Three Wizards. I hope I can beat them.

As was the variant plan, this fight saw lots of damage flying around, in both directions.

The WIZARDS ganged up on my lead Black Belt, and crushed him...

but then my fighter returned the favor.

Final score, Light Warriors 3, WIZARDS 1.

Mission accomplished, right? Well, not quite - we've still got to get back out. And Hit got wasted by three Gargoyles that ganged up on him. Oh dear. Can a black belt and black mage escape the Marsh Cave alive?

Had to pop the second FIR2 on a R.Bone / Crawl group, survived another R.Bone / Crawl group by killing the Crawl on a "chance to strike first" surprise round, ran away from an Arachnid/Muck group, and launched the last FIR2 on a SHADOW group just by the exit...

and made it!

I ran away from everything back to Elfland, raised the fallen warriors, and bought Hit his Silver Sword now.

On to Astos, the bane of many a Sullla variant, but not this one. (I neglected to take screenshots for some reason.) His RUB connected with my lead black belt, but a FIR2 and ICE from the black mage killed him on round two.

So I collected all the KEY-locked treasures, including the rest of Marsh Cave. There's a Silver Armor there, which would normally go on somebody's torso, but here it's just worth 3750 in sell value. That return trip to Marsh Cave actually entirely ran me out of HEAL potions - went through about 30. The battles with the WIZARDS by the treasure chests, had a few close calls, with my lead BB getting knocked within one hit of death a few times, but the offense (okay, still mostly Hit) came through each time.

And as I marched over to Earth Cave, my Black Belts finally leveled up to 10. Now the real Berserker game can start, with the BB offense doubling to 4Hits each. The BBs and Fighter are quite close in offensive capability right now, mostly depending on the target. Enemies with a strong Absorb rating, like Earths, take more damage from Hit. Weaker enemies take more damage from Slam and Bash.

Well, clearing out the first floor of Earth Cave, one BB got clobbered by an EARTH enemy, and then the second also hit the dirt. Time to beat another retreat, and of course Melmac doesn't have a clinic, so all the way back to Coneria. (At least when you're traveling on the overworld, frequent Inn stays are easy, so the black mage can just nuke everything without worrying about spell conservation.)

I easily made it to the Vampire, killing him in one round. And because he cast DAZZLE, I took zero damage. :)

In Earth Cave, the party's philosophy of offense finally started to shine. The now double-powered Black Belts could kill most medium enemies (Arachnids, Shadows, Asps, Cobras, Gargoyles) in one hit. Also, I clearly noticed the high EVADE% of my characters. Most enemy attacks would actually miss! But the ones that connected dealt quite a blow. So most fights were really at the mercy of the RNG.

In many cases, better strategy was not to distribute the party's attacks around the enemies, but to overkill one or two targets to make SURE they died in the first round. If I spread around the offense, I'd kill enemies sooner and take less damage on the average, but that runs the risk of a bad round where I kill nothing and the enemy all gangs up on one target. By concentrating the offense and risking overkill, I took a little more damage overall, but minimized the cases of extreme variance that could kill a party member. Heal potions are cheap (once past Marsh Cave) and provide virtually unlimited healing outside of battle.

But I did get out of Earth Cave with less than 50 remaining out of the initial stock of 99 heal potions. That FFClassic comment about the Black Belt party requiring gallons of heal potions rings dead on.

On the return trip to Earth Cave, floor three brought a group of IMAGES, who kept paralyzing Kill before he could get off a FIR2. They then ganged up on my lead BB, and he took a dirt nap again. I didn't feel confident about beating half of Earth Cave and LICH down a man, so retreated back to Coneria yet again. (Yes, this is effectively level grinding, though I'm not doing it deliberately. This was an entirely legitimate attempt to beat Earth Cave, I just failed at it.)

Here we are at LICH. (Well, three minutes later after backing up and waiting for that silly bat to move out of the way.)

Conveniently, my fighter had just made level 14 on the previous battle - that's 3 hits with his Silver Sword. That meant he'd be the recipient of the first FAST.

LICH got off an ICE2 that hurt the party (especially Kill) but didn't kill anyone.

The battle lasted two rounds. Victory to the Light Warriors. (By the way, Sullla mentioned that it's tough to snap a screenshot just at the right moment to get the "Terminated"? I've gotten it every time except for Garland right at the beginning. )