhanced perception she could have heard, seen, or smelled even the smallest trace of the survivors. It was no use asking her about it, if they got any of the kids home she would immediately go back to her irreverent demeanor and tell them that she'd smelled human piss or something. So long as the lives of teenagers hung in the balance, she wouldn't bother answering at all. The Sentry looked back briefly to make sure that Badger was OK with her calling out, and shouted ahead as soon as she saw his nod. "How many of you are still alive?!" Putting one's voice into the wind was a terrible idea on any battlefield on the Home Worlds, but to the Jotunheimers no English words were meaningfully different from the growls of wild beasts.

"Four." The answer was a single word. A word that spoke of grief and exhaustion. But a better word than they had feared.

####

Luhgra grabbed Max's arm and his attention at the same time. "{What is} har-sek {mean}?"

The train they were on continued apace, but the train of the story was thoroughly derailed. "Well," Max began, "a parsec is a very long distance. It's so long that you'd need a space ship or a world gate to go that far. But the important part is that when he said that his ship made a trip in twelve parsecs, that's just the distance of the trip. It doesn't mean anything." Max smiled at the small child with a twinkle in his eye.

A small child smacked him on the arm. "{Why would he say it if it doesn't mean anything!? That's lying!}" Luhgra was getting herself worked up toward being genuinely upset.

"He said it..." Max thought about how to explain it to Luhgra. The idea of probing questions wasn't exactly a simple concept even for adults. "He said it because he wanted to know if the people he was talking to knew what a parsec was. It wasn't exactly a lie, the twelve parsec journey was twelve parsecs. But he wanted to see how they'd react." The young orc stared at him with incomprehension. Max did not feel that he was doing particularly well in his mission. "So if they wereimpressedby what he said, it would mean that they didn't knowanythingabout space ships."

She sat with her eyes and mouth open for several seconds. Eventually she asked the next most important question. "{But... were they impressed?}"

Max smiled impishly at his daughter. "Not in the slightest. The old man rolled his eyes." after a quick demonstration of eye rolling, the two of them shared a giggle. Feeling like his ears were on fire, Max furtively looked around at the women in the other seats. It seemed that he was getting approving, hungry stares from all of them. He wasn't entirely sure what they wanted, but based on what they usually wanted he did not think that he should ask them about it in front of their child. He thought about how he could slip off for "mommy story time," but didn't see a way to do it before the end of the train trip. And that in turn meant that there wasn't going to be any more training sessions until they got back to Camp Acheron. The chances of him having time alone with his harem slaves at the gate fort were pretty low.

A sinking feeling was developing that he wasn't going to be able to spend any amorous time with the women of his party even when they returned to the world of the Ancients. The latest word was that a Rapid Response Team had been sent into the dungeon after Team Eight. They might already be back, but such information couldn't get to Nurn until the next gate connection. And since Max and company would be going through that gate connection, there was no way to find out how many casualties there had been before they got to Camp Acheron. Max didn't think he was the kind of guy to try to have sex at a funeral, and they might be heading intosixfunerals.

He entertained Luhgra with his stories until she fell asleep. She drifted off with her head in his lap, which left him powerless to sneak off with any of his party mates. He expected them to be upset, but it seemed that everywhere he looked, the women were pleased. At least, Sophie, Miriam, Fiona, and even Chloe were all watching his predicament like he was a fuzzy kitten. Chaeryn and Ulzhari were aliens, and so his ability to interpret their facial expressions was limited, but theyseemedto be pretty pleased with the goings-on. Kwrtzl was the most alien of all, and so while he got the distinct impression that she was jealous, he wouldn't bet any money that his interpretation was correct. He wasn't sure what she'd be jealous of, but there were still many things about Tartarian culture that he did not know.

With nowhere to go, he called Kwrtzl and Leticia over and made a suggestion. "We still have several hours left on this train ride. Quirky, why don't you tell me a story and I'll tell it to Leticia? That way, we can get some language work in." The bat-winged woman agreed, and began telling a story. It was actually pretty horrifying as stories went, like something that would come from The Brothers Grimm or a Mayan codex. He was quite glad that Luhgra was asleep, because he didn't want to explain skin scorching to the point where it stuck to the insides of red-hot metal boots to a child. He determined that Kwrtzl wasnevergoing into Luhgra's bedtime story rotation, not even once they'd both learned English.

Apparently it had been a story that Kwrtzl had been told before she was declared an orphan. It made Max want to comfort her, but he didn't know how. Lacking any better ideas, he patted her head, and that seemed to go over well. Leticia didn't much care about the content of the story or its relative appropriateness for children, the use of new words and a special tense for things that happened very long ago and were incompletely known absolutely thrilled her. Leticia got so excited upon discovering that storytelling invoked a "remote past presumptive tense" in Kwrtzl's language that she began bombarding Max with prompts to ask the rampager to say a series of very similar things about stuff that probably happened a long time ago. His class' abilities meant that he literally could not hear the differences that Leticia was trying to elucidate. Everything Kwrtzl said was translated to him before he heard the actual sounds, making the whole process very boring for him.

Max couldn't wait to get to the gateway.

####

Rosalita couldn't wait to get to the gateway. When their team had been reached by rescuers, she had felt such immense relief that the weight of her experiences almost made her pass out. She'd been running on adrenaline for literally days, and even a slight reduction in tension caused every part of her body to remind her of how overworked they had been. Getting to actual safety promised a full general strike of everything from her eyes to her toes. There had not yet been time to process the deaths of Jack and Baethiel. She'd helped take the armor off their cooling corpses, but she hadn't really had the chance to grieve. If she got to a place of safety, the first thing she'd do is sleep, but when she woke up she figured that she would cry.

Watching the rescue team get into the enemy fortress was instructive. Mostly it instructed her that she had no business being on the same dungeon raid. Gadget had been able to magic the fortress open from across the ravine, cursing the vaetti guards with misunderstandings about how the gate functioned and whether it was up or down. By the time they realized that they'd been deceived, Badger had put a dummy arrow into every vaetti in the gate house. Bubbles and Knuckles had charged across the drawbridge, and once they were in the courtyard it was too late for the fortress to be closed up. The vaetti that had rushed to retake the gatehouse had perished in flames summoned by Rooster. It was a chaotic mess, but it was so effective that it would be easy to pretend that it had been a precision operation.