"Release."
A wisp of red mist drifted from Caeden's lips as all the thorns forged from his Sharp shroud inverted. The center of the rose-shaped constructs folded outward into a spike, with all the petals fusing into the mass. Then they fired, exploding across the distance in a bout of instantaneous acceleration fuel by all the kinetic energy stored by their spinning.
Making contact with the Rock Trolls and Hairy Holes, they punched through, turning the monsters into gory examples of swiss cheese. Despite the damage, it took dozens of released thorns to put down each monster. Especially the Trolls. One unifying feature of all Troll variants was their durability. It manifested in different ways for every variant; sometimes they had tough skin or amazing regeneration. Rock Trolls were damage sponges. They could soak up hits without losing any functionality up until they died. So it wasn't surprising when one of the Trolls with three holes in its face continued to move until several more thorns eviscerated it.
When all the monsters flopped onto the group like puppets with cut strings, everyone relaxed. The screaming monster sounds had died off. They had managed to defeat all the nearby monsters that had come to this tunnel. Most likely, the ones that would have come through the blocked tunnels would show up later, but they had a moment to breathe, which they all desperately needed.
In the background, they could still hear the spectral Knights beating the sword ever deeper into the Heartstone, bit by bit. Taking a glance, Caeden saw that in the last ten or so minutes that they had been fighting all those monsters, the Knights had managed to get the sword down so that only about two feet of the blade were showing. That was roughly a third of what had originally been exposed. If the pace remained consistent, they had another twenty minutes before the sword reached its hilt.
"That was a bit rough near the end. It's a good thing we instituted so many emergency backups. We've only used a couple. This is going great so far." Lily commented, laying on a cloud to relax.
Caeden nodded. Erik acting as another tank and his massive collection of thorns had both been backup plans if they started to get overwhelmed. They had been lucky that only those two had been needed. Every emergency plan past those would take one of them out of the fight for several minutes if they became necessary. Essentially, if any further monster waves were bigger than the one they just fought, the team would have to start dipping into their true trump cards.
All of them waited to hear more hoards running toward them, but five minutes went by without them hearing a sound other than the hammering in the cavern. Caeden had been so convinced that another hoard would be only minutes away that he began to feel paranoid in the silence. That single wave couldn't have been everything, could it?
That's why he was almost relieved when the five-minute mark hit, and something happened. However, it wasn't another monster hoard. Instead, another pulse of light coursed through the orange veins all along the tunnel's walls.
"What was that?" Cat asked.
They all looked back at the Heartstone. The center of orange light set directly beneath the sword was glowing brighter than ever, visibly shifting and roiling as the power within it moved. Suddenly, a massive rush of energy came back into the cavern. The veins of light bulged and swelled as more power flowed toward the Heartstone than the team had ever seen move through them.
In the brief second it took for this all to transpire, Caeden noted that the sword only had a foot and a half of blade sticking out, officially marking the halfway point in their progress. Then the light beneath in the center of the Heartstone swelled to a blinding brilliance as a grinding of metal and stone echoed out.
The sword began to move up.
"What in the Shroud is it doing?!" Cat cried, watching their work slip away. "All my work!"
"All that energy…" Caeden muttered.
"Oh, that's…something." Lily seemed torn, mimicking Caeden's emotions.
"What is something?!" Cat shouted. "We just almost died to get that stupid sword in, and now it can just push it back? What are we supposed to do now?"
Caeden and Lily shook their heads simultaneously. "It couldn't just do that at will; otherwise, the Heartstone would have already removed the sword ages ago. It had to sacrifice something it didn't want to."
"Which can only really mean one thing," Lily added. "After all, the orange veins are just an expression of the energy the Heartstone is using for resurrection. If it had to recall a large portion of that power…"
"It must have delayed the resurrection. We're no longer only a few days out from the Magma Titan appearing." Caeden finished.
"Oh, so that's great!" Erik sighed. "That whole' sword coming out of the stone' thing had me worried."
“Weeeeeell…” Caeden drew the word out.
"What? What is it? I don't like that sound of that well." Cat stared a hole through Caeden's head.
"That wave of energy likely wasn't just to fuel the pushback against the sword." Lily sighed. "It was the same kind of wave that sent all the monsters here."
"So what? The monsters already came. How much worse could it get?" Erik asked.
Immediately, three heads whipped around. "Damn it, Erik!"
A hole burst through the floor of the cavern, spewing dirt into the room. Everyone immediately looked down into the face of three Crystal Moles, which retreated only to let a flood of monsters start charging into the chamber.
"Protect the Knights!" Caeden yelled, physically diving into the tunnel as Forged Infinity clicked and whirred, the dial spinning. Slamming a gauntletted fist into the face of a Rockbreaker Python, Caeden took it into the new tunnel with him.
He descended into a monster-infested nightmare. This tunnel contained just as many monsters as they had faced the first time, with none of the traps to stop them. This was exactly the situation they wanted to avoid. As quick as he could, Caeden laid into the mass as they attacked him with just as much gusto.
The damage mounted quickly as Caeden received dozens of bites and had a Python wrap around his leg, using its serrated scales to grind into his flesh for the brief seconds it took him to free up a moment to reach down and snap its spine. The body was left to hang around his bloody leg until it discorporated.
Caeden wasn't left to his own devices for long as a massive storm of sharp ice slivers rained down into the death pit the tunnel was becoming. Soon Erik was down there with him, firing off rapid punches and kicks, throwing monsters into each other, and generally causing chaos as he bound multiple monsters into angry balls and sent them careening deeper down.
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Just when Caeden thought they were getting a handle on it, two things happened. A Rock Troll shoved a fist up around a twist below him, and he heard another tunnel burst open somewhere else in the cavern above. Slamming a gauntlet into the reaching hand, Caeden yelled up above. "Cat, you're going to have to seal that tunnel alone!"
"Oh, come on!" Cat shouted back.
Caeden didn't have an opportunity to respond as an enraged Troll levered itself around the tunnel below to shove its face in his direction. Even so, he still heard Cat's next words.
"Spectral Army."
The cacophony of hundreds of booted feet stomped above as Cat went to war with a tunnel of monsters. Caeden had no doubt she would win, but any losses she sustained wouldn't be coming back any time soon. She would be tapped out on shroud for a while.
Knowing he had little time to deal with his own problems, Caeden shot a look at Erik as his tunnel diving companion punched a Wolf into another wolf while tying a Python in knots and kicking a Beetle in the antenna. "We need to alternate as the Trolls come up. One hit kills."
Erik just nodded, still intently focused on laying a smackdown into every monster that had the misfortune of being near him.
Caeden turned, clicking one of the internal buttons layered into his gauntlets. Shifting, the colors changed as purple and red grew more prominent, forming complicated swirling designs along his right gauntlet. Remorselessly, Caeden also used a mnemonic. "Strength Form."
His muscles bulged as large sections of his arms, legs, and chest became solid purple, following major muscle groups like his biceps and pecs. He slammed his fist down into an explosion of gore that was once a Troll's face. He hit the monster so hard its own skull eviscerated its bowels as it was propelled through the humanoid monster's guts.
The blast had a residual force that resonated out from the impact point in a cone downward into the tunnel, causing every monster mildly close to the Troll to lose chunks of their body as the force cone ripped through them. Deeper below and protected by the tightly packed bodies of their fellows, Wolves, Pythons, Beetles, and another Troll all began bleeding from every orifice. The Slimes simply burst apart under the raw pressure.
Deciding to make the most of the unintentional gap he had opened in the scrum of monster flesh charging up the steeply sloping tunnel, Caeden began slinging his fist as hard as he could with a shouted 'HA' accompanying every attack. His heavily reinforced blows produced massive, devastating Blade Waves.
That particular mnemonic scaled with the type of attack that produced it. Faster, smaller swings with something like a dagger would create small and fast line of red energy to cut into distant opponents. The full-body, maximum effort punches he was throwing now made for thick blasts of highly concentrated Sharp that tore chunks out of whatever they hit. The already bloody tunnel became soaked in even more monster ichor as bits and pieces of various varieties of nasty were flung about.
Through the storm of flying energy came a second Troll, near-blinded by the force wave from Caeden's attack flooding its eyes with blood and bursting capillaries. Before it could make it a few steps, Erik appeared in front of it. His movement was so fast it bordered on teleportation. Using that momentum and his own spring-stitch mnemonic, with a dash of Ki and martial arts, Erik slammed both fists into the guts of the Troll in an invisible blur that caused the charging figure to bend in half and fly backward as its intestines splattered out wetly from the hole that used to be its middle.
The wave carried on. Every effort they made was complicated by the fact that this tunnel, dug by three Crystal Moles working in tandem, was half-again the size of the natural one they guarded earlier. The total fifteen feet in diameter compared to the ten of the other one added up to make defending it infinitely harder. So many more monsters could fit through. Worst of all, the Trolls could comfortably come up two at once, which they did.
Caeden and Erik dropped bodies in hoards with the occasional heavy-hitting attack helping to mitigate the damage. However, both of them couldn't keep this up forever. Each was taking hits, and often. There were just too many monsters to go around. Some slipped through. Caeden had been bitten by everything imaginable and was covered head to toe in partially healed tooth marks.
They could both vaguely hear the other tunnel fight raging as the silent forces of Cat's specters held the ravening monsters at bay. Lily acted as overseer and tactical manager. She would jump in and out of both tunnels whenever a gap formed, covering for both sides. Her speed and wide variety of abilities made her perfect for the role. Caeden was the other option, but he could work his best buried hip deep in slowly discorperating monster guts.
That wasn't an exaggeration. They were killing so many monsters so fast that the bodies were starting to pile up. The corpses were starting to become a hazard of their own. Multiple times, Caeden barely managed to avoid slipping on a section of loose entrail or a blood-slicked bit of exoskeleton.
One thing became clear as the battle stretched on into its tenth minute. They were losing. Slowly but surely, the monsters pushed them back. They had to or risk being flanked and surrounded. Giving ground brought them ever closer to the cavern and the sword's suppressive effects that would almost certainly spell the end to this exercise in endurance.
Then a third tunnel opened.
Lily let out a battle cry, and the temperature in the tunnel and cavern above suddenly dropped from hundred of degrees to barely above freezing. The rapid change caused the rocks to crack and groan under the sudden compression that the shift caused.
Unable to resist, Caeden took the brief second he bought by hurling a broken Troll corpse deeper into the tunnel to take a look at what Lily had done. Peeking out of the tunnel and into the Heartstone chamber, Caeden could hardly believe his eyes.
Lily had sealed the third tunnel, Crystal Moles and all, in a giant glacier that stuck ten feet out of the ground. She had collapsed on the ground, having used every last ounce of shroud in one massive move. Caeden could appreciate the sacrifice. There was no way they could handle a third opening. Lily had sealed it and guaranteed no more were coming all at once, at the expense of leaving herself vulnerable for the long minutes it would take her to regain a decent amount of shroud.
Essentially, Lily had just saved all their lives by solving a problem in a way only she could while placing immense trust in the three of them to protect her while she recovered.
"Lily probably just ended this outright," Caeden yelled to Erik over the cacophony of monsters raging down the tunnel. "She froze up that tunnel and the Crystal Moles with it. They can't make any more tunnels."
"Sweet!" Erik cheered, slamming a fist wrapped in Stitch into the ribs of a Troll. The white thread blasted out, wrapping up its body and pinning it for a brief moment before it ripped free. That instant was long enough for Erik to leap up and slam both palms of his hands into the sides of its skull with an echoing impact that sounded louder than the blow should indicate.
{Resonating Pool}
The Troll's face rippled like water before bursting bloodily, its eyes ejecting from the sockets. The monster slumped over, already starting to discorporate.
"Man, we are gonna be rich when we get out of here. Have you seen how much ether these guys are dropping?" Erik laughed.
Caeden had indeed noticed how much ether and magical materials had been collecting on the ground in the remains of all the monsters they killed, but he was more concerned with the still living ones. After all, their time down here in the depths of Black reach had already netted the team a vast wealth in all kinds of valuable items from the monsters they had killed. What was in front of them was far and away the most he had seen at once but was probably less than what they had gathered over the week.
"Stay focused. It's not like we know this is ov-" Caeden started to chastise Erik even though he knew the effort was mostly pointless when he heard the sound of metal scraping against stone, louder than he'd ever heard before. "Oh, no."
Caeden looked at Erik, not really seeing him. He was focused entirely on the sound, trying to pinpoint it. The origin wasn't further below them in this tunnel, but it didn't sound like it came from the mess that Cat was handling with her specters. That only left…
"We forgot about the original tunnel!" Caeden gasped. They had been so focused on dealing with the newly created entrances that no one had remained to handle anything coming down the natural tunnel. "Erik, I need you to hold this tunnel alone. I don't know how long."
"Yeah, yeah." Erik casually waved a hand partially soaked in discorperating monster gore. "I'm not a baby; I'll manage."
Caeden frowned. Sometimes it was hard to tell how much of his friend's nonchalance was an act or if he was just that arrogant. "Just… Be careful."
With no more time for words of caution, Caeden jumped the short distance up the lip of stone that separated the heavily sloping and twisting Crystal Mole tunnel from the Heartstone cavern. He charged the natural tunnel, seeing the largest horde of Ash Reapers he'd ever encountered just starting to turn the corner.
He would have to hold them all alone.