Zaria leapt to the side in the face of Suderah’s charge, lashing out with her tongues as the creature passed. The tongues slapped against the side of his hide, unable to find purchase, but each left behind signature marks of their elemental type. Bright blue lines appeared on Suderah’s hide where the moon tongue hit it, and an instant later - owing to Ysdrah’s dominance - a ghostly tentacle struck again, following the exact path the moon mouth’s tongue had left a moment before. The bird tongue also had a secondary effect - feathers appeared over Suderah, raining down like arrows. Each one did very little damage to the beast, but as a group, they still accomplished something.

Suderah skidded in the mud, turning to face Zaria, his claw leaving deep furrows in the soft ground. He hissed from the alligator mouth. “Savor that taste of my blood. Once you’re my- argh!”

He hadn’t probably been planning to say argh. He also hadn’t been planning on crossbow bolts to his faces. The lunar crossbow mimics on Zaria’s deck didn’t care what he planned on. Their bolts flew fast and true, striking the chimera. Two moons began to form over his head, and Zaria silently cursed her luck. Celon and Ysdrah. Spiral’s unique ability to bypass most resistances was what she really needed right now, but the gods that watched over the random generation of magical effects didn’t favor her at the moment.

Suderah also didn’t particularly favor her at the moment. His skin started to split and crack like stone, but also took on a green hue like moss. The bolts could still find purchase, but it was a near thing, their heads barely penetrating his reinforced skin.

New Opponent Element Discovered: Ruin. Review Ruin elemental summary? Y/N.

Suderah took a deep breath, and Zaria braced herself as she quickly shot a yes to the notification. The moment he seemed ready to unleash, she leapt to the side as quickly as she could. Suderah let out of a wide beam of energy from the goat's head that streaked mere inches past her side. Everything on the other side of the beam appeared grey, washed of all color, and no life was visible when viewed through the curtain on the other side of the beam. Instead, there were only visions of ruined structures superimposed over the landscape, towers of glass and steel that were cracked and shattered and overgrown with vines and had skeletons hanging from windows.

The text from her summary request undercut her sight.

The Ruin Element is a combination of Dark, Earth, and Water element that achieved Primary Element status with the ongoing destruction caused by the Fissures. Ruin elemental attacks function similar to the now depreciated Decay element, but deal 200% bonus damage to structures and complex mechanisms in place of Decay’s bonus damage to the undead and other non-living mobile organic entities. New spells unlocked for Ruin casters, check your lists. In addition, do not believe rumors that Ruin can grant visions of the future. Ruin is not the future. Ruin is not the future. The Moon has seen.

Well, all of that was ominous and terrifying to consider, but in Zaria’s mind, the fact that it dealt massive bonus damage to structures was the largest concern. Was she a structure?

Best to not find out.

The crossbow mimics chattered away on her back, and Suderah charged back in, bellowing in fury. Zaria shifted her weight like she was going to jump left, then stepped right the moment he swung. The step meant the massive mole talons on his claw didn’t strike her a direct blow, instead glancing off her side paneling. Zaria’s moon mouth bit down on the claw as it impacted, cracking Suderah’s claw and forcing the beast to recoil. Zaria saw her advantage and quickly turned around, bringing the bird head into range and shifting so its beak could catch Suderah on the shoulder. The immense power of this beak was enough to crack the Ruin reinforced hide, taking a chunk out of Suderah’s flesh.

Suderah’s goat head bleated, and he leapt back, the single motion taking him well out of Zaria’s tongue’s range, and he readied another Ruin beam. Before Zaria could even figure out which direction to juke, the goat head was ready to fire - then something jerked the head back, pulling it towards the sky to fire the Ruin beam straight into the air.

Broil had gotten in range during the fight, and grabbed onto the goat’s horns with his stovepipe. A surge from the Copper boss contracted the tentacles, bringing it up to Suderah’s back, and then Broil glowed red hot. Moments later, acid from Maw splashed against Suderah’s belly, and the Tin boss leapt up to join his companion on the chimera’s back.

The frog head whipped around to look at the two invaders and focused in on Maw. Suderah snarled at the Tin invader, then opened his mouth.

Bleh.

That was the sound he made, but it wasn’t really speech. Instead, a massive tongue unfurled from the Boss’s mouth and streaked towards Maw. There was no time for the Tin boss to move, although he was fast enough to open his mouth and bite down on the incoming tongue.

Even with the way Suderah shuttered in pain, it had no problem reeling Maw back into the open frog mouth and swallowing the chest mimic whole. Suderah’s neck distended into a pouch that now held the struggling Maw.

Zaria had been afraid of that. When she’d thought Suderah would just have the power of a normal Bronze dungeon mob but more brains, adding Maw would have turned the balance of power from roughly equal between Broil and the Servitor to favor Zaria’s mobs. Against a Bronze tier boss, however, Maw was as effective as a yapping dog trying to interfere with a duel between two master warriors. If only she could change orders for her mobs once they were out of her influence - but that was a power exclusively reserved for Bronze dungeons.

Still, now the fight was her and Broil against a Bronze boss level mob. Broil would fill for her the role Maw had been going to fill for Broil - an annoyance just dangerous enough that Suderah couldn’t completely ignore it. Sure enough, even as Suderah charged her again, the frog tongue lashed out at the Oven Mimic - only for Broil to heat his metallic sides to glowing red. Suderah’s tongue hissed and sizzled against Broil’s hide, and he withdrew without trying to swallow after another bleat of pain from the goat head. Then he stumbled again as the budge in his throat that held Maw writhed and squirmed, and the muffled sound of Maw belching acid filled the air. So the Tin boss wasn’t down yet.

Zaria took advantage of the momentary distraction and her ability to see in all directions to get some distance from the Servitor while the tongues lashed out behind her without any loss of accuracy, and the crossbow mimics on her turret kept firing. Suderah was faster than her, able to move on all four limbs, but right now he was distracted and in pain, and it gave her a chance to regroup and form a plan. She took a quick moment to check on Vysala. Well, a kind of quick moment. Dungeon minds worked differently - for Zaria, it was a matter of absorbing delayed knowledge of everything that had happened in the fight she’d been ignoring. Everything she saw had transpired over the course of her fight with Suderah, but she was learning of all of it in a fraction of a second - yet it still felt like it was happening all at once.

The front line of the Reclaimers consisted of four tanks backed by two healers - everyone in that group that wasn’t bound to a demon, in fact. They were locked in melee with the candlemen that had sword mimics on their back, the tanks keeping their shields up and using their abilities to deflect flurries of blows from the furious blades as the candlemen carrying them used their own shields to directly press back against the melee fighters. As Zaria had hoped, the tanks were assuming the candlemen and sword mimic combinations were a single mob, and were focusing their attacks on the weaker but better defended part of that team.

Meanwhile, the crossbow mimics were firing with abandon, targeting the demons before all else. These demons were all the same type, vaguely humanoid with horns for eyes and wide lamprey-like mouths in the center of their face. Everyone currently bound to them was a ranged class, and it immediately became apparent why. A Copper Archer fired a Flame elemental shot at one of the Candlemen, and an instant later a duplicate of the arrow appeared from the demon’s mouth - the same spell, but this time infused with Fiendish mana instead. The two bolts completely blew a Candlemen’s head off. While that wasn’t fatal to the wax mob, it certainly did terrible, terrible damage to its internal structures in the process from the shock wave. A follow up blast from another caster finished the job those two blows had started, collapsing the Candleman but leaving it’s sword still alive.

If it had just been candlemen against the Coppers, this fight would have been done in seconds. The tanks could have held aggro, the healers could have kept them up, and combined ranged damage dealers and melee demons would have shredded through the rest.

But it wasn’t just those groups.

The mutant horses went even more wild now that demons were on the field, charging after the fiends and lashing out with their tentacles. The lead horse caught a demon by the ankle and pulled it to the ground. Instead of thrashing it about like Zaria had seen them do against humanoids earlier, the horse used its other tentacle to slap the demon on the back of the head and try to hold it to the ground until the rest of it caught up, allowing it to bring it’s hooves into play. The demon sunk into the soft mud beneath it and the horse continued to stomp with wild abandon. At the same time, another horse caught a demon. This one landed on his back instead of his face, and was free to counter attack with his claws and Fiendish spells that poured from his mouth - provided by his mage handler.

That horse died, but not before the demon did.

Similar to the horses, the lycanthropes had abandoned all their attention on the mortals the moments demons were in play, and they leapt towards the brutes like a pack of starving, tentacled wolf men. Which was what they were, to be fair. Their assault was nowhere near as effective - they were Tins, after all. Three of them died after managing only a couple of blows on the demons. Three others, however, proved equal to their prey.

Zaria glanced at their nameplates. Copper. All of them.

She’d been hoping for that. Zaria was certain she’d only targeted Tins. It had been possible she’d accidentally targeted a Copper, but three times was impossible. The only explanation was the Copper she’d copied and these two others weren’t Coppers she’d accidentally killed with her cackle. They were Lycanthropes that had killed enough in the initial chaos to advance from Tin to Copper.

One was currently locked claw-to-claw with a demon. The spells pouring from the demon’s mouth were tearing chunks out of the lycanthrope’s fur, while the lycanthrope’s mouth tentacle wrapped around the demon’s neck and tried to pull it in. Another had managed to wrestle its demon to the ground and sunk its four-split jaws into the creature’s wrist, and was now using its full body to try to tear the demon’s arm straight out of the socket. The third and last was dancing around the demon it had engaged, the two creatures rushing back in and out of the fight to lash out at each other before leaping away.

Then, last but not least, were Vysala, Rav, and Zaria’s newborn Lycanthrope mage.

Those three had, at Vysala’s urging, gone around the edge of the fight for a moment. Now that they were on the other side, they charged in, Vysala leading the rush with her Spork raised. Rav and the lycanthrope mage let loose, Rav firing lunar crossbow bolts and the mage unleashing a barrage of arcane orbs, striking one of the mages in the back multiple times before he was aware of the danger. He dropped to one knee and turned around just to see Vysala leap for him, spork raised.

She brought the Spork down, blatting him across the face. A fraction of a second later, her permanent Impact runes and two others on the spork’s spoon activated at the same time.

The mage’s head exploded like an overripe grapefruit, showering his companions with a fine red mist before they even fully understood they were in danger.

This was why Vysala favored the spork as a weapon. Witches weren’t meant for melee - unless they deliberately built that way. Then they could select their perks and runes in such a way to offset the natural weaknesses of the Witch from being a ranged class - and in the process, get a massive damage boost from adding runes to heavy weapon blows.

Vysala’s momentum allowed her to slide through the mud, crouched down with one hand to keep herself steady. She swung the spork hard to the side with the other hand, catching an archer in the calves and sending him tumbling backwards As he fell, Rav shot him with two more arrows, and Vysala spun and stood upright do deliver another overhead blow to the man’s ribcage. She only used a single Impact rune with this blow, but it was still enough to drive the man deep into the mud. It wasn’t fatal as just a strike - at least not until she whirled the spork and brought the tines down. The first blow caught the man in the forearm, and an Impact rune severed his hand. The second took the blow directly into his throat.

His dying breath was wet and full of blood.

The ranged casters panicked. They’d had a terrible few minutes since the battle had started preceded by the nightmare that had come moments before of the flood, and now they were being forced into melee, which was the last place range classes wanted to be. One broke and fled. Vysala brought up her fingers to her lips and whistled, and the lycanthrope mage took off on all fours to charge that one down. Another turned to run in what was a more orderly fashion - only to find her path blocked by the two surviving Crate mimics. As Tins, they couldn’t easily finish the caster, but they could keep her from retreating.

Then a spell struck Vysala in the back, knocking her forward. She whirled to face her attacker, only to be frozen in momentary shock.

The mage who’s head she’d turned into a fine paste was standing back up, a blood red and translucent mirror of his face floating up from the open wound in his neck. As blood spilled from the wound, it didn’t float away, instead pooling into the image, solidifying it. The bond between himself and his demon was bright red, and it was now obvious which direction the power was flowing. His demon was the one dancing with the werewolf, and it was visibly slowing in its fight as its power was sucked in by its master - who was now starting to reform a skull inside that misty mass of blood.

A quick check confirmed Zaria’s suspicions. The other one Vysala had downed was still down, and his bond with his demon had vanished. Severing the arm had to happen to stop the transfer.

She didn’t have time to inform the Witch of that, however. The Tanks were whirling to face this new threat, and the healers were aware their ranged casters were taking damage. The melee line needed to be eliminated, or Vysala only had moments to live.

Fortunately, Zaria had a plan. She charged the melee line herself, with Suderah in hot pursuit.

And, per her earlier command, the Candlemen followed her instructions. She had, after all, told them to avoid her feet.

They leapt back as a group as Zaria bore down on the tanks.