A horrible wail comes out of the mouth of the cave, like an army of lost spirits all screaming in unison, and the wail burns through all of the remaining seals all at once.

Fuck.

She places Taharqi on the floor and jogs over to Mother Ga-in. "Seals. All of them, as many as you can, enlist as many people as you possibly can right now to help..."

...and he's out.

The lancer wakes up with a sudden, deep, wheezing breath, then turns over to cough up some blood as well as something that's probably a piece of a lung. "What happened?" she asks, in between coughs, still wheezing.

"You got run through with a spear," the archer says from where he's perched on a wall, looking out somewhere.

"That's my schtick," she grumbles. "—where are we?" she then asks, noticing that she is very much not where she was when she died.

"Courtyard."

"We had to retreat. There was no way we could've dealt with all of the spirits without you drawing their attention," explains the priest from where he's placing seals on the stone walls around them. "There isn't a direct entrance to here that isn't covered in debris so it was good cover."

"Aww, you carried me? That's so nice of you!"

"Thank N̴͈̾͒̆́̑͒̕i̴̠̰̊̂̄͂͆̚̕͜͜͝ẗ̵̫̬͙̣́̀͊̉̍̅͑͊̃̋̍̿̆͝a̵̡̧̰̮͚̣͖͖̳͖̖̭͚̲̔̄̃̒̍͑͐́," says the archer, gesturing with his feet at the horse-sized wolf that's resting by the wall. On hearing her name she perks up and starts panting, her tongue lolling out.

"Awww, who's a good girl?" coos the lancer, painfully getting up from where she'd been lying on the floor and walking over to the wolf to scritch her behind the ear. "Who's the goodest girl? You're the goodest girl!"

The archer snorts, but the wolf is clearly very happy with the scritches.

"And T̵̡͕͖̠̟̱̮̊ä̷̛̩̯̦̦͇͈̲̹͈́̈́̇̿m̶̧̢̳̭͙̳̦̹̗̗̳̯̫͙̪̳̀̇̚?"

"Doing recon," says the mage from where he's staring at some runes in the air and occasionally poking them or changing them. "By the way, thirteen."

"Oh, fuck you. You try not dying when a horde of angry vengeful spirits bears down on you."

"They did bear down on us when you died for the thirteenth time this mission."

"Yeah, well, you somehow managed to die seven times already even though you're ranged magical."

"Maybe both of you just suck," suggests the archer.

"It's easy for you to not die when you can just stop whatever you're doing and flee. Try interrupting a cast to see how you like it."

"Oh? And what's my excuse?"

"Your excuse is that you're a coward who will interrupt his casts at the slightest sign of danger."

"To be fair to him, we do kind of need him to be the one out of all of us to survive."

"He can teleport. If he gets in danger he can just be gone. That's just excuses."

"Finding your dead bodies after teleporting away would be such a chore, and hiring someone else as a bodyguard would be expensive. Not to mention really difficult, do you guys know anyone punching in our weight class?"

"Excuses, excuses, excuses."