Without further ado, the fight broke out.

With so many moving pieces, even a normal dungeon encounter 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 plate 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 playing in the backline. 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 collapse. A five on five was tenable, but five-on-four, once the first person was knocked out? Numbers advantage was a real thing—overwhelmingly so.

As in Tenet-sponsored spars, HP would decide who surrendered, not literal incapacitation. Once that magical resource dipped low enough it didn’t offer enough protection to stave off serious injury, each participant would surrender. Or be too stunned to keep fighting back in the first place; having your HP sent to zero could be debilitating in its own right.

But this wasn’t a fight to the death. Still, it was probably a fight for everything they owned, and would set them back horrendously if they lost, so Natalie intended to 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 shocking speed. A part of Natalie stubbornly wanted to 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 class hadn’t closed the gap between sexes yet; she couldn’t match Otto’s bulk, even aided by her class. And at a guess, the boy was even more of a juggernaut than the typical tank.

That said, she couldn’t let him charge through. She suspected he’d head straight for the backline 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 counter-bash as he came charging forward. Her shoulder jarred as she essentially bounced off of him, shield clanging—though he at least grunted and stumbled, momentum faltering.

He recovered and faced her, then raised his short-sword and advanced. Natalie struggled to regain 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 second to place why.

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

If Elida disabled Jordan, then joined the 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 play, 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 backline.

Natalie took the lead on the next exchange. No longer incompetent 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 clang, 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 been better, but a hammer wasn’t shabby.

An illusory second-Natalie shimmered into existence, overlaid 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 opponent and their stats—but trying to track multiple pairs of arms and weapons and discern 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, playing to her strengths, not trying 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 stronger attack, what better time to use it than when her team 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 faceplate, Natalie saw a furrowed brow, eyes flicking around, trying to pick the correct one.

They exchanged blows. Natalie caught a slash of his short sword on her shield, then followed the blocked attack up—her intent 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 construct of light disintegrated as it slammed into his shield, and Natalie’s real attack crashed into his exposed side.

Hammer bit into plate, and Otto grunted in pain, a dent left behind. He retaliated with a shield bash, but Natalie had already stepped away. Otto’s plate 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 plate helm, clearly caught off guard by the strength of her illusions, and Natalie sneered in return. She didn’t have a problem with him in specific, she guessed, big-picture speaking, but the reaction had been instinctive.

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

Her opponent 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 class, and she was knocked over with comical ease.

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

She climbed to her feet, only to be laid low a second 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 slapped around. Even having used [Empower].

She exchanged 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 shocking speed. His own retaliations were brutal, too. For her initial appraisal of seeming defense-focused, his offense wasn’t lacking in the slightest. The opposite.

Then, out of nowhere, a dagger slashed 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-been lethal attack had Natalie’s stamina disappearing all at once, and she collapsed into the ground, instantly limp.

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

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

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

Otto joined Elida, headed for Liz and Ana.

When Natalie had halfway recovered—which only 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 opponents were standing. They hadn’t even taken one with them.

Easy pickings, Elida had said.

Natalie and her team hadn’t proved that wrong.