Chapter 86

Without further ado, the fight broke out.

With so many moving pieces, even a normal dungeon encounter could be chaotic. But five trained delvers against five others? From the moment the melee started, Natalie lost track of her surroundings. The boy, Otto, in heavy plate armor charged her, and what Jordan, Sofia, and the rest of her team were doing didn’t matter, couldn’t matter, else Natalie would lose her own fight.

Likely, the fighters, tanks, and rogues would match up against each other, with the mage and healer playing in the backline. The start of the fight would be individual spars with wild elements of who the healer and mage helped. From there, as the sub-fights were decided, the rest of the group would collapse. A five on five was tenable, but five-on-four, once the first person was knocked out? Numbers advantage was a real thing—overwhelmingly so.

As in Tenet-sponsored spars, HP would decide who surrendered, not literal incapacitation. Once that magical resource dipped low enough it didn’t offer enough protection to stave off serious injury, each participant would surrender. Or be too stunned to keep fighting back in the first place; having your HP sent to zero could be debilitating in its own right.

But this wasn’t a fight to the death. Still, it was probably a fight for everything they owned, and would set them back horrendously if they lost, so Natalie intended to give it everything she had. And not just for her own sake, but Liz’s too.

Otto barreled forward, braced into his shield, and for all his bulky armor, the gap closed with shocking speed. A part of Natalie stubbornly wanted to meet him head-on, to test her strength against his own, but the pragmatist in her admitted it would be rather one-sided. As a level one, her class hadn’t closed the gap between sexes yet; she couldn’t match Otto’s bulk, even aided by her class. And at a guess, the boy was even more of a juggernaut than the typical tank.

That said, she couldn’t let him charge through. She suspected he’d head straight for the backline if Natalie side-stepped and refused to engage. She had to keep his attention.

She settled for the middle ground. She stepped to the side, but made sure to throw her entire weight into a counter-bash as he came charging forward. Her shoulder jarred as she essentially bounced off of him, shield clanging—though he at least grunted and stumbled, momentum faltering.

He recovered and faced her, then raised his short-sword and advanced. Natalie struggled to regain her own footing from having been repelled by a mountain of metal. Her attack had been less potent than she’d expected, and it took her a second to place why.

Because for once, Liz hadn’t empowered Natalie with her strengthening buff. It was disorienting, since Natalie had been fighting with the enhancement practically all day. But she knew the reasoning behind the choice. Likely, the spell had gone to Jordan. She had the hardest match-up: Elida herself.

If Elida disabled Jordan, then joined the fray in two-on-ones against the other standing members of the party, they’d crumple in moments. Though maximizing power and durability to the tank was the usual best play, clearly, Jordan was the appropriate target in this brawl.

So, Natalie against Otto. Tank against tank. Before the fight devolved into true chaos, with members dropping out of the fray from defeat, it would be a more traditional duel, with occasional interference from the backline.

Natalie took the lead on the next exchange. No longer incompetent with her spellcasting abilities, her [Illusion] sprang to life, orchestrated with a quick swipe of her hammer, which crashed into Otto’s tower shield with a resounding clang, and made the boy grunt with the impact. As far as match-ups went, hammer against heavy armor was one of the better ones. A spiked mace would’ve been better, but a hammer wasn’t shabby.

An illusory second-Natalie shimmered into existence, overlaid on top of her. It was one of Natalie’s favorite applications of the skill against intelligent enemies. Her illusions could be seen through with some effort—how easily depended on her opponent and their stats—but trying to track multiple pairs of arms and weapons and discern which were real could be devastatingly difficult in the middle of a brawl.

Maybe other applications were better from a raw efficacy standpoint, but Natalie found the illusory limbs fit with her style. She supplemented her melee capabilities, playing to her strengths, not trying to be something she wasn’t. Tess’s advice.