Edge Cases

Misa watched as light cracked open the sky.

Something was wrong, she knew. It was too early. The first time this had happened, it had been in the middle of the night; it was part of the reason it had taken so long for their village to respond. It wouldn't have been enough even if they'd managed it, of course — the fact of the matter was that they simply didn't have enough people to fight off a horde — but it had contributed to how quickly they'd been run over.

Maybe that was for the best. She couldn't imagine what it would've been like if they'd been taken out slowly, over a long, protracted battle. Losing the people she loved one by one over a period of hours instead of minutes...

...Misa swallowed, put her mind off of the memory, and watched.

The earth shook. The air sparked. There was that long-familiar sensation of a tear in space, although this one felt different —

— the beam of light was in the wrong place.

"Stop!" Misa shouted, running towards it. The guardsmen and her father looked at her, bewildered; they were already preparing to fire in that direction. But this wasn't the dungeon break — it couldn't be. Too many things were wrong. [Danger Sense] wasn't even going off.

Orkas, thankfully, trusted her, and shouted for his men to hold their fire. In the distance, as the light faded, she saw eight figures slowly resolve in the distance — three of them particularly familiar to her. Her heart raced. Relief. They'd found their way, and they'd managed to do it before the break started.

Misa slowed down as she approached, and grinned at her friends, keeping the relief out of her voice. "Shit, guys. Almost thought you wouldn't make it in time."

"We were always going to," Sev smirked at her, though his smile dropped a bit when he noticed the redness in the corners of her eyes. It didn't take much to put two and two together. "Are you doing okay?"

"No," Misa answered honestly. "I want to know what the fuck this place is. I want to know why my village is here. I want to know why my parents are here, and why they don't remember me—"

Her voice cracked slightly as she spoke.

Vex came up to her and gave her a hug without saying a word; she had to crouch down slightly, but Misa hugged him back, letting the rest of her words stay unsaid.

Too many questions. Not enough time.

"I cannot tell if this is a cruelty or a kindness," Derivan murmured out loud, mirroring her thoughts from before. But he looked at her, and then he added, "But we will find out, one way or another. And if there is a way to preserve what lies here..."

Misa's heart skipped a beat. She hadn't even thought about it. She'd been afraid to. But Derivan watched her, a steadiness she didn't have flickering in his eyes, and even Sev and Vex seemed ready to do whatever it took—

"Don't give me hope," Misa said, almost too soft to hear. "Not about this."

She didn't even know if they were real. She didn't want to acknowledge the fire of hope that had been burning in her heart ever since she'd seen them.

She didn't know what she'd do if she did, and that fire went out again.

"Watch out!" one of the guardsmen called at them as they returned, readying the bow. His voice was much shakier than his bow. "Skeletons! Behind you!"

"I know," Misa said, raising a brow at him. "They're on our side."

"O-our side?" the guard lowered his bow slightly, but if he had any hackles to raise, they would be raised. "They're skeletons. Monsters," he hissed. Misa looked back at the original delve team apologetically, but most of them seemed unbothered, except for one that shrank back into himself.

"They're allies," she said. "They got hit with a bad dungeon effect. Stop being a dick."

"Are they going to be helpful?" Orkas finally spoke, having arrived from where he'd stationed himself to command the battlefield.

"Four of them are," Misa answered, glancing back at them. "One just need a place to shelter."

Orkas' grip on his staff tightened. "I'm not putting them with the noncombatants in the village."

"Dad, he—" Misa cut herself off, gritting her teeth and ignoring the flinch that she felt when her father's eyes tightened at the word. "Orkas. He's a person like anyone else."

"He's also powerful enough to slaughter everyone in the village with all of us outside," Orkas countered. "I can see his level."

"If he wanted to do that he could do it anyway," Misa said.

"But we'd have a chance to stop him."

"Orkas," a reproving voice said, and both Misa and her father jerked slightly, glancing to Charise; the woman seemed filled with life again now that she'd had an opportunity to talk to her daughter, and there was a fire back in her eyes that hadn't been nearly so strong before. Misa didn't miss the way Orkas' entire posture softened when he looked at her. "He needs food and rest."

"He's a skeleton," Orkas said, perhaps a little stubbornly. Charise rolled her eyes.

"Fine. He needs rest, then. I'm going to make sure he gets that rest."

"He might—"

"He won't," Charise interrupted firmly, and then looked over at the lone skeleton, who stood awkwardly away from the others, not quite looking at them. "Will you?"

Very slowly, he shook his head.

"Good," Charise said, apparently satisfied with just that. "I'm going to bring you into the village and feed you some stew. It'll do you some good."

"He is a skeleton," Orkas said, a little exasperated.

"I'm sure I'll figure something out," Charise said dismissively. She waved for the skeleton to follow her, and — perhaps a little nonplussed — he did.

Misa watched both her mother and her father. It was so... like them. She didn't have the words to speak, so she just watched as Charise led the skeleton deeper into the village; that left them with the captain, the two lizardkin siblings, and the orc, who seemed to be taking Orkas in slowly.

"How long before the attack?" Vex asked, his tail swishing about anxiously. She glanced over at him.

"A few more hours, the first time," she answered. "No guarantee it'll happen the exact same time now, but it's what we've got to go on. We almost thought it was happening early when you guys arrived."

"I thought the timeline might have been off, but it seems we're still on track," Orkas rumbled. He sagged slightly. "I admit a part of me hoped that you were delusional; that you are my daughter returned to me through some odd quirk of magic, and not the tale you told me. But your friends are here now, and they bring with them men or monsters that could only be the result of a dungeon..."

He shook his head, seeing Misa open her mouth to respond. "No. Ignore my words. Focus on the battle ahead. We must plan again now that we have more resources on hand."

"I'll... strategize with my team," Misa said, strangling the rest of what she wanted to say.

"Then I will speak with the allies you brought with you," Orkas said, tilting his head to indicate the captain and the three delvers with him. They nodded back at him and he led them off, presumably to discuss how their skills could contribute to the fight ahead.

The guards left with them, leaving the four adventurers alone in the field just outside her village. For a moment, they were silent, none of them quite knowing what to say.

Sev broke the silence. "That was your dad, huh?"

"And the woman was my mother," Misa said. "Or she still is. I don't... know. It's complicated."

"We don't have many examples of dungeons doing things like this," Vex said quietly, answering the unspoken question. "A few bonus rooms here and there, explored mostly by Platinum rankers that don't talk about their time in them very much, except to fill out the blank spots in our history books."

"Is the rest of the world still... here?" Misa asked. "What if we just asked everyone to leave? Get them to evacuate the village, run somewhere the horde won't find us?"

Vex winced. "Trying to do something other than what the dungeon tells you to do usually results in the dungeon dissolving the bonus room early."

Dissolving. Misa let that word sink in for a moment.

"We're supposed to get answers from this dungeon," Misa finally said. "What do you think this will tell us?"

"I don't... know. The answers we get might not be from this bonus room at all," Sev said. "But this is a dungeon break, right? What do we know about dungeon breaks?"

"They happen when no one delves a dungeon for too long," Derivan said, reciting the answer as if from memory. "The mana accumulates in them, and eventually they seal themselves off. It is important to delve dungeons before that happens, and it is usually lucrative enough that adventurers are eager to do so. But sometimes dungeons are less noticeable, or disguise themselves well, and a dungeon break happens before we are able to head it off."

"We didn't know about this one, or we would've delved it. Or at least moved," Misa said with a sigh.

"I guess I should've asked a different question," Sev said. "What don't we know about dungeon breaks?"

"We don't know why they happen," Vex said. "We know mana accumulates in the dungeon, but we don't know why the dungeon seals itself off after a while, or why it 'breaks' and sends monsters flooding out. We've never been able... to..."

Vex trailed off. Misa glanced at him, and she saw Sev and Derivan doing the same.

"We've never been able to figure out where those monsters go," Vex said softly. "It's rare that we clear out every single monster that emerges from a break. We just hold out and survive, or we evacuate. So there's always an excess of monsters after the break ends, but the monsters just... leave, and we don't know where they go."

"No one's tried tracking them?" Sev asked.

"We've tried," Vex said. "We haven't succeeded. Even scouting and tracking classes just lose track after a while."

"Is that what we're supposed to figure out?" Misa frowned. "The task is to defend the village. Once we complete it —" she stopped herself mid-sentence, frowning, and then forged on, "— are we going to get a chance to follow the monsters and find out what happens once we complete it?"

"I don't know," Sev said with a sigh. "Probably not. But do we have any better ideas?"

"What happens when a dungeon breaks?" Misa asked, looking at Vex. "Physically."

Vex frowned. "A sealed dungeon starts to shrink into a ball of condensed mana," he said. "When the dungeon break happens, that ball of mana cracks, and it causes a rift in space that monsters flood out of."

"Has anyone ever gone inside that rift?" Misa asked.

"No?" Vex looked at her, blinking. "Dungeon breaks are bad enough as is. You don't go into the place the monsters are flooding out of."

Misa gripped her mace, saying nothing.

"Misa," Derivan said, and there was a touch of warning in his voice; no doubt he could read her. She grinned at him, though that grin was tense.

"I'll be honest," she said. "All these plans I made, thinking that if I was just clever enough, there might have been a way for my village to survive... I don't think they're enough. Not when the dungeon is setting up the scenario. Not when it wants to balance it to be a challenge, and we have Gold ranked delvers on our team, Silver ranked adventurers, and Bronze and Iron ranked guardsmen. There's no challenge here that's balanced. There's no way everyone's going to come out alive."

"We can't leave them to fight without us," Sev said. "That'll make things worse."

"The traps will help," Misa said. "They'll stall them. They'll make the horde fight for every bloody step forward they need to take. We've set up enough defenses that they can hold out for a while, even without our help."

"So you want to just... dive into the rift that the dungeon break opens?" Vex asked, staring at her.

"I think it's our only chance," Misa said. "We're still going to be fighting the monsters. We're not technically going off the objective. We can reduce the numbers they have to deal with and we can figure out what's going on."

"Misa," Derivan said, sounding doubtful. "This seems..."

It seemed crazy, she knew. Even she thought it was crazy.

So why was she so sure that this was what they needed to do? Them, and only them?

In the corner of her mind, just barely beginning to stir, were the beginnings of what felt like [Danger Sense]. But she knew now that it wasn't.

[Guardian's Premonition] rang in her mind more clearly than ever.

"Trust me," she said. "Please. I don't want to abandon them either. But this feels like the only chance we'll have."