Women and Children First

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[John]: If you see any beavergoats, they’re sapper units/priority targets.

He sent the message in the party chat while healing up after the fight. He was leaving the NPCs inside the mill for a few minutes as he wasn’t sure if they would set a pace that let him channel Accelerate Recovery on the move. It was only a few minutes anyway, as he hadn’t gotten too badly hurt fighting the beavergoats.

The healing did eat a hefty chunk of mana. But between having a higher MP Regen than the highest cost he could Create alchemist’s fire at, having turned said Creating off, and the Food Buff from lunch, he was going to be back to full well before they got back to the inn and Qhila.

That taken care of, he knocked on the mill door. The NPCs inside had nothing interesting for a speech bubble, simply asking if he would escort them to the inn. They showed no response to fishing for alchemy related hidden keywords either, but they did come with one surprise. The Miller family counted 4 people, 2 adults and 2 children.

That was nice in terms of Dungeon Point rewards for the first trip, but according to the Bonus Objective, there were 6 NPCs to save total and they had received directions to 3 more. He considered briefly that the baby might be part of Mrs. Miller as far as the Quest was concerned, but it had its own 20 HP health bar, so that seemed unlikely.

The other possibilities he could think of were that a specific NPC was unsaveable from the start, that whichever he kept for last would get killed, or that it was simply impossible to reach all of them before the final attack on the inn. If a specific one had been doomed from the start, it might also be a trap of sorts that would trigger the final **** early, or trigger an optional boss.

He put that into the party chat as well, then got moving with the NPCs. It was a bit slower going than the trip towards the mill had been, but not too frustrating. Perhaps because he could just match his pace to the NPCs instead of being stuck moving a bit faster, getting ahead of them and then having to stop and wait.

They had barely gotten moving when another pack of vipermoths turned up, but the fire trick remained a quick and easy way to manage their aggro and take them out. The second pack turned up when they were just past halfway between the mill and the inn. He drew them in with fire and swatted one to the ground, at which point Mrs. Miller started screaming for help.

Whipping around to look in her direction, John saw two owldogs approach the group from behind. Expecting the vipermoths to follow his flaming fist, he dashed to deal with this new threat. Part of him wondered if this was pure bad luck of getting squeezed between a nuisance spawn and a spawn heading for the inn, vipermoths showing up on top of a scripted encounter, or entirely scripted. That wasn’t going to help him fight though, so he shelved the thought for now.

To his credit, insofar as that applied to a non-sapient game construct, Mr. Miller stepped in front of his wife and kids and kicked at the leading owldog as it got close. To considerably less credit, he missed entirely, instead getting pulled off his feet as the beast got a hold of his pant leg with its beak.

John barely made it in time to keep him from getting savaged by kicking the mutant hard in the ribs. Giving him no time to celebrate that small win, the other owldog leapt up and bit his arm. Fortunately, the way it hit mostly brought the beak to bear against the protective plates sewn into his jacket and it dealt only a few points of damage, but the beast held on, pulling him off balance with its weight.

Just then, a vipermoth dinged against his free arm. Off-balance and struggling with another beast, even that fairly weak impact was just enough to knock him off his feet. He landed on top of the owldog. Taking immediate advantage of that position, he jammed the flame-wreathed thumb of his right hand into the creature’s eye.

It emitted a sound halfway between a shrill howl and a hoot. John cut it short by moving his now freed arm from its mouth to push its lower beak against the upper and both into the dirt. With its body pinned under his, that left the creature with its throat exposed. John extended the Alchemfist’s spike and punched it through the mutant’s throat into the bottom of its skull for a fatal critical hit.

In the moments it had taken to deal with that one, the other owldog had attacked Mr. Miller again. The NPC was down a dozen HP, but John’s minimap revealed a potentially larger problem brewing. While he had been on the ground, the fire had apparently been hidden enough to break aggro from the vipermoths.

All three remaining ones were now diving towards Mrs. Miller and the kids. The very valuable, very squishy kids. Despite knowing that Mr. Miller wasn’t a real person, John couldn’t help but glance apologetically at him as he turned away to deal with the flying mutants. ’Sorry, but women and children first’

A step and a raised fist refocused the vipermoths on John. With a few more steps and a twist around himself, he put what he had learned about manipulating the creatures into practice, goading them into an exposed, relatively clustered position.

A wide spray of alchemist’s fire sent them down in flames. And set fire to one of the buildings next to the street, but John didn’t have time to worry about that right now. Instead, he rushed back to Mr. Miller, whose leg had been mauled for about a third of his HP.

Another kick in the owldog’s ribs, in roughly the same spot, put a stop to that. Judging by the beast giving a loud hoot-howl this time around, and it being a crit with a small multiplier, he must have broken or at least cracked a rib or two the first time around.

In addition to the howl, the kick toppled the creature. John was on it before it got back up, stomping the already damaged rib cage in. It took two hits to finish it off, but only one for it to look like it wasn’t getting up.

The immediate threats dealt with, John turned towards Mr. Miller. His leg very much did not look fit to stand on. The NPCs might’ve run on enough game logic to make that not matter, but he also had a thin green line in the empty part of his HP bar indicating some sort of threshold. John was willing to bet a decent sum that it marked how much he needed to be healed to be restored either to ‘able to walk without support’ or ‘full movement speed’.

Fortunately, John had enough mana to get him back over that line at least, even if it meant a few minutes’ gap when his current Enhance Muscle ran out. Amusingly, Mr. Miller, but not his nameplate, blinked out of existence for a fraction of a second when he crossed the threshold, then appeared again with a bandage on his leg instead of an open wound.

While using his left hand for that, he used a spray of winter’s breath from the Alchemfist to put out the house fire he had started. He had no idea if setting the village ablaze would be an actual issue, but he was fairly certain it was easier to quell the flames now than if they became one.

The rest of the trip back to the inn was uneventful, except for John having a chuckle when the NPCs didn’t actually enter it. They just touched the still closed door and faded from existence.

That over with, he took a moment to properly survey Qhila’s work. Well, first he took a moment to look at the glorious, gropeable roundness of her butt since she was currently bent over setting up one of the modular trap things.

Then he surveyed Qhila’s work. Like in the rat Arena, she had used spray paint to mark the triggers and danger zones for each. She had leaned more on the modular traps than on tripwires, probably because they weren’t single-use. She had also left a clear path for John to lead NPCs in on. Thankfully, they had been smart enough, or just following closely enough to John’s path, that they didn’t step off it.

“Nice work.” John walked over as Qhila stood up straight.

“It’s going to get a lot less nice from here on out.” She commented dryly, “That was the last trap module.”

John spent a moment surveying the area more critically, before responding, “I still think it looks pretty good. All the mutants have been video game enemy levels of aggressive, with mention of how much they hate people in their Observe. Odds are, as long as we’re closer than the door, they’ll target us first, letting us pull the brunt through the areas with trap modules. If we can set up the rest to get hit with either shardoil or tarfire to catch leaks, it should be quite manageable.”

“I hope so…” Qhila didn’t sound convinced. But if D&D kobold stereotypes applied here, there was no such thing as enough traps in her estimation.

“How have the spawns been?”

“Groups of two big ones, one big and 4 small, or 8 small. The big ones are snakebirds and owldogs like at the beginning, as well as what I’m guessing are the beavergoats you wrote about. I’ve, uh, never seen a beaver before. The small ones are catbirds and… long rats? I’m not really sure how to describe it. I’ve timed the breaks, and other than skipping one group about 10 minutes ago from the direction you went, they’ve been coming in slowly shrinking intervals going around clockwise.”

“That’s pretty thorough, thanks.” John gave her a thumbs up to go with it. She responded with a dismissive gesture and turned away to set up a tripwire, though her pointed ears perked up ever so slightly. “Anyway, I probably ran into the skipped group. I’m guessing they spawn on the NPCs instead of in here when an NPC is being led from their initial location to th-”

“Incoming,” Qhila cut him off, abandoning the tripwire to reach for her crossbow while she nodded towards one of the roads. It took another half second before a pair of rattlegeese came into view from the direction she had nodded in.

In that time, John had broken into a jog in their direction, squirt gun at the ready and Alchemfist loaded.