Before she could answer, there was a flump to our left as a torch flared to life, revealing the stone wall it was set into that reached up endlessly into gloom. Seconds later, another torch flamed up around fifteen feet ahead of that one, then another, and another, like dominoes. The flaring torches continued ahead, turned across a back wall that looked very far away, and then marched toward us on the right, each one building on the illumination until the circle was completed. And when the last torch was lit, a small bonfire flamed itself on near the center of the room, fully revealing our surroundings.
At least I didn’t need to hold the Light spell anymore.
The cavern was massive, practically the size of the arena for the Titan Gate tournament. Even with all the torches lit, the ceiling of the place was still hidden in gloom and shadows. Past the bonfire, about two-thirds of the way back, was a large, polished marble slab altar, and behind that stood a stone statue of a four-armed … thing. Kind of like the Shiva statue from Temple of Doom, only a lot meaner and uglier. It was twenty feet tall easy, and that was in a cross-legged seated position. Its snarling, inhuman face stared with blank stone eyes, and each of its clawed hands held a large crystal that glittered dully in the firelight. Four hands, four crystal colors: red, blue, yellow, and white.
“Oh, shit,” Crash breathed as he stared at something behind me. “That is not the door we came in through.”
I turned to look. Instead of the huge wooden doors, there was now a single bronze door with a curved latch-pull handle. Large piles of loose stones were stacked against the wall on either side of the door, and each pile was topped with a grinning stone skull.
“What the hell?” I said as I turned back and walked toward Nova. Not that I was planning to give up on this quest before we even got started, but I would’ve felt better knowing the way out. “How did you get out of here the first time?”
“I didn’t. I never came in.” Her voice was soft, and she refused to look at me. Instead she started walking slowly toward the bonfire. “My sister and I had a fight, a pretty bad one, about coming in here. She thought we could beat the dungeon, and I … disagreed. So, she came in here without me. I was too mad to follow her. I just waited outside, figuring she’d change her mind and come back out. But she didn’t.” Nova stopped and shivered. “That was twelve hours ago. Now I have no idea which way she went.”
I was about to ask what other way there was, when I realized the bronze door wasn’t the only one. There was a door set into each of the four walls of the room. The one to the left was blue steel etched with frost and flanked by clusters of frozen stalagmites; to the left, an iridescent white door that seemed to shimmer and shift, like there was a constant wind blowing through it. And on the back wall of the cavern was a dull red, faintly glowing door with flame pots on either side. Earth, water, wind, and fire. Each door was an element.
So that was why Crash said they’d called this the Elemental Dungeon. Only I couldn’t forget that it was actually the Dungeon of Oblivion — because there really was no way out. Now we had to beat it, or we’d be stuck in here forever.
“Great. How are we supposed to rescue your sister if we don’t know where she is?” Crash nearly shouted. “I was almost okay with this, because I thought we’d have four players pretty fast and two of them would be level 20. But we’re all under-leveled right now and you have no idea where to start?”
George glowered at him. “What am I, chopped liver? We’ve got four,” he said as he hopped toward the bonfire. “I don’t know about you guys, but I’m still soaked. Gonna dry my fluffy ass out before we pick a spooky door, okay?”
“Yeah, we should probably take a breather and decide what to do first,” I said as I followed the rabbit.
Nova was already sitting at the bonfire, staring into the flames with a sad expression. She didn’t look around when George and I joined her. “I still can’t believe she actually left me and tried this alone,” she whispered. “I mean, Terra’s headstrong, but we always do things together.”
“Your sister’s name is Terra?” Crash said as he joined us. “Terra Nova. So what are you guys, dinosaur hunters?”
“Very funny.” Nova came close to smiling, but it fell away. “Actually, she’s a dark elf Warrior, and I’m a light elf Mage. She’s super tanky, and I’m … well, I’m not. But I have tons of buffs and debuffs. That’s how we work — I keep her alive while she crushes everything that moves. Only I wasn’t there to keep her alive this time.” She closed her eyes. “I should’ve gone in after her. But I was so mad…”
I could see she was about to cry again. I sat down next to her and patted her shoulder awkwardly. “Don’t worry, we’ll find her. We have to since we’re kind of stuck in here now.”
“Yeah, thanks for that,” Crash muttered. “I love this dungeon. All we need is some bunk beds and a hidden stash of food, and we could just live here.”
I shot him a look. “We already knew the rules for this place. Once you go in, you can’t get out unless you beat the dungeon.”
He scuffed a foot along the ground. “Yeah, but I still thought we could change our minds.”
I did too, but I wasn’t going to admit that out loud. Instead, I decided to take a better look at Nova’s stats, since we were party members now. I called up the window on my HUD with a thought.
* * *
CHARACTER: Nova
Alignment: Neutral
Level: 20
Health: 198
Mana: 225
Synchronization: 69%
Strength: 8
Dexterity: 15
Constitution: 19
Wisdom: 12
Intelligence: 16
* * *
“WOW. THAT’S LOT OF MANA,” I said as I shut the window down. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone with more mana than health.”
Nova nodded absently. “It’s because of this.” She pulled a small violet-black crystal amulet on a thin silver chain from beneath her tunic. “Caster’s Crystal. It reverses health and mana so I can cast more spells. That’s pretty much all I do,” she said with a sigh. “Terra’s the fighter. That’s why I couldn’t rescue her by myself — because I suck at this game.”
Though she said that, the strategy Nova was talking about wasn’t the worst. More than a few PvE-dedicated parties back in Titan Gate ran that way. Though Nova might not be able to carry us if things went bad, she should still be able to contribute a lot to keeping us going. Still, with how crazy Ruul was, it would have been better if she had been, well, balanced. Still, it would be best to keep her morale up if we were going to get through this.
“You’re probably not as bad as you think,” I said, giving her another awkward shoulder pat. “But your stats are kind of weird. Why’d you put the 15 in Dexterity, if you’re building for heavy casting? At least you should’ve swapped your Dexterity and Wisdom around if you’re just playing support.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t want to die, and the Dexterity helps me not get hit,” she said, her eyes glazing over as she looked at something on her HUD. Then she gasped. “Holy shit, how did you roll all 20s?”
“I got lucky,” I said, getting to my feet. The longer we sat here talking about all the problems we were going to have, the less likely we’d be to actually get started. “Are you dry now, George?” I said to the bunny, who was wiggling his tail in the direction of the fire. “We don’t have time to make ourselves pretty, you know. We’ve got a dungeon to beat.”
George gave his tiny rump a final shake. “There’s always time for me to look good. Can’t say the same about you, boss,” he said as he hopped a few paces away from the fire. “So, which door first?”
“How about we try to find our other party member, so we have a better chance of getting out of here?” Crash said as he looked at Nova. “Can you maybe guess where your sister would’ve gone?”
She pushed to her feet reluctantly and turned in a slow circle, looking at each of the doors in turn. “Well … maybe sh
e tried to get back out when I didn’t come in after her,” she finally said. “She probably tried the earth door — I mean, if that’s what it is. These are all elements, right?”
“Oh, boy. You know even less about this dungeon than I do,” Crash said, shaking his head. “And I don’t know squat. Fine, let’s try the earth one. At least it’s not fire. That work for you, Kahn?”
“Sure, why not?” I said as I started for the bronze door. “Let’s do this.”
7
“So, what? Should we just open the door and go in?” Crash said as he looked at the bronze door.
“I guess so.” I’d already used Detect Trap on the door and hadn’t seen anything glowing green that would indicate a trap. Once again, I was glad I’d upgraded Detect Lesser Traps to Detect Traps, because it no longer took up a skill slot. I only had ten of them, and honestly it just wasn’t enough. “Hopefully it’s not locked.”
“Wait a minute. Before we go in there …” Nova held a hand out toward me.
Yellow light shot from her palm and enveloped me for a few seconds before the glow started to fade, and I heard Elizabeth’s voice. “You have been given the buff Stone Shield. You will now have +10 resistance to Earth-based attacks.”
“Sweet,” I said as Nova cast the same buff on Crash, George, and then herself. According to my display, the buff would last for an hour. “What else do you have?”
She smiled. “Plenty. But I don’t want to burn too much mana until I see what we’re up against in there. I do have one more for now, though.” She gestured at me, and this time green light flared around me and faded away.
“You have been given the buff Stalwart Hero,” Elizabeth said in her soothing, pleasant voice. “You now have +1 Strength and +1 Constitution. Your magic resistance is increased by 10 percent.”
I nodded and checked the display as Nova cast the buff on everyone else. Stalwart Hero would also last for an hour.
“Nice buffs,” Crash said, his gaze unfocused as he checked his stats. “Hey, I’m about to level pretty soon, too. I’m ninety percent there. Even if all three of us level, the party average will stay at 18 so we’ll be a closer match.”
“Well, let’s plan on leveling up in there,” I said as I started to reach for the door handle.
George gave an extra-high hop. “Hell, yeah. I’m ready for level 12.”
“Don’t you mean 11?” I said. “You’re only 10 right now.”
“That just means I have to work harder than you losers, so I’ll get to level faster,” he said with a bunny grin, whiskers twitching. “Come on, let’s stomp some monsters!”
I tried the latch. It clicked up without resistance, so I pushed the door open and stood back to let everyone else go through first. Just so Crash wouldn’t have to be last, because I’m such a nice guy like that.
When I stepped through the doorway, I left the door open behind me in case we ran up against something that might require a little more strategy than ‘rush in with buffs and kill stuff’. But the area behind the door wasn’t exactly teeming with monsters. In fact, it wasn’t teeming with anything.
It was a chamber about ten by ten feet square, and the only way in or out was the door we’d come through. Clay tiles lined the floor and the walls, and the ceiling was an inverted dome bulging outward that looked to be made out of stone. Across the room, there was a huge iron chain with links as thick as my thigh, hooked around a pulley set in the floor that vanished somewhere behind the curved ceiling.
Finally, there was a podium in the center of the floor. It was about four feet tall, and the front face was clear glass, revealing bronze clockwork gears and springs inside. The old-fashioned clock face set flush with the glass front panel had only one clock hand and went up to 30 instead of 12 — which meant it wasn’t a clock. It was a timer.
Crash had already realized what it was, too. “I don’t like timers,” he muttered. “Timers mean that something’s going to go boom.”
“Yeah, well this one isn’t running right now.” I approached the podium slowly and used Detect Trap again. It didn’t reveal any trick floor tiles or any glowing green problem areas on the stand itself. “Maybe it’s broken? I mean, it’s pretty obvious that hardly anyone bothers to run this dungeon.”
“Most likely because they don’t want to die,” Nova said as she came toward me.
I wanted to ask if that was why she hadn’t gone with her sister, but that felt like kind of a cutting question. Instead, I inspected the podium. The other three sides and the top were surfaced with wood, and there was a panel set into the top of the thing. I tried pushing on the panel, then sliding it to one side or another, but nothing happened. It didn’t budge.
“Here, let me try something,” Nova said, brandishing her staff at the podium. “Unlock.”
The staff blasted a beam of dark light at the panel. Nothing happened.
“Huh,” I said as I stepped back and folded my arms. “I’d try to use my lock pick set on it, but I’m not seeing any lock to pick.”
Nova raised a questioning brow. “You pick locks? That’s a rogue skill, isn’t it?” she said. “I thought you were a necromancer. I mean … well, you have a lot of necromancer skills slotted.”
“He thinks he’s both,” Crash put in. “Which is stupid, because he’s going to ruin any chance of an optimum build and he’ll just be sort of okay at a bunch of stuff, instead of awesome at a few things.”
“You mean like how you’re awesome at healing, priest?” I shot back. “When are you going to stop with that optimum build crap? There’s no such thing as classes here.”
Nova held a hand up. “Hey, I didn’t mean to start a fight. Can we just figure out what we’re supposed to do here?”
“I’ve got an idea,” George said as he finished his circuit around the room. I’d half noticed him hopping around, sniffing at things, but hadn’t really paid much attention. “How about we shut this door and get this party started?”
With that, he hopped up toward the open door, did a mid-air flip and kicked the inside of the door with his hind legs. It slammed shut with a solid thunk.
“Don’t do that!” Crash shouted, too late. “We don’t even know …”
He trailed off as a pneumatic whooshing sound came from the closed door and the bottom half folded up onto the top half. Then the left part folded onto the right part, and the bottom of that flipped up again, leaving a bronze panel about the size of a television screen. Part of the wall slid down behind the folded door with a grinding rasp, and our exit drew back into the wall and vanished.
Half a second after the door vanished, the panel on top of the podium slid back. The clockwork gears inside the thing whirred to life, and a series of ratcheting clicks brought up a small platform with a big red button in the center of it.
The single clock hand whirled around the face several times at blurring speed, finally coming to rest on the 30. And then it started ticking down.
That was when the huge chain pulley clanked into a slow rotation, and the boulder that was the ceiling of the room started to descend.
“Great! Nice work, you stupid rabbit,” Crash cried as he headed for the podium. “Maybe we could’ve found another way out before we all got crushed to death? I’m pushing the button. It might give us some time to figure out how to stop—”
I grabbed his shoulder. “Are you crazy? You never push the big red button!”
“Ice Lance!” Nova shouted suddenly from behind me.
I turned to see her throwing a blue-white bolt at the chains that were bringing us slow, crushing death. The bolt lodged itself through a link and solidified into a massive icicle that swelled to encase part of the chain and drove into the floor. The chain squealed in protest, clicking against the ice that blocked it from moving.
“Good idea,” George shouted, crossing the room in three huge bounds. A blast of ice erupted from his furry body to swallow the pulley and the foot or so of chain above it.
The timer’s clock hand
ticked back and forth between 24 and 23 as the pulley system groaned and shuddered.
“It’s working!” I called. “Hit it again—”
Just then, there was a shattering sound and a burst of crushed ice erupted from the chains, pelting the entire room. I threw a hand up to keep from getting ice shards in my eyes, then shook off a flurry of frosty crystals.
The chains clanked, the ceiling lowered, and the timer ticked on. 22, 21, 20…
“Damn it, I’m pressing it!” Crash jerked away from me and dove for the podium. His palm slapped down on the button.
Everything ground to a halt, and then the process started in reverse, moving much faster. The chains zipped around the pulley, the boulder slammed back into its starting position, and the timer hand swept around the clock face, back to 30.
Then the button popped up, and the timer started again as the boulder came down.
“Shit!” Crash shouted. “Come on, let’s try the ice thing again. That almost worked.”
“Wait a minute.” I had a dim recollection of something like this — not in real life, of course, since I’d never been trapped in a deadly virtual world before. But this situation felt almost familiar, and for some reason it reminded me of my high school D&D group. Finally, I said, “I think we have to let the timer run all the way down.”
“Are you crazy?” Crash said with a wild gesture above his head. “Do you see the boulder that’s about to crush us?”
“Yeah, but that could be just for show,” I said. “We had something like this in D&D once, only it was dart holes in the wall and spikes closing in. People kept pressing the button and the timer just reset every time. So we let it run out, and everything stopped before it killed us.”
Crash was not wearing a happy face. “Does this look like Dungeons and Dragons?”
“No, he could be right,” Nova said as she came toward us. “Terra had a Shadowrun RPG going for a while, and they had the Big Red Button room too. Except it was just a bunch of gears and grinding noises, and everybody freaked out until the timer stopped and a door appeared. At least, I think that’s what happened,” she added uncertainly. “I was playing Angry Birds on my phone most of the time.”
Soulstone: Oblivion (World of Ruul Book 3) Page 5
