The skeleton can't be said to not have been expecting it, mostly because the skeleton isn't even trying to play the part of something that has emotional reactions to things. It just staggers from the strength of the blow and drops its weapon. Once it's regained balance, though, it reaches back for the weapon to go after Marza.

As for Mi-cha, unfortunately a different skeleton is coming for her to drag her away who knows where.

The problem with that is that actually, that battleaxe it was holding? Marza scooped it up as soon as it hit the ground. (She tosses her club at a different skeleton.) It's a much nicer weapon, actually, balanced for combat and with a real handle and everything. She's very thankful.

CRUNCH goes her appreciation.

It buys her enough time to help with Mi-cha. CRUNCH goes another skeleton.

     "M-Marza?" Mi-cha asks, somewhat awestruck.

"Watch my back," she barks. "Scream if something's coming."

     "...I can do that!" Mi-cha says with a wobbly smile.

She shepherds Mi-cha behind a sarcophagus and takes up a guarding stance. "COME AND GET SOME, MOTHERFUCKERS!" she roars in somewhat rusty Tagalog.

The decision to keep Mi-cha alive pays dividends. She's managed to scream about three skeletons and an approaching zombie within a few minutes. Besides the dozen or so other undead to hold off between them. The axe is fucking heavy.

Marza won't admit she's flagging, and she isn't flagging as badly as someone who worked out for looks instead of strength might. But she's not a lumberjack, and she's not a soldier.

A skeleton gets through her guard and slashes her arm. Mi-cha is screaming and Marza can't tell if that means something else is coming or just that she just got sprayed with her roommate's arterial blood.

That really is quite a lot of blood. Enough blood, in fact, that Marza does not find herself conscious for very much longer.

...and it ought to have been enough blood that she should in fact have remained unconscious, uh, forever. Instead she is, possibly, in hell.

Or at the very least an incredibly dark, cold stone box—or perhaps "coffin" would be a better word for it, if coffins were large enough to give her only enough space to move her arms around a bit and get about 25 degrees up from a prone horizontal position. It's pitch black, the kind of complete absense of light that isn't just a matter of getting your eyes used to it, and the air is still and stale.

It's a fucking sarcophagus. Were you not listening.

Marza is not going to give this fucking dungeon the kind of respect it would take to scream.

She breathes, deeply and slowly.

She clenches her fists.

She does not move.

She seethes, and does not move.

She hates, and she does not move.

She does not cry. If she fears, it is only to hate more. She will become hate. Anything else –

that is extraneous.

She gets one priority. She knows this. Anything else is extra credit.

Her priority is to deny the dungeon anything it could possibly want.

It's quiet. Very, very quiet.

It's dark. Very, very dark.

The air is too still. Maybe not unnaturally so, though Marza probably does not have comparable experience in sarcophagi to say. It's still too, too still. Suffocating. Is there enough of it? Logically, there must be—it is a known fact about dungeons that people mostly aren't killed by them, most of the time—but it's not clear how there could be.

The walls press in on her, or it feels like they do.

She could be left here, alone.

How will anyone find her?

Sensory espers is how, dipshit.

Really, this is kind of meditative.

Marza isn't the meditating type, of course. But it's an aesthetic she can grasp onto.

And the fear she won't let herself feel, that's something to push against.

If you can push against something...

and you've got a handhold...

you can hang off a cliff for a very long time.

A very long time.

A very, very long time indeed.

She can't fall asleep. It's too cold for that. But not so cold that she will pass out from hypothermia. And there's just something that keeps preventing her from falling asleep, some nagging feeling.

She can't, even, meditate very much, actually. Some nagging feeling. A noise—that's not a noise. There aren't any noises. A smell—there aren't any smells. There's nothing, really. Truly nothing.

Except she can't lose herself in it. Every time it feels like she might succeed, there's something. Something, something... something.

...something...

Oh.

The dungeon isn't just hostile the way the Sahara is hostile. The way a volcano is hostile. There's someone in it, and it wants her to fail.

This won't even be hard anymore. Not now that she understands that she has an enemy.

Fuck meditation. Fuck silence, and willpower, and not giving herself the room to move. She crosses her arms over her chest and laughs, not hyena-cackling but earnest and relieved. It isn't hard anymore. Not now that there's somebody to beat.

"I really thought you got me, you son of a bitch," she whispers. "But you tipped your hand."

She starts singing. Her breath control isn't quite there, what with the half-asphyxiating, and the acoustics are shit.

But it's a victory march.

It may be that, but will it be that for long enough? Because she's going to stay there a while. A long, long while.

Of course not.

She's not into K-Pop, much to Mi-cha's disappointment. But she's got a guilty fondness for American bubblegum. And Brit-punk, and some of the really experimental crap out of northern Africa. And, hell, give her long enough and she'll dip into Vocaloid. Is the dungeon familiar with the work of Giga-P? How about Neru, or Wonderful✰Opportunity?

She didn't die of blood loss in here, despite having every reason to. Will her throat get sore? Parched? Because that sure fucking sounds like the dungeon acknowledging that she's winning, now doesn't it? And she can sing on a sore throat. Until it feels like sandpaper. Until it feels like fucking knives.

It won't feel like that.

But she will slowly lose her ability to hear anything, including her own voice.

The answer to that sounds like SINGING LOUDER, BITCH! LOUDER AND WORSE!

And now she can't hear anything at all.

The cold starts getting replaced by numbness, like her nerves are slowly dying on her. Her sense of touch starts to go, actually, just in general.

Suspending her in the infinite unfeeling void, huh? Wow! How original! She bets all the dungeon's dungeon school friends are so impressed!

Objective time doesn't exist in a sensory void. But she can keep time, especially when she's singing – she doesn't have to hear her voice or feel her throat move, the impulse is enough. ONE-two-three-four-TWO-two-three-four...

It'll be a very, very long time.

Do you know how long it takes to count to one million?

Marza does. When she was six years old, a teacher said that you couldn't count to a million, or that if you could it would take too long to be useful. This was in order to segue into a lesson on multiplication tables, but she wasn't about to take that shit.

It took her two and a half months. She would write down her total at the end of each day. Once she hit numbers it took more than one second to say, she developed a sort of verbal shorthand.

She took her paper to the teacher, when she got there, and she told him that she had too counted to one million, and it was because he said she couldn't. He wanted to put her in advanced math classes. But she wasn't actually any good at math. What she was good at was – not even not knowing when to quit.

Not having a concept of quitting. Not when she could win, instead.

14496. 14497. 14498. 14499. 15000, asshole.

15001.

There's a noise.

...hey, that's not a number. She doesn't know what it actually was, because her ears are still coming online and she was not interpreting that sensory input.

Also, huh, now that her ears are working again she can confirm that she totally was successfully sending the "sing" command to her throat. Azkalita stays winning.

(The waking nightmare couldn't have picked a better song to end on than Ang Boyfriend Kong Baduy? She should've saved the good shit for the end, not the Manila Sound. Although she's admittedly been on repeats for about six hours.)

The noise resolves to fighting. Very, very quiet fighting, in the sense that the skeletons and zombies don't make any noises and their assailants are similarly mute.

Worth it? ...yeah, sure.

"FUCK THEM UP," she shrieks as encouragingly as possible while still shrill enough to pierce stone. "I BELIEVE IN YOU, RANDOM ESPER!"

There's the tiniest, shortest of breaks in the fight before it resumes in earnest. It does not sound like whoever is on the other side is breaking a sweat, anyway, to the extent that can be determined.

And it seems like the dungeon's either lost or given up on its ability to control her senses, seeing as how she's getting all of them back pretty swiftly.