“Alright, break’s over. Five minutes to prep, and then we’re assaulting the Guardian's arena.”
Akosyn pulled on her long fingerless gloves and pulled the strings to close the laced neckline of her light shirt. It was oppressively hot in this portal, and she’d taken advantage of the brief downtime she’d allotted the team to cool off.
As a high tier four portal, this world was pushing the limits of what the guild was capable of clearing without any issues. In the months prior, they’d had this repeating portal world on lockdown, clearing it out and collecting all the loot and valuable rare minerals from the location every week.
But lately, the guild had been struggling, morale was low; and everyone was frustrated with having backslid on their progress. First, Isaldre—one of their top frontline fighters and a founding member—had been assassinated while he was making a supply run. They'd found his body mangled and stripped of everything remotely valuable hours after he was late returning to finish their clear.
These things happened, but it was much more common with lower-tier Divers, where it was easier to get a large skill or tier gap to take advantage of. Rumblings within the guild as people speculated what might have happened. Akosyn and several other senior members thought that it wasn’t purely a robbery. That it might have been political, or even personal. There wasn’t good proof in any particular direction, just a gut feeling she had.
Isaldre had been well-liked and a central figure as both a tactics anchor and a trainer of their more junior members. Losing him was difficult.
Then Datura had gone unexpectedly missing. Like Isaldre, Datura was one of their original members, but unlike the affable frontliner, Datura was more… impersonal at least, to those who didn’t know her well. And she didn’t make any efforts whatsoever to get to know other guild members, allies, associates, and so on. Akosyn had always thought that Datura had quite a lot of personality, but was withdrawn… or perhaps more focused than anything when it was time to work. And as a relentless workaholic, a so-called obsessive grinder, she was rarely seen outside Dives or guild Dives.
Outside the guild, Datura had a reputation as being dangerous, or as others would say, a murderous sociopath. Akosyn had given up on trying to combat or contest these rumors, especially since it was hard to argue against when the total number of her kill count went up week after week. So instead of fighting the allegations, she used them. A tool, a bargaining chip, occasionally a blunt hammer to threaten nails with. Datura didn’t know, mostly because Akosyn knew that it wasn’t something that Datura really cared about. Detesting politics was a repeated refrain heard during numerous early attempts to get her to join the guild’s leadership.
When the guild lost one of their main defense specialists, and then one of their main ranged offensive specialists, it caused issues. Their ability to clear high-end tier four Dives became more restrictive; they had to be choosier about which ones to try and do, and the easier a Dive was relative to the prospective rewards, the more hotly contested it became among other Divers. There were multiple benefits to doing the extra difficult or dangerous Dives, chief among them being a lack of competition.
So here they were, in the steamy caldera of a volcano, visibility limited to ten meters, and surrounded by pools of noxious, bubbling water in various extremely brightly colored hues. The water was deadly for anyone who hadn’t invested a lot of time and effort in building their defenses against thermal shocks and poisons. Some pools were shallow, barely puddles. Others were effectively bottomless, and with how saturated with gases they were, one would sink like a brick in them if you fell in. Acid pools, near-boiling hot mud that looked like dry, solid earth on the surface, and unstable footing made this place an environmental death trap all by themselves.
They were exploiting that fact, because most sane guilds didn’t come to clear this Dive unless it was much below their rank. The air itself was laden with ambient earth and magma mana. Casting was both easier and more potent for Akosyn with her stone aspect. Another advantage that would come in handy when they went to kill the giant basilisk-like Guardian.
She was about to call the guild to form up when Nylen placed a hand on her upper arm and leaned in close.
He spoke just above a whisper, his voice nearly drowned out by the bubbling and hissing in the caldera. “Wait. Give it a few more minutes.”
Akosyn prided herself on the fact that she listened to her guild mates and wasn’t one of the stereotypical loud or headstrong guild leaders. “What’s up?” She whispered back, searching his sky blue-and-gold eyes.
“I thought I felt a few flickers of mana,” he said low. He surreptitiously gestured out into the fog with his eyes. “I might just be paranoid, but we don’t have much room for error here.”
That’s an understatement. I brought in people I knew were attentive and deliberate over just the strongest we had available, because I didn’t want to risk injuries, or a potential loss with the environment what it is.
“Monsters roaming in, you think?” Her fingers tightened around her crystal-topped scepter. “Someone suppressing their aura?”
“I can’t tell. There’s too much ambient mana swirling around. I can hardly make anything out much past visual distance.”
Akosyn planted the end of her scepter into the volcanic rock and closed her eyes. Reaching out with her senses, she tried as hard as she could to filter out all the noise in the earth. An ability she’d worked long and hard to develop, it wasn’t something she advertised, and only the people closest to her knew about it. She’d worked from the ground up to build a seismic perception, and under ideal circumstances, she could detect the lightest footstep or impact on the ground within a hundred-meter radius.
That range was severely reduced here, her senses being clouded in much the same way that Nylen had complained about. For her, it was less about the ambient mana than it was the inherent activity all around them. The churn of superheated water traveling underground. The vibrations of geysers spraying. It was easy for her to tune out the micro-tremors from the activity below the surface, but those same waves sent pebbles tumbling down loose formations and triggered tiny avalanches of stone chips and volcanic glass.
He was right. There was something out there, but it was inconsistent, and on the outer reaches of her ability to detect. She opened her eyes and nodded to Nylen, who frowned.
Keeping her voice low, she told him, “Get Crend, Washbourne, and Silvia together; we’ll have a huddle to discuss fight tactics.” He got her meaning immediately. It was unlikely that any potential parties spying on them would be able to hear or see them, but there was no telling when it came to other Users. He stood and moved over to where two of them were sitting near the outer edges of their makeshift camp. She made a show of stretching, partly to try and work out the actual tension under her skin, and partly to keep up a nonchalant front.
Her mind was a different story altogether. She was frantically racing through the possibilities. They’d checked all the registrations; there shouldn’t have been another group or guild here with a competing claim. On the off chance that it was monsters, there was a strong potential that it was either an unknown type or something was acting out of character. The wildlife here in this Dive wasn’t terribly complicated or particularly challenging. Difficult and dangerous, absolutely, but not known for advanced tactics or collaboration.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Nylen place his hand on Crend’s shoulder. Both Crend and Washbourne were an item, and had been sitting and keeping a lookout together while the less capable members of their Dive were resting.
Crend slowly tipped over into Washbourne, who, when impacted, toppled over and off the rock. Both of them had long, needle-like darts sticking out of the front of their necks, and their faces were heavily discolored. If they weren’t already dead, they were well on their way.
Nylen jerked and held his hand out to one side, and a series of similar darts stuck into the invisible wind barrier he’d erected.
”Raiders!” Akosyn shouted, startling the aware members of her guild. Silvia shot up to her feet and snapped the visor of her helmet down in one smooth motion, her hands already twisting into complex mudras as she rapidly cast wards and buffs on their team. The rest of the members weren’t far behind her, and Akosyn was proud of the fact that drills and training had paid off.
Nylen was practically glowing to Akosyn’s mana senses as he burned off a massive chunk of mana all at once. Roaring gusts swept into the caldera and sent a stinging whirlwind of razor-sharp stone and glass chips whipping around, and she knew from experience what his play was here. He was spinning up a large, loose cyclone to clear the air and restore their situational awareness. She felt a similarly strong response out and to her left, pointed her scepter at Nylen, and fired off a well-rehearsed but seldomly used defensive ability. A slab of stone tore out of the ground and exploded into hundreds of tiles, which formed a layered dome of spinning plates around Nylen.
Not a moment too soon either, as the clearing banks of fog and mist lit from within with the orange glow of a massive fireball, which streaked at Nylen while it was still forming.
Shortcasting. Dirty, wasteful, and extremely noisy. No less effective for it, though. Favored by amateurs who don’t know any better or lack technique. Also favored by assassins when subtlety isn’t needed.
Akosyn had an idea what she would see when their opponents were revealed, and confirmed it while she collapsed the dome down and sealed Nylen inside. A tremendous explosion shook the ground and sent sprays of shattered stone, boiling mud, and water flying everywhere. One of the lower-tier members screamed and clutched their arm to their side. Silvia was already working to address the wound.
Akosyn reached out, both with her hand and her mind, and crushed her fist closed so hard her entire arm shook with the effort. The explosion of the fireball was met with a less flashy, but no less deadly explosion of stone at the source of the shortcast. Although the risk of friendly fire was extreme, she opted for effect over safety. She detonated a large boulder of solid flint, and the resulting explosion formed a lethal bloom of chips, flakes, dagger-like blades, needles, and rounded masses of stone. Most of the shrapnel would have bled off its energy at the distance her people were at, and the dispersion meant they’d take proportionately less than those in the immediate vicinity.
The winds blew away the remaining dregs of steam and revealed the raiders.
Six people and two corpses, Slate gray armor, white guild crests with a black flower.
The Pale Collectors. Diver contract killers. Much worse than I thought; this isn’t a rival guild making an opportunistic play, unless this is one hell of a coincidence or we’ve stumbled into one of their unmarked stomping grounds.
One of them was carrying a bow and had a long, thick-shafted arrow already nocked. They drew the string back and released it in one smooth motion, and as they were doing so, a purple mist condensed down into a dark glow on the head of the arrow. It shot across the fifty-meter gap between the groups, and one of Akosyn’s frontliners, Havar, raised his shield and intercepted it, deflecting it off to the side with a horrible screech and shower of sparks. It had been intended for Silvia.
Thank the Twelve for defense specialists; nobody else would have made that block in time.
The arrow’s imbuement burst when it hit the shield, and sprayed thick, gloopy strings of gunk over Havar’s shield and shoulder pad. The gunk hissed and smoked on the metal, and Silvia shouted at him to ditch the armor.
Nylen stepped out of the crumbled remains of the dome he’d been shielded in, looking singed around the edges, but alive. He drew his hands back and cupped them, and she felt his storm aspect mana reverberating. He needed cover, and a distraction. Havar spread his feet and flung his shield like a projectile, then drew his secondary weapon—a submachine gun—shouldered it, and started unloading rapid bursts of automatic fire at the Collectors.
Akosyn flashed hand signals to Silvia from behind her back, issuing her orders to prepare any wounded for evacuation. They might be able to win this fight, but it wouldn’t be worth any further losses, especially not with two dead and at least one other wounded. She began the process of forming a construct to transport them out of the Dive in relative safety.
One of their lower-tier members, Turia, pulled a signal pistol out and fired it at the other guild. An ear-splitting shriek and spray of rainbow-hued burning phosphors shot across the gap and wildly missed the bowman. It exploded in a thunderclap and a second shower of burning sparkles after ricocheting off the ground and spiraling up into the air.
Not a moment later, a hill of steaming loose shale on the other side of the caldera shifted, and a bellowing roar shook the air. The Guardian was alerted and staring at the Collectors, who were wreathed by the remaining bits of pyrotechnics.
The leader finished their construct, and stones of all shapes and sizes rolled into a lumpy pile that resolved itself into a crude four-legged creation. It shook itself out like a wet dog, and excess rock fell off until it was a much leaner, wolf-like creature with obsidian eyes and a jaw packed full of smoky glass daggers. The body was hollow, with a rectangular cut-out in its side that was folded down into a makeshift set of boarding steps.
Silvia ushered the remaining guild members inside the belly of the beast while Nylen threw his hands forward and cast a blindingly bright golden sphere at the other guild. Return fire was exchanged in the form of a rain of fire from the sky, several more arrows, and a number of throwing darts. Akosyn did what she could to shield herself and Nylen from the fire with some overhead stone shingles, but both of them were getting burned on their lower half by flames that splashed like water.
The portal Guardian had been charging across the caldera on eight stubby legs, and the two senior members used the distraction to get into the hollow wolf, which sealed shut behind them. Akosyn knew the direction to the exit portal, and hopefully there wouldn’t be more Collectors waiting for them there. The construct would handle the rest of the navigation on its own, which was good, because her mana was rapidly approaching rock bottom powering the thing.
Silvia did what she could to address their burns, and the last three officers of Red’s Gambit exchanged looks. No words were spoken; not that it would have mattered. The interior of the construct sounded like an industrial rock crusher. They needed downtime, and to call an all-hands meeting.
***
Roughly an hour later, a gaunt, pale-skinned woman of Asian heritage let out a low groan from the sim cradle she was reclining in. She reached up with a near-skeletal-looking hand and carefully disconnected the data line from her neural interface port. Rubbing her eyes with the backs of her thumbs, she didn’t move for several long moments. When she did get up, it was slowly and deliberately.
She took a bottle from a carton sitting next to the cradle and shook it while yawning. Status lights from the bracer on her arm blinked out a steady cadence. One drink from the bottle left her with a scowl on her face; she chugged the rest anyway, then made her way into the small wet closet of her cube. A painfully brief shower later, she re-emerged looking a few degrees more lively than she had going in.
She poked at a dataslate sitting on the folding table that extended from the wall while pulling on an assortment of darkly colored clothing items: underwear bottoms, a pair of distressed jeans, socks, and sneakers. A faded World of Divers tanktop hung from bony shoulders and covered visible ribs. Her bracer beeped several times, and she unclipped a latch and removed an empty glass vial, tossing it into a small sharps bin with a prominent biohazard symbol printed on each side. A new vial–this one filled with a cyan blue liquid–was reinserted and locked in with a click.
The woman took a seat at the table and scrolled the dataslate while fumbling around to pull out a wrapped bar, which she opened and chewed on at a glacial pace. Her fingers were flying across the dataslate, a sharp contrast to her otherwise deliberate movements. She scrolled through an extended list of missed calls from the same contact, then tabbed over and checked the security notices for her cube. Half a dozen visitors since the last time it was checked. A tap brought up the security feed outside her door and a pile of stacked boxes. She sighed loudly and flipped through the public feeds throughout the hab-block.
Seemingly satisfied, she opened her cube door, picked up the pile of boxes, carried it straight to the waste chute, and dumped every one into the trash sorting system before returning to her cube. She leaned back against the inside of the door and thumped her head against it several times with her eyes closed. Taking a deep breath, she huffed and pulled out her slate to send a rapid-fire series of messages out into the matrix.