Without further ado, the fight broke out.

  With so many moving pieces, even a normal dungeon enter could be chaotic. But five trained delvers against five others? From the moment the melee started, Natalie lost track of her surroundings. The boy, Otto, in heavy pte armor charged her, and what Jordan, Sofia, and the rest of her team were doing didn’t matter, couldn’t matter, else Natalie would lose her own fight.

  Likely, the fighters, tanks, and rogues would match up against each other, with the mage and healer pying in the bae. The start of the fight would be individual spars with wild elements of who the healer and mage helped. From there, as the sub-fights were decided, the rest of the group would colpse. A five on five was tenable, but five-on-four, ohe first person was knocked out? Numbers advantage was a real thing—overwhelmingly so.

  As i-sponsored spars, HP would decide who surrendered, not literal incapacitation. Ohat magical resource dipped low enough it didn’t offer enough prote to stave off serious injury, each partit would surrender. Or be too stuo keep fighting ba the first pce; having your HP sent to zero could be debilitating in its ht.

  But this wasn’t a fight to the death. Still, it robably a fight for everything they owned, and would set them back horrendously if they lost, so Natalie inteo give it everything she had. And not just for her own sake, but Liz’s too.

  Otto barreled forward, braced into his shield, and for all his bulky armor, the gap closed with shog speed. A part of Natalie stubbornly wao meet him head-on, to test her strength against his own, but the pragmatist in her admitted it would be rather one-sided. As a level one, her css hadn’t closed the gap between sexes yet; she couldn’t match Otto’s bulk, even aided by her css. And at a guess, the boy was even more of a juggernaut thaypical tank.

  That said, she couldn’t let him charge through. She suspected he’d head straight for the bae if Natalie side-stepped and refused to engage. She had to keep his attention.

  She settled for the middle ground. She stepped to the side, but made sure to throw her entire weight into a ter-bash as he came charging forward. Her shoulder jarred as she essentially bounced off of him, shield g—though he at least grunted and stumbled, momentum faltering.

  He recovered and faced her, then raised his short-sword and advanced. Natalie struggled tain her own footing from having been repelled by a mountain of metal. Her attack had been less potent than she’d expected, and it took her a sed to pce why.

  Because for once, Liz hadn’t empowered Natalie with her strengthening buff. It was disorienting, sialie had been fighting with the enha practically all day. But she khe reasoning behind the choice. Likely, the spell had goo Jordan. She had the hardest match-up: Elida herself.

  If Elida disabled Jordan, then joihe fray in two-on-ones against the other standing members of the party, they’d crumple in moments. Though maximizing power and durability to the tank was the usual best py, clearly, Jordan was the appropriate target in this brawl.

  So, Natalie against Otto. Tank against tank. Before the fight devolved into true chaos, with members dropping out of the fray from defeat, it would be a more traditional duel, with occasional interference from the bae.

  Natalie took the lead on the exge. No longer inpetent with her spellcasting abilities, her [Illusion] sprang to life, orchestrated with a quick swipe of her hammer, which crashed into Otto’s tower shield with a resounding g, and made the boy grunt with the impact. As far as match-ups went, hammer against heavy armor was one of the better ones. A spiked mace would’ve beeer, but a hammer wasn’t shabby.

  An illusory sed-Natalie shimmered ience, overid on top of her. It was one of Natalie’s favorite applications of the skill against intelligent enemies. Her illusions could be seen through with some effort—how easily depended on her oppo and their stats—but trying to track multiple pairs of arms and ons and dis which were real could be devastatingly difficult in the middle of a brawl.

  Maybe other applications were better from a raw efficacy standpoint, but Natalie found the illusory limbs fit with her style. She supplemented her melee capabilities, pying to her strengths, n to be something she wasn’t. Tess’s advice.

  More than that, Natalie tapped into [Empower]. While a disgustingly expensive ability when speaking from a long-term perspective, basically trading experience for a strotack, what better time to use it than wheeam was about to be robbed for everything they were worth?

  Doubling the strength of a skill was incredible, but it wasn’t some instant fight-ender, either. Especially when, while her spellcasting had improved drastically, she was no archmage.

  Still, it worked beautifully. Illusory limbs sprung up around Natalie, and behind the boy’s facepte, Natalie saw a furrowed brow, eyes flig around, trying to pick the corree.

  They exged blows. Natalie caught a ssh of his short sword on her shield, then followed the blocked attack up—her i hidden by her mirage of limbs—with a swipe of her hammer.

  Otto instinctively positioned himself to eat the impact, except he did so for the wrong one, falling victim to the empowered illusion. A harmless struct of light disied as it smmed into his shield, and Natalie’s real attack crashed into his exposed side.

  Hammer bit into pte, and Otto grunted in pain, a de behind. He retaliated with a shield bash, but Natalie had already stepped away. Otto’s pte armor and physique meant he could take a hit better than her, but she was the more maneuverable.

  Otto eyed her from behind the slit of his pte helm, clearly caught off guard by the strength of her illusions, and Natalie sneered iurn. She didn’t have a problem with him in specific, she guessed, big-picture speaking, but the rea had been instinctive.

  He stepped forward, shield raised, and Natalie tensed for another charge—but then, uedly, he stomped. The ground crumpled beh her, and her footing became unsteady. Nothing an empowered [Illusion] could do about that.

  Her oppo lunged forward, shoulder braced into his tower shield, and Natalie barely got her own defenses up in time. Hundreds of pounds of metal crashed into her, empowered by a css, and she was knocked over with ical ease.

  She crashed into the ground, head boung off tight-packed dirt, and her breath was stolen from her, head left ringing. Instinct alone had her rolling sideways, avoiding the sed of the boy’s earth-crag stomps. His skill, Natalie registered, but so much strohan she’d expected.

  She climbed to her feet, only to be id low a sed time. His sword scraped against her thigh, the easiest to reach exposed area, and the blow bit into reinforced leather and drew blood. HP ate some of the attack, but it wasn’t a critical area, so it didn’t stop it in its tracks.

  Natalie clumsily bashed his follow-up, then regained her footing. But she was on the back-foot, now. Her head still spun from crashing into the ground. She’d known whoever Elida’s tank was would be one of the best of the year—but losing this quickly? She wasn’t even holding her own, really. She was being spped around. Even having used [Empower].

  She exged a few more blows with Otto, but even direct impacts only seemed to make him grunt, and he had adapted to her illusory limbs with shog speed. His owaliations were brutal, too. For her initial appraisal of seeming defense-focused, his offense wasn’t g in the slightest. The opposite.

  Then, out of nowhere, a dagger sshed across Natalie’s throat, and she felt her HP evaporate. It scraped sideways, drawing blood but not biting deep, repelled by that vital resource. The exhaustion that impacted her with such a would-have-beehal attack had Natalie’s stamina disappearing all at once, and she colpsed into the ground, instantly limp.

  Elida, it seemed, had won against Jordan, and was w through the rest of them—starting with Natalie. The redheaded ared a smirk for her, then dashed for the bae.

  Otto nudged her hammer away with his foot. “Stay down. You’re out.”

  Natalie couldn’t even reply, still gasping in air, vision bck at the edges, so yeah. She didn’t o be told. The words barely registered.

  Otto joined Elida, headed for Liz and Ana.

  When Natalie had halfway recovered—whily took a few moments, but that was forever in a fight—she struggled up onto an elbow and looked around.

  Her team had been swiftly disabled. All five of their oppos were standing. They hadn’t even takeh them.

  Easy pigs, Elida had said.

  Natalie aeam hadn’t proved that wrong.