They tried to fight with LJay for a while, but after he’d glanced Geria’s defenses twice, hadn’t manage to be out of the way for Don’s arrows, and absorbed several of Deyana’s own shots, the group decided that it was a better idea for him to get some practice on his own with the new weapon before they actually started incorporating him into group tactics.

Difficulties were absolutely expected and, especially with Deyana and Geria being in new roles, present, but “massive friendly fire” was one of those things that couldn’t really be allowed to continue. Luckily, he agreed, and went off to hunt the cenuras on his own.

Cenuras were probably the toughest enemy they’d faced so far, a green, warped humanoid torso with arms on top of a shrunken frog lower body plan that used the bent hindlegs that could be expected from that, but with the addition of straight vertical forelimbs of similar length. All of this lead to an upside-down Y look from the side, all topped by a full, though shrunken enough to seem proportional on the humanoid torso, frog head.

They tended to be generally slow but stable, with large bursts of speed where they used in decently coordinated rush attacks that, because they were jumping, lost most of that stability. Though they didn't have the intelligence of goblins or kobolds, they used spears and javelins to good effect, and taking a single hit from them that cut meant getting hit with an extreme stamina-eating poison.

To a degree, it helped that Geria was acting as their front line.

Deyana wasn’t sure that she would have been able to successfully manage that many attacks.

The primary strategy was fairly simple– Geria would engage, then Deyana followed, throwing smaller lightning [Bolt]s out, balancing her mana consumption to stay mostly topped up, waiting for the second jump.

Most of the time, the second jump would be primarily aimed at her, standing in the midline between Geria and Don. Luckily, the coordinated nature of it actually worked out in Deyana’s favor (allowing her to teleport out of the way after they’d committed to the jump instead of burning enormous amounts of mana on blocking the charge itself) and at that point the second phase would kick in.

Activating lightning [Connection] and discharging the storage runes on the staff was usually enough to outright kill at least one of the cenuras, and she immediately followed by switching over to the glaive-hold of the staff. It wasn’t enough to totally take her out of their threat range, given their longer arms and nearly equivalently-long polearms, but it was enough to buy time for Don to peel off or kill at least one and Geria to follow their charge with an attack of her own.

Still, this was the first time she’d ever been at a portal break with so few people, and it showed. Instead of taking out the cenuras basically as soon as they spawned, they instead needed to take out a group, then retreat to regenerate resources for a moment before going back in.

During one of those pauses, Don turned to the two of them “So, you were talking about frontline raid stuff.”

Geria just tilted her head, so Deyana answered. “Some, yeah. What’s up?”

“This glove you made me. Why?”

“Oh! Geria, could I get some help with this? Thin, visible if you can manage it, three horizontal by eight vertical.”

The other girl nodded, looking around for a second before taking out the bag she’d shown in the fight with her former guildmates, tossing two of the rocks from it onto the ground between Deyana and Don. A thin green wall appeared between them, more visible near the bottom and misty near the top.

Deyana, meanwhile, stuck her staff into the ground and activated the blade of it, facing up with the edge pointed back, and stepped out to the side. Fully charged, it would last for half a minute or so without refreshing. “Alright, Don, now shoot the blade. No moving from where you are right this second, the ground to your left and right has traps.”

He gave her a skeptical look before knocking what looked like an enchanted arrow, though not one of the ones she’d made.

As it left the bow, she saw it go ethereal in the instant before it hit the wall.

And bounced.

“Wait, what the fuck, that was an ethereal!”

“Which can be easily stopped by manifested force. Like most things, actually.”

The glaive ran out.

“Yeah, but that’s expensive. No way anything keeps that up for long.”

She decided that it wasn’t worth mentioning that Geria’s entire combat style leaned on it, usually activating them for moderate-length bursts of action and disabling them when other people were holding attention. “And if it’s refilling an attack you can’t adequately stop? If it’s constantly got one pointed towards the highest damage dealer on your side? If it’s mid-retreat, on the way to trigger another boss and heal?”

“It wouldn’t–”

“It absolutely would. Even Falling Dawn had to deal with that, back in reds; [Etherealness] is common, but it’s portal boss exclusive.”

Don made a disgusted sound. “This kind of shit makes me want to stay in T-three. Maybe T-two if I really want to push it.”

Deyana shrugged. “Honestly, for most people, that’ll make sense– and you can go off on your own if you’d like. But we’ve got four, maybe five people here, and while LJay or Geria can buy me up the ladder, we don’t want to lean on that too much.”

Geria raised her hand slightly, though she didn’t wait for either Deyana or Don to acknowledge her before she spoke. “We only really have two or three moderate jumps or one big one. LJay’s always kept way less in credits and runes than I have, and my earlier buys ate into my reserve. Which we can’t really replenish at the moment, except maybe by selling things using Don as the auctioneer.”

They took out another couple of groups before Don spoke up again. “You really think you’ll be able to keep this rune?”

Deyana made a noise of acknowledgement, aware as soon as the question was asked that she needed a little bit of time to form her response. “Right now? I don’t know. I give us… even odds? Maybe a little better, maybe a lot worse. I’m assuming that the guilds are mostly going to be sabotaging each other as much as they are chasing us, plus there’s at least one guild that’s… tentatively on our side, though not publicly. Also assuming that a few of the later-term Falling Dawn members are going to be acting at least a little bit outside of the best interests of their guilds, though not like, outright against them.”

“Are you sure about the Falling Dawn members?” Geria asked.

“Sure, no. But there are a few I kept talking to, and who I had some interaction with pretty recently. At least one in DS and one with the Smurfs. Then there’s whichever member of Third it was that’s led off the main Alliance group…”

“Sounds like this is gonna be complicated,” Don said.

“Good chance of it.”

When they went back to farming this time, Don did start to weave the use of the redirection glove into his strategies, training himself to use it. She’d known in the design process and her own use of her teleport runes that the momentum of the arrow would be conserved, but he appeared to be having trouble aligning with the fact that it was relative to him, not the bolt’s direction. More than a few times, an arrow went completely flying off into the distance instead of landing in his target.

He was getting better, but she worried for his ability to manage it while under threat, if one of the guild did end up forcing a fight again.

Usefully, his change in style did open up her own role in the formation a little bit more, allowing her to swap in the new sword she’d created after a charge and launch a few void copy-bolts in the following melee without needing to worry quite so much about maintaining a true front-to-back team formation.

Which, in turn, led to an addition to the experience and drops windows they’d been getting from the combats.

Rune Quest |Merge|

Phase 6/20: Refinement

Complete!

Phase 7/20: Limit Testing

It is the nature of humanity to make intuitive assumptions. It is the nature of progress to test those assumptions.

“Oh, fuck’s sake.” Deyana sighed, careful to moderate the tone to exasperation instead of anger. “Good news! Finished a part of the quest. Bad news: Next part is vague as hell. Well, maybe bad news, maybe not, but I lean towards yes.”

Don looked over at her. “Why would that not be bad news?”

“A vague explanation means there are alternate paths to success,” Geria responded, taking over while Deyana distractedly muttered about the quest.

“So…”

“I need to test assumptions I made, which could mean that recognizing one and testing it is enough. It could also not pop at all until I test all the assumptions I made, which is harder than it sounds.”

Don narrowed his eyes. “Wouldn’t you know the things you assumed?”

“No. Not a chance in hell. It’s possible to figure them out, but we all make a ton of assumptions just to get through the day.”

He looked like he wanted to argue the point, but his body language showed him coming up with counterarguments to his own points before he ever voiced them, and LJay’s approach let him off the hook for responding.

“Yo! I found our solo player.”

Deyana eyed the sword he was continually swinging around with a bit of skepticism but chose not to comment. “Someone I might recognize?”

“Nah, but Geria might.”

“Would I?”

“It’s the puncher girl”

Geria winced, the motion barely noticeable in her layers of gear. “With the caster?”

“Yep,” LJay laughed. “She’s got a new pair of gloves, but the layering problem is still there.”

The figuring look that Geria shot her set Deyana a bit off guard, but what she said was almost worse. “Point me in her direction. Join these two, I’m going to go talk to her.”

“You’re kidding.” LJay said, stopping the spinning of his ludicrously oversized sword almost on a dime. He did, though, point in a direction that Geria began walking towards.

“Last week I might have been. But…” She gave Deyana a meaningful look over her shoulder. “The game does appear to be telling us to examine our assumptions.”

Don scoffed. “Casters? Not a chance in hell.”

Geria didn’t respond, and neither LJay nor Deyana were honestly able to stick up for this particular decision, either. Casting was a common fantasy trope and had been pretty heavily tried for a long time; people drawing runic formations on the ground, walls, or floor of locations instead of carrying enchanted items.

It also presented enough issues so as to be completely untenable.

Instead of dealing with a known, solid, surface, casting had to deal with whatever the location had already, including but not limited to ground that wasn’t solid enough to channel mana across, unseen breaks and gaps, threats from enemies in the middle of creating it, difficulty in keeping shapes accurate at large sizes, and, perhaps most importantly, the absolutely insane cost of mana inks.

A large part of which was the fact that the best ones were all made of portal dust. The higher-tier, the better.

Some of those issues could be mitigated, but the cost was just not worth the efficiency gain of the scaled-up runes.

Once Geria was out of sight, they went back to farming– LJay showing that he had, in fact, learned how to handle his new weapon.

Instead of trying to “frontline,” LJay wildly threw himself into the mass of Cenuras, drawing as much attention as he could in a few seconds and earning the first charge mostly focusing on him. Moving the blade between him and them was fairly simple from there, and while there weren’t any physically defensive runes on it, the massive size and weight combined with disproportionate inertia allowed it to act as a shield, the follow-up swing taking out more than one of the cenuras while Deyana and Don targeted the faster-movers.

It was a wildly different style than they’d been using with Geria, and it showed in Don’s accuracy.

She’d need to talk to him about that.