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This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 129, Dungeon Dreams IV
🕑 Added 2022-08-17 15:01:10 +0000 UTCIf you'd like to read a totally unrelated bit of non-fiction, I wrote a blog post on AI art and some thoughts about it, The AI Art Apocalypse.
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They ate in the garden stone, which had been placed in the big circular area with all the doors. It was a lunch that Mizuki had packed for them, a warm goulash in an earthenware crock, ladled out into little bowls with a wooden spoon. Alfric took his and tried not to eat too fast, though he was feeling nervous. In the back of his mind was the thrum, which was gone now. His body still seemed attuned to it, and at different moments his hands would start to go to his ears or his body would tense, as though anticipating it. The thrum didn’t come though, and wouldn’t have in the garden stone anyway.
“We’re going to be able to get out of here, right?” asked Mizuki. She was picking at the goulash.
“We are,” said Alfric.
She looked up at him, frowning. “You’re a terrible liar.”
“Well what’s he to say?” asked Hannah. “That no one can know for sure, and it’s entirely possible that we’re trapped here, and the whole thing scrapped?”
“I just wanted some assurance,” said Mizuki with a small shrug.
“I’m bad at being assuring when I don’t think there’s cause for confidence,” said Alfric. “Sorry.”
“Well I think we’re going to make it,” said Verity. “We’re low on resources, relative to what seems to be left, but we just need to plow on through. Alfric has a neat new sword, we don’t need to worry about the thrumming or the shifting, and we’re a plucky team of adventurers.” She smiled at the group.
“I think we’ve got problems when Verity’s trying to cheer people up,” said Mizuki.
“I’m a bard, we do cheer people up,” said Verity. “And if you’d like, I can weave some lightening of the spirits into the next song.”
“We need to keep it for combat,” said Alfric. “Sorry.”
“In a way, isn’t morale the most significant part of combat?” asked Verity, raising an eyebrow.
“And why are you in such high spirits, ay?” asked Hannah. “Not that it’s somethin’ I’d complain about, but the circumstances don’t seem to call for it, and you’re down a progressive melody, which means you must be feelin’ it.”
“I don’t know,” said Verity. She’d finished her serving and placed the wooden bowl on the center table. She always claimed that bardic magic increased her appetite. “I think that we’ve been doing well, even with the octopus … thing.” She had a look that Alfric had seen from her before, as though she was lost, trying to find a piece of song or descriptive phrase. “I’ve always compared dungeons to a kind of performance, and we’re gliding through this one.” She shrugged.
That wasn’t even remotely how Alfric was feeling, but maybe it was because he was so aware of the time, and the fact that they might not make it out before he would be compelled to reset. It was something that they’d have to have a discussion about in another few hours. He was hoping that they could make it through another forty rooms in that time, which didn’t seem too absurd unless they ran into something like the octopus again.
Isra was uncharacteristically quiet. She was eating her goulash at a steady pace, not really looking at anyone. Alfric wanted to say something to her, but he didn’t know what to say. Two of the mice had died, and it didn’t seem like a few of the others would be reclaimed. The way that they had talked about it earlier in the day had been like they were taking these mice on an adventure, and he could sympathize with the way she was feeling. She had been resistant to bringing animals into the dungeons from the very start.
“Alright,” said Mizuki. “I think that the octopus creature with the stone on his back represents Verity’s ability to handle a lot of things at once.”
Verity gave a little laugh. “I was worried about where you were going with that.”
“The rock on its back represents the way she carries the team,” said Alfric.
“Har,” said Verity, but she was smiling, and blushing, just a bit.
“The octopus represents tenacity, obviously,” said Hannah.
Verity smiled again, and there was an expectation in the air that was focused firmly on Isra. She looked up at them, as though only just realizing that they’d been talking, and Alfric opened his mouth to rescue her from having to say that she wasn’t listening.
“Like an octopus, Verity is a very good wrestler,” said Isra with some deliberate slowness.
There was silence for a bit.
“Um,” said Mizuki. “I have so many questions.”
“Is Verity a good wrestler?” asked Alfric.
Isra nodded. “We’ve wrestled together.”
“Before we were dating,” Verity added quickly.
“Why?” asked Mizuki. “I mean I guess if I was wrestling a boy I would know why I was doing that, and why he was doing that, so I guess I’ve filled in the blanks, nevermind.”
“It was innocent,” said Verity, in an awkward, rushing way. She glanced at Isra just for a moment.
Mizuki rolled her eyes.
“But is an octopus a good wrestler?” asked Hannah. “Seems to me that its tentacles would give it a good grip, but a good grip isn’t the major thing when you wrestle, it’s leverage. Hard to see an octopus bein’ able to pin someone.”
“I’ve never wrestled an octopus,” said Isra with a shrug. “I’ve actually only seen them a few times, during trips to Liberfell.”
“Where are octopuses in Liberfell?” asked Mizuki.
“In the river,” said Isra. She held her thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “This big.”
“Huh,” said Mizuki. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen one before.”
“I don’t know if they’re good wrestlers either,” said Isra with a shrug.
Alfric coughed. “If everyone has eaten as much as they’re going to eat, we should get moving,” he said. “Mizuki, the goulash was good, thank you.”
When they came out of the garden stone, they were in the large open room again, where the chest was waiting for them. Sixty doors were arranged in a ring around them, which in theory meant at least sixty rooms. Alfric corrected himself: there were fifty-nine doors, because they’d come in through one of them, the one that the octopus had crashed its boulder into. It was so many doors he almost thought he’d be sick, but there was a way to handle it, which was one door at a time.
First, there was some business that they’d put off until after lunch: the pile of metal that Mizuki had said was an entad.
As far as entads went, it was enormous, with each of the pieces being almost ten feet long, hinged in the middle. There were six in total, shaped and contoured, as thick as tree trunks, though hollow, which meant it was possible that the five of them together could move one. Thankfully the thicker bottoms of them were just barely narrow enough to fit into the chest, but it was going to take some doing, and getting them out would probably take a crane of some kind. There was a pattern to the metal, an embellishment, which made it look almost like the surface was covered in lizard scales.
In the end, it was the helm of flight that helped the most. Alfric had ropes, obviously, and was able to hook them up to Mizuki, making a harness around her. That meant that she could pull directly up, straining against the ropes, while everyone else tried to move a single end of a single jointed tube. Once it was up, it was just a matter of maneuvering it into the chest, which was easier said than done. If they’d had the time, Alfric would have dug a hole for the chest so they could slide the big tubes over and drop them in, but instead they ended up needing to angle the chest and the tube, in a way that needed to be delicate while also handling an entad that weighed hundreds of pounds.
Then they had to do that five more times.
Alfric wasn’t sure that it was worth it. It was entirely possible he’d get them out, have Filera look at them, and she would say that they were worthless. Maybe they made things that they touched blue, or the hollow could be made to produce a bag full of grain. Alfric had hope though, because larger entads were supposed to be better. He was a bit skeptical of that, and thought maybe larger entads were better because if a large entad weren’t good it would get junked rather than sitting on a shelf, leaving only good survivors, but he was hoping that was an academic point. He thought he might have read it in a book on entads somewhere.
It took them at least half an hour, though without the thrums, it was much harder to time.
<I’ll bet these are awesome,> said Mizuki. <Some kind of giant stilts, maybe?>
<We need to get going,> said Alfric, which was becoming his usual refrain. <If this is what puts us behind schedule … I don’t know.>
<We’ll make it,> said Hannah. <You’ve got that sword now. The shift has stopped.>
The shift having stopped didn’t make him feel any better. From what they knew of the shifts, it was entirely possible that the final shift had locked them into a configuration that didn’t connect them to the exit, something they’d already experienced once. If that happened, it would take them multiple hours to exhaust every door and figure that out, and then they would be left trying to break through walls and find the rest of the dungeon. Alfric was fairly confident that the new sword could slice through wood with ease, but cutting through load-bearing material seemed like a bad idea, and it would be hard to tell what might cause a collapse.
Still, they had hours of time left, and options. Fifty-nine options, in fact.
Alfric pushed open the first door, sword drawn and in polearm form with a footlong blade, and saw a group of furry bear-sized monsters in what looked to be a kitchen. They noticed him, and began to move.
<Fireball,> he called, ducking for cover.
<Kitchen stuff though,> said Mizuki, but even as she said it, the fireball raced forward.
The sound of the explosion was muffled, confined mostly to the room, and it came with a horrible clanking of metal and shattering of glassware and ceramics. There were yelps from the creature, painfully high, and while Alfric had hoped that they were all dead, one of them came racing out. It stunk of singed fur, and there didn’t seem to be more to it than fur, but Alfric brought his polearm down on it, slicing it, then turned to the room, looking for more. None came.
He looked down at the creature, then at the footlong blade at the tip of the long shaft. He had expected almost no resistance, as with the octopus, but the blade had felt practically blunt. He’d compensated, but it hadn’t been what he’d thought.
<Clear,> he said after he’d stepped into the kitchen. The fireball had killed almost everything except that last one, and he had put mortally wounded creatures out of their misery. He did it twice, and there was again that same problem. The blade was sharp enough for the job, but when he’d fought the giant octopus, it had sliced through the chest like it was almost nothing. There was a catch somewhere, and he didn’t like that.
<This poor kitchen,> said Mizuki as she came in.
<We need to keep moving,> said Alfric.
<Let me mourn the plates, at least,> said Mizuki.
<It was the right call, incidentally,> said Alfric. <I had been thinking about the creatures, not the loot. Sorry.>
<I didn’t want to go against what you’d said,> replied Mizuki. <It’s fine.>
There were things to take, and because the room had been over in a hurry, Alfric allowed it. Mostly it was a few plates that hadn’t been blown up by the fireball. Then they were moving on.
Alfric didn’t like having an untested weapon. It wouldn’t have been so bad if it was untested in a way that meant he was leaving some functionality on the table, but this one was untested in a way that seemed like it might cause some interference. Testing entads in a dungeon was bad enough, but testing one ‘live’ was worse.
He kept using it anyway. He didn’t really know why. There was something about the new weapon that made him feel more secure, as though he’d acquired a special toy and didn’t want to let it go. It was childish. He made a few cuts against the bodies, to confirm that it was sharp enough for use, then continued on with the polearm.
The next room had humanoid creatures, stringy ones that were seven feet tall and with wrists as thin as broom handles. A fireball greeted them, and three quick arrows took down the rest, without Alfric having to do all that much.
<Small rooms,> said Mizuki. <Less to work with, and I’m trying to suck from too far away.>
<Phrasing,> said Hannah.
They moved on, through the next door. They hadn’t seen any space-warping in the dungeon, multiple skies aside, and Alfric felt better going in a consistent direction.
The octopus had been an aberration. The creatures in the rooms were mostly weak. The rewards in the rooms were weak, maybe even weaker than expected given their elevation and the level of the threat. It was easy to imagine that this might have been how their first dungeon could have been, or every dungeon after that. It was easy to see how people could think dungeons were easy, and even more easy to see how they would give up after having gotten a few weak entads and a bit of junk.
The polearm wasn’t weak, exactly, but it underwhelmed. There was a chance that he’d used a once-a-month ability, or that it needed something big and powerful, or that the sharpness went on a cycle, or depended on specific conditions, or … a thousand things. There was every chance that it was a dud. He really should have stopped using it, but time was ticking down, and it felt like a liferaft, a signifier of things that would be lost if the dungeon was undone. It wasn’t actually worse than the bident, anyhow. He resisted the urge to fiddle with it, at least.
They went through a dozen rooms and eight different fights, though many of them were over before they started. There were natural rooms like caves or canyons, and manmade rooms that looked like they might belong in someone’s house. They had to backtrack, more than once, and eventually they reached a dock under the same dark sky they’d first seen. Fish people with extra flippers on their backs had jumped from the water, and it had been one of the fights that had stressed them, depleting stamina and Hannah’s healing, though nothing terribly severe. The waters were illuminated with their lanterns, and Alfric looked out at them. The dock was simple wood, probably of a sort that could be found anywhere along the big lake. He could, thankfully, see the edges of the room, which meant that this wasn’t an actual lake, just a piece of one.
<Going in?> asked Hannah.
<No,> said Alfric. <We can’t check every single body of water. We’re going to run out of time.>
<Then let’s get back so that doesn’t happen,> said Mizuki. <Come on, go go!>
There was something heartening about that, though Alfric was well aware that their pace was going to be dictated more by their bodies than their hustle. In fact, they’d been in the dungeon for nearly five hours by his reckoning, and most of that time had been moving and fighting, with only a few stops to gather up loot. Most of those small breaks had been to catch a breath more than anything. He could feel himself slower and more sluggish than he’d been at the start. Professional dungeoneering teams on a multi-day dungeon usually didn’t try to push too hard for fear that someone would get sloppy.
They kept reaching dead ends and coming back to the giant circular room where they’d found the octopus. It was maddening, in a way. What they needed to find was just one single room, but it could have been anywhere, down any branch of the dungeon.
<How’s the guild message coming?> asked Mizuki.
<It’s a graph of nodes,> said Alfric. <And the answer is poorly, trying to make a map is really not what this is designed for.>
<Write a letter to the Editor,> said Hannah. Alfric had never heard the expression, but he imagined that it was equivalent to saying that he should go give a sermon to the trees.
The map had grown less and less useful as the number of rooms increased. He wished that he’d put the whole thing to paper instead. They’d consulted it only twice thus far, both times to double-check that they remembered the way, and only one of those two times had the map prevented them from making a mistake.
Twenty rooms came and went. It took another hour. It was fantastic time, three minutes per room, and toward the end of it, Alfric was sweating hard. The only reason they’d stopped was because Isra had gotten a long slash along her forearm that had gone almost straight through the thimble armor. He was glad for the rest though.
<Why didn’t you use the amulet?> asked Alfric.
<I’m saving it for a larger creature,> she said. <You think not?>
<I don’t know, just curious, not judging,> said Alfric. <I’m hoping the octopus was the worst we’ll see.>
<The small wounds are adding up,> said Hannah. <If you get a break, I can still heal it, but we’re approachin’ my limits.>
<Sorry,> said Alfric. He’d been injured twice, both times when something had gotten up into his armor. The fact that the plates didn’t interlock was a problem, mostly when there was something with a lot of vectors of attack.
<Don’t be sorry, just don’t get hit,> said Hannah. <There’s a good chance that we reach the end this way.>
She meant the end of their dungeon run. That was sobering. Eventually she would have more and more trouble with the healing, and then they’d be stacking up wounds for real, and there was only so far you could make it into a dungeon while wounded. Wounds begat wounds, when you were favoring one leg and holding your stomach.
<We should talk about the Overguard Maneuver,> said Mizuki. <This really seems like a time for it.>
<No,> said Alfric. She had been asking whether she might get to see it in action ever since his mother had made an offhand mention of it.
<Please?> asked Mizuki.
<Still no, thanks for the manners though,> said Alfric. As strategies went, it was reckless, the kind of thing that could clear a dungeon incredibly fast, if you survived. He’d thought that it was cool, when he’d heard about it, but the more he learned about dungeons, the more disdain he felt for it.
An hour passed, and then a second. They cleared through half of the doors in the circular room. Quite a few of the paths had joined up, and a few of the doors went to the same room, but that wasn’t terribly heartening. Things went mostly the same, and they fell into a rhythm with it, rushing rooms one after the other. Alfric was following the left-hand rule, which made tracking where they were easier, and eventually he gave up on the guild message, getting out pencil and paper instead while he tried to get his breath back.
They took more hits, though Alfric tried his best to stay out front. They found four more entads, though nothing whose function was immediately obvious, and nothing that he wanted to spend the time or risk on. The dungeon was chipping them down and giving them almost nothing in return, and the chest was filling up with relatively useless junk. They had started doing something that was really not a good idea to do, which was throwing almost everything they thought they could salvage into the chest. Given the first-in, last-out way the chest worked, it was going to be an insane amount of work to get it all out and sorted, especially with those giant metal tubes right there in the middle of it.
<I actually was serious about the Overguard Maneuver,> said Mizuki. <I want to legitimately talk about it. We’ve got only a few hours left until you want to call it quits, right?>
<No, Mizuki,> said Alfric.
<If you’re going to reset anyway, then why not?> she asked.
<It’s stupid,> said Alfric. <And it’s not really designed for this. We also don’t have the tools, really.>
She had the look of someone who wanted to keep pressing on with the argument, but they were moving through the dungeons, and maybe there was something in his fatigue that made her hold her tongue.
The injury happened three rooms later.
Alfric pushed open a door, slightly out of breath, and stood to the side as Mizuki sent a weak fireball in. Sorcs were supposed to be able to go almost forever, but he had the sense that she was flagging, more from the fatigue of moving than because of anything going on with the magic.
When that was done, and Isra had shot off her arrows, Alfric went in. It was a grotto, their third of this dungeon, with thigh-deep water, and it seemed as though the water had spared the monsters some of the pain of the explosion. There were five in all, with another two dead in the water, and they had been injured, but Alfric could tell that this was going to be a difficult fight. One big sign of that was that one of Isra’s arrows was stuck into one of the monster’s chest, and it was still coming for him. They were each as large as him, not quite bipedal but capable of going up on two legs, a horrible combination of alligator and gorilla, long snapping jaws and muscular arms.
Alfric stabbed one in the chest, pushing against the side of the spear to turn the hole into a gash and lead on toward the other. With a polearm, the idea was to keep the enemy at bay, but with the numbers against him, it was clear that was going to be a problem. He slashed a monster across the chest, then choked up on the spear, holding it close to the sharp end and extending the blade as he did so.
They grabbed at him, and he slashed another, using the weapon more as a sword, shortening the shaft. It didn’t respond instantly, not like he’d have liked, and the creatures drew closer to him, even as he saw arrows appear in their flesh. He moved to retreat, cautious of putting them too close to the others, but Hannah was in the water, swinging her warpick. She clonked one in the head, and it fell, but her weapon was stuck for a moment.
The blade was doing better than it had been before, sharper and more alive, and Alfric tried to remember his bladework, which wasn’t what he’d kept up his training in. He caught one in the neck and slid the sword free, but he was surrounded now, and one of them had caught his arm. He moved the plates, trying to shake it free, but its arms were wrapped around him, and no movement of the plates could shake it. They were brutally strong beasts, their grip impossible to overcome, and with a swift motion, the one with a grip on him snapped his sword arm.
Alfric howled in pain. He was blinded by it, in spite of his training. He’d had breaks before, but this one was brutal, a full fracture right in the middle of his forearm, both bones. With that much pain, with the creature still tearing to rip his arm off, wiggling the bones, it was impossible to stay aware of himself, and so Alfric didn’t.
When he came to, the creatures were dead and Hannah was healing him, muttering to herself. He didn’t think that he’d gone unconscious, but it was hard to say. His throat was sore from screaming.
<How bad?> he asked. His body felt raw, as though it had been pummeled by the pain.
<Not so bad,> she said, voice light and calm in that overly-clerical way. <We’re clear, armor down so I can see your face.>
Alfric allowed the armor to slip down, and Hannah swore.
<Is he going to be okay?> asked Mizuki.
<When I said not bad, I meant from the perspective of a heal,> said Hannah. She was looking at his eyes, which Alfric expected were bloodshot. <I was able to line everythin’ up while you were out, get the bones back together so that it wasn’t such a stretch to heal. Not a compound, we can be thankful for that, nothin’ full shattered.>
<I lost blood,> said Alfric.
Hannah nodded. <Not so much I think you’re not fit to fight, but it took some time for us to kill the last of them, some seconds I don’t think we wanted to spend while your arm was like that.>
<Okay,> said Alfric. His arm was in her grip, the armor still on it. <Am I good to move it?>
<Ay,> said Hannah.
Alfric moved it, testing the motion, then climbed up out of the water, to his feet. He’d been dragged over to the sloped earth of the room’s entrance, and by the wetness on his face and the way his gambeson was soaked, he must have been beneath the water for at least a little bit of it.
<Okay,> said Alfric, half to himself. The room had two more exits. He didn’t move toward them.
<I’m frayed,> said Hannah. <We’re all frayed, and I include you in that. Verity’s been playin’ more than she’s ever played continuously, Isra’s shot so many arrows that her arm’d have fallen off if I hadn’t been keepin’ her fresh, and Mizuki … well, Mizuki is fine.>
<I’m tired and hungry and I want to go home,> said Mizuki.
<We’re runnin’ low,> said Hannah. <That’s all I’m sayin’. It’s too much dungeon.>
<Alright,> said Alfric. <It’s time to get stupid.> He looked at the party. <We’re going to try the Overguard Maneuver.>
<Yes!> said Mizuki with a wide smile.
<And what, precisely, is the Overguard Maneuver?> asked Verity.
Alfric explained it. They talked about it. They agreed that under normal circumstances, it was pretty stupid, and that under these very specific circumstances, it was worth a shot.
Twenty minutes later, Alfric was wearing all the armor. There had been some argument about whether it should be him or Mizuki, but he had insisted, and she had eventually relented. She was fresher, and smaller, and better with the helm, and could throw fireballs, but he was more durable, more combat capable, and actually knew what he was doing.
Alfric wore the thimble armor as the base layer and the plate on top of that. They didn’t quite fit right together, and his mobility was hampered, but it was as much armor as he could have on him. He had also taken the robes from Verity and the amulet from Isra, which meant that the threat vectors that would actually work against him were pitifully small. He had the sword in one hand, retracted, and the other hand was largely free, though he planned to use it as a shield. He was wearing the helm, to allow him to fly, because it was the fastest method of travel they had available.
<This is so dumb,> said Mizuki. She was the only one still wearing armor. <I love it.>
<Tell me again what you want for music,> said Verity. A steely calm had washed over her.
<Endurance above everything else, but also mental quickness,> said Alfric. <If I call for it, progressive strength, dropping the endurance. You’ll be in the stone, blind, so be listening for my queues.>
<I don’t know if I can handle a progressive,> said Verity. <But I’ll try.>
They filed into the garden stone, one by one, and Mizuki gave him a hug and a kiss on the center chest plate. When they were gone, he carefully placed the garden stone within the chest and tested that it was following him. The corner was still missing, but they’d gotten the missing part from the octopus and placed it within a pocket of the lid’s storage. Hannah had insisted on waiting to repair it until they were well out of the dungeon, and given how little healing she now had left, that seemed to have been the right call.
Alfric looked at the nearest closed door and steeled himself. It was stupid, but it was possible that it was also necessary, at least in this case.
The Overguard Maneuver had been an invention of Alfric’s great-grandfather, who was an extremely enthusiastic dungeoneer and also an idiot. The general idea was that dungeons took time and effort, and fighting the monsters was the worst part of it by a thousand miles. Because at least half of what you were looking for were easily spottable goods or magically identifiable entads, killing the monsters and then doing a thorough bout of resource extraction was a sucker’s game. Instead, Alfric’s great-grandfather had figured, it made the most sense to not fight the monsters any more than you had to, run through all the rooms, grab anything that stood out, and then leave before anyone had time to react. If you didn’t have the speed necessary for that, then at least you would save time by fighting all of the monsters at once.
Alfric burst through the door and didn’t spend time or attention looking at the thirty-pound rats that were crawling across the floor of a wine cellar. His attention was instead focused on the location of the next door on his left. As soon as he spotted it, he was zipping along, counting on his armors to protect him, bashing into the door. He barely felt it, and reoriented himself again, looking past the humanoid reptiles with their bulldog heads, and toward the next door. They came at him, running on stork legs, and he blew past them, clipping one and sending it tumbling, then broke through that next door as well.
It was fun. Alfric was actually surprised by just how enjoyable it was. This wasn’t how dungeons were supposed to be done, it was dangerous and stupid, but as he sailed over the heads of irate avian tortoises, he felt the smile on his face grow.
He made it five rooms before he reached a dead end, and once he’d confirmed that there were no more doors, he did the more dangerous part, which was turning back to face the collection of monsters that was coming after him. They were already at the door he’d just come through, spilling in, with such variety that it was nauseating, gazelle legs and fish fins, a swan’s neck with a shark’s mouth, and one small ooze that slid quickly across the ground.
He went at them with his sword, handle held in one hand, blade nine feet long, and sliced through them with just a hitch or two when he hit bone. Mizuki had discovered the problem with the sword while he’d been out, and it was something he regretted not cottoning onto himself: the sword got sharper the longer the blade was.
At nine feet long, its full length, it was godly sharp, but also incredibly unwieldy, especially when he was worried about slicing straight through structural supports. He swung anyway, quick flashing slashes to clear the doorway, and then he was through as the bodies fell apart, off to the next door on the left.
Doors splintered apart when he hit them, though he did occasionally have to slice through a metal door. The sword trailed behind him, and he had to be careful not to let it touch the chest, which was also running behind him, stepping its way through monster blood. It had gotten filthy in a hurry, but that wasn’t all that unusual with the gunk and dreck of a dungeon. When Alfric needed to bring his sword around to slice something, it was so long that he was usually forced to cut through a wall to maneuver it, which did offer resistance, even with the blade maximized.
He tried to keep track of the rooms as he went through them, but that was a fool’s errand with so much he was trying to do at once. In every room he was looking for the next door, trying not to mind the monsters too much, sometimes swiping at them but other times leaving that for if he had to go after them on the way back.
The monsters accumulated as a ravening horde behind him as he swept through rooms, and the way he cut through their assembled army of grotesque creatures did nothing to stop the ones he missed. They came with clubbed feet and segmented waists, spindly insectile legs, hooked beaks, and useless arms that ended in two-toed hooves. He bashed through doors to escape them, and was introduced to more creatures, which soon joined their fellows. The odd bodies and strange locomotions he might have been able to handle, but sometimes when he looked back, he’d see a gout of flame or a sintering beam of light. There were exotic attacks among them, and the thing that worried him most, given his history with the dungeon, was the idea that he might be blinded. Layer upon layer of armor wouldn’t save him if that happened.
He found a rich vein of rooms, one that seemed to go on for a very long time, almost thirty rooms in total, and then he ran straight into a dead end, requiring him to double back. Most of the rooms only had one door, and he was far down a chain of those.
The monsters killed each other, not on purpose, but because of their natures. A flaming creature on wobbly legs incinerated others who got too close, and a mottled snake let out bursts of electric juice that spattered on the others and caused them to tense up and die. Alfric killed the snake from nine feet away with a precise swipe of the sword. It was precise only in the sense that it got the snake: he had cut through the door frame, the walls, the ground, and three other creatures that were dying to the snake's strange venom.
The chest trundled along, not seeming to mind the chaos, and Alfric did his best to hurry as he flew toward the next leftmost door.
<Still alive out there?> asked Hannah.
<Busy,> said Alfric as he wrenched a brass door to the side with his poor range of motion. He should have cut through it, as that mostly just required the motion of his wrist.
He got hit with the slime right after that, and felt the constriction of his armor before he even really understood what was happening. His armor had locked itself, and the telekinesis effect on the plates seemed to do nothing to help unstick them. His sword was trapped in the position it had been in, slightly extended, and as he tested it, he could feel that only his left leg and arm were free to move.
Alfric still had the helm though, and used it to spin toward the creature, using his entire body to make a single slash of the sword. It toppled, and Alfric tried to orient himself, which was a sickening process given that his head was trapped instead of the armor that surrounded him. He had to move his entire body to align the slit of the armor and find the next door.
The helm moved Alfric, who was mostly immobile, and his sword cut its way through the walls as he flew, because he couldn’t much move it. After five rooms of this, he took a moment, only seconds, to transfer the sword from his immobile right hand to his still free left hand, and from there he had a better time, but his view of the world was narrow, and he had never been able to train his non-dominant hand to be quite as good as his dominant hand.
A tall six-legged goose was leading the charge among the monsters following him, and he bashed through another door rather than trying to fight the creature. That brought him to a place he really hadn’t wanted to see again: the circular room with its sixty doors. He had made a long loop, and if there was no space-warping, that meant he’d just spent a long, harrowing time going in what was essentially a giant circle.
The goose quacked, and Alfric bashed through another door. Mobility was coming back, slowly, but he was still a flying brick more than an actual fighter. His swings were wild and uncontrolled, which wasn’t what you wanted with a nine-foot-long sword that could cut through almost anything. He spun, found a door, hoped that it was the right one, and flung himself at it. He wasn’t sure, but he thought that maybe the immobilization was helping him, because the concentric metal shells of armor were protecting him even more from the feeling of knocking the doors from their hinges.
He turned in the air, looking for the next door, and found it. It was open. There was a moment of rising panic, because that meant he’d made a loop or a mistake, until he realized that he hadn’t doubled back or anything at all like that. It was the same table and chairs that he’d seen when they’d exited the lute room for the second time, which meant that he’d joined up the segments of the dungeon. There was a bit of relief at that, but it didn’t get him closer to finding the exit, so he spun back the way he’d come, cutting a line through the wall, and flew to find the next door.
He was mostly trying not to fight the monsters, instead depending on the helm’s speed to fly on past them. The layers meant that he was nearly invulnerable, save for the slot he was seeing out of, and he bumped them once or twice, no worse for the wear but feeling the crunching of them as he did.
There were three separate swarms after him, two of insects and one of birds, and one of the birds got lucky as he doubled back, slamming into him just so, lodging its narrow beak in the small slot that he was seeing out of. The tip of the beak was half an inch from his eyeball, and he could only just barely move the plate enough to crush it, but that left a bit of beak to fall down inside his armor, near his mouth. Similarly, when he flew through the swarms after a deadend, he would sometimes splash right through the insects and hear them pelt against his armor, adding to the much and blood that was there.
He took a moment to inartfully cut down the mob, swinging his sword left handed, turning his entire body to change where he was looking. The sword was a marvel, but there were creatures it was ineffective against, and the more of the dungeon he saw, the more of them there were. A lizzo-shaped ooze was following him, faster than he would have liked, alway five rooms behind him. He’d sliced through it more than once, feeling no resistance but doing no damage to it either. The swarms persisted, though he reduced their numbers each time he plowed through them at speed and more of their bodies splattered against his armor. He heard an explosion in the distance and grimaced at the thought. His eyes kept going to the chest, where the garden stone contained his companions, and every time he had to double back, he thought to himself ‘don’t cut the chest, don’t let the monsters get the chest’. Doubling back was always the most dangerous moment, when he had to come face to face with whatever he’d stirred up most recently.
He flew through a narrow, half-height door, barely fitting, wincing at the idea that he might have to go back through it, then five rooms later that was exactly what he had to do. When he reached door on the return, the ooze was sliding through, almost casually, and Alfric slash with his sword, trying to kill the monsters that had begun to fill the room. Some of them were beating against his armor, almost unfelt, but at the back of his mind was every horror story that he’d ever heard about what a dungeon could throw at you. A rusting touch, ethereal fingers that could go through metal, a piercing shriek that could burst your eardrums, the heat, the cold, on and on. It was so hard to know what any of these things did until they were on him, and most of them had only teeth and claws, if that, but the aberrations didn’t stick out until they were actually doing whatever it was they did. Then the ooze was through, and Alfric moved around it, flying as fast as he could, through the tiny door, pushing limbs and bodies out of the way with his bulk of metal.
He felt them against him, clawing at him, these unknown and unseen creatures, and a thick spike of fear lanced through him. Something large gripped him by the leg, and Alfric tried to kick or spin free, but it held him tight. With every second that past, more of them were on him, more hands and claws and pincers against the armor, and he was getting pulled back by the weight of them. He activated the amulet of Isra’s with a thought and slipped out like a bar of soap, shooting away so quickly that he almost slammed face-first into a wall.
He burst through another door, and another, doors of wood and a few of metal. Something with claws leapt onto his back and he slammed himself against a pillar to crush it. He was dripping blood and viscera, gunk and mud, so encased in metal that he didn’t really know what was outside him, viewing the world through his little slit.
He’d lost track of the rooms, and of where he was, and there’d been so many of them that it couldn’t help but feel like he had been there before. The only thing he knew was that a closed door meant somewhere he’d not yet gone, so he barreled into them, smashing them with the full weight of his metal and flesh. He ignored the things he passed, even a large red one towering ten feet tall that bellowed at him, even an odd one with white and black spots, even the strangely almost human faces.
That was how he almost missed it. He came out of a door, looked left, saw, down a hallway, a room that led to a long open tunnel, then looked right and saw more doors. He’d been seeking doors at a frantic pace for so long that he almost went to them, as though he was an idiot sailor drawn to a siren — and then he realized that he’d seen this hallway before, and that the tunnel he’d spotted was the thing he’d spent the entire time searching for.
He raced for it, making a nauseous spin to align his view with the chest one final time.
<Going out, hang on,> he said.
He could feel but not see something on his left leg and kicked it away as hard as he could. He caught a glimpse of it, furry, scrambling, and dark. He landed himself right in front of the exit, then turned to the chest and hopped over it, putting it between himself and the tunnel. He got down and pushed using his back, as hard as he could, with the full weight of the helm’s power flight. It still wasn’t an easy thing, like pushing a full cart by himself.
The monsters came, spilling out into the hallway, some of them slamming against the wall before reorienting themselves. They were the fastest of them, those that could almost keep pace with the armor, largely skinny creatures with wiry strength and sleek bodies. Alfric held out the sword toward them, having surprised himself by holding onto it through all this, and waved it in front of him, its nine-foot length swishing through the air. Most of them ran into it, their bodies falling apart with only token resistance, but a few small ones went under and gripped onto him. Animals the size of squirrels gripped his immobilized plate, and there was nothing he could do unless he wanted to swing the incredibly sharp sword at his own legs. He tried to stay calm and keep pushing, but he had no idea where the tunnel exit would actually end up being, only that he was close to it.
The world grew darker for just a second, his lanterns not penetrating it. He’d never come out of a tunnel backward before, and it was startling to see nothingness as he looked back at the border.
As soon as he realized that he was out, he turned and rose, taking off into the night sky, up out of the entrance. He dropped the sword just beyond the collar, hoping that he hadn’t cut it, and focused his attention on the riders that had gotten on him, the small creatures that he hadn’t managed to cut through. The work was frantic, mostly for fear of what they might do to him if left unchecked, in part because of the combat thrill that had yet to leave his body.
<We’re out,> he said, voice shaky.
When he thought he’d gotten them all, he dropped to the ground, to where the party was emerging. The chest was a sorry sight, not because it had suffered much damage, but because it had been running behind Alfric the entire time, cheerfully stepping through mud, blood, and whatever other fluids had been spilled in the wake of the mad dash.
<That worked?> asked Mizuki.
Alfric nodded, slowly. It was nighttime, but the three moons were out in full and the sky was clear, giving them the half-god’s light, almost as bright as daybreak. His hands were shaky, and he could feel the energy draining out of him. The bruises and bumps were making themselves known, as though they’d been politely waiting for a moment to interject. He could hear the slow trickle and drip of the horrible mixture of things on his armor.
He let out a laugh that came on as though from nowhere. <My mom is going to be so proud.>
~~~~
Author’s Note: I know, I know, octopuses are seawater, not freshwater, how could they live in a river? Well, it’s fantasy, I can do what I want, okay?
Comments
fbt
no link here to Eager Readers? It was amazing. Really, *really* good. I love (and sorta collect) short stories (always been my fave form), and that was an epic one. GJ!
Tristan A
Great series of chapters! Glad they managed to overcome the challenge. Can't lie, super excited for the loot reveal and entad testing. Also since extending the blade affects sharpness I wonder if extending the handle does anything that Alfric maybe didn't notice.
