“Jacobs' deception aside…” Darksider started.

  “Hey!” the healer in question protested.

  “...we should focus on the plan,” finished Darksider. “I think what Voice suggested with Jacobs changes is solid. We don’t know the fight, though, so be cautious and stay fluid. We should all be ready to switch targets or to pull back… No one let themselves get battle-focused and lose sight of the bigger picture.”

  “No berserking, got it,” G said, and then continued at the few inquisitive looks. “I can go into a battle high, increases damage, speed, reduces stamina drain, but I hyper focus on my target.”

  Voice went in first, the creature turned to him when charged through the nest at her, his sword a light with flame and his shield coated in ice. Daisy and Sam, closely on his tail, the others a little more sedately.

  I followed Peachy down into the arena, which gave me a better view of the area. I could see there were tunnels on opposite sides from each other, which had a steady but slow stream of smaller bugs going in and out. Peachy moved around the arena, grabbing as many of the creatures she could on one side, and I sent a towards a clump of them near one of the passages of the far side. It ignited with a little bit more of a whoomph than I was expecting, and several of the piles, ones which had a dark hue to them, were left burning.

  “Some of the poo piles are flammable!” I declared, before choosing my next set of targets.

  “Armour’s tough!” shouted G as his mail bounced ineffectively off of the cow-sized creature's chitinous armour.

  “Aim for the ripples, they are a little weaker there!” Sam called out, his rapier penetrating a spot to demonstrate what he meant.

  It was accompanied by the humongous bug releasing a barely audible screech.

  I then heard the rapid clicking coming from the two passageways, and it occurred to me. This was a broodmare queen, and in most insect colonies, they weren’t the fighters. It had guards for that… what if the swarm we had seen hadn’t been the defenders of the colony but the workers seeking food for their queen…

  I turned and sent a into the tunnel furthest from Peachy.

  “Incoming!” Jacobs shouted, I turned to see them coming out of Peachy’s tunnel. They were, while fewer in number, bigger in size than the ones we had faced before. I could hear my lightning arcing off the ones coming from the side I had set it. I turned and swore; there were way too many.

  “Back!” I shouted, “We need to choke point!”

  We shifted back. Kelsey had moved up alongside me and was alternating her knockback arrows towards the two tunnels. Another had been set up at the entrance to the other tunnel, and the arcs were regularly bouncing through the mobs, but it wasn’t going to be enough. The melee players moved behind us first, and then we all pulled back behind the tanks as we proceeded back the way we came. The queen didn’t follow.

  We pulled back to one of the tunnel’s thinnest sections, where Peachy and Voice stood side by side and G and George took the gaps at the sides. I dropped a smack in the middle of the growing swarm, then set a to sit in their path.

  Kelsey’s knockbacks weren’t as effective against these bigger creatures, and despite our combined efforts with the spells, the creatures were getting closer and closer to our line. Some were making it through our spell layers and had to be taken out by the front line using their melee weapons.

  And the number doing that was increasing.

  Jacobs Fireballs decreased as he focused more on healing the damage.

  It was going to be inevitable. The full swarm would hit our line, and the few that made it through already were taking their toll. So I made a Hail Mary play just as the bulk of the mobs were about to hit our front line…

  I filled the passage in front of them with my Arctic .

  The white blizzard enveloped our view. A freezing storm of cold, a rapid low pressure which caused a tugging on the air. Then the cold sent shivers down my spine as I focused my will on doing as much damage as I could for as long as I could.

  I could feel the darkness creep in around my vision. My focus shrank down to just a few of the creatures which made it through. Only to be beaten by the front line or knocked back into the whirling, swirling blizzard I conjured.

  I felt my knees give way first… and then my consciousness followed it. My final thought being of annoyance that I had held the spell too long.

  I was floating in absolute darkness. I couldn’t even hear the sound of my own breathing. It felt like time itself had stopped. I tried accessing my HUD, and I got some mental stimulation as it popped up in my vision. My mana bar was in the negatives, but I could see it slowly refilling… this must be why I was out cold.

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  Ahh, status unconscious… I tried access chat, access denied… although my out-of-game communications were still available.

  ‘You pushed your magic hard, going beyond what you thought were your limits and survived, allowing the Aether within you to grow denser, Aether point gained.’

  I looked at my mana bar again as it ticked up. Guess I was going to be out for a couple of minutes at least… letting my mana drop to zero in combat was definitely a big mistake… One I definitely was not going to live down…

  Fortunately, I didn’t have to just float here and wait. I opened up a browser and started to look online at some of the game's discussions.

  It was the return of sound to my world which let me know I was starting to come around again. I took the lack of combat to be a good sign. Followed by the sensation of being laid out on my back with something under my head. Definitely a good sign.

  I blinked my eyes open and stared up at the cave ceiling. It seemed vaguely familiar, so I didn’t think we had moved far from where we had been fighting. I sat up, trying to ignore the pounding headache I was feeling.

  “Welcome back…” a tired voice said. I looked over to meet Jacobs’ eyes.

  “Sorry…” I muttered, “Spell drained me faster than I had expected…”

  “It was a good call…” Peachy said. “You weren’t the only one to go out of mana…” She nodded her head at Daisy and Sam, who had been lying next to me. She then grabbed another of the larger scarabs and started to strip the chitin off. “We’ll discuss it later in group chat… the others will be on once we get out…”

  “What happened?” I asked, looking around…I could see George standing watching the cave entrance, but none of the others.

  “After you dropped, your spell dropped. It faded down, revealing what was left of the swarm. They hit us, only a fraction of what was there originally, but they hit hard…” Peachy said before grabbing another scarab.

  “Peachy’s new shield took the brunt of the damage from them… Voice didn’t have that reduction. Daisy was managing to keep him alive until she collapsed like you… and Voice went down before I realised he didn’t have a healer…” Jacobs said sadly.

  “I managed to get the last of the mobs taunted, but not before they took out Kelsey, G and Darksider…”

  “Your friend there is a beast… he was dodging them like crazy, mixing magic, pistols and those blades of his…” George said… “He went down taking the last of them with him… never seen anything like it… If anyone got a good recording of the fight, we should post it…”

  “The queen?” I asked.

  “Weaker than we had thought… it’s dead…” George said.

  “They OK?” I asked, nodding at the two who were still out.

  “Same as you, I hotted them both, but unconscious until their mana is back up.”

  “Loot?” I finally asked.

  “We’re waiting on you two before we check out the nest…just in case… You should meditate… your pool will take the longest to refill…” Jacobs said.

  “How long until the others respawn?” I asked.

  “Kelsey is back up already, her first, so she’ll be back with us soon. She’s dodging carts. Around an hour for the others, two for G, due to his deaths in the underwater park,” Peachy said.

  “Death timer goes up?” I asked, surprised.

  “Yeah, it goes down by a death after each day… but it can stack up quickly if you die a lot…” Jacobs said.

  Daisy came around about a minute later. Jacobs took the distraught healer aside, and they had a quiet conversation about the fight from a healing perspective. Honestly, healers are a different breed; all that responsibility on your shoulders can be devastating when you fail. That's why you need to remind them of the rule. If the healer dies, it’s the tank's fault for not holding the aggro. If the tank dies, it’s the tank’s fault for taking on too much. And if the DPS dies, it’s their own fault; they shouldn’t be taking any damage, so they must have screwed up somehow. Which I think I could hear Jacobs doing, while he ignored Peachy's eye rolls.

  Sam was up as well by the time Jacobs and Daisy finished chatting. She was still clearly upset, but no longer seemed to be spiralling as she had been. The three of us got into some meditation and… honestly, group meditation like this was kind of mellow, peaceful even.

  Even though I started first, I was the last to finish, and there wasn’t much left of the pile of corpses, but I joined them all in stripping the crafting materials from the scarabs. Kelsey arrived just in time to join in with the last six corpses. She and Sam shared a hug when she first got there, and despite not rushing it, the pair still stripped their scarabs quicker than I did.

  “How many did we kill?” I asked, looking at the discard pile that was halfway up the wall.

  “I’m trying not to think about it,” Peachy said. “Lots…”

  “How is it looking?” Peachy asked George as we moved over to join him, looking into the nest.

  “Pretty quiet. There were some of the small ones earlier, but no movement for the last few minutes… Looting time?” he replied to her.

  The six of us moved quietly into the nest and looked around.

  “The queen bled out…” Jacobs announced. “Yours and Darksiders blows, I think,” he said to Sam.

  “They really couldn’t handle the cold…” Sam said. “We should make sure we all have the elemental weapons spells…”

  The scarabs had been dragging various things down here. Some looked and smelled like some kind of animal faeces. A careful examination showed it was their preferred medium for the things eggs to be laid in. Some eggs, though, were also laid into piles of burnt-out electronics, a couple in a pile of cables. From the various piles we accrued a handful of armour crafting crystals, not enough for a full armour set, but the start of a couple of different ones. We found a nice collection of weapon crystals, including another shield.

  “Aenara,” George called out. “I think you will be interested in this one…” He was looking at the largest of the piles, one that looked like the queen had been moving towards when she died. I joined him, and my eyes went wide. In the centre of the pile was the largest of the eggs I had seen. Surrounding it were some of the most intact components from any of the piles. It was like someone had taken the choice pieces for this one pile. A belt had been used at a seat for the egg, identified as a ‘Belt of the Forge’, offered fire resistance and bonuses to blacksmithing. There were a pair of pistols which were remarkably like Desert Eagles, with a spare magazine and a waist holster for each. Some powercells, a few other things I remember being on the town's priority list. And then there was the reason George had called me over, the teleporter cores.

  Two of them.