Fighting Them There Ch 05

The assigned parties were named in the order they were to enter the dungeon. So Max's Team Four got to watch three other teams vanish into the gate ahead of them. The janitorial staff were quick to roll up the tarps and put down fresh ones, so the next party was ready to go almost ten minutes before there was enough energy to open the gate again. When the first group went in, Max's eyes were only for Sophie. She looked amazing. There was just enough wind that her blond hair really

flowed

from her helmet. She looked over at him and waved from the granite platform, and his heart fluttered as he waved back. Then she turned to her column and disintegrated into blue light.

When it was Team Two and Team Three's turns, Max was more analytical. Rosalita and Thelenia had both said they wanted out of his party, so Max and Sophie were back to square one. Neither the E-rank storm nor the D-rank flanker were

objectively

much of a loss, but their recruitment pool wasn't deep and every rejection brought them closer to disaster. They needed four more women to agree to join their party despite the weirdnesses that Max's class would inflict, and with the impending retirement of Rosalita and Thelenia there were only fourteen hunters in his pod that met the requirements. Twenty three women in the pod, Sophie was already in, five support, one other vanguard, and two had already said 'No.' Of the seven women in Team Two and Team Three, only five of them were even a possibility. They were of especial interest, because three of those five were the only C-tier women that could join a party with both Max and Sophie. All three of them were second line classes, and two of

them

couldn't work together because they were both control. Their party would need to have some D-tier women on it, because that's just what was available in the crop.

The fact that the women of the second line classes outnumbered the women of the front line classes among the C-tiers underlined a broader point: that the Ancients were pretty sexist in a lot of ways. Females were more likely to be given second line classes than front line classes by nearly two to one. That Sophie had been given a front line class and Max had been given a second line class was twice atypical given their genders. Indeed, support classes were the least likely runes to appear on a man's body. It unfortunately meant there were quite a lot of women who could not join a party with him simply for having the same role for their class.

Assuming that Sophie and Max didn't want to team up with E-tier hunters, there were literally only four female front liners left after Thelenia ruled herself out. They'd need two of them to join to have a balanced party, and they'd need at least one of them to join if they were to have a viable party at all. Teams Five, Six, and Seven hadn't come in yet, but as he recalled they only had Alice the Ninja and Ulzhari the Berserker. Disconting the E-tier Shieldbearer, and Merkarri the Shaman support, Ulzhari was the only orc that could fit into the party, as only three of the eight orcs in their crop were women. Max didn't know anything at all about talking to orcish women, and he had no idea how to approach her for a potential spot in their party. He gave especial attention to the two D-tier women from Team Two and Team Three's front lines. Glyffildir the Battlemage couldn't join a party with Sophie and he could ignore her.

Chloe the Hoplite strode to her column in gleaming armor wielding a shield almost as tall and wide as her own body. It was an interesting quirk of the the dungeons that the shiny bronze breastplate that she wore probably came out of the same kind of lead sealed chest as Max's leather jacket. The dungeon cared not a whit about how much things would cost in terms of the physical resources that would have been required to actually make such things, but only how useful it deemed the item to the hunter who raised the lid. Chloe was a D-tier defender, and it was simply a foregone conclusion that she would wear heavy armor that fit the idiom of her class.

Sandra the Duelist wore a silk tunic that looked to be even lighter than Max's own dungeon leathers. A reminder that not all front liners were gifted with armor that would be easily recognized as such. She carried two swords that were each heavier than the blade that Max wore in his belt, a result of her D-tier slayer skills. Between her magically augmented strength and her class-granted ability to fight with two weapons as easily as one, it simply made sense for the government to issue her two magic arming swords. The chests may have preferred to give her daggers or rapiers that might better fit the class' aesthetic theme, but the Space Force felt no obligation to force newly minted hunters to go into the dungeon with weaponry from lead sealed chests. Humanity might be obligated to play by the rules, but there was no way the forces of Earth were going to play fair.

There wasn't a lot to be learned from the C-tier second liners from watching their procession into the dungeon. Between Kaitlin the Phantasmist, Miriam the Geomancer, and Lupe the Invoker, it wasn't at all obvious what kind of mage they were from the outfits that the dungeon had deigned to provide them. Lead sigil mage outfits were stylistically similar for controllers regardless of whether their primary element was earth, light, wood, or blood. Nor was there much daylight between a controller and a storm mage. Those artillery classes that were mages rather than archers were also given much the same robes and dresses. Kaitlin was an artillery, and Lupe a controller, but both wore dark gray dresses that were nearly black. Miriam's robes were only noticeably distinct in that they were brown instead of gray. The wands, orbs, cups, glyphs, and staves that mages used instead of more traditionally weapon-like weaponry were all pretty interchangeable between mage classes. Miriam could trade her goblet with Kaitlin's orb and they'd both be able to cast their spells with whatever bonuses the objects granted. Even Max's own collar and leash combo just gave blanket bonuses to magical strength and mana regeneration, it didn't care at all what kind of spells the slave was using.

He was still thinking about it when he stood on the dungeon gate tarp himself.

###

Two golems and one corpse construct with a bow. The tactics practically wrote themselves. Mrowag and Sophie each engaged a golem while Oscar sprinted in to take down the archer. Fenniel leveled his doom magic at the golem occupied by Mrowag and Stephen just conserved mana for a bigger crowd. Yalena could watch the whole scene and calculate where her seals could do the most good. None of the enemies had a blood gem, and their party outnumbered the opposition. Two large melee opponent and one fragile ranged attacker: the tactics really did practically write themselves.

The only part that went off script was that Fenniel was supposed to turn his destructive magic onto Sophie's clay-clad golem after he'd finished off the one Mrowag had pulled, but Sophie jumped up and smashed through her golem's terracotta helmet before he'd had a chance to do that. Each golem had a person's skull somewhere inside the head, probably a human in this case. Sophie could easily tell an orc skull from the enlarged lower teeth, but she could not tell an elf skull from a human one. The distinctive elvish ears left no trace when stripped to the bone.

Stephen pondered the shattered head piece of the golem Sophie had disabled. "If there's bones inside all the golems, does that mean that the golems are corpse constructs too?" No one had any answer for that. Nor was there any explanation for where Mictlan got the skeletons in the first place. Dungeon breaks had allowed Earth scientists to study corpse constructs sufficiently to prove to their satisfaction that the bodies of humans, elves, and orcs that they were made out of were

real

, but that just raised more questions. Questions that Sophie's party wouldn't have had the security clearance to know the answer to even if the answer was known to Space Force Command.

Oscar grabbed a single arrow from the fallen archer. He could keep that one ready and fire it off the next time they encountered enemies. The dungeon didn't recognize it as an arrow, or even as a weapon, because it hadn't come out of a chest. The alliance couldn't bring such objects out of the dungeon, and Oscar couldn't use his arrow storage ability on it. But it was physically arrow shaped, and the next time he bent his bow, he could fling it with force. There wasn't

much

reason to loot fallen enemies, or the dungeon itself. When the vault door in the final room was opened, only hunters and dungeon approved treasure was coming back to Camp Acheron. Still, anything that could be useful during the raid itself was worth considering as a thing to put hands to. How the forces of Mictlan got all these corpse constructs and weapons into the dungeon in the first place was a question nobody gave voice to.

That

was a question that was unanswerable by any person in the Alliance.

Some hunter parties had claimed that there were dungeons with gold and gems studding the walls, but of course they would not and could not have any souvenirs to back up their claims. This particular dungeon seemed to be made of cyclopean blocks of stone, with some rooms and passages covered in enough sand to obscure their original purposes. The overall affect was of a ruin that had been swallowed by a desert. But if that was the case, it implied some connection to an outside of some sort. So far, there hadn't been so much as a window or chimney, all light was provided by the drifting blue will-o-wisps. The air hung still, and despite the sandy crunch crunch crunch under the feet of everyone but Sophie, sound didn't seem to carry far in the dimly lit labyrinth.

Each group of enemies they had encountered were small and severely outmatched by their party. It indicated that they hadn't made it very far into the dungeon, which was itself notable for something that the technicians had claimed was suitable for a beginning party.

###

When Max's vision cleared, he was glad that he had closed toed boots. He was standing in water, the dungeon metaphor being one of an Escheresque sewer or aqueduct. The room they were in was muddy beyond recognition, and pipes of all sizes ran along the walls and ceilings. Some were broken, and water that Max hoped was just that poured lazily onto the ground. There was a large trough in the floor that water flowed through, but the floor they were on was wet with mud and pockmarked with puddles. Max had appeared standing in one of them. Will-o-wisps danced among the pipes, causing the long shadows to move about like a hand was flailing in front of his eyes.

He looked over at the Thunder Mage and reached out, Rosalita understood and fished the leash out of her robe to hand the end to Max. "What the actual fuck?!" Alex shouted. "We're on serious business, we don't have time for your weird sex bullshit!" He was right, of course, and both Max and Rosalita reddened.

Thelenia came to their defense. "That strap adds to Rosalita's magical strength when Max holds it. It's not a sex thing, it's just that the most efficient thing Max can do at the moment is make sure that Rosalita's lightning spells are as damaging as they can be." This seemed to make perfect sense to Gormag. James looked incredibly uncomfortable.

"This is bullshit!" Alex fumed. "A whole support hunter just spending his time making the storm look good. It's going to make me look bad." As soon as Thelenia had explained the leash's effects, Alex the Executioner went from being angry that Max wasn't contributing to being angry that he was.

The water moved through the channel in the floor in an obvious direction, which left the party with a choice to follow it upstream or down. "The dungeon logic for non-tower dungeons is generally that the end of the dungeon is at its deepest. The water flows downhill," James pointed his saber downstream, "so the end of the dungeon is probably in that direction."

Alex harrumphed. "So we must go that way." The Executioner nodded his head in the exact opposite direction. "We're not here to speed run, we're here to fight monsters. The camp is going to check how many we killed, we're here to impress. Optional enemies are fucking mandatory!" Max wasn't sure that made a lot of sense, but the team agreed to go the way Alex wanted them to.

Their direction determined, Thelenia sidled up to Max. "We're going to need Essence now."

"Wha-" Max's cheeks reddened as he considered what he'd done to send Sophie off with

her

Essence.

Rosalita pfffted. "Just spit in our mouths. And don't make it weird." Max felt that his completion of the Thunder Mage's request was decidedly mixed. Thelenia and Rosalita both shuddered and rubbed their thighs together when his saliva hit their tongues, and then neither one of them would look him in the eye for some time. It was especially noticeable with Rosalita, because while the Scout spent much of her time up ahead scouting, Max was literally holding a tether attached to Rosalita's neck. He found the situation awkward, but also they weren't in a position to talk it out.

The trough of flowing water ran through the center of the passage, cleaving the walkway into two. The stream was a bit over a meter wide, and any of the members of Max's party could easily jump the distance. The ground was muddy and slippery enough that Max would not want to take the risk of trying, though all of the front liners had enough agility that they wouldn't be expected to have much of a problem with it. Even Rosalita probably fell into that category by dint of the bonuses she got from her envy seal, though that might start a conversation neither of the women wanted to have.

The hall turned ninety degrees several times and with each turn the passage became narrower and the stream shrank. There were additional waterfalls from earthenware pipes and rivulets pouring into the central canal from puddles and cracks in the wall at every corner. It wasn't a maze, there was truly only one path to travel, two if one considered the walkways on either side of the main stream to be distinct, but it was still easy to get turned around. They had made enough turns that Max was unsure whether he was heading in the original direction or not when they made contact with the enemy. Hart rats.

Forty centimeter rodents with antlers, the hart rats were not individually threatening to a grown human with a stick - let alone to a hunter armed with a magic blade. But hart rats didn't come individually. This group had more than two dozen, all scrabbling with their claws and flailing their pointed antlers. Some were on the left walkway, some were on the right. A few were swimming in the water, with their antlers curving above the surface with menace and intent. It was barely enough to threaten a single hunter, and they had six. Max considered his own contribution, and amended that to five and a half.

Gormag shook his head. "I'm useless here." His lament wasn't completely accurate, he could call thorn vines to rend rats to pieces, but broadly speaking they were actually small enough to simply pass through most of his wooden barricades. His contributions weren't overly relied upon, as James, Thelenia, and Alex were all agility fighters by preference. They struck fast and struck accurately, which was definitely preferred against hart rats over attacks that were slower and wilder.

But the real star was Rosalita. A swarm of rodents was almost the textbook place for a storm class hunter to shine. Thunder Mage perhaps less than others, because her spells had less area for more damage than those of a Fire Mage. The extra damage was completely useless as the thunderbolt fried every hart rat it touched. The narrowed passage eliminated much of the thunderbolt's weakness, and only a few of the rodents escaped the devastation of Rosalita's wand. The front liners had just a few stragglers to skewer and slice.

###

"Don't step there." Oscar pointed to a place where the sand was perhaps just a little

too

sandy. Sophie was floating slightly above the ground simply as a way to make travel less arduous, but in this case it had prevented her from falling afoul of the trap. The trap itself turned out to be a pit with spikes at the bottom covered with a cloth that had in turn been covered with a thin layer of sand. Enough sand to fool most eyes, but nowhere near enough sand to support a person's weight should they attempt to walk across.

It was interesting, because it implied that the forces of Mictlan had no reason to go down that passage at all. And further it implied that their party very much wanted to get to the end of it, because the dungeon monsters had spent effort specifically trying to prevent them from doing so. It increased their eagerness, but also put them on high alert. Mrowag activated his signature deathwatch ability. It was generally used in larger melees but in this case it was used to identify hazards in an area where they believed there were no monsters at all. He was able to point out trip wires and blades in the wall. Someone very much wished to prevent hunters from getting to the end of that particular hallway.

What the monsters had

not

done, was to simply bury the entrance in rubble or even sand. Collapsing a ceiling was not beyond the technology or imaginations of the monsters of Mictlan, but they had not done it. And so none of Sophie's party members were surprised when they came across a vault door. The Alliance had probed the limits of what they were allowed to do with chests, terribly important as they were the only source of physical goods that hunters could take into and out of the dungeon. But it seemed the monsters had restrictions of their own. Logically, the monsters could just

open the chests

, causing them to explode with their contents for having been opened by someone without the appropriate hunter's rune. But they never did. Nor did they ever simply bury them away. The paths were usually guarded or trapped, sometimes both, but never cut off entirely. Much virtual ink had been spent speculating on forums why that might be, but Sophie suspected the rules for the monsters were just as arbitrary as they were for the hunters. Something had to happen to the monsters if they disposed of the chests, though what that might be she had no basis to even guess.

"What did they do to the door?" It wasn't a question born of deep insight or long experience, it was simply obvious that if someone had gone to all the trouble of creating all those means of mechanical impalement in the passage, that the door would have been made unsafe as well.

Mrowag grunted and pointed to a taught string that ran from the top of the door to a wedge in the ceiling. If the door was tampered with, a block of stone would crash down. Solid stone weighed a lot more than people thought, and that crushing weight would probably end the lives of any of the hunters it landed upon. The ceiling was four meters above the sandy floor, but this was no issue at all for Sophie, who was able to simply rainbow step her way up to it. Spikes from the pit trap were adequate to keep the ceiling block from falling after they had been repurposed. Her Essence had worn out, and the flying took more mana than it had earlier in the mission, but the costs were still negligible when she stayed very close to a surface.

The treasure room itself had seven chests, bathed in a yellow glow. There were no will-o-wisps in the room, but light was still provided by a glitter cloud. It gave the room a twinkling look and felt very different from the rest of the places they had been. There was no sand on the floor, but there was a layer of gray dust. Eight statues had been placed around the room, but they had been smashed to pieces. The larger pieces seemed to indicate that they had been statues of men and women, wizards and warriors, humans and orcs. Some of the statues were smashed thoroughly enough that even the species couldn't be determined, but Sophie guessed at least one had been an elf. It didn't take a wild imagination to suspect that the eight statues represented the eight class roles. It was an important concept that hunters were encouraged to obsess over.