Fighting Them There

### Fighting Them There ###

### Fighting Them There ###

### Chapter Thirty-Five ###

### Chapter Thirty-Five ###

Ulzhari was running. She'd cleared the rough ground of the ruins and broken through to the path that Max's golem had stamped down between the pyramid and the well. It would be very difficult to explain to anyone back home that her harem boar had a golem of his own. That she was expecting to be in a harem with a golem from Mictlan. She knew three languages, and she wasn't sure how to explain that in any of them. Something much easier to explain was that there were enemies ahead. She knew that because her class was allowing her to run at an increased speed. She didn't move her legs any faster, but each step magically covered more ground. It was an effect similar to running down the aisle of a moving train, and there was no way it could kick in without her noticing it.

They'd been so careful to set up the sight lines so that the gunners on top of the pyramid could shoot anyone climbing over the wall from any direction. And they'd made sure that if Chaeryn was standing in the well area, she'd be able to shoot anyone trying to bring down the walls through windows that Miriam had installed. Against almost any of the Patalans, it would have been tactically sound. The hart rats could squeeze through the windows themselves, and had arranged a path into the well that kept them out of line of sight from the top of the pyramid. It was a clever attack method. Ulzhari intended to thwart that cleverness with overwhelming brutality. Maybe the Iron Claw Clan would commission a song about it.

There were several hart rats that had set up an ambush of sorts. There was no place around the well big enough to hide an orc, or even an elf, but the hart rats were smaller. Antlers slashed at her shins, making horrible grating sounds on her chitinous greaves. She'd lost some durability, which was modestly surprising. More surprising than the ambush itself. She'd gone in recklessly, because the enemy was placing their soldiers behind their lines, where they couldn't be seen. It was a simple enough Vuhshahk strategy, and the only response was to cede the territory or aggressively contain the incursion. Ceding the territory wasn't an option when Luhgra and the final door were in it, and so it fell to Ulzhari to take their pieces as quickly as possible.

A longsword was probably overkill to take on a hart rat, especially one that had come from a gold chest. Ulzhari did not mind, though she choked up on the blade. One hand on the handle, one on the ricasso, it made the weapon effectively shorter but more precise. Hart rat after hart rat was chopped in two. It was like she was carving up bloodworm pies for sharing. That was an odd thought to have, as it had been a long time since she had had a bloodworm pie, and just as long since she'd had to share a pie with her siblings. Ever since she'd been purchased by the Iron Claw Clan, those kids hadn't been her siblings anymore. And once she was living in High Market, no one asked her to scour the marsh bottoms for bloodworms.

Chop. Spin. Chop. Spin. The Patalans were coming at her from multiple directions, and she needed to keep her eyes moving. It was a drag on her left-footed spin that alerted her to why she had lost durability. One of the hart rats had managed to wrap her ankle with its antlers. The greaves kept the antlers separated from her skin, but they didn't cover everywhere. She had run out too far ahead of what she could see, and been punished for it. You have to look where you're going when you're wading in the shallows, or you might end up swimming. Advice that she would have to give to Luhgra, along with several other examples of when she had failed on that score.

The hart rats weren't engaging her anymore. They were scurrying out of the way when she focused on one. They had changed their tactics to one of harassment from all sides. It was a strategy designed to run her out of moves by making her guard territory she had already claimed. That's when it hit her: an antler in the back of her calf. But she had also been hit by the realization that she was surrounded and outmatched. For her own safety, she should fall back, regroup with Chloe and Pribatar, come back and engage with backup from Fiona. But... she couldn't do that. Not as long as they were threatening to climb into the pyramid where Luhgra was.

She was fighting in desperation, and she knew that her enemies could recognize it. This was where the leader of the hart rats would attack her. She hadn't seen the largest of the smallest Patalans, but she knew it would find her at the well. It would see that she was alone and unwilling to back down. A tactical weakness that any clever monster would be sure to exploit. The hart rats had shown every indication of being clever, of placing their pieces like someone who saw the whole board. The leader would come, and Ulzhari would fight it.

Ulzhari was not disappointed, and she did not have long to wait. A larger set of antlers smacked into her right in the breastplate, knocking her over. She hadn't seen it coming at all, the orc-sized hart rat appearing only briefly while the antlers were actually flipping her. The other smaller rats dove in from all directions, pressing her down and finding the gaps in her armor with the sharp edges of their antlers. They weren't strong enough to hold her to the ground, but their antlers were sharp enough to hurt terribly. She rolled up to one knee and sliced another hart rat in half. A quick scan didn't show her the leader at all, but she knew it was there.

"Big rat. Well. Hard to see," she huffed into the communicator. It was all the time she had before a set of antlers rammed into her from the side and knocked her down again.

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"Little Rabbit Foo-Foo..." Miriam sang to herself quietly. Her Geomancy spells required a lot of concentration, but that didn't mean she couldn't sing little songs. For some reason, grabbing all the hart rats and bopping them on the head with the fists of her summoned golem got her thinking of a song that they sang in summer camp. That was before she got her rune, when no one thought she was going to be important. Back then, no one expected that she would go fight them there in any personal sense. It was a strange choice for a song, as the fairy in it was quite against violence to rodents. As the fist of her golem bopped another hart rat while it was wriggling in the grasp of her magical stone, she wondered if the fairy was a representative of the Nemesis Worlds.

Those were ridiculous thoughts to have, and Miriam chastised herself. She had an important job to do. The hart rats had gotten into the final room, technically. They could get to the final door, and that might be some kind of catastrophe. Alternately, they could go upstairs and enter Luhgra's room. Hart rats were quite dangerous to civilians, they could fold their antlers together in order to get through smaller spaces, but they could also splay them out like a fan of knives. She didn't think Becky Boulevard and Sidewinder Kate would be able to protect Luhgra from more than one or two. Really, Miriam was the last line of defense. Bopping hart rats on the head was important.

The Geomancer's thoughts turned to what might happen if the hart rats did get to Luhgra on her watch. She would never forgive herself.Maxwould never forgive her. How could she even call herself a hunter if she couldn't protect one child?

Her mana would not last forever, but it didn't have to. It just had to last until the enemy ran out of rats, or the rest of the team got downstairs. There were gunners coming, which the Geomancer found ironic. Hunters like Miriam went to dungeons to fight them there and all that so that guardiansdidn'thave to shoot monsters in toilets. That was the whole deal.

As her golem bopped another hart rat, she pushed the dark thoughts away. Mostly away. She performed another echoing stomp, to check if the hart rats had figured out any other way in. It seemed they had not. But it also seemed that one of them had managed to get out of her stone grasp.

How unfortunate.

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"No, keep carrying Fiona around to find and burn any of the hart rats that have gone to ground," Max spoke into the communicator. He understood that Sophie wanted to fight the final enemy leader, but he needed her doom seer ability to find the littler rats that were hiding in the ruins. And just as importantly, he needed her tonothave her soul strike ability activate on the last Patalan leader. He really wanted to capture one of them alive, though he was definitely afraid that he was going to be asked to have sex with a beast if they did.

His dark ruminations were interrupted by an excited update from Doctor Kwok. "The chests are getting seals," she squeed over the open comm channel, "this one is a silver seal, and it's for the speaker role." The scientist was obviously thrilled. "I recorded the whole thing! This is data that might tell us how chests are made!"

Max was happy that she was happy, but also very confused as to what she was talking about. He'd known about the eight roles that hunters were sorted into since before he'd become a hunter himself. Lately he'd come to discover that the Nemesis Worlds had different roles, though none of the eight roles that Kwrtzl had described to him werespeaker. "I'm sorry, thewhatrole?"

The question was answered by Fiona. "While you two were building your love nest, Pribatar drew us some diagrams. Speaker is one of the eight roles that Mictlan gets." Pribatar herself was a corrupter, which was a role that Tartarus had. It seemed that there were some roles that overlapped and some that did not.

If that was the case, then it wouldn't be strange if the Patalans had some roles in common with Mictlan and some roles in common with Tartarus. With Jotunheim in the mix, he wondered how many roles the Nemesis Worlds had between them. Obviously more than the eight roles that the Alliance used, but also definitely less than the thirty-two it would be if they all had their own lists. All these thoughts stampeded through his mind and he had to remind himself of two important facts. The first being that the Space Force was already in possession of this information and had top minds like Doctor Heidi Kwok working on it; and the second was that there was still a battle going on. "Uh... that's probably for one of the invaders. Are there any that we can use?"

"Yeah..." There was silence on the line, presumably while the scientist checked the new images against other images. That fact alone told Max quite a bit, there wasn't any sigil from a hunter role or one of the classes in Max's team that she wouldn't recognize immediately. That meant... "I don't recognize one, but there's one for vanguard and one for defender." That would be one for Sophie and one for Chloe, unless they decided to send them back to Camp Acheron to help pay off chest debt. It was a decision for later, since neither was in a position to open a chest at the moment.

As far as Max was aware, the monsters of Patala did not have hunter's marks anywhere on their bodies. Tartarians like Kwrtzl did, and Pribatar's blood gem had a mark that named her as a Captivator if you looked closely enough. But whatever rules the Patalans played by, Max did not know how one would go about checking their class. And yet, the fact that there was a role-linked chest whose role was not Pribatar's or Kwrtzl's was proof that Patalans had roles and classes just like invaders from Tartarus or Mictlan. Well, notproofproof, because there could still be other explanations. But strong enough evidence that he'd treat it as true until he had reason to question it.

Such ruminations were important, because it kept him from asking Chloe every five seconds if she was in position to help Ulzhari yet. He knew she was the closest, and he knew that Sophie and Fiona were doing important work playing whack-a-mole with the hart rats that had gone elsewhere in the ruins. And he knew that Miriam needed backup and that Chaeryn and Alina were going to get there first. Ulzhari was in danger. Miriam was in danger. And it wasn't that he was doing nothing about it. He had already ensured that the people who could do the most good the fastest were already in motion. He felt sick to his stomach.

"I see it," the Hoplite said over the communicator, "I'm engaging."

Max sighed with relief. "Try to take it alive. But try to keep yourselves alive more. We'll fight more monsters, we can't get a replacement for you or Ulzhari."

"Thank you, Master, I- oof!" Chloe didn't say anything else on the communicator for quite a while. Objectively, probably not that much time passed, but was enough to make Max very agitated.

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It was bigger than she was. Most of the Patalan monsters were bigger than she was, but for some reason a hart rat being so large was disturbing. A mirror cat or an iron bird was just supposed to be bigger than a human. That's the kind of animal they were. But hart rats were small. Seeing one that wasn't small at all was disorienting. It was attacking Ulzhari, Chloe could see that easily even if her rush to aid wasn't kicking in to show her where such an attack could be blocked. Ulzhari had said it was invisible, but it clearly was not. Grey fur matted to its body and a long tail swished with menace. Atop its head were two antlers that each came to seven knife-like points. The alien looked so much like an Earth creature, in many ways more so than Kwrtzl did, every part of it looked like it came from a familiar mammal. Its claws and long teeth were rodentish, while the antlers were taken from some particularly brutal kind of deer. And yet, it was a beast of Patala, it didn't even code DNA in the same way.

Chloe rushed forward, shield at the ready. Her fellow harem-wife was being attacked, and that allowed her to move even faster. Her target was the big rat, but one of the little hart rats stepped into her path and braced its antlers against the ground. The impact was not good for the rat, but it sent Chloe on a trip of her own. She rattled and clanged as stumbled into the stony ground, but it was more damaging to her pride and momentum than it was to her body.

Bolstered by the strength of her hunter's mark and also the seals that her master had placed upon her, Chloe was able to get to her feet quickly. But when she looked around, the big rat was gone. Then she was being knocked down again and she could see the antlers as they scraped across her bronze cuirass. She could see the rest of the hart rat as well for the briefest instant before she saw the swirling galaxy of glitter clouds that illuminated the dungeon and then heard the bell-like ring of her helmet impacting the ground. Chloe felt that she was becoming a rodeo clown, and she did not like it.

Ulzhari said something. From her tone of voice, it sounded triumphant. Chloe couldn't understand it, because she'd said it in a Nurnian language that Chloe did not know. She was already rolling back into a crouch when she heard the impact of blade into meat. The hart rat hissed, and Chloe also did not know what that meant as words, or even if it was words at all.

By the time Chloe had regained her footing, the hart rat had caught the Bloodletter's shoulder with it's antlers and twisted her off balance. It vanished again, but Chloe was able to see where it was by the way the orc was falling over. And by the trail of blood the came from the wound that Ulzhari's blade had inflicted upon it.

Slamming her shield into a space that she knew but could not see contained her opponent, Chloe was gratified to feel the impact and the activation of her shield rush skill. Finally it was the hart rat who was sent for a tumble, though Chloe was aware that if the fight was to two out of three falls that the Patalan would have claimed victory over both of them. Ulzhari didn't even try to stand, instead whacking her blade sideways into the visually empty space from a supine position. Again, blood gushed out from nothing and began staining the stones.

The limitations of the Patalan's invisibility were coming together. It couldn't hide from both of them at once, it couldn't hide from someone it was touching, and it couldn't hide the drops of maroon blood it left behind from its wounds. If they had time to talk to Max, Chloe was certain that he'd come up with an elegant plan to take the hart rats down. As it was, the two hunters just grappled and flailed, and spent a truly embarrassing amount of time on the ground.

Having four legs and a lot of experience of locking antlers with other hart rats, their opponent seemed to be just incredibly good at smashing the hunters into the ground. Chloe was developing a quite extensive history of ways to hit the ground. She'd been pushed over, tripped up, knocked down, and thrown off. She was really glad this battle wasn't being scored. There was only one ending that mattered, and all the Patalan's blood loss made that easier to achieve. Unless it losttoomuch blood, and then Max would be disappointed with them.

It was stuck grappling with Ulzhari on the ground. She couldn't exactly see it, but she knew where it was. Ulzhari's sword was tangled in the hart rat's antlers. That would be a big problem for the Bloodletter if she was trying to kill the Patalan with her sword, but as it was that was exactly what Ulzhari had wanted. A grapple of limbs and a bind of weapons gave Chloe a free hand. This wasn't a one-on-one, and neither side had any intention of fighting fair.

The temptation to end the monster with her ranseur was very real. In almost any other circumstance, that is precisely what she would have done. The three furnace-hot blades of the ranseur would spit and roast the Patalan monster, giving what would in most situations be the kind of victory they were after. But not this time. Chloe let her weapon clatter to the floor. While it had originally been opened by a chest from Mictlan and taken on a bloody campaign across Nurn after a dungeon break, now it was bonded to Chloe enough for her to be able to take it through dungeon breaks. It was a historical treasure belonging to an influential clan on Nurn, and it had been lent to her only with the provision that she use it to perform great deeds and enlarge its legend further. And she was dropping it on the ground, because it was too strong.

Clang! Chloe brought her shield down in a double-handed smash on the Patalan. It was a round shield with bronze facings and a blue spiral pattern. It was not the kind of shield that was really supposed to be used like that. Mostly she used it to push enemies out of the way. It was more like the cow catcher on an old train than the hammers used to lay those train's tracks. But it was metal. And it was heavy. And every time she brought it down on the hart rats' leader, it made a very satisfying noise. Clang!

It was not as strong as Ulzhari. Even before losing blood, the Bloodletter was the stronger of the two. Their goal was to capture it alive, and so the fact that Ulzhari had the advantage of physical strength was important. As a C-tier slayer, Ulzhari would have the advantage in physical strength against most opponents, and as she wrestled the hart rat onto its back the real surprise was in how little of an advantage the orc enjoyed.

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Miriam was not a front line hunter. When it came to second line hunters, she was one of the most second line there was. Even Fiona's magical implement was an athame, which could definitely be used as a dagger in a pinch. Miriam's own implement was a cup. It was pretty useful as far as making her magic powers work properly, but she wasn't inclined to use it as a club.