Red had been right. Upon attempting to [ Inspect ] the woman, she was just left with more questions than answers.

[ ACCESS DENIED ]

[ INSUFFICIENT PERMISSIONS, PLEASE CONTACT ADMINISTRATOR TO INQUIRE FURTHER ]

Something about the sequence made it throb through her skull, and Sláine briefly raised her hand to her temple before trying to shake the feeling off. Before this, she hadn’t put any thought into where the individual System messages had been coming from. She’d simply assumed they all were filtered through the Protocol maintained by Aria of the Fallen, the one she’d Registered with.

Aria.

But that had been distinctly different. Heavier, weightier, lacking all of the personal little touches and soft sequences of characters that she now attributed to the being known as ‘Aria’. Formality wasn’t the right word for it, but it began to approach the idea. Stiff, perhaps. Mechanical.

Whatever it was, it ached.

She found a welcome distraction in Red, who stopped suddenly at a t-shaped intersection and turned her mask towards the pathway splitting off to the right. “Huh, well that’s new,” she murmured, tapping something invisible in front of her. Sláine’s ears perked, catching the faint sounds of an odd, scraping shuffling from further on in the gloom.

Her grip tightened on the long shaft of her halberd, and her voice dipped lower. “What is?”

“This. The dungeon has changed shape; used to just be a wall here.” Red’s fingers splayed out in a gesture meant to encapsulate the tunnel. Ah, right. Red had mentioned that their duties down here included mapping, though she knew little about the specifics..

“And that means…?” Sláine asked lowly, becoming increasingly aware of another sound somewhere inside the wall not too far ahead of them. The bizarre acoustics of the place made its exact location difficult to pinpoint, but she guessed it was somewhere to the left.

“Means there’s more energy being generated here. More fear. The Swarm’s been getting stronger.”

Sláine heard it before she saw the gleam of its thorax, a welcome boon given that its coloration made it near-impossible to pick out against the mottled, dingy brown of the walls. Acting purely on instinct, Sláine thrust the spear-like tip of her halberd up and inwards, impaling it through the unarmored flesh of its belly. Its hindquarters, an ugly, elongated thing, spat a stream of fluid that filled the air with a noxious odor.

Anticipating more, Sláine shoved her weapon in deeper, not bothering to divest the still-struggling creature from the polearm. She refused to gag, even when blocking the narrow entrance agitated the creatures beyond, who released more horrifying liquid in protest that slowly dripped down the undulations of the wall.

“Tunnel Assassins,” she heard behind her, a substantial enough distance that Sláine didn’t have to turn to confirm that Red had made herself scarce. Good. “They’ve got a nasty bite. Watch out.”

Gripping the shaft with both hands, she rapidly slammed the head of the halberd as far into the hole as its size would allow it to go. Frantic chittering built into a crescendo as she turned the struggling mass of bugs into a mound of pulp, only tapering off once the chorus of notifications began filling her mind.

[ Tunnel Mite Assassin has been slain! ]

[ Tunnel Mite Assassin has been slain! ]

[ Tunnel Mite Assassin has been slain! ]

…and so on.

From the same direction where she’d placed Red, Sláine heard the same tinkling crackle that had accompanied her earlier uses of magic. It briefly occured to her how odd it was that she hadn’t heard Red use a single verbal trigger for her abilities, given how natural it’d seemed to her when she’d used a [ Skill ] of her own. From what she’d previously observed, saying the names of one’s attacks was a common phenomenon.

No time to entertain those thoughts, though. Sláine scoped the surrounding area, looking for other entry-points the Swarm could use, and noticed a small, dark opening near her knee. Only narrowly did she avoid the thing jumping forth from the darkness, its spindly, delicate antenna twitching erratically as it landed on the floor. A bizarre structure tipped with a sharp point bent unnaturally upwards, and in a whir of thin little legs it scrambled forth, along with half a dozen of its kin. Each was about the length of both her hands put together.

Sláine kicked at them, pulling back her halberd with a swift jerk to retreat and gain better ground. A deft strike with the toe of her boot upended one, exposing its belly to the ceiling, but another latched onto the leather of Sláine’s shoe, the thin fibers on its foot hooking in as it climbed.

There's something viscerally horrifying about the feather-light rhythm of a scuttling against one’s skin, and Sláine succumbed to a moment of instinctual panic before she clamped down on the feeling. Fear was a profoundly unhelpful emotion in combat, and it would do nothing but feed the power of the creatures in this place.

One broke apart with a satisfying squelch as she slammed her heel down upon it, and with a fierce smack, she swatted one of the crawlers away with the back of her hand. A jolt of intense pain shot up her leg though, as she’d missed the one on the back of her calf, and it had rammed its frontal appendage straight into her skin.

They were too small to properly stab or cleave, and she scrambled back, throwing her leg against the wall to smash the offending creature. While it did drive the point deeper into her, the brutal sharpness digging into the muscle, it was a tolerable pain. She just wanted these little shits to die.

[ Tunnel Mite Assassin has been slain! ]

[ Tunnel Mite Assassin has been slain! ]

[ You’ve been afflicted with Poison! ]

Great, Sláine cursed, but then something caught her attention.

Thick slabs of dark crystals now plugged each of the nearby holes, preventing any more reinforcements from joining the fray, and with a tinkling chime, a final pair formed within the shadowed tunnels near Sláine. Snapping her gaze up, Sláine found Red clinging impossibly to the wall, the base of her shoes and the flat of her palm stuck to it as if by some magnetic force. While this would normally pose little issue to the horrid greeting party that’d come for them,as they climbed to attack the woman, the shadows around her stretched impossibly wide, forming small tendrils that somehow gained physical presence and dragged them straight to the floor.

“Sláine, over here!” Red shouted, and some primal instinct in her immediately thought that Red needed saving. Dashing over, she completely ignored her unwanted passengers in her urgency to do… what, stomp on them?

That was not, in fact, what Red wanted from her at all.

As soon as Sláine entered into range, her shadow flickered and stretched, reaching up to snatch the insects clambering up her and pulling in the others that flooded the hallway. The darkness swallowed them up, forming a bubble that Sláine recognized from earlier, though while it tightened around the wriggling mass, it didn’t crush its contents like the maggots Red had used the same technique on previously.

"Damn, I can't quite..."

It seemed reasonable enough to conclude that, however Red's powers functioned, they involved manipulating darkness and giving it a solid form. So, without warning, Sláine solved the problem in the way that seemed most logical to her. In one smooth motion, she deposited her halberd on the ground and knelt to experimentally touch her fingertips to the bubble's strange, rounded surface. It felt smooth, firm, and before Red could express her confusion, Sláine lifted it up. It broke free from the floor with a plop, firming up around the bottom to keep the bugs firmly contained in an opaque sphere.

Perfect!

With a casual toss, Sláine sent it up into the air, then clasped her hands together in front of her to spike it directly into the ceiling.

After the crunch of its collision, Sláine watched the still-intact, pleasantly sturdy ball as it fell, then shifted her stance to rocket it into the wall with a well placed kick. Red simply stared as the dust cleared and the shadow melted away, leaving a compacted pile of tunnel mite corpses nestled in the rounded divet produced by the impact. There was a bit of residual twitching, but nothing that worried Sláine as the death notifications piled in.

[ Tunnel Mite Assassin has been slain! ] repeated over and over again, followed by…

[ Berserker Class has reached Level 6! Please check your class menu for updates.]

"In hindsight," Sláine commented after the brief moment of silence was broken by one of those spitting, warning hisses from down the hall. "That may have not been my best idea."

"It was cool as shit though; I can't wait to see what you can do when you actually have all your [ Skills ] and crap."

Red clambered down to the floor, and Sláine fumbled with her [ Inventory ] for a few moments before managing to retrieve the antidote and one of the restorative droughts. "About that," Sláine said before popping the cork out with her teeth. "After we deal with this, I have questions about the 'class menu'."

"Sure. How're you feeling, though?" She tilted her head towards the noises. "Run? Fight?"

"Fight, obviously. You?"

Sláine slammed down the contents of the vial, before remembering that Red had applied some of it as a topical solution before. Ah well, she thought, setting to work on the other tincture. Hopefully it was fine.

"Mm... alright. We're still real close to the exit. We can teleport right out from there if things get rough."

Sláine briefly checked her stats to confirm she'd been cured, then fell into a defensive stance as she prepared to face whatever new onslaught was coming from them. She strained her hearing, trying to figure out how many there would be, and how close they currently were.

Taking a step closer to Red, she glanced back at the other woman. "That was impressive, earlier," she said, in part because it was, but also...

When standing next to someone, ready to face one's foe and - perhaps - their own mortality, Sláine was the sort to make sure that her companions knew of her respect for them. After all, there was always the possibility there'd never be another chance. That was the natural consequence of battle. Of facing ones fear.

No matter what, it was always possible to be overcome.

"...What?" Red replied, clearly baffled by this tradition or, perhaps, the feeling of respect in the first place.

"I know little of magic, but I've never seen anyone be able to give life to shadow. Though," she tilted her head slightly, "Perhaps that was because I mainly encountered it through territorial disputes with the elves. They hate the dark."

Too focused was she on the noises in the walls, that she missed the stiffness of Red's posture. "And hear that!" Sláine continued. "It seems like plugging their tunnels has frustrated them as well. Very convenient."

Red raised a hand to her mask, adjusting it slightly, and then gave the woman beside her a contemplative look. She watched the way her stance shifted, light adjustments of her head to better track and study the movements of the oncoming enemy, and after a long moment, she finally spoke her mind.

"...Wanna see what else I can do?"

Eyebrows quirking up, Sláine looked at her, not paying much mind to the way Red's mask had angled away. She simply assumed she was paying attention to their surroundings, much as she had been moments prior.

"Certainly. What do you have in mind?"

"It's dangerous, but I think you can probably handle it... and it'll be really efficient."

"I love efficiency when it comes to slaughter," Sláine replied honestly, tone brightening in the way only a true [ Berserker ] could. "What have you got in mind?"

>> Listen to Red's plan, and perhaps make some poor choices