“Hold there!” John called out over the wall, turning back to the other two. Blinking, he realised George had vanished. “Uh.. okay, Miri could you grab a couple sticks out of the fire? Something torch-like.”
“Sure.” She answered easily, walking to the fire with no rush in her step. John envied her calm, for he himself was growing more anxious by the second. Of course there were more people, he had known that as soon as the dialogue of survivors had opened when they had first arrived here. Stupidly, he realised he had never expected to come across any. He berated himself: Of course they would, it was only a matter of time. Humans were curious, social creatures.
Miriam returned, cradling the makeshift torches, while John scrambled up a branch to peer over the thick trunk. He brandished his torch, thrusting it into the light-starved night. The figure beyond the wall remained elusive, hooded and just beyond the torch’s reach. The stick with the white fabric had vanished. “Who are you, and what do you want?” John demanded.
“My name is Singh,” the voice replied, tinged with an accent that betrayed English as a second language. “I seek shelter. Please, kind sir, allow me passage.”
John hesitated, firing off more questions. “Alone, or do you have companions?”
“Only me. My family—they were lost the day before.” Singh’s words came in a rush, his form shifting but refusing to step into the light.
“What I wouldn’t give for a flashlight… Listen buddy, you mind moving forward a bit? I can’t see you barely at all.”
Singh shuffled back and forth on his feet again. “Ah… but no, I cannot. Apologies, good sir, but I’m not sure of your intentions.”
John frowned, peering into the darkness around the stranger. “Yea, well, same buddy. Let me talk with our guards for a second.”
“I shall wait as long as I must.” The well-spoken man settled and stopped shifting, and John turned back to Miriam.
“Thoughts?”
“He’s full of shit.” Miriam said with confidence.
“Uh…”
“Listen, the man lost his,” Miriam mimed air quotes, “‘family’ just yesterday. Now he’s using their memory as a guilt-trip to breach our defences. Ask to see his wedding ring. Either he’s a grieving psychopath or a perpetual liar, but either way, don’t let him in.”
“He’s clearly suffering.” John retorted.
“Is it clear? Huh. I thought it was dark as shit and we couldn’t see anything.” She scoffed. “John, you can’t have a bleeding heart for people. Not a day ago we were almost killed by wolves. My fiancee is missing. Our healer is missing. Our wall isn’t done. The-”
Their exchange was cut short by the dull thud of an object striking the earth beyond the wall. John clambered atop the barrier to investigate.
Singh regarded the bloodied pelt at his feet with bewilderment.
“Take it and go.” A voice called harshly from the treetops.
Startled, Singh recoiled as his hood fell away, revealing a visage marked by alarm. “You move with the silence of the grave! May I—”
A soft twang resonated, and an arrow embedded itself ominously close to Singh's feet. “Take it if you want. Food. Water. A cloth to use as a blanket. One more step closer though, and the next one finds your favourite limb.”
Singh grabbed the bundle and scampered into the forest. Minutes later, George descended from the canopy, his expression grim.
John rounded on him, noting absently that Miriam didn’t appear to be backing him up. “What the hell, man? You could have shot that guy.”
George scoffed, catching Nimbus in his arms as the cat jumped up. “Probably should have. Prick.”
John’s disbelief grew, but Miriam’s question cut through. “What did you find?”
George looked pleased with himself, and he could almost imagine Nimbus putting on smug airs as well. “A few trees back, Singh left his sword hanging. Too alert for someone on a two-day journey with no sleep. Cloak, boots, vambraces, sword—the man had four possessions.”
“Meaning he had four items, not three. I wonder which he took?” Miriam pondered, and John couldn’t believe her either.
“Where’s your humanity? Trauma does weird things and so does shock, he could very well be about to collapse but look wide awake. He left his sword behind, which should be a sign of wanting to be diplomatic, and he could’ve gotten the extra item from his dead famil-”
“His class was Con Artist.” George provided, his smugness rising to a crescendo.
John stopped, worked his jaw, and eventually set it with a frown. “You could’ve led with that. Either way, I say we spend the night building the wall higher. I thought it was good, but actually having someone on the other side and imagining the wall being our defences, I was disappointed.”
A few minutes of lamenting and argument ensued, and soon the three got to sharpening branches, making fires, and digging trenches.
----------------------------------------
“Asshole tried to shoot me!” Singh exclaimed, accent gone and English fluent. The Swashbuckler/Con Artist was particularly grumpy. His class features hadn’t failed him yet, so this was a major annoyance.
“Rich of you to call someone else an asshole.” The dirty man said darkly.
Singh scoffed. “Okay Jacob, whatever helps you sleep at night. Oh wait. That’s me. I help you sleep by doing all the dirty work.”
Jacob rolled his eyes in the darkness. “Whatever. What’s the situation?”
Singh fell out of the banter and gave a proper report.“They’re missing their healer and some dude named Mitchell, but I couldn’t get any class info out of the guy I was talking to. Either he’s high level, or has some ability to hide his details. They have some sort of archer that was hiding in the trees like Zeke does, and there was another person behind the wall but I didn’t get a look at them. They tried to lie and say they had guards, but my Instinct triggered on that so I bet it’s just the three of them.”
The woman with the spear groaned as she got to her feet. “5 against 3 seems like our win-”
“Four.” Singh interrupted darkly. “Four against Three.”
Jacob felt the tension in the air thicken. Singh’s late wife had been with them when they entered the Tutorial, and had gotten some sort of Priest class that had allowed her to heal their wounds. She’d been killed by a trap laid out by another group and they had been forced to leave her body behind to evade the ambush. “It’s been a long day. I’m sure Kyla didn’t do it on purpose.”
Singh rubbed his cloak between his fingers. In the darkness, it was very hard to see that it was spattered with blood. “Alright. An hour to let them fall back into security and then we go. Where’s Zeke?”
“Where do you think?” Kyla muttered. “Hunting.”
----------------------------------------
“One ant, two ant, red ant, blue ant!” Mitchell grunted rhythmically as he faced off against another pair of majors, smashing mandibles aside with his shield and doing his best to not be bowled over by their charges.
For her part, Sarah was hitting him consistently with cleaning and adrenaline spells, targeting actual wounds as they appeared. “You best hope you didn’t just summon red and blue ants!”
“I ain’t gonna be no summoner!” Mitchell called out, finally getting one ant in between him and the other. In the seconds of having only one opponent, he dashed forwards, swaying aside from the mandibles and hammering away at the front leg with the edge of his shield. The dent in the shield grew, to Mitchells growing dismay, but the attack tore the leg free from its socket. He pushed back before the two reset their formation, and the dance began again, sans one leg.
“You ain’t nothing yet!” Sarah called back, her nerves slightly settled. She wasn’t sure if it was the constant forward motion, the steadily growing difficulty of the ants, or the fact that she hadn’t once seen Mitchell doubting his course. Whatever the cause, she was steady, and was almost starting to find it fun. She was there to look for problems, and when problems came up, she solved them using a combination of her spells. It was like getting hit with a puzzle every 30 seconds or so, and she was getting much better at solving them.
“Well that’s just rude- owowOW!” Mitchell started screaming as his caught leg was slowly crushed by the mandibles. For the second time, Sarah ran forwards and whacked the ant across the antennae with her staff, fracturing one and causing the ant to rear back with a squeal of pain. She ran back before the second ant could avenge its disoriented brother.
“Do that thing again!” Sarah called out as the second ant ignored Mitchell and followed her.
“I don’t know how!” He called back, limping his way through the fight.
A minute of running in circles - ants couldn’t turn well at high speeds - and another minute of healing and cleaning Mitchell later, and two more carcasses decorated the ground of this odd, arbitrary cave system. The pair sat atop the relatively intact one for a brief moment of silence to catch their breath, and Mitchell coughed drily as Sarah started to work on his leg wound. The itching feeling of muscle reknitting was incredibly uncomfortable, so he sought distraction through conversation.
“I think I’m gonna make sure to carry water from now on.”
Sarah looked over at him incredulously. “That’s your take on this?”
He shrugged. “Yea, I guess? I mean, I don’t think we’ll come across a cave full of ants again, but another dungeon isn’t impossible.” He let out a hiss as the surface of the wound closed up. “Ugh that feels so weird.”
With a final cleaning spell, Sarah let out a breath. “I feel that. Mana doesn’t make any sense. I feel… well, beat down, like I just spent a long day at a crappy job.”
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“Wanna take a quick break to recharge?” Mitchell offered.
She slumped in relief. “Oh thank goodness. You had me thinking you were just going to keep going and going and going.”
He shrugged again in response. “You aren’t wrong, but that doesn’t mean I need to be stupid about pushing myself. If it were just me, I’d likely have fallen long before now, so I recognize that we need to keep at our best.” He pulled at the tattered fabric of his cloak. “I could give my gear a bit of time, too.”
“Huh?”
Mitchell unstrapped his shield and held it out so she could see. “You see that dent in the front edge there?”
She had to really look, but she eventually saw where the rolled steel had bent inwards. “Sure..?”
“It was bigger in the last chamber. My systemized gear is fixing itself. A couple tears in my cloak have mended, too.”
With excitement, Sarah checked on her First Aid kit that she barely had to use anymore, but it hadn’t replenished anything. “Not mine.”
Mitchell hummed. “It might just be armour, which would kind of make sense from a game design standpoint…”
They fell into a silence for a moment before they urged their tired bodies to the next chamber. Quickly, they dashed into the chamber and took cover behind a rock outcropping.
A new sight awaited them. This chamber was much bigger, and much more full than the others. Across the left wall, a deep pit stretched down into the darkness, an incredibly steep ramp switching back and forth across the grade. In a procession moving up the ramp, worker ants travelled with small globules of what Mitchell knew as food, with a warrior positioned every so often as if to guard the procession.
Against the right wall was a series of small recesses that appeared like the ones they had seen previously filled with the liquid food, but they were instead stuffed with the corpses of dead worker ants, with a few majors.
Taking up the entirety of the far wall was a massive archway carved with some sort of relief that was impossible to make out from the distance, but standing before the archway were a trio of smaller red ants that guarded their own procession of smaller workers.
Giant Fire Ant Worker (Minor)
Level 5
Giant Fire Ant Worker (Major)
Level 7
The black ants approached the archway and presented the food to the trio of red ants, who would then transfer it over to one of their own fire ants. A particularly small ant approached with a small globule of food.
It dropped the food before the red ants and almost appeared to shake, then violence erupted. The trio of ants darted forwards, mandibles clacking furiously, and two of the ants held the large black worker still as the third moved forwards and clamped its mandibles on the workers front leg, shearing it off with a spurt of the insectile blood the pair had grown intimately familiar with.
Not a second later, the leg was discarded and the red ant reared back and with a slam onto the ground, a gout of fire erupted from between its mandible. A hideous screeching sound erupted from the injured ant as its wound was cauterised and the surrounding chitin burnt. Almost disdainfully, the two that were holding it still lifted it up, and cast its still twitching body down into the pit.
Searching, they could see many of the carpenter workers were injured - a missing leg here, a half-antenna there, a burst eye bringing up the rear. Sarah held back revulsion. Mitchell held back unbounded curiosity that was only exacerbated when one of the fire ant workers picked up the leg and shoved it into the nearest alcove with space.
See, he’d recently done some research on carpenter ants, which was how he knew about the acid spit. Their house had an infestation, in the pre-System time, and no matter what they had done, it had been impossible for them to locate or destroy the colony.
Until they used the delayed action poison. The ants would bring back the food the trio had laid out, and gradually share it with the hive. Rich in all the things ants like, they would send more workers to collect more food and bring it back, but then about a month later the ants would start getting sick. The queen would become infertile, and the colony would die out slowly and terribly.
What a carpenter ant would never do, under any circumstance, is give away collected food. Nevermind that, but give away collected food to another hive of a different species that looked like they were performing a combined eugenics-farming program on the hive.
The two tucked back behind the rock outcropping.
“Too many.” Mitchell agreed with her before she had even spoke. She’d seen about 15 carpenters on top of the three fire ants, so she agreed.
“Yea…” She let out as her brain tried to solve this puzzle. She could try to heal the ants, but they appeared largely healed, save for the one she’d seen cast into the pit. Even then, would they help her get through the arch, or just run away?
“Well, hold on. For once, we have a situation we can exploit.”
She sighed. “You know, I’m starting to realise I didn’t really know you that well?”
“You’re just realising that now?” Mitchell snarked, but in a tone that she knew he was joking.
“Be a little serious, please.” She retorted, trying to keep the irritation out of her voice. “I’m just saying that I know what John would do here. I can guess about George, and to a degree Miriam as well. John would want to save the carpenter ants from whatever is going on here, so he’d probably go fight the fire ants.”
Mitchell shook his head. “We’d be screwed if any minors joined in on that fight. Three versus one is already difficult without them being two more levels up and able to spit fire.”
“I know.” Sarah admitted. “George, at least with his new class, would find somewhere they can’t reach him and shoot arrows until everything here was dead. Then he’d stay for a bit to find out which tasted best.”
“Fair, but we don’t have any ranged options. I bet it's the fire-ants. They look spicy.”
Sarah bit back a giggle. “Miriam would want to set up some elaborate ambush, possibly collapsing part of the cave or forcing the workers down so we could slip by.”
Mitchell raised an eyebrow. “Wow. Wait until you hear my plan: It’ll blow your mind.”
Five minutes later, they started. The crippled warrior agreed with the thoughts that Sarah had shared, because all of them had been ideas he’d had as well while he watched the maiming of the carpenter ant. However, he was here to exploit, not solve, and so saving the ants didn’t occur to him. Helping them revolt, on the other hand, was a bit more possible.
With that in mind, Mitchell dashed into the chamber, Sarah hot on his heels and already weaving the starts of several spells. They were quickly spotted by the ants, and rather than the usual response, the fire ants let out a screech and skittered forward, while the carpenter ants scattered down into the pit.
The lead fire ant reared back and briefly, the image of his own flailing, burning body flickered across Mitchell’s imagination, but he pushed through. That would only happen if he failed and there was no time to think about failure when it was the moment for action.
Sarah couldn’t help him. She dashed past the burgeoning battle, spinning out of the way of a flicking leg. The fire ant crept closer, then with a squeal it was yanked scrambling back. “Go, go go! I can’t keep this up for-!” Mitchell roared in pain, shaking out his smouldering pant leg. Sarah managed to slip an Adrenal Rush and Calm Mind on him, only realising a beat later that those spells might conflict, but then she was past the skirmish and dashing for the food alcove.
Mitchell frantically patted out his pant leg, absently taking a step back out of the range of the mandibles of the next attacker only to have it keep charging and slam its head into his chest in an impact that drained the breath from his lungs.
With a panicked step he retreated back, trying to suck in a breath, but then the panic left his mind and he dropped his foot an inch short of the pit's edge. With fire running through his veins, his roar of pain morphed into one of anger and he pushed forwards, keeping an ant between him and whichever of them was readying their fire.
Sarah didn’t see how her Calm Mind spell had saved Mitchell from a terrible fall, as she was grabbing bits and pieces of ant and throwing them into the pit. After she had emptied the first alcove, some sort of signal passed between the remaining fire ants and they turned away from Mitchell as one. Taking the opportunity, he grabbed one lagging leg and dragged the ant back, spinning and throwing it into the pit. It screeched on the way down, then a thump signalled its landing and the screeching got more and more frantic until suddenly, it cut off.
Sarah was too busy dodging at this point to notice. She scrambled back and away from a set of swinging legs, shoved her staff in between her and a set of scissoring mandibles, and then fell over in a panic when she saw one of the ants rear up and prepare to fire.
“Up, up, up!” Mitchell shouted at her, coming in at speed and bodily slamming against the one that had prepared to cook her alive. The force of his impact slammed both him and the creature into the wall.
The ant didn’t let up, tilting its head down to where Mitchell pressed its thorax against the stone and unleashing a gout of fire. Lifting his shield to block the brunt of it, Mitchell still let out another shout as his cloak caught aflame. She heard a sizzling sound that made her sick to her stomach, and would have traded every spell in her arsenal for a Stop That Poor Man Burning spell in an instant.
The fire sputtered out, a few stray sparks floating from the ants mouth, and Sarah waited for it to fall and eat Mitchells body.
The ant fell, and Mitchell collapsed to a knee, panting and sobbing in rasping agony. His shield glowed cherry red, and he held his handless arm away from his body to keep the hot metal away from himself, the sizzling of his arm gradually fading. A black mandible clattered to the ground from his hand, followed soon after by a spray of blood from the ants thorax.
Sarah couldn’t spare the time to help him, for her own enemy had pressed its assault. She was smart and managed to slip around it when it tried to roast her, and the fire splashed ineffectually against the cave wall. She swung her staff with all her might at the thing's face, and her staff bonked off with an almost comical sound.
Her heart dropped at the result and she almost dropped with it. This was it. She’d been stupid to follow Mitchell on his suicide mission and now she’d end up - what, burnt to death? Chopped up into bits to be eaten later? Her mind flashed to John, his easy grin and strong body a solace in her growing panic.
She breathed a quick, hitched breath of realisation, and hit the ant with the staff again, remembering what she and Miriam had been working on.
“Inverting an effect isn’t as easy as it might seem.” Miri had explained, even as her eyes flicked across the book’s words - symbols? Sarah couldn’t read the tome, no matter how she tried, so it didn’t matter. “WIth something like a levitation spell, it’s not as simple as countering it with a downwards force. The levitation spell has multiple components that all come together to create a cohesive effect. It would take me 13 differing arrays to cast that spell - and don’t even get me started on how often that number comes up - yet a force mage could cast it as one of their most basic abilities. Do you know why?”
Sarah lay on her back, panting. “No.” She spat, her Mana exhausted as low as she could get it without passing out.
“Because it accounts for everything! Gravity, wind, air pressure, everything! I could cast it with 12 arrays, and it would gradually accelerate towards that mountain over there, because one of those arrays takes into account the momentum of the spinning planet!” She’d said excitedly. “Yet instead of those arrays, I’m starting to understand a force mage would just cast it, like you do with your own spells.”
“Inverting, though?” Sarah knew, at least, that she had to have some sort of offensive ability. If she were caught out without her party, even by a single wolf, she’d be done for.
Miriam slapped the book shut. “Sure. We just need to design an inverse array for each aspect of one of your spells, then sequence them in the proper order with the proper conduits. That should leave us with just radii to do by trial and error, but that shouldn’t change the effect too much. Which spell do you want to start with? I think I need to know more before I can finish that regen spell, anyways.”
Sarah vaguely recalled the ‘arrays’ that Miriam talked about, but she never saw anything when she cast her spells. Sometimes, if she really focussed, she could see the faintest of a warm glow when she cast, but it was easy to miss.
What she could do, which Miriam had claimed as unfair, was feel the various eddies and whirls of the energy within her own body. How it gathered, warm and soothing in her stomach before flowing out her arm along the bones and through the staff. She could feel the way that the magic was shaped, how she drew in the ambient energy and flavoured it to work with her own spells.
So she just… did it in reverse. Where before it would swirl counterclockwise in her wrist, now she had it swirl clockwise. Where it would travel through various points in her body that did something to it, she reversed the order. The more the spell progressed, the more wrong it felt, but she held on and continued casting, hoping against hope that it would work.
When her staff impacted, the build up of energy spiked into the chitinous form of the ant and she let herself gain a savage grin. I did it, She thought to herself, it worked. That was all she had time for before she staggered, a wave of MP leaving her body. She would later find that her inverted version of Skeletal Mending, called Breaker of Bones by the System, cost many magnitudes more MP than its more benign version. Especially when it was cast at the entire skeletal structure of a giant creature.
An ant fell to pieces in front of two prone forms with its own last thoughts being those of confusion and panic. It had always had such a strong exoskeleton.