Christine breathed out a soft sigh as a pair of rather violently bickering goblins passed by her hiding spot. They were so close she could smell their disgusting odour as clearly as if she was sitting in the middle of a freshly fertilised crop field.

  Clearly, these monsters thought personal hygiene and showers was something that only happened to other people. Still, it made her gut roil just to be this close to them.

  For what might have been the millionth time, she thanked whatever gods existed out there for the Skill they’d granted her. She wasn’t really a believer, never was, but it felt somewhat reassuring now to believe some supreme magical being was out there, handing out rewards for her struggles.

  [Aqua Rogue] was the Class she’d chosen and the Subskill it granted to her, the same one she was currently praising in her mind was called [Blur].

  It sounded simple, and it was, but that was what made it so good. Simple was good, easy. She couldn’t mess up with a Skill like Blur.

  All it did was cover her in a mirage-like haze that blended it with her surroundings and then messed with the depth perception of whoever was looking at her.

  This Subskill was the sole reason she was still alive, it was the only thing that had kept her hidden as she snuck through the streets of Graz teeming with goblins.

  Stepping out of the shadowy alcove, underneath the curtain walls made of stacked up logs held together by some dark miracle of Rift magic, Christine kept low as she made a small circle around the mass of tents.

  Her eyes roamed the many moving, shuffling, wrestling forms like a hawk and she counted them all in her head.

  She kept moving, only ever stopping when she absolutely had to for avoiding detection. However, even that wasn’t enough. The detestable goblins had noses long and crooked, which weren't just to make them look even uglier than they would have been otherwise.

  Oh no, the noses worked as well and as a result, Cristine had a few of them sniffing the air around where she passed. They were murmuring in that wretched tongue of theirs, cackling in glee that only lasted as long as a bigger one didn’t come along to stomp them into the dirt and start sniffing around itself.

  When a hobgoblin came ambling around, sniffing right at the alcove she’d just vacated half a minute ago, Christine decided she’d done enough scouting for the day.

  She vaulted up a shoddy ladder, her movements swift and fluid as guided by her new instincts and she was atop the wall in moments.

  Jumping over the parapets, a line of logs with sharpened tips pointing up, she reached out and grabbed a low-hanging branch to catch herself.

  Under the tree waited a pair of goblins. Cursing herself for not taking more care when choosing her branch, Christine hung there for a few moments.

  No choice. She thought, her ears twitching as the hobgoblin started ambling up the shoddy ladder she took just moments ago. No time. I have to take the risk.

  With her heart jumping up into her throat as the realisation that she had to be gone before the larger, smarter goblin could lay eyes on her sunk in, Christine palmed her enchanted dagger, slipping it out of its sheath at the small of her back. Then she let go of the branch and dropped.

  She had only been at most four metres off the undergrowth, and the goblins standing in it, but it was enough, it had to be; she had to make it be enough. Christine twisted mid-air, her second Subskill’s — [Aqua Dagger]’s — passive effect guiding every twitch of her muscles with superhuman precision. When it was time, she activated the [Aqua Dagger]’s active ability.

  Her mana drained away, flowing up into her arms grasping the dagger like a runaway current and out of her fingers to cover the blade in a thin film of water.

  The tip connected with the nook of one goblin’s neck moments before her feet touched the ground. It crashed into it with the power of a tsunami concentrated at the tip of her dagger, sinking into its flesh up to the hilt.

  Christine tore the weapon out, letting her instincts take over as she danced out of the way of a fountain of blood and activated her Subskill again. She crouched, then struck up like a coiling serpent, her dagger going in through the chin of the second goblin.

  She kicked off of it, and then she was gone with the soft rustle of leaves even before her two victims crashed to the ground, dead.

  From there, she snaked her way back towards where her temporary delving team waited. Going unnoticed by the few teams of wandering goblins roaming through the jungle.

  *****

  “I said it’s fine,” Mia said, patting the agitated Lina on the arm. “I’m fine, everyone’s fine. You did good, we just … need to work on our teamwork when we get the chance.”

  “Alright,” Lina said, taking a deep breath. “Yeah, and sorry again. If Clive was just a bit slower … yeah. Teamwork and actual combat practice, maybe even spars.”

  Apparently, the reason Lina failed to ward off the drop-goblins was that her attention was focused on one specific goblin falling towards herself. The problem came when Lina reached out to swat it out of the sky … only for Carmilla to jump into the path of Lina’s attack to smack the goblin away, forcing the Air mage to put her entire focus into aborting her own attack.

  Mia knew Lina had much better control over her magic than her, and likely her willpower was also leagues ahead of hers, which was likely the only reason she actually managed to dissipate an attack she’d already launched.

  Carmilla just nodded off to the side, a hint of sheepishness tugging at her features. Yeah, even if the girl could survive getting swatted out of the sky like a bug, it couldn’t be a fun experience to heal a dozen broken bones when you went flying into a tree at fifty kilometres per hour.

  Mia just slid over and gave a quick side-hug to the now-brooding vampire, patting her on the side consolingly. “It’s fine. We just all have to learn and get better, right?”

  Carmilla nodded slightly, her gaze focused forwards into the dense jungle. Mia let go of her and returned her focus to the present, to the upcoming fight. The rest were silent, stalking towards the fortress, wearing grim faces.

  They all stayed low, close to the ground, and circled around a bit to approach the fortress from downwind. Christine was ahead scouting and Mia was surveying and noting whatever she could from just her Spirit Sense.

  She could vaguely tell the difference between hobgoblins and shamans by the way the latter’s presence roiled like a stormy sea while the former were just spewing forth that wrongness like damned fountains.

  Some, she guessed, were other types of monsters. There had to be monster types other than just Goblin Raiders, Shamans and Hobgoblins. There was that Troll too, after all. Though maybe that one was just some weird mutation thingy from it being the Rift Guardian?

  They retreated back to a hundred metres away when a goblin patrol came their way, just to be safe while the elven woman scouted. That meant only the very edge of Mia’s Spirit Sense brushed up against the outer battlements, a tradeoff the team was willing to take for not getting swarmed just yet.

  Thankfully, the lesser goblins weren’t up there in the intelligence department, so none of the ones that ambushed the team on their way here seemed like they were planning for it. Some of the little green shits looked absolutely gobsmacked to find themselves face to face with humans.

  With their aimless wandering through the forest, Mia wagered the few groups they’d come across were the weakest goblins, ones that had been booted out of the fortress. Meaning, despite dozens of smaller groups of goblins having stumbled upon the team, none ran to report their presence to the fortress.

  The sneaky water mage came back about fifteen minutes later, and the team had to dodge another three groups of goblins lazily patrolling about in the woods. Well, they were less patrolling and more searching for something to beat up as shown when two of their ‘patrols’ stumbled across each other and broke out in a general brawl that quickly descended into a free-for-all melee.

  Christine shed her watery invisibility skill as she came close. Mia followed the woman with her eyes, curiously observing how the thin film of water covering her like a second skin blended into the surroundings and messed with the light a bit to throw off her depth perception.

  It wasn’t perfect, but it was quite something for a Rank 0 Skill.

  “What did you find?” Brent asked once the woman had a few seconds to catch her breath and drink a few gulps from the canteen.

  “It’s a square shaped fortress, mostly made of logs,” Christine said, grabbing a stick and drawing out the square into the muddy earth. “There is a wall, an outer wall going around to surround both the fortress and a camp filled with the greenskin. The keep itself is about fifty by fifty metres while the whole fortress is about a hundred metres by two hundred.”

  She drew it out vaguely, a larger rectangle with a smaller square in one of its corners. The curtain walls and the ‘keep’. Then she drew little circles inside the larger square for the tents the monsters apparently lived in.

  “Any way inside?” Brent asked. “A gate? Or will we have to climb it?”

  “If it’s wood, I could make an entrance,” Aiden suggested eagerly.

  “It might come to that,” Brent agreed, nodding towards the fire mage.

  “I saw a larger gate,” Christine said, pointing right at the opposite end of the fortress from the keep. “Around here. But I think it’d be easier to climb up to the battlements, the walls are barely three metres tall. We might be able to just jump down from an overhanging tree-branch.”

  Mia thought about that last suggestion and found it much more palatable than blasting through the main gate just for them to end up in the crosshair of every single goblin staying in the courtyard.

  Mia, Carmilla, Christine, Helene and Lina could easily climb up a three metre tall wall made of logs. Though Mia might have some trouble if it was slippery.

  Could I use Arcane Shackles? I mean, they aren’t meant to be used as grappling hooks … buuuuuuuut, it’d be cool.

  While Mia was imagining herself running up the side of the battlements like some super spy, hauling herself up with her … glowing pink chains, Helene had another idea.

  “I could just lift everyone up there if someone can take out any lookouts they may have,” Helene suggested. “It would take a while to lift everyone up one-by-one, but maybe if it ever gets dark in here, we could do it unnoticed?”

  “Do you have a headcount?” Brent asked Christine instead. “Just a guess about how many goblins are we looking at staying out in the courtyard and atop the battlements.”

  “A hundred?” Christine sounded unsure, biting her lip as she stared down at her crude mud-map while her elegant, longer ears twitched occasionally. “Maybe two? It’s hard to tell how many of them were piled up inside the tents. Could be as much as five hundred if they are lying in there like sardines.”

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “And those were all the lesser kind?” Brent asked. “No hobs, orcs or shamans?”

  “I saw a few of those Orcs,” the woman said, her nose scrunching up in apparent distaste. “And I think there are one or two hobgoblins on all four walls. Didn’t see any shamans though, nor any other Trolls.”

  “Couldn’t I just dig up a part of the walls?” Mark asked. “Goblins can’t be too good builders, I doubt any of their walls have much in terms of a foundation. I could probably dig a part of it up.”

  “We need a way to kill upwards of five hundred goblins with just the ten of us,” Brent said. “I know we killed much more on the wall, but they couldn’t use their numbers back then to overwhelm us. We need to set up a choke point either by making a new hole in the wall or by the gates and bait them into rushing us.”

  “That could get the stronger ones hiding inside the keep to gang up on us along with the weaker ones,” Mia said. “This Rift spat out thousands of goblins so far, hundreds of them hobgoblins and shamans. They had to come from somewhere, and I’m guessing the majority of them still inside the rift are in that keep.”

  “What else could we do?” Brent asked, staring at Mia questioningly.

  Mia just glanced at Aiden. “We could just bar up the gates from the outside and let him have at it. Burn the whole courtyards. That would at least take out the weaker ones, put them all into disarray and let us just take care of the rest.”

  “If there is one thing that’s sure to have the strong ones coming out it’s setting their house on fire,” Mark countered evenly, rubbing his beard.

  “Yeah,” Mia said, shrugging. “But we’d only have to deal with them, probably. I’d wager most of the weaker ones would be pretty dead by then, unlike if we just bait them out.”

  After some more bickering and debating, the group concluded that Mia’s idea had merit and the highest likelihood of succeeding. Aiden was ecstatic, while the rest turned much more sombre as they set out.

  This would be dangerous, likely extremely so. Helene and Carmilla stuck to Mia like glue as they advanced, both radiating worry that was only making Mia’s own anxiety so much worse.

  The plan was pretty simple, and there were only a few ways it could go wrong. It started out with Helene hauling Mark up to the battlements in full armour, then quickly coming back down as the dwarf cleared a bit of space out atop the walls.

  Carmilla, Mia’s Familiar and Lina went up next, neither of the three needing Helene’s help, and their job was quickly slaughtering everything up on the battlements while Helene went back down to lift Aiden up onto the wall too.

  Then started the main part, with Mia watching on worriedly from her perch just high up on a nearby tree to see inside the courtyard. She sent off a few potshots, aiming her piercing Bolts at an Orc barking out orders and then a number of hobgoblins stumbling out the tents in the courtyard.

  Aiden let out a chuckle, his presence flaring up to Mia’s senses like a sun going supernova. All that power gathered at his fingertips, flowing into an orb of bright flames that he sent flying right into one of the larger, yurta-like tents covered in animal furs.

  It burst aflame; the explosion sending its parts flying as flaming shrapnel that spread the fire to other tents. Aiden didn’t stop, his presence flaring up two more times just before he let off another orb of flame at two more targets. After that, having seemingly run out, he just kept throwing less powerful fireballs at any clumps of monsters he saw.

  This was the point where Christine and Clive also managed to climb up the walls, while Brent was airlifted up by Helene. Amelia was a few trees over from Mia, also taking potshots at more nasty goblins or ones trying to climb up to the walls and out of the quickly spreading inferno in the courtyard below.

  Clive took to protecting the now nearly spent Aiden and stomping on grabby goblin claws trying to climb up while Chris disappeared from sight, only a few goblins falling to their deaths while spurting blood signifying her continued presence.

  Mia was pretty satisfied with how things were going so far. Only the melee fighters — minus Chris — lost their Lesser Wards so far, so everyone still had a get out of jail free card.

  With no longer needing to serve as an airlift, Helene just fluttered about above the battlefield, throwing out bolts of lightning left and right with largely invisible effects from where Mia watched the battle. She was guessing her mother was finishing off stronger monsters Aiden’s flames weren’t quite enough to kill though.

  A few arrows came flying up, some even enhanced with air magic, but Lina swatted them all out of the sky, only looking somewhat strained when two air-enhanced arrows came flying at two different targets. Still, the blonde managed to keep the party safe from ranged attacks and she was helped in that by the Familiar that was only now coming down from a killing spree.

  Unlike Carmilla who’d stayed largely around the wall she’d climbed up to, the Familiar made an entire circle around the battlements and clawed its way through a few dozen throats.

  It took the team at most fifteen minutes to have the entire courtyard and battlements section of the fortress taken over, clean of all living monsters. Which was when the nastier ones decided it was time to come out and play.

  Mia felt them, ten level ten hobgoblins, another five orcs at the same level kitted out in steel armour and three shamans behind them. The last trio was level 12, all three of them.

  There were more where those came from, much more. Mia’s Spirit Sense felt a roiling pit of wrongness under the keep, likely a cave reaching down into the earth.

  The shamans had a trio of Aegises up, pushing back against the magical flames with contemptuous ease, allowing the rest of them to walk safely out through the open gates of the keep.

  Mia shot off an experimental piercing Bolt, and was slightly surprised when the shadowy Aegis it hit only cracked instead of breaking. Guess that Bolt really is meant for piercing physical protections, not magical ones.

  The magical dome spun, the cracked part moving away and out of Mia’s line of fire and a trio of bow-wielding hobs rushed to retaliate.

  Mia saw them nocking arrows, and knew three enhanced ones were a bit beyond Lina’s capabilities to stop so she heaved herself off of her perch and kicked off the trunk, leaping for the battlements.

  She felt the air rushing by her as she was mid-air, felt Lina’s magic crash into them and maybe diverting them a bit but her focus was firmly on the quickly closing in walkway and the very pointy top of the parapets.

  Her heart pounded in her chest, but she’d aimed her jump right and went over them, she almost went over the walkway even had Carmilla not grabbed her by the arm and yanked her back.

  Mia flattened herself to the floor of the walkway, the monsters were down in the courtyard, so it robbed them of an easy line of fire.

  “Form up,” Brent shouted. “Gather behind Clive and Mark, defences up and take out those archers, quickly.”

  It was easier said than done, since the goblin archer just stepped out from behind the Aegises to fire their shots before slipping back in.

  A much easier set of targets were the seven hobs with various melee weapons rushing out from the magical protections and for the nearest ladders up the battlements.

  The shamans and the archers provided covering fire, but Helene, Aiden and Amelia opened up on the undefended hobgoblins.

  Some got seared by lightning, some got holes punched through them by beams of energy and some had their flesh melted off by balls of flame.

  The only three that made it up the walls were wounded, and Brent almost gleefully pounced on them while Clive and Mark took care of fending off the ranged attacks.

  Mia crawled behind Mark, who now had a pair of tower shields made of earth before him. Panting a little, she set her runic-model rolling to get the Arcane Blast spell castable.

  Feeling her Familiar get snuffed out, she froze up the same time Mark cursed and took a step back as if to brace himself.

  “Fuck,” the dwarf said in a muffled voice. “Those shamans hit like a damned truck.”

  Carmilla was crouching down next to Mia, her face serious as she listened to the fight. The vampire occasionally peeked out, sending off a Blood Bolt with seemingly little effect.

  “They are stacking their Aegises together,” Carmilla said. “Mia, can you give me an opening? If you can disrupt the shield for a moment, I could kill one or two.”

  “I could do that … probably,” Mia said, then remembered her newest spell. “Or I could put up a wall of our own. I have Phalanx now.”

  “Give it a try,” Carmilla said. “If it fails, do the Phalanx. We can wear them down if we can’t break through their shields. They can’t have more mana between the three of them than the six of us do.”

  Mia nodded, and when Blast’s circle was ready she nudged the vampire. “I’m ready.”

  “Alright,” she said. “On one. Three … two … ONE!”

  Mia leaned out from behind Mark’s shield and sent a crackling bolt of pink energy right at the centre of the Aegis.

  When it impacted, the explosion sent writhing arcs of pink energy burrowing into the magical dome. The shadowy mass that made up its body faltered, turning translucent and from a single fist-sized hole in the centre, the pink energy seared a metre wide tear into the dome like an ember landing on a piece of dry paper.

  Mia barely had time to see the withered face of a goblin shaman pale before a crimson lance went right through it.

  The other mages didn’t let the chance go either and before the Aegis could recover, lightning and fire was wreaking havoc inside it.

  The Aegis spun around again, much too late to ward off all the attacks but soon enough that Mia could still feel half a dozen presences alive inside.

  “Shield,” Mark said, his voice growing frantic as another angry Dark Bolt slammed into his shield. “Do the shield. I don’t have fucking earth up here to repair my shields with. Help!”

  Mia decided to oblige him, hastily rebuilding the Phalanx spell’s circle and then grabbing her wand. She only took a single quick look over it, Mark’s increasingly frantic voice edging her on to cast already.

  It took every bit of her mental focus and willpower to activate the absolutely massive spell. It had more runes than even her Mana Familiar and the entirety of the spell took the spiritual equivalent of her popping a blood vessel to actually activate. When it did though, a spell circle nearly a metre across lit alight before her palm and took with it half of her entire pool of mana.

  The spell activated, thankfully, but not without the wand in her hand vibrating in agitation. Mia thought it would explode, or break in half, but it seemed whatever mistakes she’d made were light enough that it only gave a single whining creak.

  The opaque pink wall that went up just a metre ahead of Mark was two metres tall and three wide, made of two layers of tetrahedron shaped arcane constructs blending together seamlessly.

  Mark heaved a deep sigh of relief, his armoured form slumping visibly. Mia just collapsed against the parapets, staring at the pink wall, up at her mother fluttering in the sky and dodging Bolts of dark mana and at the swaying green-clad branches.

  Lina, Brent and Clive came over not long after, dragging an unconscious Aiden along with them and also taking cover behind Mia’s Phalanx while Amelia and Christine were nowhere to be seen.

  Well, one could guess about Amelia, based on the occasional beam of energy that ripped through the canopies from one treetop every half a minute or so. The woman must have circled around the whole fortress by now.

  “Shit,” Mark breathed. “Why didn’t you do that to start with?”

  Mia ignored him, focusing on not forgetting how to breathe as she stared up blankly.

  “Mia?” Mark asked again, turning around and finding her zoning out. “Shit, something’s wrong with Mia!”

  “Mental fatigue,” Carmilla said, leaning out from behind the wall and sending off another Blood Bolt before a pair of air-enhanced arrows rippled by next to her. “Give her a few minutes.”

  Mental fatigue? Mia’s tired mind slowly chewed over the words. That felt right. She felt like someone had taken her mind out the back and kicked it black and blue while stomping on her spirit for good measure. Breathing … I’m not breathing … okay, in and out. Just … in … and out.

  Mia felt two presences get snuffed out in quick succession, and then Mark exclaimed in surprise. “Shields are down!”

  Lightning thundered and wind exploded, breaking bones and then the melee oriented guys rushed down from the walls with a resounding war cry.

  By the time Mia gathered enough focus and willpower to make her body move again, the fight was already over. Stumbling up, Carmilla was there for her and held her up by the waist.

  “What happened?” Mia asked, trying to keep her eyes from going out of focus.

  “Christine snuck inside the shields and slit the throats of the two shamans,” Carmilla said with a touch of surprise in her voice. “How do you feel?”

  “Weird,” Mia mumbled, shaking her head. She wanted to sleep. Her mind was utterly drained, but she wasn’t tired, not physically. It was weird. “Tired?”

  “We still have a Rift Guardian to fight.” Carmilla frowned. “And who knows what else between us and it. Why do you always exhaust yourself before the boss fights?”

  “Mark was in danger,” Mia said, as if that was reason enough. To her, it was.

  Carmilla just sighed softly, continuing to help Mia walk down a set of half-burnt wooden stairs leading down into the courtyard.

  The rest of the party was assembled there, talking or sleeping in Aiden’s case. Mia was instantly jealous, her eyes focusing on the man happily snoozing away on a wooden bench.

  “Mia,” Brent said, making some of the others turn towards her too. “How do you feel?”

  “Tired,” Mia said, smiling weakly as Lina and Helene broke away from the gathering to come and check over Mia worriedly. “Urghhh, I just want a bed.”

  Her body might not have been tired, but her thoughts were slow, sluggish and fuzzy as if drenched in an oily bath.

  “I suppose we could take a few hours of break,” Brent said, looking around for any objections and blessedly finding none. Only shrugs and nods. “Alright. While Mia and Aiden rest, the rest of us take turns keeping watch. I want at least four people up and about at a time … “

  Carmilla led Mia a bit further away, up to the side of the curtain walls running around the courtyard.

  “I think I saw a fur rug that survived the fire somewhere around here,” the vampire murmured, looking around and sniffing the air. “Ah, there. Come on. It’s not a bed, but better than sleeping on a plank.”

  Mia leaned into Carmilla, tightening her weak hold around the vampire’s waist for a bit to show her appreciation. “Thanks.”

  “Sure,” Carmilla said, tugging out the slightly singed piece of fur and placing it atop an even spot of earth. Then, she gently lowered Mia down onto it. “Have some rest, I’ll wake you- “

  Mia was already asleep. The moment her body’s position approached the horizontal, she fell into an easy slumber.