I watched in dismay as Haroshi and Nerien’s group brought down two more spirefiends and their riders. The demons would barely get within range of the force below them before their Hit Points vanished rapidly. Cuby and I had made short work of them for two people, but it was obvious that the enemy players would have no trouble at all with any of the encounters ahead of them by how quickly they could kill—and they had two armored chosen to tank for them, so there wasn’t much hope that they’d be losing players to attrition, either.
“I think she might be a psychic,” said Cuby. “Not good.”
“Why not?”
“Because psychics are good,” she said, glancing over at me as if this should be obvious. “But her other class—maybe warrior? Pilgrim? Psychic spells all have translucent projectiles, and she’s always meleeing. I can’t tell if she’s launching spells as she attacks, but she definitely opens fights with an instant cast, like you sometimes do, and it’s definitely translucent.”
“Could she be a battlemind?” I asked.
“No,” Cuby said. “Battleminds are bad.”
“The hybrid psychic fighter class?”
“Mhmm,” said Cuby. “It’s sad, really. But they’re pretty well known to be no good, according to the Archivect. That’s why we haven’t seen many.”
“And the Archivect is your systems reference document,” I said, wondering how the translator was coming up with that particular proper noun.
“Uh… something like that? I don’t know if that translated well.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “I got it. So none of the chosen are battleminds.”
I looked back down the slope of the mountain at the enemy players. They’d finished their encounter and moving around the mountain in search of another one—not making to climb it as if to enter the dungeon. Their plan, at least for now, was to farm the outer groups much like we had. And while they might have killed faster, they were splitting experience a lot of ways—it was doubtful that any of them would be reaching 11, or even 10, soon.
“Okay,” I said. “Your illusion spell might be a big deal, here. Wait—did you keep the illusion spell when you changed class?”
“Yes,” said Cuby. “I got to choose for everything, even the iconic. I kept it.”
“Good,” I said. “Much as I don’t want to do this, I think we should empty out that chest. Then, if they camp when Haroshi’s cooldown is up, we can wait until dark and put the chest somewhere they can find it, with a rock overtop it.”
Cuby cocked her head at me, then laughed. “An illusory rock.”
“Yeah,” I said. “We’ll put the useless armor back in. That way if they find it, they might think the system left it there for any player with true sight to find—a little reward like our cave was.”
“It seems….”
“Implausible, yes,” I said. “But so was this place. And I want to know if they have true sight without tipping them off to our presence. Now, they might just figure out that it was us—but if we don’t attack tonight, Haroshi can be pretty safe assuming we’re not around.”
“Okay,” said Cuby. “But is it really worth it not to attack tonight?”
“We’ll see when they make camp,” I said. “But I’m sort of worried that an attack would make us vulnerable. They’ll have watchmen out with the Heightened Sight skill, and Haroshi very likely has level 4 vice at this point. What’s to say he doesn’t have a flight skill like we do? One good hit on either of us from the right ability and we’re toast—and if Nerien really is a psychic, your extra Defense Rating from your acrobatics might not stop one of her fragmented spells if it’s coupled with a Moment of Mastery.”
“But what does that leave us?” asked Cuby. “We’ll have to ambush them tomorrow anyway, as they make their way up the mountain. Is it really worth not even trying just to hope they’ll be less cautious? If I were Haroshi, I wouldn’t need to know for sure that you were here—I’d be expecting you around every corner.”
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“I don’t know,” I admitted. “We’ll see when they make camp. As for ambushing them tomorrow… I have a few ideas, but nothing that’s coalescing into a real plan.”
“Like what?” Cuby asked.
“We haven’t seen any true sight abilities or skills yet,” I said.
“There isn’t any true sight in the common classes,” Cuby said. “That’s why the illusions and the rogue’s invisibility are so limited.”
“Good,” I said. “If their group has the power to see through illusions, it probably comes from a potion. If we can give them a true sight test like what I said with the chest, we might spot the only person they’ve given the buff to—and then if we kill them, we might be able to get away with some cheaty illusions.”
“Do you want to tell me about it inside?” Cuby asked. “We can check on them again in a bit, but our clocks are counting down.”
“Right.”
Inside, we made some adjustments to our camp. Cuby lowered the illusory rock that blocked our exit, essentially making it appear as if the crack led to nowhere instead of having a rock overtop it—this was so that no-one from Haroshi’s group could spot the illusion at a distance. I covered the low entrance that we’d crawled through with some rocks and dirt, using the shield I’d kept from the first morthoth we’d killed as a sort of scoop. Then I set an Auditory Illusion Rune Trap at that end of the cave in case anything came in behind us.
“Okay,” I said, rejoining the camp. “I’m thinking that most spells have projectiles, but not all of them. Hardlight Tether and Hardlight Construct both just appear, and Healing Light doesn’t either. But the big one is Devour Magic. There’s no projectile on Devour Magic—I don’t think it can miss.”
“What are you—oh,” Cuby said, smiling with sudden realization. “You want to stand in a rock and eat all their buffs.”
“That too,” I said. “But better. Investiture doesn’t throw a projectile. And I just got Invert Hostilities.”
Cuby’s eyes widened. “That… that could work. If we got them in the right spot, if they didn’t realize what was happening right away. And you have Intuitive Spell… ah, Alatar!” She was grinning, now. “That could work! But how do you hit someone with the first inversion—they’re going to spot the projectile.”
“Not if it’s part of a rune trap.”
“But then they’ll spot the trap—once the players—”
But I was shaking my head. “I wasn’t going to use a player. Monsters will work fine to start.”
Cuby laughed. “Okay, it might work. But we need to make sure the hidden rock is in the right spot.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s a pretty complicated plan. But we have the escapes in case it doesn’t go right, and it’s better than just ambushing them whenever they engage the boss. There’s another plan that’s a bit simpler, but it has its own problems.”
“What’s that?”
“Rocks fall. They all die.”
Cuby laughed again. “A rockslide? Can we manage it?”
I shrugged. “When they’re camping tonight, we should sneak out the other exit and get back to the road—if it’s not covered in demons, we can check around all those steep steps we kept finding today. I can use magic damage to blast some of the rock into glass dust, use a Hardlight Construct to hold up some stones, then drop them once the enemy players arrive. The only problem is that the lower mountain is pretty continuous in terms of rock formations—it might be hard to break enough rock free to kill them all, especially since I don’t know much of what I’m doing.”
“It’s worth trying,” said Cuby. “Not all of them would die—some of them could jump out of the way—but on the steepest parts of the road? A single boulder could flatten a dozen. It wouldn’t need to be a full rockslide. But what about your rune traps—don’t you have an area damage spell?”
“The cone,” I said, showing her Destructive Wave. “10 meters on a side, more with Huge Spell. I can replace Auditory Illusion with Destructive Wave, Charm of Gliding with Huge Spell, and False Identity with Charm of Gliding.”
“I’ll just trust that you can learn the wave,” Cuby said, eying me sidelong. “Really, the only benefit of not being chosen is that I don’t have to think of how to juggle abilities like this.”
I laughed, but she was right. I might even have replaced Slow with Huge Spell.
“That reminds me,” I said. “I should make a card for Hex of Chains while we’re here. And I should find a feather if we go out—kill a bird or something. I can use it for another Charm of Gliding card.”
“But what about your runes, though?” Cuby asked. “The traps, I mean. Haroshi can see and dispel them, but if we put them behind some rocks or something, will the area still extend past the rock? Because if you can Rune Trap some Destructive Waves, and invest some in me, and fragment another one, we could wipe a cone-shaped set of very surprised people off the face of Mount Mirrak, and fast.”
“It’s worth it to check out,” I said, then added: “later, when we’re under the cover of darkness.”
“Think we should go check on him again?” Cuby asked.
“Definitely,” I said. “I’m not sleeping until they’re camped, anyway.”
We both rose to go perch in the mouth of the crevice that led to our cave.
“Say,” said Cuby. “If nothing’s changed with Haroshi, will you tell me some human things? Stories about humans, I mean?”
I smiled. We might be waiting awhile. “Yeah, Cuby. I’ll tell you human things.”