Chapter Five-Hundred Three (Patreon)

I am definitely not giggling evilly to myself.

“Whatever you say, Boss.”

Quiet you.  It’s not like you’re doing any better.

“I’m not pretending.”

I can’t give him a flat look, but he laughs at what I manage to convey anyway.  Merriment aside, the delvers are doing a great job.  They’ve been pretty handily able to deal with the encounters I’m comfortable with sending after them in the lava.  I’m still sending thieves and such after their protection items, but now it’s more a game of tag than capture the flag.

If one of my denizens manages to touch their item, Teemo hauls them into a shortcut and they’re defeated.  I might need to drill them on similar tactics while in the tunnels later, but this is fine for now.  I don’t think shadow affinity can really hop through anything in the lava, so they at least don’t need to worry about that.  But they will need to worry about possibly getting separated while in the tunnels.  I’m not willing to bet lives that the Betrayer can't coordinate his shadow denizens as well as I can.

Still, we’ve only taken a dozen or so more delvers in the lava.  The sonar is working wonders, and the delvers are learning how to read it beyond just what direction they’re facing.  It’s still a bit awkward, and I’d like to give them actual 360 degree vision, but that’s either a really complicated illusion, or a mental thing.  Either way, I think it’s beyond my ability to make right now, and probably beyond the delvers’ ability to adjust to in time for the raid proper.

Right now, they’re riding that line of effort and risk that even I don’t get a chance to push them to that often.  Sure, I have every safety measure in place I can think of, and I have my reputation and Grim on my side, too, but everyone is acutely aware of the danger all around them.

It’s making them improve by leaps and bounds, too.  Nobody has gotten burned yet, but basically everyone has had injuries to deal with.  I was pretty worried about the first time someone got cut.  Liquid blood in magma sounds like a steam explosion waiting to happen, but the magma protection enchantments cover things like that.  I have no idea how, but the blood is acting like there’s not molten rock everywhere.  A few tanks have gotten some limbs broken, and the paladin in Aranya’s group actually managed to crack a few ribs when he met a drake head on while submerged.

They quickly killed it and got him back in good condition, but it’s just another reminder of how dangerous this is going to be.

The group the kids are in is moving slow and steady, keeping an even pace that, though it seems slower than other groups’, is eating up territory like a juggernaut.  Slow progress is still progress, and that’s better than some of the groups can claim.  Gerlfi’s group has had to pull back and regroup.  They didn’t take any serious injuries yet, but they had a pretty good scare when they got pincered by wyrms.  Right now, they have a nice defensible position while they discuss the best way to keep that from happening again.

The quickest group right now is definitely Aranya’s.  Even with the paladin cracking a few ribs, they have a great selection of classes and affinities to deal with whatever I might throw at them.  It’s tempting to toss Rocky their way to see what they do, but I don’t know if the Betrayer has any real analogue for him.  While I’m sure he has something strong enough to go head to head with him, I doubt he has anything with the breadth of skill my boxer has.  Of course, he might have enough things to make up for that, but I’m honestly not sure how to try to emulate that.

No matter how good he is, he’s still one Rocky.  He’ll have trouble pretending to be a dozen Harbingers or something.

Anyway, Aranya’s group may be covering the most ground, but Noynur’s is the one closest to the key.  They have a goblin scout whose name I didn’t catch, and he’s a slippery one.  He must either have mental or illusion affinity, because he’s hard to keep track of, even while I’m trying to pay attention to him.  He swims on ahead and returns to the party at intersections, where he and Noynur compare notes before picking where to go.

I’d say they pick the right path a good four out of five times.  I nudge Goldilocks to give them a few harder encounters, but nothing too out of the ordinary yet.  If I drop a boss fight on them, they’ll probably figure out they’re on the right path pretty quickly.  I stick around to watch them deal with a group of basilisks, and it’s impressive watching the large orc at work.

At a glance, he looks like a berserker, all brutal swings and devastating attacks.  But he’s fully in control of every moment, every movement.  What looked like a lucky dodge at first, is revealed to be all skill by the third.  Nothing is wasted, and it’s plain to see why he’s the leader of his personal party, and of the larger group he’s leading as part of this.  His orders are calm and precise, and after delving together for months now, everyone smoothly follows without second-guessing.

My poor basilisks never stood a chance.

I don’t press them too hard, partially because it gives me a good chance to consider more stuff to train them against later.  Ideally, they shouldn’t ever be anywhere close to anything the Betrayer would consider vital.  Realistically, they’re adventurers through and through.  If they can’t find something important, it’s only because it doesn’t exist.  There is a very real possibility they’ll stumble onto the Betrayer’s Sanctum before me, even with the shenanigans of using shaped implosives.

I’ll need to make sure they can handle something on a Harbinger scale on their own, and be able to hold out until they can get help against something stronger.  And if they actually can handle Harbingers, all the better.  Just another reason to train like this.

I withdraw a bit as Noynur and his group continue to advance on the key, running through my head what we still need to prepare.  The first sub is still a good two weeks away from being finished, I’d say.  By then, I want to have the forward base established at minimum.  Fully fortified would be nice, but it needs to be manned to be useful, otherwise the Betrayer could just come along and take it.

We’ll need to drill with the implosion breaching tactics… and try to anticipate what the Betrayer will do in response.  The most obvious counter would be to stop flooding his areas with magma, but with holes blown everywhere, he won’t have as much of a say in that as he might like.  I take a look through my options for removing things like that, and it’s not cheap.  Removing hazards is as expensive as placing them, even if they’re not something you actually placed in the first place.

So he might be able to staunch the flow, but it’d be prohibitively expensive to just delete the amount of magma I expect he’d need to.  Trying to cut off the flow with earthen collapse traps could work, but not fully.  It’d probably hit the annoying sweet spot where neither of us is happy with the levels of magma.  With his denizens, he might be able to shore them up properly… so we’ll probably need to train in a bit of defensive fighting, too.  The main magma arteries will need to be patrolled and kept open.  So what else could he try to pull?

He could try to lead us into ambushes.  We’ll be using sonar to figure out where to go, so if he can make his walls thicker, he’ll be able to force us to go where he wants.  The implosion charges will only go so far.  But that’s what my tunnelbore ants are for.  If he has the time to reorganize his interior to deal with the rapid advance of implosion charges, we’ll have to fall back on the tunnelbores to let us go where we want, not where he wants.

Living vines will also make it easier for us to get around, both to hide our size, and to make the long digs not quite so long.  They’re not as good as Teemo, and never will be, but they’ll definitely help.

I think the biggest problem will be if he decides to stop guiding me at all.  I’m pretty confident in turning tunnels around on him, because the tight confines will probably restrict him more than it does me.  Probably ironically, a big open cavern would probably be the safest place for him to put his Sanctum, maybe behind a few different caverns.  Bottlenecks work in my favor, and once he realizes that, he might stop playing around and force me to face numbers with numbers.

And… I’m not sure what to do about that.  An open cavern would let me flex gravity and my flying denizens, but an open cavern doesn’t have to have high ceilings.  I could try to do some digging, but by that point, I have to imagine he’d have some kind of answer, even if it’d just be to dig to my own diggers and zerg rush them.  I need a way to keep him from consolidating his forces, especially if his spawners are designed with synergy in mind like I think they are.

By the time Noynur finally gets the key, I don’t have an answer.  At least not one I like.  If things go like I’m imagining them, it’ll be full circle back to a siege again, just one with walls made of denizens instead of stone.  I can dig through stone, but the denizens respawn, and my own denizens won’t be able to rejoin the battle for probably a week at best, and the delvers don’t respawn at all.

In a siege like that, attrition will heavily favor him, not me, and I have to imagine he’s clever enough to figure that out.

I mentally shake my head to clear it for now, letting me hear the delvers cheer as word spreads of the victory!  The final key is theirs!  They’ve worked hard for it, and I couldn’t be prouder of what they’ve done to get it.  I didn’t make it easy on them at all, and while a good three out of four of them made it to the end, that’d still be a lot of missing faces if this were the real deal.

And they know it.  They celebrate, of course, but I can feel their resolve hardening.  By the numbers, 25% casualty rate isn’t bad for something like this.  But they’re people, not numbers, and even losing one is something nobody wants to let happen.  They’ll fight Poe as a final test of raw power, and after that, the final round of training begins.

I don’t think anyone is going to be satisfied until we manage the impossible and get that number down to zero.