Levi slammed his eyes shut, trying to preserve the memory of what the room had looked like and to protect himself if either of the Soul-Seekers turned their gazes away from their minions.

The glitterlings swarmed and he was fighting blind, all sound and motion and chaos. Having the soul-seeker bosses backed up with swarms and their own illusionists made for a terrifyingly dangerous combination.

Dungeons were always dangerous, but this one was treading the edge of more. Levi himself may dramatically outlevel the dungeon, but the team as a whole were closer to on-level.

Levi couldn’t be sure if his partial memory of the battlefield layout was still reflective of reality or not. The urge to try stealing a glance remained dreadfully strong, even though Levi knew full well that he'd see nothing but the illusion the opposing Mirror Sprites had concocted, and expose himself to potentially worse in the process.

"Tink, try to find a way to relay an illusion of the layout to us once your mana comes back.”

Tink landed on Levi's shoulder and sat, drooping wearily against the side of Levi's head, but he felt the sprite nod.

Drok's health was dropping steadily, and from what Levi had seen before Tink lost control Pierce had even more glitterlings on him. Either could have crushed the swarms if in their right minds, but lost in whatever illusions the Soul-Seekers were imposing on them, they didn't even fight back.

Levi set out through the half-remembered landscape of the fight, forging his way toward Pierce, the closer of the two beleaguered minions.

His progress was slowed by the glitterlings filling the room, more even beyond the hundreds on Pierce and Drok. Too many. They hummed through the air, stinging against Levi’s body as he tried to reach Pierce's side, and with only two swords there was no way to stop them all.

Levi slashed them from the air in an unending series of rapid slashes as he advanced, but in all the chaos he couldn't be sure he was heading the right direction any more. Uncertainty made his steps tentative and progress slow. He wanted to rush forward whatever the consequences, but he'd be even less help to his team if he fell into a pit.

A mighty crash shook the floor and Gordon's immediate shout of dismay made it quite clear what must have happened. Pierce had fallen.

Levi was too late.

Then the glitterlings were flying up in a great buzzing cloud, drowning out the sounds of fighting around them, deafening Levi to all but their multitude.

He struck out wildly, slashing and chomping with his blades, slicing glitterlings apart or crushing them in his shortsword's jaws. They flooded out, stinging his arms as he carved through them with rapid slashes that were still insufficient against their sheer numbers. But he was not their target. They flew around and past him, the burns against his armor incidental as they flew toward larger prey.

Drok's health immediately began to drop faster, from a steady drain to a rapid one. Levi spun away and followed the swarm, but they were not flying in one single direction. Instead it split in thirds. A moment later Levi understood why as Cen and Centoo began losing health as well.

He couldn’t reach them all on time, even if he threw away all caution and ran flat out. Not while blind.

"TINK, status!"

The sprite buzzed by Levi's ears, then a brilliant flash of light sparked across the inside of Levi's eyelid, almost stunning him. For a moment it vaguely resembled a blurry shape, then it dissolved into incomprehensible sparkles.

"Keep working, we need to be able to see what we're doing! Gordon, what’s going on?"

“Pierce and Frosty are down. Sparky didn’t last long, I think the locals took offense, and I don’t know where Plus is. Ow! Stupid sparkle bugs! I don’t know if I can hold out here.”

“I’ll be right there.” Levi reluctantly turned and moved toward Gordon. He couldn't do anything for his minions, fighting alone, scattered throughout the room. They could be revived once the fight was over; Gordon could not.

This was a battle of attrition now, and as long as the Soul-Seekers remained in play they were at a disadvantage. But the enemy bosses had too many support minions of their own, making it hard to address the real problem.

Levi and Gordon fought back to back and gradually whittled down the glitterling swarms, but it was all they could do to defend themselves. Before long only a handful of Levi's minions remained standing.

Tink remained hovering between them on Levi's left, but if the sprite was making any progress on his illusion it wasn't clear. Skarm survived Centoo's downfall and joined Levi, standing just behind him and to the right to help guard Gordon as well. Shadevine was still alive out there somewhere, hopefully draining one of the bosses, but he wouldn't exactly be much help in the current situation.

Gremlin Two went out in a blaze of glory, screaming indecipherable battle cries as he engaged in repeat stabbing into something squishy - hopefully one of the bosses, inflicted with an extra helping of Two’s nature-poison and destruction-corrosive combo.

Still, as the battle simplified and allies fell, Levi began to feel the conflict settle into familiar patterns. Survive. Fight. Protect the one beside you, but waste no time in mourning.

It felt right and wrong all at once: dissonant against who he had begun to transform into, but comfortable in its stability worn from years of fighting for no better reason than simply to survive another minute, another hour. It was easy to slip back into that coldness.

Did he really need anything beyond the moment, did any of it truly matter?

If he fell here, would anyone care?

Yes. They would.

He had more to live for now, and couldn't afford to forget that.

He was running low on stamina, lower on mana, his blades limited to their special attacks every eight seconds, but he was used to fighting to the very edge. His stamina draw remained perfectly balanced, his movements precise and calculated by deep instinct worn into him by years of doing exactly this sort of fight against overwhelming odds.

These odds weren't overwhelming. If he survived they would be victorious. His minions were roughly on-level for a dungeon of this power, but Levi himself was not. He'd fought dungeons twenty times as strong and come out alive every time. This dungeon should be the one fearing him.

The only challenge here would be protecting Gordon. Anything else would be simple.

He almost managed to believe it.

Levi fought. Levi killed.

Levi survived.

After a time, the glitterlings came slower, fewer. The room's chaos slowed. Calmed, quieted. Silence instead of buzzing.

Levi's heavy breaths and the shifting of his few remaining companions were all that broke the stillness.

"Is it safe?" Gordon whispered.

"No!” Levi snapped. “The Soul-Seekers are still out there. Tink?"

His sprite hummed dejectedly.

"It's not safe." Aside from the pair of giant floating eyes of terror and certain destruction, there were probably at least five or six of the Mirror Sprites too, flying too far overhead to be detected. "Keep your eyes closed."

Skarm poked Levi's leg and squeaked a question, tugging toward the right.

"Maybe if we had more of us left, but there are two of them and not enough of us."

Without the glitterlings, it would be easy enough to force the confrontation... if Drok or Pierce had survived. Without anyone physically large enough to dominate the space or reach the ceiling, attempting to herd the soul-seekers into being cornered would be very difficult. They could only work with what they had to work with.

Which wasn’t much. Skarm, Tink, and two shadevines against a pair of insanely overpowered bosses that could seal you in your worst nightmares if you so much as looked at them. And it couldn’t even be blocked by bending light, since their attack was apparently mana-based or something. If Levi had his old sword with a shield expansion from the future, he could probably use that to block the attack easily enough, but he didn’t have anything like that here.

He did have the beast-sight lens, but the amount of mana it required was so small he couldn’t imagine it would actually block a soul-seeker’s attack. He’d need something much more mana dense and still translucent.

There would probably be something he could craft that would do the trick, but the middle of a fight wasn’t the ideal time to start experimenting. Especially when he couldn’t see what he was doing.

Still, there might be something he could put together quickly. Perhaps he could use tokens as a kind of filter. They were full of mana, even if the color would make it hard to make out, it would be better than nothing. But he didn’t have anything to use as a frame, and no time to cobble something together. He'd need a complete seal, too, something to prevent the soul-seekers from slipping an attack past at an angle.

Something flexible and malleable…

“Tink, bring me Shadevine.”