It looked like while I’d been advancing, Dienne’s golems and the troopers had polished off the remains of the first wave and the second one, while the third wave, small desert rodents with an annoying propensity to tunnel quickly under the dried mud, were getting smashed.
The rodents, four-foot-tall six-legged moles with tentacles and mouthfuls of daggerlike teeth, were difficult to detect by sight while they were tunneling, but easy enough to spot with remote forces, and I powered up my primary construction drones and sent them around the edges of our enforcement… The drones were heavy enough that simply stepping firmly on a tunneling rodent would smash both it and its tunnel. After a moment, I started using the pod’s guidance lasers to highlight the burrowers, and the troopers, who had switched to pikes to stab the things as they left concealment, suddenly gained a lot of efficiency.
“Smash!” I had my drones say as they squashed tunneling rodents with their heavy stomps, and Dirk turned and grinned as I grabbed a short stabbing spear of my own and left the pod’s cockpit to join in the fun. I was not heavy enough to stab the spear through the ground, but when their tentacled heads appeared, I happily ran and jabbed the spear into the heads that were abruptly exposed.
“Hey!” he said as he drove a pike into the ground where one of my targeting lasers illuminated a tunneler. “We got a bet going on. Lindsay bet me you would take a pure assault class, but I’ve seen you fight in heavy gee in the gym. I was betting you’d take a support class and figure out how to turn it into a killing machine.”
“Can you do me a favor?” I asked as I shifted over to where a new vole had stopped and started to tunnel its way upward to its doom.
“Wuzzat?” he asked, quickly stepping sideways to impale another tunnel vole and avoid my drone’s big stomp as it crushed a tunnel and its inhabitant.
“Give Lindsay my sincere apologies. I grabbed support pilot, which has a pretty clear path and command utility. Someday I want to fly my own ship and the traits,” I coughed and took a breath as I swatted away the tentacles of a pair of voles that were squealing as they sprinted towards us, “translate perfectly into command rank.”
Dirk was watching me just a little too closely, and I pointed behind him as my drone had to drop the hammer… literally, his left arm was a hammer… on a vole that Dirk hadn’t noticed because of his unfocused attention. “Yeah.” he said, “I will do that.”
He turned and started stabbing away at the voles again. “Hey, don’t tell the Warrant that I asked, but did your tits get bigger?”
I rotated my arms in my armor… yeah, it pinched just a little, they probably did as part of the last gasp of my rapid maturation when I gained copper. Thank God they weren’t huge, but investing in a slightly larger support garment for when I trained in heavy gee would probably be a smart move. “Probably, but I am pretty sure yours did too, I’ll let the Warrant know you guys need a little extra training in heavy gee to work off your new fat layer. It’s a good thing I’m allergic to chocolate.”
Dirk grumbled and took a moment to give me the finger before he turned back to killing, and Crimwell, standing next to him, murmured, “Did you just buy us extra high-gee training, manboobs?”
Fortunately, it appeared that there had been zero fatalities. This was a copper raid, and the XO had intentionally restricted it to copper and below to prevent advancement fade from bronze or higher participation. The three most dangerous parts of the raid were the initial entry with its attack waves, which Dienne and I had helped thwart by landing us at waypoint one instead of trying to fight our way in without support. Then there was the bat cave… I didn’t get the reference, but supposedly it was packed with natural traps, hazards, and flying enemies.
I planned on building a series of disposable combat and engineer drones to help the troops handle the bat cave safely, but the boss fight could be an oversized version of any of the creatures we’d fought so far, plus waves of elites. I was going to remote Dienne’s golems through the bat cave, keeping them out of the fight while he concentrated on clearing out any leftovers from the waves and keeping his feet close enough to the landers to prevent the rift from… eating them.
Rifts couldn’t absorb materials unless there was no one in their proximity, which was why Dienne was staying with the ships. During a raid, everyone involved shared advancement, which was why we didn’t have any bronze or higher with us. Dienne’s golems were perfectly capable of stripping the attacking waves of resources like the scorpitaur’s carapaces, high-tensile protein-carbon fibers from the vole’s tentacles, and other useful monster parts, and once we hit the boss battle and I dropped a node, he’d remote to take over the half of his golems I’d be piloting through the bat cave.
I hadn’t found any mineral resources yet, and the lack of sand prevented me from taking advantage of potential ceramic or silica compounds, but supposedly the bat cave was packed with metallic outcroppings that I could butcher to create a new horde of drones. Everyone was saving their powerful energy-consuming abilities for the boss fight, which hopefully meant the drones would perform well and distract the boss.
Once the official third wave was over, the entire raid reformed. Minor healing where necessary, and I was able to repair some damaged armor fairly easily by using my swarm. A couple of the troopers were a little spooked by the cloud at first, but when I told them it was just my power effects and not some kind of creepy nanites they seemed to take it in stride.
After we started marching, and I grabbed my case of drone cores and the portable node, we marched into the bat cave, and my arrogance was quickly disabused. No. There was no way I could have soloed it without trooper support.
It was… anticlimactic yet dangerous. I was marching at the center of the formation, well-protected by the troopers surrounding me. The hazards were easily spotted, and my swarm was able to build reinforcements easily. A few times the flying enemies, some kind of lumpy floaters with stubby wings that spit acid, got a little too close and were speared out of the air by the troops, but once we learned to spot their concealed hiding place among the stalactites the swarm was able to quickly disassemble them from a distance. Yeah, it was a little gross stripping off their valuable skin and wings, but it only took a few seconds before their gas sacks popped and a lump of blood and muscle plopped onto the floor.
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The packet hadn’t been kidding about the mineral deposits, though. We stopped every few minutes while I assembled a new drone out of one of the drone control modules and the iron, copper, and tin my swarm could scoop out of the walls, but we left the more valuable silver and crystallized gem deposits to be dealt with by full-sized mining drones. Soon our unit was marching along trailed by lightweight human-sized drones as well as Dienne’s golems, and it looked like our twenty-five-man raid had somehow expanded to nearly a hundred.
Copper-level drones and golems were nowhere near as powerful or useful as real live troopers, but I figured when we got to the boss, each drone killed was one trooper that wasn’t. I was...honestly getting a little fed up with how useless my drones were. Even my swarm, while certainly convenient, wasn't any sort of game-changer.
“I don’t like that smell.” Trooper Lindsay announced, a tall, full-figured woman that, based on Kushiel’s comments, was currently Dirk’s bedmate. Honestly, I kind of envied her. Statuesque, with clear yet feminine musculature, an hourglass body, and large breasts. Amazons were designed to be physically dominant, but based on their workouts in the heavy-Gee gym, Dirk was a lot stronger than her, which might be why they were together.
I hadn’t noticed, concentrating on having my swarm break down a stalactite that was unstable and would have dropped at the slightest noise, as well as reinforcing the thin stone lid on the path that would have broken away under a trooper’s step, dropping them into a deep crevasse with water faintly audible rushing at the bottom.
“It smells like iodine. What do you think?” she asked Trooper Caldwell. He nodded in reply, “Yeah, that’s the same smell that the centipede things in the second wave had. I am thinking that’s probably what the boss is, so we need to worry about the fact that it’s probably able to climb walls and attack from any angle. Venomous claws, but no acid spit.”
The fifty-foot wide cave opened up ahead, into a lit cavern that probably had some kind of access to the sky, based on the slightly rising temperatures and the slight puffs of breezes through the big tunnel.
Five of the troopers immediately broke down and stowed their pikes, which were joined in the middle of the shaft for easy storage. Lance Corporal Brenton started passing the word to her troops, and the troopers tugged out incredibly heavy-looking crossbows to match their enhanced stats.
I started setting up the portable node, and in a few moments, I felt Dienne’s cool, calm essence flowing through it as I relaxed control of the golems to him. Fortunately, his essence didn’t get grabby or intrusive as he took them, and I was secretly glad I wouldn’t have to cut his nose off.
“Okay,” Brenton said, “Remember that these…” she waved at the drones and golems that we were starting to assemble at the sides of the cavern, “Are disposable. We haven’t had this level of support before, so I am hoping we aren’t going to lose anyone this time. Last time we lost three, but protect yourselves and your teammates, and let the boxes soak up the damage.”
“Dirk, Lindsay, your sole job will be protecting Reynard. If you need to, toss her out of trouble, she’s probably tougher than you are, but she will be distracted, especially if we take any hits. Granite, Bomer, you girls are covering Casparov. You can fight, but she’s here in case one of us takes a hit. Casparov, I know you have a toughness enhancement and life mana as well as regeneration, but this thing is most likely peak copper or low bronze… don’t take risks.”
I nodded to Casparov, an attractive blonde woman with yellow eyes. “I have an energy surplus from my new class. I don’t heal nearly as well as you, but I can do light heals fast. If you hit a snag, or your pool starts to flag, scream at me or wallop me to let me know. Zero casualties.”
She laughed and nodded, “Zero casualties.”
I grinned, “Except Dirk. He’s dead meat walking.”
He snerked. “Why you cursing me?”
I chuckled, “Because I figure you are unkillable. Are you planning to retire soon? Have a family full of kids that will miss you and depend on you for support? Secretly developed the cure for necrotic contamination that you plan on giving us as soon as this dive is done?”
He shook his head, “If I have kids, I don’t know about them.”
Brenton laughed, “I get it, cinematic consistency means he doesn’t have any of the flags for dead meat walking.”
I nodded, “Yep. If any of us has a death flag, it’s me.”
Dirk glared at me, “How do you figure?”
I shrugged, “Well, I am young, goofy-looking, kind of a prodigy, and have never been with a man, and really like the big, silver paladin. If anyone’s going to die, it will be me.”
Brenton nodded seriously, “She’s actually right, cinematically. She needs to die to set him on the path of righteous vengeance, although I think she’s safe since this is just a regular raid and we aren’t fighting any significant evil presence that he can use as a story driver. Still, drag her ass out of trouble if you have to.”
“Is she serious?” Dirk whispered to Lindsay.
Lindsay shook her head, “Nope. So far things haven’t been grim enough. If anyone’s going to die, it will probably be a trooper who she hasn’t met yet. You know, to show that the story is serious.”
Dirk seemed to take her seriously, as he started introducing me to the other members of our raid group. I tried to remember their names, but I was sort of busy, and besides, it wasn’t like this was a story or something. I expected every single trooper to make it out alive, even if it cost me every single drone and golem we had.
It turned out my prediction was pretty accurate. Brenton was right, the boss was a nasty giant centipede thing with four claws and a horde of poison-tipped tentacles going down its spine that lashed out anytime someone got close.
The waves were mostly the same sort of centipedes that took over the second wave outside, while I was busy ranking up. Several of the troopers switched over to swords, which were better at smashing apart centipede waves, and my combat drones each grew a giant blade and attacked en masse while the golems smashed at the creature with their giant hammers. We were sort of… overloaded for the raid, to be honest. The boss was definitely early bronze, but the only trooper injury we had was Lance Corporal Brenton herself, who got stabbed through the gut by one of the barbed tentacles.
I was not joking about Casparov being a better healer. She cured the poison, patched up Brenton, gave her a recovery potion, and had her back in the action in less than a minute.
The portable node chirped after the last add was turned into pulp by one of the surviving golems.
Raid complete! The hovering, sourceless hologram projecting from the node announced.
And that’s when the work really began.