The stalemate that the birds created managed to keep the adventuring party mostly in the same area, though it had rapidly devolved into a charnel pit of avian corpses. They were mounding up and leaving the adventurers fighting in a vague crater of bird bodies, with higher piles surrounding them. All the information was relayed second hand, as when Malcom had received the first report from the Crowforged he had sent out about the low number yet high skill of the intruders, he organized a rotation where the Crowforged periodically sent out recurring troops to check on the progress of the fight every few minutes.
It was the only way Malcom could get reliable intelligence, as even though he felt a connection with the tainted land that surrounded his dungeon's entrance, he still couldn't perceive anything besides positioning his viewpoint at the cavern entrance and staring out into the blurriness. If anything, his vision was actively worse than before now that almost everything was a uniform black, making it hard to determine shapes in the distance. The Mechanical and Crowforged troops had thoroughly spread through the tunnels below by this point, and he was in the middle of debating sending them out to join the assault.
The confines of the dungeon would work in the intruders' favor, as it would be harder to gang up on their small number with the narrow passages he had created. On the other hand, if he kept his troops back until they started pressing in, he hoped he could trap them with bodies and overwhelming numbers. One could argue he had overplayed his hand the moment the Picantch started swarming, but that had happened due to his standing orders. Nothing he could do about it now but use it as a chance to gather intelligence.
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The fighting had stretched on for minutes, then an hour, then two. The adventurers were growing more and more frustrated, and while they still took no physical damage... it was hard not to feel a psychological effect of endless birds and the chaotic noise of the fight for so long. "If this place has so many birds, I'm starting to see why they couldn't send anyone else in! When we get out of this, I don't think I'll be able to so much as think about eating chicken for a month." The hulking figure of Manfred joked out with his teammates, not even sounding winded.
Truth be told, they had almost become accepting of the birds assault, and were putting a lot less effort into doing more than keeping them away from their faces while they tried to plan a way through the situation. Flint chimed up in a shout that barely made it above the chaotic noise, looking at their mage, "Are they enough of a nuisance you're going to get off your fat magical ass and do something about this yet? You're the one with the best wide-range attack potential here!"
Rather than respond immediately, Noel pulled out a blue-hued, glowing flask of liquid and handed it to the thief. "Be ready to pour this down my throat in a moment. Rodney, protection from fire on the party, if you would." The mostly-bald figure complied, holding his necklace's pendant forward and aiming it at each member of the party in turn with a murmured chant. An orange hue came to life, flickering across the group's members, "Ready!"
Flint tucked the bottle he had been given into one of his pouches, and promptly gave up any form of offense to stick his fingers in his ears, hunching down into a crouch to make himself a smaller target. While not as exaggerated, the other members struck a defensive stance, while Noel brandished his staff above him as if holding a lightning rod to the skies. If the gemstone had been shining before, now it began to glow like a second sun. The smell of burnt feathers was starting to linger in the air as the Picantch closest to the mage began to burst into flame from the mere build-up of energy the spell was forming.
Noel's body paled even more than his natural hue, and he wavered in place, dumping every last ounce of mana he could muster into the spell. Considering he was arguably one of the greatest fire mages in the region, this was quite a lot. With a short flourish of a pointing forward gesture and a shout of "Maximized Meteoric Strike!", the staff slammed the gemstone into the ground like a mace. Rather than shatter, a blast of wind and fire burst outward from the point of impact. An intense blast of dirt, plants, and birds burst away from the area even before the heat of the blast wave could hit.
The next moment, all flying debris immediately was reduced to ash, that ash burst into flame itself, and was practically evaporated from existence. Picantch, sword-grass, the mutant trees, everything aside from four straightening figures of the adventurers rising had been blasted to the ground. If one were to look at the blighted area of the altered lands from a birds-eye view, it now had an off-centered circle blasted into it, making it resemble a crescent moon. Everything in that circle was reduced to charred, blackened earth that was glowing like coals in a hearth.
Flint released a low whistle, plucking the blue-glowing potion from his pocket and promptly pushing the bottle to the mage's lips, forcefully feeding it to him. "Remind me not to make you angry, at least before you've spent all your mana." He joked. Noel, after his part, had hit the ground after his display of magical might, and had a miniscule amount of color return to his face after the potion's effects kicked in. Rodney stepped forward and gave a murmured blessing of "Restoration" and "Replenishment", and in mere moments the completely spent mage was standing up and looking nearly as ready for combat as before, albeit with more sweat upon his brow.
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"Let's get moving. We've got a core to smash, and I'm going to enjoy this one slightly more than the rest, I imagine."
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Marcus didn't need a scout to tell him what had happened with that burst of fire, as all the birds he had built up over a matter of hours of dedicated attention were removed from the battle in a single instant. Sure, there were a few left in the tunnels that hadn't made their way to the surface yet, but he would have to hold back for a while to amass the numbers he had been sending at the adventuring party. If he didn't send enough, they would just be ignored or swatted from the skies as they could flow into the battle.
In truth, a rising sense of panic was making it hard to think clearly. When he had burrowed down into the earth, he had jokingly thought that he wanted to be prepared for someone dropping a missile on his head, and that was practically what had happened. He had felt that quake actually shift the ground around the dungeon after that strike, and even if he hoped that the other individuals were mere cheerleaders for the spellcaster behind that blast, he wasn't that optimistic. Malcom was in real trouble.
He had planned his dungeon to be traversed by strong people, yet people who were still human, or human-adjacent enough that spiked pits, arrow-traps, and good old-fashioned violence was going to be a threat to them. He might be able to stall them out with the mixed labyrinth of tunnels he had dug out, but eventually all his stalling, all his plotting and planning, meant nothing if he couldn't find a way to inflict damage on the adventurers. He needed a new plan, and fast. He only hoped the Mechanicals and Crowforged would stall at least as long as the Picantch had.
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"There it is!" Flint called out, pointing at a raised lump with a conspicuous cave entrance lain bare, since all the tall grasses and trees around it had been obliterated. The group approached the hole, and as one took a long, deep breath of the mana-dense air. "Whew, feel that? This place is positively oozing with mana. Bronze rank? You're kidding me, this is at least a gold rank, maybe even a diamond rank! It should still be a walk in the park, but we'll actually get some measurable amount of experience for smashing it up, I expect!"
Manfred hefted an axe that was almost as tall as he was in disappointment, before strapping it to his back and drawing out a more modest pair of hand axes. "Man, can't I ever get a break with a dungeon that likes wide hallways and tall ceilings? I never get to use my favorite axe until the final chambers. It's like dungeons all universally agree that it's necessary to be cramped and claustrophobic until the final boss or something..."
"It just means you'll have an easier time doing your job as a frontliner, instead of having an excuse as to why things keep getting past and bothering me in the middle of my spellcasting. And what I said before still stands, unless you can't handle it, I don't want to deal with the trash monsters. Big spells are such a bother to prep for." The mage leaned more heavily against his staff as the group entered the tunnel, Flint leading the way to look for traps, with Manfred, Noel, and then Rodney bringing up the rear.
When the group came across the levitating spiral staircase of black stone, only Noel eyed it appreciably with a murmur of interest. The rest merely assessed it for danger. "Think it'll collapse as soon as we touch it?" Flint murmured, tapping the first step down with his foot and pushing experimentally, only to find it refused to budge. "How deep do you think it is?"
The moment the question left, there was the sound of whooshing as Manfred simply leapt down the center gap of the staircase, the rest of the group sighing and hearing him start to count as he fell. "One... Twoooo..." It faded briefly before there was a resounding thud, and the barbarous man called back up, "It's barely a drop, so hurry up. It won't kill 'ya even if it does collapse. They didn't even put spikes at the bottom!"
Noel slipped a pair of gold-glinting coins from his pocket and passed them over to a broadly-grinning Flint, "Told'ja he'd jump as soon as I asked." With a sigh as he watched his coin disappear, Noel started down the staircase. "I keep hoping he'll learn. That, or I'll be paying out my coins with the delighted knowledge that he finally managed to kill himself with one of his stupid stunts."
Rodney followed the mage, mirroring his sigh, "As much as I agree that he could use more restraint, you know very well if that happened then I'd have to exhaust most of my energy reviving him. He wouldn't even learn a lesson if he did manage to kill himself. I think that's half the reason he behaves like a giant man-child."
"The other half?"
"That's just because he knows it bothers the rest of us."
The group was surprisingly unbothered by the jagged spikes of rock that circled the eerie appearance of the staircase, and met the bottom in short order. Rather than a continuation of a single tunnel, the circular room had eight different doorways arranged equidistant around them, heading in all possible directions. "Great, we've got one of those dungeons..." Manfred whined in complaint as the rest of the party rejoined him. "It thinks it's being clever to wear down adventurers or something. A dungeon at this level should know better than that though, unless it's already learned to shield its core. Noel?"
The mage pulled out a compass-like device, though the needle was blue and wasn't pointing in the direction of north. "Nope. Greatest flow of mana is coming from the second door to your left. The rest are decoys. It's possible the dungeon has a treasure emitting more mana than the core and is using it to mislead us, but in that case, we'd want to make the detour anyway."
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With his viewpoint hovering all but directly overhead of the group, Malcom was left gaping. Of all the tricks he had expected, them being able to detect the right direction toward his core wasn't one of them. This immediately cut off a vast amount of traps and distracting tunnels from their path, and even the twists and misleading turns on the correct path were likely to be ignored. It was time to send in the rest of his troops and hope they could pull off a miracle, because he was rapidly running out of ideas.