Fighting Them There

### Fighting Them There ###

### Fighting Them There ###

### Chapter Thirty ###

### Chapter Thirty ###

"Did you read that book I lent you?" Chloe's question was directed to Miriam. With Chaeryn scratching Ancient runes into the dirt, neither one of them had much to add. It seemed that their newest teammate was pretty good at reading and writing Ancient runes, and that meant that they could talk with her by passing written notes. But it also meant that their Assassin got to do most of that writing. The Shadow Elf had studied Ancient language since she was a child. Technically Miriam and Chloe had as well, though neither had been forced to take an Ancient Runes class until the second half of eighth grade. Chaeryn had been studying the runes since they were in elementary school, and it showed.

The redhead answered cautiously. "I... did." The dungeon romance in question was pretty formulaic. The heroine has a great class, but she can't use it properly until she has had sex with the sadistic male lead. The male lead is strong and cruel, and he doesn't learn to work with his team until he has sex with the female lead. It wasn't very different in that respect to any other dungeon romance book she was aware of, it seemed pretty typical for the genre. She had not enjoyed it very much, and didn't feel that the book was for her. Dungeon romance was a genre that was read for theromancemore than thedungeons, with pretty basic errors of monster classification being common enough that avid readers of the genre didn't even worry about trolls riding on razor boars or Tartarian necromancers raising armies of corpse constructs. And when it came to reading spice in romance, Miriam's tastes did not run nearly as rough as that book went. She did not consider herself a prude, and her tastes in actual sex had become a little... well, alotrougher since she'd discovered how pleasurable her own binding seal could become in Max's hands. But that didn't mean she wanted toreadabout such things.

Sex as rough as she could ever want was hers for the asking. Her hopeless fantasies were about Max looking at her the way he looked at Sophie. Miriam sighed. Her high-school self would be scandalized by what she got up to with Max, and absolutely disappointed by what she got wistful about.

Sidling up closer to the Geomancer, the Hoplite stage whispered the question that she'd been leading up to. "Do you think he'd do that for us?" She was fidgeting in a manner that revealed her insecurity and her hopefulness. The brunette's luxurious braids drifted behind her like wind chimes in a light breeze.

"What?" With their most perceptive party member crawling and scrabbling in the dust to share runes with the Mictlan wizardess, it had fallen to Miriam to periodically stomp the ground to check for any enemies that might be sneaking up on them. Every time she did it, the runes scratched in the dirt became plain to her, and she was able to read most of them. Most of Chaeryn's questions had been about force dispositions of the forces of Mictlan. If Pribatar was to be believed, there were still quite a lot of enemies left in the pyramid. With such weighty concerns, Miriam had quite lost the thread of Chloe's book review.

The Hoplite grabbed onto her arm. "The stair labyrinth," she said with urgency, "do you think he'll do that. For us. To us." That narrowed it down a lot. Chloe obviously wasn't talking about the monsters that had been fought, or the counting game the hunters had devised to keep track of the branching staircases, she was talking about the sex scene. There actually weren't that many sex scenes in the book, Miriam probably could have deduced which Chloe was asking about without needing any clues.

Now that she knew what was being asked about, the redhead had her answer. "If you asked him for a spanking, he would give one to you. But he won't spank you for beingdefiant. That whole scene is just not something Max would do. He'd only push you onto the stairs, tear your clothes off, and spank you to tears before slamming his turgid member into your velvet sheath if you'd already told him that's what you needed from him. Hedefinitelywill not do that if you justdefyhim, no spankings are coming just because he's angry." The book in question treated consent as something to be grantedafterthe things being consented to, and Max had made it pretty clear that he didn't agree with that. At all.

"Oh." Chloe was disappointed, obviously. She wanted tobeone of the heroines in the stories she liked, and that entailed sexual releaseunder protestmore often than not. Some of the bodice rippers she enjoyed went pretty hard when it came to the ripping of bodices.

Miriam put her arm around the Hoplite's shoulder. Chloe was stronger than she was in terms of raw physical strength. As a Geomancer, Miriam's class was stronger in an abstract sense, but did not provide the raw lifting and crushing ability of a front line class. "Look, if you want Max to take what he wants from you, we can still make that happen." She stared off into the darkness for a moment as she thought how it might work. "You want to besurprised, right? But Max wants to know he's doing something you're OK with. So what you do, is you give him a list, and then he does something off the list without telling you which one he's picking. Right?" It seemed that it was time to get moving again, so Chloe would have to consider her list later.

####

The information that Pribatar had given them seemed to be accurate. The dungeon's central pyramid had four staircases that reached the top, and all around to the corners there were seven landings that were themselves like a set of stairs for someone able to take a four meter step. Corpse constructs had been arranged on each of the landings so that they could launch flanking attacks on hunters attempting to scale the stairs, and equipped with javelins that allowed them to rain punishment on hunters who found themselves embroiled in battle on the landing below. It was not a battle plan that had anticipated flight on behalf of Sophie and Kwrtzl. Nor had it anticipated the lack of protection the stone landings would give when Miriam's Geomancer abilities could identify the locations of enemies hiding on top of blocks of stone.

It was a time consuming ascent, one which required the hunters to stop at each landing and go all around it to clear out the corpse constructs. All total there were less than fifty corpse constructs on the pyramid, but even with access to additional intelligence and unusual avenues of attack, it was a lot of walking and a lot of fighting to clean it all out. There weren't any golems in these positions, the forces of Mictlan had decided that their best defense was to have the stealth and agility that golems could not possibly match.

Of course, the simple fact that the corpse constructs were sticking to their disciplined plan meant that one of their leaders was present somewhere. Without a nearby commander, the corpse constructs would follow their basic programming and leap down from one landing to the next in order to get into melee range with any hunters they detected. The strategy they were employing was a lot more likely to work against most teams of hunters, though it hadn't yet adapted to the abilities Max's team already had. The rune that Pribatar had written to describe the controller of the corpse constructs was the "Master" rune, the same as Max's class. And a qualifier rune for many other things, such as the Master Swordsman class and the originator of a seal. It was also now the descriptor of Max's relationship with Pribatar.

"Why did you accept me as your master?" Max asked his question while Sophie was again demonstrating how ineffective it was to throw javelins over a ledge when the hunter in question was standingabovethat ledge in the air. "When I kissed you, you had the choice to become my slave, why did you?" Many ideas went through his mind. Perhaps she had feared that he would stab her to death if she had declined. If that was the reason, he didn't know how to feel about it. Because he definitelywouldhave run her through if he hadn't figured out how to get her to change sides.

Pribatar looked at him quizzically. "{If a Master is powerful enough to bind a Slave, why would the Slave attempt to refuse the bound?}" She gestured her pale hand toward the battle. "{You don't see any of them refusing a Master, do you? As soon as they can become a Slave, they do. And becoming your Slave was very fortuitous. I have never had so much blood.}" The Mictlanian licked her tongue against her lips. It was an odd declaration, and one that Max didn't know how to process. None of the questions he had asked her about how things worked in Mictlan, how she thought about her society, what she even was, had given him an answer that he knew how to deal with. The class gave him a translation of her words, but it didn't give him any insight into her heart. She didn't seem to have a heart, because even Chaeryn could not detect a pulse on her. The only heart she really seemed to have was the seal of claiming on her butt cheek.

Discussions of tactical layouts had gone easier. The rune Chaeryn used for corpse constructs was different than the ones Pribatar's people used, for one thing they distinguished corpse constructs that wereanimatedfrom constructs that wereassembled. Max's ability to translate spoken words cleared up that confusion quickly, though the underlying difference between an assembled bone spider and an animated corpse warrior appeared to be quite technical. The runes for their corpse constructs, their golems, and their blood-gem having hunters were lined up side by side with the versions that Chaeryn knew them under, and the confusion was eliminated. Pribatar's term for other Mictlanians with blood gems was similar to how Kwrtzl described her fellow Tartarians: conquerors. And a team of three conquerors with four golems was stationed at the top of the pyramid inside the pagoda that served as the destination for all four sets of stairs. Within the pagoda was a set of stairs down, which proceeded through five floors until reaching the doorway room - the room that Mictlan's conquerors intended to invade the Home Worlds through. Interestingly, there were seven steps of the pyramid, but onlyfivelevels inside the pyramid. Pribatar had explained that some of the rooms inside had higher ceilings than the outer layers would allow for, and that there really wasn't a one to one correspondence between the inside and the outside floors.

At Fiona's insistence, Max had asked if one of the floors had a place to imprison captured hunters, and as expected there was one. He tried to get her to explain how she thought the torture devices worked, and was rewarded with a description both cryptic and unnerving. "{Once prisoners have been taken, their life and death powers can be evaporated and collected.}" It was clear that it would take a long discussion with Leticia to get to the bottom of what any ofthatmeant. All he'd figured out was that blood was a "life power," and that apparently she had gotten a tremendous increase in blood quantity since she had agreed to be contracted to him.

The most poignant questions about the conquerors and golems in the pagoda that Max had come up with came back with answers that he did not understand. The conquerors had different means of empowering the necromantic constructs with life and death magic that were either mortal or spiritual and conceptualized as crowns or banners. There were a lot of dichotomies in the way Mictlan understood their magic, and Max did not understand what she was talking about. Pribatar had a crown of blood, which was acrown, and usedlifemagic, and the effect wasmortal. It was a lot of moving parts. That and her rank was "overseer," which was less than a "steward" and more than a "handler." But that also her rank was pretty similar to "architect." As a result, Max didn't really feel that he understood what she was telling him about the conquerors inside. The first two were an overseer and an architect, while the third was a steward. Which apparently meant that it outranked her.

Which was another interesting thing, which was that the enemy in question was anit, rather than amanor awoman. The Ancient language was a verygenderedlanguage, like Spanish, Max supposed. And Pribatar was definitely female. He was pretty certain about that part. But Pribatar hadn't considered herself female until she got more blood and had sex with Max. Before that, she took the gender that the Ancient language used to describe inanimate objects. From what Max recalled of Ancient runes studies, that was incorrect. That even a wheeled cart was considered mobile enough to take feminine rune modifiers. However it was apparently quite important to the conquerors of Mictlan that only those who had a certain amount of life magic be considered masculineorfeminine.

He thought of how many hours he was going to spend chasing down minutiae related tothatlinguistic facet with Pribatar and Leticia and he just groaned. It didn't sound like a good time. Bringing his focus back to the matter at hand, he drew up a plan of attack on the pagoda. Sophie, Chaeryn, and Kwrtzl would fly or sneak around to cover the three external exits that the main team wasn't rushing into, Fiona would dump a fireball into one of the entrances, and then Chloe followed closely by Ulzhari would rush into it and put an end to any of the conquerors who weren't fleeing into an ambush. Once the enemies were fully engaged with the two front liners, a human, an elf, and a Tartarian attacked from the other entrances.

The golems weren't even able to engage before their bonuses from necromantic crowns or banners were all extinguished. Reduced in speed and agility, it was practically a training exercise to deprive them of their durability. Pribatar was very impressed at how efficiently her new master had put an end to her erstwhile colleagues. The reward, aside from access to the stairs that led into the center of the pyramid, was two iron-sigiled chests. One for an artillery, one for a rampager. It was the first time most of them had ever seen a chest marked for a generic rampager. Chaeryn got eight iron arrows, and Kwrtzl got an upgrade to her tassets. She swapped the leather tassets for ones made of cloth with metal scales sewn onto them. Max thought about how short a time she had actually worn the leather tassets and how much chest debt he had taken on to allow her to do so. He wouldn't have done it any differently, but it was still frustrating. He hoped someone in the spring crop would be able to use the leather tassets.

####

Five levels to fight through, and each of them was larger in terms of square meters than the one before it. They did not expand as rapidly as the base of the pyramid, which Max supposed meant that the exterior walls became thicker as one descended to the final door. The first, third, and fifth levels were supposed to be just singular rooms, with the second and fourth divided into multiple cells. The first one was about the same size as the pagoda above it, and Pribatar had described the size of final room in terms of the arena for a ballgame. That information didn't give Max any clearer picture of the size or shape of the room in question, but it did set his mind aflutter with the knowledge that Mictlan had ballgames.

He'd just sort of assumed that Jotunheim and Tartarus had sports, though questions of their nature hadn't intruded much into his consciousness. The fact that Mictlan had sports actually surprised him enough that he almost derailed his line of questioning into an extended interrogation on Mictlan leisure activities. Such questions had to be filed away for another day. At that moment they had to seize the first room, and he focused his questions to the tactical.

The first room had some bodies that were animated and given spears and crude swords, and a couple of assembled enemies that had been given many limbs. Max took swordsmanship seriously, and the lack of care in production and maintenance of the weaponry used by Mictlan's forces annoyed him on many levels. Simple animated bodies with weapons were the most numerous and apparently the lowest effort of corpse constructs to make. The ball of writhing limbs that made flpt flpt flpt sounds as it rolled tumbleweed-style into battle certainlylookedlike the kind of thing that would be more difficult to make than to hand a rusty falchion to a largely intact corpse.

The assembled construct was translated to Max as a "{pain star}," although when he asked whether itcausedpain or wasinpain, Pribatar was seemingly very confused. The name was apparently related to the kind of magic used to hold it together, and there wasn't anyone feeling any pain in any way that Max could related to. It was a reminder that while the Captivatorlookedmore human than Kwrtzl or even Chaeryn, she was still an alien invader.

The basic reanimated corpse constructs weren't very threatening. Their tactics and swordsmanship were poor. Actually fighting the pain star was tricky. It had too many limbs to be effectively warded off with a shield, and parrying its wild flailing was nigh impossible even though some hunters had skills that gave them prescience as to where its attacks were going to land. Entering the flurry zone was like trying to parry the scrubbers in a car wash, and the room was simply too small to keep distance and take it down from afar. Flpt. Flpt. Flpt. The limbs slapped the ground, but they also slapped and clawed at the hunters. From afar it looked like a tumbleweed, but up close it was like crowd surfing on a concert hall full of fans that wanted to reave flesh from bone, to pinch and tear with claws and fury.

Something about its construction meant that the constituent pieces weren't sharing durability particularly well. Each strike tore pieces off to send flying to the corners of the room. Each moment scratched and pinched. A slapping hand dug in and burrowed like a lamprey attaching to a host. The front liners took it apart, but it wasn't clean. Meaty pieces were everywhere, and Max had to use his soothing touch on Sophie, Chloe, and Ulzhari afterward.

He brought them into a group hug, kissing the two humans and the orc alternately. Chloe and Sophie on the lips, Ulzhari on the cheek because her Essence lock was still in place. The humans raised their pteruges and guided his hand onto their rumps. He stroked them and they sighed. Not wanting to leave Ulzhari out of it, he removed his hand from Chloe's skin and inserted it into one of the gaps in her bodysuit. The Bloodletter was silent, but she wiggled in appreciation. All three of them had lost some mana, but their durability had been restored. The three front liners shared a glow of contentment and looked upon Max with fondness.

The effect was even more dramatic on someone who wasn't even in the hug. Pribatar looked dazed, hungry to the point of famishment. She panted like someone who had just finished a race. "{Master} Max! {My back. It feels so good. You're touching them. It feels so good to watch you touch them!} Unnnng!" Orgasms were a new thing to the corrupter from Mictlan, she had been a virgin before Max had taken her first time. And yet, she was having an orgasm right there in the remains of the battle. She felt a great deal of shame and not a small amount of uncertainty.

"Sounds like someone just got her envy seal," Miriam said with a knowing smile. The Geomancer's envy seal was similarly placed, and she recognized the signs.