Time to save Phelia.

Amelia’s right eye alone was bright enough to attract the melanoids. Whenever she activated her many modules, her core surged with such energy that it had no choice but to expel much of it through the empty socket that served little other purpose. She had tried using eye patches on occasion, but it limited her depth perception too much, even with no eye there to speak of.

So, with her eye burning bright and her soul gem shining through her shirt, her presence was enough to distract the horde of melanoids that had surrounded the dazed and confused kobold who had fallen down here just seconds earlier.

One melanoid, in the shape of an elf but with limbs too long for its body, leers at her and lets out a rumbling sound that approximates a distant roar. Whether these things had any consciousness whatsoever, she could not tell. Regardless, she would destroy them all.

Amelia activated her [Harmonic Ring] attack and started to charge herself up. Her body vibrated rapidly and she felt her entire body building up with energy.

Then, for the first time in a while, she activated her Boost Module skill [Heel Dig], and her feet planted firmly into the ground, allowing her to move aroound rapidly and doge any attack coming at her. The melanoids swiped her way, and she dodged with narrow twitches of her neck and torso. She retaliated with heavy punches in return, knocking a few of them over.

Now [Harmonic Ring] was charged and it was time to strike.

“Get down,” she said to Phelia. For her part, she complied immediately and got on her hands and knees.

Amelia launched the attack and a circular blast of kinetic energy surged out from her core and ripped through everything around her. The cliffs behind her tore to pieces for a full foot, and the wave crashed through the nearby melanoids like they were wet cardboard. Several of them dissolved away without another movement, while others began to scramble around wildly in their final moments of tenuous life.

Luckily, with Phelia below the blast range, she was safe. And when the coast was clear, she popped back on her feet.

“Wow! Thank you!” she exclaimed.

Her attack was powerful, but the melanoids were far too plentiful. She barely even made a dent in their forces, and the flash of light from her [Harmonic Ring] seemed to be attracting even more creatures this way.

Amelia took a knife from her belt and gave it to Phelia. “Don’t be useless. Protect yourself.”

“Y-yeah.”

From up above, a loud firing sound came down, and a spray of bullets rained onto the crowd of melanoids. Aeo fired her rifle as quickly as she could. One shot, one kill, it seemed, because every strike immediately tore each victim apart. They seemed to be so structurally weak that the force of blasts alone was enough to destroy them.

Unfortunately, the rifle was too slow to reload each shot, and it was failing to have any impact. Same with the balls of high-powered water coming from Mino. If she was lucky, her attacks could knock two out at once, but several of them outright missed, so on average it did even less than Aeo’s rifle. Hummer launched arrows one after another, but her accuracy was poor and most of them snapped uselessly against the rocks. The three of them attacked for only a minute before they realized they were not helping enough, and stopped, ready to run down the makeshift stairs and join Amelia and Phelia at ground level.

Moreover, the melanoids had begun to take interest in the trio up on the ledge. The monsters’ numbers had grown to fifty, maybe sixty, and about half of them suddenly decided the viewing area was the perfect place to go. They had two stories’ worth of cliffs to scale, but they also had each other to count on; the melanoids began climbing as far as they could, and then successive ones climbed on top of those to get a little bit higher. They stepped on each other’s faces, and many of them cried out in pain with their dull, crackly voices, but they did not slow or stop. They cooperated mechanically to climb the cliffs as quickly as possible, leaving that position entirely indefensible.

Luckily, the sudden assault of melanoids climbing on top of each other left an opening in the deluge of monsters, one just wide enough for Amelia and Phelia to break through.

Amelia grabbed her kobold companion by the wrist and held a knife with her other hand. “Move.”

“Got it!”

They rushed as fast as they could through the mass of monsters. Phelia sliced wildly with her knife, trying to cut everything she could as she passed them by, but that was accomplishing little but attracting more of them to give chase.

Amelia realized she could not maneuver effectively, not with Phelia tagging along. She was small, slow, and not particularly good at fighting, all things that could prove a death sentence with these things after them. So she stopped, let Phelia drag her arm ahead of her, and then took the girl by her waist.

“Eh—Wha?”

“Group with the others. I’ll join you.”

And then Amelia took Phelia with her right arm and pulled it back. She was a lot heavier than she expected, and she strained to hold her like this, even with her Boost Module active.

Then Amelia threw Phelia as hard as she could—

The girl went flying forward, her wings flapping wildly as she soared for a few brief seconds over the masses of dark, shimmering creatures. She landed gracefully on her feet, and waved to Amelia with her knife-wielding hand before she ran off deeper into the cavern.

Amelia was alone, for now, but that was just how she liked it.

Two melanoids grabbed her by the shoulder, and she felt the icy cold stab of their false fingers furrowing into her soul, sapping her mana away. A few more joined in on the fun and slashed their claws along her chest. No physical damage, but plenty of damage to her insides, she could feel. A few minutes like this, and she would be little more than a husk.

Just where she wanted them.

She launched [Shock Pummel] into one mel’s body and it instantly evaporated into mush. The others refused to let that slow them down, though, and Amelia took the brunt of several strong swipes.

A couple seconds later, and another [Harmonic Ring] blast wiped out the whole area around her. This time, with no walls to impede the attack, she must have annihilated ten of them. The blackish, silverish slime oozed over the floor like especially viscous blood.

A few more thought they could try encircling her again, but she spun herself around, then jumped up in the air with a foot extended. She kicked one, two, three different melanoids with enough force to send them hurtling to the ground. Two of them dissolved, while another stood back up, its body flickering and head spinning. Another melanoid swiped its claws through it and destroyed it, just to make room for its own advance.

By now, the melanoids had given up climbing to the viewing area, or else already reached it. Those that did not were coming back down and rejoining the fight, and Amelia knew this would her last stand if she stayed. So she took off running in the same direction Phelia went, hoping to find the others as soon as she could.

Ed had never told Amelia about melanoids. She hardly ever spoke of Fleettwixt, even though she lived most of her life here. Based on the few details she was given, Amelia thought this place was a dreary, uneventful city filled with posh upper crust types and corporate meetings. It had those things, certainly, but she realized that the main reason for Ed’s coyness on the subject was very simple: If Amelia had known about just how exciting the Manadhmeth Dungeon really was, she would have absolutely begged to come here.

She found the others around where the path to the small hut was located. The old man no longer sat at his rocking chair, and the chimney had been put out. The few who lived down here knew far better than to mingle with the mels.

Mino and Hummer were tussling with two straggler monsters, with Aeo and Phelia struggling and failing to cut into them. One, in the shape of an oversized faun, had its arms around Mino’s neck, and the other had grabbed ahold of Hummer’s sword by the blade, refusing to let go or even acknowledge the pain it should have been feeling.

Amelia took her knife by the handle, judged her aim perfectly, and flicked it forward. It hurtled over to the melanoid with a hold on Mino and stuck directly into its head. The whole thing blew off on impact, leaving the creature, headless, to spin around in a daze before it finally collapsed into nothingess.

Now free, Mino moved over to where Hummer was still fighting. She raised her hand into the air and, after about two seconds, a collection of water had formed, spinning in a sphere in front of her hand. It had gathered presumably from the moisture in the air, or even the sweat on the people around her, and now she could manipulate it at will. Mino moved her arms and the sphere of water spread out into a whip of sorts. She slashed it down on the melanoid’s arms, cutting them off completely and freeing Hummer’s sword from its grasp.

It looked around, baffled about the sudden disappearance of its limbs, and then only a moment later, it found itself cleaved in half.

Hummer and Mino high-fived.

And now everyone had time, just a second, to breathe.

Aeo laughed. “That was easy. I could take on a hundred more of these things.”

Rumbling sounds reverberated in the distance, and not very far in the distance either. Everyone looked at her with considerable disdain.

“Why the heck are there so many?” Phelia asked. “On the third floor, even?”

“I have no idea,” Mino said. “Even when the Dungeon Core was still around, I never saw anything like that. It’s almost like they were sitting there just waiting for someone to come around.”

“Maybe they came up from one of the lower floors?”

“Or maybe they’re having babies now, because life finds a—” Aeo cut herself off when she realized that, really, no one here was in the mood for humor right now.

“We need a plan,” Hummer said. “There’s four paths here. One option is to go back where the mels are, and obviously that’s a no. We can go back up to the viewing area and wait it out, or we can keep running back through the cart tunnel until we’re safe, or we can try to hide it out in that old man’s house, if he’ll let us. Either way, we should split in two groups so the mels can’t overwhelm us. We’ll meet back at the outpost and hopefully we’ll all be in one piece.”

“Splitting up is a terrible idea,” Mino said. “Overruled. Veto. Denied.”

“She has a point,” Amelia said, biting her lower lip.

“Really? Why?”

The alien sounds of the melanoids grew louder and louder, followed by fevered footsteps clanging in several directions.

“Because we don’t have time for anything else.”

“True... Let’s go!”

The party split in two, an action never, ever advisable, and yet under Hummer’s suggestion they did it all the same.

Mino, Aeo, and Phelia ran off in the direction of the tunnels, attracting a large number of melanoids their way.

Hummer and Amelia briefly climbed the stairs up to the special viewing area, but then both of them stopped when few to no melanoids actually followed them.

Amelia gave her new companion an annoyed look. “I know your plan here,” she said.

“Genius, isn’t it?” She snickered. “The others’ll be fine. Or, Aeo and Mino will be fine, and Phelia will do her best.”

“That’s not what I’m worried about.”

“Let’s go to Floor 4 together,” she said bluntly. “This is our chance!”

“That’s what I was worried about.”

A few melanoids gathered behind them, but just goblin-sized ones. Amelia grabbed them before they could reach her, and bashed them against the wall until they went away.

“I’m going down whether you do or not,” Hummer said. “Are you in or are you out?”

Hummer looked at her with an impressively fiery expression. She was absolutely not giving up on this dream, and nothing Amelia could do would dissuade her. Even if Amelia knew in every fiber and pebble in her being that bringing someone along with her to the Fourland facility would lead only to ruin, she also knew that ignoring Hummer would likely lead to her getting herself hurt or worse.

“I’m in,” Amelia said.

“Great. Then, I don’t know if you noticed, but that huge hole to Floor 4 has a ladder attached to it. We can go down that way without having to sneak through one of the major entrances.”

“The huge hole surrounded by melanoids.”

“Well, let’s hope we’re not too tired yet, because we’re going to have to rush them.” Hummer held up her blade.

Amelia nodded. “I just hope you’re better with your sword than your bow.”

“Oh, you’ll see.”