Fighting Them There Ch 12

The skills of the party members are listed at the end of the chapter.

### Begin Chapter 12 ###

They weren't alone. Team Six was going into the gate next, and so they were milling about, watching Max's party line up to their columns. Despite Kaitlin's presence, everyone definitely thought of it as

Max's

party. Thelenia was in Team Six, and she studiously avoided looking at him. Max knew his presence was making her feel uncomfortable, and that made him feel terrible. But there was nothing he could do about it. Chloe was in that team as well, and she was watching him intently. Wearing her Corinthian helmet, he couldn't read her expression at all. Team Two was on hand, all five members other than Kaitlin. While Danny seemed like he was there to cheer on his team mate, Lupe seemed like she was there to scowl at Max. He couldn't blame her. Glyffildir, Alice, and Merkarri all seemed curious. Max couldn't blame them either. Yalena and Alex from Team One were also watching. They didn't have a team member on the platform, Max assumed they were just there to observe the competition. Alex wasn't exactly

watching

, because he was wearing his blindfold while frowning. Yalena was observing everything with a critical expression on her face, which didn't distinguish it from any other day that Yalena looked at things.

Standing before the columns of the gate, it seemed almost like starting a dungeon raid in a normal way. It was strange to think of traveling through a portal to fight monsters in a dungeon as a thing that could be

normal

, but Max was genuinely almost at that point. If it had been Chaeryn on the platform instead of Kaitlin, it would have felt positively domestic. He was worried that Chaeryn would not survive the journey, that she would be left behind in some extra-dimensional slave storage space without anyone to get her out. Everyone else seemed so sanguine about the possibility that attempting to cheat the limits of hunter roles with his class' insane subsystems might turn out badly, might literally kill Chaeryn. But for Max it was causing him anxiety to the point of nausea.

A part of him was angry at Kaitlin, he wanted to blame her for the dangerous test her presence was putting on Chaeryn. It was unfair, and intellectually he understood that. The other hunters stood next to their columns because they were ordered to. Because that's just how things worked. Hunters didn't activate the gates or dial in the target dungeons, that was done by skilled technicians. And while hunters submitted their own party rosters, it was ultimately up to the Space Force to approve parties or not. It wouldn't make sense to blame Kaitlin for the current party lineup demanded by the officers any more than it would make sense to blame Danny or Miriam for the previous party lineup. Obviously the Space Force wanted to test his limits in field conditions, and he couldn't say they were wrong to want to do that.

The real blame had to fall on himself. Ultimately, Max had agreed to put Chaeryn in storage, even without knowing that she would survive the experience. He had followed orders, despite knowing that it put his party member in danger. The Space Force, and apparently the Queen's Council, wanted to know what the limits of his powers were, and they were willing to risk Chaeryn's

life

to find those answers. And Max had agreed to help them.

Chaeryn had agreed as well, because she believed in him. Rather, she believed in a mythical hero that she associated with him. Remembering the absolute trust she placed in him made him feel guilty. There were few things he was more certain of than that he did not deserve that kind of faith. He wanted her to arrive in the dungeon OK, and thinking about her made him anxious to the point of nausea.

"We all risk our lives, Max." Sophie had detected his distress, and was attempting to talk his anxiety away. She was holding the chain that attached to her gorget, the tether of restrained rage. She gave it a light rattle and it reminded him that he had responsibilities to all the women in his party. "When we go into the dungeons, it is to fight monsters. They fight back, they'll try to kill us. And if we don't go, they'll invade our homes and try to kill us anyway. Chaeryn is doing what she can to fight the monsters. So are you. Our job is dangerous, and it's not your fault." She smiled at him, and he felt much better. He was still worried, but how could he not go forward when such a vision of loveliness believed in him?

He smiled back at his girlfriend, but he did not have time to formulate a reply. There were a lot of things that wanted to come out of his mouth, but none of them did. And then it was time. The gate opened. The world turned blue. Then it was much darker.

####

As his eyes adjusted to the lower light levels of the dungeon, the first thing he did was to spin all around, looking for active threats in every direction. He wouldn't be able to do anything for anyone if a monster bit his head off. Long ago, experiments with magnetizing iron dungeon equipment had proved that dungeons did have a magnetic field, and so there was such a thing as North, but that paled in comparison to the fact the more often than not a hunter entered the dungeon facing the exit. It meant that the real guidestar wasn't

north

, but

forward

. And in the forward direction, there was a hedge-lined path. Below him was a mossy brick patio. Above him was... a dark night sky? To the right was a hedge. To the left, a different hedge. Behind him, a fountain, depth indeterminate. The fountain was an obvious ambush location, the hedges weren't nearly as solid as they appeared and monsters could burst through any of them. Sources of

danger

were everywhere, but nothing was

literally

attacking him in the immediate sense.

His first task checked off, Max checked his inventory and withdrew Chaeryn from storage. "I knew you could do it, Master Max!" Before even checking her surroundings, the elf's eyes fixed on Max and twinkled in the faint blue light of the will-o-wisps. He was so relieved when she appeared, he actually felt lighter. A smile was on his face, but he didn't think he could bring himself to say anything but apologize for risking her existence. He heard some of his party members release their breaths, and he wondered if they'd even noticed they were holding them. Sophie, Fiona, and Miriam all came and laid their hands on Chaeryn while murmuring affirmations; both to reaffirm their social bonds and to confirm that she was physically real. Ulzhari hung back and waved timidly.

Kaitlin pshawed with exasperation. "Seriously? That's it? You're able to double up on hunter roles? Do you even have a maximum party size?" Her snarky question had a flippant answer, which was obviously that since he currently only had a slave storage limit of

one

, his maximum party size was

seven

. But the real answer was that while he could see that his slave storage was upgradeable, he had

no idea

what limits there might be if he were to accumulate enough Mastery. The truth was that he did

not

know what the maximum party size might be in the future. When he had assumed that he was still limited to one hunter per role, it had seemed obvious that the second slave storage slot was the last. That would have been fine, but now he was no longer sure. There were still only eight roles, but now that he knew they could double-dip, he might eventually be allowed nine or more hunters in his party. It was a daunting prospect.

"Is that, is that the

sky?

" Miriam was looking upward. Beyond the hedge-tops, beyond the will-o-wisps, there was a blackness that her eyes could not penetrate. It was a strange question to ask, as dungeons all seemed to be contained. Regardless of what kind of place they seemed to be, they were all buried in stone. The only exit from a dungeon was, well,

the exit

.

"No," Fiona replied, her voice carrying the certainty of someone who literally did not need light to see, "there's a ceiling, it's just like three hundred meters up." There was a roof of stone that was far enough away from the will-o-wisps as to be invisible to the others, but it was there. Fiona's eyes of night skill showed her that the darkness above wasn't actually

night

in the traditional sense.

The most critical tasks completed, and Chaeryn's continued existence assured, Max's checklist proceeded to trying to identify less immediate sources of danger. And there were a lot of them. He wasn't familiar enough with plants to say whether the hedges had any Earthly equivalents, and might not have been able to tell even if knew about such things. The leaves and flowers of the hedges appeared black in the blue light cast by the will-o-wisps, which made him think they were green leaves and red flowers, but it could just as easily be the opposite. Regardless of what kind of plant they were, or where they came from, he was reasonably sure that a hunter or monster with magical augmentation to physical strength and tenacity could push through them with ease. The area they had appeared in looked secluded, but in reality it was exposed: the hedges were curtains, not walls.

"Sophie," Max dictated, his confident and assertive tone grabbing the attentions of his party members, "take Chaeryn and Fiona

up

to have a look around." Sophie and Fiona were wearing leashes, and Max wasn't ecstatic about sending them both away to a place he couldn't reach their tethers. However, the reality remained that Fiona and Chaeryn had the sharpest eyes, and Sophie could lift them to a decent vantage point for much less mana than Miriam could. His command carried risks, and it left him personally helpless to assist them, but it made sense. The three of them were happy to obey his orders.

As Sophie took to the air, Max was reminded that while she had panties as part of her dungeon equipment, Fiona definitely did not. Chaeryn was also going commando, of course, but she was also wearing pants and wasn't flashing the grounded portion of the team the way the Vietnamese American and her very short dress were doing. Sophie's plated skirt and magical white panties were a practically indecent joy to watch from below, Fiona's creamy skin and bare genitals were simply pornographic. Taken about five meters above the ground, Sophie slowly twirled in order to allow the women she carried to scout in all directions. Whatever they saw, Chaeryn decided she needed to use her crossbow on it. Three times she loaded a dummy arrow into her crossbow and three times she let her projectile fly. Each time, Sophie was pushed noticeably by the recoil, maintaining her grip on her party members only through literally super human tenacity and physical strength. It was a reminder both of how much force Chaeryn's crossbow exerted on its bolts, and how little friction Sophie had while she was flying with her rainbow step skill.

The three arrows seemed to be enough, and their Sniper relaxed her weapon. Sophie slowly spun again, and both of the women she carried seemed satisfied. After a quick survey, she returned them to the ground.

"We're in a maze made of flowers," Chaeryn reported, "outside there is a field with a tree lined path leading to a mansion. Architecturally, it looks like something from the Mist Moors. Queen's palace, lower residencies, barn for livestock, and industry all together. Each part of the economy and social order within a single set of walls." None of the other members of the party had ever been to the Mist Moors, so the comparison produced more questions than answers. Fiona got more traction by describing it as a "Jane Austen building." Kaitlin and Miriam nodded with immediate understanding. Ulzhari, of course, maintained her silence.

Max's brow furrowed, having never visited either the Mist Moors nor Regency England. "Um... sure. I think you might be leaving off a bit of important information. What were you shooting at?"

Adopting a facial expression that would be consistent with blushing if her skin was not already pigmented to blackness, Chaeryn both looked and sounded embarrassed. "There were two visible guards. Walking corpses, so we're up against Mictlan." Almost everything from Mictlan didn't need to breathe, and thus was fully capable of staying underwater essentially indefinitely. Water like...

"Ulzhari, go smash the monsters in the fountain." He hadn't literally seen any monsters in the fountain, but no one in the party was

surprised

when her silent approach gave her the jump on two submerged skeletal warriors. Her ax came down upon them with equal parts brutality and finality. "We're not here to get to the end quickly," his simple statements of fact sounded bold and leaderly, "we've come to fight them here. To completely destroy

all

the monsters. We'll have to explore the whole hedge maze, see if there are any more of these lurking around."

As it happened, there were some. When the scythe-armed bone construct crashed through the thorny hedge it was a

surprise

, but it wasn't unexpected. Pushing through Miriam's hands of stone proved more difficult for it than the plants had been. Its struggles took time it didn't have in the face of Sophie's sword and Ulzhari's ax.

####

With a total lack of first floor windows, the manor had been designed with defense in mind. But with large glass windows just five meters off the ground, concessions to the luxury of the inhabitants had obviously been made. Twinkling yellow light from within gave the impression of a candlelit residence against the blue night of the will-o-wisps, but really just proved that the mansion contained glitter clouds. Stairs led up to the great double doors that featured as the main entrance, but there was also what looked like a barn door on the side and a small ground level door on the back that Fiona said would be a servant's entrance in a period drama. Dungeons never quite seemed to have an

exact

correspondence to any historical culture from any of the home worlds, so

which

period that drama might be set in was anyone's guess.

"Obviously," Fiona speculated, "we don't want to go through

any

of the doors. The forces of Mictlan will ambush whoever opens Door Number One. But the same is true for Doors Two and Three."

Kaitlin shrugged. "If there's an ambush, it doesn't really matter. We have to fight them there anyway. We might as well just get on with it before we get hungry and Max needs to feed us all cum or whatever." The blond woman was actually freaked out a bit when the other women in the party didn't act as if she had told a joke. She was expecting a mix of chuckles and groans, with maybe some confusion or denial from the aliens. Instead, everyone just

carried on

. As if suggesting that they all eat Max's cum was a normal suggestion.

"Just because we have to fight them there," Miriam mused dismissively, "doesn't mean we have to fight on their terms. We'll have to take out the monsters who are behind that door, but we don't need to subject ourselves to the traps on the doorway."

Studying the building, Max came to a revelation. "It's wider than it is tall, but it's three floors. Functionally, it's a tower. So the final room and the exit are going to be on the third floor. That scratches the third floor windows, so we're going to enter one of the second floor windows." He pointed to one chosen decisively but arbitrarily. "We'll go in there. We'll backtrack to the main entrance, hopefully flank the welcoming committee." Five party members verbally affirmed their intentions to follow his orders, and Kaitlin felt peer pressured into going along with it. She realized that Max was the party leader, but

she

hadn't voted for him. Kaitlin was the only one who hadn't.

Miriam created a simple earthen ramp up to the window he had selected, and the invasion was on. Sophie used shield rush to go through the window, and several hunters thought that it would have been an action right at home in an action movie.

The room inside seemed like a child's room. The twinkling golden light of the glitter cloud illuminated something not unlike a rocking horse, several dolls, and a tiny bed. Max's bed needs had recently grown massively, but even alone he didn't think he'd have been able to fit in the bed he was looking at any time in the last seven years. Upon affirming that they weren't actually in combat, he took hold of Sophie's chain. She needed to be leashed to get the benefits of being

un

leashed, so he needed to hold the rage tether when she wasn't fighting, but might be soon.

"Who do you think slept in that bed?" Sophie literally asked the question, but all of them were thinking it. Mictlan corpse constructs didn't sleep at all as far as any of them knew, and the forces of Mictlan were generally built from the bodies of adults. Presumably to have died as adults, they must have lived as children, but no one knew where or when they had done so.

Pointedly ignoring the connecting chain between Max and Sophie, Kaitlin ran her hand on the bed. Just one hundred and twenty centimeters of mattress length. "This bed has

never

been slept in." She said it confidently enough that the others accepted her verdict. It raised the question of whether that made the story of such a place more tragic or less.

Fiona looked at the bare corners of the room. "Fireplaces. There aren't any fireplaces. There's no source for light or heat." She pointed accusingly at the blank walls.

"Light comes from glitter clouds and will-o-wisps," Chaeryn reminded her, "we're in a dungeon." The Night Caller had difficulty formulating a reply. She really felt like the point she had made was self-evidently important, and the alien's apparent inability to follow her proposed train of thought had put her in the uncanny valley of conversations. Obviously the dungeon didn't

need

fireplaces or candle fixtures, but it didn't need a child's bed either. Chaeryn was willing to simply accept that discrepancy, but the contradiction weighed heavily on Fiona's mind.

Ignoring the developing discussion of dungeon furniture, Max dragged Sophie to look at dolls. There were five of them, with various styles and levels of detail. Studying the dolls, Max noticed that one of them had the quilted patchwork of skin tones that he associated with orcs, and one had the triangular ears he associated with elves. The other three he was inclined to classify as human, but he was aware that the arrogance of species was probably influencing him. The chibi proportions of the dolls couldn't truly be said to be accurate scale models of humans or any aliens he was familiar with, but such artistic license was common for children's toys. For three of the five, he saw no markings that would cause him to classify them as non-human and his mind made his own default assumption. He wondered how many would be classified as elves to Chaeryn's purple eyes.

He had only started to ponder the nature of the rocking horse and the spiral horns on its head when a sound from outside the door put them back on a conflict clock. There was no longer time to ponder the artistic intentions of representative art. As always, it was a shame such items couldn't be brought out of the dungeon. Archeologists and anthropologists from Earth would just faint from excitement if they were to actually get their hands on such items. Many hunters lamented that they weren't able to haul back gold and gems, but to Max it was obvious that the real treasures were things like the dolls. Objects that might hold clues to humanity's past, and the origins of elves and orcs as well. Yet even those treasures were not as valuable to him as the lives of his party members, and so he made a decision. "Let's get through the door to the hallway, we'll fight them there." He hadn't actually

seen

a hallway, but it was intuitively obvious that a building of this shape would have one. The moment he saw the room they had entered did not extend to the other end of the manor, he'd known that the lone doorway opened into a hall rather than another room. A hallway with doors wasn't necessarily the best place to have a fight, but he didn't fancy letting the forces of Mictlan lay siege to them in a child's bedroom.