Edge Cases

126 - Book 2: Chapter 63: Tricks and Alchemy

"Two of you," Irvis snarled; his face twisted in a raw, sudden sort of fury that almost made Misa take a step back. "Two of you! The mage I understand, but you? You don't have any magic!"

Shit, he's hit Vex. Misa's first thought was worry, before it resolved into a more determined narrowing of her eyes. Irvis had waited for this. This man or whatever he was had known about them at least since she'd blocked his attempt at killing Elyra's delve team only a month or so ago. That he had only chosen to show up again now...

It seemed like a choice.

He'd waited for them to split up, and that meant he didn't want to face them together. Vex had been targeted first, and she had been targeted second, from what he'd said. She wasn't sure what to make of that. Maybe he was avoiding one of the two of them, or maybe he just didn't want to face Sev and Derivan together.

Either way, he wasn't as invulnerable as he pretended to be. Of course, she could have figured them out from the bleeding wound she'd left with her mace, where specks of light drifted out from his skin. It looked raw and painful.

Misa smirked at him, spun, and threw her blade far into the corridor, past the traps. She could sense Irvis trying to attack her in that moment of opportunity [Guard Stance] tried to activate to push her into the right position to stop him but she deactivated the skill before she could, and activated Endless Echoes.

The world spun into a fractal. One version of her was more familiar than all the others; the one she used most frequently to block, when she wasn't in the right position for it. Some version of her had acquired a [Teleporting Mace], and it had become her favorite shtick there.

Misa reappeared halfway down the corridor, ducking underneath the trap that sprung almost immediately; pure instinct, this time, from her observations of the traps this dungeon liked to throw at her. It was sort of uncomfortable that the dungeon was adapting to her strategies, including her use of Echoes, but that was a distant concern to the threat of Irvis.

He was already catching up.

She had to lead him towards the center of the dungeon, where Sev and Derivan would be headed. Part of Misa wanted to try to fight him alone, to take a stand and see exactly how well she could fare against this monster, but she quashed that impulse; it would've been the same kind of stupidity she'd been reprimanding Sev over. No more of that, she told herself.

Instead, Misa scanned ahead, looking for a good way to stay ahead of Irvis and lure him where she wanted him. She could use her blocking trick a few more times she had more than enough mana banked for it but Irvis would no doubt be prepared. He'd figure it out the moment she pulled out her sword.

The corridor ahead of her was uniform to the point of being almost boring. Perfect square tiles, each of which Misa knew from experience could either trigger a trap or be a trap; there was no telling what was behind any given tile, and they all seemed identical, besides in color; they ran in long white stripes and shorter black ones along the length of the corridor. There was nothing there she could use, as far as she knew. She cursed under her breath and glanced back.

He was already catching up to her, bastard that he was he moved in an odd, flickering sort of way. She never quite caught him running. She'd see the initial moment of him starting to move, and then he'd fade out of her sight, only to reappear closer to her. Always in a spot of the dungeon without a trap. Always on one of those empty tiles along the corridor, where he would reorient and move again.

It was creepy. He was also almost certainly shifting the way Derivan could the way her own other selves touched on, albeit in a slightly more distant way. It explained how he could see those other versions of her...

Ah. That gave her an idea a few ideas, even. Misa grinned again, and it wasn't a nice grin; she wasn't in a very good mood.

To start with, if the dungeon was going to adapt to her, then she would have to make it adapt in her favor, against Irvis.

"Stop running," Irvis hissed at her. The sound carried across the corridor, and it was only the tone and strangeness of how that sound carried that made her think to block. Her mace flickered into the appearance of a flute, and something in Irvis' words was sucked into it, a shimmering red mist expelled from the other end of the flute a moment later. Irvis growled in exasperation, and Misa wondered what exactly she'd just avoided.

No matter. She stopped, just like he wanted; Irvis almost seemed startled by it. He charged at her a second later, some sort of bolt appearing in his hand, and she activated [Guard Stance] in response. She just needed the instant of precognition it provided her

There. Misa twisted on her feet right as Irvis appeared next to her, taking a single step forward and shoving her bodyweight in. She felt a grim satisfaction take hold as Irvis gasped in surprise, and she kept going. One fist wrapped around the stupid tie he wore with his stupid suit, and she yanked as hard as she could.

Which was pretty hard, first of all. She'd invested a fair number of points into Strength. Second, and perhaps something that shouldn't have surprised her, the man was light.

Irvis went sprawling.

She would have followed up, but she'd thrown him with intent. Her echoes rolled the dice on the traps, stepping on a half-dozen different ones in the instant. Every physical trap that was launched she blocked, and every mana-based one she'd gritted her teeth and allowed herself to get hit; if she was right about what the dungeon was doing...

A hole opened up in a nearby wall, and the hair on her skin prickled as mana gathered. Misa couldn't see the process, but she saw the result mana so concentrated that it glowed a deep blue light. It launched out of the hole in a fraction of a second, at a speed so blisteringly fast Misa wasn't sure she could have triggered her block in time if she'd been the one to set off the trap.

Irvis certainly didn't react in time. Whatever his stats were if he had any at all they weren't oriented around speed and reaction; the lance of mana impaled him through the head and chest with enough force to send him flying back and into the wall.

In the instant before the lance struck, though, Misa caught a glimpse of him starting to smile.

She didn't wait to see what happened she could guess. Conventional mana-based attacks wouldn't work on Irvis; she needed the specific anti-magic weapons she summoned when blocking magical attacks, or else she would be hard-pressed to do any real damage to Irvis.

Better yet, she needed Vex. From what Irvis had said, he hadn't been particularly successful in his attack on her friend, but she still worried; there was nothing from him through the system, yet. But the little guy was resourceful, she told herself.

Sure enough, in the corner of her eye even as she ran, and dodged the traps in her way, sometimes only barely Misa saw Irvis pulling the mana lance out of his head and looking at it in what almost seemed like disdain; he clenched his fist, and the lance shattered with the sound of a ringing bell.

Not encouraging. But not, she reminded herself, the end of it.

This fight, as far as she was concerned, was an opportunity to gather information. Arcane mana didn't react well to Irvis, but there had always been the chance that that was just a quirk of arcane mana as a whole. Now she'd learned that he had some immunity to standard mana attacks, too. She doubted Irvis was very concerned about physical attacks she remembered how the delve captain, Harold, had attacked him only to have his sword phase straight through.

Time to lean fully into getting to the end of this fucking corridor, then. She was getting a little tired of all the planning.

"We must hurry," Derivan said, glancing sharply ahead.

"Something up?" Sev looked over at his friend.

"There is trouble... somewhere. I suspect it is with Misa." Derivan could feel reality fluctuating wildly through Shift, in the exact way he'd come to expect when Misa used the upgraded [To Fall Yet Hold the Line]. Endless Echoes, she'd said it was called, though she looked oddly embarrassed while saying it.

The two of them hadn't exactly been taking their time with the dungeon their path had been methodical and careful, but not exactly slow. The theme of the particular corridor they were going down seemed to be enchanted items and weaponry. Lined along the sides of the corridor were little alcoves styled after different workshops; everything from alchemy labs to entire foundries and smithing stations.

Derivan thought Vex would have loved it. As far as he could tell, each individual alcove was a fully functioning workshop all on its own; the ingredients stocked on the shelves seemed genuine, and the half-complete items that lay scattered about made it feel like they were left there by real artisans. The only reason he knew it was dungeon-made was because of the way Patch screamed at him all of this was linked to the system, in some way.

He suspected he knew exactly what style of trap it was. Create something in these workshops, and whatever you created would then be pitted against you, further down the hall.

The problem was what happened when you didn't create anything in those workshops.

Every one of those half-completed projects left strewn about in them came to life if they just walked past without engaging, this time much less complete than the single suit of armor he'd broken the link of; these were smaller, mindless creations of the system that would fall to nothing if he snapped that link. It wasn't worth the ding to Patch to destroy them that way, and so he and Sev resorted to fighting.

Mostly.

Animated swords and axes and whips were fine. Animated potions, on the other hand...

They'd learned very quickly that the alchemy workshops were not ones to walk past, because stray alchemical effects were strange, and animated potions were not fun to fight when a single splash of liquid created wildly different effects.

"Ah, shit, we've got another one coming up," Sev said, glancing to the right. There was yet another workshop there, this time with shelves lined with an assortment of red potions and herbs. Derivan thought he recognized some of them from Emily's garden, even. "You wanna handle this?"

"Yes," Derivan said simply.

He was quick and precise.

He also had no idea what he was doing. He enjoyed the process, though there was something about grinding random herbs and throwing them into liquid and watching the reaction that was fun but there was a solid chance that the whole mixture would just explode, which had happened once or twice. After the first one Sev had declared that Derivan would have to handle all the potion-mixing from now on, unless there were ingredients that he explicitly recognized from priesthood.

Sev had mixed one successful potion and kept it, at least.

The potion Derivan made settled and stopped drawing in mana after a second, and Derivan would have let out a relieved sigh if he'd been capable of such a thing. He simulated one anyway, glancing back at Sev and giving him a thumbs up.

"Nice," Sev said. "Any idea what kind of potion you made?"

"I do not," Derivan said.

"Hopefully it's not anything too bad. It looks like that's the last workshop we need to work through." Sev gestured to the corridor ahead of them it led to a big, central room of some sort, and there was the sound of a very familiar orc yelling something that sounded suspiciously like "come and get me, fucker".

Sev paused. "Okay, you weren't kidding. We better hurry Hey!"

Derivan didn't bother waiting for Sev. The human got tired too easily, because agility apparently didn't come with stamina, and because he hadn't put that many points into agility to begin with. He just picked Sev up under his arm and started running.