The pale screech of wailing souls cut through the air as their blue translucent forms curved through the darkness of the necropolis, illuminating it with baleful light only matched by the flickering of torches that stood aside the long walkways. Fields of gravestones grew like fields of wheat on perfectly square areas of sick looking grass, only intercepted by the occasional tomb complex amongst them, which stuck their moss-covered grey stone entrances out in the shape of roman style mausoleums.

The ceiling of it all was an arrangement of green crystals, dropping necrotic energy as they glowed selfishly, to only reveal their own existence but nothing else of where they hung from or how they were fixed in place in the pitch black. The air was cold and moved in swirls of stench, as if a giant with rotting flesh between his teeth was breathing upon them.

“Moody,” John commented on the pretty chilling environment, the group standing on a crossroad of pale pavement, watching one of the many drops fall upon a gravestone. It quickly took the colour of the crystals above, and then an arm burst out of the soil, rotting flesh sticking to pure-white bone with fingers sharpened to the point of being a natural weapon. The undead rose from its temporary resting place in a rusty armour, green energy filling him to the brim, and holding a sword that had seen better days but whose hue identified it as dangerous in other ways than just the cause for slashing wounds.

Wherever the drops hit gravestones, they caused such a zombie to rise. Armed with an array of different weapons, all dropping with the dark energies that reanimated the corpses in the first place, they rattled their bones and began moving towards John.

These undead seemed less coordinated than the orcs had been, at least John couldn’t see them form any ranks or formations. However, it wasn’t like they were alone or the only threat around. Where the drops didn’t hit a gravestone but instead the ground itself, they sunk into the soil, only to then rise again as some form of ooze creature that slugged its way forward.

If the drops happened to land on John or his allies, they dealt damage. Only where they hit the white stone of the walkway pavement did they do nothing.

“Okay, battleplan-“ John tried to quickly throw together a basic strategy.

Metra immediately acted and charged ahead on her own. With the force of a train, she crashed right into an Un-damned with her shoulder first. The ribcage shattered under the impact, but the being wasn’t quite as weak as to be done in with just that, raising its sword in an attempt to ram it into the berserker babe’s back as it was being carried. The attack was thwarted by Metra ramming both of them into the wall of a mausoleum, yet more bones cracking, causing the arms of the being to shake out of focus. Before it could readjust, Metra with a triumphant scream took Qiada and executed an attack that had the upwards pointing tip rush even higher, into the decaying head and ripping it straight up.

Holding the weapon high like the banner of victory for a moment, Metra then suddenly swung it down, sending the scattering remains of the created enemies into a crescent as she took stance. With that straight charge she gained the focus of at least half the figurative room on her own. Whether or not that was a good or bad thing remained to be seen in the long term, but John seized the opportunity to model something as close to an ideal situation as he could.

The ideal began with a roof. Now the question was how to get that roof. Without Momo around, erecting the tower they had usually used as the base didn’t quite work out, being just too mana intensive to complete in one go. He could put up some walls, but that would be very costly for a limited effect, especially with those slimes looking very much like they could just do as slugs do and travel up anyway. Really, what he wanted was protection from the random damage of the falling energy drops, an advantageous standing came after that.

The question remained how. There were three ways. One was Gnome, one was Nadine (the two type combination from Undine and Gnome that had control over plantlife) and one was Smlere (Gnome + Salamander, lava control). The last one of those would do the exact same job as the first one but also give a cheap lava trench in addition to having more mana on her own, thus needing to take less from John himself. Meanwhile, the decision between Gnome and Nadine was one of reliability versus cost. He already knew that stone negated the falling drops completely, would vines have the same effect or would the drops slowly trickle through?

It was a risk not worth taking, so John came to his conclusion. ‘Gnome, Salamander, Stirwin, fuse!’ he mentally instructed them. This was another advantage of Metra going off on her own, he could go back to using mental communication, which was way quicker.

Now, why was he naming three elementals? As Stirwin, Gnome and Salamander converged into the same direction, became streams of energy and finally formed the amazon of a woman that was Smlere, John was reminded of his discovery that from the 20 possible combinations of the 3-types, 14 were recycled 2-types. The important difference being: The 3-type versions had higher Stats. On the one hand, that annoyed John a bit, it felt like lazy design and limited his needlessly vast array of tools, on the other hand, it already was a needlessly vast array of tools and familiarizing himself with a complete, even larger new set of fusions would have been quite hard.

The other way to ask that question was, why was he going for 3-type if the thing he wanted was accessible in a 2-type? The basis of powers remained the same for the recycled ones, some changed a little, some didn’t change at all, none changed a lot. That also applied to looks, Smlere’s armoured yellow dress had gotten some new shiny golden decorations, but that was about it. The simple answer was: he wanted to save as much of his own mana as possible, and with Smlere having higher stats, that meant John had very little he needed to add. The cooldown was the same either way, with Stirwin being currently useless in fights as well. The only argument for using the two-type was that it would last 10 rather than 5 minutes, but John didn’t need her to do something lengthy.

‘Right on it!’ the toned woman with the lava braid raised her leg high and stomped once. Pillars of black stone rushed out of the floor, a second stomp added shoulder-high walls between them, with two gaps at opposite sides, easily defendable by one person each. Then came the really mana intensive part, as she created a ceiling from lava she conjured between her raised hands as if she was the central pillar. It took more than a few moments of extreme heat before that work was finished. Sylph and Aclysia engaging in fights already with Undine attentively watching if she would have to intervene by either blocking something with her body or healing somebody.

Smlere added a final line of defence in the shape of John’s all-time favourite: the lava moat. Double bonus: this one was technically infused with the element of light, so it would deal extra damage to the undead. Not that it needed that, it was a lava moat. If it hadn’t been for his enchanted underpants, he would have been quite uncomfortable in the heat that began to rise in their improvised base of operations, however.

What they had here was more of a bunker than a tower, but they could upgrade it in the next few hours if need be. It only cost John half of his current mana and that was as quickly refilling as always.

With their position secured, Aclysia manning the defence of one entrance and Smlere the other (until she would split again and leave the job to Gnome), they were secure. ‘Time to check on Metra,’ John thought and sent Jack flying.

It wasn’t hard to find her. A pile of Un-damned was desperately stabbing at something beneath itself. The pile quivered, as Metra underneath it tried to throw it off and failed. Then it quivered again. And again. Each time it happened it looked like she managed to break out that little bit more and each time it was accompanied by a furious scream. Only at the seventh attempt had Metra’s wrath stacked high enough that the corresponding buff allowed her to fulfil that feat of absurdity.

“Oh, this is the best,” she grinned fiercely whirling Qiada around in plated hands. Her whole body was hidden underneath the villainous looking armour. For a moment both parties waited, then Metra took the first step forwards. Her arm shot into the air, a place where nothing should have been, and disappeared up to the elbow in a portal she ripped open. Reappearing in front of the head of an Un-Damned, she grabbed it by the throat and then pulled it back. The portal closed before it could become an obstacle to the monster now flying towards her, making this a situationally effective ranged grab.

Metra met the enemy with a decapitating strike of her halberd that sent the undead’s head flying and earth scattering as the weapon crashed into the ground. With the grab being the signal that it was go time again, the Un-damned had begun attacking her once more already, and so a wild exchange of blows ensued. Ripping Qiada back up with brutal force, the ancient weapon that was Metra cut through the rib cages of two more of those surrounding her.

A Necrooze whipped its acidic tentacles at her, but the attack bounced off her armour without doing any damage. The sole of her plated feet, covered in tiny spikes against slipping away on smooth surfaces and making kicking a much more lethal weapon, splattered the being in a single crushing stomp. It was a vulgar display of power that made John realize that he didn’t have to worry about Metra in the slightest. As much as she fought alone and was able to profit from her buff, she was strong enough to kill even these group buffed enemies by her lonesome. What was more, they couldn’t even scratch the Astrotium that covered her.

In other words, Metra could have her fight and John only stood to profit. He sent an Observe her way to check on just how stupid her current stats had to be.

‘Almost +200% in all Stats but Charisma… That’s dumb,’ John thought after estimating how high those buffs were. He would need to double check with her normal state, where only the passives of her Consumptions affected her.

Not like Metra was without her weaknesses, looking at it from an enemy’s perspective. For a start she had limited mana regeneration, so once she burned through what she had, the fight became a whole lot easier. Although short distance usage of her powers didn’t seem to cost that much, so limiting her dimensional tearing fuckery to a range of something like three metres would also increase possibilities immensely. Next was her already mentioned need to fight alone to maintain that buff. Third was that the buff relied on her being angry as all hell; she had a pretty good grasp on it, but that didn’t make her immune to making mistakes in the heat of it all.

It was something between a bad habit and a wise policy that John tried to come up with plans to defeat everyone, even his summons or enemies. At the very least it kept his mind tactically trained, and there was little need to adapt to the current situation anymore. The roof held, Smlere had already split again so Gnome and Aclysia were guarding the entrances. Meanwhile, Salamander and Sylph were throwing their airborne attacks as per usual (albeit the endflame elemental also used her new melee capabilities whenever she felt like it) and John and Undine provided support from within the bunker. They were pretty set in their usual pattern.

Of course, those tended to shake that up quite a bit. John noted that the Necrooze didn’t have influence in that spawning. Did that mean there was a secondary boss that could spawn or where the slimes just extra? Judging by the earlier Observe he had thrown their way, he guessed the latter.

Through Jack’s eyes, he soon spied a new kind of undead walking up the stairs of a mausoleum. It was a skeleton, all the flesh that could have covered it had liquified into a gelatine mass of greyish pink that stretched over the warped bones, more spikey and thicker than usual.

The aptly named undead raised a black wooden staff to the ceiling and thus more drops began to fall from the crystals above. He wasn’t doing anything else, just standing there, but there was simply no reason for him to move either.

‘I hate spawners,’ John thought as he became aware of the situation that this put them in. Ignoring the Raincaller meant that more Un-damned would spawn thanks to the increased rain. They would then kill those Un-damned, causing a second Raincaller to spawn. That would then increase the rain even more. Eventually they would find themselves in a figurative storm of necrotic energy raining from above and undead attacking them. It was a pretty mean cycle. It also would have been a pretty quick road to certain death without a roof.

Luckily the easy fix was to kill the boss. Of course, there would still be some more enemies than before, but it seemed the dungeon was somewhat balanced with that in mind. The early wave had been a joke compared to the orcs and the Un-damned were not particularly intelligent; they could handle a few more.

If they could handle a few more stretching over three hours, that was a whole different question.

‘Sylph, Salamander, you deal with that Raincaller,’ John instructed as he turned Jack around to keep an eye on the rest of the situation. That was when a miscalculation struck him. When the drops had been few and far in-between, dodging them as a sparrow hadn’t been that hard. But now that it had almost doubled and approached drizzling, that quickly changed.

John realized his mistake too late, altering the course of the sparrow to come back to the bunker. A drop hit one of the wings, dissolving the feathers and showing the underlying mechanical skeleton. Gliding with a giant hole in one wing proved to be difficult, and then a second and third drop dissolved other sections of the sparrow’s body.

‘Shit,’ John thought as the mechanical animal landed on the floor only to then be crushed by an Un-damned, ‘there goes the money I put into that… this is like the fourth flying Possession target that I lost!’

In good news, the Necrotic Raincaller turned out to be one of the weaker bosses. The monster saw the two flying elementals approaching and threw neon-green energy bolts at them. Sylph was too small and flimsy a target to be hit by something like that, while Salamander either dodged them narrowly or simply broke through. Sylph then began a turbulent dance of winds by circling around the Raincaller at absurd speeds, her body a pale green streak inside the tornado. The battle was then decided by Salamander using her unleashed ability, reinforcing that storm with grey and golden fire.

‘We can definitely do this,’ John thought and the battle continued.