Benjamin had no idea what to expect, but even before he reached the main cavern, he could hear the sounds of battle. He drew his sword as he squirmed out of the narrow door, and when he finally got outside and climbed atop the nearest single-story home for a better look, he almost dropped it.
Shapes were pouring out of large rents in the north wall that hadn’t been there before. It took a moment for him to figure out what they were, but with the hideous green skin and the beady red eyes, there could be no mistake. Goblins were here.
How? Why? He had no clue, but that didn’t change the facts.
He looked around and saw that all three of his friends were charging toward the enemy from different parts of the city along with several stone shapes, but even as he moved to join them, he wondered what good 10 people could do against dozens or even hundreds. That worry didn’t stop him from hopping down and running to join his friends in the heart of the action, though.
The gibbering mob came at them in a wave, flooding a whole district of the tiny city in just the last few minutes. In fact, because of the half-scale size of the buildings, the invasion was made both more comical and more terrifying. His brain just couldn’t help but see an endless army of giant goblins rampaging through a normal-sized city.
He didn’t need to get anywhere close to the action to start helping, though. Instead, it launched a level 3 vampiric bolt at the part of the widening mob furthest from everyone else. The spell all but drained his mana, but even as he drained his health to fix that problem, the rush of life force replenished him. The fact that it was laced with rage and flickers of brutal memories was just enough to make him cringe as he prepared to cast the spell again, but he bit the bullet and did it anyway.
Of all the spells he had now, this was the one he’d fiddled with the most. Ever since he’d noticed the splash damage in the forest so long ago, he’d wondered at the best way to tune it. Now he had the area of effect version, which is what he was using now since it knocked the little buggers over five or ten at a time like bowling pins, but there were other versions as well. He had a beam to make extra sure he only hit one target at full power and a combination with some of the blood burn runes that hit an even wider area and did a little bit of damage constantly for several minutes to everyone affected.
It only took a couple seconds and a script to swap them out, but right now, this was exactly what he needed: a big life-draining shotgun he could blast over and over again as he shot into the crowd. The best part was that it wasn’t even damaging the buildings, unlike Raja, who was firing a single arrow into the air and having it come down as dozens of mana charge duplicates.
The two of them were basically the only ones on crowd control. Everyone else was cutting a bloody swath through the monstrous crowd toward the rifts that they were pouring in from. Emma was a bloody whirlwind. In fact, it was almost impossible to see her because she was moving so quickly; instead, you were forced to rely on the path of destruction she left in her wake.
Matt, by contrast, was an implacable juggernaut. He’d been having the stone children work on some steel armor for himself, despite the dampening effects it had on magic, and between those fine steel plates and his rampant healing powers, he was all but untouchable. Though he could use his boosting magic like titan’s strength on other people, he mostly just used it on himself, and that raw power was on display here. Every blow either crushed a skull or ripped an enemy in half.
There simply was no stopping him. The only ones who were nearly as strong as Matt now that his rage was overflowing were the stone children. They fought with oversized polearms and repeating spring-driven crossbows, but unlike his friends, they fought as a team, which was apparently a rare magic ability because, in a year of these crazy moments, he and his friends still hadn’t quite figured it out.
Maybe it just takes hundreds of years, he thought to himself wryly. Surely, Matt and Emma will be back on the same page by the time they go gray.
Despite all they’d done, they were still slowly losing ground. Those furthest to the front were caught in a near standstill, and even though Benjamin and Raja had a shooting gallery and were killing at least a score a minute, the green tide was getting closer and closer to them.
Benjamin fished around in his pocket and felt some of the charged gemstones in it. If he were to use all of those, that would probably take out a couple dozen, but it wouldn’t be enough to get him to the fissures, which he desperately wanted to freeze solid to stem the tide.
While he tried to figure out the best move, he had a moment of Epiphany. Why did he need to use the crystals he had on him when he was surrounded by crystals. Streetlights dotted every corner of the city. Part of him realized that if he stole the contagion protocol from his data leak spell and combined it with the life drain and a restructured detonation rune, he could probably blow out every light in the city.
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If I had a real mana pool, he reminded himself.
It would take more like 30 mana to cast such a complicated spell, and he really shouldn’t be planning such complicated things on the fly. It might not be him who would die from his mistake, and there was no way that he could shield his friends from the impact either.
Though it wasn’t smart or even feasible, part of him still wanted to try for the challenge of it. He couldn’t help but imagine waves of concentric detonations as the whole grid of glowing crystals detonated in violent amber and white explosions.
Something more targeted might be a better choice, though. For a moment, he hesitated, and then he decided to pull the trigger. If he’d prepared this earlier, it would have been a cakewalk, but on the fly, he went for simple. He eyeballed the size of a crystal near the edge of his casting range. He changed the enchantment to reflect the larger mana capacity and made the trigger condition full mana. Then he spent the next several seconds draining his mana bar by dumping it into the crystal at the same time as he filled it up again by emptying his health bar.
By the end of that, he was down half of his life and feeling a little dizzy, but the thing was full. He had just enough time to wonder what he’d screwed up when it didn’t go off right away, and then the thing detonated catastrophically.
For a moment, he worried the thing had fizzled and he’d wasted 30 mana. Then it erupted in a blast of incandescence that was so bright that he was still seeing spots seconds after the last of the shimmering magical sparks had faded away to nothing.
Only then could he see the devastation that his improvised explosive device had wrought. The buildings nearest the thing were completely obliterated. That shouldn’t have surprised him. He’d used Arden’s mana batteries as literal demolition charges. What was surprising was the range. At least fifty goblins worth of pieces were painted across the buildings that were still standing. Beyond that, it was hard to say because the debris from the massive blast had blown out the lights for a ways in each direction.
Suddenly, he was glad he hadn’t tried to get fancy. If he’d rigged the whole thing for a chain reaction, well, he might have made the entire cavern collapse and bury them all alive. That would have been one way to take out the goblins, of course, but taking everyone with them was simply too high a price to pay.
Benjamin upped his estimation of the danger of some of his plans and pushed forward, using vampiric bolt to fix some of the mana he’d lost while everyone else took advantage of the lull in the goblins that his bomb had created. The crowds were thinning out now, and he pressed forward toward where everyone else was, more than cognizant that he would be far less effective and far more at risk as everyone crowded together.
“Does anyone have any idea what’s going on?” he yelled as he tried to be heard over the din of battle. They’d probably killed a hundred goblins by now, but the things were still pouring out of their jagged rents like it was a busted pipe.
Emma ignored him, Matt probably didn’t even hear him, and Raja was too far away. In the end, the only one who bothered to respond with anything more than an angry glare was Phosdan, who said, “This can only be the work of the summoners.”
Obviously, Benjamin thought, though he wasn’t rude enough to say it. There was only one group that could have done this, but the question was why they’d done it now. Was this a random thing? Was it targeted? Did they have a way of tracking him, or perhaps one of the items he was carrying, like the Prince’s medallion?
He didn’t know, but as he sealed the smallest of the rifts with an adapted, overcharged application of chains of ice to turn the three closest goblins into a frigid cork, he knew they’d have to find out quickly.
There was the briefest of conversations there, and the divisions were laid out quickly. The stone children would stay here and mop up the stragglers, while the humans pushed deeper into the goblin lair to figure out what had happened.
Part of him knew that the plan was dumb because the smaller warriors were clearly the better choice when it came to tunnel fighting, but he didn’t care. There was no way that they were going to put Phosdin, Feldsparia, and all the rest in any more danger than they already had.
Besides, Matt had already pushed ahead without them, and they were going to have to hurry to keep up with his implacable killing spree.
“You want me to go with you or stay here?” Raja asked as Benjamin started to climb inside after Emma. “Not a lot of room for a bow in there.”
“You’re right,” Benjamin said, “But I’m pretty sure when we get to the surface, we’re going to need you and your arrow-powered missile launcher. So, maybe you should come along just in case.”
Raja brightened at that and quickly followed Benjamin into the dark. He had no idea this went to the surface, of course. This deep underground, it felt like he was crawling around in a giant, stinking ant farm, but this wasn’t an accident or a coincidence. Someone had done this, and Benjamin was fairly certain that whoever that someone was, they'd be waiting for the four of them on the other side of whatever hell they were about to crawl through to find their answers.