As Moriko’s bout was about to begin, Mordecai felt on edge. He knew better than most that she would be perfectly safe from a long-term, physical point of view, but he also knew that contractors did not get the same adjustment to their instincts about death that inhabitants did. If something lethal did happen to her, the experience could be traumatic despite the dawn revival.
Her opening gambit made him want to laugh even as he sent a mental grumble her way about obligating him like that. Mordecai didn’t actually mind, and she knew it, but it was an expected part of the game. It also made him feel relieved, as with Takehiko off the board accidents were less likely all around.
It was worse than Shizoku’s analysis made it to be, really. The closer you wanted to run a fight where you were dealing with multiple power gaps, the more chances there were for something to go wrong. And Moriko would have needed a lot of support to actually push Takehiko since a team of five-tails should be capable of clearing a dungeon’s tenth floor.
Even with that change of dynamics, he worried. It was an insidious whisper in his heart, and he knew its source, so he ruthlessly squashed it. Mordecai had lost a lot when the village he’d created had been destroyed, and it still affected him. This was exactly why he was going to push Kazue and Moriko to go traveling and experience the world as soon as Kazue could form a fully invested avatar. He did not want to smother them with protectiveness, and refused to let his own irrational issues hinder them in any way.
When the fight eventually ended, Mordecai could finally relax. “I’ll be right back with our wife, love.” He said to Kazue, kissing her before shifting his avatar to Moriko’s position, drawing her up into his arms and giving her a lingering kiss as he manipulated his shadow to remove the bullet. And then held the kiss a moment longer as he used the contact as a channel to cast a healing prayer. It was hardly necessary, but it was fun. And the whimper she’d allowed herself when he cleared her wound was strangely cute, because he was pretty certain she’d not have allowed herself to make that sound if she wasn’t giving herself over to his care.
It was a type of trust to let herself be that vulnerable to him, and he appreciated it more than he could articulate. Even more touching was that he was pretty certain she hadn’t considered what she was doing. Mordecai was in a good mood as he carried his wife across the lake and toward the exit for the floor.
Then his core was distracted by an odd eddy of mana in the feast hall, and he’d barely had time to lock onto what he quickly identified as a scrying sensor before there was a sensation of piercing violation and fourteen people suddenly appeared in the hall. Even in his moment of shock, Mordecai made a quick count: six in heavy armor, five more in light armor, and three in battle robes, about human size and proportion, and roughly even gender mix. As he started swinging Moriko down to her feet, he mentally labeled them as Heavies, Scouts, and Mages.
“ASSAULT! Protect the core!” He mentally shouted across all his connections, then shifted his avatar into the feast hall, trusting that Moriko would figure out what to do. Mordecai was about to be very busy.
The attackers had appeared in a half circle, with mages in the center and their backs against a wall. This didn’t go as well for them as they had planned, and Enki’s fist erupted from the wall to grab one of the mages around the waist and drag her up against the stone. The elemental couldn’t just submerge her like he could for himself, but he could apply pressure. The woman screamed in pain as the others nearby turned toward this threat to start tearing at the wall or attacking Enki’s fist directly.
“Protect and clear the guests from here, but don’t interfere with Takehiko, Akahana, or Ricardo. Isolate and observe those three guardsmen.” His core snapped the command out while manifesting his avatar, then despawned Zushi and respawned the void rabbit near the ceiling, to the edge of but directly above the intruders, and let the massive raid boss fall toward their foes.
Mordecai’s avatar focused on calling forth his Eidolon, Shenlong, and the dragon-form summons appeared in front of the group with an explosive blast. Zushi landed on one of the heavies at about the same time, half absorbing and half crushing the man, who was shouting and struggling still as the pressure began pulling him into Zushi’s void while the prolonged contact started sapping at his life energy.
Despite the speed of Mordecai’s counterattack, the invaders were responding quickly as well. The grappled mage was managing to manifest a corrosive aura on her hand to try and melt Enki’s fist enough to escape, and the other two mages were doing the same while two of the heavies had closed in to chop at Enki’s wrist.
Two of the remaining heavies moved to flank Shenlong as soon as they had recovered from the blast, while the last heavy and two scouts moved to assault Zushi. This went less than well for one of them as a scout thrust her blade toward Zushi’s eyes, only to have the void rabbit open his mouth wide instead of flinching, and her blade and arm disappeared into the darkness of his maw. When she jerked back, the woman shouted in horror: most of her arm was missing, and the end of her stump was withered, gray flesh. Zushi wasn’t playing nice.
The remaining three scouts were seemingly abandoning their companions and headed toward the back of the room, where the entrance to the private chambers was. It seemed clear that they were tasked with locating the core, and then they would all attack it. There was some small chance that the mages were going to try to subdue the dungeon instead, but that seemed foolish if they were here because of who Mordecai was.
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The scouts were interrupted by several figures rushing out from the back, as that was where Kazue, her parents, and the two sixth-floor bosses had been. Mordecai shouted, “Akahana! Sensor!” and had his core light up a sphere where the nigh invisible probe floated, slowly headed in the same direction as the scouts had been. The druid narrowed her eyes angrily, then spat out a magic dispersing spell at the highlighted area. The sensor shuddered under the assault and then popped out of existence.
Mordecai might have been able to do it himself, but Akahana was the more powerful spellcaster right now, and there was no room for error. He winced in pain as Shenlong exchanged blows with the two Heavies, as eidolons were not independent summons and drew on the life force of their conjurer to sustain themselves. His avatar gave a mental command causing Shenlong to turn toward Zushi and let loose a cloud of dark energy, catching the enemies in between them while leaving the void bunny unharmed, then charged into the fray himself, using a spell-strike to surround his fist in a flickering chromatic aura right before he struck the heavy that was assaulting Shenlong.
The aura flashed into orange, corrosive magic that ate at the man’s armor and flesh, and as he fought Mordecai continued coordinating the battle. “Kazue, get your mom to the entrance so she can try to find the mage who cast the scrying spell, but tell her to retreat if things look difficult.” He was pretty certain that he had a rough idea of how the scrying sensor was activated directly in the hall, but teleporting fourteen people through a dungeon’s territory was still a difficult feat.
The three scouts that had been heading toward the back were now engaged with Ricardo, Jasi, and Kulle. Jasi had shifted into her naga form and cast a slowing spell on her target before attempting to wrap him in her coils, but the kelpie chose to keep his human form and focus on his water magic. He’d encased one of the scout’s heads in a bubble of water, and she was attacking him with wild desperation, but the water also made it harder for her to see. Still, she’d managed to land a couple of shallow slices, and Jasi was sporting a few small injuries as well.
Ricardo’s target was fairing the least well of the three scouts, his leather armor sagging slightly from being sliced by the man’s daggers, and the wounds Ricardo had inflicted were bleeding freely while the scout’s flesh started turning an inflamed red from poison. Mordecai’s next command went out to the bunkin and rabkin. “Capture, strip, and then tend to any invaders who fall. We want prisoners.”
As Kazue led her mother to the shortcut to the first floor, Mordecai’s core pulled Klastoria into the battle, placing the slime boss approximately halfway between the scouting group and the primary group. While a dungeon couldn’t generally spawn its creatures adjacent to outsiders, the hall was big enough to give him some flexibility. The giant slime turned her attention toward the larger group and lashed out with acidic, crystal-tipped tendrils at the two who had been assaulting Shenlong.
Enki had been forced to release his grip before he lost his hand, and had fully emerged from the wall, but his attack had at least distracted the mages while Mordecai had worked on breaking the formation protecting them. The dungeon was gaining momentum in its counterattack, and now Moriko burst into the room, followed shortly by Takehiko. The monk went straight for the three scouts while Takehiko focused on the mages next to Enki, casting a spell that sent three searing rays of fire at the group, one for each of them.
There was some confusion and panic from the enemy mages as they found themselves in a far more compromised situation than they had anticipated. One of them launched a lightning spell that assaulted Enki and then chained to Zushi, Shenlong, Mordecai, and Klastoria, while another one narrowly missed Takehiko with a green ray of energy that disintegrated the table behind him instead. Mordecai hissed at the pain as the electricity scorched his avatar’s flesh, but he was more worried about Takehiko. “Watch yourself, these guys are strong!” Both of those spells were a rank higher than any of the spells at Takehiko’s command.
The third mage, the woman who had been assaulted by Enki, had focused on the earth elemental instead of their other attacks, assaulting Enki’s mind with an attempt to dominate him. Enki was able to resist, but only with a struggle that left him momentarily stunned.
The heavy that Mordecai had assaulted turned to hack at him with an axe, but suddenly twisted and fell to the floor with a shout of surprised pain instead. Mordecai blinked in surprise at the dagger that had been thrust into the man’s foot, trying to figure out what had just happened. He was fairly certain that the attack had been made from Shenlong’s shadow, but with the full attention of both his core and avatar on this room, it should have been almost impossible for anyone to cloak themselves in shadows deeply enough to hide from him, especially given his boons as a priest of Ozuran.
Almost impossible.
But he did have one friend who was quite capable of it, and that friend had the most interesting sort of luck. A shark-like grin spread across Mordecai’s face, and his morale was only improved as several feathered serpents swooped in through the entrance from the sixth floor, and more were on their way.
Bunkin and rabkin were also swarming into the surrounding spaces, ready to support or attack as needed. The warrens had to reach this far if the laganthros were going to be able to play host for their guests and serve food, so they had all the access they needed to bypass the main halls and get into position.
Their attackers had been planning on taking advantage of the recent sixth-floor fight, anticipating that some of the strongest bosses wouldn’t be available, or at least be badly injured, and they had intended to crush through the dungeon’s defenses while they searched for the core. Whoever had set this plan in motion hadn’t had enough information about the dungeon’s guests, nor understood all the advantages of a dual-core dungeon, and had no way to guess what the interaction of Mordecai’s expertise with Kazue’s need for a more normal looking social situation would do to the less visible parts of the dungeon’s layout.