No Need for a Core?

Mordecai was rather pleased with the way the expedition had been going; fourteen zones cleared and moving on through the fifteenth zone in less than a day was impressive, even with his plan. Additionally, they had been able to keep any soldiers from dying, though a few had been sent back topside for longer-term care.

While a field cast of a regeneration spell would have probably restored missing digits or hands/feet just fine in a few days, it really was best to have that done under more continual supervision of the progress, and there were replacements for any injured soldiers who had to go back.

Of course, part of the reason that he'd been able to prevent any lethal injuries ironically offended him on a professional level: the shoddy craftsmanship of Svetlana's inhabitants.

Oh, he understood exactly what she had done and why, but it was no different than a smith wincing at the sight of a poorly crafted sword, even knowing that the smith who had made the blade had been forced to do so.

It was clear that she had crafted their bodies and powers exactly as she had been ordered to, without any attempt at efficiency or synergy.

Mordecai, who at this point was constantly in his 'ambassador' form, deflected a lightning bolt spit at him by a bird-like demon, then backhanded the demon when it teleported close enough to try to claw and bite him. Now, within the power budget for a demon in a zone this strong, it should have been easy enough to enable the demon to ride the lightning bolt, which would have forced Mordecai to deal with deflecting the lightning bolt while being attacked at the same instant, rather than there being a couple of seconds between the events.

He could practically read the list of abilities and priorities that she had been given for each inhabitant. This had been especially egregious with the fake demons; while he could see what each one was supposed to be, they had been built as if someone was going through a guide designed to tell the reader what abilities to be aware of. Especially since he knew that the Puritasi soldiers were sent here to train — he could almost see their instructor waiving his pointer to show 'typical demon traits'.

But the teaching was still flawed, despite the living examples; yes, this covered all the most common and most dangerous abilities of any variety of demon, but this also only taught so much about how a demon used those abilities. And that was assuming you weren't fighting a demon disguising itself as a different sort of demon, or with an elemental mutation, or just something that hadn't been documented before.

That's where creativity came into play. That slight uncertainty of what was going to come next, the need to be alert for the unexpected. While there was certainly variety present, there were no twists without a visual indicator. The bird demons that spat lightning were blue and yellow; the ones that spat fire were red and orange. Always.

Mordecai didn't know if Svetlana had been instructed to color-code them that way or if she had slipped that color coding in herself when not instructed otherwise. He rather hoped it was the latter. The first would indicate stupidity on the part of the Puritasi that Mordecai found difficult to accept, and the latter would instead indicate Svetlana spiting her masters.

She seemed rather good at that part.

One thing that Mordecai had not mentioned to anyone was that starting with the sixth zone, an oddity had been introduced into the corridors. There was no definitive gain to telling anyone else, and there was a chance that Svetlana could pick up his subvocalizations, and thus be forced to reveal anything he said. Passing on things like Kazue's illusions or other descriptions of what he was sensing was one thing, given that Svetlana would already know that information, but he wasn't going to risk betraying Svetlana's own subterfuge.

There were slits and holes that had been hidden in crevices and shadowed areas, but not as part of any trap. They didn't aim into the corridor, and a light probing with his aura had shown that they all led downward and gradually widened, and their inner surfaces were perfectly smooth.

What excellent receptacles for little scraps of paper they made. They also made good locations to use his aura to burn in more of his single-use command glyphs, all of them set to the same single-word command. He didn't actually know what was going to happen when he activated them all, but he was fairly certain that one way or another, Dimitri was going to be distracted for a few moments.

Mordecai rather liked Deidre-the-person, and Svetlana-the-nexus was proving quite interesting too. Hundreds of years of enslavement and abuse, and she was sabotaging her master this quickly? It was probably best not to call her a 'good girl', but that was how he was feeling about the situation.

Hopefully, when all of this was done, they could be friends. She was going to need a bit of guidance to fix bad habits that she'd cultivated as a method of defiance, and the plans that they had worked out with Deidre should help there, but she seemed to have the most important spark for creativity.

It was just painful seeing that creativity used to sabotage her own creations.

Creations that, for the most part, hadn't been really eager to fight. The more bestial and feral creatures were savage enough, but the sapient inhabitants? They were slaves here too, and were forced to take actions through their unwilling bond with Svetlana.

Slave armies of any sort were generally a bad idea. Even with magical control forcing their actions, they were, at best, fighting to survive, but they would rather simply not be where they were or doing what they were doing. It was worse with nexus creatures, as there was usually no real concern about survival. Thus, their will wasn't focused, and they were doing only what they were commanded to do, without any attempts to improvise or change to more effective actions when the commands were not ideal.

That lack of focused will was telling too. A properly honed will and spirit amplified the effects of simple power. Fighting Svetlana's inhabitants had often felt like fighting something hollow. Still dangerous, but relatively easy to defend against and to defeat. There simply had been no real weight behind their attacks.

But numbers could make up for a lot, and the next reset was coming up, right before they were going to reach the boss for this zone. "Reset!" he called out to ensure that everyone was alert. Mordecai decided it was probably about time for him to start being regularly active all in the upcoming battles, rather than just playing support outside of the major ones.

A decision that was reinforced by what the outer edges of his aura felt as they traveled down the tunnel to the boss's chamber. Crap. "Get low!" he shouted at the soldiers at the front, then leapt into flight to pass them and rushed toward the chamber ahead.

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The fifteenth zone boss was a large demon-dragon, which was already going to be a dangerous fight, but it looked like Dimitri had realized that he needed to start ordering where specific inhabitants were going to be manifested during a reset. All three raid bosses were in the chamber already, along with every zone boss from earlier floors.

There was no time for finesse, and he had a lead on the soldiers, so Mordecai simply accelerated into the barrage of magic aimed his way as he transformed into his war form, selecting the zone's demon-dragon as his primary target. Shadowfire washed over him from his target's breath attack; Svetlana's masters had not even managed simulated hellfire. The void aspect healed him more than the fire aspect harmed him, which helped offset the damage from all the other attacks.

Mordecai's own breath weapon took a moment longer to unleash, as he was modifying it with magic at the same time. By the time it was ready, he had slammed into and was grappling the demon-dragon, which had made it impossible for his foe to dodge when he spat lightning into its face. Lightning that left frozen swaths of flesh before leaping to its next target: the raid boss dragon. From there, the freezing lightning continued to leap to the rest of the targets in the room, shortly followed by a swarm of explosive foxfire from his tails, modified to corrode like acid at the same time that it burned.

The final part of Mordecai's opening move was to fire his poisoned quills, which were primed to break open moments after striking a surface. This would give enough time for the toxins to be injected if a quill struck true, with any unused toxins then becoming a small cloud of toxic gas. The plant-like avatar that originally had this ability had been inspired by a mundane plant that naturally grew tiny glass-like hollow fibers filled with a mix of toxins, though modified by other plant and animal abilities in order to fire the quills. It was too bad that they hadn't collected a fresh sample of that plant for Azeria yet, but it did not grow on this continent.

Even with his modified physiology and the combined experiences of all his previous avatars, this had been a rapid series of complicated, large expenditures of mana and chi, which had left his internal energies in flux and difficult to command. This did not, however, prevent him from continuing his physical assault upon the demon-dragon, ripping and tearing through its defenses as it struggled to fight back. The dragon-moose in Dersuta's nexus had been more dangerous to Mordecai, and that was before the moose had transformed.

His attack had entirely cleared out the floor bosses from the early zones and had focused the surviving bosses on himself, which gave enough time for the first of the soldiers to enter, along with the Azeria party.

Fuyuko's bow had immediately started humming, sending thick shafts plunging into the raid dragon's hide, which distracted it from attacking Mordecai's back while Mordecai was occupied with the demon-dragon. Fuyuko shifted targets to the remaining zone bosses as soon as Moriko engaged the raid dragon, and Amrydor intercepted those who tried to charge her. As soon as Mordecai no longer had to contend with as many targets, he shifted to his smaller but safer battle form to continue his fight with the demon-dragon; he didn't want to risk inadvertently injuring his own people or the Trionean troops.

Meanwhile, the giant skeleton once more found itself being taken down by Bellona and Xarlug, while Kazue had forced the kobold sorcerer into another duel, though at least this time she had not gone berserk on the poor thing. Mordecai had mixed feelings about the kobold's clear nervousness at fighting her; on the surface, it looked like a rather amusing situation. However, it betrayed a few truths about the situation with Svetlana's nexus.

First, its spirit must already be well broken for an inhabitant to feel demoralized simply by facing a delver that had defeated it previously, no matter how thorough that defeat was. Second was how much Svetlana's inhabitants must not believe they could or should protect her, a situation that Kazue had risked when the celestial fox had first entered her nexus so long ago. Third was the level of dissonance there had to be in Svetlana's relationship with her inhabitants — Mordecai would never have forced one of his inhabitants to face someone they didn't want to face that badly.

Not that Svetlana had a choice. Her inhabitants were as bound and enslaved as she was, and given that Deidre had said her original sapient inhabitants had been purged, there were no sincere bonds between her and Svetlana's current inhabitants. There had been a twisted sort of wisdom to that purge; sincerely loyal inhabitants will work to free their core, given the slightest opportunity. Maintaining sufficiently tight orders on loyal inhabitants looking for any loophole was difficult.

These poor souls were either outsiders who had been dragged in and forced to become her inhabitants, or had been raised into sapience while under the duress of the enslavement. While the first was definitely the more problematic of the two, neither option made for a healthy or positive relationship.

As fast as this combined assault had been at eliminating all of these bosses, there was still the oncoming wave of other inhabitants to deal with. Many of whom had been from the fifteenth zone, making them relatively tough for the soldiers present, especially in such numbers.

But that was why Mordecai had arranged for numbers of his own, and more squadrons were joining the fight from the other end of the now gory arena. Once Mordecai had finished off his foe, he spent the next fifteen minutes or so simply working on keeping the soldiers from being overwhelmed by the number of oncoming inhabitants.

When the strongest creatures had all been dealt with, he left the remaining swarms to the army; their spellcasters were more than sufficient for the rest. This gave him the time to check up on everyone and then examine the work that the soldiers not engaged in battle had been doing. The front line was only so big, and there was little time to waste.

This was the largest chamber that they had cleared, and even Mordecai's extended aura wasn't enough to touch the ceiling. So the boss's chamber was being carefully measured and floating platforms were being set up at mathematically determined points to ensure that people resting or meditating on said platforms had overlapping auras to prevent any inhabitants from being spawned above any of the soldiers.

Once satisfied that everyone was alright and that everything was being arranged satisfactorily, Mordecai took a moment to clean up and settled down to meditate while he waited for the army to finish its job and get its next squadrons arranged.

He was also taking advantage of one more aspect of the situation that he had not accounted for when he had made his plans.

In most of the world, mana tended to spread fairly quickly when expended. Nexuses were one of the exceptions, inverting expectation by drawing excess mana in their territory into themselves. Normally.

However, Svetlana was still overfull on her mana capacity, despite the portion that had been consumed to support herself over the previous several months, however much she had lost when she'd sent out waves of creatures to break free of the barriers being erected, and the amount that had been spent on new zones and creations.

This meant her core couldn't quickly draw the mana in or even fully claim it, but the mana still couldn't disperse properly. Which left it ripe for harvesting, if you knew how, and Mordecai understood the process thoroughly. For most of the expedition, he had been able to continually draw in enough energy to keep himself full, though this last battle had expended a lot of energy in a fast burst. His brief meditation had accelerated the process, allowing him to restore himself completely before he got up and prepared to head down into the sixteenth zone.

At this point, Mordecai was fairly certain that the nexus held eighteen zones, leaving one last zone that Deidre had described, and then two completely unknown ones. From what Deidre had told them, this next zone was going to be particularly nasty to get through. Ironically, it would be easier to get through it alone, but it was going to take all of the Azeria party to take down Dimitri, and Mordecai still wanted the zone secured before they headed further in.

So with some trepidation, Mordecai walked down the steps and into the thick mists of the sixteenth zone.