Archmund swept his Infrared Lance through the narrow opening of the tunnel into the grand hall of the underground manor. Formless Monsters popped like balloons as they were speared by invisible rays of pure heat, their shadows turning to dark mist and fading into the air. Their Gems dropped like gentle raindrops onto the padded carpet. Was he imagining things, or was the air growing darker with their miasma?
A gloved hand gripped his arm.
“What. The. Hell. Are. You. Doing,” Mercy said from behind him.
She whirled him around and grabbed him by the shoulders. Her hair and hood were up, and her voice was half an octave lower. The kindred spirit from the Omnio was gone; in her place was the battlefield commander.
“I suppose you’ll have me court martialed for insubordination?” Archmund said glibly. No, far more likely she’d just execute him, either legally or on the spot. An Imperial heir could definitely get away with it.
“I thought you were smarter than this, asshole,” she growled. “And yet I wake up to hear you provoking the Lower Subtier, farming some Gems, doing the same glory-hound bullshit I see from every other noble that I have to deal with—”
“That’s not—”
“I thought you understood the gravity of going through a Dungeon. That they would die for us. I don’t expect a spoiled noble brat like you to understand sacrifice or tragedy—”
“My mother is dead,” Archmund said. “My brothers and sisters too.”
“It’s different!” Mercy spat. “They died of the plague. There was nothing you could have done to save them! This is—”
“Don’t let them die for me. If I die, say that you killed me because you had to,” Archmund snapped.
“…What?” Mercy said, releasing her arms. Beyond the tunnel, the shadows undulated. They shift from formlessness to halfway manlike shapes. Mercy gave them a quick glance and struck them down with sharp shocks of lightning, the ozone byproduct wafting into Archmund’s nostrils.
“I wanted to cull them,” Archmund said. “I don’t want anyone to die for me. If that means I die, so be it. You’re an Imperial heir. You’ll get away with it.”
“So stupid,” Mercy said, though her words less angry and more disappointed. “I’ll get away with my life, but a failure this big? Ten soldiers or heroes are acceptable losses, but killing a noble for getting in the way? If I could get away with that I would’ve done it to the stupider ones! The scandal! The scandal would destroy me. They’d probably marry me off to your father as compensation.”
Archmund’s face twisted in disgust. “He’s like three times our age. He likes adult women, like a normal person.”
“Well, they’d have me replace you as Granavale heir one way or another. They’d make your dad adopt me. Either way I’d be out of the way, and you’d be dead. What were you thinking?”
Still the shadows coalesced. Casually, as they spoke, Mercy summoned the lightning and blasted Monsters as they formed.
“I just didn’t want anyone to die,” Archmund said. Well, he would’ve been fine with his own death. Though now that he thought about it, such a desire was desperately and thoroughly irrational. Perhaps it had been triggered by Mercy’s stories of how her life was doomed to go. The constant competition and jockeying for status from a young age. Being compared one’s peers, and grinding down countless others to sustain that. Perhaps that reminded him too much of what he had once lived, and that constant screaming need for escape.
Mercy glanced over to the soldiers. Somehow, they were all still asleep, despite the booms and sizzles coming from the manor hall. “Those boys can sleep for hours if things have gone hard enough. Meanwhile you’ve been up for what, two days straight? No wonder you did something so stupid.”
“I…”
Yeah, He could blame sleep deprivation for this one. Maybe going down off of the coffee high. Maybe a sugar crash. Maybe unresolved trauma from his previous life.
“But Granavale, I’ll be counting on you.”
“Huh?”
She smirked, her eyes flashing with challenge.
“If you don’t want anyone to die, then you’d better pull your own weight.”
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Alone, he had felt far safer sniping at the Monsters from afar. With the two of them, Mercy felt they could handle stepping in.
Once they stepped in, she flicked her finger at the passage behind them. A chip of her fingernail flew off, and transmuted by her Diamond of Guard, became a seafoam-green barrier that blocked their exit and stopped others from joining them.
Once again he surveyed the room.
It was a wide open entrance hall. There were two sets of curved stairs that went up to a balcony. There were exits on all three walls, but they would stay here and kill as many as possible.
“We’ve got about an hour and a half until the rest of the men get here,” Mercy said. “You’ve provoked the Monsters already so I’d only feel safe letting 1-Gem or above soldiers joining.”
It was easy enough to guess what she meant from context clues — soldiers with at least one piece of Gemgear, which made them stronger and set them on the path to Heroism, whatever that meant.
Archmund was going into this effectively naked.
Even if he could’ve used the Gem of the Seven-Fingered Starbeast, he wouldn’t have been nearly as proficient with it as his Ruby, which he’d spent 100 days practicing with.
He was, at the moment, a glass cannon. All offense, no defense.
And for now, that was enough.
Mercy was moderating her power. Short, directed electrical blasts as the places of deepest shadow, wiping out Monsters before they could fully form. She covered the right half of the room; Archmund covered the left, standing at a 90-degree angle from her. He followed her lead with his Infrared Lance, blasting through the deepest shadows as fast as he could. As they fought, they’d struck sparks and lit fires, and so the curtains and finery of the false manor had started to burn.
The ground was littered with spherical Gems, sizes ranging from dewdrops to golf balls. In a way, they were pinned in place — if they walked, they would almost certainly slip and fall.
The Monsters were getting stronger. When Archmund had first started slaying them from afar, he had burned through formless shadows. But now some took the shape of men and women — humans, though some stood taller than any mortal soul, before he was able to cut them down.
“They’re getting faster,” Archmund said.
“Still one-shot kills for you?”
“Honestly, I was surprised that my Infrared Lance killed them as formless shadows, before they were mimicking real things.”
“Even whacking them hard enough with a sword works. I really wouldn’t worry about it right now,” she said somewhat sarcastically as she released another bolt of lightning.
Was it the transfer of energy in any form? That would depend on whether ‘ice magic’ worked as well. Maybe it was more metaphysical, in an Aristotelian motion sense — the shadows had a telos, a final purpose they wanted to follow, and any disruption to that could release their Gem?
None of that mattered if he didn’t live to see the light of day.
“Why is this happening?”
“It’s the miasma,” Mercy said. “You kill a Monster and most of its power goes into its Gem, but a little goes into the air. And that goes into the other shadows. If they’re the ghosts of the same kind of grudge or memory, they Amalgamate.”
Another piece of jargon he’d have to remember.
“Their powers get combined or something?”
“In this case, yes. It’s like when a peasant uses a Gem. The dead Monster’s the Gem, the living one’s the peasant.”
“How cheerful.”
He fired Infrared Lance after Infrared Lance. He still didn’t feel tired, even if he knew his decision-making was getting worse.
The Monsters were more and more human now that there were more of them, they could form faster, and the soulstuff of their grudges was dense enough to survive an Infrared Lance. He could almost recognize them from his memories of grand balls and social events before the Crylaxan Plague — noblemen in fineries with Gemstone Rapiers, noblewomen in glimmering dresses and Gemstone Hand fans held before their mouths. They weren’t skeletal, with their flesh sloughing off their bones and their movements staggering. No, they moved with the elegance and grace of the gentry, and their skin was pale yet whole.
“They look like undead nobles,” he said.
“Pretty common. Most Dungeons have some Undead Nobles somewhere. Target their heads — they might not look like much, but they remember having magic.”
If he aimed his Infrared Lance at their heads, they died in a single blow, their Gem weapons clattering to the ground. Yet he could no longer kill them before they had heads, which was frustrating.
“Is this how it keeps going?” he asked. “We just hold off wave after wave of Monsters as they get stronger and stronger? If they’re too strong, once your men get here the only thing they could do is pull us out.”
Mercy released a thunderbolt, brighter and sharper than the quick bursts of electricity she’d been using. It leapt between several of the Monsters. Some, now, looked like suits of armor — ghostly knights in Gemstone carapaces. It was easier to boil their heads using his Microwave, and they burst like balloons, their Gemstone armor falling to the ground with a thud.
“It’s more like the Lowest Subtier is awakening.”
“That doesn’t sound good at all.”
“It’s not so bad,” Mercy said. “Less risk of getting knifed in the back.”
Archmund didn’t like how that sounded. “Why?”
Mercy pointed towards the balcony of the false manor. The miasma had thickened; it could no longer be mistaken for imagination. Even as she spoke, she released blasts of lightning at lesser shadows, her eyes constantly darting across the battlefield.
“It concentrates. Pools into one, a representation of what this place is. You think it’s a coincidence that this final subtier looks like a manor?”
The shadows became layered upon themselves, no longer the absence of light, but black upon black. They formed into the shape of a man, taller than the rest, with slicked-back hair.
“Why are they all humans?” Archmund muttered.
“Because of where we are. People have lived in your lands for a long, long time — and that Monster over there?”
The shadows receded; no other Monsters spawned, as if all the power of the Dungeon had been concentrated into this one final defender.
“It’s the spirits of nobles that once ruled these lands, that once owned this manor. If I had to guess, the souls of your ancestors.”