Liberty and Death, Chapter 78
Chapter 78
15 minutes later, with Cora comfortably boosting herself to Kyra’s [Agi], Lysander finally stopped.
“Hmm…” she said, looking up, down, then doing a little circle.
“What?” Cora asked. She found it hard to beleive Lysander had lost the trail. However those magic escape smoke bombs worked, they didn’t seem to care about physical barriers. The group had been forced to weave in and out of the streets and alley ways, following a roughly diagonal path deeper into Light’s Fall.
Through all of that though, Lysander had never once wavered in picking their turns.
“The trail goes down, here,” Lysander explained, then clinked her foot against a steel manhole cover. Cora realized she was wearing Cinderella ass crystal stilettos.
“You know we have boots, back at home, right?” Cora asked, feet aching in sympathy pain.
“Hmm? Oh, these?” Lysander laughed. She waved her hand, and her lower legs fuzzed, resolving into well worn shit-kickers. “I took Illusion magic, remember dear? You will never catch me looking less than my best.”
Briefly, Cora considered if she was vain enough to waste some points investing into a skill Lysander would invariably be able to do better. She sighed, and dismissed it.
Linnea had perfect skin anyway, she comforted herself.
“So? They’re down there, right? No wonder we never found them, but let’s fucking go, aye?” Kyra insisted.
[Party Chat: C, K, [BS]]
[BS]: HOLD UP
[BS]: DOLLARS TO DONUTS THAT SEWER SYSTEM HAS BEEN CONVERTED INTO THE FIRST LEVEL OF A DUNGEON
[BS]: NOT GONNA BE QUITE AS EASY AS WALKING DOWN THE STREET
C: Yeah? So, what, monsters?
[BS]: MONSTERS.
C: then how the fuck do they use it as a base?
[BS]: BEATS THE CRACKERS OUTTA ME
[BS]: IF IT WAS WORKING AS IT SHOULD MOST OF LIGHT’S FALL WOULD BE DUNGEON BY NOW
C: cool. Can you tell how far it goes? Would the sewers near us be like that? Could be good for training during the day.
[BS]: NO IDEA
[BS]: I SUGGEST WHOEVER YOU SEND TO SCOUT HAS A POOR SENSE OF SMELL
K: fucking thanks
Cora dismissed the chat window, finding Lysander waiting expectantly.
“Right, [Big Sys] says the sewer has probably converted into a dungeon, if the Chains do indeed have a dungeon core as we suspect,” Cora explained to the odd woman out. She looked at the three of them, and hesitated.
“Lysander… could you pick this trail up again?” Cora asked, wincing as Kyra’s eyes flashed. “We’re beat, not injured yet but fuckin’ beat. Idk what’s down there, but I don’t wanna fight it with my Doubles dead, and with you running on mana fumes.”
Lysander chewed on an impossibly plump lip, eyes scanning something only she could see.
“Cora, what the fuck, you know we gotta at least find her tonight,” Kyra accused. Cora fliched, but tried to hide it.
She didn’t know that as a fact. The only reason they needed to find her tonight was if they thought they could get her out, which they didn’t, or if they couldn’t find her later, which…
“No,” Lysander sighed in defeat, “the trail already fades. Should we wait we will be blind.”
Cora didn’t like that answer, and didn’t like the viscous grin that split Kyra’s face upon hearing it.
“Well then what the fuck are we waiting for?” She asked, kneeling to pry up the cover with the tip of a karambit, then flipping it halfway across the street.
She landed with a splash at the bottom, and promptly gagged.
“Holy fuck it smells like Linnea’s soul down here!”
Great. Here goes…
Cora took a peek, held her breath against the stench, then splashed down into ‘water’ that mercifully didn’t quite lap above her boots.
Lysander, with an air of complete disdain, floated down on a cushion of air, one she kept going as she landed, pushing the much away from her deceptively vulnerable tootsies.
“You’re welcome for this,” she said, and a curtain of air fell around them, blowing away the worst of the stench.
“You’re good doing this?” Cora asked, finally able to take a full breath.
“Oh please, this is barely a cantrip,” Lysander chuckled. “I may be of minimal use in a fight, but I can serve to break the assault on our senses for now.”
“Well thank god for that,” Cora said, eyes deciding they no longer needed to water. She clapped Lysander on the shoulder, and it came away wet with sweat.
Cora’s eyes met the dancing lights of Lysander’s, she received the message to keep her mouth fucking shut.
“I prefer Goddess to god, but at such heights I suppose gender is a simply a formality anyway,” she said with a carefree air, as she once more led the way for the group.
Ideally, they would have had Kyra scout ahead, but pushing her out if Lysander’s bubble of olfactory safety seemed truly cruel.
That did, however, mean that every squeak, every creak, every splash from a side tunnel in the dark; they were all illustrated by nothing but the group’s imagination.
“Any insight to what we can expect down here?” Cora asked Lysander, “you did some Dungeon Diving in your day, didn’t you?”
“Oh yes, decades of the stuff,” Lysander agreed. Indeed, part of her actually seemed more at home down here, in cramped, dark, tunnels, than she had on open city streets. “We didn’t have this convenient System in Azalon. Power was earned there, through discipline and practical application!”
“Heh, okay boomer,” Cora chuckled, and while there was zero chance Lysander understood that, she definitely understood it was an insult.
All of the sudden, her little air bubble didn’t include Cora.
Just for a moment, but a moment of a city’s worth of ass when you weren’t expecting it was enough to make Cora blow chunks against the wall.
Loudly.
“Quiet!” Kyra hissed, holding up her hand.
“I’d fuckin’ love to be,” Cora gasped, wracking with one final dry heave. She glared at Lysander. “Guess age doesn’t make you less petty, huh?” Cora growled.
Lysander just gave her a self satisfied little shrug. It was tough to win a spat with half-digested stew on your chin.
A high pitched whine, and the darkness flashed orange as Kyra sent a buzzkill down the tunnel.
There was a familiar hissing shriek, then the fervent patter of a lot of feet.
Cora cursed, drawing [Vector Driver] and slamming against the wall, shooting down past Kyra’s waiting shoulders. She wished, for once, that this gun had more of a muzzle flash. Instead, she just kind of pulled the trigger, it made a little crack! and things were dead.
A splash after her first shot told her she’d probably hit one of the beasts, which sounded like Alphounds, which was good. What wasn’t good, was that she hadn’t even been aiming, and that meant there were enough that aiming wasn’t an issue.
“Lysander?” She asked, question implied.
“No, blast it, I excel in these situations, but if I produce the walls of force needed you will have to carry me home,” she said.
“Can you give us light?”
“That I can do!”
Her tone made it sound easy, but Cora could see the sweat darken her brow as lines of floating globes of light illuminated the tunnel in both directions.
Cora looked behind them, an blessedly, they weren’t getting it from both ends. But in front of them…
The very walls seemed to skitter. And the floor, and the ceiling, the Alphounds had never paid much attention to normal vectors of attack, and now that they had a tunnel to work with, they were making upsettingly good use of the space.
As one, Cora and Kyra lit the oncoming tide the fuck up.
Cora had counted as best she could, and she was fairly certain Kyra had 8 karambits on her at any one time. She still had no idea where she kept them, since her [Voidblack Bodysuit] clung to her like goddamn paint, and there where no wickedly curved tumors to be seen on the flawless body Cora tried so hard to ignore.
Now, all 8 of those blades screamed as they tore blazing gouges into targets, most long dead before the {Buzzkill} blades stopped spinning, flame or flagellation proving too much for something vital.
As Cora watched, two snapped back into her hands, instantly sent back out to find more targets.
And there was no dearth of choice for targets.
Cora was barely aiming, and each shot of [Vector Driver] was rewarded with an explosion of gore. For a moment, she was feeling pretty good.
This really was like a video game, and she and Kyra had just outleveled these trash mobs.
Then, after a plaintive wail Cora had heard once before, she stopped feeling quite so optimistic.
The Alphounds froze. Then, as one, their eyes glowed the turquoise blue of the {Matriarch’s Call}, and they continued their charge with renewed vigor and tougher skin.
Suddenly, one [Vector Driver] shot wasn’t enough. Monsters kept charging even after a {Buzzkill} blade lost its impetus, flying back to Kyra’s hand.
Any hope they had of breaking the tide, or ending this engagement at range, died alongside the final, wailed note of the Call.
Oh, they tried. The whine of blades, the crack of gunfire, it was deafening in the confines of the tube.
Cora risked a look back.
Lysander tried to hide it as soon as she saw, but she was too slow. Cora had seen an emotion plastered on her face it really wasn’t made for.
Abject fear.
Fuck! What the fuck good does [Agi] do me right now? I can’t run! Kyra would make it, but Lysander…
Wait…
Anyone in my aura?
Oh please please please please…
Cora could always feel Luxholme. Distant, like a memory, but present, just at the back of her mind, or maybe something deeper. A home covered in her aura. A home that was part of her.
A home she felt Hawk walk into the same instant she focused on it.
She dropped Double Act with Kyra, and latched onto Hawk like a lifeline.
Then she met the tide before it could meet her.
[Vector Driver] in her right hand and [Rib Cutter] in her left, she waded into a storm of tooth and claw, and she became its eye.
They were just so laughably slow.
She didn’t even have to activate her Reactimax. Her [Dex] was plenty to dodge bites, hop over swipes, and retaliate every time.
No, the problem she would have had, was those retaliations just wouldn’t have been enough to end these fuckers. But when those strikes were propelled with the force of Cora’s own Monster?
[Rib Cutter] didn’t live up to its name. {Matriarch’s Call} toughened her kindred’s hides up like an absolute motherfucker.
A more apt title, currently, would be [Rib Crusher]