There was no time to argue about strategy or positioning. Drayya held out a hand to prevent Lieze from running off, but she didn't have the time to convince the girl with the Gibberling rampaging towards their location. She had no choice but to run as fast as her legs would carry her into the depths of the dungeon.
Spurred on by the instinct of a predator, the Gibberling elected to pursue the lone Lieze instead of the engorged horde of thralls idling behind Drayya - a relief she would have been grateful for if Lieze's life hadn't suddenly been placed on the chopping block. The bristled hairs atop the creature's skin stood on end as it squeezed its way through the corridors, exposing its undefended rear to Drayya's thralls.
Her first reaction was to command the Void Beast to attack, only to order its retreat a second later. The Gibberling was gone in an instant, rounding a corner faster than one would think possible to pursue its escaping prey. Drayya was left listening to its maddening screeches bouncing from the labyrinth's polished walls, unsure of how to pursue it.
Meanwhile, Lieze's attention was focused on not losing her footing as she stole through the dungeon's halls, resisting the urge to look behind her whenever the Gibberling emerged onto a particularly long stretch of flat ground. A powerful mage she may have been, but an athlete she was most certainly not, and before a sprinkling of minutes had passed, she was already beginning to run short of breath.
Unlike her fortunate attempt to strike the Gibberling earlier, there was no time to turn on her heels and intone another spell without risking her life. She would have to rely on Drayya's quick thinking to exploit the beast's thankfully quite pitiful attention span - and she would have to do so quickly before it inevitably closed the gap between itself and Lieze.
She kept to the familiar stretches of the dungeon, which was more difficult than she could have ever anticipated. Telling apart one featureless hallway from another was imperative to ensure that she wouldn't run into a trap or - worse yet - a dead-end.
Her recollection of familiar places only became more fuzzy as she was forced to take multiple corners at once whenever the Gibberling strayed a tad too close for comfort. Any attempt to outmanoeuvre the beast only seemed to deepen its frenzied concentration, increasing the pace at which its three-toed limbs slammed against the ground.
Having crawled for one second too many, the Gibberling's slavering maw aimed itself in Lieze's direction. A great warmth was building up within the creature's core, taking shape as a blinding glow emanating from the depths of its gullet.
Gibberling's MP - 5,959 / 6,959
A fell mixture of sorcery and acidic saliva erupted in Lieze's direction. The furnace-like warmth of its casting gave Lieze just enough time to glance over her shoulder and prepare a [Blood Barrier] to prevent herself from being dissolved alive.
[Staff of Thraldom] Stored MP - 1,100 / 3,417
The projectile splattered against the shield, dispersing its payload across the width of the passage. Wherever the mana-infused spittle settled, decay soon followed in its wake. Entire swathes of black quartz melted into slag over the course of a few measly seconds, weakening the structure of the dungeon even further. Lieze's [Blood Barrier], too, was quickly eaten away by the sludge.
"So that's what it uses its mana for…" She thought, "The projectile itself doesn't appear to do any damage, but the acidic effect is powerful enough to melt stone… I'll be dead if I'm hit by so much as a stray droplet."
Presumably, the Gibberling sported a resistance to its own caustic brew, or else it would have been boiling alive long before Lieze and Drayya ventured into the dungeon. But that wasn't to suggest that it couldn't be used against the creature.
"The entire weight of the dungeon is being supported by these lower layers…" She distracted herself from the aching in her joints with strategy, "A clean hit to a weakened section of the ceiling would cause a landslide of debris from above…"
Her plan was developing independently of Drayya's contribution, who for all Lieze knew had gotten herself lost within the twisting corridors. With that said, trying to come up on the rear of a creature tearing through the dungeon like nobody's business was easier said than done.
-And what a trial it was turning out to be. A league of shambling Gravewalkers trying their best to locomote atrophied limbs was making it rather difficult for Drayya to keep a good pace. She gave up on the idea of chasing after the Gibberling within the first minute, instead switching to a strategy of predicting Lieze's movements and placing herself in a strategically sound position for an ambush - again, simple in theory, but difficult to execute.
Transmutation would be the factor that determined success. In order to attack the Gibberling from behind, it would first need to be immobilised. Without a blockade of sacrificial thralls, there would never be any hope of doing so, but Drayya had just the thing to perform a similar strategy without wasting her minions.
Communion with the God of Many Faces differed from communion with the Blackbriar. Drayya was one of the few necromancers of the Order who understood this difference, having honed the art in secret over the course of many years. Whereas the Blackbriar sought to invade the mind of its acolytes, the God of Many Faces demanded that one achieve a certain state of mind before its power could be channelled - a state of perfect, ethereal depersonalisation.
Drayya closed her eyes - not only to distract from the screeching chorus bouncing from the dungeon walls, but also to separate herself from the world and its material form. It was a difficult mindset to adopt, requiring one to acknowledge the existence of their ego and the possibility of physical rebirth.
She imagined her body and soul as separate entities. Like gears, they each served their own purpose, but couldn't accomplish anything without operating in tandem. She could not hope to meld one or the other while they weren't in motion, and so perceiving them as individuals aided in visualising the desired change. Her train of thought extended to the Gravewalkers under her command. Unlike Drayya, they were mere shells - devoid of spirit and will, making them excellent and unproblematic subjects for transmutation spells.
Drayya's MP - 432 / 982
The light from her torch bended towards an empty space in the passage, morphing into impersonators of the Gravewalkers. Drayya's concentration came to an end after the fifth facsimile was created. Her brain felt like it was about to catch fire.
"Oh… that really takes it out of me…" She rubbed her forehead, "Hopefully this will be enough…"
The copies weren't true simulacrums of the real thralls. Perfect, intelligent doppelgangers were far beyond Drayya's ability to create. They were in fact mere illusions, albeit indistinguishable from the original articles. It was a spell she'd worked tirelessly to master as a younger woman, though her time as a Deathguard had provided exactly zero opportunities to put it to good use.
"That beast won't be smart enough to tell them apart from the real thing." She said, "If I found the right place to set them up…"
She went off in search of a dead-end, of which there were plenty to happen upon within the labyrinth. Taking great care not to stray too far from the Gibberling's location, she commanded the ethereal Gravewalkers to take up position right against the wall of one such turnaround. All that remained to be done was to await Lieze's - and the Gibberling's - arrival.
"If we can divert its attention towards the illusions somehow, we could trap it facing backwards…" She theorised, "That'd give us the chance we need to kill it. But how are we going to get it to take the bait?"
She could only hope that Lieze would pick up on her idea and fill in the missing gaps.
Meanwhile, the girl in question was starting to reach the end of her rope. Long-distance sprinting was not among the exercises she would have considered herself particularly talented at. Her diminishing supply of adrenaline was just about the only thing allowing her to place one foot in front of the other - an effort complicated by the occasional globules of acidic saliva being flung in her direction.
As she turned yet another corner in her circuit through the labyrinth, she was relieved to spot Drayya and the thralls idling near an intersection. Not a second later, the Gibberling hoved into earshot behind her, barely 10 feet away from making Lieze its next meal.
"You're supposed to be behind me!" She yelled.
"How do you expect me to chase something that fast!?" Drayya screamed from further down the hallway, pointing towards the opposing passageway, "Can you lure it this way!? There's a dead-end! It might get stuck!"
"Not without trapping myself…" Lieze muttered between pants.
She was forced to admit that Drayya had a point. The Gibberling clearly wasn't accustomed or adapted to moving through the dungeon's layers, or it would have caught up to Lieze already. If she could find some way of slipping behind it, the beast would almost certainly have some trouble turning itself around in the cramped space.
The time for theorising came to a sudden close. The left turn into the dead-end was approaching rapidly. Lieze had to make a decision - continue her fruitless sprint straight ahead and restart the chase from the beginning with far less stamina, or take a chance on a half-formed theory.
Both were undesirable, but one provided at least some possibility of emerging victorious. Lieze's shoes skidded across the polished floor as she hung a left towards the dead-end, spotting a conspicuous group of Gravewalkers idling near the end of the passageway.
"Did Drayya place those here as bait?" She wondered, "If I could suddenly disappear from the Gibberling's field of view, it would probably direct its attention towards them…"
Disappear. How could she disappear? A guttural roar from behind reminded her that time was not a resource she had in abundance. Her fate was already sealed if she couldn't think of something quickly.
Her body moved faster than her mind, hand diving into her Bag of Holding and wrapping around the intricate fleurs of a gaudy circlet. With a clumsy movement, she half-donned the headwear and envisioned the space directly behind the Gibberling.
Lieze's MP - 0 / 1980
!MANA BURNOUT!
The 2,000 MP needed to activate the circlet's [Master Teleportation] ability was more than enough to deplete her mana entirely, and because it wasn't a [Necromancy] spell, her focus was incapable of covering the cost. Even so, it activated, and in a single instant, Lieze found herself teleported behind the Gibberling's repulsive form.
The beast was perplexed to see its quarry vanishing into thin air, but found its primal anger redoubled by the presence of five statuesque Gravewalkers observing it from the end of the corridor.
Gibberling's MP - 2,959 / 6,959
A slug of corrosive spit jettisoned from its gullet with impunity as it continued its charge. The projectile passed straight through the immaterial thralls, landing squarely against the back wall and splitting off from the impact to coat the dead-end in boiling saliva.
Expecting a free meal, the Gibberling was faced with inconsolable confusion as the Gravewalkers turned to smoke while passing into the abyss of its maw. Without anything in place to slow its momentum, it slammed into the wall, sending tremors through the entire layer.
As the acid ate into the dungeon's foundations, chunks of rubble dislodged from the already-crumbling infrastructure, quickly encasing the Gibberling in an impenetrable tomb of stone. Drayya stepped forward to grab Lieze by the shoulders as the latter lost her footing on the way back to the intersection.
"Oh no…" The raven-haired girl recoiled as another tremor sent showers of dirt and pebbles down from widening cracks in the ceiling, "I think that might have been the last straw…"