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Duskbound-Chapter 150 - Book 2, 71
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The skirmish wasn't going the way Aria had expected, and that was a good thing. She knew a stall tactic when she saw one, and that was what this fight was. Trolls were notoriously difficult to put down, requiring both time and resources to finish off. She'd expected Torwin to take care of the spiders and Velik to do his best to keep some of the trolls tied up while she whittled down their numbers with her magic.
It should have been a long, exhausting battle that left her with nothing to contribute to the next fight. Instead, Velik had pulled something off that was letting him chew through trolls like they were goblins. Oh, they still got back up once or twice, but that was it. They should have taken thirty or more rounds before they exhausted their regeneration and stayed down, and that was assuming Velik kept the pressure on them.
It's got to be some sort of mana draining skill, but I don't have a clue why or how he'd have something like that. If it was something like fire that just took a heavy toll on their regeneration, I'd be seeing the physical effects of it, but there's nothing. The kid's been keeping secrets, though now that I think about it, he did put that hydra down suspiciously easily as well.
Unraveling that mystery was a chore for tomorrow. Right now, the goal was to punch through this diversion as quickly and efficiently as possible so they could find their real opponents. Aria wouldn't be surprised to be ambushed any second. If the smart monsters really were that smart, though, they'd call off the attack. Velik had outplayed their trolls.
Unless she very much missed her guess, her wolf-shaped companion was actually doing better now than he'd been at the start of the fight. Aria wasn't sure if that was something innate to his new skill or if he'd somehow stolen the trolls' regeneration, but either way, it was a win for her team. Velik's injuries had been a major concern half an hour ago. Youth and grit could only take a man so far before reality asserted itself.
Torwin had noticed, too. At the start, he'd done his best to draw the majority of the monsters his way, fearing for Velik's safety. It was impossible to keep everything attacking him, of course, but the two veterans had quickly realized that, far from having to protect Velik, he was easily holding his own. Once they'd figured that out, they'd shifted tactics and easily tore the weak monsters apart.
"That went better than expected," she said once the last troll was down.
"We should push the advantage while we can," Torwin agreed. "They won't be expecting us to cut through a pack of trolls that fast. Whatever they're setting up, this didn't buy them the time they wanted."
It was a short walk down the back tunnel, one which resulted in cutting through a few more pygmy trolls. Thankfully, the massive spiders the first group had been riding on were nowhere to be found. A terrible choice for an underground dungeon, anyway. I'd bet they were created for traversing mountainous terrain outside the mine and scrambled to slow us down once they realized we were coming.
Once they were past that, it became incredibly obvious that they were in a dungeon. It hadn't even tried to make the tunnels look natural. Instead, each one was a smooth bore, effortlessly slicing through stone in gentle curves that circled lower and lower. Velik stopped to sniff at each intersection, a feat of tracking that both Aria and Torwin observed with interest, but always pulled them deeper underground.
She could only hope he was on the trail of the remaining two hunters. That was the primary objective of this mission, after all. If they accomplished nothing else, Aria meant to rescue what she'd come to think of as the hostages, dungeon interference be damned.
[Horizon Seer] was still struggling to pinpoint their location, and the deeper they went, the worse that got. It was so bad that she eventually dismissed the skill. She could see farther with her own eyes than she could with magic, so there was no point in draining her mana that way.
As the minutes ticked by, Aria started to become uneasy. They should have found something by now, but the tunnels continued to descend deeper into the mountain endlessly. She exchanged looks with Torwin, who was no doubt thinking the same thing, but neither spoke. They knew the value of silence, especially deep into monster territory.
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Wherever you're leading us, hurry up and get there, she thought at the large wolf padding along in front.
* * *
The good news was that Velik could smell new people. The bad news was that the numbers weren't adding up. They were looking for two hunters, but he was smelling five unfamiliar scents. At first he'd dismissed it as his inexperience using a heightened sense of smell, but the deeper they went, the more sure he was that he was right.
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Eventually, he paused and looked around. The last thing he needed was to be ambushed while he was in the middle of reverting [True Form], but he was running out of energy to hold the skill anyway. Realizing that he could use his spear's [Mana Drinker] enchantment to directly rebuild his own reserves while in [True Form] was convenient, but they hadn't fought anything in the last half an hour or so.
"What's wrong?" Torwin asked after he finished reverting to human form. "Run out of mana?"
Velik shook his head. "It's not that. It's… I don't know. There are too many people down here. I recognize a bunch of them, but there are five people I don't know. Two of them are probably Lali and Vudra, right? But who are the rest?"
"One of them could be… uh… Emberson's monster's old host," Torwin said. "He said that thing was in another body before it took his."
"A monster body," Aria said. "I'm assuming your wolf shape's nose is sharp enough to tell the difference."
"My human nose can do that," Velik told her. "No chance I'm miscounting. There are five non-monster smells down here. I just don't know what they all are."
"Are they all sticking together?" Torwin asked.
"Impossible to tell for sure, but I don't think so. Some of the scents have gone back and forth multiple times, but at least two of them only have a single trail. Plus, there's something… off… about them. I don't know what."
Torwin sniffed the air himself, but he just shook his head. "I smell monsters and people, but that's it. This one's on you to solve."
"Whatever it is, just be ready. We might be fighting more than just two hunters when we get there," Velik warned. "I'm going to recover for a bit, then shift back into wolf form when we get closer."
They all knew the danger to that plan—that they'd be caught before he could activate [True Form], but truthfully, it was a risk they had to take. [Apex Hunter] and [Dread Lance] both pulled from the same reserves, and entering a fight with nothing left to power his skills was a terrible plan. At the same time, none of them wanted to stop to rest. Whatever was happening, the sooner they arrived, the better their chances of stopping it.
Velik still had the sharpest nose out of the group, and he took the lead with his spear in hand. The flickering candlelight of Aria's skill guided them deeper into the dungeon, which, strangely, had yet to throw another monster at them after the trolls.
Maybe that was all it had for defenders. Its purpose is supposed to be to make more agents of corruption, which don't stay here, and its primary defense was that no one knew it existed until a week ago. It could have gone light on the defenders and just hasn't had time to produce hundreds of monsters like other dungeons would have. That bat champion and a host of pygmy trolls probably would have at least stalled the average dungeon-clearing team long enough to get whatever agents it had already produced out of here.
Something about that theory didn't sit right with Velik, if only because things were too easy. There was a trick or a trap waiting for them somewhere, and they needed to spot it before they walked into it.
Velik pulled up short as he started to round a corner and saw the tunnel disappear into an open room. Backpedaling, he immediately activated [True Form]. Scents flooded his nose, and he signaled to the others with four taps. Torwin and Aria both nodded grimly, and the trio burst out of the tunnel into the room.
A woman was hung up on a rack, bound at her wrists and ankles with some sort of solidified stone. Innumerable wounds covered her from head to toe, a thousand shallow cuts that practically had her skin sloughing off her body. Near her, a tall man who might have been Agora's twin stood, fully armored and with a massive shield placed on the ground in front of him.
If Velik's nose wasn't deceiving him, and he was sure he could tell the difference now, the woman didn't have an agent in her. Her escort surely did, but that meant they only had to fight one corrupted hunter instead of two. It should have been good news.
Two human shapes dropped down from where they'd been positioned on a ledge overlooking the entrance into the room. One of them hit Aria and dragged her to the ground, but the one aiming for Torwin wasn't fast enough to catch the wiry old man. He smoothly dodged out of the way and drew an arrow to fire on his attacker, only to falter at the last minute.
"Of course," he breathed out. They'd already seen it before.
An agent of corruption didn't need a living host to puppet a body, and two hunters had been killed already back when Emberson's team had been taken.
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