I turned myself over to my skill. It was both a great and terrible idea. While it was a great thing for when I needed to make something. It wasn’t the best thing to do in battle. Yet, I needed every edge I could get, and so I danced with the weapons in my hands.

Gremlins were small, almost fragile things. Evil killers that would eat children and loved to cause those around them to suffer, but fragile. I had been much more fragile myself just a few days before, but with my new armor, I was hoping to stand against the tide.

I stepped forward to the tripped gremlin and saw my sword snake out, scoring across the neck of the floundering monster. Then I crossed two steps in front of the right side of the charging gremlins. With each step I took, I used my hatchet to either remove a limb or a head.

I had reached the wall and so turned to put my back to it. I left just enough room to be able to move but hopefully not enough for a gremlin to get behind me. As I was turning, I struck out with my sword plucking a claw-like hand from an outstretched arm.

The battle gave the feeling almost like when I was in the Lich dream. I was inside my body experiencing what was going on and yet was also watching. However, this time there wasn’t a gut-wrenching horror show of my actions towards people. No, this time, I watched and learned how best to dance with monsters.

The gremlins advanced towards me in a mass that seemed numberless. There was screaming and screeching. They were mindless in their pursuit of me as they would just as soon step on each other as they would attack me.

It wasn’t but a few moments into my dance that I had to leave the wall. There were just too many of them, and while having an angle of attack that they couldn’t get at me was great, it also limited how I moved. I need to be able to dance around the rising tide of bodies.

My hatchet, while powerful, was odd in my off-hand and seemed rarely used as I danced my way backward. I gave ground with each step, letting their front edge bleed on my blade as they were also torn down by their own.

Each gremlin was no more than two and a half feet tall, which brought them just about thigh-high if they stood up. But since they tended to like to be on their hands and feet, they mostly were around knee height unless they jumped. When they jumped, they could clear my head which made for some fun dance moves.

While I might not have been striking down gremlins with the hatchet. It turned into my go-to weapon to knock the jumping gremlins back. What was nice about that was their own were so evil that they treated the ones I knocked back no better than a rug to be trampled down.

It wasn’t that the gremlins weren’t reaching me as I danced; it was rather that they couldn’t find much to harm. My thighs took the brunt of their deranged assault as I only had my belteus knock off to save them. I needed tassets of some sort when fighting these guys as they kept using my thighs to try to launch up to my face. It was much like when a dog tried to climb your leg. The claws were there, but since they were always out, they hurt but didn’t go deep.

Yet, even that minor damage was adding up. In just under five minutes, my health had drained down a fourth. I didn’t know how many of the monsters I had killed. However, I knew that the battle was about to change.

I had retreated back to the tiger trap. I forcefully pulled myself out of the dance, which ended up making me stagger. That staggering let more of the gremlins jump on me. It was only a second, but I felt my face get cut to shreds by the claws of one of them as I knocked it free with the back of my hatchet.

I jumped to the little ledge of the tiger pit and quickly edged my way across the hole. Not only were gremlins tiny, but they were also dumb too. They could have gone in single file and made it down both edges, but the front ones jumped at me. Whereas before, I had thought the gremlins were acting like kids, now they acted like lemmings and raced off the edge into the trap.

I took the slow down in the fight to ask across the link, “How are you doing?”

Blink responded, almost pouting, “hunts no funs, they runs by.”

I started to laugh at that. She was upset that they were all coming at me and running by her. The fight had turned into one that was overly simple now that only a handful was getting to me. I was darting from one side of the tunnel to the other to knock a few into the trap.

I was honestly beginning to regret not bringing the halberd with me as this was the perfect type of fight for it. Soon, however, there were enough dead gremlins at the bottom that the new ones were jumping down and then back up at me.

I entered the dance again. There was nothing else I could do. My area effect runes only worked if there were clouds in the sky. Not only that, I didn’t have any runes with me. So I danced as they came at me.

The flood of gremlins we much slower now. The press wasn’t enough to let them jump right on me. So I was able to kick them back or even cut them down in the air as they tried to get back up. The ones coming across the ledges I cut with my sword or bashed with my hatchet.

The fight went on and on. The bodies in the pit stacked up till they were running across the top at me. Happily, they moved slowly across the full hole as they could slip. Soon, however, I saw the end of their line move toward me. Their bodies fell like Paul Bunyan fell trees in giant swaths. Blink had come, and she wasn’t even stealthing. She was battling them like the trash they were.

When I dropped out of the dance, I was tired. My stamina hadn’t been below an eighth the whole time, but it also hadn’t been above a fourth. I was dancing in the zone of being half-dead for most of the fight.

My thighs and biceps were covered in scratches, some deep enough to be flowing with blood. I had gremlin teeth embedded in my moccasins, my hands, and I even pulled one out of my knee cap. That last one had been my fault when I bashed a gremlin that managed to get on my back. I yanked it off my back and slammed its face into my knee.

When Blink got to me across the sea of the dead, she licked my face. I still found it odd that her healing lick wasn’t part of her status screen. Yet, whatever it was, it closed up the weeping mess that my face had become.

I looked over at Blink as she curled up. “You going to eat any of them?” I asked as she was usually face deep into them by now.

“Taste wrong,” was all she said.

“I guess being something from the dungeon they might be different. But I thought the Bashers were okay?”

“Bashers goods, these nos goods,” She sent back across the link as she closed her eyes.

My armor was all down about midway on durability. Even though the gremlins weren’t very powerful, the hour-long fight wore out my equipment. If I hadn’t taken the time to prepare, I would have died from the battle of attrition.

I spent an hour turning the bodies into loot; there were so many. Most gave me nothing, but I got a few stand-out pieces of loot. I managed to find a small bag of gold flakes, a dungeon apple, and one copper coin. The rest of the things were strings or gremlin ears. Nothing much in the way of usable loot.

“Blink let’s move on. We need to find where the token to go down the next level is.” I said as I gently shook my sleeping Ropola.

“Nap,” was all she sent back to me.

I shook my head just a bit. She was going to play hard to wake up. I could likely deal with this floor by myself, but I didn’t want to run that risk. So I tried again.

I got down close to one of Blink’s big eyes and yelled, “Blink Get up!”

Her eye snapped open, she vanished, and I got knocked overall in the span of less than half a second. Coming over the bond was panic, pure I am scared what is going on panic. I tried to calm her down, but she wasn’t having any of it.

“BAD!!!” was the one word she sent to me. She managed even to somehow get that same tone that I would use when she would do something I didn’t want her to.

I chuckled as I stood. The standing was a good idea; we needed to get moving. The chuckling was the wrong move now that Blink was this big. Her tail worked wonders on sweeping out legs, especially while she was still invisible.