"Ok, what was that?" Erik asked.

Uh," Caeden looked at Lily, who was looking at him. Then the same idea sparked in both of them.

"The Crystal Moles!" They shouted at the same time.

"Ok, genius. Care to enlighten the rest of us?" Cat asked, her sarcasm edged with worry.

"The increased spawning of rare and powerful monsters that the town noticed," Caeden said. "We just forgot about it. But that had to have been caused by the Heartstone awakening."

"Exactly!" Lily jumped in. "But why would the Heartstone resurrection increase monster spawning? It has to be a deliberate function of the stone, not some random coincidence."

"Right, so that means that the Heartstone is actively causing more powerful monsters to form for a purpose. I used aura sense on the thing; it's not a normal part of its function. So that means the Heartstone's normal resurrection process has been changed." Caeden continued.

"Which can only mean that the sword has caused the Heartstone to change its normal behavior." Lily gushed excitedly.

"Can it do that? Isn't it just a rock?" Erik asked.

"Monster-generated items are practically alive. They are such complex magical objects that they have something close to a living intelligence. A change in behavior to react to outside stimulus is nothing new." Lily explained.

"Which loops around to the monster creation and why it's doing that. The Heartstone is supposed to bring a Magma Titan into existence. Spawning some low-IP monsters would be easy, but why?" Caeden asked, his tone implying he already knew the answer.

Lily responded anyway. "For protection! The Heartstone was threatened by the sword, so it started spawning monsters to defend it. Now that we've found a way to shove the sword down, it's panicking and calling all its minions to save it!" Lily practically cheered.

"Why are you both so excited?!" Cat yelled. "Every monster under the mountain is coming to kill us!"

"Cat, you're looking at this wrong," Caeden explained. "The Heartstone itself basically just confirmed that we're a threat to it. If we can keep the knights going long enough, then we can seal the stone right now! This is great!"

"I think you're forgetting the part about us fighting an army of monsters!!" Cat hissed.

"Look, this won't be as bad as you're thinking." Lily started to explain as Caeden moved over to one of the tunnels connected to the cavern. This cave was relatively small, and there were only four of them, including the one they entered through. "Caeden's going to collapse the other three tunnels so they can only come through one entrance. With them all funneled to one point, only so many can get to us at once. We've been fighting these monsters non-stop for a week straight. It's not going to be easy, but we can do it!"

"Caeden, you're good with this plan?" Cat asked, hoping her normally cautious friend would be a voice of reason.

Shoving Forged Infinity in the form of a long spike warped around his fist into the wall, a deafening crack sounded through the cave. Pulling his metal-wrapped fist out, Caeden jumped back as a huge section of the tunnel collapsed with a roar of rocks grinding against each other.

"Oh, I think we're definitely fucked." Caeden happily admitted, which caused Lily to frown. "But there's no going back. The monsters are already on their way. Might as well make the best of it and shoot for a win. Think positive, right?" He shot Cat and Lily a goofy grin.

Cat groaned. "I think I liked it better when you were a pessimist. Also, did you two seriously come up with the same plan at the same time without consulting each other?" She looked between Caeden and Lily.

"Yes." They replied at the same time.

"This is going to be a nightmare," Cat muttered to herself.

"Oh, come on! This will be fun!" Erik cheered, wrapping an arm around Cat's shoulders and causing her to let out a surprised squeak before slugging him in the arm.

"Don't surprise me like that!" Cat shouted as Erik began laughing while rubbing his shoulder.

"Oh, lighten up! No need to face our impending death with a frown! Smile, have some fun. Trust me; it's much better than dwelling on it." Erik advised, his expression halfway serious.

Cat decided to take his word for it and let go. Out of all of them, Erik would know how to deal with the threat of death the most. She snapped her fingers, getting the idling Knights to start slamming their sledgehammers down double-time, alternating blows. The sword began to cause a constant groan to rumble through the Heartstone as the blade sunk in by minute fractions for every blow. At this pace, it would take nearly an hour for the crossguard to reach the stone's surface.

In only a few minutes, Caeden managed to collapse large sections of three tunnels with a careful application of investigative sense to find weak spots in the stone, followed by a violent application of Forged Infinity. The only way into the chamber now was the tunnel they had entered through.

Leaving the chamber and the hammering Knights behind, they all entered the tunnel in combat formation with Caeden at the front and Cat at the back.

"Why didn't we just collapse all the tunnels until the sword was back in? We could dig out after this is all over." Cat asked.

It was Lily that answered. "The Crystal Moles. If we didn't leave an entrance for the controlled, enraged monsters to enter the Heartstone cavern, they would start trying to dig their way in. The Crystal Moles could do it in seconds. With the monsters in an enraged state, so long as they already have a viable entrance, they'll funnel into it, leaving us with only one direction to defend."

"What if they dig around anyway?" Cat asked, feeling belligerent. Sometimes having a friend who had all the answers was aggravating. Cat had two.

"Oh, we planned for that." Lily dismissed her concern. "We just want to minimize it. Speaking of which."

Lily created an ice dagger and rapier, tossing them to Caeden. He immediately started working Physical Enhancement into the weapons. The dagger was finished in under a minute, and the rapier was done just as the tunnel started to shake with the pounding of hundreds of monsters running for them, screaming for blood.

Lily's weapons had visibly changed from their time in Caeden's hands. The dagger was a much darker, navy blue than before with an almost black edge. The rapier had lightened considerably, with the bulk of its mass being a sky blue and the edge shifting to be entirely transparent, making the blade seem smaller than it was unless the light hit it just right.

As Lily caught her newly enhanced weapons out of the air, the first monster turned the corner and began barreling straight for Caeden. He was still in his golden body and wielded two hand axes with massively oversized heads that were more than two feet wide. The blades dwarfed the handles, curving down over and covering Caeden's hands.

The monster was a Stonefang Wolf, one of the lesser threats in the tunnels. They always traveled in packs, as the individual members had little power on their own. They had stony fur that offered decent defense and a bite that could crush stone. Otherwise, they were the size of a normal grey wolf with greyish-black fur and no other special features.

The Wolf lunged for Caeden's throat, soaring through the air at top speed. It stopped an inch before Caeden, suddenly bound head to toe in thick bands of glowing white string. The monster only had a moment to contemplate its situation as Caeden let out a shout, an axe coming down on its neck like a guillotine, instantly severing its head from its body.

That victory was only momentary as the rest of the overeager monster's pack followed it around the corner moments later. Their fate was even worse. Before they could cover the short distance between the curve in the tunnel and Caeden standing over the discorporating body of their fellow monster, five of them had their jugular severed while five more had ice spikes stab into their spine.

The spectral assassin disappeared once their targets had fallen over to bleed out, and the transparent slivers of ice hovered back into the cloud of their fellows hovering at the top of the tunnel, now covered in a thin layer of blood.

Then the flood came.

Elemental Bats of five different varieties swarmed across the tunnel ceiling, overwhelming Lily's invisible spikes in short order even as dozens died. The floor was choked with Stonefang Wolves, Rockbreaker Pythons, Black Pudding Slimes, Dragonling Newts, and Rockroller Beetles. All types of monsters they had faced a hundred times in the last week, but never together and never in this kind of overwhelming number.

They also hadn't had this much prep time.

As hundreds of monsters filled the short length of tunnel between the sharp corner and the cavern entrance, it exploded with dozens of traps. Cat's spectral assassins flickered in and out of view, taking a life every time they appeared. Entire groups of monsters were bound together in balls of white string that choked up the passageway and slowed down the monsters behind them.

A cloud formed on the ceiling, darkening swiftly before it began to pelt all the monsters with fist-sized chunks of hail. This knocked many of the Elemental Bats to the ground, where their relatively fragile bodies were trampled by the stampede. Still, many slipped past and headed for Caeden.

Ready to meet them, Caeden took a massive swing for the head of the wave, a truly massive Rockbreaker Python that lunged for him, ready to wrap him up in its serrated coils and rip him apart. As he swung, Caeden let out a loud "HA!" As he did, a wave of crimson followed his swing, projecting a line of Sharp from the axe blade and cleaving into dozens of monsters.

Caeden's axe didn't even touch the Python; it was severed by the Blade Wave. Instead, his axe buried itself in the carapace of a Rockroller Beetle, the tough exoskeleton absorbing the mnemonic but unable to handle the shrouded weapon brought down on it by Caeden's heavily enhanced might. He split the beetle in half, spewing gooey gore over the other monsters around it as his axe carried on, cracking the rock the bug monster had been riding toward him.

The opening salvo was a prime example of what the next few minutes devolved into. Cat, Erik, and Lily would tie up large portions of the horde with traps and chip damage while Caeden brutally put down anything that made it through to him. As time passed, the congestion at the tunnel corner grew worse and worse until hardly anything could beat its way through the tangled mess of injured monsters.

This was a problem. If the monsters didn't have a way in, they would make one. All the injured monsters would ruin their plan. So Caeden cleared the way.

Slamming on axe into another Rockfang Wolf, Caeden stepped to the side, giving Lily the room she needed to freeze a Black Pudding Slime that had crept up on him. He threw the other axe into a skulking Python skull and, in the same motion reaching out and grabbing the snout of a lunging wolf, jerking it off the ground and whipping its body so hard the neck snapped.

Using the opening he had created, Caeden activated his own trap. With his free hand, Caeden snapped his fingers. Instantly, thousands of lines that had been scored into the black tunnel rock all around the corner glowed red, giving a much more sinister accent to the orange veins already present. As one, arm-thick blades of Sharp shot out from every single line, turning the writhing mass of tied down, broken, beaten, bleeding monsters into a pile of gore that began to rapidly discorporate. Hundreds of monsters died in an instant.

There was a moment of silence as so many monsters died.

"Did we get them all?" Erik asked.

Everyone groaned.

"Come on, man! We talked about this! You have to stop saying stuff like that!" Caeden complained.

Indeed, a set of much deeper, louder roars echoed down the tunnel.

The second wave was coming.