Sera woke up in the same bed she’d slept in the night before, which although not familiar quite yet was at least recognizable. Before she even opened her eyes an aching pain rose up from her stomach, accompanied by weakness that assaulted her muscles and sapped her will to move. Hesitantly, she forced her lethargic arms to move and reached for her chest, expecting to find bandages or a torn shirt crusted with dried blood, but all she found was soft cloth. It took her a moment to realize she’d just tested the site of her wound with hands that should have been just as badly damaged.


    Finally understanding that her wounds were already fully healed, she wondered briefly how long she had to have been in a coma for that to be possible- then her brain finished rebooting and she remembered that wasn’t how things worked here. In Omichlódis. A place where literal divine miracles could heal the sick and mend the wounded. From what she understood it wasn’t easy to treat injuries as bad as hers had been, but it wasn’t impossible.


    With that knowledge Sera managed to identify the pain she was feeling. It was just hunger. She was positively ravenous, to the point that it felt like her stomach was going to start digesting her from the inside out. Deciding to do something about that, Sera opened her eyes and realized she wasn’t alone. Tiriana was passed out in a chair she’d found somewhere and Vivi was laying on the cold, hard floor, pressing her cheek into the magically formed stone.


    As soon as Sera lifted her head, Tiriana jerked awake, instantly alert and searching for danger. She’d probably used an alarm spell to notify herself when Sera woke up, not considering what she typically cast them for. Sera noticed that the elf looked exhausted; there were bags under her eyes and her skin seemed a bit off-color.


    “Oh, it’s just you,” Tiriana said with a sigh of relief. “How are you feeling?”


    “Hungry,” Sera grunted. Tiriana laughed before standing and hurrying to the door. She opened it a bit and stuck her head out.


    “She’s awake!” she shouted into the hall, closing the door afterwards to return to her seat. “Sorry about that, someone will bring you something to eat in a minute. We kind of expected you’d need something to eat right away- Vivi was so spent she had to cut some corners and help your body heal itself, rather than substituting divine energy.”


    “So I guess we’re alive then,” Sera observed. At some point during all the fighting she’d stopped expecting to survive, which probably explained her lack of hesitation at the end.


    “Most of us,” Tiriana corrected somberly. “There were a lot of injuries and not enough clerics to go around. Some of the Aegis Company adventurers didn’t make it through.”


    “What about Rinnie?” Sera asked, surprising herself with how worried she felt about the acerbic dryad.


    “Alive…somehow,” Tiriana answered with exasperation. “At some point those leapers managed to pry her armor off. I’ve never seen someone survive so many stab wounds.”


    “Another weird dryad thing?” Sera guessed.


    “When I asked how she lived through that, she replied with a question: ‘When was the last time you stabbed a tree to death?’” Tiriana relayed to Sera, frowning. “I pointed out that trees have a vascular system too, but she just questioned why I wanted to know how to kill her. I…didn’t really have a response to that.”


    It suddenly dawned on Sera why Tiriana had had issues with the other adventurers that formed the original expedition with her. The question had been knocking around somewhere in the back of her head ever since meeting Layla and Rinnie; with Rinnie becoming a bit more agreeable lately it had bothered her even more. Put simply, the mage lost all tact when her intellectual curiosity was piqued.


    “Yeah, that’s a fair reaction,” Sera noted with a sigh. “Should we…check on Vivi, by the way?” She looked pointedly at the unconscious cleric.


    “Eh, I’ve seen her sleep in worse places,” Tiriana denied with a shrug. A knock on the door interrupted the conversation as a woman Sera didn’t know entered with a tray of bread and some kind of broth, leaving immediately after handing it over with instructions to eat slowly.


    “So what else happened after I passed out?” Sera asked as she tore a piece of bread off and dipped it in the broth for flavor.


    “Not a whole lot. Mostly cleanup and treating the injured. We’ve got a lot of samples of intact nachzehrer armor to take apart now, so we might be able to find more weaknesses. Other than that…there was a bit of trouble getting the airship back down without lowering the barrier, but once the engineering team was convinced to leave the secondary core room they managed to figure it out,” Tiriana summed up as Sera ate. Nodding along, Sera just worked on her meal, letting the conversation die for a while as she finished. Before long there was another knock on the door and Cadenza entered.


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    “Good to see you feeling better,” the gray-skinned adventurer said as she entered. She noticed Vivi conked out on the floor a moment later and gave Tiriana a concerned look. “Is she-”


    “She’s a cleric of Adventure, it’s not the worst position she’s slept in,” the elf dismissed before Cadenza could finish.


    “If you say so. Anyway, I just wanted to stop by and thank you for your contributions. I’ve already commended Tiriana, but you performed well defending the core. Beside that, your insight might just have won us the battle,” Cadenza told Sera, leaving the matter of Vivi’s sleeping habits aside. Sera gave the adventurer leader an odd look, not sure what she was referring to.


    “The nachzehrer weak points?” she asked, giving it her best guess. “It seemed like the bait-and-switch strategy had a lot more impact than that.”


    “Actually, I meant your remarks about the tunneling. Dr. Kahnton’s earth mages had time to check before going up on the airship. They spotted and collapsed several surprisingly large tunnels leading into the bowels of the fortress,” Cadenza clarified, folding her arms and leaning back against the door.


    “You think the nachzehrer were planning to use them again?” Sera questioned next. “Isn’t that just speculation?”


    “It turns out they were able to reopen a small passage in time for the battle- we think it’s how that officer and its entourage got in. It was so narrow they would have had to crawl through it, so they couldn’t get many troops through, but it was enough to make a move for the core,” Tiriana chimed in.


    “They may have succeeded in the end, too, if Vivi hadn’t reactivated the traps on the lower levels. She caught the next wave off-guard when they were already inside the blast radius of various traps,” Cadenza added. “For that matter…when we investigated the other side of the tunnel, we found they’d been trying to widen the hole until the end. There’s evidence there was a much larger force waiting on the other end, but they must have retreated when they realized they wouldn’t be able to catch us by surprise anymore. And that was just one tunnel. If they were planning to use all of them…”


    “Oh,” Sera mouthed as everything clicked together in her head. “That’s what you meant. You think the tunnels were the real attack. I did think what you said on the wall was strange- that it was both wasteful and reckless for them to waste troops just to play mind games with our artillery.”


    “Exactly. The second wave was meant to convince us they’d played their hand when in reality it was only another distraction. But they must not have checked the tunnels first, so they entire plan fell apart and they had to make a play for the core instead,” Cadenza confirmed.


    “So their entire plan was one big shell game, but they botched it because they were complacent,” Sera observed, setting her empty tray aside.


    “The nachzehrer were so convinced we were just more alchemists that they assumed the same tactics would work on us. And if the alchemists never figured out to check for tunnelers…” Tiriana continued, trailing off as she had a realization.


    “Then neither would we. And they were right, just for the wrong reasons. We assumed they would avoid strategies that magic made obsolete, failing to consider that the civilization that created the nachzehrer would have fought their wars without magic, against foes that didn’t have it either- and when they finally had an enemy that did use it, they were so inexperienced at war that they couldn’t predict the simplest of strategies,” Cadenza summed up, clenching her jaw in frustration.


    “Before Layla killed that officer, they said something about how we don’t fight like alchemists and they knew to plan differently next time,” Sera recalled.


    “I heard,” Cadenza confirmed. “The barrier is a powerful defense and we’ll be watching for tunnels going forward, but we’re going to have to break out the history books to have any chance of predicting what they might use next. We can’t assume they’ll avoid trying something just because there’s a magical counter available.”


    “…I can think of a few possibilities off the top of my head,” Sera volunteered. Earthworks might protect against even Cadenza’s fearsome railgun spell- long ranged artillery batteries behind earthworks might be able to attack the barrier with impunity. Missiles were another alarming threat modern magical civilization might not expect. Had they developed supersonic flight, or countermeasures to it?


    For all that the people of Omichlódis were incredibly advanced, it came with the caveat that their magical technology had progressed along entirely different lines. Magic had provided other solutions to problems.


    “Good. We’ll need that insight if we’re going to stay here,” Cadenza replied.


    “Didn’t you say you were a mistwalker as well? Your world didn’t have magic either, did it?” Tiriana asked Cadenza, who nodded slowly.


    “I am…but I’ve been here for decades. At least as long as I lived on Twire. I wasn’t exactly knowledgeable about this sort of topic in the first place- I was a dancer before I arrived in Omichlódis,” she shared. Subject aside, it explained her fighting style- she must have learned to integrate fighting into the way she already knew how to move her body, rather than developing her skills to the point of flowing gracefully across the battlefield.


    “I’m not an expert either, but I’ll do what I can,” Sera promised. “Just keep in mind I can really only share things that were common knowledge.”


    “What’s common knowledge for you won’t always be common knowledge for us, or vice versa. Anything we can get improves the odds a bit more,” Cadenza asserted before pushing away from the door. “Anyway, that’s all I had to say. There’s going to be a party later, so get as much rest as you can. We’ll be celebrating the victory as well as honoring the dead.”


    With that said, Cadenza left the room, leaving Sera and Tiriana alone. Mostly. After the door closed, Vivi stirred at last, slowly rising to a sitting position and twisting her neck back and forth, producing audible popping sounds. She looked back and forth between the other two women groggily for a few moments before speaking.


    “I think you need a rug.”