Gods, just don’t let it be a declaration of love. Not only did she see him as a brother, but the vaguest whiff of romance made her want to vomit. She once earned a book of sonnets as loot in a dungeon, and even holding it made her green in the gills.
“Come on then, spit it out,” she said. “This isn’t a theatre; we don’t need dramatics.”
“This is my last raid,” he said.
Well, how about that. Whatever weird possibilities she’d thought of, she hadn’t expected that.
“You’re not even forty. You’ve still got the legs for it, so why give up?”
Pumphrey scratched his head with the hilt of his dagger, a blade that must have killed hundreds of creatures in its time. “When we stayed in Boonetide, before getting here, I met a girl.”
“I saw you bragging to the barmaid. What of it?”
“We’re in love.”
Sider burst out laughing. “What are you, fifteen getting your first feel of a boob? You meet a girl and the next minute you’re in love?”
“I spent two days with her, actually. She knows about my condition and she accepts it.”
The words choked Sider.
“She knows?”
“How could she not? You know what happened back there.”
“We weren’t careful enough,” said Sider. “Promise me this girl isn’t going to tell anyone.”
“She won’t.”
“If her lips aren’t as sealed as you think they are, this could ruin us.”
“She’s not empty between the ears, Sider. She wouldn’t do that. She loves me.”
“You make me want to throw up. I’m happy for you, Pumps, don’t get me wrong, but it’s still disgusting. Who’d want to give up tombs and dungeons for a measly thing like love?”
So Pumphrey was in love and was leaving her group. Her most experienced, most loyal dungeoneer was heading for a safer life. It made her stomach twist with anger.
But then she took a breath, and she realized how selfish she was being. Seabright, standing beside them both, was watching Sider’s face, no doubt waiting to see her reaction. It wouldn’t do her standing as a leader much good if she was ungracious.
She patted Pumphrey’s shoulder and faked a smile. “When we get out of here, we’ll go find a tavern and celebrate proper, okay Pumps?”
Pumphrey breathed out in relief. “Sure thing.”
“Clear,” announced Cheeks, ahead of them.
Gammon nudged Pumphrey. “Told ya she’d be happy for you.”
The words weren’t lost on Sider; her men had all known about this in advance, which meant they were capable of holding things from her. Not only that, but Pumphrey had been worried to tell her. Did they see her as a tyrant or something? She’d never hit them or anything. Not often, anyway. Maybe she’d shouted once or twice, but they could be like schoolboys when they’d had an ale or two.
She shook the thought away. They were in a dungeon, and she needed to focus.
The five heroes headed through the tunnel archway and into the room, which looked like the kind of grotto you mind find a forest hobo living in. Curved, almost circular, with stone walls and a gently sloping roof. The only way in or out was the tunnel they had just used.
Her body’s instinctual response was to make her stomach flutter and send adrenaline through her veins, but she kept a firm mental control. Anxiety was only natural, even for the most seasoned of dungeoneers. The trick was to accept it, not fight it. Soon, the feeling ebbed away.
So, what were they dealing with here?
This room was standard for a dungeon. Often, rooms would seem to be dead ends until you solved a puzzle. It was all part of labyrinthine fun and games. Honestly, a puzzle room was among the nicer things to find in a dungeon.
In this one, the puzzle was strange. There was nothing in there, save for eight mana lanterns lined up on one wall. Their flames were different colors; red, blue, green, purple, yellow, orange, white, gold, and black. There were barely a few inches of space between each lantern.
“Cheeks?” she said. “What are we dealing with? Something to do with the colors of the lanterns?”
Cheeks and his peeping duck stared at the room. “The trick to any dungeon puzzle is knowing two key things. One, every puzzle must offer either advancement deeper into the dungeon, or a reward for solving it. It’s one of those weird rules of honor that dungeon cores live by. Two, most puzzles spring a trap if you get them wrong.”
“What’s to stop a core from leaving an impossible puzzle?” asked Gammon, who was the greenest of their dungeoneering group.
“Like I said, their weird code. Same reason all riddle doors must have a riddle with a logical answer. Cores never leave a puzzle that can’t be solved. The question is, how crafty is this core?”
“It has to be the color of the mana lamps,” said Pumphrey. “I’d bet my left nut on it.”
“I already bet your left nut on the kobold,” said Sider.
“My right nut, then. What else could it be?”
Matilda the duck gave a quack of disapproval at Pumphrey’s suggestion.
He sighed. “Fine, Matilda. You know best. Tell us, oh wise duck who knows so much, what else is it?”
“Quack.”
“Just ignore him,” whispered Cheeks to his bird. “You know he’s just trying to get a rise out of you.” Then he spoke to the rest of the group. “It isn’t the colors, not exactly. That’s too obvious. There must be more to it.”
“What’s obvious about that? Even if it is the colors, we don’t know what to do with them,” said Pumphrey.
“The colors are all included in the adventurers’ guild crest, and they also correspond to the colors of stones on the precious stone chart.”
“You and your memory,” said Sider, feeling beyond proud of him. Cheeks might not be able to fight for crap, but he earned his loot share.
“They’re also mentioned in a song,” said Cheeks. “Wait a minute…”
“Gut sumething?” asked Seabright.
“Maybe. In the Soul Bard books, soul bard has dyscalculia, which is like dyslexia but for numbers. So, he learned to deal with numbers by assigning colors to them. It helps him think about them easier.”
“That still doesn’t give us a puzzle to solve,” said Sider. “Sounds like a stretch.”
“Nope. See, the Soul Bard defeats a bridge troll by singing it a riddle.”
“More riddles. Great,” said Pumphrey.
Sider stared at the lamps, wondering if maybe there really was something to it. “What’s the riddle?”
“In the books,” said Cheeks, “He lists a bunch of animals and asks the troll to count how many legs they have in total, knowing that trolls struggle with numbers.”
“Miscunceptiun,” said Seabright. “In Untryia, trulls work in banks, buukshups, credit lenders. They can understand numbers as well as anyone.”
Cheeks, who didn't like being corrected, took the correction with the grace of a baboon flinging its feces at a nobleman's wagon. “Thank you so much for the troll history lesson. I’ll make sure to write to the author of Soul Bard and let him know about his racial inaccuracies, and let him know my source is Seabright the Untryan genius."
“Not the time for squabbles, lads. How can you be so sure that this has anything to do with Soul Bard?” asked Sider.
Cheek pointed. “The colors. They’re the exact ones the bard uses for numbers, in the exact order. Red is one, blue is two, and so on. It’s too specific to be a coincidence.”
“Then what do we need to count?” asked Sider.
Seabright’s eyes lit up. “Ah. Every puzzle must be fair, yes? Then uur clue is here sumewhere.”
Seabright opened his shoulder satchel and took out a glass jar half-filled with blue dust. He opened the lid, releasing a fragrance of cinnamon and oil. He threw a handful of it in the air.
The dust, instead of falling straight back down as gravity would no doubt have preferred, hovered in the air. Then, grain
by grain, the dust floated across the room and collided with a wall. Soon, all of the blue dust stuck to one section of the wall, revealing a hidden message.
Pumphrey read the blue-outlined words.
“A cat and a fox, a dog, and an ox. A west-sand crustacean, and a bloody big Alsatian. A gremlin and a joon, and a naughty baboon.”
Sider slapped Cheeks on the shoulder. “I swear, if I hadn’t seen you once eating a beef and gravy pie without using your hands, I’d be convinced you were a genius. Well done, Cheeks!”
“Furgetting sumeune?”
“Congratulations on throwing anti-illusion dust in the air,” said Pumphrey, grinning at his friend. “It took great skill.”
“We just count the legs, right?” said Sider.
Cheeks shook his head. “Joons are fish; they don’t have legs. The only thing these animals all have is eyes. We need to count the eyes, and then extinguish the relevant colored torches on the wall so the right number of eyes is listed.”
“You know,” said Gammon. “The Rump and Apple tavern does a quiz night every Thursday. You and I could make a fortune with that memory of yours, Cheeks.”
Sider tried to picture all the animals in her head. “Focus,” she said. “Pumphrey, you keep counting. The rest of us will just say how many eyes each creature has.”
Gammon chewed his lips as he thought about it. Barely a second of intense pondering and he looked like he was going to explode. “Cats and foxes have two. So do dogs and oxes. That makes ten.”
“Oxen, not oxes” corrected Cheeks. “And that makes eight.”
“Crustaceans have seven, and Alsatians are just dogs, so they have two. Gremlins have two, joons have two, and so do baboons. That makes…”
“Twenty-five,” said Sider. “Cheeks, can you do whatever you need to do with the torches?”
Cheeks approached the mana lanterns cautiously. He took a hand-sized sheet of copper from his satchel. Only certain types of metal could snuff a mana lantern. Given that the heroes sometimes used them, it was handy to carry the copper with them on all their dungeon raids.
Using the sheet, he extinguished all lanterns by the blue and yellow, leaving the colors for two and five still glowing.
Sider grinned. “Okay, boys. When the door opens let’s breeze through this place. I’m starting to get hungry, and we left the puppies on the surface. Puppies regenerate us best when they’re fresh. I don’t want them going rotten.”
The puppies were in fact street dogs rounded up by the dog catcher in a town named Yuleton. To procure them, Pumphrey had posed as a representative of a dog sanctuary, promising to find them a great home. Not the most moral of actions, to be sure, but what else could they do?
A great clanking sound filled the chamber, and the archway of the tunnel they had used to get here was now blocked by a great block of stone.
Sider drew her sword, while Pumphrey and Seabright stood back to back, scanning the room.
Next came a hissing sound, like air wheezing out of an old smoker’s lips.
“What in all hells…” began Sider.
There was no time for anyone to answer her question, because Cheeks collapsed onto his knees, his face purple. He gasped for breath, and he madly tried to pull his shirt collar as if the garment restricting his breathing.
Panic flushed through Sider, and it took all her experience to not struggle against it, and instead let it complete its course and wash through her.
Pumphrey was next, staggering into a wall and then slumping onto his bum.
Gammon fell next, and Seabright followed him, bellowing “By the Guds! What’s happening?” before collapsing.
And then Sider felt it.
A sensation in her chest, as if the air she breathed turned into thorns in her lungs.
This was the trap. They’d got the puzzle wrong!
The sensation became pain and then agony, and weakness coursed through her. She lost control of her hand, dropping her sword.
A trap.
A puzzle failed.
But what…
With her last ounce of energy, she touched the pendant on around her neck and gave a mental command.
“Your pendants!” she choked, as her pendant began to work.
Only Pumphrey and Seabright were conscious enough to heed her orders, and they each touched their pendants.
CHAPTER 15
Sider and the Four versus Core Beno
“And here’s the kicker,” I said, barely containing the laughter inside my core. “Crustaceans have seven eyes, as a rule, yes. No arguments there. But the clue specifically said west-sands crustaceans, which have four. And now look at those dopes, gasping for breath because they got their crustaceans mixed up. Hilarious, or what?”
Gulliver arched a perfectly manicured eyebrow at me. He stared at the image of the poison chamber, which I projected for him using my core vision.
“Those people are dying, Beno.”
“This is a dungeon. What did you think would happen to the people who enter here? It’s not a playground, Gulliver. It isn’t an underground kobold petting zoo.”
“I was a warscribe for almost a decade; I know how the world works. But do you have to take quite so much glee in it?”
“Have I ever looked down on you for your hobbies?” I said.
Gulliver began scribbling then, which he often did when we disagreed about something. I was beginning to suspect that most of his writings about me and my dungeon and my monsters would be negative. Still, if it spread my reputation, free of charge to me, then who cared?
For now, I was proud of myself. I had dispatched a party of heroes without losing a single creature. All because they had failed a rather simple riddle. A trick riddle, sure, but the answer was fair and logical in its way.
“How was it, being a warscribe?” I asked. “Even if the armies aren’t swinging swords at you in particular, it must be scary.”
“Beno, I live by a simple rule, one that doesn’t allow me to show fear. Before I do anything, I pause for a second. If my future self doesn't travel on time to prevent me, then it can't be a bad thing, can it?”
“That's an incredibly poor way to make decision.”
“Excuse me if I don't take advice from someone who already died and had to be resurrected.”
“Hey! A fair point, but a low blow nonetheless.”
With the heroes dead, now I just had to wait for the poison to dissipate, and then I could send Wylie and his boys to retrieve the corpses and…
“I wouldn’t start planning your victory parade yet,” said Gulliver, finished with his writing. He nodded at the core-image of the poison chamber.
I glanced at it.
“Oh, buggering goblin balls.”
“Buggering goblin balls indeed.”
This wasn’t good. This was good’s worst enemy - bad.
Two of the heroes were slumped on the poison chamber floor, sure. They looked to be as dead as the patients in a necromancer’s waiting room.
But the other three heroes were gone. Or rather, they were there but they had changed. Now, in their places, were three werewolves.
A trio of seven-feet-tall beasts whose fur coats didn’t disguise their rippling muscles. Pieces of their shirts and trousers clung to them while other shredded bits were on the ground. I couldn’t help but think that these guys must get through a lot of clothes.
More important than their clothing bill, was the danger they posed. The blue and yellow lanterns illuminated their great tusk-like teeth and the look of ferocity in their eyes.
“They’re werewolves?” said Gulliver. “But…how? Werewolves murder children! They eat sheep and dogs and cats after they turn, to keep up their energy so I hear. I thought these were heroes?”
“A little saying we had at the academy; heroes aren’t heroic. It’s a business, Gulliver. Maybe years ago, there was a moralistic attachment to the label of hero, but that was long ago in the time when bunny rabbits could prance through forests witho
ut stepping on a snare, and when pretty little fairies roamed the skies. We’re in a new age, Gull, and these chumps are new-age heroes.”
“But how? It isn’t a full moon. The way I understood it, their change is tied to the lunar schedule.”
“See those pendants around their necks? Something was nagging at me about them, but now I know what it is. The stone they’re made from is called blaudy stone, named after the mage fella who discovered them. Blaudies are rarer than an honest second-hand cart salesman. Blaudy stone absorbs the essence of things if you leave it for long enough. They must have stored light from a full moon in their pendants, and now they’ve released it to activate their transformation.”
“Ah, so they can change at will. Amazing. I never heard of a werewolf who can transform when he wants. The world really is a marvelous place.”
“And a big pain in my core backside, because I don’t have anything that can take on three damned werewolves.”
Gulliver scribbled in his book, his tongue poking out of the corner of his lips and his hand whizzing over the page in a flurry. When he was done, he shrugged. “They’re trapped. That gives you some time. The poison will get them eventually.”
“No, Gull. My poison hurt them when they were human, but their werewolf condition overrides that.”
“Oh. And I see what you mean now; this is quite a problem. As the drowning man said when he saw a shark; things are getting worse. Look.”
The werewolves were digging at the stone that blocked the tunnel they’d used to enter the room, tearing away mud and rock and flinging it behind them. Their claws were making light work of the bolder, ripping chunks away at a worrying rate.
For a second, I felt envious. Gods, what I’d give for magnificent creatures like that on my side.
But they weren’t on my side, and soon they’d escape the chamber and would rampage through my dungeon like drunk minotaurs lost in their own labyrinth. There’d be no stopping them.
Damn it. If I’d known I’d have to deal with werewolves, I would have shut the dungeon doors and pretended I wasn’t home. I simply wasn’t ready for a challenge like that.
So, how did I get through this with my dungeon intact?
Dungeon Core Academy: Books 1-7 (A LitRPG Series) Page 47
