'That's a good idea!'

It does indeed work like that; the one on top is badly injured but not dead, and now attacking other monsters, apparently angry at its injury.

Nice. She takes up a defensive stance – no reason to draw attention by attacking, as long as they're infighting – and waits.

It's not long, though, before they have a giant lizardcat – dragontiger? – coming at them again, and they're back in the fight. She'll use that trick again at the next opportunity, of course.

It's a pretty effective trick, and Naruto likes it - and he slowly manages to alter the pitch ever-so-slightly so it makes them even angrier. 

The swarm slows, thins, and then they're down to only a handful of monsters coming at them.

Promising. Though it does mean they have to fall back to single-enemy tactics.

And eventually it's clear, at least for now. Lennah takes a minute to catch her breath.

'How're you holding up? Do swords even get tired like humans?'

"I'm not sure? I think I could get, like, thinking tired? But I'm not right now."

"That makes sense."

All right. Time to head for the center.

"Yeah."

It gets harder to navigate - the floor only kind of exists in that it has a river ravine aesthetic, and rivers usually smooth their beds out, but there's a lot of areas with horrible or narrow footing - it's not designed for conventional walking in the slightest. But they did manage to clear out a lot of the monsters, so she'll have time to pick her way through.

And so they make their careful way, watching and listening.

The footing gets steadily worse.

"I'm starting to wonder if drawing them out like that was a good idea. If there's any more in here, I won't have any experience fighting in this terrain." She tries a couple of experimental slashes; the grip on her boots is good, but it's hard to know how she should be aiming.

"Hm, yeah. But it'd be kinda worse having to fight them all like this?"

The path's starting to join with others, getting bigger, even if the surface is more jagged. It's also sloping down, and there's trickles of water across the rock.

"Yeah, that's true. At least it's looking like we'll have the high ground." The water isn't enough to make the rock slippery, yet, but she's keeping an eye on it.

"Yup. And stuff's narrow enough they shouldn't be able to swarm too well."

He pauses, senses, "Though I think we're getting close to an opener area."

"Good to know. Let's try to stay quiet until we know what we're dealing with." This involves slowing down even further, but they can afford to take a few extra minutes.

When they get there, she stays by the mouth of the narrow pass and looks around. Are there monsters?

A few, here and there. Not nearly as many as there could be, but the cavern curves out of sight pretty quickly. It seems to be the bed of an underground river, and there's the sound of a waterfall in the distance.

Hmm.

She bounces her vision. "Do you think we can draw their attention one at a time?"

" - Probably not, they're all kinda aware of each other I think."

"All right then. In that case I think I'd want to do the chokepoint thing again, but without the big bang this time. What d'you think?"

"Yeah, that was a really good strategy last time."

So she backs up into the narrow path, and stops trying to be quiet. If they don't react right away, she'll gradually start making noise on purpose – stomping, calling out – getting louder until they do.

A few of the closer ones twitch her way, and as they make small chittering noises and look for her the alarm sort of spreads through the others.

That's more or less what they were expecting, yep.

Since this is not an RPG, they don't have a battle theme. Instead, there are only the sounds of chittering monsters, and metal on flesh, and Lennah's and the monsters' footsteps, and the occasional grunt of effort or cry of pain.

Are the lizardcats coming in simultaneously enough to use the sonic irritant trick, or will they have to fight them one at a time?

There's probably at most two or three trying to get through the chokepoint - and there's few enough of them they aren't tripping over each other nearly as much. 

The sonic irritant trick, if tried, seems to summon more.

Maybe let's not do it again, then.

Luckily, they have plenty of practice with "pointy end goes in monster". Soon enough, the way is clear again.

"I think the next little bit's clear, but - there's a lot more large openings ahead. Might be hard to do the bottleneck trick much."

"Hmm. I'm not thrilled by the idea of fighting them from all sides... we could try to draw more of them out to here, have the next bit be clearer, or just go for it."

"I'm tempted to just go for it, but I don't know if that's actually a good idea."

"I think we can take them! We're a really good team!"