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in which Aestrix is a dungeon
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Sight is another tricky problem, because there are so many possible angles on it. After some fiddling, she can produce an orb that sends out a sort of pulse of magic, and then turns that into a 3-d image of its surroundings. Complete with color, because the whole thing is more conceptual than literally bouncing raw magic off of things.

There is a distant booming sound that shakes some dust from her arches.

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Nggggggggh she needs to hurry it uuuuup!!!!!

Okay, she has all of the pieces she needs, she just needs to put them together. Aestrix bites back the urge to panic slam a horrible mush of death together and sending it flying off immediately; it will do no one any good if she assists badly. So: little drones get a seeing orb, and then she gives them a brief tour of the science room to practice moving them around. It's easiest if she thinks of it like moving units in an RTS (which, for the record, she hates, because where the fuck is her damn pause button!!!!) and directs them accordingly. Fortunately, the reflex training setup got her most of the work for how to make things that aim, so that's also straightforward enough once she attaches guns to her little drones. There is another brief tour around the science room where she practices having them fire at things.

Are there still general sounds of some kind of confrontation going on by the time she's just about ready to go?

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It's hard to tell, because her entrance isn't situated in the best place to hear things happening in the village. But there is a distant crackling sound and something that sounds incongruously like rain hitting a tin roof.

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....

"Requesting permission to get involved upstairs and hopefully render some kind of direct assistance," says Aestrix, in a clipped and business-like tone over the blue channel.

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"Granted!" Kose responds after a moment. The sound of crashing metal comes through alongside her voice before she closes the connection again.

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Right then.

She opens a tunnel from her science room to the main dungeon entrance, and out fly about a dozen of her drones. They are not, at the moment, directed to fire at anything; instead she moves them to fan out and give her a decent view of just what the fuck is going on out there.

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Her entrance sits about half way up a grassy hill, overlooking a cluster of thatched buildings. Beyond the buildings are some well-organized fields, with a smudge of forest visible on the horizon. It is an idyllic scene, rendered somewhat less peaceful by the smoke.

Two of the buildings are burning, occasionally sending up clumps of burning thatch soaring into the air, threatening to spread the fire to the rest of the village. A group of men with longbows — some with various exotic effects — shelter behind a low stone wall at the far edge of the village, occasionally loosing a volley or a more targeted shot towards some foe obscured from view by the smoke.

Beyond them, in the field, Kose dances back and forth with a sword, holding off an equally speedy foe. Someone who is probably Perkre is running towards her carrying a small object.

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It is probably best to give Kose space while she works; all powerful dungeon or not, she has far more combat experience than Aestrix. A super powerful novice throwing around magic breaking bullets is more likely to do harm than good in any combat with a practiced foe. The volleys towards the mysteriously obscured foe are more promising. With the way her seeing orbs work, she thinks she has a better chance of finding and shooting whatever the thing everyone else is shooting at; she gets to doing that. Go forth, her pretties, into the smoke. Show her what is there so she can make it die.

For the fires, she sends two drones back inside to see about refitting their guns with magical fire extinguishers. That is, rather directly, what she'll be doing; she'll swap out the railgun tubes for magical tubes that make the-stuff-fire-extinguishers-make, with the same directing and aiming scheme. Just, you know. Outputting the foam spray used in the home fire extinguishers she's most familiar with. If she can manage to multitask enchanting that shit while she's trying to figure out what thing she should have her drones be shooting at. Which, uh. She is good at multitasking, but maybe not that good.

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The enemy turns out to be another group of humans, charging across the field. They are much better equipped than the villagers are, with leather armor and tall shields they're using to hedge out the arrows. 

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... She was kind of hoping these would be, you know, monsters instead of humans. That way she could go full dakka without any regrets. As it is, she regrets not setting up some kind of loudspeaker system so she could tell everyone attacking her town to fuck right off before she shoots them. That's another point on the 'should have done her damn homework' marker.

Instead, she merely hesitates briefly before she moves on to shooting people. War is not right, or good, or fair, but she has her allies and she'll be damned if she won't defend them. Their lives depend on it, and hers probably does, too.

Tall shields and leather armor are really not enough to stop diamond bullets at high speed, especially when they rip through enchantments. With the way she set up her magic railguns, they can fire rapid speed, continuously.

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There isn't really anything that can reasonably stop magic-piercing supersonic diamonds. Aiming takes a little adjustment, but then the attackers fall like a line of toy soldiers toppling down.

The men by the village let out a ragged cheer, and Kose takes advantage of the moment to somehow encase the man she'd been fighting in a block of ice. Then she sheathes her sword, phases her hand into the ice, and sticks a dagger through his eye.

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Yeah. See, Kose did not need her help. And. And she definitely picked the targets that she was best equipped to handle. Look at how very extremely handled they are. It's probably a good thing she can't feel nauseous as a dungeon.

She gets back to setting up fire extinguishers.

"Any others?" she asks, in the same clipped tone she used earlier, as she shoves the idea of SHOOTING FOAM THAT PUTS OUT FIRE into these stupid little tubes of death fire suppression.

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"They took Tanth," Kose tells her, voice tight. "How fast can those ... things ... fly? They might not have made it back to the border yet."

As she speaks, she begins running north at a decent clip. At the edge of the fields, she passes Pona's body.

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She drops the fire extinguisher enchantment in favor of more immediate concerns.

"Very. On my way."

Right then, there is no time for freaking out, there is instead sending her little drones north as fast as they can go. This is, in fact, faster than humans can run. Can she make it?

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The borders of dungeon territory are not obvious from the air, but after a tense few moments, her drones do catch up to a smaller group of raiders carrying an unconscious Tanth between them. They aren't going that fast — not with a person's worth of dead-weight — but they're still making pretty good time through the scrubby forest.

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So, the trouble with her 'spray and pray' tactic is that it is likely to also hit friendlies. She cannot afford to do that while they have a hostage.

Instead, she directs her drones closer, to get better aim, and starts carefully picking out headshots.

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The raiders whip around after the first shot, but they can no more defend against this than their colleagues could. They fall to the forest floor, staining it red.

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"Got them," she informs Kose, sounding calm and detached and not at all like she's having any kind of reaction to watching several people have their brains splattered across the forest in agonizing detail, with the knowledge that she directly made it happen. She is fine. She is totally, completely fine.

"Are there any others I should go after? I don't know where the borders I should avoid are, and I don't want an enemy dungeon to reverse engineer any of this." An edge of not-quite-panic leaks into her voice at the end of that sentence, but nope! She is totally and completely fine and no one can possibly call her on that while they are in the middle of this emergency that needs her at her best.

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Kose lets out a bark of laughter, more out of relief than out of any humor in the situation.

"Good," she replies. "I didn't see any others, but I didn't see the initial attack. Can you comb through the area around the village just in case?" she asks.

A moment later she comes up on the spot where Tanth is lying between the three fallen men, and slows.

"Oh."

She's silent for a moment.

"I guess you were going to be my last dungeon no matter what choice I made, huh?" she murmurs.

She crouches by Tanth and gently picks him up, and then turns to walk back.

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"Checking." She sends her drones off to comb through the area, to look for anyone else. She can converse while she is doing that, having a chat about how she and Kose were prepared to kill each other is not one of those things that slot into the 'not-fine' category that she's not allowed to do.

"And... I mean, not necessarily. I think it would have been first move advantage goes the victor. And I don't..." she stops talking, because that is getting into the realm of things she's not allowed to do. But she should probably finish her thought, because she is a terrifying, terrifying being of destruction and death, and she should be as predictable as possible so as not to rightly scare people. "... I don't tend towards assassination as my first option. I think if you'd have tried, you'd have won."

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Kose swallows.

"I ... Of course. Of course you knew," she replies, voice full of some unidentifiable emotion.

She walks in silence for a moment.

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"Status report?" Rokat requests. The pendant picks up the sound of many people crowded around her, doing their best to be quiet.

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"I think they're routed, but Aestrix is checking to make sure there are no more surprises," Kose tells her. "Have everyone keep sheltering there for now."

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Yep. She keeps checking the area with drones. Probably she should get back to work on a fire suppressant, but. This is a lot to juggle already, and it would be very bad if she missed anything in her search.

“I’d appreciate if someone checked through their main force for survivors,” says Aestrix, over the channel. “I…” made a gigantic mess. “… was not very precise in my aim. Whether you want to take prisoners or not is your business, you know the situation better than I do, but. …. I’d rather not leave anyone there to die slowly, either way.”

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"Yes, that would be for the best," Rokat agrees. "I'll arrange it."

She's quiet for a minute or two, perhaps having turned the pendant off.

"How are you feeling?" she asks.

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