The wings were gone.
Rena registered it the way she registered most things – cleanly, without panic, the information arriving and slotting into place before the emotion could follow. Raven La Forta was dead. The flight spell was dead with him. A hundred feet of open air between her and the ground and two seconds to do something about it.
She shoved it down.
Later. La Forta – the gentle, nonassuming way he placed a coffee on her desk without being asked, always the right temperature, always without comment. Something ached in her gut. She would put it somewhere and deal with it later.
Right now, she had to kill this fucker.
She raised her rifle.
The golem was right there. Its eye – the small dense opening she'd been targeting from the air, the thing she'd been calculating angles for since the fight began – was right there. Fifty feet til she was in line with it. Closing fast as she fell.
Her white mana swirled through her body and into the rifle, the bullet forming at the barrel with a focused dense compression of practiced skill. An orb of light, the size of a marble, condensing into raw power. She could feel the wind of the fall through her hair. She had maybe one second.
Die, she thought.
She pulled the trigger when the trajectory was horizontal. Time slowed down, her eyes met the golem's as gravity pulled her toward the earth.
The bullet hit the eye dead center.
The golem's head snapped back, the mana inside it flickered.
She was still falling.
And then she saw it – the corner of her vision catching Rian's team, already moving, the formation that had just taken down their own golem now spreading across the plain toward hers. Espers catching espers.
Kael rushed past her, in the air – fire blasting from his feet in a controlled burst, his staff poised in his hands like a bat. He slammed the staff sideways towards the golem's head, which the golem blocked with its left hand.
The stone hand shattered into fragments and the mana inside flickered harder.
And then something dark and oppressive and warm caught her. Wrapped in someone's arms.
She looked up.
Rian's moody purple eyes locked with hers. The panic still in them – concern arching his eyebrows, the rawness she had seen in the lifetimes before, his anxiety and fear transforming in real time into something else as his arms closed around her and the ground stopped being a problem.
Relief. Pure and unguarded.
He'd caught her.
Of course he'd caught her.
A small smile lifted the corner of her mouth.
Near the periphery of her vision, the esper Caan moved.
His ivy whips already uncoiling – thick dark vines shooting across the plain with a speed that didn't look like it belonged to something that grew. They reached the golem in milliseconds. Wrapped. Burrowed into its joints.
The vines found the injured eye socket and drove in – not cutting but constraining, winding through the opening and around the dense orb within, preventing the brain from healing properly. The golem's head jerked. Its hands, one broken and one fully formed, came up toward the vines.
The espers were already on its arms, attacking vigorously.
From both Rena and Rian's teams. Simultaneously. The formation of people who had been trained to capitalize on openings pounced on the golem with an intense ferocity. The arms came apart at the joints. Stone and clay and mud falling. Holt parried a falling boulder away from the support personnel in the back.
And then Simon was there.
He landed on the golem's head, launched by another esper named Maevin – feet planted firmly on stone, lance already raised, green eyes flashing with an uncharacteristically solemn intensity. The lance came down.
Both hands. Full weight. Yellow mana flaring around him like a second skin.
The lance tip burrowed into the other eye.
He pushed.
His muscles bulged. His teeth clenched. The mana around him flared brighter – arcing off him like lightning. Not clean or contained, something rawer, something violent that didn't seem like him. His feet slid an inch on the stone. He caught himself. Pushed harder.
The orb cracked and shattered.
And then something in the golem shut down – not an explosion, not a roar, just a clean mechanical cessation – moved through the golem's body from head to foot. Its eyes went dark. Its now armless body, stiff and upright, stopped moving.
It stood there for a moment.
And then it tipped.
Backward. Slowly at first,the reluctant fall of something very large and very heavy, and then faster, and it hit the ground with a crash that sent a cloud of debris rolling across the plain in every direction.
The blue interface in everyone's vision flickered.
< Dungeon Quest >
Defeat the golems. 2/5
Defeat ???
Defeat ???
Defeat ???
No one celebrated.
Rian's and Rena's teams were already moving toward the second golem that Rena's other squad had been holding off before the dust settled. There was no time. There was never time.
But things were manageable.
Rena saw Arlen's team in the far distance finishing their golem, its body tumbling with a heavy crash. Arlen's ice had pierced the eyes precisely, two frozen spears sticking out from both openings. And Joel's golem wasn't far behind – she could see the weakening flicker in the golem's eyes from here.
✦ ♡ ✦
Sera ran.
She could have been faster. But she didn't.
The guides stayed behind the espers – that was formation, that was protocol, and more importantly that was the story she had been telling for fourteen months at Ratha and she wasn't going to stop telling it because La Forta was dead and people were falling from a hundred feet. Violet kept pace beside her, expression flat. Hibiscus on the other side. Ophelia a little bit ahead, shimmering gold as she prepared healing spells for the inevitably injured espers in the distance. Hibiscus and Violet ran as fast as they could and Sera ran at a speed that looked appropriate.
They arrived in the aftermath.
The dust was still settling. She scanned – found Rian landing with Rena in his arms, his dark wings folding, the relief on his face visible even at distance. Espers from his team moving through the fallen, catching who they could. Some landed clean. Some tumbled. Some hit the ground and didn't get up immediately.
She turned toward the latter.
Movement at the golem's head caught her eye. Simon – feet planted on stone, lance driving through the eye, both hands, full weight, electric mana flaring around him. A particular ferocity that seemed surprising for what she knew of him.
The orb cracked.
The golem went still.
Nice one, she thought.
She was already moving toward the nearest downed esper.
Aaronson. Orange hair, freckled face. Someone on Rena's team, she had never interacted with him but had seen him in passing. He was unconscious, breathing ragged and thin. Sera pressed a hand to his throat, checking for his pulse and measuring his pollution. It was thick and heavy, the corrupted mana would stack secondary damage to his already failing system, he was internally bleeding from the fall. Ribs cracked, lungs and liver fractured. He had a chance of survival if he could use his mana to stabilize, she deduced. She dropped beside him, grabbed his face, and roughly pressed her mouth to his.
Sloppy, but efficient. She pulled hard – the pollution thick and dark from the impact, the kind that accumulated fast when a body hit the ground from height after magic exertion and the system went into shock. It came loose in dense waves. She swallowed it down, processed it, and pushed her own mana in its place.
It wasn't enough, he was fading fast, the mana she pushed back was not enough to sustain his body.
She hesitated for a moment, then her eyebrows firmed into a flat resolve.
Fine, she thought. Maybe he'd be useful later.
She pulled the hippogriff's reserve from her core, pushed that into him too, just enough so that the mana to stabilize his survival tipped in the right direction. Felt his body absorb it greedily and then begin to patch his internal injuries instinctively.
Good, she thought, but he should stay awake just in case.
She parted her mouth from his – taking a heavy breath and wiped the saliva from her mouth. And like the golem her team had been fighting just moments ago, she brought her arm back as if gathering pressure, and slapped him hard across his face. His eyes opened blearily and he blinked a few times, before his vision settled dazedly on Sera.
"Hhk-hngh?" he coughed, clearing blood from his throat.
"Stay awake," she said, shaking his shoulders. "Or you'll die. Healers are coming."
She moved onto the next one.
Mouth to mouth. Pull. Return. The espers were barely conscious, some of them not conscious at all, none of them in a position to have opinions about the methodology. She dragged the ones she deemed more critical toward Ophelia and Emerson, the second healer who had materialized beside Ophelia without being asked and was working with quiet efficiency.
In the far distance, Joel's team cheered.
Their golem was down.
< Dungeon Quest >
Defeat the golems. 4/5
Defeat ???
Defeat ???
Defeat ???
Arlen's team had cleared theirs without Sera noticing. She looked toward the last one. Rena and Rian and squads of espers attacking the final one. With Arlen's teams joining the fray and Joel's close behind, the last one would fall soon.
She breathed in deep. Looked down at the unconscious esper in her lap, a woman named Haley, blonde hair drenched with blood, leg broken and breath hitching. She patted her matted hair. Brought her face close to hers and pressed a deep kiss.
✦ ♡ ✦
The last golem fell half an hour later and the blue interface updated to show the count before fading into mist.
< Dungeon Quest >
Defeat the golems. 5/5
Defeat ???
Defeat ???
Defeat ???
Espers crumpling into heaps and groans. The severity of the casualties thundering through the raid force now that the danger was over.
They stood in the sudden quiet of a plain that had been in motion since dawn and was now, more or less, still. No more cacophonous steps from golem feet or frantic screams from panicked espers.
Just heaving breaths, moaning through injuries, and quiet sobbing.
Four were gone.
Raven La Forta. Thirty-six. The esper who had given Rena's team the sky and lost it with him.
Dalen Marsh. Rian's team. The first one down, in the first hour, misjudged his footing, eyes turned elsewhere for a brief and fatal second.
Aayla Voss. Rena's team again. The freefall. She hadn't made it to Ophelia in time. Neck broken in the fall. She had died quietly and silently, in the chaos.
Renn Oakfort. Joel's squad. Third golem's laser. Sliced and burned his body in two.
Four gone. The raid force absorbed it the way war absorbed things – not without feeling, but without stopping. They were in an active dungeon and would be for a week and the dungeon did not care about grief schedules. The living began to move.
Tents went up. A perimeter was established. The injured were triaged and carried. And the afternoon and evening became tents and hands. They could cry in their sleep. They would cry in their sleep.
The guides cycled through the healers' tent in rotation – Sera, Hibiscus, Violet, the curly-haired asshole named Eaton, and four others she didn't care to name – supporting Ophelia, Emerson, Therain, and Anna – the raid's healers – as they worked through the injured. Purify the pollution. Return clean mana. Keep everyone stable enough for the healers to do the harder work. Mouth to mouth where necessary. Hands on skin.
Whatever to keep whoever alive.
Sera noted, with some private amusement, the dramatic irony of it all. The same guides who had, only a couple days ago, derided her as the town whore were now pressing their bodies against barely conscious espers with complete professional focus, encouraging as much skin and mucosal contact as possible for maximum purification. The raid's first battle had brought a sharp and clarifying light to the question of prudity. It turned out death made the methodology feel less controversial.
Nobody mentioned it.
Neither did she.
She watched as Eaton, chest exposed, pressed his upper body against an exhausted and equally naked Haley, cycling pollution through their skin contact and kisses. She clenched her fist slightly, knuckle tingling – wanted something to punch.
Possibly him.
Hibiscus worked without stopping.
Sera noticed. The wyvern cave had done something that nothing since had undone. Out of combat, Hibiscus was a different person entirely – her A-rank showing in the speed and efficacy of her purification, leading the charge through the injured, accounting for nearly a third of the post-battle workload without being asked. In combat, she was average – her dodging and running barely keeping her alive, her freezing replaced by something functional if not elegant. But here, skin on skin, mouth to mouth, the pollution cycling clean and fast – here she was exceptional.
She didn't freeze anymore. That was good. Respectable. Sera felt less inclined to eat her.
By evening the critical cases were stable. Sixteen injured. None expected to die if the mana held and the healers kept working. Haley would be out of commission for a day – broken leg, healers' magic fusing it sufficiently for the next engagement. Aaronson was already sitting up, chatting with Therain who was monitoring his internal injuries. His mana had done enough patching for the healers to close the rest. Tomorrow, he'll be sore. Day after, back to normal.
The sturdiness of espers was, Sera thought, genuinely impressive.
His green eyes found hers across the tent. A quick nod.
She nodded back.
Sera stepped out of the tent.
The plain was dark – a different dark than Earth dark, more visceral and vulnerable. Like swimming in the ocean at night and peering down into a bottomless depth. The dungeon's wrong-blue sky having faded into something deeper and more absolute. The stars above dotted in foreign constellations. Two moons. She hadn't noticed them at midday. She thought of Ratiora.
The base camp had organized itself with quiet efficiency. Tents in a defensible perimeter. Espers on rotation at the edges, weapons out, watching the dark. Small fires – not enough to compromise visibility, just enough for the particular human need of light in unfamiliar places.
The small monsters had come at dusk. Opportunistic things, drawn by the noise, the smell of blood on grass, and the mana of a prolonged fight. They had been handled without her involvement. She had watched from the tent entrance, hands still bloody, and assessed.
Not a threat.
Scouts had gone ahead – moving into the dark toward whatever the dungeon held past the plain. They hadn't come back yet.
She looked at her hands.
The blood had dried in the creases of her knuckles and in between her fingers. She walked to the water station at the camp's edge and began washing.
The water ran red for a moment. Then pink. Then clear.
She dried her hands on her pants.
Vessels, the beast inside her purred.
It had been silent most of the day, which Sera had appreciated. Something in it had opted to stay out of her way once it realized the golems were not accessible as food.
But now it was back, and the souls of small monsters in the distance, repelled by the perimeter of guarding espers, were catching its attention.
Sera breathed in deep. Checked her debuff. The hippogriff's core had done something as well, she had confirmed that the night they had eaten it. Not as much as the wyvern. But a week shaved off her timer. And she could feel it too, with the hippogriff's vessel digested, a small but sure expansion of her capacity, the ceiling was a little higher. The System's grip on her loosening fractionally. She hadn't noticed it with the wyvern's core, but now that she was measuring carefully, prodding the inside of her vessel and storage and cautiously estimating size, she had noticed it was slightly larger after the hippogriff.
Very good.
< Dimensional Transfer Debuff >
A post-Filter evolution has defied the System.
Capacity throttled.
All stats halved.
Time left: 6,444:12:07s
She thought about the dungeon creatures hidden beyond the grasses, small vessels sure, but monster cores nonetheless. And the idea of her debuff timer ticking down with each bite, even if it was just a few days, or even a few hours, filled her with a growing, simmering elation.
Her own personal feasting quest, the more she could eat, the sooner she could break free.
Her eyes glimmered in the night.
Alright, she thought, to the thing. Let's go hunting.