by Kevin Murphy
[You have fallen for 43 damage.]
Immediately, their descent continued as they briefly tumbled against the diagonal path before plummeting another five meters down into a new crystal chamber.
[You have fallen for 259 damage. Remaining HP 398/700]
The damage from the falls was hard to bear as gravitational forces conspired to end the lives of Dakkon’s party, but there was no time to wallow in pain; Cline had landed with two crystal spiders still attached to him.
The air looked to be knocked out of Cline, though he was clearly panicked by the situation. At 30 percent, his health was uncomfortably low given his predicament.
Although Melee was the first to react, her large blade lacked the delicacy required to deal with the situation, so she worked to wrench one spider off of the ranger while Roth and Dakkon collected themselves enough to attack the other. The spiders held on fiercely to Cline and sank their crystal fangs into his left side and right arm. Just as Melee managed to pry the spider free form Cline’s left side, Cline and Dakkon struck. When pierced, and bashed, the beast shattered like a glass bottle hurled against stone.
[You have stabbed a core crawler for 236 damage. Core crawler has been slain.]
[You have gained 290 experience! EXP until next level 3,196/6,950]
Melee quickly dealt with her own. Once it was free of Cline, she tossed it in the air for just long enough to grab her sheathed sword, then she crushed the spider as its legs reached the ground. As soon as both creatures were dealt with, everyone except for Mina looked up in anticipation of more spiders dropping in on them from above. They were grateful when none came.
Mina worked to heal her party back to full health, starting with Cline who’d managed to drop to 18 percent. After a chant from Mina, the three large bites he’d suffered closed up in front of everyone’s eyes. The process of open wounds reknitting and closing themselves rapidly was disconcerting to behold. After only a glimpse, Cline turned his own head away from it.
The room they now stood in the center of looked like another copy of the larger chambers that they’d been through, only now that they’d been forced onto a new level their every-right system no longer applied.
“Scratch buying new boots,” Roth said. “I need to buy one of those bubble suits.”
Mina stared at the passageway above. “We’ve got to go back up there to keep from getting lost. If we can just…” Mina trailed off in thought. “Dakkon, can you build us some ice platforms to climb?”
“Hmm,” Dakkon pondered aloud. “Yeah, maybe. I could probably make something strong enough for us to climb up one at a time, but I’m not sure how much water I’ve got left in the Dousebinders. We may only get halfway before we run out of water. Alternatively, we could rest while the supply regenerates. I’d say we could hunker down in one of the tunnels, icing over both sides to keep us safe, but then we’d use up even more of the reserves.”
The group was silent for a while until Roth spoke up. “I think you might have been right about the intelligent puppet master. This place seems designed for people to get lost. Tunnels heading every which way, sloping left, sloping right, moving up, moving down… Still, why do you think they don’t just overwhelm us with numbers? There’s no way that we could fight them off from all sides down here.”
Cline looked around nervously. “Lower your voice, would you,” he said in volume just above a whisper. “We don’t know just how intelligent the thing is.”
“… If it’s out there, I don’t think it’s listening,” said Mina. “And, in that case, I doubt it plans on attacking us outright—not after the first assault went so poorly, anyway. If it’s gone to the trouble to build something like this, it’s more likely planning to have us wander around lost until we’re out of food and tired before it bothers to attack. For all we know, this level might be entirely cut-off from the way out aside from the one hole we just fell from.”
“Oh man, that sounds pretty bad,” said Roth.
Melee, who had been examining the paths, walked back over to the others. “Try taking a whiff of the air down here,” she said.
Dakkon did. The air smelled simply like air to him. He didn’t know what he was missing, exactly.
“It’s fresher down here,” said Cline excitedly. “Fresher than it was on the level above us.”
“What does that mean, precisely?” asked Roth.
“I think… it means there might be a way out on this level?” Dakkon suggested as soon as he’d put the pieces together himself.
Cline nodded enthusiastically.
“Let’s not get too excited yet,” Mina said with hands raised in conciliation. “We know for certain that there’s a way out above us. There may be a way out down here or there may not be. Is exploring really the better option for us to take?”
“Now that we know what to look out for as far as pitfalls go, we can simply use the left-always/right-always method to poke around down here while my water regenerates,” Dakkon said. “If we feel like we’re going to stray from the path, we can just backtrack.”
“What was up with that spider trapdoor anyway?” Cline asked. “What were they doing? Just pretending to be a floor to ambush us?”
“Maybe?” Mina said, uncertainly. “Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe they sleep like that. Maybe every rough crystal area we’ve seen the whole time we’ve been down here was actually just thousands of those spiders.”
The group was standing in another chamber featuring walls covered in jagged crystals, jutting out in every which way. The idea that the walls there might actually be spiders, instead, didn’t seem particularly popular.
“At least we have an idea about how that wall up top appeared behind us, now,” said Melee. “If only we’d given it a few proper cracks, then we could be out of this pit already.”
“Assuming the spiders didn’t kill us,” Roth pointed out. “It would’ve been a pretty nasty surprise to have massive spiders randomly rain down on us. To cover a hole that size, there must’ve been nearly 40 of them.”
When the conversation began to deteriorate into hypotheticals, Dakkon decided it was a good time to give everyone something to focus on.
“So then—” Dakkon said, interrupting any further speculation. “Should we stay or should we go?”
“Nothing good’s come from going so far,” Melee pointed out.
“We got good EXP,” countered Roth.
“How about we put it to vote,” suggested Dakkon. “There are five of us, so we won’t have a tie. Either way, we’ll be keeping track of where this room is.”
No one seemed opposed. They all threw in their agreement through a nod or a shrug.
“All for going?” Dakkon and Roth each put a hand forward, then, after a moment’s hesitation, Cline stretched out a hand as well. “Looks like gaining EXP has it,” Dakkon said, though he felt a touch guilty. He didn’t know that Cline would agree to explore, but he knew Melee had her reservations about going deeper into the tunnels. Mina was probably thinking that staying put was the best plan, but in doing so they lost sight of why they came to the tunnels beneath the mines in the first place—items and experience.
“Look guys,” said Dakkon. “I know things haven’t exactly gone smoothly since we came down here, but for every mistake that we’ve made, we’ve also learned something important about this place. Now we know not to blindly wander into corridors lined with dirt holes and to avoid areas ripe with that awful smell. We also know what a patch of those crystal spiders looks like. We can sweep these tunnels looking for groups of spiders and take them down for some solid EXP.”
Mina looked to Melee to gauge her friend’s reaction to the situation, and to her surprise, Melee showed a glint of being honestly eager for the first time since the initial bug incident.
“Count me in,” Melee said. “Hitting that thing made for a really satisfying crunch.”
“Well, all right,” said Mina. “So long as we have a clear path to get back here, I don’t see the harm in exploring a bit m
ore. We’re going to need a way to mark this room, though. Something sturdy and obvious.”
“Cline, grab a short length of rope from the supplies and we’ll make a marker that shouldn’t take up too much water,” Dakkon said.
They coiled the rope in a circle two meters in diameter then, in the middle, Cline held the rope upright pointing toward the way they’d fallen into the room. The rope was covered in a layer of ice that was thicker than was probably necessary, but one which should last for the hours upon hours that they might need. This would be their way-marker pointing to freedom, should all else fail. It needed to be sturdy enough to last.
The final touch they put on the obelisk was having Roth cut a notch in the iced rope circle which would serve to note which path that they’d explored. If they found their way back to the room from some other direction, then they’d be able to easily see which path they’d already taken. The notch pointed toward their starting path, a new tunnel randomly chosen by Melee, as no one had managed to retain their sense of bearing. She did have a good feeling about that route, though.
To the credit of Melee’s intuition, the path was much straighter than any others they’d yet traversed, making it easy to maintain a longer line-of-sight. It was also free of what they wanted to avoid the most: foul smells and dirt patches. About 150 meters in, the group came across another rough outcrop of what appeared to be visilium crystal on the left-most wall.
“We don’t know exactly how they’ll react,” said Dakkon. “Let’s all pelt them from range with whatever we’ve got until they close the distance.”
The straightness of the tunnel was clearly to their advantage here. They couldn’t have hoped for conditions much better than these to start a fight. Cline pulled his bowstring to full draw, aiming for the dubious mineral deposit. Roth readied himself to throw a javelin, and Melee surprised the rest when she pulled out a piddly little one-handed crossbow. Mina had no non-magical ranged attack, and she’d already explained that the ‘crystal spiders’ beneath the mines, or core crawlers—apparently, were incredibly resistant to magic. Even still, Dakkon had to try his hand by testing out his only real ranged magic attack, ‘Burning Sigil.’
Cline released the battle’s commencement arrow as he spoke the words ‘Piercing Shot,’ then the party’s volley fell on the outcrop before them. The power of Cline’s shot surprised everyone as it bisected the entire crystalline structure, crumbling the crystal bodies that had been resting there. Roth’s javelin connected with a satisfying *thunk* as another creature rose, jostled free from its dormant state.
Melee’s first crossbow bolt did little save for bounce off of the core crawler she hit, but it was still more impactful than what Dakkon could bear against them. Dakkon activated his skill and used his finger to draw a line over the mass of crystal spiders as they began to stir. Once he activated it again, the beasts glowed with a short line of flame over their bodies.
[You have burned a core crawler for 2 damage.]
[You have burned a core crawler for 3 damage.]
[You have burned a core crawler for 2 damage.]
Six more messages of the same sort appeared, revealing that no real damage had been done to the now-mobilized spiders, then the flames promptly extinguished themselves. It was clear that, despite his efforts, Dakkon would need to rely on his dagger to fight.
After the initial blast that the spiders endured, they surged out and spread along the entire round arch of the tunnel’s walls. With quick, eight-legged strides the mineral-beasts rushed at them from all forward angles.
With a grin on her face, Melee leapt out in front of the others. “Keep me standing, Mina,” she said as she cast her hand crossbow to the wayside and whipped her massive two-handed sword in front of her, unsheathing it and throwing its large, leather scabbard next to the discarded crossbow.
“You’ve got it,” Mina said.
Another line of crystal spiders was outright dusted by the overwhelming power of Cline’s second piercing arrow, but still, the ranks quickly filled in the empty spaces.
[You have gained 240 experience! EXP until next level 86/7,240]
[You have gained a level! You have 10 free stat points to distribute!]
Roth’s second javelin dropped a spider from the ceiling but didn’t quite manage to finish it off. Then, the spiders were upon Melee.
The massive arc of her powerful first swing demolished five spiders, throwing their bits back into the others and finally giving them a degree of pause. Her second swing felled four more before one managed to make it to her left side.
The spider managed to sink its fangs into Melee but was then batted away by a precise strike from Roth’s mace, sending the creature flying toward the left wall where it collided with another spider, causing both to fall.
Another brutal arrow rocketed forth from Cline’s released bowstring, eliminating another full line of the visilium spiders. The damage was less severe this time only because their numbers were rapidly being thinned.
Roth’s mace and sword hummed as they swished through the air, rapidly striking spider after spider as they lunged toward him, even batting away those that went for Melee from his side. While Roth remained unscathed, Melee’s reckless attacks left her vulnerable to her right. With two precise jabs, Dakkon used his dagger to prune away two spiders that managed to sink their fangs into her right side, before a healing wave of blue light washed over Melee courtesy of Mina.
[You have stabbed a core crawler for 237 damage. Core crawler has been slain.]
[You have stabbed a core crawler for 240 damage. Core crawler has been slain.]
[You have gained 290 experience!]
Dakkon ducked beneath Melee’s blade as she brought it back for another big swing, realizing he wasn’t standing in a safe place while Melee operated at full-tilt.
Jinx patiently held his ground, ready to strike at anything that came close to his master, but despite the extra space overhead, no spiders rushed toward Cline or Mina. The spiders were content to drop on the front three from overhead in concentrated numbers.
Roth expertly batted small forms away, one by one, no matter how many fell at him, surprising Dakkon as Roth even managed to bat away two that were coming for him where he’d ducked. Two others landed by him. While Dakkon was quick enough to strike before one, the second managed to leave its mark on his right leg.
[You have stabbed a core crawler for 242 damage. Core crawler has been slain.]
[You have been bitten for 92 damage. Remaining HP 633/725]
Dakkon jammed his dagger into the spider that had bitten him.
[You have stabbed a core crawler for 249 damage. Core crawler has been slain.]
[You have gained 290 experience! EXP until next level 5,326/7,240]
Though Dakkon managed to deal with the two that landed on him, Melee had been covered in spiders. She whipped her red hair around violently and let out a staggeringly loud yawp which caused every spider within a meter of her to fall to the ground, laying stiff, where she began to stomp and smash them.
The only remaining spiders were those that had survived being batted away by Roth and hadn’t quite yet returned to the fray. Before they ever had the chance, Cline finished them off with swiftly-placed arrows which lacked the impressive force of his earlier shots.
After their victory, Melee collapsed to a seated position. With her legs stretched out to find the most comfortable angle, she leaned back on the support of her arms and panted victoriously. Roth simply dropped his weapons where he stood and rubbed at his tired arms. He had been waving heavy metal objects around as though he were some sort of human blender.
Dakkon was in awe, but he didn’t know which of his companions he was more impressed by. Roth, Melee, and Cline had all shown strength well beyond what he was currently capable of, dagger aside. Melee was like a Greek fury of myth the way she cleaved into a wave of enemies fearlessly. Dakkon could see no connection now to the Melee who had so recently been afraid of fighting slimy bug
s.
The biggest surprise, though, may just have been Cline. Dakkon had been with Cline for a while now. Blasting through meters of anything with an arrow, never mind something as solid as crystal, just wasn’t something he had been able to do.
Cline noticed Dakkon looking over at him with a puzzled expression and smiled back proudly. “Now that’s a pretty neat trick!”
Melee tried looking back over her shoulder, but couldn’t quite see Cline from where she was, so, instead of turning she just dropped the support of her arms and laid back on the ground to look back at the ranger.
“What the hell was that about!” Melee exclaimed. “Since when can you shoot arrows like that? Those things hit like friggn’ cannonballs!”
“Seriously, dude,” said Roth, still rubbing his arms. “That was awesome.”
Cline looked a little embarrassed by the praise, but he pulled himself together well. “That’s the first time I’d tried it in a fight. That was Dakkon’s double-casting in action—my style, of course. It seems to work a lot better with the piercing arrows than the guided ones…”
“You think so?” said Mina, shaking her head. “I’m definitely going to start practicing that for heals.” She began chanting another round of heals to reinvigorate her tired friends.
“There is a drawback, though,” said Cline. “Each arrow used about 10 times as much mana as normal… So, instead of 30 shots, I now get three.”
“Worth it,” said Roth as Mina finished her chant and an almost imperceptibly faint blue light washed over everyone in the party at once. “No doubt about it.”
[You have been healed for 110 hit points. Remaining HP 725/725]
Melee faced her head forward again. Still lying on the ground, she pointed her arm footward toward where the spiders had been. “What’s over there?” she asked. Though she’d already been healed and revitalized, she clearly wasn’t quite ready to stand back up.
