"You can't line-of-sight it?"

"No. The Skill for that has a lot of prereqs."

"And you can't just skip past them? I'm so disappointed."

...

.....why shouldn't she be able to skip past them?

"—that was a joke."

"Mm."

But now she's thinking about it.

"You guys can probably squeeze between the ropes," opines Lea, who had surreptitiously faded into the background earlier and is now back. "Need to be careful not to catch on anything but."

“That was my plan, but it’d be monumentally stupid for me to go first. So.”

Well, obviously it should be Annika first. She isn't the most acrobatic but she can very much make sure her body is where she wants it to be and not somewhere else, so she can go through the ropes in short order.

Taharqi has a much easier time of it. It's kind of bizarre to watch, the way he pulls the ropes away from each other almost not at all and yet ends up on the other side anyway, and more quickly than Annika at that.

Akiho isn’t particularly acrobatic, but she does know where all of the seals are in her very soul, so. She slips through a part of the ropes that are a bit less seal covered, and then she’s through.

“Mnaugh,” she pronounces, when she’s on the other side. It is not a pleasant feeling, this cave, and she’s more sensitive to it than most.

When she's through, Taharqi is nowhere in sight and Annika is standing guard against some twenty or more zombies and an extra ten skeletons, pulverising any that get too close.

(Although given that many of their foes are randomly getting taken down here and there, Akiho might be able to have informed guesses about where Taharqi is.)

Ah! Good, then she has something to distract her.

Zombies, huh? Well, zombies are perfectly flammable. She needs to reach out and unbalance them before her fire can properly bite, but that’s straightforward enough. She can even see Taharqi’s soul well enough to avoid catching him, too.

Some of the zombies get very confused about how ‘attacking’ works. Instead, they will… stop, standing a little listlessly, like they’re confused about what’s going on and why they’re here. Then shortly after, before the window she’s ripped in them closes, they are on fire. It’s a strange and ghostly fire, and it’s sort of like they are spontaneously combusting instead of fire being thrown, but. It sure is fire. That is blue. Taharqi and Annika feel no heat at all, even as it is definitely burning some zombies.

"Hey, didn't you say you weren't a damage dealer?" asks Taharqi, popping up right next to her and then vanishing again to go kill some more skeletons.

“Compared to a mage or something, I’m not! They’d be much better at directly blowing them to pieces. What I’m doing is a debuff. The debuff is that they are on fire.”

Pop up: "If it works it works!" And vanish.

It doesn't take them very long to go through the zombies. There aren't waves of them coming one after the other, it's just the ones that had accumulated near the entrance, and once they're dealt with (and the floor is littered with bones and viscera) the three adventurers are left mostly in peace—though they can hear the vague drum of spirits and undead moaning and shuffling farther down into the cave, the acoustics carrying the sound enough that it's not clear how far anything is from anything else.

The combat lasts long enough that Akiho is called upon to heal, and the way she does it is rather strange. She doesn’t heal by directly casting a healing spell; she casts some sort of… something… on Annika, and then every time one of the zombies swings at her, at the same moment the blow connects, healing energy floods into her. Oftentimes, it’ll heal more than the zombies damage her.

“Onwards?” she asks, softly. She really doesn’t want to linger. What with the… pressure, tugging at her soul, and all.

"Onwards!" he says, cheerfully. "Hey Annika are you going to freak out if my spirit disappears from your sight?"

"Yes."

"So you mean I should try to practise cloaking my spiritual presence at a different time."

"Yes."

"Got it." Poof.

...right. Time to go into the deep. Annika summons a large ball of blue fire that orbits around her and lights up a reasonable distance away from her. Most importantly, though, it reveals any cloaked or concealed enemies, or it will when they start showing up.