There were eight invaders all in all, wrapped in camo-pattern clothing, wearing what Thomas assumed were military-issue helmets, and balaclavas were wrapped around their faces.
But no insignia, no patches, nothing adorned these people’s “uniforms” in the way he’d seen on the people who usually waited outside, including the man his creatures were currently dragging to safety.
That was what had made him think “mercenary” rather than “soldier” at first glance.
And he could be wrong, hell, most likely he was wrong, and there were legitimate reasons for legitimate members of the military to run around in a getup like that, but considering they’d attacked the guards … yeah, these guys were almost certainly hostile.
And just to make sure …
“Take one more step and I’ll assume you’re here to kill me and act accordingly!” he shouted via one of the ambassadorial raptors positioned in the entrance hall.
The dinosaur, which was literally rendered almost entirely harmless by one of its powers, exploded into a shower of gore and blood-drenched downy feathers an instant later as a crystal spear tore through it.
Yeah, the idea that this wasn’t a hostile act had been a dumb one, but with that having been said, that last smidgeon of doubt had been removed. Even on the off chance that these guys were officially sanctioned in some way, the gloves had come all the way off.
There might not be much he could do to alter the entrance area anymore, now that these people were entering, but Thomas had made the necessary preparations a while ago, using up most of the improvements to his control limit he’d gotten after slaying the dragon.
Specifically, in this case, his “preparation” involved a hippopotamus launching itself off the highest floor of his entrance hall, straight at the floor that he’d reshaped into a shallow pond dotted with rocks for standing on so long ago.
It was perfectly possible to get through without getting one’s feet wet, he’d built it for aesthetic purposes, not to annoy people. Normally, that was.
This time around, however, a two-ton murder muncher with a pocket dimension for a stomach had landed on the floor and literally exploded from the impact.
Oh, and not only was its blood a lethal contact poison, its stomach contained several cubic meters of the exact same toxin. A tidal wave of liquid sprayed every which way, dyeing the water red and threatening to wash across the invaders.
The one in the front shouted something and leaped forward, straight into the blood.
All of the invaders were at least early D-Rank, Thomas had been able to tell that from the moment they entered, but even so, that should have been lethal. Or at the very least, crippling.
Instead, a shell of clear, cut, crystal, manifested around the man, glittering like a gemstone fit for a queen’s jewelry, easily blocking the liquid that, sadly, did not have very much force behind it.
For the most part, the move had saved the group. But not the entire group.
One of the invaders, standing furthest back and just a touch too far to the side, caught a face full of toxic blood … and immediately started screaming, tearing at the cloth now soaked through with the very thing that was killing him. And now that his voice was audible, it was very clear that it was, in fact, a him.
In his panic, the man failed to even properly remove the balaclava, the helmet was in the way and was yet to be removed.
The leader barked something Thomas did not understand, and two invaders ran to help the downed man while the rest fanned out, ready to respond to any further attacks.
If the dungeon core had still had eyebrows, they’d have crawled off his head at the sight that unfolded before him.
They were … uh … not local. Definitely not. Thomas knew most of the powers granted by the orcish system, and nothing they used was a part of that.
Two of them manifested numerous pointed crystals from empty air and began to telekinetically control them, clearly readying to hurl them at anything he threw at them, and a fourth “crystal” user suddenly had a gemstone blade in each hand, ready to start slashing.
The other four … well, Thomas had no idea what the guy on the floor was capable of, but one used blades of air to cut away the balaclava, and the other had mist streaming from his hands, leaving Thomas to assume he was a cryokinetic of some stripe.
And someone had to be a fire user, considering the scorch marks outside.
Elemental control spells were a thing, but those were usually fire and forget. Manifesting and then controlling the elements with the fidelity currently being displayed was not something he’d seen anyone do before.
However, it was the language the invader had spoken that was setting his proverbial teeth on edge.
Thomas might only speak two languages, but one didn’t need to speak one to recognize it. Anyone who’d ever seen a WW2 movie would recognize German, French and Spanish were also commonly enough spoken in entertainment for their cadence to be fairly recognizable, and so on.
This … this wasn’t anything he even remotely recognized, it didn’t even sound coherent. It sounded more as though someone had run a normal sentence through an enigma machine and then fed that to a text-to-speech program than something that could directly and efficiently convey information … or maybe Thomas was just trying to find an excuse for his own lack of knowledge.
Another thing he noticed was that there were no healing potions being given to the injured party member.
Okay, definitely not British.
The injured man rasped something, and one of the crystal mages threw something at him, a fiery orange orb that exploded into a gout of flame when it struck him … only for the fire to be sucked into the “victim,” who was immediately looking a little better. Not well, but less close to death.
“Why aren’t you attacking?” Elias asked.
“I’m gathering information,” Thomas replied. “Four have different expressions of some kind of crystal system, three are elementalists, and I don’t know about the last one. I also found out they don’t seem to have any healing items other than crystals they can absorb elemental energies from. And I know that at least one of them isn’t immune to toxins.”
As they watched, the invaders formed up into a proper group and began carefully making their way across the blood-slick stones, clearly painfully aware of the fact that slipping and falling would result in much worse than simply “getting wet.”
“Alright, let’s see what you’re capable of,” Thomas whispered as he unleashed a flock of birds straight at the final invader, the only one who’d shown zero supernatural powers despite the power emanating from them solidly putting them at D-Rank.
Over a dozen different tropical birds burst from crevices in the walls and ceiling, colorful wings flapping to accelerate them faster than mere gravity would account for, divebombing the unknown threat.
For the first time in this attack, one of the invader’s first reaction was to go for their firearm.
It was some kind of assault rifle, not the same one that the British soldiers had carried, and it roared to life, unleashing a stream of bullets as its wielder simply held down the trigger.
Even someone who’d never held anything more hard-hitting than a paintball gun like Thomas knew that that was not conducive to accuracy … and yet, half the birds fell from the air, having taken a couple of bullets each, the projectiles clearly having deviated from their “normal” flight path at some point.
Of course, with only half the birds down, the rest continued their dive, but were met with a hail of ice shards, gouts of flame, and wind blades.
“Kinetic Mage,” Elias observed. “And I think I know what their system is. It’s called the Path of Elemental Mastery, and it’s ridiculously picky in who it grants power to. You need to show that you can already control it befo- … actually, that doesn’t matter.
“Each of those four can create their element, control it, and absorb it to strengthen and heal themselves up to a point. It’s easier to control things that emanate from the user, and they can’t absorb anything they create,” the fairy rattled off. “But I’m not sure about the crystal users, that could be a couple of different things, you’ll know more when I do.”
Helpful. Very helpful.
So, what did that mean to Thomas?
No punching the kinetic controller, use venom or fire, no breathing fire on the fire mage, crush him like a bug instead, ice mage … no conflict there, air mage would most likely be able to heal themselves once by absorbing the surrounding atmosphere, though it would most likely also cause injuries nearby allies, who likely still needed to, you know, breathe.
As he thought that, the invaders were carefully picking their way through the entrance hall, wary of traps he hadn’t actually put there, the only danger being the slipperiness of the ground, and the contact poisons in the water.
They were nearly three-quarters of the way to the dino section when Thomas unleashed every creature they were currently “bypassing,” namely, the horde of spider monkeys from the beginning of the panacea challenge, and the various perfectly mundane wolverines and antelopes from the Cradle, the place meant to be used by absolute beginners to power up in.
Being unranked, the swarm from the Cradle amounted to less than nothing, wiped out by a combination of wide, sweeping, wind blades and diffuse gouts of flame that may have failed against something stronger, but were more than enough for the lesser critters.
Yet their sacrifice hadn’t been in vain, because it had given the monkeys enough time to scatter to the winds and pick the invaders’ pockets … metaphorically speaking. Depending on one’s definition. Because was it still pick-pocketing when it was magic teleporting away anything not nailed down?
Either way, the power meant to grant his monkeys a near-infinite supply of the plentiful ammo available in the next room over was perfect for stripping supplies from people who clearly meant him harm.
Thomas might not be able to touch these people’s mana pools, mental energy or physical stamina, but by the time he was done with them, the only bullets these guys would have would be the ones already loaded into their rifles.
That went on for a good five seconds, bullets banking in midair to strike monkeys that seemed to just be running away, streams of frost leaving trails of ice crystals that occasionally intersected with frozen monkey corpses, and flying gemstones guided by their users’ malicious wills tore the furry bodies apart … but it was all a half-arsed effort. Shooting down fleeing enemies, not desperately trying to hold the line against a living tide of rabid monsters.
Aaaannd then someone spotted one of the random bits of their own gear that had wound up in the bloody water, realizing what was going on.
The efforts at monkey extermination were redoubled and finished after another ten seconds, leaving the entrance hall devastated, every available surface bloody or scarred.
Yet the damage had been done, spare munitions, bandages, radios, even backup weapons were now in the knee-deep water that covered most of the floor, so near, yet so far, separated by the now toxin-infused water.
Stolen story; please report.
God, he hoped they went for it, that the invaders tried diving in to get back their stuff. Even with how diluted it now was, it would still be a terrible idea to hop in.
The invaders began furiously arguing the second the room had been “secured,” accompanied by the occasional bout of swearing, which was recognizable even through the language barrier due to the tone employed.
And yet, once again, the language was a complete mystery, one that didn’t even sound like something humans would create. There was no rhythm, no rhyme or reason, like someone had fed a fed a dictionary through a shredder then randomly assembled the fragments and asked someone to read the entire affair out loud.
“Oh … obfuscation amulets,” Elias suddenly muttered.
“What?” Thomas asked.
“They basically let the wearers communicate without anyone being able to listen in, it’s usually impossible to identify the language used and if they’re of sufficient quality, they can even act as translators if the wearers don’t speak the same language.”
… Yeah, he should have guessed as much, given the name.
The invaders continued their path forward, this time in a more “collected” formation, the one with the crystal shield in the lead, one of the gemstone mages in second place, the four elementalists in the center, the second gemstone mage behind them, and the one with the crystal swords in the back.
They clearly had enough good intel to know that things were linear from that point onwards, and that the monsters in the other corridors branching off from the entrance hall had at least mostly been used up. One guy to guard the back, a walking shield in the front, mages in the middle to obliterate anything that dared to show its face.
Something that might allow them to barge their way all the way down to the core. But not if he had anything to say about it.
The next section was the one filled with dinosaurs, complete with three massive sauropods, Camarasauruses whose tails’ length was … negotiable, two t-rexes crossed with dragons for fire breath and arms that could actually be used, and a whole swarm of raptors, both small velociraptors and the much larger utharaptors, which were as large as Jurrasic Park had claimed velociraptors were.
In an instant, the carefully curated garden of prehistoric-looking plants transformed into a battlefield, plants trampled underfoot or scorched to ashes as the beasts of eons past unleashed their fury.
Once again, a crystalline shell sprang up around the lead invader, acting as a bulwark to shield those behind him … except not all attacks needed to move in a straight line.
Wind blades and telekinetically controlled crystals would be thrown around the shield, but the whips of flesh and bone could likewise reach past.
Two extendible tails cracked against the shell, blocked by the seemingly unbreakable barrier, but the third, the third had been elongated further than the others, momentum carrying it forward, wrapping around the curve of the spherical defense until it freely swung beyond it, colliding with the sword wielder in the very rear of the enemy formation.
Thomas had expected it to bowl the target over, but some kind of ability allowed the man to stand firm, to take the blow and not move an inch. Generally, that was something that could easily backfire, as any impact resisted in such a manner would transfer the entirety of its force into the target, nothing instead bleeding off into getting the “victim” to move, but even the dungeon core, someone who’d seen fights like this play out over a hundred times, could have expected things to go as badly as they did.
The tail continued, carried by its momentum, wrapping around the man, and then,the extending effect cut off for every part of the tail save for what was currently tying up the invader, yanking him off his feet and hurling him across the room towards the far side, where the dinosaurs were currently charging from.
Everyone else tried to intervene, and if they had been D-Ranks trying to follow the normal movement of an E-Rank dinosaur, there would have been zero chance of them not succeeding. But the dinosaur was merely undoing the effect of one of its powers, reeling its “victim” in so quickly that any lesser being would have outright been torn in half.
A summoned gemstone blade sliced the tail apart and freed the captured warrior a split-second before impact, allowing the man to lunge at the now-tailless camarasaurus and carve two massive lines across its stomach, then lunge onwards to hack the leg off a t-rex … that was when the gemblade wielder was swarmed.
“Punching up” and winning against higher-ranked enemies might have become progressively harder the stronger the people involved were, the power difference grew and grew as you ascended, but when it was merely a single D-Rank amidst a swarm of feathery, dragon-dinosaur-hybrid piranhas on two legs …
Every raptor that hadn’t already been swarming towards the main group washed over the gem warrior.
The man could summon ever more blades that might shatter after a few hits but all that did was fling razor-sharp shards across the nearby area, empower individual movements to become more powerful and practically impossible to restrain, and his ability to stay standing no matter what prevented him from being bowled over, but in the end, none of that mattered.
He only had two arms, and even with supernaturally perfect balance, he still needed to keep at least one leg firmly planted on the ground to stay standing.
Even when he transitioned to wild flailing as he was being overwhelmed, there were still nearly half of the over a dozen ankle biters left, and Thomas had taught the raptors the finer points of human anatomy.
Sever the Achilles tendon, and even supernatural poise would fail.
Smash against someone’s ear and disorient them.
And if you make even a half-hearted strike towards someone’s unmentionables … most men would likely expose even their carotid to protect their junk. And the invader was no different. When an utharaptor surged towards him, sickle claw surging up in a predictable arc, a freshly summoned gemstone blade split the larger dinosaur’s skull with ease, but even that incredibly swift strike allowed a smaller velociraptor to leap onto his shoulder and latch onto his throat.
When the man literally ripped the dinosaur off, it carried along a large chunk of his flesh in its jaws, containing some blood vessels that were rather important to his continued survival.
And one of the last three surviving little raptors took that as its chance to chomp down on his dangly bits anyway.
Thomas stopped watching at that point, and really wished he’d dragged his attention over to the rest of the group earlier. Some things … some things stayed with you no matter how much your circumstances changed.
A charnel house had replaced most of the rest of the room, with smaller dinosaurs having been literally detonated by powerful attacks and larger ones violently cut open, the blood having sprayed all the way to the ceiling in places.
The second t-rex was dead, slashed to ribbons by blades of wind, and impaled in multiple places by gemstone spears.
Both remaining camarasauruses had been burned to a crisp.
Of the raptors, there wasn’t enough left to identify more than just a general location of where they’d been when they died.
And the few snakes he’d sent slithering through the grass had all died as well, likely without the invaders even noticing their presence.
As he watched, an utharaptor, the final monster in the entire room not tearing into the only human corpse, leaped at the cracked barrier of the lead man, shattering it and slamming straight into his chest.
But instead of being able to rip straight into him, sickle-claws punching into his internal organs, the air around the man seemed to fracture and, a moment later, a burst of energy blew away from him.
Oh, great. The guy with the ridiculous magical defenses wasn’t even remotely vulnerable underneath it all.
“Do you know what that is?” Thomas asked.
“Nope, could still be a couple of different things,” Elias replied, glaring into the empty air as though he were watching the goings-on there, rather than a “live feed” being beamed into his head via their connection. “It’s not the Path of Elemental Mastery, but there are two crystal systems that I know of, and a ton of more flexible ones that could give you a Class like that.”
Not exactly helpful, but this time around, that wasn’t the fairy’s fault.
Still, one invader was already dead. Granted, that had been less “all according to plan,” more “the training paid off, thank god,” but it was hard to argue with results.
If that rate of attrition continued, he’d win. Of course, by then they’d be deep into the underground, caught in what Thomas privately referred to as his “fuck off defenses,” well beyond where any delvers were ever supposed to be. But he could A. not count on that and B. if they got anywhere near that far, it would be a loss in his mind.
Of course, the next room was Cheshire’s. If she didn’t get at least one kill … well, he’d love his cat anyway, but he’d be very disappointed. Switching both his bosses back into their original positions had been a bit of a scramble to get done in time, but he’d just about managed it.
The invaders didn’t even bother to enter the room before spraying it with fire of the literal, metaphorical, and gun kind. Apparently, they’d assumed that the cat was still in there somewhere, invisibly.
But while Cheshire was, in fact, in that room, she was actually located on a small balcony he’d installed over the door, to wait there for people with bad intentions, to force them into the room if they wanted to face her.
Clearly, the invaders weren’t the brightest of bulbs, after all, they’d decided to make their bad intentions clear right from the start and already paid for it, but even they had realized that something was hinky about the entire situation.
And they still had to go in anyway. Not to mention that the longer they waited, the closer Jan would get to the people beyond the jungle, Thomas’ spider monkey turned ambassador would come back with reinforcements and then these fuckers would truly be screwed.
Now, the invaders didn’t explicitly know that, but they had to at least suspect that there were more people coming at some point down the line, and that their time here was limited.
So the defender stepped forward, a restored crystal shell moving with him, attentively scanning his surroundings, somehow managing to stay on his feet just fine despite the fact that the entire floor was covered in non-flammable engine grease, even when his feet started to slip, he still managed to easily adjust using movements that just plan looked unnatural.
“Same balance power,” Elias commented.
Thomas just grunted an affirmative. It was annoying, but at the same time, it was practically guaranteed that the elementalists didn’t have it, which was nice.
The man wrapped in the crystal shell was halfway into the room before Cheshire finally made her move, launching herself straight at him, empowered claws outstretched and ready to rip him apart.
Of course, that was obviously not going to be a short process, so she didn’t even try, this was merely an attempt to do as much damage as possible. They slammed into the crystalline shell and glanced off, leaving behind glowing lines that Thomas interpreted as signifying significant localized damage, but even before her entire weight had slammed into the barrier, she was already pushing away, launching herself towards the open door, at the magic squad beyond.
Even she would not have been able to that easily change direction on the slippery floor, but if the invader was so nice to offer himself up as a springboard, why should she refuse to take advantage?
The big cat was immediately met with a hail of magic attacks, earning herself burns, cuts and frozen patches of frost that cracked and shattered as they moved, but she was a boss. In more than one meaning of the word.
A single swipe of her claws disemboweled the kinetic mage, spun, bit down the ice mage’s shoulder, and launched herself back into the boss room, dragging her victim along while the area behind her exploded in a blast of fire and crystal flechettes as the remainder tried to take advantage of her “standing still.”
Thomas was about to start celebrating, but as it turned out, he’d been too quick to assume how this would end. A blast of frost froze half of the saber-tooth’s face, and the teeth clamped down on and impaling the mage’s shoulders shattered under the strain of his weight, rendered brittle by the cold.
Even without his input, the big cat immediately realized that she couldn’t remain in a place that the entrance had a line of sight to and dove to the side of the room, forcing those who’d been trying to stay outside to come in.
But not all of them decided to focus on trying to kill the big cat, instead having spotted something.
One of the crystal mages flicked out a handful of blunt crystals and used them to hook onto a bag of sand that seemed to have been carelessly left lying around on the far side of the boss room. You know, the one nice people were given to make the fight involve slightly fewer “Bambi on ice” impressions followed by spectacular faceplants.
The bag went flying into the room where it promptly exploded as another orb dashed into it, scattering gritty grains all over the room.
That ran a small risk of it getting in people’s eyes, but it was hardly the dumbest idea … if it had indeed been a bag of sand, carelessly left lying around by a panicked dungeon core.
It wasn’t. Instead, it had contained a mixture of rust and aluminum powder which had likely given similar feedback to sand through the crystals used to guide it. But in the end, expecting ground up sand and winding up with thermite covering almost every available surface could not have been a comfortable situation to find oneself in.
Especially after Cheshire had taken this as a cue to rabbit, shooting out through the entrance to her boss room and accelerating further vanishing from sight.
It was at that point the dragon-raptor Thomas had hidden in a little alcove at the start of all this launched itself out of its hiding place and let loose a gout of fire, straight at the largest pile of exceedingly flammable metal dust.
Now, having a literally draconic physiology conferred a certain degree of fire resistance, and being E-Rank to boot should have rendered the raptor all but immune to mundane fire. Yet it burned up in a matter of seconds, and had been dead after less than one.
Being D-Rank didn’t help the invaders overly much either.
It was the crystal defender who’d taken the brunt of the flames, his shield shattering in an instant, but the air around him fractured once more, fiery-red lines seeming to carry much of the heat away from him … yet this was heat. It radiated right back at him, making the effect vastly less effective than it would overwise have been.
In addition, the ice mage was briefly on fire but managed to quickly quench it with a small application of his fire.
And the fire mage, well, he managed to absorb much of the flames near him.
But it was the air mage who’d responded in the most extreme manner, by absorbing the nearby atmosphere in an attempt to both heal his currently still surface-level burns.
The former worked, the latter … not so much. After all, this. Was. Thermite. It had its own internal source of oxygen. Even underwater or in a vacuum, once it had ignited, it would keep burning until it was finished, and not a second sooner.
Yet even set on fire and operating in a near vacuum, these guys managed to react far more professionally than ninety-five percent of humanity would have, ripping off ignited clothes and simultaneously flinging away the molten, still-burning, slag that had landed on it.
Halfway through that, air rushed back in to fill the briefly emptied area, sending them sliding every which way on the still incredibly slick floor, but they managed that with admirable aplomb.
And in the confusion, no one seemed to have realized just yet that Cheshire had snuck back and grabbed the injured kinetic mage they’d all left outside in a mad attempt at killing her.
Thomas could have sent her in, but he decided to keep her back and leave her there. Because as long as she was alive, these bastards would forever be looking over their own shoulders, even as they headed deeper into the Dungeon where even nastier creatures were waiting.
But even as his chances of victory were rising, his mood was falling.
Who the hell had had eight D-Ranks ready to throw away like this? Let alone ones loyal to the point of not retreating after losing a quarter of their number a few steps in?
