Fighting Them There

### Fighting Them There ###

### Fighting Them There ###

### Chapter Thirty-One ###

### Chapter Thirty-One ###

"Do you know why you're here?" Lieutenant Cortes' question was rhetorical, a simple delaying tactic used because the blue-eyed woman seemed to have no idea what she was saying. Considering that she was an invader from Mictlan, she almost certainly did not. Of course, she didn'tlooklike an invader from Mictlan. The new arrival's red and black robes were a bit on the goth end of the spectrum, but her flesh seemed decidedly alive. Her skin was definitely on the pale side, but she didn't have any exposed muscles or bones. Superficially, she looked very much like a human. That was worrying, did it mean that Mictlan had developed a technique to mimic the citizens of the Alliance? As far as Command was aware, none of the Nemesis Worlds had made any progress, or even any serious attempts, at infiltrating Alliance society. If that had changed, the repercussions could be severe.

"Pribatar can read Ancient runes," the Shadow Elf suggested. Despite the calmness of her suggestion, Lieutenant jumped in her chair. The hunter had a passive stealth ability and she had been actually invisible while standing in the room. Many hunters found it difficult to integrate into society after their tours of duty were over, and abilities like that played as much of a role as the trauma they suffered fighting for their lives in distant dungeons. But she had given a helpful proposal, so Lieutenant Cortes had to calm herself and accept the assistance.

Turning to her pad, the officer scribbled some Ancient runes. "WHO IS YOUR MASTER?" is what it essentially said. As a non-hunter, she couldn't see the status screens of dungeon equipment, but as an officer of the Space Force she'd studied the language of their benefactors and tormentors well enough to read and write such basic questions. She turned the pad toward the invader and tapped the sign.

Facial expressions passed across the Mictlanian's face, and Lieutenant Cortes did not know how to interpret them. Humans adjusted their commonly used expressions only slightly from culture to culture, but the frumpled mouth expression of this woman truly brought to mind nothing so much as an alien wearing a human face as a mask. Which, she supposed, is exactly what she was. "Max!" The invader declared with a bright decisiveness that belied her alien origin. It was surprising, but on reflection she hadn't actually spoken any English words, just the name of Hunter Mitchell.

"Mahastr Mahaks," the Tartarian agreed. The winged creature was continuing to behave as if pack bonded with the rest of Hunter Mitchell's party members, and not flying around on a murderous rampage. So, Lieutenant Cortes considered that to be a win of sorts. In fact,neitherof invaders had murderedanyonesince being separated from the hunter they called 'Master.' When looked at from that perspective, they were already quite fortunate.

With the hunter in question out of the picture, there was an open question of whether the two monsters would revert to attempting to slaughter every human, orc, and elf they could catch before being brought down by the guardians of the base. "Are we certain that Hunter Mitchell is still alive?" There were flashes of worry across several of the faces, but one in particular seemed to have no doubt at all.

The Valkyrie saluted. "Ma'am, I can feel Max's presence through my slave seals. And my doom seer ability has updated to specify that the attack will come toMax'sdomain. Weknowthat he is alive, weknowthat he has succeeded in taking control of the dungeon, and we know that he needs our help." Her certainty was contagious, and the others seemed to become more resolute at her inspiring words. Not for the first time, Lieutenant Cortes thought that B-tier vanguard would probably be officer material if she survived her conscription. She wasn't sure that she got the same vibes from her boyfriend, but the loyalty he seemed to inspire in his current team was impressive. The blond woman looked right at her and proclaimed her plan. "We have to go back into the dungeon immediately!"

Acknowledging the intensity of the hunter's desires was easy, the blond woman was very persuasive. Actually doing anything about the request wasn't necessarily something she could do. "How do you propose that we do that?" The Lieutenant's question would normally be rhetorical. Whether dungeons were reused at any point was still very much in dispute. On the one hand, hunters did describe dungeons whose layout and architecture matched those of previous expeditions, but on the other hand it was still a perfectly reasonable idea that perhaps more than one dungeon in the galaxy used the same basic layout. It really wouldn't be that surprising if the Ancients had more than one labyrinth or tower built along similar principles. Regardless, a dungeon whose final gate had been opened was out of the pool of reachable dungeons, and if it ever came back into the rotation the resonance signature would be sufficiently different that it couldn't be identified as the same gate target. The answer to the question of how you could return to a dungeon would normally be something along the lines of: "You couldn't possibly do it any time soon, you might not be able to ever, and even if you did you wouldn't know that you were definitely in the same place." Nevertheless, the hunters before her had managed quite a number of impossible feats, so the question was serious.

The women turned to the Tartarian, who gave an excited and somewhat lengthy explanation in her language that sounded like a dog furiously engaging in a tug of war over a stick. Specialist Leticia Clark struggled to keep up. "She says that her master will be able to call for reinforcements to um... station his dungeon. And that she is going to be one of his reinforcements, as long as she displays sufficient trust. In Max." The gate tech and linguist looked on helplessly.

Lieutenant Cortes sighed. "So what do you expect to do? Clap and say you believe in Hunter Mitchell?" She'd said it with just a hint of sarcasm, but no one seemed to pick up on it. Instead, the women took it as a serious jumping off point.

They let the new arrival from Mictlan draw up a plan, and it seemed like her idea was almost literally just that.

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He was pretty sure it was darker. The light in the room was cast by the tumbling will-o-wisps, but there seemed to be less of them. Perhaps it could be chalked up to his eyes being oversaturated from the flash of the gate opening, or perhaps the cavernous emptiness of the final room with no one left to keep him company but the fallen enemies, but it genuinely seemed to him that there were less will-o-wisps. That the shadows were deeper and longer than they had been before all his compatriots vanished.

Quiet as the grave. The natural state is not only the absence of light, but the absence of sound. With his enemies vanquished and his allies departed, Max was alone in silence. Each breath he took was the loudest noise he could hear. His footfalls were like drum beats, each pace would alert friend or foe to the very spot that his boot touched the stone. If there were any friends or any foes close enough to hear. His allies had all departed, and if his status window was to be believed there were two remaining enemies who were well outside the pyramid he was in.

The chests had departed as well, hopefully to be used in making dummy arrows for future hunters even if their contents turned out to be lackluster. Some stone boxes remained, large enough for Max to lie down in. He wondered if that was their actual purpose, to be places for the Mictlan invaders to lie down in. If these were beds, perhaps he should call them sarcophagi. The bodies of the fallen invaders were lying broken and still on the floor where Max's own team had left them, and there was nothing in the boxes but a thin layer of dirt.

He opened his status window and noted that the entire room he was in was somehow selectable. The interface wasn't obvious, because despite the fact that he could select it, it wasn't actually selected until he had the correct part of the domain interface opened. When he was in one of sub-selections, whether it was Assignments, Summons, or Laws, it had a title, and when he wasn't in any of those it did not. Unfortunately, the title wasn't a set of runes he was at all familiar with, so he wasn't sure what good that was. There was additional information that appeared while he was in Summons or Laws, which told him that its Station was one of four. He supposed that meant that he was currently in it. In Assignments, that information wasn't displayed, and he didn't know why.

He tried checking on the various sub-selections of the Summons subsection. The first one was his slaves, and noted that there was an entry for each of the women bound to him. Including Monique and Katherine. The dominion cost for the two non-hunters was a lot lower than the cost to summon any of the hunters. That seemed to answersomequestions, though it raised some more. The cost each of them was a lot more than what he had available, and he didn't know whether he would realistically gain enough dominion to summon any of them before the invasion that Sophie had prophesied occurred. Or he died of thirst, which seemed like it was even more imminent. He decided to head upstairs, thinking that he needed to start flying his banner if he was to get the currency he needed to do anything.

As he ascended, he noted that the damage that Miriam had done to the walls of the stairwell remained as battle scars. She had effectively closed the murder holes with her magic, but it wasn't anything like finished masonry. Now that he owned the murder holes, he wasn't sure that having them blocked up was necessarily a good thing. Perhaps having everyone fall back to the final room and using the murder holes while the invaders tried to bash in the gate would be an effective defense. When his team had forced open that door, they hadn't left it in a condition that it could be easily closed. It didn't look like he had any place to hold ground, which meant that he'd probably have to resort to sorties. He frowned at the prospect. He didn't know what would happen if some of the enemy rushed to the final room while they were out on a sortie and opened the door. It sounded like it might be bad.

On the next floor, there were several different rooms. A casual check showed that he could select them individually or in groups. When he went to the Summons menu, he saw a new room title that was also made of runes he couldn't read. It was a room where Mictlan had assembled corpse constructs, and Max didn't know what such a room would be called inEnglish, let alone the Ancient language. It didn't seem to be stationed, or even have a stationing limit, whether he was inside or outside. He checked another room and it had a different label, though its title also meant nothing to him. The third room he checked didn't have a title at all, and he cycled through menu options to see if he'd find it elsewhere. Surprisingly, he found something that hadn't been present when he'd checked through things in the other rooms. And it was a lot. Selecting the Zones out of the Assignments section gave only a couple inscrutable options in the first room he was in, but in the nameless room the number of options wasstaggering. The list was long, and everything he looked at popped out an additional couple of options that only then bothered to tell him that the dominion cost was too high for him to pay. Although apparently they could also be purchased as levies, whichhealso did not have enough of to afford any of the options he looked at.

There were a few words that he recognized. Prison. Armory. Treasury. These were words that broadly described thepurposeof a room. He deduced that the "Assignments" of "Zones" weren't like like spells such as azoneof enervation or azoneof darkness, but like the zoning done by cities that decided where malls and apartment buildings could be built. He found it very surprising, and wondered if the Ancients had neighborhood groups who protested magrail expansion. Home decoration would have to wait, and he proceeded up.

Ultimately, he'd have to decide whether the bottom floor was thefirstfloor or thefifth, but either way thethirdfloor was the third. That was where the dungeon riddle had been set up, where he'd had sex with Ulzhari, Fiona, Kwrtzl, and Pribatar on stone altars surrounded by the deanimated corpses of Mictlan's invaders. Absent the heat of the moment and the presence of the beautiful women, the scene was kind of nauseating. He checked the room, and recognized only about half the runes in its name. Unsurprisingly, it counted as a prison of sorts. Despite the fact that the dungeon riddle had four altars and had required five hunters including himself to complete, the station limit appeared to be only two. It laid bare how little he understood how stationing worked, made his mind race through dozens of questions he should have asked Kwrtzl or Pribatar. Now the only invaders he could ask had nothing to say. One of them had a name Max even knew, though Mamagal would never hear his name spoken again. He shuddered, and moved on up the stairs.

The storage rooms seemed to be unclaimed, except for one which had been designated asstorage. It was the same rune as for arrow storage or slave storage, and he wondered if there might be some way to put things into the quasi-space that those hunter abilities afforded. He wasted several minutes trying to store or retrieve things from it, but it genuinely seemed to be just an uninteresting room with a table and some wooden shelves. Frustrated, he carried on up the stairs.

The first room of the inside of the pyramid that they had assaulted had a designation as a "guard... something." He didn't know what the designation meant, or even what the second half was supposed to mean, but on a hunch he opened the "Zone Equipment" subsection and noted that the flurry of available selections was quite different than it had been in the original room. He was still out of his element, but at least he knew that every kind of room had different upgrades that could be purchased for it. He had a sinking feeling that there were probably some very important combinations that he should be buying right away and he had no way to figure out what those were. He was so annoyed by this prospect that he almost tripped over the pile of arms and legs that was left over from when the "pain star" stopped flailing about. It was horrible in a completely different way when the limbs weren't moving in the manner of a plant in the wind or a hideous sea creature.

The pagoda on top of the pyramid was a stationable location. While he was in it, it was stationed at one of four. The location appeared to be named a "scouting stance," but he thought that would probably end up meaning something along the lines of "observation post." There were four doorways and he looked out of all of them, and he thought that maybe things did look a bit clearer. On a whim, he checked his own status and found that there was a pretty small perception bonus that seemed to come from being in the pagoda. That discovery made him stop and think for a while. Many hunters had supposed that monsters were stronger or weaker in various parts of the dungeon, and he now had proof that that could literally be the case. It also presented a whole axis of domain design that he had no idea how he was supposed to interact with. The bonus to perception was low even for a piece of lead-sigil equipment, but spread across four hunters such a bonus might be useful in aggregate.

In essence, it was the logic of the support role all over again. Only this time, he didn't know what he was supposed to be maximizing. Or how to achieve that maximization, since he had no idea what most of the things he could build actually did, and had even less of an understanding of what he could be doing that would be helpful toward protecting his team. It had been several months since he had felt so woefully inadequate at his role.

His understanding of the banner was that it was supposed to fly on top of his domain, and unfortunately that probably did not mean that he was supposed to be putting it upinsidethe pagoda. He stepped out to the external walkway of the pyramid, and contemplated how he could climb to the top.

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Pribatar looked at the plate and the slice of pizza that was on it with what seemed to be confusion. She moved her face right next to it and looked up to where Sophie was industrially shoving her own piece into her mouth. Drawing her head back like a squirrel who had suddenly changed modes from digging to vigilance at the sound of a bird call, the new arrival from Mictlan sat very still for several seconds. Then she took the pad she had been allotted and scribbled some runes down and waited for Chaeryn to read them on her own pad.

All eyes turned to the Shadow Elf. She read them a couple of times before explaining her findings. "She says her mouth is full of tears, and she asks if and how you get blood and courage from this." The Assassin gestured at the pizza.

"Honestly," Fiona conceded, "I'm surprised that a creature of Mictlan knows what tears are." In response to puzzled expressions that inspired, she continued. "I mean, a lot of corpse constructs have empty eye sockets, and the ones that have eyes at all, they are all dried and deflated. They don'tneedto keep their eyes wet, when they have eyes at all."

Ulzhari leaned across the table until her breastplate touched the surface. She studied Pribatar's face carefully and came to a conclusion. "Has tears," was her verdict.

After swallowing her own bite of pizza, Sophie weighed in. "Well, she needs to eat. At least, I assume she does." The blond woman pointed to her own remaining pizza slice and then to the black-haired Captivator. The Mictlanian in question had a look on her face like a trapped rabbit and began another exchange over the data pads with Chaeryn.

She seemed to have an epiphany of sorts, and then she reached down and grabbed the cheesy side of the slice with her hands and pulled it to her mouth. Her mouth opened as if she intended to take it in a single bite, and then two of her teeth elongated into terrifying fangs. Chomp! Her fangs punctured through cheese and dough, with the rest of the slice flopping onto her upper lip, leaving a fan-shaped mustache of oil and sauce on her face. "Ack!" The Mictlanian sorceress made a sound that was both astonished and distressed.

Luhgra pointed and laughed. "Nonny Frivatar funny!" Despite the fact that was not quite able to get her lips together, the girl's English was really coming along. The table was divided as to whether they should be embarrassed or impressed by their daughter's outburst. The small child demonstrated how to eat pizza by taking several bites and getting no more than half as much sauce on her face as Pribatar had.

Pribatar's second attempt at eating a pizza slice was different but also unsuccessful. She opened her again very widely and pushed the slice as far as it would go. "Hagack! Gak! Kof!" She gagged and coughed. The child laughed. Chloe rushed over and slapped her new companion on the back.

Rolling her eyes, Miriam addressed the rest of the table. "Are we really going into battle alongside someone who doesn't know how to chew and swallow? I mean, maybe she needs a babysitter with Luhgra."

"Not baby!" Luhgra insisted.