Portal Grinding Volume 3 Part 1

John led his summons aimlessly through the dunes for a few minutes.

I shouldn’t just wander around, we’re looking for things out here. I’m not sure if any of the girls have anything specific that’ll help in this situation, but then again I’m not sure what any of them are exactly capable of yet. I’ll just ask and see what they come up with.

“Ignis, can you sniff out enemies like last time? If we find the enemies, we should find the other objectives too. Elora, what kind of recon capabilities do you and your soldiers have?”

Ignis yipped her affirmative before starting to look for a scent in the air. Elora watched Ignis sniff around for a moment before answering.

“While the aerial squads are performing transport duties, there aren’t any great options at our disposal. If we’re in a hurry, Chief, I can create two more aerial squads but it would leave me weak.”

“Well,” John began, “we aren’t in that much of a hurry, but I’ll keep that in mind in case we are later. Calista? Omorfia? Do either of you have skills we could use in this situation?”

Calista answered immediately, “I can sense the nearest water source. It is faint and far, but we are heading in the right direction.”

Omorfia waited for Calista to continue speaking, but seeing that both she and John were looking at her expectantly she simply stated, “My senses are not of use in this situation, Master. Perhaps if our enemies are feeling particularly… pent up… I may sense them, but from this distance I only sense your desire.”

John looked away from Omorfia as she traced her naked curves with her hands invitingly.

Gotta focus, gotta focus, gotta focus, we can fuck after, we don’t have to fuck right now, there’s a time limit, gotta focus, gotta focus…

He cleared his throat before speaking again. “Right. So. We’ll keep walking in this direction, towards the nearest oasis, unless Ignis picks up a scent in which case we’ll follow that. Sound good?”

The summons’ affirmative responses were scattered and jumbled but the general consensus was yes, and so John continued to lead them in a vaguely easterly direction.

Hours of awkward silence ensued. Or, at least to John, what felt like hours of awkward silence. The group marched onwards with nary a word spoken amongst them, even the usually chatty pixies seemed to be more focused on the task of keeping up with John than on making jokes and giggling amongst themselves. While John agonized internally about not really knowing the personalities of his summons and what they might enjoy talking about, the ladies calmly trailed behind him, not minding the silence at all.

Ignis eventually broke the silence with excited yips and cries before bounding off northwards.

“Oh shit!” John exclaimed in the dignified and collected manner of a true born leader. “She’s got a trail! Uh, double time? Yeah? Let’s just go!”

John set off at a sprint to catch up with Ignis, the scattered laughter of the pixies ringing in his ears. Calista and Omorfia fell in behind him, the aerial squads hovering close above them. The group kept a rapid pace as they chased Ignis, who was clearly enjoying the hunt, over seemingly endless rolling dunes. After several minutes of sprinting, a structure began to solidify out of the heat’s haze, still a fair distance away. Ignis slowed to a trot, then ducked behind a high crested sand dune and sat with her head tilted inquisitively.

“Good girl,” John said as he reached for Ignis’ ears and scratched them.

The burns are so worth it, he thought as Ignis purred quietly. He only scratched for a moment, though, so as to keep burn damage to a minimum when enemies were nearby.

“Elora, now that we have visual on an enemy encampment, do we have better recon options?”

The pixie general saluted before responding. “Yes, Chief. Now that we can redirect the aerial squads away from transport, they can perform flybys or orbital surveillance.”

“Orbital surveillance? You don’t mean from space, do you?” John immediately questioned.

“No, Chief. Orbital as in a set flight path that orbits a point or person of interest.”

John nodded his understanding of Elora’s answer. “Well, we have two squads. Might as well try both methods and see what we get.”

Elora turned to the aerial squads, splayed in the sand after placing the infantry squads down, and began shouting orders at them.

Summon-Synergy Skill Activated: Flyby Reconnaissance.
Flyby Reconnaissance: As a squad of Pixies performs their flyby, you may tap into their vision and see what they see. You may tap into [INT/100, minimum 1] squads’ vision at once. Visual acuity is determined by [(INT+AGI)/100, minimum 1], where the value represents how many clearly defined frames you are able to process.

Oh shit, wait, I won’t be able to-

Prompt override: first skill activation.

John’s vision went black for a moment, then cleared again much much closer to the ground. He had no control of the direction as one of the pixies looked around at her comrades, then up at John. There was a visor over his eyes, emerald green and faceted like a gem. It curved around his face in a roughly semi-circle shape, completely obscuring from his hairline down to his nose.

“Can I speak while using this skill? Oh, I can. It’s surreal watching my mouth move from someone else’s perspective. I can’t move at all in this state, unless it’s to speak, so I’ll be in your care, ladies.”

All of the pixies saluted with a cacophonous cry of, “Sir!” and then the aerial squad shot into the air like a bullet, completely disorienting John.

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck. Shit fuck. Fucking. Oh god why, was all John could think as he was taken into the air and whipped around at what he imagined must have been Mach speeds. The landscape blurred past in a slurry of warm browns and reds, then tilted a dozen times and turned into a more blue tinted brown. A gargantuan structure loomed ahead, and John barely had the presence of mind to concentrate and try to take a steady frame of information about the fort.

Click.

A flash, followed by the same stereotypical camera shutter sound that plays when a picture is taken on a phone, and a still image of the fort was taken from the mess of a blur that was John’s vision. It minimized and appeared as a tab in the top right of the visor’s screen. John’s mind lurched with vertigo as the pixies continued their flyby and circled widely back to where they had left the rest of John’s party. As the pixies landed, the visor lost its opacity, and John’s vision switched back to his own eyes. The visor lifted off his face and expanded to about the size of a laptop screen, straightening out of the curve it had been in to fit to his head. The screen displayed green rain code for a few seconds, then the rain fell away to reveal John’s snapshot.

John was the first to see it, and his impression flew unbidden from his lips.

“Well… that’s not very helpful, is it?”

John and his summons stood around his snapshot of the enemy fort, examining it skeptically. The image showed a steamy room full of naked feminine bodies, similar in markings to the Slikopethakath that Slytha had made in the last dungeon run. They were seemingly bathing each other, split into pairs and trios of cheerfully chatting creatures as they held various brushes and sponges.

“Well, I mean,” John began, “we now know they have vampire banshees, at least?”

Not to mention… These Lizardmen have neither red nor sand colored scales. They’re blue.

He pointedly didn’t make eye contact with anyone as he cleared his throat and addressed Elora.

“What did the squad see? I’m sure they got much more out of it than I did.”

“Yes, Chief. They were able to approximate the amount of hostiles guarding the fort and get a general idea of their optimal patrol paths, as well as get familiar with the external layout of the fort. The orbital surveillance should confirm the hostile counts and their patrol paths, as well as convey an exact layout for everyone. As of right now, we believe the fort to be perfectly square, with open archways in the center of each of its sides. There appear to be between a dozen and twenty hostiles guarding the fort, with the only patrol paths available either along the walls between the towers or scattered throughout the desert.”

“Perfect, that’s a great start. Let’s begin the orbital surveillance, then.”

Elora nodded at John and pivoted to the second aerial squad. “Well? What are you waiting for, ladies? The target is the nearby enemy fort, let’s get to work!”

Summon-Synergy Skill Activated: Orbital Reconnaissance.
Orbital Reconnaissance: As a squad of Pixies performs orbits overhead, you may tap into their vision and see what they see. You may tap into [INT/100, minimum 1] squads’ vision at once. Zoom is determined by [(INT+AGI)/100, minimum 1], where the value represents how many meters you are able to zoom.

Ah, that’s not very close at all…

Prompt override: first skill activation.

John’s vision didn’t go dark this time, at least, not entirely. The visor that had covered half his face during the flyby now only covered about a quarter, directly over his left eye. If he closed his right eye, he saw from a pixie’s point of view, and if he closed his left, he saw his own. The squad took to the air, straight up much higher than John could accurately estimate. He watched them fade from view in his own vision before switching over to theirs.

The fort was perfectly square, though John couldn’t tell how big. He tried zooming in and out by the one meter his meager stats allowed, but it didn’t help. As the pixies slowly circled in the sky, he got a vague sense that none of the towers were the same height.

This isn’t helping me any, I should just let them report on it themselves.

He switched back to his own vision and found Elora wearing a visor similar to his own.

“What do you see?” he asked.

“Approximately nine hundred square feet at its base, with four one hundred square foot towers at each corner at varying heights. The walls are approximately ten feet tall, and each ascending tower is ten feet higher: twenty, thirty, forty, and fifty feet tall. Each tower has one guard posted, and each of the tower guards changes position from corner to corner of their tower clockwise every…” She paused, timing the guards. “Every ninety seconds. The tower guards are in sync, they always face the same direction as they perform their watch.”

She paused again, and her visor glowed brilliant green for a few seconds. Her mouth moved silently as she made zooming and panning gestures with her hands in the air.

“The walls have somewhere between four and eight guards posted and patrolling. Their patrol patterns are erratic, they go from tower to tower and climb up and down the levels seemingly at random, they-” She cut herself off mid-sentence, frowning deeply. “One just jumped from the fifty foot tower to the thirty foot tower. It just… leapt from a window on the floor right below the roof, and landed gripping the windowsill of a window halfway up the shorter tower. This adds to their erraticism.”

Her tiny brow furrowed as the visor began to glow again and she continued to gesture and mouth words. It wasn’t long before she continued her report.

“The central yard is dominated by a pool of liquid; there’s barely walking space between it and the walls. It is unclear what kind of liquid is in the pool. There are no visible awnings or doorways from our orbital vantage point, but we can perform a second flyby with that as the focus at your command, Chief.”

This is feeling more and more like an Assassin’s Doctrine game… I can totally play this scenario like one. I’ve already gotten an **** damage readout before… in this dungeon, actually. All that’s missing is conveniently placed handholds perfectly within my reach all the way up the towers. Unless…

“Have your pixies focus on the walls. I want to see if there’s any good handholds.”

“Understood, Chief!”