Ayla, picking up a wand with her mouth, pointed at the growing roots and bit down on it. The wand, suffering catastrophic damage, exploded, destroying the worgs mouth and sending a small fireball into the entrance of the pixie home. Ayla’s jaw hung loosely on a few strands of slimy flesh, though quickly reconnecting and reforming with a few disgusting snaps and fleshy rips. The fire spread quickly, destroying the roots as it chased them down. However, the magical fire was soon put out and the plants reemerged.
“Anadine, Rowen,” Doc called. “I need you two to get inside and eliminate the source! Ayla and Aisha can’t manipulate their bodies to fit yet, so it’s up to you two. Charge in on my signal!” Suddenly, every fire wand Doc possessed floated up and turned onto the doorway.
“NOW!” Doc yelled, and an incredible surge of fire magic shot forth from his wands, blasting a whole into Claire’s home.
The two slimes, heeding orders, surged forward with weapons raised, slashing every root still free of the flames.
“Leave the weapons and hurry! The smoke, Claire can’t breathe, hurry!” Doc yelled, feeling the connection to his pixie partner weakening. He unleashed another volley of flame into the home, burning more of a hole to the bedroom.
Anadine didn’t hesitate as she dropped her weapons and leaped into the flaming hole. Rowen attempted to follow her but found the magically created flames particularly strong against his undead-based body. He lost half of his slime before he was forced back, aflame, with the worgs using their tails to stamp out the flames.
“Anadine!” Rowen called out in fear.
Inside, the blue slime winced in pain as the fire hurt her, burned her. She persevered as she exited the kitchen, the source of the strongest flames, as the plant source withered and died in apparent agony. The smoke, with no way to escape, filled the small pixie home and obscured all sight, forcing Anadine to use her tremor sense and echolocation to find the fallen pixie.
Claire, wrapped up in her cocoon of roots, was choking in her unconsciousness state, the flames creeping up the dead roots toward the bed. The blue slime smashed the roots away with her tentacles, freeing the little pixie and drawing her inside Anadine’s protective blue slime, surrounded by a bubble of smoke-free air. She turned to escape, only to be pierced by a surviving plant root. The root reached inside her, dousing its flame while seeking out both her core and Claire’s body, and started to drain her. Anadine roared, cutting the root just as more roots attacked her from the ceiling, having avoided Doc’s attacks.
Outside in the heart room, Doc held off another fire attack and concentrated on eliminating all the roots he could find, disturbing the soil and causing additional small earthquakes from his attacks. Rowen, recovering on the floor, kept his senses fully on the flaming pixie hole. Ayla and Aisha paced and let out worried yips, unable to do anything but wait.
“She’s coming out!” Rowen yelled, catching Doc’s attention. A blue tentacle shot out, holding Claire within it. Anadine’s core followed, surging down the tentacle, closely followed by a wave of roots. Doc’s crystal shone, and the tentacle was severed, saving Anadine and destroying the last of the roots. Anadine’s crystal, drained and cracked, rolled loosely onto the cavern floor, only faintly covered in blue slime. Claire, still covered in slime, lay dead to the world next to her, her body covered in the sticky, gooey material.
“Claire, Anadine?” Doc called, worried beyond words. His spirit surged out, sending strands of precious mana into both their bodies. Anadine began to recover, reforming a small layer of slime, but Claire remained unconscious.
“Claire? Wake up Claire,” Doc whispered.
But the pixie would not wake up, no matter what he did.
Doc, putting aside any notion of modesty, dove his consciousness into Claire’s body, seeing everything that was wrong with her. Slime had clogged her airways, where smoke still lingered, and her heart was sluggish without the mana her fae blood would have normally provided. Magical power surging, Doc removed the slime and smoke, clearing her airways, and pumped his own personal mana into her blood. When she failed to breathe on her own, he used his control of mana to force her lungs to breathe, moving the fresh air he created into her as fast as he could.
The four bosses watched silently in vigil as Claire’s home continued to burn behind them. Anadine, weakened into barely a layer of slime, finally fainted, her last sight being of her precious master using up all of his magical reserves to save the life of his partner.
Chapter 24
Doc panted, with crystal dripping with a cold condensation similar to cold sweat. He very much felt as if his spirit was stifled, craving to fill a sudden loss of energy. Even without lungs to breathe, his spirit felt the huge loss of mana as significant fatigue, the sheer amount of mana needed to completely irradiate the rogue Dream flower now taking its toll. He checked himself once more; he’d used up every last bit of mana hid dungeon had managed to gather since the modifications were made. He had just enough to keep the dungeon working properly, but anything beyond that was impossible for now. Once again, Doc found himself at his weakest point.
No matter, Doc thought to himself, because it was worth it.
Below him, resting on a newly made bed, was Claire. She breathed slowly, alive but unconscious after being rescued. Nearby, Rowen continued using his slime to form a blanket by weaving his tentacles under the direction of Anadine, who had recovered enough to speak. Still in ball form, she was being treated as a toy by the worgs twins, who were unable to assist.
“Even like this, she’s still more useful than we are,” Ayla muttered in annoyance as she passed Anadine to her sister.
“There Ayla,” Aisha reassured her, bouncing Anadine back. “Is okay. We best for fighting, not healing. Saliva and licking not useful here.”
“Rowen, you need to make sure the weave is even,” she lectured as she was rolled around by Ayla and Aisha. “Your tentacle is straying on the third row. Ah, you almost missed me Ayla.”
“Hush.”
“Understood,” Rowen said in a rare moment of patience, adjusting the part she was referring to back into position. Satisfied with the blanket, he broke it off from his body. The blanket solidified into a soft, yet solid, woven slime cloth that would stay cool no matter the temperature and would conform to the user’s body.
“I must say,” Anadine said as she came to stop in front of the blanket and examined it, “to think slime could be made into a material like this. It’s quite versatile.” Sprouting teeny tiny tentacles, she moved the blanket to cover the tiny pixie’s body and tuck her in.
“Is Claire doing better?” Doc asked overhead, the familiar worry coloring his words.
Rowen slid a tentacle over Claire’s body. “She’s doing the same as five minutes ago, Doc. She will need at least a day to recover, if not longer.” The white and grey slime crossed a pair of tentacles when he finished examining the pixie. “That being said, her mind may need a much longer time to recover than her body. I had no idea she was using Dream Flower; what a horrific incident.”
“Dream Flower? So, you recognize the plant?” Anadine asked, curious. Wobbling, she dragged herself forward next to Rowen at the bedside.
“It’s something of a notorious plant—at least it was a few hundred years ago while I was still a prince,” Rowen revealed. “Dream Flower is one of those rare plants that lives off mana instead of light and water. Contrary to its looks, however, it’s a parasitic plant with severe hallucinogenic properties, granting a user incredibly realistic dreams of an ideal world when its nectar is ingested. Like other drugs, however, it requires more and more over time to achieve a similar effect, resulting in the user becoming lost between realities. Too much of the nectar puts the victim into a coma, allowing the Dream Flower to easily grow into their bodies and feed off of them until they die.”
“That’s horrible!” Anadine gasped in shock. “But I’ve never heard of this plant before. Is it rare or hard to cultivate, then?”
“No,
it used to be common in the elf forest to the north of Nehatra before it was spread south by merchants eager to take advantage of its addictive properties to cultivate a new market,” Rowen said. “Unfortunately, one kingdom used it to create terrible magical weapons to wage war and conquer. Before my birth, after a neighboring kingdom was destroyed by these weapons, an insane mage created a plague that targeted the plant, retaliation for the loss of his family. He burned his entire being in that spell, and the Dream Flower was supposedly wiped from existence. The country that had been using the plant, now defenseless without their secret weapon, was destroyed in turn. I doubt even ruins remain, let alone their research or weapons.”
Rowen turned his body up to face Doc. “Mage-crafted plagues are nothing to write off, Doc. They can easily expand their range beyond the original target, so they are considered forbidden spells and research. I was shocked to see a Dream Flower here, especially one so odd. How did Claire get ahold of one?”
“They’re growing in the dungeon,” Doc remembered. “One of the plant slime gardens has them, the west one, I believe. They aren’t behaving like the ones in Claire’s home did, though—docile as any other flower. I don’t have the power to remove them right now, otherwise...”
“They should be fine for now,” Rowen assured him, “but I have a suspicion about that. Tell me, Doc, were the Dream Flowers something Claire brought into your dungeon, like the trees and herb bushes?”
Doc took a moment to examine his memories before answering. “No, neither Claire nor anyone else brought the flower inside. Near as I can recall, they appeared just after I finished reorganizing the dungeon.”
Rowen nodded his body and turned to face Ayla and Aisha. “Sisters, remind me, how would you best hunt a stronger prey?”
The worg sisters touched noses. “Well,” Ayla said, “hunting stronger prey requires weakening it first, usually with an ambush of some kind. Attacking while it’s asleep or weakened from another fight. Do you believe that’s what happened here, Rowen?”
Rowen nodded. “An extinct flower that somehow appears inside Doc’s dungeon and only reacts violently after being exposed to the mana directly from Doc’s crystal? I think someone or something is seeking to make sure Doc is in a poor position to fight back. I can’t imagine whoever is against us knowing the precise amount of damage they would cause, but they must have known something would happen. The Dream Flower is mesmerizing in appearance, after all, and only requiring mana to live makes it one of the easiest things to cultivate.
“We’ve fallen into a trap, and that means something will be coming to take advantage of our weakened state.” He looked toward Claire’s resting form, Anadine’s diminished body, and Doc’s soft glow. “As you observed earlier, Doc, and like what I said earlier, Dream Flowers are a parasitic plant that rely on incapacitated victims to feed on. They are not aggressive plants, nor should they be capable of such an assault as we witnessed unless something had been done to them.”
“Then someone threw the Dream Flower seeds into the dungeon, with the intention to cause great harm,” Anadine re-summarized. “What kind of evil thing would use such tactics? There is no honor in this, not fighting spirit.”
“One who does not hunt but takes pleasure in pain,” Aisha said, whipping the ground in anger. “The enemy, cunning and without morals. We should expect the unexpected.”
“I agree, sister,” Ayla said. “We should take steps to fortify the dungeon, perhaps create our own traps since Doc can’t for now. Perhaps locking the dungeon until further notice. What do you think, Doc?”
There was no response from the dungeon crystal.
“Doc?” Ayla asked, confused. The four dungeon bosses locked up at the crystal, which had slowly lost its glow until the heart room was covered in darkness.
“So,” Doc said softly, in a tone that sent shivers down everyone’s body, “someone did this to me, to Claire, to my dungeon. Heh, heh heh, heheheh.”
Doc began to laugh. It had been such a long time since he had laughed. It filled the heart room as he chuckled and giggled before exploding into raucous jubilation. This mad, polluted laughter echoed out of the heart room up into the dilapidated maze, where the treasure and chest slimes locked in place, instincts telling them to freeze or die. It continued, bursting through the openings into the dungeon forest, where every slime immediately fled back to their base to hide. The entire dungeon rang with hollow, malevolent laughter.
Doc’s laughter broke off without warning, allowing silence to once more permeate the room.
“Doc?” Anadine asked, hesitantly.
“I’ve been so patient,” Doc murmured. “I’ve worked through my problems, suffered in silence, and made sure everyone else had a nice, quiet dungeon. No matter what happened, I made sure to keep it all in, and now? Now, someone comes along and plays games with me? With my family? Some piece of shit thinks they can threaten me, my dungeon, my partner, and I’ll just roll over and die?
“Fuck that.”
The entire dungeon vibrated as Doc’s crystal took on a dark purple shine.
“If that’s how it’s going to be played, then I might as well flip over the table, as the adventurers used to say,” Doc growled. “Think I’m going to wait so patiently here in fear for their next move, that I’m not going to take a single step outside to defend my dungeon? Well you have another thing coming! You hear me!”
“Doc, what are you doing?” Rowen asked as he bounced around from the tremors, grabbing hold of Claire’s bed and keeping her safe and stable in the air. “We aren’t battle ready! We can’t win this fight!”
“Against someone who uses these kinds of tactics, I’m going to fucking destroy them!” Doc roared. “Just—like—this!”
Doc’s crystal showed an image of the outside of the dungeon. The clearing, which separated the entrance from the tree-line, exploded as slime after slime flew out of the ground like rocks thrown by catapults. In every direction, slimes flew through the air, landing with extreme prejudice all around the dungeon.
“Doc!” Anadine screeched, “what are you doing!”
“Retaliating,” he snarled, and the image on his crystal changed to show the happenings of the outside world. Slime after slime shattered trees and splashed around, sending acidic goo everywhere. The surviving slime immediately threw themselves at the closest living things, the mutated dire wolves who had been secretly patrolling around the dungeon. Barking and screams filled the forest as the unexpected assault took the fiends by surprise, the slime aerial assault being a complete ambush.
“Where are you getting this power?” Rowen asked as he tumbled around the room. “Doc, answer me! Where did those slimes come from? Claire wouldn’t want you to become corrupted for her sake!”
“I’m burning it,” Doc said, deadly serious. “Everything I don’t need, I’m burning it all for this. All the treasure in my astral bag: the magical armor and weapons from the adventurers, the corpses, the loot from the undead dungeon, the mana crystals from the mine I had been saving. Claire told me, everything possesses mana, so now I’m taking it all and unleashing it.”
“I can feel it,” Anadine groaned, a surge of mana flying into her body. Slime erupted forth from her core, restoring her back to her former slime body. “I’m back to full strength!”
“Good,” Doc said, his crystal alight with mana once more. “These new slimes, I am controlling each and every one of them. We don’t have the space or time for a prolonged battle with this enemy, especially if it’s connected to this enemy dungeon that’s surrounding us. None of them will survive, but through their deaths I will find the main base. Once I do, I’ll create a war tunnel and you, Anadine and Rowen, will lead your minions to destroy the enemy. My dungeon entrance shall remain open, serving as bait for whomever I piss off the most with this attack.
“Twins, I mean Ayla and Aisha, I will be relying on the two of you to lead the defense in the forest. I don’t know exactly how the slimes will react to an invasion
, let alone the forest lions and the kobolds, but you just focus on slaughter.
“Do you understand!” Doc roared.
“Understood, Doc!” the four boss monsters yelled back in response.
“Good,” Doc turned his attention back to the slaughter in the forest. “Let’s make these bastards pay for what they’ve done to our family!”
*
Outside Doc’s dungeon, the forest lay in tense anticipation. The ground had stopped trembling from the aftershocks, leftovers from the foreign dungeon reacting to some great stimulus within it. The dire wolves, having doubled in size and mutations, moved like meat puppets in a patrol around the clearing, red-tinged eyes waiting in anticipation for the order to attack. They thirsted for blood, for slaughter, to sink their teeth into something and shred. Outside their circle, other creatures, similarly mutated, gathered slowly. Spiders with two abdomens and a fused mouth with dripping fangs, squirrels with scorpion tails, rabbits with teeth that dragged on the ground and spiked toes; it was an army of nightmares. From the ground, a red mist arose, finally visible to naked eye. It wisped into the ears, noses, and mouths of the creatures, dyeing their eyes a deeper red and causing their bodies to shudder. It was about time to attack.
Then, the ground exploded, and the sky was filled with falling slimes. All around and within this army, multi-colored suicide slimes smashed into and everything in their way—tree, ground, and beast. Acidic slime splashed everywhere. Some dire wolves were pierced all the way through, collapsing with gigantic holes in their sides, backs or heads.
The surviving slimes quickly set upon this army of nightmares, berserking their way through the beasts without a thought of self-preservation, going so far as to use their deaths to inflict even more damage by sending their acidic bodily fluids flying into the air.
The mutated beasts, caught unaware, were little more than beasts led to slaughter, unable to act without orders. The trees were dyed in blood before the red mist could properly react, and then the slimes were set upon. However, already a quarter of the army had fallen, and the forest surroundings were completely decimated by the acid.
Dungeon Wars Page 23
