T2 Takeshi

“First, is the Sanctum fully charged yet?” Gil asked, looking at Snow.

“Oh. Thats when the number is one hundred, yes?” She asked, “If so, then no. It was only ninety.”

Gil ran the numbers in his head and sighed. They’d be cutting it close, almost no matter what they did.

“Alright, we have a little more than three hours left before the skyblock detaches, and I think it’ll take about an hour for the sanctum to top off, then another for Terra to transfer and get moving again.” He said, “The way I see it, we can either try to pull Noa here by any means necessary, or we can send a team to escort her to civilization. Specifically, we would get her to Rim Elm, where she can meet up with Vahn and then travel from there to the Genesis tree.”

Keilnei, Candress, and Zena all nodded. Silky was only listening with half an ear, already familiar with the situation and only present for the sake of Terra being able to hear. A rather terrified looking Mei stood near the back of the group, ostensibly to relay any valuable information they acquired to Vahn later. The mute boy in question was, unfortunately, making another scouting expedition to the gates of some castle near the all-important mountain.

Snow was accompanying Noa in case another attack came, armed with Blackpaw’s sphere. The hope was that her natural luck would shield Noa for at least a short time, and she could drop the sphere and come get help if necessary.

“Agreed.” Keilnei said, nodding. “If there is a need, I volunteer to accompany Miss Noa.”

Gil smiled sadly and shook his head.

“It’ll be a dangerous and potentially long mission.” Gil said, “I think we will be trusting Zena for this one if we can’t get Noa back here; I intend to get you home by the end of our agreement. Hopefully it’ll all be a moot point, however.”

He waved the group over to the great arch that served as an entrance to The Dungeon.

“This,” he said, patting the dungeon entrance, “is our way in. I think I can use this to enable Noa to access the Skyblock. The only problem is that there is currently a block in the way; we need to finish the next trial before we can hook it up to Noa.”

He held up a few pink hairs wrapped around one finger, sourced from a very trusting young lady. His statement was not strictly true; he could simply abandon the Dungeon of Takeshi Sato if he wanted, but if he did so he’d be losing any rewards that would come from finishing floor 2 and capturing the Japanese American man in question. Wasting limited use bindings seemed like a terrible idea, especially when he was about to drop ten credits on buying another dungeon pass for Noa.

“How long will it take?” Terra asked, hijacking Silky’s mouth to ask the whole group since her telepathy didn’t broadcast. As she spoke, Silky’s eyes glowed green. “I worry about Noa. The longer she waits, the more likely it is that one of the true enemies will find her.”

“Depends, but the last time took fifteen minutes, tops.” Gil assured her. “If you’d like, you can go attach yourself to Mei or someone at Rim Elm, but here we need at least another hour before you can do another transfer and we need all hands on deck here. If you help with the dungeon like I asked, this will go so much faster.”

“Very well.” Terra said, then Silky shook her head with a grimace the moment Terra withdrew her influence.

“Alright Candress, you’re on Noa duty until we get back.” Gil said, pointing at the elf in question. “Mei, I’d appreciate if you carried a few healing leaves and joined us in the dungeon. If you hold back you shouldn’t be in too much danger.”

Gil wanted as many bodies in the field as possible, but he remembered their last time in the dungeon. Candress couldn’t use magic effectively in the atmosphere of Brockton Bay, so she’d be down to her bow and quarterstaff in the dungeon. Still useful, but she lost more than anyone in the team by being in a mana-free environment.

As for Mei? She needed to toughen up. In Gil’s experience, repeated voluntary exposure to danger would either make her even more of a terrified rabbit or toughen her up quickly. Gil wasn’t particularly attached to either option. In the meantime, she could drag people to safety and apply healing leaves to any injuries… or draw some fire from whatever enemy they were about to face. Gil wasn’t particularly attached to either option there, either.

She was clearly terrified when the team walked through the archway, but to her credit she didn’t need to be dragged. That was a good sign, at least.

••••••••••

The five stepped out onto a nighttime city street, among a circle of strange static silhouettes. Before them was a large building, which stood out on account of being the only one depicted with color. They were boxed in by walls of dense silvery fog, which The Company had taken to using instead of invisible walls a while back.

Gil looked around for a posted mission briefing like there had been in the apartment. One of the silhouettes, a young blonde woman in a black and purple fox mask, spoke up.

“Remember the plan, everyone.” She said, her voice hollow like a recording, “If we take out Takeshi Sato, that’s 5 bonus Dungeon credits and he will be captured. If anyone in there sneaks out they’ll go get reinforcements. That’ll be dangerous, but they’ll bring a loot box along so we might want to risk it.”

Gil looked at her with disgust.

“Was that supposed to sound natural?” He asked. “I get it’s a dungeon floor, but seriously?”

“Remember the plan, everyone.” She repeated the entire speech shortly after he addressed her.

Gil sighed. None of the silhouettes moved except Exposition Lass. They all looked like superheroes, or supervillains, or whatever. There was a tall guy with a metal wolf mask, and a thin kid wearing a crown on top of his curly black hair. He was guessing that this might be another reenactment of a real event, but he didn’t have enough context to know or care about whatever storyline they were going for.

“That's going in the report.” He grumbled. “Alright everyone. We need to do this quick. They have firearms, so be careful. I guess I’ll need to go first, since I don’t know if any of you can take a bullet.”

Zena surprised him by nearly vanishing right in front of him.

“Alright. Zena, you scout.” He said laconically. “You remember the gun from last time? I expect to see more here. Don’t get into any fights without us. Repeat what we did earlier. Don’t let any runners escape until we are inside, at least. I’d rather not risk a harder fight when we have a time crunch.

They worked out a system then. Zena opened the front door from the side, pressing against the edge of the stoop and pushing it open with a quick shove. A man fired blindly from within, and the team returned fire. A rain of arrows flew into the entranceway from their bows and silenced the gunfire. Gil’s shots generally hit his targets somewhere, but Keilnei was able to strike vital points more often than not. Zena pressed herself against the wall as five Asian men armed with improvised weapons charged past her, into the street.

Three of the men, all in their late fifties at the youngest, rushed towards Gil’s team with baseball bats. The other two, young men with joggers’ builds, were unarmed and simply ran towards the wall of fog. Gil dropped his bow and pulled out his sword, but he needn’t have bothered.

Silky charged forward with her own blade sheathed, arms held low. A green aura enveloped her as she juked to the side, getting in close to the man on the left. Her torso blocked Gil’s view of the action, but somehow she ended up with the man’s bat. She wasted no time braining him with much more **** than her hourglass frame really justified. The other two swore and turned on her.

“Help her, I have the runners.” Keilnei snapped, loosing an arrow which landed in a fleeing man’s knee. He fell sprawling to the ground.

Zena, showing absolutely zero respect for trigger discipline or proper form, chased the other man with a pistol she’d presumably picked up from one of the men inside. Gil had showed them all how the thing worked, back in the first floor of the dungeon, before it crumbled to nothing. She was a terrible shot, but better than she had any right to be. The man, to his credit, only stumbled when she managed to land a bullet in his arm. That still slowed him down enough for her to finish him with a blade between his ribs, then cut his companion‘s throat.

Gil and Silky were able to mop up the two older men without much difficulty. Even when one of them managed to get in a lucky shot, both of the front liners were protected. Gil smiled when he saw Silky raise her off hand, knocking away the man’s club with a pulse of green light from Terra. They died quickly, and Gil did not have time to even pretend he cared about them once they were out of the way.

“Everyone alright?” He called, and when he got confirmation that they were he pointed to the front door. “Ok, move forward. That went well, but remember. One slip up and we could be in a bad place real quick.”

They’d managed to make it through that first skirmish without a single bruise between them. Mei, armed with healing leaves and a Door of Light, trailed behind them as they cleared the building. If they’d come without the time limit, Gil would have been inclined to burn the place down instead of risking an **** in the enemy’s home, or leaving the street unguarded.

The building seemed to serve as a kind of barracks for whatever organization this was, and things grew tense as Gil’s squad waded through the poorly armed militia… gang… whatever. Most of them looked at Gil and his team with expressions of deep, resigned despair, and fought to the **** without question.

Keilnei’s eyes grew increasingly furious as the floor went on; she did not enjoy burying her axe into enemies who seemed to want nothing more than to leave even as they struck to kill. The fighters ranged from teenagers to the elderly, and none of the people here struck Gil as soldiers, despite their aggression.

Their elven leather armor was extremely effective against the blades, only a modest layer of padding against the more common blunt weapons the Asian men and women favored, and basically irrelevant to a bullet. The rare gunmen were a critical threat, always the highest priority when they appeared.

By the end of the floor, everyone in the team had one of the bitter healing leaves shoved in a cheek, dulling the pain from multiple heavy impacts. Keilnei needed to invoke the Gift of the Naaru upon herself after taking a bullet to the sternum, but for the most part they were the clearly superior ****.

Zena was the only one unmarked, as she was busy in her own way. For one, she scouted ahead and warned the team of what to expect in each hallway or room. For another, she was making out like a bandit. Most people in a battle do not actually die instantly, even when horrifically wounded. Downed but living enemies were still enemies, and she could pick pocket each of them once. As an added bonus, she was dramatically safer if she left the fighting to everyone else.

Doing so drew upon her rapidly draining supply of mana, but she’d figured out a solution to that which she didn’t bother telling Gil about. She wasn’t eating the bead of Lerasium. She was just holding it under her tongue. Drawing upon an incredibly small amount of energy to allow her to magically create candy bars, empty wallets, 9mm ammo, petty cash, and the occasional butterfly knife or baggie of cocaine. Gil very much hoped that it would survive exiting the dungeon, due to its irregular source, at least enough to put up with Zena’s slight cowardice.

They found the floor guardian after a grueling hour of methodically clearing rooms one by one. Nearly one hundred people were packed into the building, and the guardian waited in a corner of the top floor. He stood when they entered the room, cocking a shotgun. His face was terrified yet resolute.

He was the same older man they’d seen on the top floor, standing vigil over the young lady from the room. Her father. Gil sent in Silky first, theoretically because she was the best equipped to deal with the threat. He already had her ball ready to go when she took both barrels to the chest, and Zena cut his throat before he had the chance to reload. As she did, a crystalline pillar and the exit portal appeared in the room with them.

“She’ll be fine.” He assured Mei, who looked just about ready to faint. “She will be fully healed in about an hour and a half.”

His dismissive tone did not reassure Mei in the slightest, but the green haired woman finally earned her keep by supporting Silky as she hobbled out the exit portal. She’d taken a deep breath to wrap herself in Terra’s green aura, so she was barely injured by the standards of those taking point-blank shotgun blasts.

Gil peeked out the window and saw a group of ten men with guns forming up outside, likely because someone had managed to sneak out of the building once Gil was inside. They were a team of heavily tattooed young Asian men armed with shotguns. One of them glowed gold, the same color as the lootbox Gil had gotten last time. He seemed to be the leader of this band, and Gil guessed he was the bonus objective here. What a shame that he was surrounded by men with guns.

“Keilnei, do you think you can shoot that guy down there?” He asked. “I don’t think we should wait around for them to come up here, but those are definitely the reinforcements fox girl mentioned. Take the shot, and whether or not you hit, we are getting out of here.”

She nodded, her face cold, and started lining up the shot.

While she did, Gil examined the pillar. As he expected, it was a shop.

Dungeon Credits: 15

Looting Rights (20): You may take any items from the corpses of enemies killed on this floor.

Adjust Relationships (20): Gain access to a list of names and relationships the host has; you may rearrange them freely once.

Looting rights would have been nice, what with the shotgun, but Gil couldn’t afford either option yet. He heard shouting from outside, and saw Keilnei dive down to the floor a split second before bullets tore through the wall where she’d been.

“Alright,” Gil said to himself. “Not a world where shotguns have an effective range of ten feet, I see. Did you get him?”

“Yes.” Keilnei confirmed. “A large golden cube fell to the ground at his feet, shining like a star.”

“Fuck.” Gil said thoughtfully. “Hmm. Zena, do you think you can get that box?”

“I… maybe?” She said, uneasy. “I can try, but getting back up here will be difficult if there are enemies in the hall.”

Gil tossed her the small glass rod.

“Here. Door of Light.” He said. “If you can get out normally that’s even better, but with that all you’ll need is to slip out of line of sight for a few moments.”

Gil and Keilnei shifted from window to window on the top floor, creating a distraction by shooting down and fading back. Gil was mostly just acting as a distraction because his armor could deflect small arms fire pretty well at this distance, but Keilnei was a deadly sniper. With Hunter’s Mark she could track an enemy outside of her line of sight, then pop out and loose a single arrow to deadly effect. The second time she did that, the hit squad completely gave up on returning fire and stormed the building. It was just as well; that was already stretching her reserves of mana in a dead zone like this.

They kept an eye out the window, and when the box mysteriously vanished that was that. Either Zena had it, or it had despawned. Either way, Gil did not want to meet the angry gentlemen trying to get out of the stairwell Silky had barricaded. Zena knew the plan, and she’d be out shortly.

They all filed out through the exit portal, and just like that the dungeon of Takeshi Sato was completed. Moments later, Zena appeared in a flash of golden light. Gil quietly cursed when he processed the scene before him. Snow was sitting just outside the portal, waiting for him. She was weeping over Candress, who was covered in blood. Breathing, but down for the count.

“Master Gil!” She cried. “I’m so sorry. I wasn’t sure what else to do.”

“Damn it,” Gil groaned. “Alright, what happened?”

••••••••••

Next part soonish

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