I stiffened as I felt all the magic around start to bend in a certain direction, like a spiderweb being pulled by an uncaring hand.

  “Bonecrunch is here!” I whispered urgently.

  “Mercy on your Sword! Charge and take her now!” Briggs ordered.

  We hadn’t made it quite all the way around the room, but that was fine, we were close enough.

  The Arcane Fusion went off first, laying down a large Sound Bubble and another Illusionary Wall, making sure the fellows below still saw and heard nothing up here. The Fastcast Shards Spellwarped into Split Rays and flashed through the surviving guards up top here with dangerously powerful Chains, crits flashing and killing a couple of them outright, while they rest were staggered, burned, blinded, freezing, coated in rime, and smashed to the ground.

  Bunita’s new form was pretty obvious for being untouched in the middle of them, totally shocked as everyone around her went down. Then a blur of darkness clad in crackling Lost Lightning was on her, batting through her rapier, cutting in crackling arcs that basically ignored the armor she was wearing, and overwhelmed any defense she had before it had a chance to come into being.

  The grimace on the Mick’s face was ferociously pained. He could FEEL her inside there, screaming with every blow, even if she didn’t recognize him yet. But he watched her drop as Mercy made killing blows merely temporary damage, smashing her into sleep so he could hurtle on to the other four guards that Briggs hadn’t quite managed to butcher yet and drop them as well.

  I set up the Final Rest area over the sacrificial chamber at the bottom of the hall, moving over to stand by Bunita and flick three Darts into the three remaining guards to hurry things along.

  Ten seconds later, Briggs was back on top of Bunita, bending down to encircle her head in a huge hand and concentrate, his Source Aura pulsing once. Something shuddered and broke under his fist, and he pulled his hand away.

  The Mick knelt down, murmured two words as he grabbed her limp hand, and an unseen wind rippled and spirited him back along his Lived-Line.

  Briggs didn’t hesitate, immediately driving for the edge of the walkway, and I followed after. The Summons kind of gawked as he came out of nowhere and arced through the air, then vanished from sight and sound before they could move.

  I, of course, was still Improved Invisible. They never saw me as I ghosted down after him. The two guards there ended up catching his feet in their faces, and Endure tapped one way, rebounded off as that one’s head was driven into the stone wall with a wet crunch, and his buddy suffered the same fate.

  Then he was loping towards the back of the place, Sound Bubble keeping all the screams and crunches nice and contained, even the scrapes of his armor on the walls silent with Stealthslake at work.

  No guards in the hallway, and the ones at the end had absolutely no idea what was happening as a mountain of muscle and armor burst out of the hallway, moving way too fast, and there was no way to stop him.

  He saw the Portal structure as soon as I did. Instead of a free-standing circle of light, which the old Portals had been, this, like on Caul Island, was a structure of Runes in a complex pattern closer to a Teleportation Circle than anything else, the main difference being that it required mana to charge up, making it not much different from the Long Jumps I’d made to get between islands over the water.

  I Cast the Analyze Object, and the entire structure of the Portal flashed into my Visual File and froze there.

  A second later Endure slammed into the thing and blew it apart in shards of stone.

  The Arcane Fusion for Final Rest and Delayed Interdiction went off. Briggs looked around at everyone as he ground to a halt, and they all stared back at him in alarm and disbelief as Endure roared back to his hand. All other activity stopped as everyone focused on him, and he looked right back, also taking note of the many, many crates, boxes, sacks, barrels, and containers of stuff just sitting around.

  Then I grabbed his arm and Dim-Doored out of there.

  Three seconds later the Delayed Interdiction went off, and nobody was using dimension-jumping to get anywhere out of there.

  Five seconds after that, a moving hole in the manafield burst into the ceremonial hall as all the Illusionary Walls naturally faded, and the Summons down below all turned to face it.

  ------

  Briggs and I were outside and in the forest to the west of the road, leaning against trees and waiting silently, all magic dimmed, as I watched the moving locus of magic down below us.

  It had only taken about ten minutes for the frantic action below to stop completely. We could see the entry to the Dungeon about a quarter-mile from us, and definitely nobody had made it out of there… although the drudge had chased a couple of people back towards the entry, and they hadn’t made it outside.

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  “It doesn’t look like he’s randomly destroying the stockpile of stuff down below, which is nice to know. He’s heading for the entryway.”

  We both moved to put trees between us and any visual link to the creature.

  “You’re going to love this.” I inclined my head at him. “Twenty minutes ago, Kris and the full teams, backed by the Royal Guard, ‘ported into Cragstone.”

  I hadn’t been paying attention to that, held up my hand as the locus of magic moved outside. It paused there, surveying the area, maybe smelling the young man who’d waited until Bonecrunch had passed and run urgently away, down to the river to lose his scent and trail and head upstream to the bridges, sticking to the reeds. There was no doubt the drudge could catch him, but was it worth it?

  Obviously not. The fact Bonecrunch had been there would get out, and the absolute destruction of everything blamed on him, since I had Geased the deserter to not breathe a word of our presence there. He could lie cheerfully, say he’d been guarding up towards the front and ducked into a side passage as the Prodigal Drudge attacked, and then just ran for his life.

  Good cover story. Nobody was going to know different.

  Bonecrunch started loping back in the direction of home, probably satisfied with the day’s events. “Looks like he’s heading home to get some drudges to loot the place, I’d imagine,” Briggs half-smiled.

  “And Cragstone is probably in flames with dead drudges everywhere?”

  “They took out the sentries meant to signal him first, and are just wiping the rest. The burning starts when they mostly clear the town and environs of everything.”

  Running down fleeing squads of drudges or engaging in combat with the hunter teams.

  “And he just left, and isn’t in a hurry, with almost twenty miles to go. They’ve got at least an hour.”

  A lot of drudges could die in an hour.

  “I’d like to track him, but he’d probably notice. She brought enough Disks for everyone, and two Wagons. She can pull out of there, out towards the southwest, and get away from him before he gets home without a problem. If he follows, she’ll wait for you to link up and make another Mass Teleport, get everyone out of there.”

  “In the meantime, want to loot everything that’s down there?” I asked him.

  It was a very rhetorical question. I /plugged into Kristie’s link once I felt Bonecrunch was far enough away, and she was happy to /feed me the progress of their payback.

  Nobody wanted to fight the Drudge yet, including her, but soon!

  -----

  -Hah, funny!- Kristie’s /comment got our attention as she fed us a visual of a drudge in battered armor… battered OLTHOI armor. Several other higher-Leveled drudges were also equipped with the stuff, and even some olthoi Weapons!

  -The drudges were using the Olthoi Hunter?- Briggs /asked in some disbelief, picking up stacks of boxes from Mass Disks and placing them down delicately. Bags and stuff too unwieldy to handle was being handled by Zeks, a small army of Mass Phantasmal Servants was stacking things up on the Disks, and the soon-to-be Widened Tapestry on the ground was filling up nicely. I’d already set up the first level of stone bands about it to reinforce it.

  -Obviously not very well, and not recently, at least these fellows. I’m betting they had a bunch of stuff left from the olthoi invasion, and Bonecruncher must have stumbled across her when checking out his territory. He probably noted she was an NPC, realized what she did, and got a whole bunch of free armor and weapons that way. The wild tribes never talk about the drudges taking on olthoi deliberately, unless they are trying to expand their territory by claiming Summons.-

  Bonecrunch had managed to restore a lot of the Summons Points we’d Sealed almost a year ago now, bringing back the big wide ring of Summoned Drudges around his fortress to form a new army.

  The problem was that he wasn’t in Cragstone to command them, and so thousands of drudges were sitting around the fortress that was still Bonecrusher’s forced home, doing nothing as warbands, hunting teams, and scavenging crews of drudges were being slaughtered within sight of them.

  The only settlement we had within running range of him was Eastham, and the place had never been claimed as drudge territory, probably because of the existence of Asheron’s Island so close to it. Everywhere else was beyond his running range, with only the scant people in Rithwic potentially at risk… and Rithwic was basically a base for shutting down landscape spawns, not a true settlement, either.

  Without his power backing him, the drudges didn’t press out any further, but they’d had a big territory to themselves because of him, so they’d been happy. Now, it was all coming back to bite them in the ass, as they found out coordinated military efforts and dimension-hopping could easily coordinate things around the activity of their boss… and their boss didn’t seem to be able to Teleport home.

  Pity, that.

  Our stuff was stacking up nicely. “How goes replicating that Portal Formation?” Briggs asked, three conversations going on as he nimbly built up stacks of crates already ten feet high.

  “Shouldn’t be an issue. She used aetherium instead of pyreal in it, however. It’ll take more pyreal to do the same.”

  “I’m not sure we have enough. I’ll have to look at our reserves,” he replied dryly, and I just smiled. “Also, that crate in the corner has aetherium ore in it.”

  “Shock! Horrors! They are dealing with the Gotrok and/or the virindi! Such vile and immoral opportunists! I can’t believe they would do such a thing!” I lied very badly indeed, my voice ringing with sincerity a child could tell was utterly false.

  There was a lot of white spread about the room, and armor and weapons, many of them rent and broken, were scattered here and there. Bonecrunch had not been at all gentle, and had also mashed, crashed, and slashed a whole bunch of the boxes and crates here to see what was inside. I’d had to waste some Mana on Mending them and the contents, but that was all good. It was all going away, and the drudges were going to take the blame for it.

  “We can finally rebuild the Core of the Gold Primus, if that is true.” Pyreal just wasn’t pure enough to channel the dimensional energies which the Gearknights relied on for motive power. “They should still have almost all the research into the stuff in Freehold. I’ll make sure it gets brought over to where we have him stashed. Would you or Kris like to do the forgework?”

  He almost rolled his eyes. “QL 40 req, I take it?”

  “At least,” I confirmed. “He’s a Boss-level Gearknight. Think Optimus Prime. Needs the best.”

  “I’ll do it. Just get me the blueprints ahead of time.”

  “Will do!”

  Serendipity is so nice sometimes.

  ============================

  For those who would like to support me and my daily updates, my Patreon Link is at:

  The shameless author reminds that more Patreon = more chapterz... and the First Decade Storyline and others exclusive to them!