Chapter 73 - This Used to be About Dungeons - Hero Reads Free Novel Website

This was a strange and disorienting dungeon, and Isra didn’t like it. Gravity was something that a person was supposed to be able to take for granted. In this dungeon, her feet could be planted but her body unsteady, and the movements of the party around her were sometimes disorienting. They were there for the goods though, and the discomfort was temporary, so she put up with it as best she could.

Alfric seemed quite pleased.

<It’s actually extremely uncommon,> said Alfric. <And dangerous. But we should find lots of ectad materials here, which is good, and ideally some kind of entad that follows the same pattern.>

<Rare for that to happen,> said Hannah. <Entads don’t usually suit the space, or not that well.>

<True,> said Alfric, but he seemed chipper nonetheless.

They’d taken the left tunnel, and it went for quite a distance, enough that they began to relax. It had gotten somewhat tight as they’d gone through, until eventually they were crawling on their hands and knees. The gravity was pulling them in weird directions, and Isra’s stomach was rebelling against it. She banged up her knees and elbows along the way, from times when she overcompensated for the odd things that gravity was doing.

<Found the exit,> said Alfric. Isra was grateful for the party channel, which allowed them conversation in relative silence.

Advertising

<I’m way in the back,> said Mizuki.

<Can you make me bigger?> asked Alfric.

<No line of sight, I just said that,> Mizuki replied.

<Through the party link?> asked Alfric.

Mizuki was silent for a moment that seemed to stretch on.

<I’ll let you know when, I’ll probably have to take this combat one on one. The room is forty feet by sixty feet, I think. Gravity seems normal but it’s hard to tell. The serpent is coiled up, I’m hoping that the bident can kill him without too much fight.> His voice was deathly calm.

Advertising

<Will we be able to get back up?> asked Mizuki. <Also, I’m very ready to be out of this tunnel, it’s cramped.>

<Think about how I feel,> said Hannah.

<We have gear to get back up,> said Alfric. <And your staff to stand on to get a leg up. Ready with the spell?>

<Ready, I guess,> said Mizuki.

<Now!> yelled Alfric.

Alfric was just ahead of Isra, and she had watched him wriggle out of the tunnel and drop down. She followed just behind him, slipping through the hole and trying her best to break her fall or roll into it. The room had a tile floor with a pattern of blue flower petals on it, seen and registered in her mind. Isra got to her feet just in time to roll away from a swipe of the creature’s tail.

Advertising

The white ‘serpent’ had uncoiled itself, and as Alfric moved in to stab it, it split straight down the middle. Inside it was hollow, and the two halves straightened out until the creature was almost completely flat, like a ribbon.

Mizuki’s spell went off when Alfric moved in with his bident, causing him to both smack his head against the ceiling and miss his mark. He suddenly found himself fighting while crouched down, and his largeness created a problem for Isra, who needed to shoot past him.

Alfric fought against the creature all the same, crouched and cramped though he was. He wasn’t able to use his shield as effectively, and the ends of the bident banged against the ceiling and the floor more than once. He stabbed the creature, and it writhed around, but it slipped free before he could pin it against the back wall. Isra loosed her first arrow and walked along with it. She could see that the angle was bad and it would miss, but she drew and sent another arrow off, this one aimed directly at its head. The flat serpent had mandibles like a centipede and two large red eyes like spheres stuck awkwardly onto the end of it.

Her second arrow went straight through the creature, just left of its spine, but it seemed to be barely fazed by the damage she’d done.

Isra was back in normal time when Hannah dropped down from the hole. She landed wrong, putting too much weight on one leg, which buckled below her, and she screamed into the party channel, loud enough that Isra winced. She was back on her feet quickly though, likely healing through whatever injury she’d sustained.

<Don’t come down until it’s dead,> she said through the party chat. <Get help when you drop.>

Alfric’s efforts with the serpent were going poorly. The bident could poke a hole in it, and had poked enough of them that bright red blood was flowing from the creature, but it wasn’t ending the fight. Isra’s arrows, similarly, were passing through. She was trying to hit it in the spine, or in the head, but those shots were too difficult to make, especially when the flat serpent moved so quickly.

Alfric threw down his bident and shield and lunged for the creature, stomping on it and grabbing it. It didn’t take him long to have it pinned down beneath his enlarged mass, and once it was, he wasted no time pulling on it with all his might. Eventually it gave way, ripping from the holes they’d put in it until the beast was in two pieces. Alfric got to his feet and knocked his head against the ceiling, spinning around to look at the creature and make sure it was dead. It was still writhing on the ground, at least the half that still had a head, but it was purposeless motion, and it slowed down to a stop quite quickly.

<Healing,> said Alfric.

Hannah rushed over to him. He was covered in blood, and not all of it could have been the creature’s.

<You okay down there?> asked Mizuki.

<He’ll be fine,> said Hannah. <Can’t take too many more hits like that though, mostly from the loss of blood.>

<Not the best thing for us to fight,> said Alfric, looking down at the monster’s body. Hannah finished her work, and Alfric looked up at the hole, where Mizuki was looking down. <You still have the wand, right? And it’s still intact?>

said Mizuki.

<Use it, it has my sack, which has rope in it,> said Alfric. <There are two things you could use to keep a bar in place, would you rather use a jackscrew or hammer in some pitons?>

<Uh,> said Mizuki. <You’d need to explain what those things are.>

She eventually settled on the pitons, and perhaps twenty minutes later, a rope was dangled down from the hole. It seemed a bit unnecessary to Isra, but the height was more like fifteen feet than ten feet, and it probably would have taken quite a bit of work to stack things up to get back to the hole. She had spent much of that time eyeing the room’s single door, thinking about what she would do if something came through it.

Mizuki slid down the rope, looking both up and down it with quite a bit of fear in her eyes, even though Alfric was there holding out his arms to catch her. Verity followed quickly after her, showing no fear or concern.

<No loot?> asked Mizuki, looking around the room.

<Nothing so far,> said Hannah. While they’d waited for the pitons to be hammered in, Hannah had made a thorough search.

said Isra. <They’re not stuck in place very well. I don’t know how valuable they would be.>

<We’ll talk about it later,> said Alfric. <Verity, the song is done?>

<No,> she said.

<Really?> asked Alfric.

<She was sitting in the hole with me, strumming her lute every now and then,> said Mizuki.

<Doesn’t that take concentration and power?> asked Alfric.

<Not if I do it right,> said Verity.

<Then let’s go, I guess,> said Alfric.

Isra wondered whether she was the only one feeling somewhat claustrophobic. The tunnel they’d gone through to drop down into the room hadn’t been that tight, not enough that she’d had to worry too much, but there was no give to it, and it was rock, not dirt. If it collapsed, there would be no way for them to get through it, or at least no way without some serious effort on their part. If it had collapsed on them, they would likely die. They were going to have to pass back through the tunnel, and the more Isra thought about it, the more she didn’t like it.

Alfric went to the room’s only door, readied himself, then tested the handle to see how much it would swing. He frowned after a moment, and pulled harder.

<Locked,> he said.

<Meaning?> asked Mizuki. <What do we do?>

<Hang on,> said Alfric. <Hinges are on the outside.>

It was another ten minutes before all that was dealt with, and then even more time to try to pry the door off. The locking mechanism wasn’t terribly complicated, but the deadbolt held fast. Eventually, the door came down, and they could see another corridor. Beyond it, there was a cavern of immense size, and they all came out into it to look. There were no obvious monsters, and it seemed as though it was safe, or at least safe enough.

<Not the biggest room we’ve seen,> said Alfric. <But after that tunnel, it’s a bit refreshing.> He held up his lantern, and it didn’t do much to illuminate the back wall. The floor of the cavern sloped down into still water with bits of bioluminescent blue motes, and the ceiling was likewise beyond the view of their lanterns.

There was something up near the ceiling. Isra could feel it more than see it.

Alfric put up his shield, hiding behind it, but it was pretty clear that he couldn’t see whatever it was that Isra was seeing — or rather, feeling. <Where?>

said Isra. <Up there, somewhere.>

Verity took her song out of hibernation and ramped it up, enhancing the vision of everyone in the party by so much that it was almost disorienting. Isra could see the individual threads on every piece of fabric, the individual strands of hair on their heads, every scratch and fingerprint on their armor, too much, really. And above, a hundred feet up, there were monsters on the ceiling. They were visible mostly from their wings, black leathery wings with red lines on the skin where the bones were. They didn’t hang down like a bat did, but pulled themselves flat against the surface, all in a cluster, looking almost like scales. There were at least a hundred of them, and Isra tried counting them, first one side and then the other, trying to get a sense of their numbers. Each was the size of a fat housecat, ten or maybe twenty pounds, big fat bats, or at least something that shared a surface similarity.

<Welp,> said Mizuki. She was staring at the ceiling. <That’s a lot of monsters.>

<No fireballs?> asked Alfric.

said Mizuki. <Enough to singe one of them. The dominant mood is time. Why aren’t they going for us?>

<They don’t know we’re here,> said Alfric. <Or they’re not hostile, which would be … well, very, very odd.>

<They’re hostile,> said Isra. She could feel it in them, that wrongness that was now becoming familiar. It was beyond seething hatred.

<Okay, so we try to go through the water to the other end, where there’s a door,> he pointed at the other side of the pool, where Isra could see, with enhanced vision, the outline, of it, <Or we can fight them.>

<Is there a reason to fight?> asked Hannah.

<Better to fight them on our own terms,> said Alfric. <If they wake up while we’re swimming, we could be in for a nightmare.>

<How deep is that water?> asked Mizuki.

<Hard to say,> said Alfric, peering over. <Hard to test without disturbing it, and there might be something down there. Isra?>

<Not that I can feel,> she replied. <The water is … knee deep? The light comes from a tiny jellyfish, thimble sized, harmless.>

<Possibly valuable,> said Alfric. <We should capture a few.>

<Stop,> said Isra. Alfric froze in place. <One of the bats had some dim awareness of us … I think.> It was so difficult to say, but there was a change, at least in one of them. Looking up, Isra thought she saw one of the resting creatures stir.

<Are we good?> asked Alfric. He was looking up at the ceiling, not moving an inch.

The creature, the one that had stirred, dropped down, twirling around to face them and doing a steep dive like a falcon going after its prey. The speed was so fast that even with enhanced senses it was difficult to track, and its movement through the air was loud enough to sound like a scream. Alfric brought his shield up and moved to block it from hitting Hannah, getting there just in time for it to catch the edge of his shield with a sickening crunch. The creature was dead, torn apart from the impact, and Alfric was gripping his shield arm in pain. The bat had no visible head, just a chest that was filled with things like worms, and the architecture of a mouth within it.

The rest of them had heard, and Isra had no idea how they were going to handle it, even if they could somehow get back into the corridor in time.

<Timely!> shouted Mizuki, which made absolutely no sense to Isra. The effect was immediate though, because time slowed to a crawl, not quite as slow as it was with her magical bow, but slowed nonetheless. The air felt thick, like moving through water, and breathing was so difficult that it was a struggle just to get a lungful.

The spell, if that was what it was, affected all of them, and it likely saved them from death. Isra pushed to the side, fighting the thickness of the air, and narrowly avoided one of the worm-chested bats slamming into her. She knew she needed to get back to the corridor, but the entire flock was descending from the ceiling now, and moving in a straight line seemed like a guarantee that she would be hit. It was all she could do to dodge and weave between the hurtling bodies, and the others were scrambling too.

Verity had been closest to the doorway, and made it in the quickest. Her song was still going strong, and she shifted it to raw speed.

Isra ran, which required taking her eyes off the plummeting bats. Everyone else was running too, and the rain of creatures couldn’t be entirely avoided. Alfric had his shield up, held above his head, and Hannah was covering her head with her hands, but they were still being struck, usually grazing strikes, but occasionally a solid one that staggered them and threatened to tip them. The impacts were horrifying, wet thumps and harsh cracks, the creatures killing themselves with their dives, breaking bones against the rocky floor, snapping their own necks.

Isra was struck in the shoulder just as she got through the doorway, and had to be helped by Alfric to make it to safety. He was limping with blood streaming out of his bad leg, and Hannah came after him, also bloodied about her face, her helm having not protected her, or possibly just turned what would have been a lethal hit into a serious injury.

Mizuki was the last to come in. She’d been watching the bats come down and twirling past them, more focused on that than safety or running. She had her staff in her hands and was hitting them aside, sometimes diverting them by only just enough. She didn’t seem like she’d gotten hit, but the sweat had matted loose strands of hair to her face, and she was getting gassed. She finally dashed toward the safety of the corridor, avoiding the descending bats with speed more than finesse, and came under the protection of the overhang just as the last of the bats hit the ground.

<Eyugh!> grunted Mizuki, <What was that! Worm bellies!>

The spell she’d made wore off, and they were all left panting, and in some cases, bleeding. It took Hannah a moment to get to her feet and start healing them, starting with Alfric, who had already suffered two nasty hits earlier in the dungeon.

<Did you see me moving out there?> asked Mizuki. She held out her hand, which was shaking.

Verity set her lute to the side and threw up. Isra went to her and rubbed her back for a moment, trying to help as best she could. There wasn’t all that much you could do for someone who had thrown up.

<There are mints and chocolates in the wand pack,> said Alfric. <They should be fine to eat, but they’ll be a little different from what I put in.>

Verity looked quite pale, and she gave a nod. Isra took the wand from Mizuki and used it to pull out Alfric’s sack, and eventually found both a waterskin and a packet of mints and chocolates. She did this using her uninjured arm, which made it take twice as long. Isra was dimly aware that she was under the influence of a battle rush, and that the pain would be felt more keenly very soon.

<Anyone else need healin’?> asked Hannah once she was done with Alfric. She had tended to her own head wound, but there was still a good deal of blood on her face.

said Isra. <In the shoulder.> She hadn’t been moving it much. When she did move it, there was a bright flare of pain, like the sun had gotten into her brain.

<Oh,> said Hannah once she was touching Isra. <It’s ground pork. Let me see if I can do somethin’ about this.>

The relief, when it came, was incredible, and Isra rolled her shoulder a few times just for the feeling of being able to do that without pain. That phrase, ‘ground pork’, was rattling around in her head.

<You guys saw me out there dodging the birds, right?> asked Mizuki. <And that spell was, if I do say so myself, amazing for my first time doing a party thing. I’d kind of been thinking about it as soon as we got into the dungeon and I saw time was available.> She was staring at the dead worm-bats and gripping her staff with white knuckles. It was a virtual field of the dead, at least two hundred, their corpses spread out around where the party had been standing. <That was so good.>

<Not even remotely how I would describe it,> said Verity. She was leaned back against the wall with her eyes closed. Her face was pale, almost green.

<We all lived, right?> asked Mizuki. <Just needed some healing?> She finally looked back at them and saw their faces. <What?>

<I’m glad you had a good time with that,> said Alfric. <But as dungeon experiences go, it was a bit traumatic, I think. We’re going to take a little break.>

<I’m not saying that I had a ‘good time’,> said Mizuki. <But I was,> she wiggled her hips side to side.

said Verity.

<Without the spell speeding us up, there’s a good chance one of us would have died,> said Alfric. <A single hit to the head might have been enough.>

said Hannah. <Lost a bit of time, actually. I don’t remember gettin’ into the corridor, nor most of what I did when I healed you, so let’s hope I did a good job.>

<You’re fine now?> asked Alfric.

<Ay,> said Hannah. <Though I do need a rest.>

<We’ll have to make sure you don’t have a concussion,> said Alfric. <Look into my eyes?> He squinted at her. <Hrm, okay. Rest for now.>

<Is she going to be alright?> asked Isra.

<She’s probably fine,> said Alfric. <But having our healer injured or incapacitated is what I’d consider a worst-case scenario. That goes double given how difficult it would be to get back through the tunnel with a limp body. We’d have to go grab the stone.>

<I’m fine,> said Hannah. She was slumped against the wall, resting her head, with her helm removed. <No symptoms of a concussion other than the lost time, and I’ve healed myself up from the hits I took. A few broken bones, but now I’m right as rain.>

<A few?> asked Mizuki. <How many hits did you take?>

<With the lost time, I wouldn’t trust my count,> said Hannah.

<They’re more like bats,> said Isra. <With worms on their chest. That’s also where their mouth is.> She glanced at the field of corpses. <Alfric, why did they do that?>

<Why were they suicidal?> asked Alfric. <That’s just dungeon madness. They wanted to kill us and didn’t care whether they died in the process, not that they were smart enough to realize what they were doing. Dungeon madness, usually, means trying to kill at any cost, though the interpretation, so to speak, differs.>

Isra felt bad for the creatures, which wasn’t unusual when it came to dungeons. They had been clustered, sleeping together, and then when they’d sensed people — maybe the noise, maybe the lantern — they had gone into a murderous frenzy, sacrificing their lives for no reason at all. The party hadn’t wanted these creatures to die. If the creatures had been docile, which was very possible under normal circumstances, they could have sat there peacefully for all the party cared. It was sad.

<Doing okay?> Alfric asked Hannah.

<Just fine,> she said, getting to her feet.

<We have nothing to show for this dungeon so far,> said Verity.

<We’re a third of the way done, by my estimate,> said Alfric. <Is everyone good to go? I do want to get something from this place.>

<Yes, we’ll collect both,> said Alfric. <But they’re not really what we’re coming here for.>

They spent another few minutes resting up, checking themselves over and having Hannah make some repairs to their equipment, including a dent in her own helm. The dungeon, so far, had not been kind, and Isra was hoping that she wouldn’t have too many more injuries before the day was out.