It's been hours since Astrid and Zarius found the area with the caved in tunnels. Astrid is determined to find any miners who may have survived, and that willpower is the only thing keeping her pickaxe swinging. She manages to take off large chunks, but they must be cautious of how they dig lest they disturb the mound incorrectly and it come tumbling down and burying them as well. They break for a meal and a rest, and Astrid spends the entire time staring at the map of the tunnels and trying to make sense of where the miners might be. It seems strange to her that all of the tunnels were sealed off, but she can't come up with a good reason why.



"Why do ya think all the tunnels fell in?" she asks, looking over at Zarius. A few crumbs decorate her chin, but she doesn't seem to notice them. "It's all here in the same area. If there was an earthquake, wouldn't we have noticed in Skypeak?" She wonders if whatever rumbling she heard earlier on the mountain was the mountain or the avalanche. She'll probably never find out. "And it's weird ta me that they all caved in kind of at the same places. If it was an earthquake, higher in the shaft woulda been messy too, right? And the shaft with the lift looked really weird. Almost smooth. Like maybe it wasn't dug out with tools...?" She points at the walls in the tunnel they're in. They're dinged and scratched and scraped. She doesn't have an explanation. Maybe Zarius does?

Zarius huffs as he pushes a heavy rock to the side. "There was word of earthquakes over the past few weeks. I unfortunately do not know much about mines or their construction." He looks about the tunnels. 

Astrid is right. This tunnel walls were pretty smooth as if they were scraped clean with much finer tools than the pick axes they were currently using. He wasn't familiar with creatures native to the underground, but it wasn't impossible that some sort of burrowing critter or critters who caused the cave in. As far as he could tell they were not present currently, which was probably in working in their favor as they spend hours at a time clearing the stone away. 

Eventually they manage to break through and clear enough away to climb through to the other side of one of the tunnels. Behind the wall of collapsed stone is a faint light surrounded by a number of dirty, thin looking dwarves. They look up in surprise as Zarius and Astrid crawl through the hole with their tools in hand. Zarius glances about the group, they were in pretty rough shape and a few were injured badly. They were lucky to still be alive.

"We are here to get you out, how many are injured?" Zarius asks getting straight to the point. Time was of the essence, the longer they stayed the higher the chance of another collapse was. 

"Thorgrum over there is the worst, he got hit his leg busted up something fierce." Replies one of the dwarves, gesturing to another one who is lying down against the wall of the tunnel unmoving. 

Zarius goes over and nudges him with his foot and gets a groan in response. "Well he is not dead yet. Astrid, keep clearing the way, we will need a bigger opening for the injured. I will tend to their wounds." He pulls out his medical kit and gets to work on splinting the broken leg much to the discomfort of the dwarf. 

"It's about damned time."

Stepping into the light is a sight as familiar as it is exasperating: Veliky, the extraordinary entrepreneur. Her eyes are full of relieved anger of the sort one might feel at the end of an egregious trip. And, by the dirt and soot on her outfit, she certainly seems like she's has an egregious trip.

Her signature bots are nowhere to be seen, though Zarius, with his keen senses^[1], can faintly hear the hisses and clanks of an unseen guardian^[2].

"I sent the SOS hours ago." She regards Zarius with a curt and entirely unenthusiastic nod. "Zarius. Surprised to see you here. Did you invest in this sham as we-"

That's when she catches Astrid in her sight, and that's when her jaw drops. Such a blatant show of emotion is rare from her, fitting for such a rare and blatant example of negligence.

She shuts her jaw and eyes, shaking her head with understated amazement.

"Reckless endangerment. Criminal negligence. Child abuse. Manslaughter." She opens her eyes and locks them with Zarius. They're calm, but her tone is not. "Do you have any idea how much litigation you'd be wading through if anyone knew that you brought a *literal* child into a derelict mine, *knowing* that it had already caved in and is a *current* threat to her safety?"

She begins pacing back and forth on the dusty ground, arms crossed. The dull lantern-light illuminates each side of her green slacks in turn.

"Five years. That isn't the sentence; that's how long you'd be filing paperwork and having awkward lunch dates with lawyers. Jail time would be closer to seventeen, or thirty-two if the manslaughter charge pans out. And if Astrid were the Victim of that last charge?" She stops and turns to them. "Death penalty."

Her eyes fall on Astrid. Her demeanour towards her, now, is much softer. In fact, she almost sounds sad.

"And why are you here, exactly...? Which one of you had this idea?"

---

1. Fighter's Sense (Zarius)
2. Invisibility (Rook)

When Veliky emerges from the rubble, Astrid is surprised in the best of ways. She quite liked talking to Veliky and is just about to greet her when the half-sized halfling starts tearing into Zarius and berating him. In this moment, Astrid feels quite awkward, suffering from what she wouldn't know to call secondhand embarrassment. She nearly flinches when Veliky looks in her direction, but the woman's face is softer. That's a relief. 

"And why are you here, exactly...? Which one of you had this idea?"

Astrid suddenly looks concerned, probably the most concerned she's ever looked. Part of her starts to answer sheepishly, but this was her idea, and she's going to own it. "It was my idea," she says firmly. "I heard some miners hadn't made it home, and I convinced Mister Zarius ta take me out lookin' fer them. Wasn't an easy journey ta find the mine itself, but we found it all on our own. There was an avalanche, and we sledded down the mountain on an old busted sled. It was exhilaratin'! But..." Astrid looks past Veliky at the miners dragging themselves from the rubble. "This feels pretty good. And I'm definitely glad we found ya! We've been diggin' for hours! Glad it wasn't fer nothin'." 

One of the men struggles from the rubble, so she goes and grabs a chunk of rock and pulls it away to open the hole up more. Then she pats the pile in a satisfactory manner. "I don't know why Mister Zarius would get in alla that trouble though. No one seems all that concerned with the well-bein' of a homeless kid, ya know? But I've got some purpose! I've got a hammer and a mine seemed like the perfect place ta find some special metals fer armor! And also rescue some folks." She helps another man free of the rubble. "Gotta reunite 'em with their families, right?"  

Zarius is equally surprised to see Veliky in the mines without her entourage of far too many constructs. He could hear Rook nearby, but it didn’t seem like there were any more in the immediate vicinity. What was she doing there in the first place anyway? He is about to ask when he sees her reaction to Astrid being present with them.

He struggles not to break down laughing as she very seriously relays to him the list of charges against him. She did know that he was a criminal already, right? Other than Child Abuse, none of these were particularly new to him. Actually, considering the mines are private property, she really should have added trespassing to that list.

He shakes his head, a smile of amusement on his face as he rummages through his medical pack and splints the dwarf’s leg. He glances at Veliky at the death penalty remark, part of him wondered how much of that was a threat and how much of that was concern for him. Probably much more the first than the later. Veliky didn’t seem to hold him in high regard after everything that happened in Sol City previously.

It was pretty funny to him that Veliky thought any of those charges or legal consequences meant anything to him. Every day of his life since birth he has stood with one foot in a jail cell and another in a grave. Actually, if he got a grave at all he would be lucky. Lunala knows how many bodies have disappeared into the smoke and ash of Drakveil without a trace.

He wraps up the dwarf’s leg as he listens to Astrid’s response. It’s true, it was her idea. Though Veliky would likely not believe her or just lecture him about letting a child make dangerous decisions. He ties off the ends of the bandage and waves over some of the more mobile miners to help the dwarf up. “Support him on both sides, try not to hit his leg on anything.”

The tiefling stands up then turns to Astrid and Veliky. “We can talk later, the longer we stay here the more we risk being trapped ourselves. Let us get these people out first then you, Miss Veliky, can explain to us why you also ended up trapped down here.”

Veliky looks down and shakes her head. Astrid's obviously telling the truth - that this was all her idea - but that certainly doesn't make things any better. Sure, he's a syndic, law probably isn't all that important to him, but the fact that he's comfortable with the act itself is highly disturbing. This is definitely not a man who should have kids.

At least he's pushing things along, though. With one-and-a-half extra bodies, they might be able to make it out in good fashion. She looks up at his mention of getting out quickly, though.

"That's... partly true. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to get out of this dingy hole as quickly as possible, and it's definitely in our best interests, but it might not be feasible. Rook?"

She holds up her hand, and a furled-up parchment suddenly appears in her clutches. She hands it to Astrid.

"A map of the mine, though it was pre-collapse so it's mostly inaccurate, now." She steps back. Her voice is clear and authoritative, like she's briefing soldiers for a special operation. "If it were just rubble we were dealing with, we'd be out of here by now. Problem is, whenever we've moved with any sort of intention, we've been stopped by tremors."

She raises her hand again. This time, a salted chitin sandwich appears in it.

"There's the scary part. That's the only pattern to the tremors: when try to escape, the cave shakes. Definitely not natural; our working theory is that they're caused by something alive. Could be burrowing creatures, like ankhegs or worms; or something big, like a giant, that stumbled down here and started stomping around; or even some terramancing asshole trying to mess with us."

"Or Vurmjin..." rasps one of the injured dwarves.

"Quiet, Thorgrum!" another answers. "We're already stressed enough without your muttering about old fairytales."

Veliky is equally exasperated at the moment. She takes off her hat and scratches her scalp.

"Some of the dwarves have been gossiping about some old story. Something about the 'mother of all worms;' you know the type. Personally, I'd prefer to lean on more realistic possibilities."

She turns to the left. Barely visible in the shadows, there's' the looming silhouette of a tunnel.

"We've found a couple areas that seem relatively safe. The rest of my bots are down there, digging in a spot that seems relatively quiet, so far."

"Vurmjin...?" Astrid echoes curiously. She can't recall ever hearing of such a thing. But maybe it doesn't really matter right now. But a big worm? Astrid looks around. The top and bottom of this cave in have some smooth stone work in the same way the shaft with the lift has, but it's crossing the part where the tunnel was dug out by tools. She takes the map from Veliky and looks it over. There are several branching tunnels from the main path, but as she and Zarius found, all of them were blocked in a similar way. She draws her finger across the paper in a line that crosses all of the tunnels.

"Mother of worms... I think it came through here," she says. Looking back up at the ceiling where the rubble is clear, she points out the smooth marks crossing the rest of the tunnel then turns back to the map and draws the same line. "All of these tunnels were blocked at about the same place. I'll bet that worm wandered right through here." She looks up, and many of the miners, especially the dwarves, seem even more spooked. "What? I don't think the worm meant anythin' by it, if it were even a worm. Just makin' its way through the dirt, livin' its life." 

"Don't put that kind of negativity inte the world, child," one of the dwarves says almost sharply. "We don't need te be runnin' inte no monster like that, 'specially not with a child abouts. If we're lucky, we won't be runnin' inte no creature before we get out of here."

Astrid motions back towards where they came. "We didn't have too hard a time gettin' here, we just got lucky pickin the right tunnel ya just happened ta be diggin' out too. The lift's still workin' too, but the path's a little perilous." 

"Good te hear," one of the other dwarves says more cheerily. "Maybe the devil child din't curse us callin' forth the mother after all!" 

Astrid frowns at that but doesn't respond. She's just here to help people get home to their families.

The tiefling walks across the space and leans over Astrid’s shoulder to look at the map Veliky had procured from out of nowhere. The quarterling’s army of constructs sure were handy. Shame they couldn't have helped with all that digging and saved them some time. 

Zarius shoots the dwarves a menacing glare as they address Astrid with such disrespect.

“Show some gratitude. You would not be getting rescued at all if it was not for her and she can more than hold her own.” He hisses.

If they wanted to see the curse of a real devil, he certainly could show them. Though maybe not with Veliky around and not in this current predicament. There would be time for that later if they survived long enough to escape the tunnels.

It was certainly true that if Astrid had not been so insistent that he would have simply ignored the call to action. Rescuing miners hardly helped him further his own goals, but he knew that if he had let Astrid go by herself and Cantio and Veliky later learned she had died they would surely have been sore with him. Despite his teasing and despite the tension with the quarterling, he did value both of their unique skillsets and respect them as individuals. 

“Regardless of what it is, we need to get everyone out of here before we are all buried alive.” They could speculate all day but in the end they just needed to ensure they got out. He looks at Veliky.

“If there is something intentionally stopping people from leaving then the only choices we have are to either distract it or kill it. Let us get them somewhere safer then we can investigate further.”

He looks over at the dwarves and starts herding them to the nearest safe spot Veliky had suggested despite their protests of going back deeper into the mine.

Veliky winces at the dwarf's remark. It's nothing she hadn't expected; as she's learned through her time with them, Dwarven culture is rife with superstition, whether about massive, subterranean monsters or infernal blood. He'd've been remiss *not* to make some offensive comment.

...Granted, Astrid's status as a blessing or a curse has yet to be determined. But, either way, that isn't dependant on her heritage as much her age. Based on that factor, as well as her unspoken viability for future employment, she's easily the highest-priority payload here.

Veliky beckons an unseen ear and whispers.

"Raise Astrid and Zarius to conscript status. Also, Castle on Astrid. Priority: Platinum."

The barely-audible hisses and clanks of an invisible soldier abandon Veliky, tracing taloned feet along the stone. But it has a new escort: Astrid the foundling, who is assuredly the most deserving of extra protection.

Veliky lets in a deep breath and exhales, steadying herself. She feels naked without having a murderbot constantly watching over her. But she survived for ages before she ever had a single bot; she'll be fine.

"I agree; escape is unviable until the source of the tremors has been dealt with. Let's just hope it isn't a purple worm." She knows from experience that purple worms are no joke. And Zarius might be good, but he's no Shaa.

Sized for dwarves, the tunnel is even more claustrophobic than an ordinary mine (of course, it's quite spacious for Veliky). Veliky leads the way with the blue glow of a strange lantern - the same she show off in Skypeak. The tunnel leads for less than three minutes; it seems that the area the miners have been confined to is truly tiny.

It isn't long before the rhythmic clinks of pickaxes can be heard. Soon after, the tunnel opens into a wide, but low-ceilinged chamber. Haphazardly scattered lanterns cast shadows behind natural pillars. Aside from the one through which the party entered, there are no fewer than two crumbled passageways leading off from the cave. Meanwhile, another tunnel appears to be in the making; a group of five more mechanical beings is gradually carving a tunnel into the wall with picks, shovels and other apparatus^[1].

Veliky looks on with boredom.

"Based on the map, we believe that we can access another chamber by digging through here. No clue if it'll be safe on the other side, but we're exhausting our options." She takes a bite of her salted chitin sandwich. It makes an audible, painful-sounding crunch. "...Might take a bit," she says with stuffed cheeks. "So if you have other ideas, I'm open."

---

1. Digging Kit

The crunch of Veliky's sandwich draws Astrid's attention, and she almost accidentally pays more attention to the odd looking sandwich than she does to what Veliky says. The trail rations Zarius brought along for them haven't been the most sustaining. While they're technically enough food to give someone enough energy to continue about their day of traveling, Astrid is a growing girl and awaits the day she can afford enough food to full satisfy her. So the prospect of something new and interesting and not just a dense bar of hardtack is enticing. 

She shakes herself from the food induced reverie and looks around into the dark cavern, then she looks at the map. That certainly seems like the best place to dig to get back to the main tunnel, but this is going to take ages. Dwarves are great and efficient at digging, but the dwarves here are also all exhausted. Despite their judgement earlier, she looks at them. 

"'Scuse me, how does the um... Vurmjin dig?" It's an honest question, and maybe they can take some inspiration from nature to speed up the process. 

"Hush, child!" one of the dwarves hisses. "Don't say its name so casually! It's a monstrous beast with razors fer teeth that cut through stone and the like as if it were butter. Stories say its 'specially efficient at shreddin' through stone with Ginma's blessin'."

"Who's Ginma?" she asks.

"Gods above, the child don't know the dwarves' patron god!" The dwarf throws his hands up, exasperated. "Ginma's the god governin' the earth. These mountains are 'is bones, and the tunnels his veins. Our people, the dwarves, are the lifeblood of Ginma 'imself, we are. S'why we've got the skill te carve the earth effortlessly." Astrid looks at the exhausted dwarves who were just trapped by a cave in, and he adds, "Usually, anyway."

Looking around the open chamber, Astrid breaks one of Zarius' rules and starts exploring the dark nooks and crannies looking for any additional tools or anything interesting they can use. If the big scary worm uses magic or razor sharp teeth to shred through stone, maybe they need something of the like. She's seen hand drills before, used by woodworkers especially. Maybe there's a way to make something to at least help them break through the stone. She's got no magic, and it doesn't seem like Mister Zarius or Miss Veliky do either. Her magic is inventiveness. 

After a while, Astrid finds a wooden cart reinforced with thin metal plates, some spare (or broken) metal rods, and some rope. Thinking about the lifts in town, she pushes over a minecart, which is a surprising feat for the small thing, and pulls her hammer out and starts beating on the bearings of one of the wheels until it pulls free. It takes a good few minutes of banging on metal, and the dwarves start to complain of the noise. She ignores them. 

Astrid continues to work on whatever this thing is until she starts struggling to beat and bend some of the sheet metal on her own. She walks over to the torches lighting the one hall and reaches up desperately trying to pick one up. Metal needs to be hot to bend more easily and keep its shape. She takes a few steps back when the torch is lifted by something unseen and offered to her. There's a slight mechanical whir to the movements of the torch. Astrid can't spot it, but nothing dangerous happens, so she cautiously takes the torch then returns to her work area off to the side where she digs a little hole and piles up coals from the overturned cart into it.

Finally, it's alight, and the makeshift force will have to work. She lets the metal heat until she can more easily work it into a sharp conical shape. She drives a few shafts of metal across the wide end, and then remembers to add what she can only remember as the "weird but necessary spirally bit" of a drill head to her very large drill head. This takes another round of heating metal, bending metal, heating metal, bending metal. Then once satisfied, she starts to assemble what seems to be a very large version of a hand drill. It's crude, and will probably break after only a single bout of heavy use, but if it's helpful in their escape, she's happy to have made it. Plus it distracted her for long enough to keep her from complaining of boredom. 

Gripping the handle and turning the crank, the ropes turn the drill head. She tests it on a boulder and manages to make a decent dent in it. If a bot were handling this tirelessly, it might make some real progress through the rock. 

"YESSSSS!" she cheers quietly in her little corner of the cave. Her feet do this happy little dance, and she rushes over to the adults. "Can we try this?" 

Zarius reviews the map over Veliky’s shoulder as she points out the chambers of the mine. There aren’t a lot of options aside from what she has presented. Ideally they could have gone back and used the lift. They had confirmed it worked a few hours ago after all. Risking more cave ins though was not high on his list of gambles for the day. If there was something intentionally trapping people down here, dealing with it was a necessary first step.

“I will go scout deeper to see if I can find what is causing the tremors.”

He glances over at Astrid who seems preoccupied with going against his earlier warnings. An unimpressed look crosses his face but given that there were many other eyes around to supervise her he lets it slide this time. Well, at least until Veliky isn’t around to hear any reprimanding of the young half-dwarf.

Turning on his heel, he becomes invisible and silently stalks away through the darkened tunnels deeper into the mine’s underbelly.^[1,2]

The sounds of the pickaxes fade into faint echoes as he cautiously sneaks about on his own. Even though he is able to move unnoticed for the most part, the chill in the air still makes his breath hang in little clouds that appear out of nowhere. There’s signs of the dwarves’ work throughout the tunnels, though there are many places where recent collapses have closed off the various branching pathways.

As he gets deeper into the gloom, he listens closely for movement. He pauses when a noise up ahead catches his attention. It could only be described as some sort of strange series of clicking. Zarius wasn’t too familiar with what all lived underground, but he assumed that most things would be drawn towards anything that smelled like food.

He pulls out a piece of dried meat out of one of his pouches and tosses it ahead down the tunnel towards the noise. There’s a pause then a skittering of many legs across the stone before a strange insectoid-like creature appears from out of the darkness. Then another…and another…and another. Zarius starts to back up as more sounds of skittering follow afterwards headed towards the ration and beyond that, himself.

The antennae atop the lead insect creature twitch in the air as it gets to the ration which it quickly snatches up and consumes, then its attention turns towards the unseen tiefling. It couldn’t see or hear him. It didn’t need to. A rallying screech raises up amongst the colony of kruthiks as they swarm forward. Zarius is quick to turn tail and run, not liking his odds against what seemed to be a few dozen of these creatures.

He could easily outrun them, he was plenty fast enough. The problem was there was no way to lose the swarm and only one direction to head since the rest were dead ends. Seeing that his invisibility was no help against these things, he drops his illusions and shouts in hopes that the others hear with enough time to prepare. 

"We have giant ants!"

---

[1] Invisibility
[2] Silent Step

It begins as a start when Veliky hears the cart CRASH onto the ground. She faces Astrid with confused indignance, ready to scold the foundling for her absurd behaviour, but she can't help but stop and stare. This girl's clearly on a mission. And the things she's doing, Veliky can hardly follow. Before she realizes that anything cohesive has even happened, Astrid's holding a device that looks... well, it looks startlingly like the machine she'd encountered the last time she came to Dragon's Cradle.

For once, the emotions are plain on Veliky's face: she's baffled.

"How did you-"

It's then that the shout echoes into the room. A switch flips in Veliky's mind and her face goes stone-cold as she looks into the tunnel. Already, some aberrant skittering and chittering can be heard.

"Defensive position!" she shouts. Her voice isn't as loud as the awful noises from the corridor, but it's just as forceful. "If it isn't Zarius, kill anything that comes out of that tunnel!"

Like a scream spurring crows into flight, Veliky's command is the cause of immediate action. The bots that had been digging throw their tools aside in favour of steel weaponry, while the miners clamber as far as they can from the danger. In the confines of the cave, their mechanical, sibilant march is deafening.

Four bots take to the tunnel's entrance while others prepare to lend ranged support from afar. Their weapons glow and crackle with electricity^[1], adding even more noises to the cacophony, but making them a veritable force.

By now, Zarius has bolted into the room - his encroaching footsteps couldn't be heard over the noise - but it would be several more seconds before his pursuers arrive. But they do. Heavens, they do.

It's as if the tunnel were a clutch of spider eggs that had just burst open. In seconds, a half-hundred insectoid legs are clicking across the floor. It's like a wave of black and red, and only a few measly bots stand in its path.

The first bot to fall wields a trident. It thrusts and makes contact, but its weapon's three prongs fail, utterly, to pierce the kruthik's carapace^[2]. They surround it in seconds and pull it apart like children with a toy. Another bot - a canine - meets the same fate. The other two are surviving, but quickly losing ground to the swarm.

Bolts are fired and knives are thrown. The creatures drop like flies, but they're so many that it's like destroying individual droplets of water in a pond. Attrition is not the party's ally here. If they're to survive, they'll need a more comprehensive solution.

But, no matter how many of them break, Veliky will keep her minions fighting until the tides can be turned. A kruthik scuttles toward her with gnashing teeth and a tongue that seems to bear a mind of its own. With a sneer and a heavens-infused^[3]backhand, she sends the creature sprawling onto the ground.

"Do NOT falter! You fight until you die!" Her voice is the voice of Hell's own heathens, yet her will is the will of the heavens. Her words offer power in exchange for justice, and there is no refusal! Zarius, the bots and even Astrid feel a fire burning within^[4].

---

1. Sigil's Blessing
2. Tough Chitin (Kruthik)
3. Angelic Light
4. Inspiring Presence

She barely gets a moment to admire her creation when things suddenly descend into chaos. It's not that Astrid is afraid of bugs, it's that seeing a few dozen dog-sized bugs would startle and panic just about anyone. The Blixtbots^TM jump into action at Veliky's command, and Astrid is stood there in minor shock. Sure she thought about the fact they could encounter some creatures here below the surface. It was a likely happenstance. What she did not consider was that she's never gotten into a fight with a monster. Heck, she's barely been in a fight with other kids. A few punches here and there don't equate to fighting for your life in a disturbed nest of hungry insects. 

But this is no time to falter. Cantio called her brave, and she dragged Zarius out on this adventure! Be courageous and take action! So she rushes over to the mine cart and stashes her makeshift drill there to protect it then scrambles out covered in coal soot, but her hammer in hand. It's a bit too bulky and disproportionate for her, but she wields it with ease. The confidence will come later. Picking up a handful of pebbles, she throws them at a few bugs. "Over here, ya overgrown locusts!" she shouts to them, moving back towards the safety of her non-insect companions and drawing them towards the small army. One gets close to her, so she imagines its head is an anvil, and she's the smith ready to beat a piece of metal into shape. 

Crack!

A splatting of bug brains sprays her face, and she gags. It smells way worse than she would have expected. 

Zarius dodges into the space just as Veliky's constructs launch their attacks on his insect-like pursuers. He somersaults across the ground then springs back up onto his feet to face the swarm that invades the chamber. What little time Veliky's minions bought them allowed him to slip his knuckle knives onto his hands and prepare for combat. 

He glances over at Astrid who appeared shocked for a moment. She likely had never been in combat before. It might be best to direct her to stay back with the miners while he, Veliky, and the constructs drove the creatures back. Before he can say anything though, the half-dwarf is already armed and raring to go. 

Veliky's voice booms out across the fray, reverberating deep within the tiefling's very being. Whatever Veliky had done fueled something dark within the tiefling. It feels like a burning heat that boils the blood in his veins. His fangs and nails lengthen as a dark energy pulses through him.^[1] His golden eyes flicker with blue light. 

As Astrid smashes one of the kruthik's brains in with her hammer, Zarius races forward and closes the distance between himself and the first kruthik headed towards the miners. He cuts off its approach and slams his fist into its skull, dropping it in a single vicious blow amplified by Veliky's encouragement and the dark energy enveloping his fist.^[2]

His attention snaps upwards as a few kruthik skitter across the ceiling, bypassing the constructs and making their way across to the defenseless miners. The tiefling runs to the wall of the chamber and plants his feet on the walls before racing upside-down on the stone surface.^[3]

He gets over to the kruthiks and quickly bashes in their legs with a combo of two consequetive punches.^[4] The creatures hiss in alarm as their grip on the ceiling weakens and they tumble down to the stone floor below where they are prone and vulnerable with their soft undersides exposed. 

---

[1] Abyssal Darkness
[2] Dashing
[3] Spider Silk Boots
[4] Two Piece

Grim: as apt a word as there possibly can be to describe this scenario. Zarius can easily kill one, three or even ten of these things on his own, but there are far more than that and the bots are only holding on by scraps. Will they survive? Probably; Veliky's survived worse odds. But Astrid hasn't. Damn Zarius.

A bot skulks over and pierces one of the grounded bugs' tender bellies with a knife. Meanwhile, Veliky messily drives her boot through the other's; the cracking and squelching of the entry isn't so gag-inducing as the peeling and tearing of the removal.

Veliky scans the chamber. The floor is littered with more chunks and bloodstains - organic and artificial, alike - than the backroom of a back-alley butcher shop. The bots are only barely surviving, and only by allowing several kruthiks through their defense. And the artillery have nearly exhausted their ammunition.

'Another kiena day in the kiena business,' Veliky thinks to herself with a grimace. It's hard to imagine, at this point, even to herself, that she had these bots assembled as 'bodyguards.' A 'personal escort.' How many can claim to have become the commander of a small assault squad by accident? She wishes she couldn't. If she had it her way, she'd... she'd...

A familiar sensation interrupts her thoughts, as it's often wont to do. Light creeps from her periphery, from every direction, and she can feel a scalding heat at the back of her neck. Veliky blinks, trying to shake the feeling away so she can focus on the battle. She knows he's here, but why?

Then, his voice slithers under her skin like a thousand threadsnakes. It is full of unspoken rage, unfettered judgement and unshakeable rule.

"Heresy..."

Veliky's eyes widen in shock and dread.

"What?! No, I-"

"Not you, fool. And never mind. Turn around!"

The sensation fades suddenly, violently; it feels like a tooth being ripped from her gums. Around? Where? She's already too disoriented to know which way had been 'around' when he was speaking. But it doesn't matter; she hears it, first.

There's a rumbling and scratch in the wall. The two ranged support bots turn to face the source of the reverberations, but they have nary a second to react before the wall explodes outward, showering them in debris and blowing them away! And stepping through the newly-revealed tunnel is another kruthik, but massive, easily taller than Zarius and many of him in legspan. Its carapace is monstrously thick, like steel plates. On its head is a crest that scrapes along the ceiling. Its eyes are mostly hidden behind thick, jutting chitin: a narrow vision, but an impenetrable defense. Among the kruthik, it is a ruler - a tyrant.

The two bots lie on the floor, before it. Its first doctrine, as ruler of the battlefield, is to penetrate the knife-bot's chest with a bladed foreleg. Its second is to wait and listen, scanning the room with some sense that no humanoid could fathom.

But it cannot sense all. Slowly, quietly, the crossbow-bot is regathering itself; it's reclaimed its crossbow, and it now aims a single bolt at the creature's underbelly. A single shot should kill it.

Ker-CHOO!

The bolt flies with blinding speed and deafening sound^[1]! With its enchantments, it could split stone; and with Veliky's holy power, it could pierce two armoured knights. Yet, when it strikes the creature's metallike chest, it snaps, and the creature is unscathed.

The flying bolt is a dead giveaway. The creature turns to the prone bot, and Veliky can do little but watch.

"New hostile, flanking us!" she shouts. "Real tough armour on this one; our weapons won't cut it! We need something that could...."

As she backs away, her eyes trail to the toppled minecart - and its cargo.

"Zarius, find some way to pin it down! Knight, get Astrid's drill ready! Astrid!" She turns to Astrid. Somehow, the intensity in her voice is even greater toward the foundling. "Stay safe!"

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1. Dashing [Heavy Crossbow] (Bishop)