Tim, Jake's rogue, crawled out of the dungeon's entrance. His legs were broken and he bled from a dozen different places. He pulled himself forward hand over hand trying to escape the dungeon, wide-eyed terror on his face as he moved. Others ran over to him and a few clerics from the camp began to heal him.

"It's not working!" one of the clerics yelled.

"I'm dark aligned you fuckwit," Tim groaned out.

"What does that mean? I've always been able to heal people before." The cleric said.

"There are a few types of classes that can't be healed by your magic because it comes from light-aligned sources. You need dark healing to help." Tim said through gritted teeth.

"Move! I can heal him!" Tom called.

Pressing through the throng of people that had gathered around Tim, Tom moved to get to the center of the crowd. He reached the center, knelt down at Tim's side, and began to cast Dark Healing. Tim visibly relaxed as some of the pain was alleviated.

"Thanks, man. That really sucked there for a bit." Tim said.

"I can't heal all of your injuries right now. My healing isn't very high, but that should at least keep you alive." Tom said.

"Hey, I'll take it haha..." Tim began to laugh but broke out into a fit of coughing as he winced in pain again.

"Don't move too much. I have no idea how much internal damage was done. Your legs will likely have to be set before they heal too." Tom said.

"I'll just take not dying for now. That was absolutely stupid of us. We never stood a chance." Tim said suddenly.

"And everyone else is..." Tom started but trailed off.

"Dead," Tim said.

Gasps and shocked murmurs ran through the gathered crowd. Some people thought Jake's team had the best chance of winning, while others acted as if they knew they couldn't do it. A couple of teams even walked away to prepare to go next.

"Bob was right. You need to do this together!" Tim said.

A few people moved to pick Tim up as gently as they could and he was moved over to his tent to rest. Tom followed him to see if he could find out more.

"What happened exactly, Tim?" Tom asked.

"We found the main machine. It was huge. The creature is some kind of shadow that attaches itself to the machine and seems to feed off of it. Even when we dealt it damage, it just seemed to heal itself and gain its power back." Tim began. "It launched attack after attack at us never letting up. Even our strongest powers couldn't kill it."

"What else?" Tom pressed him.

"And the monsters. It could summon other smaller versions of itself to harry us at the same time." Tim said. "Don't do it. Don't go in. We can live with the machines the way they are!"

"Bob says we can't. They are going to blow up the planet if we can't get it fixed." Tom said.

"Then...we are well and truly fucked," Tim said, his head falling back onto the ground in defeat.

"It's not over yet. We have a plan." Tom said.

Getting up and moving over to Zach, Tom leaned in to speak with him quietly.

"We need to figure out if we can get enough people on our raid party idea ASAP," Tom said.

"I've got some feelers out, but I think that this new development will help turn people to trying with us. They're likely going to warm up to the idea of trying a group effort now that Jake is dead." Zach said. "Still can't believe he was so cocksure about going in alone. That bastard."

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"Go talk to the teams again, be sure you can get the ones you want before anyone else goes in. We can't just keep having teams throw themselves at a pointless fight." Tom said.

Nodding, Zach walked off to talk to some of the other teams. Everyone waited around for a while, not really wanting to go into the dungeon after Jake's team massacre. The team that was up next to go actually decided to not enter at all. Packing their things, they headed out of the encampment to go home.

A while later another team who thought they were tougher than Jake entered the dungeon to begin their turn. The camp had grown quiet now and people were milling about in a somber mood. Nobody could believe the turn this was taking. It hadn't sunk in how tough this was until someone they looked up to didn't come back.

Zach returned with a man in full plate armor after another hour and two more teams entering the dungeon, none returning.

"Tom! This is Isaac. He's the leader of another team here and has agreed to join our attempt at the raid." Zach said.

Isaac extended his hand and he and Tom shook them in greeting.

"We have a mostly defense-based team with a lot of our group focused on being able to take hits and get back up. Figured in this world being tougher to kill meant living longer." Isaac said.

"That's exactly what we are looking for in the raid. We just need one more party to make it in." Tom said.

"So what's the plan when we do get in? There hasn't been much luck with the assaults so far, and from what Tim says there isn't much hope right now." Isaac said.

"Bob thinks he can take the beast off the machine if we can get him in. So he will be in one of our teams. When it's off we should be able to cut its power source which will weaken it and make it so it can't heal itself. We need your team to keep Bob protected. Take the hits and defend him while he works. Meanwhile, the other teams will keep the creature distracted until it's detached and then we hit it with everything we have." Tom said.

"And the minions?" Isaac asked.

"Same as the big guy. We murder them with impunity." Tom said.

"Sounds good to me. We're in. time to pay that monster back for all the death it's caused." Isaac said.

"Plus the whole stopping the planet from exploding bit," Tom said off-handedly.

"What the fuck did you just say?" Isaac asked, Zach, looking equally confused.

"Bob didn't tell you? The IFP is planning to blow up the mana core if we can't 'fix the glitch'." Tom said making quotations around the movie quote.

"Holy shit. No, we didn't know about that. This makes things much more urgent. I need to go talk to some people. I think you will have more volunteers shortly." Isaac said, quickly moving off to find someone else.

"Are they really going to blow up the whole fucking planet?" Zach asked.

"Not really sure. But, I'm not going to sit around with my thumb up my ass having a tea party while we wait to see what happens. So we need to do this soon." Tom replied.

"That sounds right to me. I'll go get my team ready. We can likely move up in the order if we move quickly." Zach said and walked away to meet with his team.

Moving back to where his teams had set up camp, Tom spoke with them to get them ready for what was to come.

"Looks like we may get our chance to go sooner than we had hoped," Tom said.

"You think we stand a chance?" Kedron asked.

"As long as we stick to the plan and nothing goes horribly wrong like it always does," Tom said.

"Fucking hell. You just had to jinx it didn't you?" Kiera said.

"Yup. Might as well get it out of the way before James does." Tom replied.

"That's fair," Graham said.

"What the hell? Seriously, I'm not that bad." James said.

"You're right, you're worse," Kiera said.

"Now listen here, lady..." James started when Squirrel started growling at him.

"Et tu you hairy fucker?" James asked in mock offense.

"Who's a good boy? Yes, you're a good boy!" Kiera said scratching the wolf's head and back while Squirrel closed his eyes in pleasure at the praise.

"Jerky? Where are you?" Tom called out.

Jerky appeared on his shoulder a moment later.

"I want you with Bob. We need to go introduce you so you don't surprise him, but Bob must stay safe at all costs, do you understand?" Tom asked.

"Jerk understand. Jerky protect old guy." Jerky replied.

"Good. We all have to work together on this. Its not going to be easy and we need to pull out all the stops." Tom said.

The team nodded solemly, everyone taking this utterly seriously.

"Now, get yourselves ready. We move in soon hopefully." Tom said.

"Tom," Zach called from off to the side.

Moving over to where Zach was standing he met another man standing with him.

"Tom, meet Chris. Chris has a pretty good team make up with defense and magic users so he should be able to help with the fighting team alongside yours and mine." Zach said.

"Great to meet you, Chris. This is not going to be easy, so we need all the help we can get." Tom said extending a hand to shake with Chris.

"Zach told me what's at stake now and I'm absolutely on board to help however I can. Some of us have families back home and we will do whatever we need to keep them safe." Chris said.

"We're so glad to hear that, Chris," Tom said.

"Because a lot of us may die," James said.

"Not helping!" Kiera scolded him as she pulled him away from the talk by his ear.

"Ow, ow, ow, fucking OW!" James screamed as he was drug away.

"Sorry, ignore the idiot," Tom said.

"It's fine. I've got one too." Chris said. "Now can we go over the plan one more time?"

"Zach, can we have Isaac join us? I'd rather finalize everything with all of us here." Tom asked.

"Sure thing. I'll go get him," Zach replied.

Zach jogged off to find Isaac and Tom turned to his team.

"Kedron, come over here," Tom called and Kedron came to join the others.

A few minutes later Zach came back with Isaac and they all gathered around to discuss strategy.

"Alright, so here's the plan..."