Kazue was embarrassed on top of all her other emotions. She had charged into battle when her temper had flared, she had defeated a raid boss, and then, right at the end, she had faltered, unable to finish off the kobold who she knew would be forced to continue fighting them if he had recovered. Moriko had to finish the job for her. It was pathetic.

This was far worse than the delve into Dersuta's territory. There was no care, no passion, no fun, no humor, nor anything else of value behind the construction of the territory or the designs of Svetlana's inhabitants. It was a mockery, and she could practically feel the resentment between the core and her inhabitants.

She hadn't noticed it when they visited Dersuta, because it was the same with Azeria and Kuiccihan, but Kazue now realized that she could sense when there was harmony between a core and its inhabitants, and that meant being assaulted in this nexus with the distinct and unpleasant feeling of dissonance between core and inhabitants.

On top of that, almost everything here felt like a mockery of her and people like her; not just kitsune, but anyone of mixed bloodlines.

It was all horrible.

Kazue had done her best to ignore as much of the environment as possible and just focus on helping some of the injured soldiers, but it was hard to pretend not to see what had been done. She still wasn't sure what had set her off like that against the kobold mage, but now, with her anger spent, Kazue mostly felt tired, emotionally and physically. So once the zone was more thoroughly secured, she sat down to meditate with Carnelian Flame settled across her shoulders; she needed to regain her mental balance and restore her mana, as well as let her body rest.

Fuyuko and Amrydor took a break with her, which left Kazue with mixed feelings. Either her stamina for this sort of thing was as low as a pair of fifteen-year-olds; her spouses wanted to make sure she had company and wasn't alone; or both. She could ask, but maybe it was best to not find out if they felt like she needed 'guards'.

This did not stop nor slow the progress of the delve. Mordecai could maintain what he was doing almost indefinitely, and there was a constant flow of more troops — far more than they had trained over all those months in Azeria. But that was why Mordecai had made sure to send some of them back home early, to start the new training camps. Moriko, Bellona, and Xarlug were also still fresh enough to continue, but they also hadn't spent themselves in sudden fury the way Kazue had.

Still, this didn't leave Kazue's group very far behind once Kazue had recovered. The individual sections of these zones were much larger and took a lot more troops to occupy, so the lead troops were taking longer to advance on the next section.

The leaders of these squadrons were all people who had trained in Azeria. Kazue couldn't have possibly named them all, at least, her avatar couldn't have, but she did vaguely recognize faces, and she'd had her earring active since the delve started, as had the others. If they needed information quickly, a moment or two of distraction might be dangerous. Also, this meant that the cores could analyze all the passive information overheard and process it to see if there was anything their avatars missed.

The twelfth zone boss had already been taken down by the time Kazue, Fuyuko, and Amrydor had caught up to the front force, and Kazue forced herself to do no more than glance at the body of the dragon, though that seemed to be stretching the definition. All of the dragons of Azeria were beautiful and magnificent creatures of power, unlike this wretched-looking thing that the soldiers were already harvesting.

Well, except for some like the dracobits, but they were cute instead of powerful looking, so that didn't count, she was sure.

The thirteenth zone presented another change in tone. There were swarms of imp-like creatures supporting the more powerful draconic creatures, plus demonic-looking recreations of the kobold and mixed-blood mockeries of the earlier zones. It hurt to see these twisted creatures made from old tales of horror mixed with mockeries of people like herself and those she loved. They were also a reminder of how many of those old tales were themselves partial and corrupted tales about Mordecai's original nexus.

It was also where they were when the next reset hit, meaning they had been delving for about twelve hours now. When re-manifested creatures started swarming in from the next section of the zone, Kazue did not attempt to reengage the kobold sorcerer; she had enough to deal with just mitigating the impact of so many fresh combatants. Not that the raid boss seemed to enjoy his experience with Moriko and Sparks any more than he had enjoyed Kazue and Carnelian's assault.

Instead, she poured her emotions and mana blindly into raw manifestations of her magic as she flew over the packed crowd below and maneuvered around the few groups of flying creatures, with Carnelian Flame flying in her wake, spewing fire to assault any enemies that got too close. In most fights, it would be an inefficient use of her energy, but with so many enemies crowded close together, most of them much weaker than her, it was a perfect tool.

Her dreams, nightmares, hopes, fears, and pain were all used to fuel the semi-real dreams made manifest and create chaotic illusions; some manifesting as physical creations of light and sound, others only hallucinations created in the minds of her victims. Kazue didn't bother to try to choose what parts of her mind were echoed by her magic; the incoherence and chaos were part of the point.

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When she had finished her fly-by of the enemies and had flown back to a safer area, Kazue could take a moment to examine her handiwork. While it was impossible to tell what mental images some of them were reacting to, it was rather entertaining to see some of them battle illusory recreations of everything from some of her cute inhabitants to the powerful beasts of Dersuta's nexus to a few patches of that gross mass she had to fight alongside Moriko and Bridgette.

Others were swept up in dreams and recreations of other events, such as the kobolds that appeared to be trying to recreate the dance that Mordecai and Satsuki had performed during the mid-winter festival.

Then Kazue blushed as she caught what some of them were trying to do with illusions ranging from scenes she'd written for her books to recreations of, um, activities, that she and her spouses had enjoyed. Oh dear. She hoped that everyone else was too busy to really notice, especially Fuyuko.

Mordecai simply turned his head to wink and smirk at her before turning most of his attention back to his fight. Oh, of course he'd be able to pay enough attention to notice. Then Moriko's laughter started echoing out of her earring at the same time that Kazue's core said, "No, oh no, what did I do? No, Mordecai, stop telling me what my illusions are doing! I don't want to know that!"

Kazue glared at Mordecai as she used a wand to blast lightning through a small pack of wyverns that had chased after her. He blithely ignored her surely terrifying expression as he finished taking down the dragon raid boss. She kind of felt bad for the kobold mage, though; Moriko had started laughing out loud in the middle of their battle.

Well, on the plus side, her magic had certainly helped keep the pressure off of the soldiers; not only were a lot of the enemies preoccupied with not attacking, the ones who had not been affected by her magic were having to deal with the other ones taking up a lot of space and flailing about, or sometimes even attacking their fellows.

Thankfully, it looked like Fuyuko had been too preoccupied to notice the more peculiar activities some of the creatures were engaged in — her bow was firing continuously to keep aerial enemies at bay, who were also more likely to be strong enough to resist Kazue's mass magic. This kept her gaze above where most of the, um, activities were taking place. Amrydor, on the other hand, had a beet red face, and he was clearly trying to ignore anything other than enemies that got close enough to be a threat to Fuyuko.

If Bellona or Xarlug had noticed anything, they were hiding it well. She was hoping that they just hadn't noticed. As for the Trionean soldiers, Kazue was going to pretend that she didn't care what rumors were going to spread about her, even if she suspected that some of the stories were going to make her sound like a half-crazed, murderous sex fiend.

...

Huh. That sounded like some of the more extreme stories that were sometimes whispered about Lady Mericume. Or some of the more infamous stereotypes of kitsune in general. She really hadn't helped to break that stereotype, had she?

"You know," Mordecai's core said thoughtfully, "I am certain that your knight would be impressed to hear such tales about her queen."

"Don't you dare!" Kazue's avatar and core responded in perfect synchronization.

Moriko's laughter redoubled, and Kazue couldn't tell if Mordecai's laughter was coming from his core, his avatar, or both. Probably both.

During all of this, Kazue had continued to rotate through her selection of wands to blast any flying creatures that were either chasing her or the baby dragons, or harassing ground-bound soldiers. At this point, the front line of Trionean forces were elite enough to have some flying soldiers and mages, but overall, they were still a minority. Most soldiers needed external spells or enchanted items to fly, which was expensive, so only the more elite forces were going to be provided with such things regularly.

Kazue's embarrassment and the resulting interactions with Mordecai and Moriko had helped keep her from thinking too much about the ongoing battle, but she found it strange to realize that she was now experienced enough to pay attention to a conversation while fighting.

Once that massive battle was done, Mordecai was the only one of their group who was able to continue on immediately, though it did take several minutes for the soldiers to reorganize themselves into squadrons. There were at least mild injuries spread throughout the different squadrons, but Mordecai only wanted uninjured people in the lead groups, so the soldiers were recombining with the reinforcements that had been arriving in steady waves.

At this point, the encampment on the surface had to be nearly emptied. Not only were there soldiers occupying every inch of the nexus territory that had been cleared, there were soldiers still making their way down to their current zone. There was no reasonable way to have people standing by; instead, for the early zones, the squadrons had been sent in with ten minutes of spacing between.

According to the plan Mordecai had laid out, the time between each group was to be gradually increased to account for the longer fights and any other delays that might have occurred. The last squadrons were supposed to be sent in with a full hour between them, though by the time they caught up to the front, there would be less than an hour gap.

In fact, it looked like the front line was currently the bottle neck, given how quickly more troops had been able to reinforce them. That made Kazue feel a bit more secure about setting up a mini camp with the others while Mordecai went ahead. They only had about five hours to eat and rest before they needed to get moving and catch back up to Mordecai, so that they could help deal with the raid bosses again.

There being only three raid bosses was a good sign. Four raid bosses would have required Svetlana to have twenty zones or to have acquired a boon that Deidre wasn't aware of, so there were at most nineteen zones to cover. Twenty or more zones had been extremely unlikely anyway; if Dimitri was strong enough to maintain control over a nexus that large, then this was going to be a lot harder than expected.

Deidre had also been able to confirm that Svetlana had sixteen zones when she had been sent to attack Azeria.

That gave them a four-zone range of possibilities. Well, they would need to get closer to the core before Mordecai would be willing to give his opinion on how many remained, so there was nothing to do about it except to get some rest and then continue the battle.

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