//------------------------------//
// Chapter 4: Adventure Tactics 
// Story: Dungeons and Dazzles 
// by Eyeswirl the Weirded 
//------------------------------//

Nothing of interest really happened on their way to the spire in the center of the valley, just a lot of walking through grassy plains and distant creatures that, whether they looked capable of self-defense or not, were content to stay where they were, even if the sirens gave them wary glances. Sunset's first guess was that this was cooldown time set after what was supposed to be a panicky, hectic boss fight with that fiery boar, but maybe they just hadn't put anything hostile in the area yet. When they reached the spire, Sunset leaned in to read the little plaque stuck to the front of it.

"Ooh, okay, looks like this is the main quest here! It talks about an artifact of something-or-other being kept in a mountain fortress-" she stopped to point to the opposite side of the valley from which they'd approached, "-probably that one, how it's been there since some great war centuries ago and- well, whether we actually have to go get it or not, we'll probably get paid handsomely if nothing else."

"Cool," nodded Sonata, looking towards the mountain in question, "so, we just go there, nab the thing, and kill everything that tries to stop us?"

"Yep!"

And off they went! 

The walk along the valley path was uneventful, at least until they drew close enough to the mountain to see what was waiting for them at the top of the long, rocky ramp leading up to the entrance. Not yet alerted to their presence was a huge, black dragon, curled up and apparently asleep at the doorway to the mountain fortress.

Aria looked at Sunset. "Mini-boss time?"

"Probably, but at least here, we've got more room to maneuver, and aren't surrounded by lava. Adagio, you go up and whack it, we'll hang back and-"

"I beg your pardon?!" Visibly stressed already, Adagio pointed to the dragon. "You want me to just run right up to that thing, by myself, and get its full attention by waking it up?!"

"It's a game," Aria said while lightly pushing Adagio forward, "quit being such a wuss. We can just block whatever damage it does, right?"

Adagio's eyes narrowed. "Then why don't you wake it up?"

"Uh... b-because," She quickly glanced at Sunset. "it's, part of her strategy!"

The sirens looking to her for answers was something Sunset was starting to enjoy a little too much, but she restrained her reaction to a smile. "The plan is that Adagio, being stuck with melee range, can get in close and use healing potions if necessary while the rest of us, with our shorter health bars if all of the dragon's attacks aren't from the front or it gets a cheap shot in, shoot at it from a distance. Sonata can buff us and probably heal you from back here, a classic tank-and-spank!" The three searching looks made her blush. "Not what it sounds like, promise! So," she said while looking at Adagio, "think you're up to it?"

Her expression at the moment said 'No, this is scary, and I hate you, but I don't really have any other ideas, so here goes,' backed up by her tentatively stepping forward. 

When she started on the narrow, rocky pathway leading up to the dragon, cliffs she was smart enough not to gaze over on both sides, she raised her weapon in a blocking stance, getting closer at a steady pace. Sunset and Aria readied themselves to offer support fire in case the dragon woke up before Adagio reached it, Sonata getting ready with the short list of buffing spells Sunset had told her about during the walk over here. The only sounds were the blowing wind and Adagio's boots meeting the stone as she drew closer and closer. She stopped just a few feet away from the dragon.

Aria leaned closer to Sunset. "What's she doing?"

"You're asking me?"

"You're the tactician here!"

"That doesn't mean I know everything you guys are thin-"

The three of them saw Adagio's axe slooowly being raised over her head, then quickly and repeatedly come down on the dragon's massive neck, accompanied by the sounds of Adagio's frantic screams. 

The dragon quickly rose, letting out a bellowing roar as it wildly swung a scaly arm at its screaming, murderous alarm clock. The blow caught her in the stomach, sending her rolling backward as Sunset and Aria let loose with lightning bolts and thrown knives. Aria had to throw pretty hard to make that distance, but it looked like the knives that hit were still dealing damage. Sonata cast her damage buffs as the dragon spread its wings and took to the air, quickly closing in on the other three adventurers. Sunset saw it suck in a breath of air.

"Scatter, quick!!"

They ran in different directions, narrowly avoiding damage from the dragon's fire breath as it scorched the ground behind them. Using a minor potion to mend her wounds from the first hit, Adagio again raised her axe and charged back down the stone walkway. Sunset wasn't sure what it was about that sight that made her smile, but adrenaline always did weird things to her brain. Luckily, it wasn't anything detrimental this time as she thought to fire ice-spikes into the dragon's wing. Only a few hit, but it was difficult to say whether or not that was the reason it landed... right next to Aria.

"CRAP!!"

Aria herself uttered a much more vile string of words as she frantically swung her daggers at the beast, stumbling and falling backward as its jaws snapped at her. Looking up at it, she could swear it was smiling as it sucked in another breath, losing it by suddenly jerking its mouth upward and ejecting another stream of flames straight at the sky. Behind the dragon, Sonata could see Adagio doing to the dragon's tail what she had been doing to its neck just a moment before. She was on the fence between running closer to see if she could heal anyone and just casting Holy again when the dragon took to the air for the second time, flying around in no particular pattern before disappearing over a hill, Adagio, axe raised, in hot pursuit.

Sunset jogged over. "Everyone okay?"

"Yea," Aria said as she got to her feet, "still got all my limbs. Pretty sure I lost some health just from that thing biting near me, though."

Pointing her staff, Sonata sing-songed. "He-eal~!"

"...Thanks."

Sunset knew exactly why she smiled at Aria's begrudging little grin, but remembered that Adagio was quite possibly taking on a dragon by herself by now, and immediately ran in the direction she and the beast had gone. She and others found Adagio standing idly just on the other side of the hill, looking down into the grassy plain below.

"Um," Sunset asked, "Adagio? Where's the dragon?"

Adagio pointed to a towering humanoid, easily three meters tall, carrying a giant bone-club as it casually ambled away from the body of the dragon and its now-flattened head. 

"Man," Sonata said with a raised eyebrow, "this game is kinda broken. That's two bosses in a row that we barely had to do anything for."

Aria, her face twisting with rage, pointed at the giant. "FREAKIN' KILL-STEALER!!" 

The giant looked over his shoulder at her, causing her to squeak and duck behind Adagio. The ensuing stares she got from the others made her shrink down a little more as she tried to cover her face with her hood, but at least the giant had moved on. 

"Uh. I'll just, go see if that dragon had anything on him..."

The others stood guard as Aria cut open the dragon to secure a few hundred coins, one of its ribs, reclaim some of her throwing knives, and a little of her own dignity.

Meanwhile, Sunset chuckled. "Y'know, Spike was actually a dragon too. Kinda wondering how he'd feel about his simulated kin getting flattened by a giant cave-man." Silence. She looked at Adagio and Sonata to find them giving her blank looks. "Spike? Twilight's purple and green puppy?"

Sonata scratched her head. "There was a puppy...?"

"Oh," Adagio said while smacking the side of a balled fist into her palm, "Rarity mentioned this; he was the one that went and got Vinyl!"

"Who?"

Adagio chose to move right along. "That was supposed to be a dragon?"

"Well," Sunset uncertainly answered, "I don't really get it either, but in Equestria, yea, he was a dragon. Just a baby one, but still." Neither of them said anything, but the two sirens sharing a look made her curious. "...What?"

"A dragon turned into a puppy. Even as an infant, that's a reptilian creature turning into a mammal." Adagio looked down at her own hands. "We, hippocampi born of insect-like changelings and Discord itself, came out the same-" she pointed at Sunset, "-as a pony, apparently missing our scales."

Sonata reached back into her hood to brush her fingers through her ponytail. "But like, if a dragon turns into a dog and their scales are just fur over here...?"

Sunset felt her brain twisting to match the implications. "What, you think your hair... is your scales?"

"Given our lineage," Adagio answered while scrutinizing a long lock of her own hair, "it wouldn't surprise me if whatever magic handles the translation just didn't know how to process us. Our hair isn't uniformly the same color as our scales were, but I don't have any better explanation." There was probably something to be said for how tough their scales were in relation to how hard Adagio's hair could be to manage, but Rarity had made a lot of progress over these last few months.

Interested though she was in the theory, Sunset held off on thinking about what exactly would be needed to test it. The sirens were behaving themselves over here, and she wanted to think they'd continue to do so if allowed back into Equestria (nevermind how they might feel about only being permitted access to their own home world to act as guinea pigs...), but who knew what would happen if they went back without their gems? 

She'd message Twilight later, and maybe some day, they'd come up with something if the sirens were interested.


    	     


When they got back to the path the dragon had been blocking, they proceeded ahead far enough to reach the base of the mountain/fortress/citadel place. Here, they stopped for different reasons.

"Uh, Sunset?" Sonata pointed at the two diverging tunnels ahead of them. "How do we know which one to go through?"

"Unless there are two different final bosses and two different resolutions set up to this thing, they probably lead to the same place eventually. Even if not, we can just backtrack a little if we hit a dead end, so either way should be fine." She started toward the path on the left just because she was standing a little closer to it at the time, but Aria stopped her.

"Wait a minute..." She looked back and forth between the two paths, a thoughtful hand on her chin. "You said they either lead to the same place, or one's a dead end, right? So, if it's the first one, we could be missing half the loot for this place by the time we get to the end."

"Yeaaa...?"

"We get paid in the real world based on how much stuff we swipe, so if we split up and nab it all, we might get double the money."

"True," remarked Adagio as she glanced over her shoulder, "and not that I'm complaining, but things have been a little on the easy side so far. Still, if we do that, we should be careful; have a healer in both teams. Aria got hurt in the last sim when we split up and it would have been a problem had I not come looking for you two at the time." There were no objections. "Seeing as how I'm already on potion duty and sending the two mages together could backfire badly if they run out of mana or Aria and I end up needing magic for something, you two-" she indicated Aria and Sonata, "-go together and I'll stick with Sunset. If we come across any intersections with another path leading to the way forward, we should mark it in some way to indicate to the other group that we've been there if we don't see any other sign of each other."

Smiling, Sunset silently noted Adagio's affinity for recognizing and coordinating the aptitudes of those following her. "Even if one path's a dead end, the group that hits it first should be able to catch up to the other if the path on that side is pretty much clear. I'll probably burn a circle on a door or doorway or something for our group's mark."

Aria nodded. "I'll carve an 'X' on 'em, unless we find stickynotes around here somewhere. We all set?"

Tightly gripping her rod, Sonata beamed. "Let's get adventurin'!"

As the two pairs split up to make their ways through the separate tunnels, Adagio smiled.


    	     


Sunset and Adagio wandered through the stone tunnels, which quickly proved just wide enough to walk side by side with comfortable elbow room.

"So, not that I'm complaining," Adagio said quietly, as if testing the waters, "but I don't see any light sources that would feasibly light up the whole cave, and yet...?"

"I know it doesn't make a whole lot of sense that we can see where we're going without much trouble, but that's probably because it'd be annoying to have to fiddle with torches any time you weren't standing outside during the day."

"Fair enough. And, where do the giant webs come in?"

Sunset stopped walking. "Webs?"

Nodding, Adagio pointed far ahead, where impossibly huge thickets of spiderweb adorned the cave walls, leading to a dead end where the webs blocked the path completely.

"Ah," Sunset said a little louder than was strictly called for as a chill ran up her spine, "well, I g-guess that's to let us know that we can't go this way, level must not be done yet, so let's head back and-"

"Wait," Adagio said with a raised eyebrow, approaching the web-wall, "it's just spider webs, right? Maybe we can just break through it, I'll use my axe and-"

"Uh, we-" Thinkthinkthinkthink! "we should, uh, we should probably just head back, catch up with the others as soon as possible and-"

"It'll only take a minute to try," she called over her shoulder, raising the axe as she drew closer and closer to the barrier of webbing, "and I'd rather not tell Aria that we skipped out on loot if it turns out this stuff is destructible."

Crapcrapcrapcrapcrap!!

Rooted in place, Sunset frantically looked around for anything she could use to stop Adagio from unleashing doomsday, but there was nothing but rocky wall around them and the only other path was backward! She knew the tropes, she knew what was coming, that giant webs always meant giant spiders, whether it made any kind of sense or not. Unfortunately, the most compelling argument she could think of to stop was 'don't go that way, there might be monsters behind that wall,' but as this was a fantasy RPG, that was going to be true no matter where they went!

She could see Adagio raising the axe and readying her first swing, after which swarms of scuttling spiders would pour out of the gash, flow over the two of them in freakish, many-legged, many-eyed horror, countless bites melting their insides to drain through their eyeballs, their shriveled husks a warning to-

Whish!

Adagio had cut through the webs. Nothing happened, so she peered through the opening like a foal checking under their bed before going to sleep. She smiled over her shoulder. "The path continues from here, let's go!"

"Yay..."

In some weird way, Sunset was gratified to see that Adagio wasn't utterly fearless in the face of imminent spiders, but her slightly anxious face and guarded stance may have indicated fear in general of the dim, narrow corridor. If she hadn't noticed the tiny, skittering shapes moving among the webs (probably spider babies), Sunset wasn't sure pointing them out would be the best idea right now, and tempted though she was to just burn every inch of the corridor as they went, her mana wasn't infinite and she'd need it for the real threat. That threat came when they approached a relatively large, web-adorned dome that again gave Sunset mini-boss vibes, particularly the nightmarish sight of the huge, easily-two-meters-across spider busying itself with a large, web-covered pod in the center of the room.

Gaming habit kicking in, she glanced up before she could stop herself and felt her blood turn to ice-water as she found the ceiling to be crawling with giant spiders. There were only about a dozen big ones, but swarms of the little, scuttling ones. Sunset dared hope that the tiny spiders were just scripted set-dressing, because while the bigger ones might have made for a hairy encounter all by themselves, the little ones might make for a quick death by a thousand cuts.

Immediately looking for an escape route, Sunset spotted another webbed doorway, then whispered to Adagio. "Hey, I think if we move fast and keep quiet, we can get through that exit without alerting these things. You cut the web, I'll be ready to Fireball anything that looks at us funny, and the second the way is clear, we can both-... Adagio?"

"Oh you are so precious!"

Sunset looked around to find that Adagio wasn't next to her, but next to the spider in the middle of the room, her weapon sheathed, and hugging the thing. Sunset could have sworn she even heard-

"-wookit you with an' your widdle eyes, I see you! Yesh I do!"

-baby talk. The spider was flailing its long, freakish limbs and biting into Adagio's shoulder with its dripping, nightmarish fangs, and she was babbling at it in baby talk.

"Adagio," Sunset loud-whispered, forcing herself to focus on Adagio's barbarian mane and not the horror it barely concealed, "what the Hell are you doing?!" She shivered when Adagio turned to face her, inadvertently bringing the spider around to where Sunset could see it better.

"I love these creatures, especially the fuzzy ones! I know those don't make the silk structures, but-"

Sunset barely reminded herself in time not to shout so loud as to alert the nightmares still clinging to the ceiling. "They bite people!"

"So do cats and dogs."

"That one is biting you right now!"

"Hmph. I think you're jealous that he likes me better." 

"It's biting you!!"

"They're love-bites! See how softly he's doing it?"

It was, somehow, true; the spider was slowing down its assault into a kind of hesitant teething, as though it were having second thoughts about this meal. After another moment, it quit biting altogether, letting go of Adagio with its forearms as she gently stroked its... back? Its head? Sunset didn't know or care when Adagio stepped away from the creature.

"So, you said something about an exit?"

"Yes," she quickly answered while moving toward the web-covered corridor, "this way, let's go!"

Adagio strode along at a relaxed pace, Sunset just hoping the rest of the spiders were programmed to be triggered by the first one taking damage, not the party nearing the escape tunnel. With a quick swipe of the axe, they were free to go, the spider in the middle of the room having returned to its task of... eating unborn children or something.

Once they were a good distance from the spider room, she dared ask. "So... how did you know that thing wouldn't just keep attacking you?" She got a baffled stare.

"Why would I think it would?"

"Uh... b-because it's a monster in an RPG...?"

Adagio raised an eyebrow. "Those birds and deer outside didn't attack us, nor the giant when he saw us."

"Well, that, y-yea, but...!"

And then she remembered: The sirens didn't normally play games, possibly didn't watch a lot of TV, and probably didn't know the convention to these things, wouldn't know at first glance what was going to try to kill them and what wasn't. Was that why they gave the ambient critters outside those looks? The three of them probably didn't have the same, primordial fear of arachnids that a lot of land-walking species did, but whether that was due to their changeling heritage or Discord's, she wasn't sure.

Probably Discord. There's gotta be giant spiders that catch changelings in their webs, right?

Sunset shook her head. "Didn't it hurt when the thing bit you?"

"They were love-bites, I barely even felt them."

"Did you feel it when those goblins hit you?"

"I-..." Adagio's eyes went wide as she  trailed off, visibly making connections in her head. "Their attacks, their weapons, they felt... about the same..." Then she looked hurt. In the emotional sense. "He was trying to kill me!"

Facepalming, Sunset didn't know whether to laugh or cry.