There was an aura of menace around the two snakeheads, one that only grew more pronounced when they barked out a word in an unknown language before pointing the two metallic staves they carried at us. Even without the sudden appearance of a glow around the tip of their staves, I could recognise the gesture as one of malice and immediately conjured up a barrier of Ice, unwilling to let whatever they were trying to do hit us.

And it was a good thing I did. There was an electric buzzing for a moment before a red projectile burst from the staff with a sharp, whistling sound, only to impact the barrier I had conjured and shatter it while unleashing a burst of steam. Most likely, the projectile was incredibly hot but I didn’t have the time to think about it, as the other projectile had bypassed the remains of my barrier and struck one of the bound humans we had just captured.

With that, the battle was immediately started, the two snakeheads kept shooting, even as Lia and Silva moved into melee with them and they were soon joined by another four of their brethren, all wearing the same metal armour and these incredibly cumbersome heads. I just couldn’t fathom why anyone would willingly wear a headpiece the size of one’s torso into battle. If it was for ceremonial purposes, sure, I could see the use of elaborate crowns and heads but in battle? Foolish, though even as I launched more attacks on these guys, I quickly realised that there had to be more to these helmets. Maybe it was only their bodies that were human and they actually had a snakehead, something of a weird reflection of a centaur, only instead of an entire human torso, they only had the head of a snake.

Whatever the case may be, these warriors were certainly tough and their staves proved capable of tremendous damage, as I learned when I was glanced by one of the projectiles I was too slow to dodge. It felt as if a burning coal was dragged across my skin and I had no doubt I had been burned by it but luckily, I was the only one in my party who was hit. The others, especially Lia and Sivla, exploited the fairly awkward length of these staves to great effect, carefully keeping track of the tip of them and turning them into nothing but cumbersome melee weapons. It was similar to facing a gun, if the barrel couldn’t be brought to bear on you, the gun was nothing but a badly balanced club with an awkward grip. Unless somebody decided to grab a rifle by the barrel and club somebody with the stock, in that case, it might work as a melee weapon. Until it went off, pointing right back at the user.

But while their staves were both powerful and useless, their unnatural toughness was a pain to deal with. After their first attack, I tried to stun one of them with my Mind Magic, as it had worked fairly well with the four humans earlier, only for my attack to do nothing but stagger him for a moment as if he had been lightly shoved. Given that I had put enough Astral Power behind the strike to send four people to the ground, having it essentially glance off a single enemy was an unwelcome surprise.

Similarly, when Lia managed to sever the arm of another, the guy just let out a grunt of pain and kept fighting with his other arm. Sure, using a staff one-handed was ineffective but watching an armless guy be anything but harmless was somewhat disconcerting. Especially when he decided to drop the stick, draw a knife and try gutting Silva.

Luckily, what their bodies had in toughness and their staves in offensive power were all the advantages they had. They were clearly lacking in training and tactics, otherwise, they wouldn’t have let Lia and Silva cluster them up and force them to fight in melee, allowing Luna and myself to be fairly unthreatened, if not for the repeated staff blasts flying our way, mostly when the guys missed Lia and Silva. But, for all the power these blasts had, they were comparatively slow, just about as fast as a casually launched Icicle and with the glowing staff-tips, they were incredibly telegraphed, making it relatively easy to dodge, at least as long as one was able to move.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

So, it only took some time and effort to wear down the six snakeheads, the biggest problem was simply the amount of damage we had to do to them to keep them down. Wounds to their limbs were completely ignored, similarly, when Lia stabbed one of them through the chest, it barely slowed the guy down. Their oversized helmets provided fair protection to their heads, so we hadn’t been able to tell if their heads were weak points but when I managed to send an Icicle straight through the armour on one of the guy’s guts, it sent him to the ground and he didn’t get back up. From that point on, we knew what to target and the fight turned out a lot easier.

When they were finally down, we had a moment to take stock of our situation and realised that it wasn’t just the Snakeheads who had died, but the guys we had bound earlier were just as dead, thanks to stray staff blasts striking them. A quick glance at the notifications revealed that the Snakeheads were officially called Serpent Guards and uniformly level ninety, each of them giving a nice chunk of EXP. If there were any more of them, I would soon reach level ninety-five and if we came across a lot more of them, I might even get to level hundred. Unlikely but it wasn’t impossible if there were enough.

Before we continued onwards into the strange dungeon, I decided to sate my curiosity and test the guns carried by the four dead airmen. Given that I knew guns had a tendency to explode since the change, I conjured some cover for us to hide behind and a simple stand for the gun, allowing me to trigger it magically, by pushing a bit of Ice against the trigger.

To my surprise, the result was a resounding bang and a bullet crashing into the backstop I had prepared but when I tried again, the bang sounded different. When I checked, I could only count the gun as a loss, the entire barrel was split and the mechanism was completely broken. I could only shake my head in disappointment, the guns might have been useful, an opinion shared by Alex, who had Lia pack the three remaining guns up, hoping that they could be made useful again.

Similarly, we decided to check out the Serpent Guards and their weapons. The staves were tested, just like we had tested the guns, but the stick didn’t even fire when I pushed Ice against the trigger. Maybe there was something in the gloves, maybe it had to do with the guard holding it or what we thought of as the trigger really wasn’t and the weapon was wielded with some sort of magical connection. Whatever the case, we were unable to figure it out easily, so we boxed the sticks up, just like we had done with the guns. Curiously, when we used Inspect on the weapons, they came back as M-16 for the rifle, M-17 for the two pistols and Ma’Tok for the staff. But only that, there was no information on damage, nothing but the name, similar to the way it had been when inspecting weapons from before the Change.

Now having more questions than before, we decided to check out the Serpent Guard’s bodies, curious what we were faced with. At first, we quickly removed the helmets and were faced with fairly ordinary-looking humans, making the strange helmets a pure affectation but when we stripped off the rest of their armour, things started to get strange.

For some reason, these guys had a cross-shaped incision on their stomach, right where we had discovered their strange weak points and when we investigated, we came across a weird, worm-like thing within that incision. These alien creatures were now dead, likely due to our attacks, but I had no idea what to make of them. Why would anyone run around with a worm in their stomach, or why would people cut open their gut to make room for it? That being said, where did these guys have their intestines and all the usual, squishy stuff housed in a person’s gut? A part of me wanted to start cutting to find out but given that we essentially were on a timer, as the Dungeon Explorer Buff lasted only so long, we decided to push further investigation back and continue on our merry way, curious what other insanities we might find in this dungeon. So far, it was incredibly interesting and I wanted to see the rest of it.