Mage Tank

“Stay alert, we aren’t done,” I thought to the group. The Demilich’s soul thrashed and escaped from the corpse, fleeing up through the mound of bodies held at bay by my Elemental Barrier. I noted that Nuralie’s Spiritual poison was still attacking the boss’s soul even as it fled, and it had to shake off Xim’s Divine fire. That was good information to have.

My Soul-Sight pierced the corpse dome and I watched for a second as the Demilich’s spirit soared up toward the ceiling high above. Thousands of spirits from the slain Undead joined her as she rose.

“Varrin, fly Xim to the ceiling and you two destroy whatever magic bullshit is going on up there,” I thought. “Liches revive, I don’t know how long it takes, and blowing up the shiny is usually a good strat.”

Between everyone present, the pair had the best survivability while flying in the open against ranged opponents. Varrin was fast, and he was strong enough to carry the transformed cleric, while Xim could heal. I was also hoping she would repeat her crawl-on-the-ceiling act.

The corpse pile began rumbling as what I imagined were thousands of spatial rifles started tearing their way through.

“Nuralie, assassinate the Commanders and provide support if needed.” The loson had already disappeared into the dark. “Etja, you and I are staying low to minimize the number of soldiers that can target us. We’ll do what we did against the Pit and I’ll be your meat shield. Let’s swing around the outside of the horde, keep the wall to our backs, and melt shit.”

“As Closetland’s Supreme Wizard, I vote to ratify this plan,” Etja thought with a grin.

I activated Therianthropy, spreading my wings and pulling two spare shields from inventory with my tentacles. I started to say something rallying but hesitated when a question flitted into my head.

“Since we’re fighting the entire Zng military, does that make this our first war?”

Several Zng Serpents swept toward our impromptu fort, visible through my Sight. Their approach interrupted our opportunity to legislate whether war needed to be formally declared, or if we could even war with a dead nation. Xim hopped onto Varrin’s back, her hulking beast form making the big guy look average by comparison.

Varrin blasted up, his blade cleaving a slit through the bodies and debris before exploding through the massacre. Xim dropped Judgment twice as they flew, with Varrin doing his best to dart and weave between a thousand spatial rifles trying to bring them down. Their health bars did gymnastics as dozens of strikes landed while Xim pumped out healing as fast as she could.

Etja copied Xim’s move and hopped on between my wings. The mage had a higher top speed than I did with Siphon, but it took time for her to ramp up to it. With my Level 20 Speed evolution, I could go full throttle from a complete stop, which I was betting would help us dodge.

My tentacles covered her body with their shields, and I used Gracorvus to cover my front. We were a mile from the nearest wall along the edge of the enormous staging area. I could close part of that distance with Shortcut, but it was gonna cost me.

The anti-teleport weaves within the Delve added an exponential multiplier to my teleport costs. Moving up to 288 feet with Shortcut was unaffected, but each equivalent increase in distance doubled the resources the spell required. Shortcut cost me four mana, but that cost increased when I mana-shaped it to take other people along for the ride.

Each additional person I was teleporting added another four mana to the price tag. That made it a normal cost of eight to take Etja with me, sixteen to teleport double my safe range, thirty-two for triple, etcetera. It was more efficient to make multiple jumps to our target than trying to cover the distance all at once, but each cast had a brief cooldown where we’d be vulnerable.

I didn’t have enough mana to cover the full mile. I was down to 150 after achieving my new personal best multi-kill and then fighting the boss. Going double distance was the same multiplier as casting twice, so I focused on putting us 596 feet closer to the wall and activated the skill.

Fortunately, I could fly full tilt while waiting out the two-second cooldown, which let us cover another 1,000 feet the normal way before I popped Shortcut again. Each cast was accompanied by a loud crackling sound as I pushed the skill slightly above its safe range. It placed a burden on our bodies, but our resilience was high enough that it didn’t cause any damage.

What did cause damage was the endless ranks of Undead firing at us for the two seconds we were visible.

Etja was well hidden beneath the two tower shields I held over her body, using Siphon to shunt soldiers out of our path and unbalance as many as she could to disrupt their aim. But I couldn’t guard against everything with Gracorvus. My legs and underside were exposed. I flew low to the ground in a Superman pose to avoid giving anything a good shot at my belly.

The soldiers took a moment to orient and aim when we appeared, and we wove through the densely packed ranks to minimize the number that could target us. Even so, hundreds took their shot, and dozens scored strikes on my limbs for ten damage a pop. My health was in the 1500s before I hit Shortcut again.

It took three casts, a dozen leg fractures, and countless small wounds of stretched and distorted skin and muscle to make it to the wall. My health was barely hovering over 1,000. I rotated and brought all three shields to the front, placing Etja and my back against the wall, then forming a wall of metal in front of us.

I cast Elemental Barrier to push back the closest group of soldiers, creating space and making it impossible for anything to get a bead past the shields. My mana was down to 82, but Etja could cast without fear from the riff-raff.

The Serpents were a different problem.

Most of the ones that had survived Explosion! moved to intercept Xim and Varrin, though the snakes were slower than Varrin. Three had followed Etja and me toward the wall, heads down and horns forward as they charged up to skewer us. If they managed to break my shield defense, we’d be exposed to hundreds of rifles.

“Focus Serpents,” I thought the Etja. She mentally nodded and started building up for an attack.

I watched the lead Serpent with Soul-Sight through my shields and threw Somncres to my right with four copies. The hammers arced around and hurtled toward the Serpent. It tried to dodge, but the hammer unerringly homed in on the target, and all six collided into its body, shattering bone and taking bites out of its skeleton with Oblivion Orb.

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Etja’s body glowed with Divine light as she pumped Blessed stacks into two death beams, the first hitting the Serpent I’d just struck and cutting it down its center line. The snaking monster was reduced to a half dozen carved-up chunks that crashed down into the soldiers. The second beam cut away half of the second Serpent, but it kept snaking toward us even as its rear half fell and toppled a score of its allies. I managed to follow up with another set of hammers, killing the second and leaving one Serpent to slam into us.

I activated Gravity Anchor to hold myself in place, losing my breath as the full force of the multi-ton beast slammed into me, but refusing to budge. One of the horns tore a hole through my right tower shield, skewering me in the ribs and taking another chunk of health along with it. It pulled the shield out of position for a half second, exposing me to another volley of spatial blasts.

HP: 1,003 -> 705

Rings of deadly pearls, glimmering with vicious Dimensional energy, formed around the length of the serpent as Etja exhausted another swath of Blessed stacks. They detonated, shredding the Serpent and allowing Elemental Barrier to hurl the broken chunks of its body away. The soul of each felled enemy tore away from its corpse, heading toward the ceiling.

Now we just had six more legions to deal with.

A massive eruption drew my attention above, where Xim glowed like a fiery bead in the sky. She’d shredded through one of the strange devices on the ceiling and unleashed a massive blast of Spiritual energy. The cleric looked none the worse for it and was already soaring towards the next one as chunks of metal and ice fell away from the first. Varrin battled multiple serpents while he protected her demolition, both of his soul clones now loose and holding their own.

Sadly, the Undead soldiers did not start dropping like they’d run out of batteries, so my hopes that the machines were powering the horde were dashed. I’d watched the Demilich’s soul long enough to see it get sucked into one of those things, but I still didn’t know what they did. Maybe they were some kind of Spiritual collectors?

You stupid fucks! Stop breaking everything! Seriously, who raised you?!

“Alright, looks like our plan is to hold out while blowing up the shit that’s collecting souls on the ceiling,” I thought to the group. “Nuralie, swap from killing Commanders to assisting Xim with her rampage. Etja, what’s your max range?”

“With enough mana, if I can see it, I can hit it,” she replied.

“Target the collectors farthest from Xim. I’ll rotate us around the horde to get us closer to the ones on the edge.”

“Aye, aye, my liege!”

Another collector exploded. A ring of fire glowed brightly on Xim’s back as she flew across the sky. She looked like a muscular drop of flaming blood from this distance, and I realized that she’d combined her Angel of Fury form with her Revelation of the Heart.

At her back was a swarm of angry spirits, hurling blasts of Spectral energy from their ethereal forms. Xim trailed flames behind her that Ignited and consumed the spirits in her wake, spreading out to any others that came too close. Still, the spirits had begun to pour out from each of the collectors, joining the pursuing horde faster than Xim could eliminate them.

She reached her third collector, leading with a fiery breath that incinerated a mass of wraiths defending it. She landed hard on the mana-woven metal and stone, then shredded it with three swipes of her claws, each hit emitting a fifty-foot plume of fire that rolled across the ceiling and laid yet more specters to their eternal rest.

Scary.

I did my duty as a meat shield, keeping my back to the wall and soaking hundreds of rounds a second with my blocks as I circled the battleground. My mana was low, but I was flush with stamina and tossed out endless hammers, arcing them around my shields whenever soldiers crept too close. I kept the horde back, but without Oblivion Orb, my damage output wasn’t nearly high enough to deal with the massive numbers.

Etja burned the rest of her Blessed and shot two beams of destruction high into the sky, melting two collectors with a single spell. Another collector sparked and went dim, which I assumed was Nuralie’s work.

I was anxious to see what would happen if all twelve were destroyed, hoping it would end the fight. I didn’t have the resources to deal with the thousands of enemies, and unless we could repeat Xim’s Fire Spreader exploit, I didn’t know that any of us did. I also didn’t think that trick would work again. The Commanders in this group were smart enough to quarantine the Ignited soldiers and push their lines away from the two points where Xim had dropped Judgment as she’d flown up with Varrin.

However, I didn’t have to wait that long. Once the sixth collector was destroyed, all the mana in the chamber was sucked into a single point in the center, right where we’d originally been teleported.

I grunted as the force even sucked at my own mana pool, dropping it several points before I focused and seized control of the tug. A deep wrenching sound overpowered the sounds of battle, and bright cracks ran along the chamber’s walls, scattering dust and gravel into the air.

Okay, I know we’ve had our differences, but would you be willing to put a pause on hostilities and possibly consider a teamup?

I was too busy trying to fight and figure out what we’d just triggered to give the notification proper consideration. Even after it had shuffled to the front of my brain’s attention queue, it didn’t make much sense without more context.

I settled on an eloquent “What?” as my verbal reply.

All of the Undead soldiers suddenly lowered their rifles. The Serpents pulled back from Varrins one, two, and three, and the big guy was heaving mighty breaths, his helmet dark.

The ground rumbled, the stone and ice that had been fractured by Explosion! shifted. Massive hunks of stone began to rise from the floor.

I know your flesh brain only moves at the speed of stupid, but I need you to follow along a little faster. Your irresponsible assault on the collectors has damaged one of my containment weaves and now there’s a small chance of something getting loose that no one will be happy about!

I couldn’t help but laugh, despite the situation. “We’re the irresponsible ones?” I asked. I searched for the words to address the Core’s gross mischaracterization but decided on something simple. “You know what? Fuck you.”

Listen, meathead, I–

“No. You sound like a twelve-year-old throwing a tantrum.” I peeked over my shields at the rising slabs, each one larger than a house. “Also, there’s no way this is a Level-appropriate challenge, Expansion Delve or not.”

You don’t know shit about balancing encounters! This has all been rigorously planned and tested to ensure it falls within appropriate parameters.

If you’re struggling, maybe you’re just bad!

I chuckled. “I doubt it.” Then I sent a psychic comm to Grotto. “Any idea what we’re dealing with here?”

Grotto let out a long mental sigh. [I believe this Core reached for the sky and somehow managed to catch a star. Sadly, she did not know what to do with it once it began to incinerate the world.]

“That’s… oddly poetic of you.”

[I am lodging a formal complaint with the System. It might be able to intervene before you are killed.]

“It can’t be that bad.”

[Oh yes, it can.]

A pulse of Spiritual energy–an order of magnitude more potent than anything we’d encountered within the Delve–swept out across the room. The thousands of Undead turned toward the center of the chamber as one and knelt. The Serpents glided down from above, quickly parking themselves on the ground beside the soldiers, heads bowed in supplication.

A masculine figure rose from the excavated crater, soul brimming with ghastly power. Their skeletal figure was shrouded in tattered robes, their face obscured behind a reptilian mask. They held a simple, dark staff, its mundane form belying the power that thrummed within it. The entity swept its gaze across the room.

Supreme General Diathemon Tyrianaeonis, Lord of Miasma, Father of the Blighted: Elder Lich, Grade 51.

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