Edge Cases

Derivan didn't particularly have the time to figure out what the new spell or the new stat could do. It was easy enough to guess that the spell wouldn't be anything good, with the way the Patchers had twisted Misa's [Paralyzing Slash]; mid-combat was not the time to try to understand it. As for the stat...

He had a rough idea. But this wasn't the time to try it out — he had one point in it, and was in the middle of active combat besides —

A half-formed insectoid arm whiffed past his helmet, so close he could hear the whistle it made through the air; Derivan jerked his head away from the near miss, glaring at the Patcher attacking him. One part of him kept a close eye on what was happening with Vex, who was still dancing away from the strikes of his own Patcher, and Misa, who was handling all three of the ones she was fighting remarkably well, but was clearly taking hits.

He needed to take one of them off of her. Sev would be back soon, no doubt, as soon as he was able to find help. They needed to survive until then, or Shift needed to recover enough for him to push all of them back away from this plane of reality, or something —

— Derivan blocked the next attempted strike with the edge of his sword, using a sharp, twisting motion to crack open one of the Patcher's joints; he transitioned smoothly into a kick, heavy metal smashing into the center of the Patcher and sending it sprawling back. Before it could recover, he took three quick, large steps —

"Misa!" he called, and she seemed to understand exactly what he wanted. She shot him a grin.

"Kept me waiting," she shouted back.

Two Patchers attacked her at once; the last was still dizzy from whatever strike she had used against it, and swaying on its feet. She stepped past one of them, letting the momentum of that strike send the Patcher directly into her mace.

The crunch of false chitin shattering sounded in the air.

The second attack Misa dodged — but she used her one free arm to grab the limb the Patcher used in the attack, and then moved with the Patcher, turning the attempted charge into a throw. It sailed through the air directly at Derivan, and the armor hefted his sword, cutting deep into the center, where all the limbs were joined together.

Up until now, the Patchers screamed when they attacked, sending out a wave of energy that somehow Shifted the air around them. This time, the one he'd cut into wailed, making a sound that was somehow painful and threatening all at once. This one didn't have the accompanying deadly wave, and yet...

In that sound was a song he didn't expect. A song he expected he wouldn't have been able to hear at all, if not for his new stat. Derivan would have frowned if he could have; as it was, his eyes darkened into concern and worry.

His understanding wasn't perfect. But the Patcher seemed like it was trying to finish something — to do whatever it had come here to do to begin with.

Vex seemed to realize the same thing. "Careful!" the lizardkin yelled, and there was a flare of panic in his voice that hadn't been there before. He sounded just a little bit out of breath, but Derivan was more concerned in that moment with getting the Patcher he was fighting to stop wailing.

He could see what it was doing. Not a shift, exactly, but small-scale attempts to change the mechanics of the system; for one thing, it was weakening their connection to it, and for another, it was trying to change the effect of their stats —

— but it was getting confused. Because his stats were different, and it didn't understand.

Derivan pushed his sword the rest of the way into the center of the Patcher. There was a crack as something fundamental within it shattered, and whatever was holding those disparate insectoid limbs together abruptly fell apart; four limbs scattered to the ground, suddenly lifeless.

That left four Patchers.

Derivan took another two steps even as the one he'd been fighting before caught up to him, and stabbed his sword into the joint of one Patcher just as it tried to hit Misa. It screeched at him, clearly angry.

"I am taking two of them," Derivan informed Misa, because he saw how hurt she already was. Before she could protest, Derivan hopped several steps backwards, flicking his gaze to Vex as he did so — thankfully, as far as he could tell, Vex was fine. The lizardkin was practicing avoidant combat rather than actively trying to hurt the Patcher; his dagger didn't seem to be able to do much against it anyway.

Derivan still worried. But that worry wasn't productive, and he pushed that feeling aside for later examination.

Fighting two Patchers at once, Derivan quickly found, was harder than Misa had made it seem — they were quick, and they didn't move like organics usually did. They moved and attacked with the same limbs, which made it easy for them to turn an attack into a sidestep and a dodge into an attack. One of them, he could handle.

Two he could also handle, but like Misa, he couldn't do it without taking a few hits.

Derivan — for the first time in quite a while — hissed in displeasure as one of the Patchers finally managed to score a hit on him. He'd been trying to dodge one and block the other, but hadn't quite been able to move fast enough; he no longer had the benefit of Agility, after all. One Patcher turned its attack into a slight shift to the side, and then followed it up with a stab towards him in a move that was so smooth he almost didn't see it.

Derivan's armor was tough. He'd been built as a set of armor, after all, and he was a set of armor in a high-level dungeon to boot; Vex had asked him what his armor was made of before, and Derivan had honestly not been able to answer. None of his spells had been able to identify whatever type of metal Derivan was made out of, either. All they knew was that it was very durable, and conducted magic very well.

All of which to say that single limb, with no sharp edges, encountered only a bare amount of resistance before it cut through that metal anyway.

It happened the same way it had when he'd seen a failed attack strike the ground. The rock had simply parted ways, fizzing slightly with the aftereffect of whatever it was the Patcher had done; it was the same thing here. He felt a moment of pressure as the natural protective magics in his armor held back the attacking limb, and then that pressure turned into a sharp, unfamiliar bite of pain —

— Derivan leapt backwards almost on instinct, then felt the wall of the storage building pressing against his back. He glanced at his friends. Misa was getting tired, he could see, and so was Vex; the half-orc was in a slightly worse state than Vex, but neither of them were doing well.

He wasn't going to count on either of them interfering.

It was odd, though, that the Patchers' attacks could bite through the ground and even his armor, but blocking them with his sword didn't cause it to break in the same way. Derivan ignored the aching pain coming from the hole in his torso-piece, and considered what he could do.

The Patchers, of course, did not grant him the courtesy of time. One of them screeched again, the air rippling with that odd Shift that made the air pause and the stone flicker; the other was the same one that had hurt him the first time, and it had clearly seen that its methods worked, because it was just trying to stab him again.

An application of Shift to force the air and ground back into stability. His sword redirected the stab, sending chitinous arms into the wall behind him instead of into his armor yet again. The wall hissed behind him, whatever enchantments built in to protect the mana slivers not giving so much as a peep of a reaction.

Derivan went on the offensive.

He kicked off against the wall, using the boost it gave them to blindside the Patchers with a boost of speed. They could be hurt, he knew that much. His sword could cut them, and Misa's mace could crush them, and yet even as he burst out past the two Patchers, his sword aimed directly for the center of one of them —

— there was no shatter. No break. Whatever purchase his blade had caught with the first Patcher failed to manifest here, and his sword bounced uselessly off the system-box chitin instead. He had to duck under the followup attack, only the barest glimpse of a moving limb in the edges of his awareness warning him that it was coming.

He'd have to rethink his strategy.

Already, he was channeling mana into his gauntlet again, but drawing that glyph was complicated when two of the Patchers were fighting him — he had to abort several times when they launched themselves at him and he had to duck out of the way. A few times he slammed his sword into the Patchers, breaking off bits and pieces of system-blue chitin, but never quite finding the same weak spot he had with the first one. Maybe Misa had weakened it in some way?

Derivan didn't quite get the chance to find out.

There was a brief flicker — a jump in what he could sense with his Shift stat, followed by a flash of light from somewhere behind him. Derivan didn't have to turn around to guess what had happened, and in fact kept his focus on the Patchers in front of him; they suddenly seemed confused, their arms waving in the direction of the newcomers like they wanted to head for them, instead.

Derivan did turn around, then, to see that three mages and one priest had arrived. Sev looked out of breath, and was even now panting heavily; the other three mages Derivan didn't recognize. Otter-Noram wasn't among them, in any case —

A Patcher staggered towards Derivan, apparently intent on moving past him and towards the mages, but the mages apparently didn't want to waste any time. Streaks of light burst out from their foci, piercing each Patcher several times over even as Derivan watched. Small pieces of the beams deflected off that protective chitin, but by and large...

Wait. No.

Derivan had assumed they'd solved the problem by cutting through the Patchers — but while the magic had clearly done a lot of damage, the Patchers were somehow still alive.

This was going to be more complicated than he'd hoped.