The golem's hand came thundering down with a heavy clap. The force of it squashed the earth like dough, leaving an imprint behind. Grass, dirt, and rocks lifted as the hand rose back up, aiming once more before another hit.
Sera rolled away just in time – the impact vibrating through her body, the world tilting sideways – and was back on her feet before the debris held in the golem's hand finished falling. A chunk of stone clipped her cheek on the way past. She felt the sting of it, the warmth of blood, and kept moving.
Around her, Rian's team scattered like ants from a disturbed hill. Holt's voice cut through the noise – sharp, directional, no wasted syllables – and his squad reformed near him without breaking stride. Kael's fire erupted to her left, scarring a path through the grass and burning up the golem's leg. The fire dissipated – no damage to the stone construct. He cursed.
The golem turned.
It was the size of a building. Two stories of mana-dense stone and System code. A bipedal body structure – two legs and feet, two arms and hands, one head – an amalgam of clay, stone, and mud. Two glowing blue eyes from its head. Not really eyes, per se, more so holes, through which dense mana flowed out, the brain of the golem housed within. The orb of condensed mana that powered its movement. The thing they needed to destroy.
The golem pulled its abnormally elongated arm back, as if gathering pressure, and swiped it forward from left to right – intent on swatting the humans before it.
"Dodge!" Rian roared.
Sera ducked fast, pressing her chest low to the grass and watched Hibiscus throw her arms over her own head as she did the same – heavy stone swiping where their torsos had just been. One esper on Wyer's squad didn't dodge in time, Sera watched the stone arm slam into the esper with a nasty squelch and his body get flung far away into the distance before landing, still and unmoving, in the far plain.
One dead already.
✦ ♡ ✦
It had been only two hours since they walked in.
She remembered the morning assembly – the way they had waited in the early morning, the air still wet with dew, with tense energy and fueled bodies for the buses that would take them to the portal gate.
Fifty or so people assembled at dawn in the guild's front courtyard. Excited and nervous chatter. Packs on backs. Weapons checked. Lucky charms and keepsakes fastened tight. The commanders at the front – Rena standing disciplined and domineering, Joel contained and precise, Arlen was relaxed, and Rian stood slightly apart, eyes staring toward nothing in particular.
They had all clambered into their vehicles. Some caught extra sleep in their seats, some read or listened to music, others chattered or exchanged tips as they drove to their destination. Sera sat next to Ophelia who was focusing on communing with her staff Chorus. Initially, she had wanted to chat with Ophelia but seeing that she was busy, Sera had a conversation with the thing inside her instead.
And then, they arrived.
The portal gate was on the beach. Closed off to the public and had been that way since it had manifested – a line of metal fencing, aggressive yellow tape, and government officers with military rifles sealing the gate from public view. A portal directly in front of the ocean. Like a doorway to the sea.
It was larger than she expected. A flat circular plane of dense mana, easily ten meters across, hovering three feet above the sand. Red at the edges – deep, ominous red, wafting off the portal in a way that felt insipid and evil. Black at the center – as if all light was negated. An absence rather than a presence. It was a little eerie – as if someone had cut out a circle from a photograph of the ocean.
Similar, she thought, to the portal she had used to escape to this world.
She had felt the entity stir. She couldn't determine what it was sensing exactly, but she could tell how the entity was feeling – thinking. It began since she had acknowledged it, a faint thread of understanding seeping into her bones as the days wore on – she could feel its wants, its desires, and its emotions with increasing clarity. And warily, she realized, it could feel hers.
There were vessels beyond the portal, that was what the thing was reacting to. A growing alertness in the beast inside her as they approached the gate, an environment filled with robust monster vessels that Sera had not yet sanctioned it couldn't eat, like she had designated the humans around her.
It leaned forward and Sera steeled herself.
Then Rena had said something clipped and efficient and the raid force began moving. Footsteps in formation, walking through the gate in steady, practiced form.
The crossing was immediate. One step in the city's early dawn – blue sky beginning, the cool of morning air coupled with the ocean wind – and then the gate swallowed the light and everything went black.
Incredibly similar, Sera thought once more.
She felt her body disintegrate in the blackness, mana tumbling through and around her as she was whipped around by a cosmic frenzy of stardust and matter. Her sense of consciousness frayed and scattered in one second, and in the next instant, it returned. And then her body reformed with a snap and her vision had resurfaced and it was–
Green.
A plain. Wide and open, the grass the particular deep and wild green of something that had never seen a city, the sky above it a color that didn't quite match Earth's blue – slightly wrong, slightly too vivid. The air was different. Denser. The mana present and ambient in a way it never was outside, buzzing faintly at the edges of her awareness like a frequency she could almost hear.
She swallowed down her saliva.
All around her espers and guides and support personnel took in their environment, brains and bodies adjusting to the dungeon environment.
And then it started immediately.
Across every human's field of vision, in an instant, a blue interface appeared.
< Dungeon Quest >
Defeat the golems. 0/5
Defeat ???
Defeat ???
Defeat ???
And then the monsters had fallen.
Five of them, dropping from the sky, parting the clouds like spears, each one whistling as they crashed sequentially into the earth.
Chunk. Chunk. Chunk. Chunk. Chunk.
They had lodged into the earth in a loose perimeter. Five oblong stone constructs buried deep into the earth where they had landed. A heavy vibration clacking across the air and earth as each one settled into the dirt with a thunderous crash.
And then the oblong stone constructs began to uncurl, hands unfurling, legs extending, heads lifting, pulling their bodies from the earth – until five humanoid figures of stone, clay, and mud the size of two-story buildings had stood in the distance, positioned directly toward their raid force.
Sera's eyes stiffened in recognition.
Murmurs of confusion rippled across the raid.
"What is that?" someone exclaimed.
"A new monster type?" another had gasped, looking at the towering figures.
"Golems," Rian and Sera had murmured, each in their own position, to themselves.
Commander Swift reacted immediately. Bellowed an instruction to an esper named La Forta, who had then raised his robed hands to the sky, one hand empty, one hand holding a staff, and cast a spell. Immediately, her three squads took flight. Feathery white wings sprouting from every ankle, lifting her team into the air with a heavy mana wind.
"Taking the far two," she had called out to the other commanders, her squads already flying towards the golems in the far distance. And then she had sped off, wings on her own ankles driving her forward towards her team, her rifle engaged and ready in her arms.
The rest of the commanders – Joel, Arlen, and Rian – took one golem each. Commanded their teams. And charged forward.
✦ ♡ ✦
"Sera!" Yoru called out, somersaulting backwards, gaining distance from the golem.
She was already there, positioned to receive him as he backed into her, daggers raised in awareness, eyes tracking the golem's movements.
She placed her hands on his neck, felt the pulse of pollution and pulled it through her fingers into her core, returning clean mana in return. Pushed more in than what she took, given the situation, pressing some of the hippogriff's mana, dense and alive, into his core. Small gift for a friend.
Sera felt him flinch, he had noticed the difference, not her usual. Yoru glanced at her, flashing her a crooked smile. She grinned back. "Thanks," he muttered, before leaping and jumping back into the fray.
She didn't have much time to bask in the banter of friendship. She leaped backwards, barely dodging a laser beam sourced from the golem's eyes. The beam cut fast across the plains and her path, igniting the grasses in its path into an explosive boom.
She covered her face and coughed, before rolling and dodging a second beam. Hibiscus and Violet were also in close proximity, breathing heavy from their own maneuvering. They were positioned near the back, still within attack distance, necessary in order to replenish the espers. The guide's motto – purify and dodge like hell.
Sera frowned, her mana tendrils were curled through the earth, embedded in the golem already. No vessel. Nothing to eat. The golem was a construct, not alive, there was nothing to eat. She could siphon the mana from it, but the thing inside her seemed less interested. More hassle to obtain it, the nourishment it provided would not be worth it. Like eating celery.
She wasn't sure how they were going to defeat it.
The golem was very protective of its head – for good reason, its power source was stored within. Each time an esper cut off an arm, or a leg, it reformed immediately, pulling the dirt and mud and stone back into place.
She had watched Rian, with his scythe, slice an arm clean off and it had reformed mid fall. Dirt and debris had tunneled from the golem's body toward the falling arm and reformed the connection, adjusting the arm into a swiping attack once more – his scythe taking the brunt of the force as he was thrown back.
She bit her lip.
Nothing much she could do at the moment besides watch.
Mira fell back, landing next to her in a crouch. Sera wrapped her hands around her neck, cleansing the same way she did Yoru.
"Can you cover me?" Mira asked, her breathing heavy, her eyes never leaving the golem.
"Yes," Sera responded.
"Okay," Mira gulped noisily. "Okay, then, I'm going to do something." She brought a hand up to Sera's on her neck and squeezed.
"I'm trusting you," she glanced at Sera. "Because you carried that researcher."
"Got it," Sera affirmed.
Mira closed her eyes and a heavy wave of green mana wrapped around her body and the quiver on her back. One by one, needles floated out until five were above her head, angled like a crown. Mira took a deep breath and opened her eyes. She dug her hands into the ground.
"Then, let's do this, Theor."
She sent her needles whistling forward.