Chapter 57: Trapped with the Tank
Mirra’s MP bar was at eight percent and her hands were shaking and Noir’s chest was rising with the slow careful rhythm, and the eastern gap was still producing elites at a rate that Midnight’s flicker-strikes were slowing but not stopping, and Rogue was doing damage in the shadows that the spawning rate was eating as fast as he could make it, and the numbers were still wrong.
Then the shadows split.
Midnight came out of them, her shadow-walker form flickering between solid and present, and she hit the eastern gap from the inside with two shadow anchors placed with a precision that rewrote the spatial logic of the corridor entrance, collapsing the path the elites had been using into something that was no longer a path.
Thirty seconds of silence through the eastern gap.
"You owe me a meal," Midnight said, from somewhere near the ceiling, her voice unsteady in the way voices are unsteady when they have just done something they weren’t sure they could do.
"A real one, four courses."
"Done," Liam said, already moving forward into the space she had bought, his eyes on the Matriarch who had not moved but whose hood had flared wide at his approach.
The tail came down at him with the full weight of a creature that had decided he was the problem.
He caught it in both gauntlets, the Vulcan heat flaring white at the contact points, and for a moment it was the same physics as the Golem fight, except this time his boots were sliding, an inch, two inches, and the ceiling above the southern wall was doing something that his peripheral vision had been tracking for the last three minutes and had arrived at a conclusion about.
Liam was standing at the very centre of the formation. He was tanking, but not in any traditional sense; he just stood there, collecting aggro and trading hits, his health bar a flat plateau that refused to drop below sixty per cent. He had stopped calling out taunts or rotations. He didn’t even look at the mobs.
He was staring at the ceiling, posture loose, like he was watching something over everyone’s head.
Fracture lines and being recently compromised. Getting worse with every tail impact that had been landing against the southern side since the fight started.
He was about to say something about this.
The Matriarch’s tail released him, found a new angle, and drove into the cracked section of the southern wall with the deliberate precision of something that had been watching those fracture lines develop and had been waiting for the right moment to use them.
The sound the wall made was not a crack, but more of a sonic boom and a howl.
Stone folded. Dust erupted in a column that turned the purple moss light to nothing and the violet summoning light to nothing and everything in the chamber to white and grey, and the physical sensation of the ground moving in a way that ground is not supposed to move.
The section of ancient catacomb architecture between the eastern and western halves of the chamber came down.
Elizabeth’s hand closed around his forearm in the half second before the dust took everything, her fingers digging in, and Liam’s arms came around her because the ceiling was still coming down, and that was the practical reason, and he was going with the practical reason, and his brain could catch up later.
The noise stopped.
The dust moved in slow curls.
On the other side of twelve feet of rubble, the party was alive. He could hear them. He filed this under good and took stock of everything else.
Elizabeth had not let go of his arm.
The collapse separated them from the party; it was just him and Elizabeth now.
Liam grabbed Elizabeth by the back of her armour and pulled her toward him as the tunnel folded inward. Stone and compacted earth crashed between them and the rest of the party.
The sound was enormous, then muffled, then gone. Dust billowed thick enough to taste chalk, wet mineral, and old, buried air.
A Naga elite shrieked from somewhere in the haze, disoriented, thrashing against rubble. Its health bar flickered into view through the dust cloud. Half HP. Enraged status.
Liam set Elizabeth behind him. Didn’t think about it. Just did it.
The Naga lunged. He caught the strike on his forearm, the impact registered as a dull red flash across his peripheral HUD. Twelve per cent HP was shaved off. His passive defence absorbed the rest. The thing’s claws scraped across his gauntlet with a sound like a fork on a plate.
Elizabeth was already moving. She came around his right side fast, her oversized blade carving a wide arc that bit into the Naga’s exposed flank. It recoiled. Liam stepped forward and body-checked it into the rubble wall, pinning it long enough for Elizabeth to drive her sword through its throat.
It dissolved into loot particles.
Then it was quiet
The dust kept falling. Tiny grains caught whatever faint ambient light the dungeon provided, which wasn’t much. Was the chamber maybe fifteen feet across?
Liam opened his status panel. Checked his HP 74% that was fine. Checked his inventory: three health potions, a stamina flask, and two bundles of cave moss he’d picked up on the way down because it looked like it might be edible. He closed the inventory and opened the party interface, then found Elizabeth’s HP bar.
68%.
He frowned that was not critically low, not dangerous, but lower than his, and she had less total HP to work with.
Liam closed the panel, opened it again, 68% same number. Obviously, the same number. It had been four seconds ago,
"You’re hurt."
Elizabeth was crouched near the spot where the Naga had dissolved, sorting through the loot drops with one hand. She looked up.
"What?"
"Your HP, you took a hit during the collapse."
"It’s at sixty-eight per cent."
"I know."
She stared at him, "Then why are you telling me?"