Masters of Strata (Deepest Dungeon #2) - A LitRPG series

by G. D. Penman

  “Why are you not saying so to start with?” Jericho cracked his knuckles. “Let’s kick some kitty!”

  Sidestepping the gate, Martin led them up and over one of the bridges to the river of wax, and, more importantly, the wax-falls into the next deep. They went as close as they could to the drop off, then Martin paused to issue orders. “Put your hands over your face when you drop so you can break the wax away easily when it hardens. Keep them there until you are out of the pool at the bottom, otherwise you’ll be blinded and suffocate.”

  Speckles shook his head and, by extension, his whole upper body. “Me no like this plan.”

  Jericho shrugged. “I am with the frog. We need a better plan.”

  “There is no better plan. This circumvents the Felidavan ambush and the damage from the fall, not to mention the hot wax will charge up your vengeance so that you’re ready to fight at full capacity. I’ll heal you once we’re on our feet in the next deep.”

  “Speckles no like this.”

  “Speckles isn’t required to like this. Speckles is required to do as he is told.”

  “No hurt!”

  “Maybe? You’re pretty limber, maybe you’ll find a way to jump clear of the wax or bounce down some ledges. I don’t know what is over that edge. All I know is that this is our best option.”

  Looking from Jericho’s vacant stare to Speckles’ expression of amphibious terror, Martin sighed. There would be no talking them into doing anything. But he could always shame them. He took off at a run, clapping his hands over his face as he sloshed out into the scalding flow of wax, and then leaping as best he could with the weight of it already trying to pull him back to earth.

  Covering his eye was a good idea. It helped a lot with the terror of flinging himself off a cliff.

  [Skaife has suffered 12 environmental damage]

  He hit the surface of the pool at the bottom of the waterfall in a bellyflop that spreadeagled his little limbs, despite the way he’d cramped up in dread as he fell. Only a death-grip kept his face covered, his own tiny claws drawing blood. Popping back up to the surface in a flurry of kicks he hauled his hands and the wax away from his face and took in the sights.

  Scraps of skin and fur were burning on the surface of the wax lake, the only light to be seen down here. Flames began to wick up off Martin too as he fumbled toward the wax’s edge.

  [Skaife has suffered 9 fire damage]

  There were ridges of wax built up around the indentation in the stone where that wax had hardened over the months, and they gave him the handholds he needed to drag himself out. He waited for Jericho to come splashing down but it seemed that the other man hadn’t been shamed enough. He was still finding his courage. Martin shouted up as loud as he dared. “Come on, you cowards!”

  Somewhere off in the dark, something moved. Something huge and lumbering. Not a Felidavan. Nor anything like a Felidavan. In the moment, it occurred to Martin that this deep area he had just dived willingly into could be described as a pit, and that the Boss of this deep had been described to him as a Pit Fiend. He shouted again, more frantic than antagonistic this time. “Come on!”

  The Fiend came out in a flurry of motion. The light from the lake cast deep shadows in the recesses of its skin. Far too much skin for even its massive bulk, the loose folds of it hung down over every joint and every roll of fat. It took Martin a moment to understand what it looked like before he remembered the one time that he had seen a hairless cat, then the pot belly and wrinkles became more familiar. As did the vertically slit golden eyes, although, to his recollection, cats only had two of them rather than the six of various sizes that this one displayed around its head like a crown.

  Needle teeth lined a mouth that was definitely more frog than cat too, a massive gaping void as wide as the Fiend’s head and opening almost as large as the distended mass of its stomach. The spindly limbs attached to the fiend seemed to be an afterthought, last-minute additions that didn’t make sense in the context of the beast as a whole. The same loose skin dangled off the stick-like arms, dribbling all the way down to its three-fingered claws, but the structure beneath had no correlation to the bulbous bulk of the creature.

  It took both arms dragging it forward to get any traction going, and even then the Fiend barely made it a few inches before it seemed to be panting for air. If it had legs, they were lost beneath the dangling gut and skirts of loose skin.

  Lunging at Martin, it extended both of those clawed arms, reaching out and swiping at him, but failing to reach. Martin had naturally leapt away around the side of the lake, but now found himself drifting in closer, seeing if he could bait the thing to attack again.

  Big and dumb weren’t always synonymous, but in this case they might as well have been the same word. The arms lurched up, the body lurched forward, then just as abruptly as it had started it stopped dead in its tracks. It was stuck.

  Keeping his distance, Martin scouted around to the side, moving away from the comforting warmth and light of the lake and into the deeper shadows. His eye never drifted from the Fiend. It slithered along beside him, tracing out a curve on the cavern floor that clearly marked the limits it could reach.

  Jericho splashed down into the lake.

  The Fiend’s head snapped around and it made a bounding charge toward the glowing wax, letting out a battle cry like somebody gargling lard as it went. With the bulk of it aside, Martin could see the chain holding it back. The loop of it dipped into the overlapping layers of fat and skin somewhere around its neck – though that would imply the thing had a neck – and then extended back from that noose into the darkness, angled sharply down. Martin made a break for it while it was distracted, slapping at his guild crest as he went. “Break free of the wax. Don’t panic. It can’t reach you. It’s chained.”

  Jericho’s scream-roar echoed all the way across the cavern. If they didn’t already have the full attention of everyone in the deep, they would now. Martin kept powering on, hunks of wax cracking away from his legs as he went. A trail of broken molds that could be used to make little pieces of a Martin. He spared them no attention.

  The chain was looped through a great metal ring that had been set in the solid stone of the floor. It was not the smooth tidy work of the Masters. Tools had been brought to bear. Scratches and dust piles surrounded the ring. This was the work of the Felidavans.

  They had to relocate the Pit Fiend so that they could make use of the other pit. Then they had to chain it up so it didn’t go roaming around, ruining their plans or trying to return to its original position, and if they had to do that anyway then why not put it here to protect them from the secret entrance that Martin had been so proud of finding, but which now seemed so painfully obvious.

  Martin mounted the chain with one loping step and then reversed direction, heading up toward the Fiend’s head as fast as his legs could carry him. “Keep it on you!”

  Jericho roared, mouth still gummed up with excess wax. “I know how to tank!”

  Running and talking at the same time was easy enough, but the chain lurched from side to side as the fiend strained to follow Jericho, and that meant Martin had to throw out his arms to the side to keep his balance. He had no idea how Lindsay made this stuff look so easy. He had no idea how Lindsay made most of the things that he struggled with in life look so easy.

  Part of the trick was not looking down. The distance had been daunting enough when he was leaping from the top of the wax-fall, but now he couldn’t risk closing his eye against the dimly-lit stone beneath him. Solid stone. This wasn’t like the sojourn outside the world. Physics applied inside the walls of the dungeon. If he fell, that was going to hurt.

  Through all of his wild sprint up the chain, Martin could hear Jericho in the distance roaring and taunting, just outside of the Fiend’s reach. The chain thrummed to the rhythm of his running feet, pulled taut enough to make desperate screaming sounds each time the links twisted against each other.

  Almost close enough to connect, Mar
tin readied his Celestial Strike, his sword blazing into glorious light. He was able to see the skin of the fiend, bloated and bulbous, like something that had been drowned and bound under the water until rot set in. What he had not seen were the other eyes.

  The six golden eyes arrayed around its head like a coronet were just the beginning. What Martin had mistaken for pustules on the skin opened up to reveal the slick, black, dead eyes of an aquatic predator as he got closer. The light and vibrations of the chain had alerted the Fiend to his presence. That wasn’t good.

  He readied himself for a wild leap to strike at the back of the monster while he still had time, but the chain beneath his feet dropped away. All that the Fiend had to do was lean his way to put him into a freefall.

  Tumbling through the air, he reached for the chain as a lifeline, and it seemed for a moment that the Fiend meant to let him catch it. It jerked suddenly back toward Jericho’s roars, but it was false salvation. The chain snapped taut into Martin like a blow from a flail.

  [Skaife has suffered 12 bludgeoning damage]

  It launched him back up into the air, and the lurching fiend set the chain loose and dangling all over again when he thought he might catch on. Chain and rat fell together, but this time Martin did all he could to angle away from it, so that the next time it snapped taut he wouldn’t lose any more teeth.

  His aerial twisting was at least partially successful. Twirling and spinning, he managed to strike only a glancing blow off the side of the chain on his way by.

  [Skaife has suffered 8 bludgeoning damage]

  Now he only had to survive one last hit and he could get back to dealing with the undamaged boss monster that substantially out-leveled him. Healing Touch gave him a buffer of health to soak up what the floor doled out, but even Martin’s rapid calculations couldn’t promise his survival.

  Speckles caught him mid-plummet. Bouncing out from the wall where he’d been making slow but sane progress across distantly spaced platforms that might have tempted a player to make a leap of faith and die in the attempt, but were easily bypassed for an Anurvan.

  The thump of the frog into his side knocked all the wind out of Martin. All the momentum that the Anurvan had averted dispersed harmlessly in the impact. Well, almost harmlessly.

  [Skaife has suffered 3 bludgeoning damage]

  When they tumbled to the ground, Martin landed on Speckles entirely by accident, but he couldn’t say that he was too angry about how the damage was allocated. He was on his last legs, and Speckles hadn’t taken a hit yet. This seemed more equitable.

  Martin patted his companion on the face as he pushed up off him and onto his feet. “Thanks.”

  “Me… help, anytime,” Speckles wheezed from the floor.

  The Fiend had made a full turn while Martin was distracted with plummeting to his death, far faster than anything that bulky had any right to move. The chain had come clattering to the ground as the Fiend slithered closer, all those golden and black eyes narrowing at the sight of Martin. “Speckles, run. Speckles, up. Now. Run!”

  Once it was in motion, there was nothing slow about the Fiend. It was the difference between looking at a mountain and watching a landslide coming for you. Speckles managed to get to his feet and run, and the Fiend was kind enough to turn a blind eye to him, bearing down on Martin alone.

  Sword still glowing, brain still frantically calculating odds, vectors and damage potential, Martin realized that a tactical retreat was in order for him, too. He turned tail and ran. There was no way to get past the Fiend and out into the cavern beyond its reach, but if he could find some way then he could use the constricting cavern tunnels against it. If he was slapping the Fiend down somewhere, he’d have put it near to the door, if only so that he didn’t have to drag it too far. It would also ensure that anyone trying to sneak in would encounter it, ergo the chain hoop would be near the cavern exit.

  The Fiend didn’t sound like a train, though the displaced air of something that size moving at speed certainly ruffled Martin’s fur the way an approaching train on the subway would. It sounded mostly like someone stirring the biggest pot of macaroni cheese Martin could imagine. Sticky, sloshing, nauseating. Even if, as a rat-man, Martin was legally obliged to like cheese.

  One backward glance over his shoulder told Martin that he wasn’t going to make it. They were almost to the ring, most of the chain vanishing beneath and behind the Fiend, but time was up. The monster wasn’t even going to have to attack him. It wasn’t even going to have to notice him. It could just roll right over him and he’d be dead. That meant two hours locked out of the game waiting for a respawn, a whole repetition of the mess back in Deephaven, and rescuing Speckles from this pit before they could press on. It wouldn’t be the end of the world, but it would screw his schedule.

  Still Martin ran, because he couldn’t think of anything better to do in that moment than run and hope that, for some reason, the Fiend stopped before he died.

  At first he didn’t even realize that his wishes were coming true. The Fiend was still flying at him at the same terrible pace. Then the beast started to roll forward, the many chins and folds plunging down toward him like gravity had finally caught on to all the mass that it had been ignoring up until that moment. It was only when the chain bit a line down the center of the Fiend’s prodigious gut that Martin realized what was happening.

  On the far side of the Fiend, roaring with laughter, Jericho had the chain looped around him and he was holding his ground. “Not so fast, chubby bunny!”

  The same screaming of metal that had marked Martin’s fall from a great height was also the soundtrack to the Fiend’s faceplant. Martin skidded and charged back at it. The glow of holy light had already dimmed in his sword, but there was plenty more where that came from. Smite surrounded the Creedblade in an envelope of golden light as he closed the distance to the wall of flesh ahead of him.

  Just a step short of his attack, the Fiend’s head jerked up. The golden eyes blazed, and the needle teeth glinted with slobber in the light of his sword. It opened wide, ready to swallow him whole. Martin’s buckteeth popped out of his grin. If it was hungry, he was happy to oblige it.

  [Pit Fiend has suffered 48 light damage]

  Introit struck the Fiend full in the face, snapping those needle teeth closest to the front clean off at the root, and sending waves of loose skin and glutinous flesh rolling away. Martin almost wished that it hadn’t, because it exposed what those layers had been hiding. Tucked away, deep in the Fiend’s folds, were spines. Somewhere between those of a lion-fish and a porcupine, pointed and striped, and clearly dripping with venom. The same venom the damned Felidavans had been using to knock them out earlier.

  He whipped his sword around to graze over the Fiend’s face before making his retreat.

  [Pit Fiend has suffered 11 light damage]

  [Pit Fiend has suffered 10 slashing damage]

  He pressed his casting hand to his chest once more. “There are spines hidden under the skin. Venomous. They’ll knock you out.”

  “Great, I will avoid hitting it in the… everything.”

  [Pit Fiend has suffered 32 dark damage]

  With a crack like thunder, Jericho unleashed his vengeance on the back of the Fiend. His nine-headed whip bit into it and tore away sodden gibs of flesh. It was enough to catch the Fiend’s attention. Martin had hoped that the thing would be like the old joke about dinosaurs, with brains so small and far away that they wouldn’t notice their tail being attacked. Sadly, it seemed that pain moved faster than the speed of nerve impulses here in Strata.

  Once more the awful slurping, stirring sound as the Fiend changed course. Martin had to dive as an arm swept by or risk being launched off into the darkness.

  [MISS]

  “Remember, you’ve got no damage reduction. You need to dodge.”

  Another thunderous crack.

  [Pit Fiend has suffered 24 dark damage]

  Jericho didn’t use the crest to communicate, he used all t
he lung power that his giant form granted him. “You need to keep your big brain on your own big-brain business.”

  Another snap of the whip, but no announcement. It seemed that all the damage Jericho had suffered in the fall was spent and his whip couldn’t penetrate the Fiend’s skin on its own. Perfect timing for the monster to hit him.

  [Jericho has suffered 22 bludgeoning damage]

  Martin caught a brief glimpse of Jericho in flight, heading out over the glow of the wax lake before he splashed out of sight and the Fiend was turning once more. Every twist tangled it tighter in another loop of the chain. If Martin could get past it then he’d barely have to run at all to reach the new limit of the Fiend’s imprisonment.

  He was already running when the bulk began to swivel once more, the golden eyes seeking him out, tracking his movement with a sniggering sound like a bubbling swamp. The spindly arms raised up and the thing let itself topple toward him, mouth spreading ever wider as it descended.

  There wasn’t enough time. He wasn’t going to get by before the Fiend came crashing down. He needed more time. Gulping in air and setting his feet as best he could, Martin cast Rebuke.

  [MISS]

  There was no way that the spell would have been powerful enough to knock the Fiend back, but he could knock it off course. The yellowed claws that had been coming right for him now scraped by the rock where he had been standing a moment before, throwing up a cloud of dust and grit. The damage revealed the pallid corpses behind the thin crust of rock. Stuffed in so tight that they had lost all appearance of ever being the bodies of living things.