Into the Black

(Instanced Dungeon, Southern Continent, Star’s Reach)

Major Khan was thankful for the noise dampening effects of his helmet. Rifles going off in enclosed spaces was a great way to do permanent damage to one’s hearing, especially if you didn’t have protection. Of course, being on the receiving end of rifles going off in enclosed spaces was even worse for one’s health, but it was something you tried to avoid as much as possible. Losing your sense of hearing made your battlefield awareness suck, and that could get you killed, fast.

His team of six had made steady progress through the facility. In battle, one must balance prudence and caution with the need for speed and not giving your enemy time to prepare his defenses. However, this time, with only hints at the dungeon’s power, he decided to play things slow, using stealth and brutal sneak attacks to take out patrols rather than frontal assaults. This mission was to recon and map the dungeon, and see what kind of threats there were, after all.

Actually, it was a good thing they had gone slow, because they would have missed some of the traps and other defenses if they’d been hurrying, and some of those traps were very lethal, to say the least. Compared to the soldiers they were fighting, the traps were sometimes more challenging than the ‘mobs’. After all, an unseen threat was more difficult to defeat than one that was simply patrolling around or standing guard.

Which wasn’t to say that they had been getting through these fights unscathed. Even with surprise attacks, the enemies managed to get some hits in, and when those hits were with pulse rifles, it didn’t take many to add up to a whole lot of hurt. If they hadn’t had medical supplies and healing psy, then they would have lost their effectiveness, and probably been sent for a respawn.

There had also been fights that they simply couldn’t handle as stealth attacks. Two ‘named mobs’, as the hardcore gamers in the corps would call them, had been found so far, and their defenses had made for two hard-fought, straight up battles. They were likely supposed to be this dungeon’s version of ‘boss fights’.

One had been a stealth-focused fighter that used active camouflage like the special forces armor that the Owner used when his harem let him off ship to have ‘fun’. (Oh, sure, most of them were his slaves, and they all seemed to be VERY happy with his lifestyle, but the boss’s laments on guild chat about how his women wouldn’t let him go out and play had become LEGENDARY.) That fight was a nasty piece of work, as they were trying to shoot a ghost. It would have been damn near impossible without some kind of psy designed for piercing stealth, or just using large-scale AoE attacks, but the Black Star Marines recognized that stealth threats might be an issue, and, while they didn’t carry many of them, they did have enough paint grenades that they were able to catch the assassin in the blast radius. With their stealth nullified, concentrated firepower had quickly taken its toll on that one.

The second boss was not that tough, himself. However, he hid behind protective shields while sending waves of drones and other enemies after his team. That made the fight a grind, as they had to break off from trying to wear down the boss’s shields to deal with incoming threats and keep from getting caught in rocket launches. The fight was an exercise in attrition, as the drone commander tried to wear down enemies. Fortunately, they had finally managed to crack the shield protecting the boss, and that had been that.

Now, they had finally made their way to what appeared to be the last section of this dungeon, in front of doors that were very impressively decorated with the symbol of Deus that the soldiers in the base all wore, the last guardians of this door laying on the ground with smoking wounds where their heads formerly were. After checking that their weapons were loaded, their HP and PP were full, and everything else was ready to go, Major Khan nodded, and Chavez hit the door controls, causing the massive doors to slide open. What they saw was shocking, to say the least.