The bolt of light impotently splattered against her club, and Elise quickly sent up a prayer that she managed to block it before running in.

She had been hit by one of the fairies’ Magic Missiles before, and the damned spell felt like getting struck with a hammer. Took out over half her health too. These Rev-Up Assistant managers were no joke, as was to be expected from lvl7 mobs.

The others had come to the same conclusion. Dave’s insistent pleas for aid had some effect, in the form of a lone adventurer and four noobs being present when she and Carter arrived. The noobs were of that potential Lambda group and barely armed chumps of lvl2-3, and Daniel the lone wanderer was a lvl5 with some decent gear.

The Clurichauns were manageable, even for the noobs. They moved fast, but they didn’t even use the slingshots they had. Instead they hugged their target with remarkable force.

Not a great match for Elise, who couldn’t smash them without also goopifying the crawler they were clinging on to, but once you knew their trick they weren’t that dangerous. They always ran at you in a straight line, so you could block them with relative ease by having them run into your weapon or kick them away.

These Rev-Up Assistant Managers on the other hand meant business. No pun intended, she mentally added quickly. The fairies looked like tiny soccer moms with wings, and the trashy kind at that, but one of them took Daniel’s head clean off with one of her magic missiles. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they showed up with a posse of half a dozen of the grey midgets and were smart enough to order the Clurichauns to use their ranged attacks.

As a result, there were only four of Elise’s group left. After Daniel’s gory death one of the noobs lost it and ran away, and they lost Kenny to a few unfortunate hits from the slingshots. The man might’ve lived if it weren’t for the Taint effect, but without healing he was going to die from his wounds before the five-minute timer ran out.

Elise ignored the last few Clurichauns and jumped as she swung her bat. The fairy dodged, but Elise managed to surprise it by letting go of her club with one hand and snatching the little bitch out of the air.

The fairy screamed something at the Clurichauns, but in her panic her words were unintelligible and they just looked at one another with confused stares. The next moment Elise smashed the tiny head against the wall, the head turning into a red paste bob-cut and all.

The Clurichauns tried to react, but one of them got a decapitated fairy thrown in the face and the others actually lowered their slingshots to turn to their flinching friend and laugh at him. Before they could even realise how stupid that was, they were all dead.

“Alright. This didn’t go well, but it wasn’t disastrous either. Loot the bodies and see if we can heal Kenny the old-fashioned way, but if we see even a single enemy appear in the next five minutes then we’re running.” Elise said, eyeing the Taint effect countdown in the corner of her eye. It reset back to the full five minutes every time she got showered by the critters’ gore, and the dungeon really liked turning its mobs into grotesque confetti. Meaning that pretty much every attack reset the clock.

“I take it that the small groups we faced were meant to be scouts, and this was the advance party.” Carter said. “There are four fairies at least, so we’re either looking at another three battles like this one or the next wave will be the big one.”

One of the noobs gulped at that. This had already been a very tense and deadly battle, and the Clurichauns had shown that running away wasn’t even an option if no one was covering for you. Not when they ran faster.

“What good are scouts when they engage and fight to the death the moment they spot you?” Elise said. “That’s just- Never mind, I guess that the whole ‘joke’ of these guys is that they are just stupid like that.”

Carter laughed at that, only half meaning it. Elise ignored it. The guy had been ‘subtly’ glancing her way for a while now and acted even more macho than before.

He wasn’t bad-looking, in fact the four day gruff gave him a roguish look that wasn’t half-bad. Better than the other guys here, of which at least two joined purely because she was here.

She didn’t need to worry about Daniel’s advances any more, the lone crawler deciding ‘on a whim’ to help them out a few minutes after her involvement was made public hadn’t been nearly as subtle as he thought he was. Shame that she lost the one crawler with experience fighting mobs by himself, but most of his worth had been in his items anyway.

Kenny was too bad. He was over fifty years old and his preferences were age-appropriate, he joined to protect the camp rather than help himself get stronger or to ogle her. But he was also the slower one of the group, and it had cost him.

The other crawler here to follow her around like a love-sick puppy ran away mid-battle, so she didn’t need to worry about him either. If he came back, she’d have a good reason to tell him to bugger off.

Which left Merry and Pippins. She was pretty sure that Martin, no relationship to the crazed killer, was here to try and worm himself into her group rather than make romantic advances. He had no talent and crap items so he picked the wrong person to approach, but at least he seemed only appreciative of her figure rather than lusting after it. And Pierre followed Martin, being an archer who liked to have a shield between him and the monsters.

No, she wasn’t planning on recommending those two to join their group. Carter maybe, he was showing skill and wits even in the heat of battle, but these two guys would likely remain a burden for a while before they’d be worth their buck.

She considered that for a moment. Carter would increase the average attractiveness of the men in her harem, as well as introduce the element of open adoration for her lovely looks, and his interest would add to her clout when she pressed her opinion. It wouldn’t be a bad thing, and he had the talent to carry himself if she gave the recommendation.

It would spice things up too. Ben was the only one openly interested in her, but he was way too young for her to even consider him. As a result, there was no real pressure for the other boys to give chase while she was still available.

Darryl was always so hard to read, for all she knew he might be gay or asexual. He was the silent type, hopefully of the kind that wouldn’t show his affection until he could do so dramatically. He did that back when he was protecting her from the Woolf, but there had been no time for taking a deep look in her eyes and saying some romantic one-liners. And without that, she hadn’t triggered a meaningful flag of his.

No, both of those guys were dead ends right now. There might’ve been relationship flags with them that she missed, but she wasn’t really interested in pursuing either of them right now.

Thomas on the other hand…

She always liked the strict guy in the otome games she devoured with gusto, those stern and stand-offish men that would sneer and look down on her for not being as orderly and prim as them. Her friends had teased her with daddy-issues, that this preference for Megane guys was based on how she’d assume her father to be if she had one, but she called bullshit on that. She just liked guys with glasses that make her work for their love and adoration, is all.

Sure, Thomas normally didn’t wear glasses and those feminine librarian glasses were NOT proper Megane boy accessories, but the way he was bossy and always criticising her had been arousing for a while. It got annoying a lot faster than she thought, and the way he just completely stopped complaining about her antics and reckless behaviour after their first big argument had been disappointing.

She followed the flags perfectly too! You’d almost think that visual novels weren’t an accurate simulation for seducing people and getting into a relationship…

But if an interested and age-appropriate Carter were to be added to the group, things might change. Her progress with Thomas was stagnant right now, and she wasn’t sure if her trump card was going to change that even if she played it perfectly.

But if he had a real adversary, his male competitive spirit might urge him to pursue her.

On the other hand, maybe she should keep it simple and just reveal her ace in the hole. This whole bloodlust issue was weighing on everyone’s mind, and with her period only getting started her behaviour wasn’t going to get nicer any time soon. If she revealed that she could see the bloodlust meter and that it only filled up when she used her Trashing skill, she might redeem some of her ‘reckless behaviour’ in his eyes and show herself a more capable and responsible adventurer.

It would be a nice twist if she were to reveal it. They were talking about bloodlust deprivation as if there was such a thing, when in reality she only saw the bar rise when she attacked in a more aggressive way that the AI considered ‘Trashing’. She could fight a dozen foes and not make her bloodlust increase by a sliver, or farm brindle grubs to increase it bit by bit.

Well, not really. The bar depleted really quick so those brindle grubs weren’t nearly enough to make it worth the effort. It rose fast and went down just as fast, requiring a prolonged battle without breaks to fill up the bar between too little and too much.

Things shouldn’t get bad until the bar went up to ‘reckless rage’, the bloodlust state was probably just a combat buff. She wasn’t sure about that yet, she’d yet to trigger it. She could’ve tried it during the battle with the Woolf, but proccing something that could backfire would’ve been a pretty stupid and irresponsible thing to do.

And she wasn’t going to experiment with it without the guys here to watch over her, that was for sure. Like hell she could trust these noobs to protect her if she went feral or dumb or whatever the system might pull on her. She needed her harem to jump in and save her day, or to see them go slack-jawed when she showed off how awesome she was.

Even if it were only Darryl then she would’ve felt comfortable trying it out, but alone she wasn’t going to risk her life.

“He’s dead.” Pippins softly said, closing Kenny’s eyes. They immediately opened again, because unlike in the movies it actually took a few hours before the muscles relaxed enough to close the eyelids of someone that died with his eyes open.

“Damn.” Elise said.

She quickly read the room. Though the death of a fellow human made them solemn, no one was actively mourning someone that was practically still a stranger to them. Good. No need for a moment of silence or walking on eggshells, then.

“Pierre, do you have a close combat weapon?” Elise asked.

Pierre held up one of his arrows.

“Then grab his weapon. You guys split the rest of his stuff amongst yourselves.” Elise said as she walked over to Daniel’s headless body. “This guy’s stuff is better, at least for you lot, so I’ll distribute it.”

Carter seemed a bit taken aback by her disregard for the weight of the situation, but didn’t say anything. Good, they didn’t have the time to traipse around things like mourning and respecting the dead down here.

Daniel’s stuff wasn’t actually that good, nothing better than a silver box she reckoned, but at least it was magical stuff with attribute improvements.

She gave his best item, the Bleeding Sickle, to Carter. The man wasn’t half-bad in a pitched battle, but used an ordinary short sword that could’ve been made by humans, and he had no combat skills other than the simple Stab. You knew that it was a shit skill when the AI didn’t even bother giving it some scathing or grotesque name.

She also made his cut of Daniel’s goods more heavy on the healing scrolls and potions, because she doubted that the other two would use the scrolls in battle and she could use more of the latter for the future of her group. Merry and Pippins got the crawler biscuits and other trash that Elise didn’t actually need, and the inferior stuff like the bronze box weapon that almost everyone got entering the dungeon.

She still gave them one potion each so they wouldn’t suspect anything, so no foul done.

Then there were two other good items, Daniel’s bracelet and shoes. The former was a simple +2 Cha buff, for all the good that it did him, and the latter was a Dex improvement with walking skill buffs.

Both were decent additions for her. The former could stack on to her Charm, and though she didn’t like how she got designated as the group’s charisma mule she wouldn’t turn down power-ups either. The latter was the much more enticing item, one that would decrease the sore feet that she got after walking these damned tunnels for literal hours.

But the rest knew that Daniel had these, so she couldn’t just take them without seeding enmity. Nor could she give them to Carter who already got the sickle, so she reluctantly handed the bracelet to Merry and the shoes to Pippins.

And then she took the body.

“Wow, the hell!?” Carter said. “What the hell are you doing?!”

“Can’t exactly leave them lying here, now can I?” Elise said, putting Kenny’s body in her inventory as well. “Or do you want the brindle grubs to eat them?”

She got three small achievements just now, one for looting a crawler corpse bare, one for duping Merry and Pippins, and the one she wondered she should have the others duplicate. Putting a fellow human’s corpse in your inventory got her a Silver Cold Sunnovabitch Box.

“Well, that’s true I suppose.” Carter reluctantly agreed. “Just seems a bit disrespectful.”

“The bodies are frozen in time, so no rotting or anything. Seems more respectful than carrying them around on our backs.” Elise shrugged. She grunted in annoyance when she touched one of the dead Clurichauns and saw her Taint debuff reset to five minutes, but went with it. “Don’t loot them if you’re not Tainted, but we’re not leaving these things for the Brindle grubs to feast on either.”

“Uhm, guys?” Merry said.

“Yeah, what now?” Elise said. “Don’t just stand there, help me will ya? These things carry some cheap kind of booze that has some strange properties, and trash or not we can give these slingshots to the unarmed folk back at the camp.”

“Look at the map.” Merry said.

Elise widened her minimap and quickly saw what Merry was referring to. It was hard to miss, considering the amount of enemies. They were moving slow, but there were thirty dots at the edge of the fog of war and more appearing still.

“Shit! They’re not splitting up in groups, they’re making one big wave that will hit the camp in force!” Elise said. “We’re not stopping that, we’re falling back and let’s hope that the brass has a plan for dealing with these guys!”

She quickly looted the bodies bare but left the corpses themselves for the grubs before she made a run for it. The guys were right behind her, spurred on by the sound of banjo music echoing from behind.