Mage Tank-Chapter 271: Layover

“Want to do the honors?” I asked Xim. The cleric flashed me a smile, then uncrossed her legs and leaned forward.

“Hmm, where should I start?” she said, tapping a finger against her chin. She paused and locked eyes with Baltae, then with Pio. “Okay, I got it.” She scooched forward an inch, while both Baltae and Pio leaned forward slightly to mirror her posture.

“We were on our way to rescue the king of Hiward from the clutches of an evil avatar named Hysteria, when we were ambushed by a team of Level 20 Delvers from the Eschen Wastes…”

Less than sixty seconds into Xim’s narration, the other conversations went silent as we all became enraptured by her retelling. Halfway through, I glanced down the aisle to find Tavio watching me with an eager expression. Soon after, he was looking between everyone else in my party with an unnerving hunger.

I was pretty sure we were all going to have to spar with the man.

*****

“The Icon was malformed,” I said with a shrug once Xim had finished. “It wasn’t as bad as it sounds; hardly a speck of deific power in the whole thing.”

Pio let out a quick sigh and rubbed her forehead, then looked at the pair of us, trying to gauge our expressions. “Will all of your tales be like this? Filled with godly beings?”

“No,” I said. “One time we got stuck in a Delve that was actually a giant mimic, and all its little mimic babies pretended to be works of fine art, then tried to kill us while we were appreciating their beauty. They made a mockery of visual and expressive creation. But dammit, were they gorgeous!” I felt some heat under my collar as I continued. “I even kept one that had turned into a fantastic chandelier after they all went inert, but then Hysteria fucking ate it and–” I froze midsentence, then clicked my jaw shut.

“Hells,” I swore. “They do all end up looping back around to godly beings.”

“Only if you keep going on like that,” said Xim. “If you’d stopped with The Mimic, it would have been fine.”

“Yeah, I guess,” I said. “What about you guys? What was your toughest Delve?”

“The last one for certain,” said Pio. “The plant was not the worst part, I do not think. There was a very difficult Atrocidile Titan just before the obelisk room.”

Baltae waggled a hand in the air. “Otherwise, it was not so interesting. There was some tale about this person called the Void King attached to it, but the entire thing felt like a badly written romance novel.”

“Oh?” said Xim. “Could you be more… specific?”

Baltea placed a hand on his chest and held the other up in the air in a dramatic fashion. “‘Crimson Dread gripped the Void King’s manhood, her healing flooding his wounded pride until it swelled with new life,’” he recited. “‘But the wound was grievous, and the Void King without an heir. Crimson Dread knew that should her king’s lineage end, there would be war within the kingdom.’”

Xim’s smile widened, and I rubbed at my eyes, trying my best to pretend I was somewhere else.

“‘There was but one choice,’” Baltae continued, sweeping his gaze between us. “‘As the Void King’s high cleric, it was her duty to ensure that her liege’s fertility endured. She knew that there was but one way to deliver unto him her most potent healing, and that was to bring him closer to the source of her power, to let him touch the magic that thrummed in her mana core, just below her navel. She needed to bring him… deep inside of her.’”

“Ow! Ow! Owww!” Cezil cheered, eyebrows waggling above flashing red eyes, then she gave a salacious whistle. Madel flinched and sank down in her seat, like she was trying to hide from being associated with her twin.

Etja leaned around Nuralie to look at me. “Why don’t we get any Delves like that?” she asked. “With us, it’s all blood, guts, and bugs.”

“We could make a special request,” said Nuralie. “The System might agree to let us into a Delve with a”–Pause–“compelling plot line.”

“Wait, but I want to hear how it ends,” said Xim.

“They fuck,” I said. “The end.” I crossed my arms and looked back at Baltae. “How about weird stuff? Any weird Delves?”

“I would describe some of the activities between the Void King and Pale Rider as being strange at times,” Baltae replied. “Not that I am judging, but there is no reason to require a twenty-foot-long–”

“Odd!” I said as I felt Varrin’s eyes burning a hole into the side of my head. “Delves that were unusual for reasons beyond the proclivities of their associated characters.”

Baltae made a tittering noise as he considered. “I believe I would pick Anthra’s Drawl,” he said. “It was a sound-based Delve with a constant subsonic frequency that induced nausea and fatigue. What was odd was that we could not find any monsters. It was an endless series of rooms that looked like they came from a cheap government office, but they repeated endlessly.”

“There was no food or water, no useful resources of any kind,” said Pio. “We eventually tried to break through the walls, but they were so tough that we would have run out of time before we could dig very far. Even if there hadn’t been a time limit, we would have gone mad from the sounds. Of course, only Baltae could hear them clearly. For the rest of us, we just felt its effects. Otherwise, it was terribly silent. Except for the chirps.”

“The chirps?” I asked.

“Every few hours, there would be loud, watery chirps from just around the next corner of the hallway or outside of the office we were inside,” she said. “Almost like a drowning bird. It was startling in the beginning, but no matter how we searched, we never found the source. As the timer drew closer to running out, the chirps became… distorted.”

Baltae picked up the next part. “Once that happened, we began to feel tremors, as though a massive creature were always drawing closer. Much larger than any of the hallways could contain. Something was stalking us from outside, and we began to fear that the walls around us would be crushed between its teeth at any moment, along with ourselves.”

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“What was the solution?” asked Xim.

“I had been hearing it the entire time,” said Baltae. “I have the Eidetic Memory evolution, so I could remember all of the subsonic droning with perfect clarity. Paired with my Investigation intrinsic and one of my passive skills, it allowed me to create mental simulations of the noise while accelerating its frequency. It was a message that allowed me to interpret the chirps, which led us to a section of the Delve where the wall was thin enough to break through.”

“Outside was total darkness farther than any of us could perceive,” said Pio. “Light would not penetrate it, and the effect was too large to dispel. Whatever was stalking us was still out there. It realized we’d broken free and began to chase us. No matter how fast we traveled, it always drew closer, but we could never see it. Fortunately, Baltae saved us again.”

“I have Navigation,” he said. “The Delve was literally telling us how to leave the endless offices from the moment we entered, so I suspected this was a case of something always being hidden in plain sight. I took us around the outside of the facility and back to where the entrance of the Delve was, just on the other side of the external wall.”

“And there was the obelisk,” said Pio. “By the time we got our Level, the giant had grown so close that the floor beneath us began to crack from its steps. I had never been so happy to see an exit portal appear.”

“After that, I picked up the spell Worm Tunnel,” said Baltae. “Now we do not need to dig through walls, we can just walk through them.”

I knew that spell well, since it was the same one Baltae had used to break his way into the hot springs area of the Closet.

“That all sounds pretty terrifying,” I said. “No pun intended.”

Our two groups continued to trade stories back and forth. We’d all met a couple of times before to do basic rundowns of our builds and capabilities, but hearing firsthand how we each dealt with challenges did a lot to put those abilities into perspective.

Team Pio presented themselves as having a pretty classic composition, although I knew that several members of their party had their own special tricks.

Guar was a hammer-wielding tank with a paladin flavor, using stacks of Blessed to boost his attacks. This paired quite well with his golden eyes, which I was pretty sure glowed when he got excited. The sergeant was straight Strength, Speed, and Fortitude, and had a couple of abilities that allowed him to substitute Strength for Charisma when trying to hold the attention of enemies.

Baltae was a Mystical-attuned mage, although he preferred Dimensional spells. While he could drop AoEs and nuke enemies like a champ, he had a heavy investment in puzzle solving, analysis, and perception as well. He was magic Sherlock Holmes, basically.

Pio was the team’s healer and support, who could shield and buff allies from the middle while calling out tactics. While she wasn’t built too far into defensive stats, she had enough defensive skills and evolutions to let her sub in as the off-tank when Guar got overwhelmed. The trade-off for that versatility was that her damage was basically non-existent. Even without being much of a threat, she could pull aggro using her high Charisma. That, or she could just spam enough heals that the enemy decided she needed to die.

Madel was inexhaustible single-target damage, whose build centered heavily around being able to make as many attacks as possible, as fast as possible, for as long as possible. She was extremely mobile, hard to hit, fairly tough, and stacked debuffs with every attack. Her build was the narrowest, but I’d seen how effective it could be for her team.

Madel’s twin, Cezil, was the strangest, but essentially fell into a magic rogue category. She had Stealth, Subterfuge, and could shapeshift to look like just about anything she wanted. While hidden or blending in, she’d apply mental debuffs to enemies, oftentimes sending them into a self-destructive frenzy. This let her cull packs before her party even saw them. For tougher enemies, she stacked Cursed, which would rapidly weaken their attacks and defenses. She didn’t do a lot of damage on her own, but in my opinion, she was the scariest member of their group.

As for what I knew that Team Pio wasn’t telling us outright, I’d seen Baltae call down the attention of Godqueen Yara using the celestial language, which was part of the reason Grotto thought they had promise. That kind of thing wasn’t a standard Delver ability. Cezil’s shapeshifting gave her the same powers of a mimic, which meant that when she transformed, she was indistinguishable from the real deal. It couldn’t be dispelled, and even Grotto and I, working together, had trouble figuring out where or even what she was while transformed.

Cezil could also turn into a weapon for Madel to wield, giving the more reserved twin a massive boost to her combat abilities while allowing her to weave even more debuffs and curses into her attacks. It also gave the normally staid woman a god complex, but that might have only been from the one combo I’d seen. It was extremely likely that there were others. I wasn’t very clear on how their pseudo-fusion skill worked, and I knew part of it came from a hidden ability Madel possessed, but I had some theories.

As for Guar and Pio, I wasn’t aware of any abilities that would peg them as ‘escalated’ in any way. Hopefully, they’d held something back or had figured out some new tricks since I’d last seen them in action. Of course, we could always help to bring them up to par, but that kind of thing was very individualized. It would be good if they had some groundwork laid beforehand.

The hours passed as we traded stories and got a better handle on everyone’s personalities. Overall, I thought we had a decent mix, although there was some tension in places. Cezil was the sourest grape of the Littan bunch, and her flippant, sarcastic attitude could grate at times. I could tell that it annoyed Nuralie, and that Cezil knew that it annoyed Nuralie, but I attributed some of the needling to an unspoken feud that was starting to get rolling, since their party roles were fairly similar.

I didn’t sense any real hostility out of it, which was good. If anyone would have trouble adjusting here, it would be our sole Eschen. Her primary experience with Littan culture was that they were the giant, militaristic bogeyman next door. One that had come invading a short while ago.

Otherwise, Varrin was too confident to be bothered by anyone, Xim was… also too confident to be bothered by anyone, and Etja was too Etja to be bothered by anyone. Personally, I didn’t get the feeling I was meeting any new best friends, but if I got locked in a cell with any member of Team Pio for a few days, I felt like I could make it through without wanting to kill them.

The first leg of our journey melted by, and soon we were descending to exchange our hammerhead for a fresh one near the Littan capital city of Tarras.

Of course, in traditional Fortune’s Folly fashion, we wouldn’t be landing in the capital city, nor would we have time to take a tour. Our birdplane touched down in a small lake to the south of the sprawling capital, next to a defensive outpost in the middle of some farmland. A small tug floated out to pull us up onto the shore, next to a few more of the birdplane-baskets.

We had a half-hour to kill while we waited for our new ride, so everyone stepped out of the cabin to stretch their legs. Cezil immediately began doing cartwheels, which Etja quickly copied, and then the pair of them tried to get as many people as they could to do cartwheels alongside them. Guar joined in, but the thickly built fellow was not very good.

Then again, neither was Cezil, and in fact neither she nor Etja were actually doing proper cartwheels. Etja was using her gravity magic, and Baltae was using Telekinesis to keep Cezil from embarrassing herself. It seemed like something he was used to doing.

So, as far as the impromptu cartwheel competition went, Guar won by default since he was the only one not disqualified.

Madel immediately pulled out a sword to begin sharpening, which drew Varrin’s attention, and the pair of them did some side-by-side weapons maintenance. Neither of them said a word the entire time, but I did spot Varrin passing the woman some oil. After that, the two warriors had a silent conversation solely through razor-thin movements of their eyebrows.

Meanwhile, Xim strode off with Baltae while the two of them got into a competition for who could perform the most dramatic retelling of various ‘romantic’ stories they knew by heart. Baltae lacked the raw Charisma of Xim, but the man was clearly experienced at the task for whatever reason. I was ninety-nine percent sure that the whole thing was flirting. freeweɓnøvel.com

Nuralie was… somewhere.

Just as I was about to turn to Captain Pio for a stoic discussion of leadership techniques, Tavio strode up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder with a knuckle.

“Come,” he said. “Let me show you my favorite view of the capital.”

He began walking off towards the nearby mew, and I followed behind him, curious to learn more about the man.