How to Be an Adventurer- World of Gimmok

by Damien Hanson

  ***

  Yenrab threw himself out and over the lip of the hatch, his muscular body bulging as he screamed out.

  “Raaah! Hooorah! Ha ha!” he yelled, as he called upon the Great Bear to fill him with anger, courage, and endurance.

  The rest of them looked at each other in surprise, then scrambled to follow.

  Bellowing hard, the barbarian smashed one of the spiders with his fist-wrapped axe handle, driving it across the room and into a wall with a satisfying crunch. Another swung down onto his back, digging in its venomous fangs. Yenrab responded by ramming his back into a wall, cracking the thing into pieces. But more swooped down upon him, and the big man was engulfed.

  Bern Sandros scaled and leaped, landing on his feet with catlike grace as he scanned the room, his bow at the ready. Spotting another swinging down on the enraged half-human, he fired, the arrow nailing it in the side. Fluid spurted from around the shaft.

  Carric Smith scrambled up behind him and, seeing the shot, made a hasty one of his own with his crossbow. Though it was not well-aimed, it still landed almost on top of Bern’s own shot. The rogue gave him a nod.

  “Nice. Hells of a shot!”

  The bard nodded back, already reloading his next round.

  Svein popped out of the hole next, his bow well ready. He spotting one swinging down at Carric and fired, the arrow striking the thing in the abdomen. Thick fluid squirted out in gouts, and it veered wildly off target and into a wall, where it latched and rested. The man sighed, sure that it wasn’t dead, and began to ready another arrow.

  Tracy was the next one out. Seeing the trouble that Yenrab was in, ze spun about in a quick circle, gathering threads of energy as if they were material things that could simply be grasped and combined, and then throwing them at the one on the man’s back. Hir magical ray struck the spider in its head, which exploded. The rest of it fell to the floor lifeless.

  Bern looked on in amazement and then tapped his bard friend on the shoulder. “Carric, man, we’ve got to up our game!”

  Yenrab gurgled and gagged as his teeth tore off the head of another spider.

  “Graaaaaah!” the man yelled, throwing the other ones off of him and then sprinting to the base of the stairs that wound around the light tower.

  “What in the abyss?” asked Jenn Eric, wildly firing and missing with his own crossbow, and terrified out of his mind.

  He watched as the half-orc sprinted up the stairs, screaming like a wild man. He was bleeding from multiple bites, but he didn’t show any pain or exhaustion. The barbarian leaped from the staircase’s end and landed on top of one of the spiders in its own act of swooping down upon the party. Drawing his battle axes, he began to mindlessly chop at its sides.

  “Hahaha! Roraladdaljdfkla! Bear feast!”

  “I’m not sure I like this side of Yenrab,” Tracy confided as ze zapped another spider with much less impressive aim and results than his first strike.

  “Well,” confided Carric as he worked his crossbow, “not liking berserkergang is part of the point of doing it!”

  The twang of a crossbow sounded, followed by a spider falling with a quarrel exactly within its brain zone.

  “Well done, Carric!” yelled Tracy with tremendous volume, surprised beyond belief.

  “Oh, it was me, actually,” called out a timid Jenn Eric.

  “Holy droplets of Tyr, I didn’t know bards could shoot so well!” exclaimed a mocking Wex, who had exited last and was simply standing there waiting for some sort of melee combat since missile weapons were not part of his gear.

  Carric groaned a bit, but otherwise said nothing.

  Then, from above, a scream sounded. An angry one. That grew in decibels as seconds went by.

  “Sadjfdflsdahlhflsddffdss! Ghsdhjkfsakj!”

  “Here comes Yenrab,” Wex noted in his ironic nonchalance as the barbarian fell three stories onto the hard floor upon which they stood. “From the sounds of him, and that fall just now, I’d say he needs to, well, you know, get a grip!”

  Bern laughed but then noted, “I wouldn’t let him hear that. Not right now, the way he is acting.”

  “Good advice,” the cleric responded, stepping back a bit and readying his short sword. For sure, he thought, the spiders will swing down upon him, and I’ll finally get my own licks in.

  Sure enough, a spider shot down after him. Wex stabbed it through with little thought and then stepped back again.

  “Roratllgah!” Yenrab shrieked, leaping to his feet.

  More of the things swung down at him, but he was both ready and also very, very angry. With axes in each of his hands he swatted and batted them, left and right, slinging thick ichor all about him in sprays of hate.

  “Ya-know!” the barbarian bellowed, his enraged brain seizing upon the only words it could think of.

  “Ya-know!” Svein repeated, making it a war cry. His long blade tore a spider asunder as it swung into him.

  “Ya-know!” Wex screamed, cutting off three legs in one hack of his blade. The thing skittered away at a strange and difficult angle.

  Arrows and quarrels flew, Tracy and Carric side by side as they knocked off advancing spiders.

  “Ya-know?” tasted Carric with a half-loud questioning yell.

  “Ya-know!” Bern replied, nailing another spider through its gruesome visage.

  Tracy blasted one in its body. It burned as it slapped into the ground, and then it moved no more.

  “Hot damn, that was a good one,” Bern yelled out, well into the fight.

  A knot of spiders swarmed down from above, knocking the barbarian to the ground. Svein and Wex waded in, slicing and stabbing as the others continued to provide missile support.

  “Do you think he’s poisoned? He’s gotta be poisoned,” said Tracy as he cast another ray of force magic at a spider descending upon them. There were so many less than before.

  “Half-orcs are quite resistant to many poisons. More so when they’re angry. I wouldn’t worry about it,” stated Carric with a grunt, scholastic yet deadly, as he landed a crossbow bolt in the small space between a spider’s head and body.

  Another crossbow bolt followed, landing in its head and killing it immediately. Carric turned and glared at the other bard.

  And then, all at once, with the party slashing, firing, and clubbing, the onslaught was over. The spiders that were still alive retreated as well as they could, ascending back to the top of the light tower, their web strings slinking back into the aperture from which they had sprouted.

  Tracy sighed, hir face sweaty and tired. Ze leaned up against a wall, winded. Some part of the wall pushed inward under his weight, perhaps the victim of old or faulty construction. In the far distance a clanking and ringing sound began. He shrugged it off.

  “I hate spiders,” commented Tracy, wiping a whiff of hair from hir face.

  “Do you hate big, hairy, poisonous spiders, Tracy?” asked Carric, looking upward with a frown.

  “Yeah, I especially hate big, hairy, poisonous spiders; who doesn’t?” responded Tracy with a bit of a disgusted quiver.

  “Don’t move then,” said Carric with a sort of crazy calm. “At least, not a lot.”

  Following the bard’s gaze, the party all saw, in the gloom of the towers ceiling, smaller shapes scuttling within a large and majestic web.

  “Huh . . .” whispered Tracy with eyes wide open.

  “Yeah, let’s not deal with that,” Yenrab said, slumping with exhaustion. His berserkergang had faded, and he bled from multiple places.

  The massive half-human paused and took a pull of red solution from a flask marked healing. “I bet if we let them live, they’ll let us live, and well, ya know, that’s just fine by me.”

  Chapter 34: The Walking Dead

  Bern stood in the corner, cupping his ear and listening hard.

  “You guys hear that, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, I hear it. It started when I leaned against this wall over here,” Tracy said with a yawn, well ready
for a rest.

  Wex looked at them all with wild eyes.

  “I think you just tripped something. You hear that, Bern?”

  “I sure do. Guys, we’ve got to bar that door. This battle isn’t finished yet. Something is coming for us. You set off an alarm!”

  Yenrab ruffled through his rucksack lying on the floor.

  “I’ve got a shovel if someone has some spikes.”

  “I’ve got some pitons right here! What’s your plan?” Bern asked as he grabbed the bundled spikes up and out of his bag.

  “I’m gonna hammer that door shut. Then I’ll make a plan,” the half-orc said with a grimace as they hurried over to the portal in question.

  Wex and Svein joined them as they held spikes up against the door, and Yenrab hammered them in with dull clangs, his muscles flexing hard with each swing. A different sort of clanking, probably the sound of gold upon stone, was getting louder from behind the door.

  “We’re not gonna have enough time! Guys, any ideas?” Yenrab asked as he hammered another one in.

  “Funnel them!” Bern answered.

  Carric’s face lit up. “Yeah! Brilliant!”

  “What are you talking about?” Yenrab wondered aloud.

  Svein entered the conversation.

  “We let them in, one at a time, and smash them to bits. You, Sir Yenrab, stand behind the door and force it shut whenever we yell now, and the rest of us will take down whatever just made it through. If these are just mindless undead and not”—Svein shuddered—“and not beings with intelligence, we’ll have defeated the lot of them by breakfast, or maybe lunch at the latest.”

  “What I need is some cool to cold beer, mates,” said Bern with a grin and half a laugh.

  “Yeah, I’m in. Let’s do this.” Tracy rubbed hir sometimes genderless hands in anticipation.

  ***

  Libraries are full of dusty, voluminous texts that are entirely devoted to the concept of clockworks and industry. Little read by any but the most dedicated, and possibly every tinker in the gnomish technocracy, it is ripe with diagrams and concepts that would have looked very familiar in the combat that followed. Gnomish technocrats would have squealed with joy and then attempted to replicate it with clockwork toys. Human scholars, the second most likely to dive into the dangerous and unpredictable steampunk errata, would have nodded approvingly and given an applause. Perhaps they would have even asked for an encore. Even the dour dwarves, whose down-to-earth approach to such mechanics is given a very, very thorough and overserious vetting before ever being put to use, would have at least harrumphed at the very apparent efficiency being applied to the process of eliminating their foes.

  A skeleton would enter, shining and glimmering, while Yenrab, grunting, timed each pass perfectly so as to push the next in line back and behind the large door. Then the rest of the party bashed, hacked, slashed, shot, and blasted, immediately ending its unlife and sending its shattered remains to the floor and sides. They repeated this, again and again, with little problem and hardly any wind lost. Well, for anyone other than the half-orc, who had begun panting and sweating hard, and smelled worse than the inside of a cow’s pen after a hot afternoon.

  “What in the bloody hells, Yenrab?” Bern asked a bit angrily, snorting to keep from sneezing and coughing.

  “You like it? I’ve got even better if you don’t shut your mouth. This isn’t nearly as easy as it looks, ya know.”

  Wex piped in, “Like anything could smell worse than this. Gods look the other way, but isn’t this a bit of a hex on us all?!”

  Yenrab moved his legs into a wide stance. Bruuuuuuuuuuuuup. One could easily imagine seeing his massive butt cheeks vibrate as a smell worse than the most sulfurous, torturous place to have ever existed tore out of his body in a long ear-pleasing but life-hating tune.

  “Gack. Ack. *cough, cough*” Wex replied.

  Svein, looking a bit green, actually left his place in the semicircle for a bit, his food escaping the toxic environment it suddenly found itself in.

  “Yeah. Oh, yeah! Feel my wrath!” Yenrab yelled out laughing, tearing a second lesser one from down below.

  “How many of those are in there, Yenrab?” Carric asked in desperation between coughs and gasps, tears beginning to stream down his face.

  “How many do you need?”

  “Guys, we are in the middle of a dangerous dungeon, and you are making jokes like school kids. Don’t you think we should concentrate?” said an irate Svein.

  Then, everyone heard a little squeak. Turning to look, they saw Tracy, oddly unaffected by the tremendous miasma, had adopted a wide-legged stance similar to the barbarian’s and decided to join suit. The fresh breath of wild flowers lightly seasoned the horrific burden of Yenrab’s load. Bern and Wex began laughing. Svein rolled his eyes.

  Crack! The doors, both barred with Yenrab’s body so as to keep the undead at bay as he played his mischievousness upon the group, shuddered and creaked hard.

  “The dark abyss and below, Yenrab! Knock it off! Now you are breaking the doors with this nonsense!” Carric called out in anger.

  The doors shook and shuddered again. Yenrab looked strained, his muscles bulging out large and veins sticking out in his temples.

  “Not me this time, guys. Get ready. Something’s changed!”

  The doors shuddered a third time before both splintered inwards. Yenrab fell with the break, ducking and rolling sidewise out of harm’s way. From beyond the imploded threshold stood a couple of the golden skeletons with their eyes blazing, one with green fire and the other with red. A number of the more regular ones stood behind them. With the barriers to their movement removed, they all began to march forward in lock step.

  ***

  The party was all a bit stunned—well all of them except Carric, who felt a rush of adrenaline as he ran forward, yelling. “Are we the guys you’re looking for? Well, you found us. And you will find us to be,” the bard said, tearing into a new ballad, “bad to the bone!”

  Swinging into an intense rhythm the likes of which the rest of the group had never heard before, Carric’s mouth harp warped and pulsed as it slapped powerful waves of audio magic against the oncoming horde.

  “BA-BA-BA-BAD TO THE BONE! BABABABABABA BAYAD!”

  Every syllable was a blast, each more intense than the last, until the final word tore forth with unearthly power.

  The skeletons with the blazing eye sockets hunched and braced themselves, weathering the sonic waves as they tore through the crowd.

  The others, however, did not fare so well. They marched mindlessly into the shock, getting knocked off of their flesh-bare feet, and cast backward. But they got back up and plodded forward again.

  “Aw, nuts!” the bard yelled as they swarmed into him.

  The skeleton with eyes of red fire leaped forward with incredible agility and landed on both feet before Carric. It socked him in the jaw hard. Carric reeled back, seeing stars, as the green-eyed one called some sort of blade to existence into his hand whilst leaping. It landed next to his side and thrust for his head. The bard managed to stumble a dodge, getting grazed bloodily over the back of his neck.

  “Help! You’ve got to do something quick, or I’m going to join these guys!” Carric Smith called out in desperation.

  Yenrab popped back up off the hard-stone floors and ran to seal the breach against the horde without, trying to keep them from joining in on Carric.

  “Carric, get out of here and get healed!” the half-orc screamed about him. “Guys, get those things off of him!”

  With an axe in each hand he clubbed and bashed at the golden things before him, making cracks here and there. But they well-reciprocated, tearing hard into his tough but exposed flesh, causing him to bleed profusely. He screamed and then growled, as he changed from his former amiable self, giving in to the berserkergang that lay beneath.

  “He’s not going to make it,” Svein yelled, fending off a clawed attack of his own. “There are too many of them!”
>
  The barbarian was awash in blood, slowing down as he slapped and slashed. There were so many wounds now, and the ground was muddy with their contents. He looked dizzy and his anger was fading to exhaustion. He sank to one knee in weakness as he continued to try to weather this storm.

  “Yenrab!” screamed Tracy as the large barbarian sank out of his line of sight. He rushed forward, dodging a grasping hand, looking for a way to save him. A series of quarrels and arrows lodged into one of the skeletons around him, killing it a second time, and the sorcerer was able to catch a glimpse of the half-human, now kneeling, has axes continuing to pound around him. He was still going.

  Looking about, ze saw the skeleton with red blazing eyes tearing at Carric, the bard, and decided the man needed more help than did the barbarian. Hir arms and hands whipped and weaved as ze gathered together magical tangles, then ze clapped hir hands and opened them.

  The room glowed with soft, sky-blue light as a series of beautiful spectral butterflies released out into the air to flutter about him. With an angry glare, the sorcerer looked to the skeleton and pointed. The butterflies zipped into it at the speed of sound, and it exploded into bits and pieces, the red flame extinguished.

  With that same anger radiating through his face in waves, the sorcerer began to weave again. The energy of the room was beginning to wane but there was enough, he knew. More butterflies began to assemble about him.

  Meanwhile, Bern had an idea. Dropping his bow, he sprinted up the stairs, taking them three at a time, and then he threw his grappling hook up and into the rafters. Testing the line in haste, the human grunted at its firm hold and loosened a pouch, getting its vials of oil ready for battle. Eyeing his course once more, he wrapped the rope around one of his mighty arms and began to swing.

  “Watch out below,” the assassin cried into the desperate melee underneath him. Oil sprayed as he dumped multiple bottles of the stuff over where the skeletons battled with the dying barbarian. “Hey, Yenrahhhhhh—” a thump sounded and cut the rogue’s words short. He had misjudged his arc and slammed into a wall. The assassin slid down hard, knocked quite senseless. Oil soaked into and about the man.