No further resistance was met after the destruction of the werewolf pack. Alexander rotated to the rear, his shift at the point complete, and he got to enjoy a relatively relaxing hike through the Maine spring amongst the foothills of Appalachia. In a different time and context, the trip would have been a vacation. He caught a fragment of sadness shrapnel when he reminded himself that such a trip would have been, almost certainly, in the company of his parents, who had loved the outdoors.
Until three hours before sunset the raid team and its support element traveled the highway. Alexander noted that the once solid road was already being overtaken by grass and weeds. Within a generation, this wide causeway of trucks and cars would be a narrow clearing surrounded by, and probably interspersed with, the fast-growing pines and maples. About twenty-five miles north of Falcon’s Rest, the travelers made camp, with plenty of daylight to set up, and fortify, their position.
The camp established by the twenty settlers, along a creek a hundred fifty feet off the road, was bounded by a thirty-foot diameter ring of rock, about eight feet high by one thick, courtesy of the Talus mage Van Richards. Brig came in behind him and raised stone pikes facing outwards to discourage any charging monsters or predators. Stakes cut from some dead wood pines made a crisscrossing palisade along the top of the ring wall, which hung outward to discourage climbing. Tents erected in organized rows only took a scant ten minutes to set up, and rocks from the creek made fire pits, all within a half hour of stopping.
Well before the sun fell below the tree limned horizon, Alexander was sitting next to a cook fire, a Dutch oven baking simple camp biscuits in its coals, while a small pot boiled to bring a bean suppah closer to fruition.
Every settler carried a personal ration of rice, beans, dried meat, seasoning, and some of the fresh fruits coming in from the greenhouses, along with their personal cooking kit, but a hearty meal still got fixed up by the individuals amongst the traveling Adventurers who enjoyed cooking. About everybody in Falcon’s Rest was at least passable around the kitchen, but the cream always rose to the top, separating the folk who could do it from the one’s that actively relished the task.
Alexander considered his campfire one of the more attractive ones, although he had to admit a little concern at the delicious smells that threatened his reign as king camp chef, coming from over near Julia’s campfire.
She was up to something, something that smelled like bacon and apples.
Not everything was carried in the packs born by the travelers, of course. The carts carried heavier supplies, such as tents, bedding, a big, waxed canvas pavilion that could enshroud the tents in case of heavier weather, or act as a central meeting place for the raid team and raid team associates. Other items, like saws, axes, mallets, and the like shared space on the carts as well, all the tools needed for safe travels in the Green.
Two Sun lanterns hung from fifteen-foot poles on either side of the camp, their oil-soaked wicks lit, and the approaching gloom of twilight was repelled for forty feet around each of them. One could imagine walking under a mid-morning daylight near those lanterns. Any creatures of Nut that entered the camp would find themselves quite out of their element.
A third, more potent form of lantern was walking around camp with her spouse: Melinda, the Luminous Pathfinder. On her left arm was the Sun Drake vambrace that amplified her abilities. She could pulse a light that would leave a person seeing doubled images under a noon day sky. Against the creatures whose sight was tuned to perpetual night, she would bring radiance that blinded.
A sodden Brig thumped down onto one of the nearby folded camp chairs, courtesy of the outdoors shop stock in town. She’d been to the creek for a bath, which Alexander considered a good call. Staying damp from your own sweat was a good way to chafe. He’d go down later after he’d had a chance to eat.
“Dinner ready in about a quarter hour, your Brigness.” Alexander told the smirking amazon.
She turned her nose up snootily, doing her best Dame Sanchez, “And I trust the help will be decent enough to be out of sight by then. I hate eating where the stink of the rabble can ruin a good vintage.”
The “vintage” she spoke of was good old Lipton’s Iced Tea, sitting steaming in a stainless-steel pot only minutes past having been brewed.
“Of course, your Brigness,” Alexander deferred, playing along, “The peasantry will be supping with the hogs, as usual. Can’t have the hay haired ones getting ideas.”
“Quite so, quite so.” Brig laughed.
The Dame had mellowed out some with her more obstreperous objections to the low bred, but she still had her moments.
“Not bad today Ms. Knievel.” He commented, giving the beans a stir, “I give the landing an eight. Bonus points for the follow up harpooning of monstrous thingies.”
The warrior woman smiled at the praise; she’d worked hard on that maneuver. It was the first time she’d gotten to try it at the speed of live.
“Yeah,” She said, philosophically, “I am pretty awesome, huh?”
“And humble.” Alexander added, smirking at the woman’s preening slouch.
“That too.” She agreed, nodding along, ignoring his sarcasm, but she leaned back and closed her eyes to rest.
Raising a two dozen stone spears over the course of half an hour had fairly well wiped her out, magically.
“Room for another bowl?” Ben announced himself with suppressed eagerness, similarly dressed down from a bath in the stream.
Alexander waved the big man on in, “Plenty to go ‘round, come on, grab a chair!”
Julia, despite her shyness, had a small crowd around her fireplace now, but he still had loyal followers. She’d really one upped him with the apples, though, he’d have to congratulate her later.
Benjamin took a camp chair and relaxed visibly into it, before leaning in to take a stick and begin poking the fire. Even without the armor, the presence of the man was solidity incarnate. The subtly metallic sheen from his dark skin only amplified the effect.
A low hum of conversation gently filled the camp, as supper was taken amongst the settlers. A half dozen folk still in their travel gear were acting as sentries, ready to respond should anything dangerous crop up. Guard shifts had already been assigned, Alexander would be taking the middle shift, where his eyes could do the most good in the overcast night. There wouldn’t be a moon to shed light through the persistent Maine cloud cover. For those who didn’t have first shift duty, it was a chance to eat, relax, and commune.
When first rotation was relieved, they too would have their chance to rest and make merry, before grabbing six hours of sleep. There would be, at any given time, about half the raid team awake, to limit the opportunity for any skulking critters to get foolish.
For a few minutes, Alexander, Ben, Brig, and, soon after Shiv, sat in silence around the fire. Mark and Melinda were already asleep, they had the third rotation.
Soon enough, savory soup beans, camp bread, and meat boiled to softness were packed away by professionally hungry folk. A lesson learned far, far earlier in his life was that hard work deserved a full belly.
Alexander turned in after, getting his chance for a few hours sleep before his middle shift. From the warmth of the sleeping bag sprawled atop a foam pad, a far cry from his comfortable bed, he wound down to the rural orchestral of friends chatting after supper, evening songs of birds, and the yips of wolves, Gaian ones, in the hills.
His eyes opened a second later, or so it felt. The stars wheeling above through a gap in the clouds, soft moonlight trying to peak through, told him it was time to take sentry duty. He extracted himself from the bag, the zipper’s too loud buzz cutting through an otherwise peaceful night.
It only took a couple of minutes to don the splint mail armor, and he stuffed helmet down over his feathered hair, checking the chin strap to make certain it was set. Absent fingers played over buckles and straps, doing the same for the rest of the combat clothes, as he sometimes referred to the armor. Nothing was out of place, he’d done good work in the fitting, but it was habit.
Bow in hand, quiver secured to his belt, he relieved Bonny and sent the girl to her well-earned blankets.
Alexander’s otherworldly stare penetrated the darkness, but he didn’t care for the glare of the Sun lanterns, they cast odd shadows that even his eyes struggled with, so he exited the walled encampment and vanished into the midnight forest.
Stalk guided steps took him around the perimeter of the encampment, Broken silhouette further obliterated his presence, and he breathed deeply of the damp night while he ghosted through the woods. Piney smell, detritus of the autumn fall, the earthy forest smells permeated, not yet broken up by spring’s burst of flowers. After two years postmodern civilization, he found the absence of extraneous noise, the contamination of his nose by pervasive exhaust intoxicating.
Gaia was wild again, and dangerous. He loved it. For all that he would spend his days within the workshop to obtain again some semblance of modernity, he could not say that he wanted things to go back, with two profound exceptions, to the way they had been before. There was again, for the first time since he’d been born, a sense of adventure on this world. Sights unseen. Maps to be charted, if not for the dungeon generated changes in geography, then for the new creatures and life forms that now roamed the surface. Alexander Gerifalte had been denied his dream of flying. In its stead he was granted the aspiration to become an explorer. Just as soon as humanity had achieved a stable bedding.
Once Falcon’s Rest was well and truly established, once his goal for the Enshrined was met, or, if it was found to be unattainable, put to rest, Alexander would probably leave the settlement behind. Out in the Green, the last Gerifalte was purely alive, for his own sake. As much as he’d come to love these people he protected, he didn’t want to be bound to them forever.
“Does any falcon want anything less than freedom?” He philosophized and chuckled silently at himself, and at the irony of his name.
Such thoughts occupied the young hunter as he padded through the budding forest, sometimes amongst a cluster of pines, sometimes duck walking beneath the new leaves of the early maples, occasionally clambering up and over a jutting granite boulder. Nothing arose that demanded he draw his bow, and he returned to camp with a few hours to daybreak, and, after he’d passed his baton to Ben for guard duty, he made for his blankets to finish his sleep.
Day two of the journey went more smoothly than day one, no resistance was encountered. A winter bear chewing its way through an elk caused a minor detour of half a mile, but the terrain was kind, and there was only minimal hauling of the hand pulled carts to free them from binding mud. The third and final traverse left the highway, going instead up a gravel logging road, which, five miles in, turned into a game trail. One that showed the obvious signs, broken branches, deep pawed imprints, occasional scat, and traces of animals rent to pieces, of werewolves.
Markers along the trail guided the raid team to their destination: the tier three dungeon of the realm of endless night.
It was immediately obvious when they arrived. Unlike the only other closed dungeon Alexander had explored, the source of the goblins and ogres that had terrorized him when first the Pulse changed the rules, Nut had not claimed a mine or natural cave. What the adventurers found was a stone temple, a small one, of almost Egyptian architecture. Obelisks of grey-black stone, like slate, rose up fifteen feet, in pairs along a stone walkway leading into the temple interior. Each foreboding pillar was adorned by carvings of strange creatures, many of them eyeless, several of them winged, and all of them belonging in humanity’s nightmares.
Gathered along the crest of a low hill, whose canopy of thick old growth fir blocked all but the most persistent light from the mid-afternoon sun, the travelers shared a moment of shared realization that grim business was at hand.
“It feels bad.” Bonny summarized succinctly.
It did, indeed, feel bad. Ominous, what with the absence of light within that interior, all except for a faint blue glow, the boundary to the realm contained by the dungeon.
Van cleared his throat and began raising a semicircular wall in front of the dungeon, about fifty feet away from the obelisks.
“First thing, I can’t move the stone around this dungeon. Can’t even feel it, it’s like the planet just ends in a perfect circle fifty feet from the door of that temple.” The Talus mage reported.
In a way, that made sense. Van’s gift allowed him to manipulate Gaia’s substrate. Whatever Nut was, it didn’t respond to the mage’s powers.
Alexander posed the question that came to mind, “Could you manipulate any of the rock inside the dungeon?”
Another six foot long by eight tall section of wall lifted at the beckoning of Van’s magic and he shrugged.
“Dunno. I could inside the other dungeons, but they were all field dungeons. Felt like the difference in handling two types of mortar. I can work them, but they respond just a teensy bit different. The dungeon exterior I can’t so much as touch. Might be because it’s anchored metaphysically, the dungeon core shrouds itself in its magic and I can’t touch it from the outside.” Hypothesized the terramancer.
Put it on the pile of things they didn’t know, the rules to be learned about how the dungeons interacted with Gaia, and how Gaia interacted back on the dungeons.
“Do what you can to fortify a forward operations base, we’ve got the rest of the day to work before we attempt the clear.” Mark Ross decided, and the twenty travelers set to their tasks.
The first thing they did was to cut down several of the crowding fir trees, breaking a window into the canopy that permitted a much-needed beam of sunlight to grace the temple. Disturbingly, the ground shuddered when those first rays touched the dungeon entrance and a thick fog rose around it, as if it felt the need to shield itself from the light’s touch.
“That’s how it’s going to be, huh?” Ben declared, when the shivering ground subsided.
Brig declared, completely serious, “Yeah, well, it better be fucking scared,” which made Alexander feel a little better.
Sometimes confidence was infectious.
Twenty hands made for light work, they had a similar set up to the night encampments well before the orange and pink highlights of sunset.
Major pondered, looking at the heavy timbers of the fir trees that had been felled and used to make a palisade wall across the front of the encampment, where Van’s magic couldn’t find hold, “You think it knows we’re out here? The dungeon, I mean.”
A good question. No one knew what mind might live inside the dungeon cores. Gaia spoke to her children, but the other realms did not, at least, not unless through their minions. When a human touched the crystal surface of the dungeon core, the power that it held was stripped away, used by the planet to augment, to strengthen her champions. That other world was unable to resume its grip on the crystalline heart until after a Pheonix sun, when the mana field of Gaia turned over. Since no human had ever made contact with the potential mind that dwelled within another planet, no human had insight to offer about the nature of its intelligence. If any existed at all.
Riley answered, saying aloud what most folk felt to be true, even if there was no hard data to support it, “It knows. And it’s got ideas what it’s going to do about it, too.”
Alexander trusted his gut when it came to matters like these. He trusted Potter’s gut too.
They weren’t going to be surprising the denizens of Nut. This wasn’t going to be like when he’d caught the entire Goblin King led army in an ambush. Those monsters had been starving, they’d been cut off from their food supply, isolated, with a ravenous Goblin Queen in need of nourishment to pump out more eggs to create the filthy creatures. Who knows how long this dungeon had sat here? Who knows for how long its creatures had been consolidating their hold on the surrounding lands, fattening themselves until whatever sapience, the dungeon core or its guardian creature, determined that raids farther afield were in order?
“If we are expecting the worst, then there is only good news, da?” Shiv spoke, while he gripped a tent stake for hammering.
A few loud whacks of the mallet set the stake and the physician stood, stretching his back.
“I am no general, but it seems like a good idea to go to fifteen on, five off, rolling shifts. This close, if multiple packs were coming from the dungeon and scattering, they will here be concentrated.” The Brigid healer reasoned.
Ben nodded along and said, “That’s my vote too. Every six hours, we can put the guys who’ve been up longest to bed. Georgia, you got your runes up, right? Just in case?”
The Morrigan woman with her blond hair bunned, flashed a thumbs up from place next to a fire lay that awaited lighting.
“Ayuh. Temporal Ward is ready to go. If a mob comes out of there, I can put them in time out as they come through the temple doorway.” Georgia Stephens confirmed.
“I’ve got the furry bastards’ number now; I can grind their bones to make my bread with one love tap.” Cervantes reported.
That conversation covered the precautions, the rest of the supporting cast knew their job was to hang back, fight together in small groups, the way they’d been trained, and try to pick off anything that the Adventurers proper crippled. Now that they’d reached their destination, the groups separated into their predefined teams. The dungeon clear party of Alexander, Georgia, Ben, Mark, Melinda, and Cervantes were, from now until the clear was complete, moving as a unit. The other folk were grouped by varying combat abilities and experience.
Alexander kept an eye on the other groups, because the village had elected him mayor of what barely qualified as a hamlet, and that forced him to feel responsible for them all, in addition to the responsibility he’d accepted when he told them about a little town he’d planned to found six months ago in Safe Harbor and they decided to join him.
A carpenter woman, Denise Barre, was a tall, six feet one inches and whipcord thin and the first noncombat class of one of the groups. She was a Brigid with dark brown hair in a no-nonsense ponytail whose class, Stanchion Arcanist let her infuse wooden items with her mana that reinforced them in a way that multiplied the innate mechanical properties of the object and lent it a degree of magical protection akin to Soak. He watched her make her way from one fir timber to the next, lay her hands, each of which had two extra fingers on each, delicate, dexterous hand, just like Shiv’s mutation when his Brigid lineage awakened, on the wood, and the wood seemed to shrink just a tiny fraction, becoming more solid, more tangible.
The next member of that group was that one guy who could blend disconnected fragments of things into singular pieces whose name Alexander simply could not compel his brain to remember, he was like a friggin’ grey man. The early thirties, prematurely bald guy who stood average height and carried just the faintest hint of a paunch was a Brigid bloodline, his class read Seamless Carver, and he had no extra digits on his hands, but his eyes were white throughout. He claimed that his vision was completely fine, even better than it had been since before his tier up. When Denise was done with her robustness spell, he came in behind her to meld the fir timbers together, forming a singular monolithic wall of wood.
Lastly, Potter, who led the group, made up the leader of that cell. Potter was a competent fighter, despite being on the losing end of a fight against a pair of werewolves earlier. He could handle himself and take point for his team, bringing his offensive powers to bear while both of the others, who each had a long spear and a hand axe for back up weapons, could delay and distract, playing defense.
Brig was carrying another group of noncombatants.
Tabitha Perrot, a stout, tow-headed Marid with hazel eyes and possessed a class called Raincaller that, let her pull humidity from the air to make rain, was the first. She could make the droplets into needles, which fell like subsonic small caliber bullets, but they didn’t fall hard enough to damage most things that had Soak, so her abilities were almost entirely utilized on the agricultural sectors. She was working through a combat drill with her buckler and one-handed sword with Mark at the moment, while Brig danced in front of her with light jabs of a blunt pole to train her reflexes. The Marid girl, younger than Alexander, was moving well in her light armor, and learning from her elders with enthusiasm.
The second civilian, as it were, was one of the farmers, a gangly man of middle years, grey haired and green eyed, with skin that seemed to want to blend into the background when he stood still. Ryan Bianchi was a dryad who could use his mana to perform feats of growth similar to the Entling blood. He also had a talent for creating new strains of magical plant, oftentimes with more potent properties than previous generations, so long as his mana was infusing the plants during flowering, pollination, and seed growth. Alexander had bestowed on the man, for this journey only mind, the Reaper’s scythe. Left behind in his Lab, he’d been unable to find the time to refine the thing into some more useful item and he considered Ryan too great an asset to risk without a major assist. The crop fields would miss his attentions, but he’d insisted that the farmers should be learning how to deal with the threats from the Green, if ever they were to be able to expand fields past the wall of Falcon’s Rest.
Alexander couldn’t deny that, so Ryan got to take his turn on a mission.
Van Richards had another two combat greenhorns, a brother and sister pair of albino twins who never separated.
They were both Ifrit blood lines, and they both had the same class, a rarity on its own. What made them completely unique, so far as Alexander had known amongst all the survivors of Safe Harbor was that their abilities were as twinned as the rest of them. Sara Esser, Kinetic Conduit, could slow a moving object, bleeding off its momentum as a shimmering orange liquified motion, with enough aetheric force to stop a charging horse, despite her middling five feet six inches and slim build. Herman Esser, Kinetic Conduit, could feed distilled kinetic energy into an object, accelerating with enough force to throw a thousand-pound ox five yards.
One was virtually useless without the other, Sara could stop a bullet with her powers, but she couldn’t do anything with the energy she captured and burned her mana supply rapidly trying to hold onto it. Herman could bring a fully loaded wagon from rest to a rather brisk canter, but only if he had the energy Sara created to do it with, his own mana reserve was too small to create the momentum on his own without being completely exhausted. Together, however, Alexander had a suspicion the two could act like a reality warping inertial engine, shunting momentum from one object to another, without obeying Newton’s third law in between.
That was why the dimpled, red eyed girl wearing dark, oil-based paint to protect her skin, held a net in one hand, and huge aluminum tower shield in the other, these being her tools to help extent her powers to catch incoming objects and bleed their energies. Meanwhile, Herman, similarly painted, a sturdy framed but not impressively built lad, held a two-handed hammer made of tool steel that weighed thirty pounds. It was ludicrously heavy. On his own, he could barely swing it, and only barely did the term “swing” apply to the motion. Fed the orange energy from his sister’s stolen kinetic energy, he could sling that hammer like a nerf bat.
They worked with the farmers, most of the time, because they had wanted no part of monsters, dungeons, or anything else but tilling nicely parallel rows of dirt and living a slow, quiet life. David’s murder pushed them to the drill field, realizing how cruelly they might be parted if they couldn’t defend each other.
Bonny was in charge of Major, and two others. Nick Lancaster, the horse trainer, and leatherworker novice was one. He had no horses to lead on this mission, but the foals had dropped a week ago, so his services tending the animals wasn’t critical until they were weaned and ready to break to saddles and harness. The broad-shouldered ginger man was plain faced, good natured, and impossibly patient. He swung a double bitted felling axe hard enough to drop one of those two-foot diameter firs with about twelve strokes though, so Alexander didn’t worry about him as much as he did some of the others.
Nick was helping the last member of the expedition to put up the big canvas tent.
Zainabu Omehia was six feet tall, coal black, and probably the second most gorgeous human being Alexander had ever seen next to Brig. She shaved her head, eschewing vanity, and her Morrigan bloodline printed silver feather markings instead of the dark ones of the others. She also had what might be politely called talons on her fingers. An inch long, cruelly hooked, like miniature versions of an eagle’s claws. They were immaculately manicured and painted magenta, which Alexander thought was kind of metal of the young woman. Not being one of the Adventurers, a pacifist before the murders this winter past, she’d been happily serving as a jack of all trades, doing a little carpentry, helping here and there with the crops, laying a hand to drive wagons, and helping Kim Summers melt down cars at the smelter, whatever she turned her hand to, she seemed to do competently. This was her maiden voyage using her skills in the Green, he sort of wished the main adventurers hadn’t been so efficient dealing with the ambush earlier so he could see her in action.
Her class, Fractured Seer, was another one of those odd time manipulation ones. He asked Georgia about it, because she, too, could bend time to her will. Georgia explained that her gifts were mostly time traps, defensive tools. In small bursts, she could even burn tremendous amounts of her mana to move faster.
Zainabu was an offensive class, built around two simple, but profoundly powerful gifts, Seer Sight, and Seer Shift.
Where his own eyes saw the fine tensioning of muscle beneath the skin, the flexes and positioning of the body, and then the projection of mana that showed him the resulting motion in space, the Morrigan’s blank iridescent silver eyes really could see into the future. Quantum entanglements that generated the highest probabilities of the reality wave function collapsing into actuated physical events, she’d called it, and Alexander took her word for it because he had very little clue what the hell she was talking about.
He understood the results of her abilities easily enough, the more mana she drew, the farther out she could see both around herself and into the future. For a pittance of her energy a heart beat or two, and only immediately around herself. For a tenth, two seconds about three meters around herself. Half her mana for five seconds at five meters. The whole pool got her a whopping minute for anything within her line of sight. For some reason burning her entire mana pool on a single seeing was more efficient in terms of piercing the veil. Seer shift was the partner ability and permitted her to slip into the timestream while her sight was active, allowing her to move within the range of her vision, while nothing else could, because everything else was still locked into the past.
If not for how heavily that gift consumed her magic, even taking a few steps cost her half her core’s reserves, she might be the mightiest one versus one warrior alive. Who could beat someone that killed you in the future?
The woman herself, she described it as being like everyone else frozen but with ghostly images projected where they would be, images that she could touch, when he asked her about the experience after a spar. Her long estoc, and short, heavy, bowie knife were dangerous on the practice field, what with you were never certain when your attacks had been read perfectly. Once her phobia of blood was overcome, she’d be hell on wheels.
Alexander had high hopes for the Morrigan woman as a replacement for him in the village, as soon as Saki taught her enough chemistry and he could give her lessons working with Sterling and the boys. She might be the key to his freedom when it came time to leave the fledgling village behind. If it ever came time.
His meandering was rudely interrupted by Melinda flash-banging him from point blank range.
Brilliant spots of white danced in his eyes and he lost balance for a second, barking, “Fuck!” as he tripped over his feet.
The young hunter had been working through a routine drill, some short sword exercises he had practiced until the motions required no thought. The meditative actions left his mind wonder its own twisty corridors. That is, until the all-consuming burst of sunlight blinded him.
“Sorry! Ooohh, sorry, sorry, I don’t know how much to use yet!” Melinda cried, standing with her Sundrake gauntlet raised, mortified by half the clearing suddenly grabbing their faces or falling over or both.
It took several seconds for the lancing pain in his orbs to fade, and he picked himself up, squinting owlishly while he dusted his pants off. He bent over to pick up the High Steel and Argentum jacketed Messer, frowning in the general direction of a blur that he felt confident was Melinda shaped.
Zainabu swore loudly and steadily and sucked a talon bearing thumb batted by a hammer swing interrupted by glorious incandescence.
Sheepishly, the Luminescent Pathfinder lowered her arm and covered the Sunstone imbedded in the armlet, as if that ship hadn’t already sailed.
Alexander blinked several times, trying to clear the residual black spots that replaced the throbbing bright ones.
“Melinda, can I ask you to point that thing somewhere else next time?” Ben asked, his hand moving backward and forward away from his face, with no indication he could tell where it was.
“Ehehehe, yeah. Umm…sorry, again.” She replied, chuckling nervously.
“I think I have eye cancer.” Brig announced, looking around aimless, her efforts to make out much of anything going unrewarded until the dazzle faded.
The Albino twins, wearing their elastic banded sun goggles, as they always did when outdoors, smiled to one another and traded high fives, Herman calling “Suck it melanin enjoyers! Now you know how it is on the other side!”
Melinda took a walk of shame outside the encampment wall to practice her empowered talents afterward. Unfortunately, the rest of the raid party went with her, and Alexander found himself wishing he had sunglasses well before the sun slipped behind trees, putting an end to the training session. It was just as well, inside the dungeon, those flares of luminescence would be a part of the strategy for handling the creatures of night.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Shiv’s plan for rotating shifts was carried out. The six-man raid team was the only one that got a full eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. They rose early that morning, pre-dawn, and broke fast with a hearty meal.
Armed in the best gear the village could produce, from the materials that the top Guilds of Safe Harbor had literally killed for, the sonsofbitches, and as prepared as they would ever be this day, the party strode between carved obelisks into the dark of the temple that housed the gate to Nut.
Alexander noted an instant drop in temperature, as soon as the threshold into the temple had been crossed, and the daylight peaking over the horizon was muted, filtered by the infection of the realm beyond the blue boundary.
“I have the lead,” Mark Ross reminded his team, “Melinda stays behind me and supports whatever side holds the most threat, Ben, hold the left flank, Georgia the rear to cover us, Cervantes has the right flank, and Alexander, you’ve got the flex and forward scout, if you think you can recon without drawing aggro.”
No one said anything, the reminder wasn’t needed, it was just to help them all feel more confident about the raid.
Mark, with a Sunlantern burning at its lowest setting buckled to his sword belt, strode into the boundary between worlds, and the rest of the team followed without hesitation.
Nut Contested Space Entered!
Within his mind, the announcement that they had crossed over into Nut sounded, as it did for them all.
He was immediately presented with the reverse of the temple that they had strode into, like a mirror. Outside the temple were the same carved pillars. Here, in the realm of night, they emitted an eerie silver glow, soft light that cast no shadows, and only served to amplify the extent of the darkness. For dark it was. As the scouting party had reported, there was no moon. Stars twinkled in a sky arranged into constellations no human had ever seen before, but they offered the umbral forest no reprieve from the oppressing lack of light. As soon as the party exited the temple, a feeling of pressure, as if passing into the parts of a cave that had never seen the sun, settled on the Adventurers.
The Sun lantern at Mark’s belt cast a sphere of daylight fifteen feet in diameter and not a single inch more, the dungeon’s darkness cut off that glow with the sharpness of a knife. Alexander knew light didn’t behave that way, didn’t just terminate, so this must be a manifestation of the space itself. This fragment of Nut didn’t just not have light within it, it was antagonistic toward the existence of the sun.
“Oookay, I’m going to go to medium burn, fifteen feet isn’t enough space to work without tripping over each other.” Mark said, twisting the valve that allowed more of the wick to alight, which burned the oil within faster.
The sphere of daylight expanded to twenty-five feet in diameter. It was impressive how aggressively the dark mana within this realm imposed its lightless edict.
Alexander could make out the forest beyond the lantern’s reach. It was a colorless blend of greys and blacks, where the edges of the shapes of things were more defined than their interiors, but it was vision. Outsider’s Perception let him pierce the gloom.
“I’m going to a dispersion of fifty feet outside the day globe,” the Entropic Venator reported, “No risks, if anything spooky shows up I’ll call the bearing and get back to the formation.”
With that, he left the faint warmth of the Sun lantern behind and Stalked ahead into the forest.
The arrow he held between his fingers he kept firmly nocked, ready to be pulled to full draw. Leaves, branches, fir tree sheddings, the same detritus as had filled the forest of Gaia were even more heavily muted here. Alexander smelled a dampness that said the forest never truly dried out and felt a coolness on his skin that was unpleasant. It was just as well the party was dressed in layers of protective gear, else they would have quickly become chilled.
Once at the declared separation from the rest of the party, he gave a short, whistled chirp to let the rest know they were ready to move. He’d be playing the role of scout here, his passive senses less impactful than Melinda’s, but also less strenuous. Better to save the Luminous Pathfinder’s strength, as much as was possible.
Half an hour of cautious walking revealed that the Nut dungeon had cannibalized part of Gaia, had made of itself a mirror of the terrain above, as the preliminary scouting report claimed. It felt weird to him to be walking forward, but backward along the path that the party had taken through the Maine forest to reach this point. A flicker in the dark made Alexander stop cold, and he knew he hadn’t imagined it.
“Contact, two o’clock!” He called to the party behind.
Immediately, he heard the pace behind him quicken and the muted sounds of armored footsteps in heavy air grew louder with their approach.
The subtle dark on black that had caught his attention didn’t repeat, but his instincts screamed that the creature was still out there, only still, and waiting.
It decided not to wait for backup to arrive, and a black edged hunched over form ran on four legs toward him before sliding into a hulking shaggy werewolf, claws reaching.
Alexander put an arrow into the center of the monster’s chest and had a second arrow drawn, recalling that werewolves had two hearts. He loosed the second arrow and watched it disappear opposite the creature’s liver, its howl cut off into a growling whine. Less than a dozen feet away from him the monster fell forward into a sprawling roll, dead. Alexander Gerifalte didn’t believe it, so he put a third arrow into the monster’s skull. He was rewarded for his cynicism by its jerking spasms as it clawed at the third dart briefly before subsiding.
“Be aware, the fuckers will try to play possum to get at you, even when mortally wounded.” He passed the information along to his teammates, as the light from their bubble enveloped him.
“Okay, rules of engagement updated to include decapitation before considering furry fuckers neutralized.” Ben advised.
“Ayuh.” Cervantes agreed aloud.
They pulled the core out of the werewolf, a bigger one than those that had come at the party outside the dungeon, and whose Scroll imparted the information that it was mature.
Alexander advanced, and the party followed his lead. They were in unfamiliar territory, despite the terrain matching the forested Maine foothills outside. What they were searching for was the dungeon heart, the core, the crystalline source of power that sustained this invading fragment of Nut. Unlike the other dungeon clears, they had no clue where it might be, how far they might have to go to find it, and this dungeon wasn’t so straightforward as a mine shaft with a giant geode. To maximize their chances of hitting a trail or clue, Alexander made hundred-yard zig zags at forty-five degrees to the straight axis they wanted to travel. It meant taking much longer progress through the forest, but vastly increased the odds of coming across some indication of the source of the dungeon’s strength.
An hour later, they got their first big clue: six werewolves led by a bald, pasty skinned man dressed in leather hauberk, a dingy metal skullcap helm, light vambrace, knee high boots, and a bone and leather tasset. The light armor, without stain or scuff in the greyscale world of Alexander’s eyes, was largely ignored when the figure turned to reveal its oversized incisors on a visage twisted into batlike features.
Alexander called contact again and focused on the new enemy, calling the creature’s Scroll to the fore of his mind.
Dracul Pack Leader
Status:
Aggressive, Arrogant
Soak: 20%
LifeForce/Armor
Head
Mana: 100%
Might
14
Length
5’11”
LifeForce/Armor
Left Arms
18/10
LifeForce/Armor
Right Arms
Grace
20
Weight
179lbs
21/8
Vampire’s Fangs
21/8
Impetus
21
Age
84 years
Vampire’s claws
LifeForce/Armor
Chest
Vampire’s claws
Cogitation
16
Core
Blood garnet, heart
10/10
Wisdom
10
Origin
Nut
LifeForce/Armor
Left Legs
LifeForce/Armor
Right Legs
Ingenuity
11
Monster Race:
Vampire-2nd Tier
24/6
LifeForce/Armor
Abdomen
24/6
Durability
18
21/8
Valor
16
Traits
Nosferatu, Cunning, Pack leader
Skills
Bat transformation, Vampiric bite, Hypnotic gaze
Arcana
Blood siphon, Sanguine spear, Crimson Regeneration
Another creature from the dark recesses of the human imagination, found within the dungeon. Alexander was not a great believer in coincidence, and the startling number of fairy tale myths found inside the contested zones was enough to convince him that Gaia had not been always the magicless slumberer of a world that modern man had come to know.
The screeching command of the vampire siccing werewolf minions on him was a confirmation that Gaia might have come close enough to waking to permit incursions from other realms before, just too transient to permit the formation of dungeons.
Bow raised, Alexander put into flight an arrow aimed for the leader of the werewolves, and the creature, he would not call it a person, threw up an arm to intercept the shaft. A five-inch-long stiletto dagger of an arrow, driven by a hundred twenty-pound simulated draw, pinned the blocking arm to its shoulder, and pallid features showed surprise and pain in combination.
That surprise lasted a mere moment, the vampire wrenched the arrow free, evidencing only discomfort at drawing wood and steel through its flesh. A red mist rose up from the edges of the arrow as it did and it casually snapped quarter inch ash shaft in its hand in contempt when it finished.
Alexander Gerifalte, his mission accomplished turned tail and ran, with a glance over his shoulder to show six slavering pursuers, gaining ground. Dracul weren’t susceptible, or not quickly, to the hemotoxins from Mandrake leaves, he’d have to try the Mindflayer tears, if he didn’t get killed to death. Grass and granite crushed together beneath his feet as he fled.
“Forty yards! Six! Dead ahead!” He called and sprinted toward the sphere of lamp light.
The vampire was faster than battle form werewolves, long claws, made longer by the glittering rusty red sheathes of bloody blades scraped his armor, a shower of sparks thrown and he felt the baseball bat impact of the attack down his spine a second before he made the sheltering light.
His balance was thrown forward and he had to roll or sprawl over his bow. Long hours being thrown around by Ben and Annita, whose Judo was much better than his, paid dividends, and he pelted into the light headfirst with some degree of control, coming to his feet with his bow in hand, if not ready.
The Dracul miscalculated, thinking the lantern was at its limit, and the only source of light.
Melinda raised her left arm and called aloud, channeling her powers. A sphere of pure golden sunlight roiled into being and its light hit the vampire visibly, washed over it in a wave of purifying flame.
“Heeayyarriiiigh!!” Screeched the monstrous humanoid, and it went into a panic batting at its form, rolling upon the ground for relief from the blazing sphere held aloft by Melinda.
It found no surcease from the sunlight in her hand, and flashed suddenly into a man-shaped bonfire tall flames lashing the air for only a moment before subsiding. Where the vampire’s form had been was now a vaguely hominid patch of blackened grass, a charred skeleton, and ash-like vampire dust.
The howling werewolves saw the destruction of their master and demonstrated that its orders were more akin to suggestions, because they came on heedless, roaring for vengeance.
Mark met the creatures, his kite shield raised and a dangerously glowing sword in hand. The first beast leapt into the deceivingly compact man, trying to knock him down, and rebounded from the unexpectedly solid stance, his boots dug in against the ground. It didn’t get the chance to recover from its mistake, an up-stroke from the readied blade, white with heat, ripped through its chest and neck, nearly severing the creature’s shoulders from its abdomen. Mark strode forward in a rush behind his shield, bullying aside the dying monster and the second werewolf in a line with the jumper found its face and chest burning from being smashed by Argentum gilt along the rim, engraving, and boss of the shield, which concern was aborted when he shoved brought down the raised sword, neatly parting its skull down through to its stomach.
The third and fourth pack mates turned in their charge to hit an occupied Mark from his left hip and found themselves facing a Steel Heavy Knight with a silver coated naginata. Ben clipped the pair of them with a single sweeping stroke, the speed of it nearly beyond Alexander’s ability to follow. The upper halves sprung upward from the lower with the violence of the attack, like wood springing apart under the splitting maul, thudding to the forest floor ten feet apart.
Five had jumped high, aiming for the sunlight wielding woman, and came down instead on Georgia’s bastard sword, her shield catching its weight to throw it aside. Its flailing was awkward for being in slow motion, like a seventy-five percent speed film of falling. Georgia met it where it landed and three vicious cuts to its neck freed the wolfen head from the man-like body.
The last werewolf, seeing its pack and leader destroyed in seconds, discovered cowardice, it turned to flee. Alexander was drawing his bow to prevent that but didn’t get the chance, Cervantes caught it in the hips with an arcing swing of the great sword, that rang like a gong when it hit bone. The werewolf collapsed in a heap, bones in the hips, thighs, and lower spine powdered from sonic vibration. The once cheerful man wore a wrathful scowl as he drove his now silver jacketed blade between its shoulders into the soft dirt below and twisted to ruin its heart and lungs.
Heavily breathing from his sprint, Alexander rose from a ready crouch and let the tension fade from his bowstring. It was over. Against silvered weapons, the Soak of the monsters amounted to nothing. Against the direct force of concentrated sunlight, the Dracul had found death within a second or two. Preparation of the correct counters pulled the fangs of these vipers.
“Can I get a ‘hell yeah’, Brothers?!” Alexander cheered, gleeful, and his call was answered, their voices ringing out into the night.
They policed the cores of the monsters and brushed the brittle bones and dust of the cremated vampire into a pouch. Who knew what alchemical use the stuff might have? Oh, Alexander Gerifalte, that’s who, he chuckled to himself, giving the dusty contents a taste, despite the grossness.
Vampire Dust: the ashen remains of a sun-killed vampire have been purified of their dark mana taint, but retain magical potency from the longest night. Chief amongst the properties are potent regeneration of flesh and blood, rapid regeneration of mana, and a cure for the Dracul’s infectious bite, as well as other transformational afflictions.
Barely had the information obtained by his alchemical ingestion skill registered before he was making connections with the blood clotting traits of his powdered mandrake root quick clot, the rank, yet incredible vitality of a wyrmling liver, and the crystal mana heart of another, much loathed, creature that possessed incredible regeneration.
Master alchemist synergy detected:Vampire dust, Powdered Mandrake root, Powdered Yeti core, Dragon liver, Spirits base ► Elixer of Healing
Alexander blinked slowly as this newest piece of the arcane settled between his ears.
“Guys, I think we hit a high-water mark for weird Gaian shit. I just popped a formula for the Elixer of Healing.” He announced.
The Children of Gaia found themselves restored every three days to perfect health, absent time’s steady advance. But a substance that could heal rapidly, regenerate tissue, close wounds, and permit a critically wounded person from dying until that holy sunrise was, quite literally, priceless. Clues, suggestions, alchemical breadcrumbs had pointed to this. But, upon finding this last ingredient, the necessary knowledge for its creation was at hand.
“It needs vampire dust, which, apparently, you only get by killing Dracul like this dude here with sunlight. Which means, Melinda? You get the honors for all bat faced fuckers, if that can be arranged safely.” He informed the party.
“Hot damn! You don’t fucking say?” Drawled Ben, elated at the news.
Lives saved made Ben a happy boy. So did killing monsters. Killing monsters to make lives saved really put the stiffening in the warrior’s trousers.
If they’d had something like this, it was very possible that Hilde would have survived her lightning strike wounds. Same for Dan. It probably wouldn’t have made a difference for Kim and David, they’d been virtually instantly killed, but just the thought that there might be a way to keep death’s cold clammy fingers off human necks made Alexander tingle.
“Mark?” Georgia asked, getting their leader’s input.
He nodded, the feathered crest of his helmet bobbing in the lantern light.
“Oh yeah. Definitely. Melinda, sweety, if you get the chance to sun blast some pasty fuckers, I would like for you to do it, ‘mkay hun?” He politely asked of his common law wife.
Alexander had had to “bless” the union a month back. Unnecessarily in his view, but there were still some traditions left to the survivors of the end of the old world.
The petit black woman slapped her husband’s arm playfully, and said in a fake, bowels of Georgia, Southern accent, “Why Darling! I thought you’d never ask!”
After that moment of levity in the darkness of the dungeon, the Adventurers carried on. A quarter of an hour later, they got their chance.
Three Dracul, a fencer with light armor and a rapier, a crossbow wielding archer, and a big boy carrying some kind of ring hilted dadao, with a hefty cutting blade.
This time, Alexander wouldn’t bother wasting an arrow on the rapidly healing humanoids.
He’d caught the three in a game of dice, with scout form wolves, another pack of six, around them napping. There was something person-like about the way they gathered around a camp fire, clatters of bones showing symbols that meant nothing to him, rules only the denizens of Nut might know, guiding the game. Low tripods of stakes driven into the ground held oily rag torches burning fitfully in the dungeon around them. The weak light barely extended beyond a six-foot radius miniscule compared to what should have been, and those lights cut off sharply, just as they did with his party’s lantern hidden behind a rise about a hundred yards back.
Alien conversation accompanied the exchange of chits of metal, the raspy tongue sounding sibilant on his ears. Alexander never questioned his choice for how to react to the scene. Sapience didn’t earn these vampires a reprieve; these creatures would kill him and anyone from Gaia they caught. Whatever was generating that cooked meat smell from the fire could attest to their natures.
The young Venator put his bow over his shoulder, and raised his hands toward the unsuspecting monsters, an act not specifically necessary for what he was going to do, but kinesthesia aided focus with Gaian magic and abilities for most. He’d been meaning to give this a try, anyway.
Outsider’s perception let him see three dimensionally when he concentrated on something, like a hologram in his visual cortex. He concentrated, completely, on the group and built in his mind an image of the camp and its denizens, lining up the angles.
A heavy pull on his magic, his core throbbing slightly at the effort, generated six Chaos Strikes, their grey-black crackling forms clear despite blending into the darkness around him.
An effort like a maximum effort deadlift pushed the magic forward, and he fired the salvo. Six compact streaks of entropy impacted without warning, three striking the vampires in the face, three finding a furred muzzle similarly.
Pained cries sounded fainter under the muting influence of the night dungeon air, and Alexander was off the way he’d come. Chaos strikes did heinous things to sensory organs, eyes above all. The ruin of the vampire’s vision should keep them from catching up to him prematurely, unlike the last time. The werewolf pack would be broken up, half of them slower for their debilitation than their untouched kin.
“Contact! Incoming!” He yelled loudly, both for his teammates, and for the benefit of the dungeon spawn, who he needed to follow him for the plan the Adventurers had come up with to work.
The creatures didn’t actually get created in the dungeon, Alexander was certain, as his feet flew over the ground. But it gave them transport from their realm to his own, in limited quantity that grew as it established its foothold on Gaia, and they were permitted through every three days, when the Phoenix sun announced a Gaian heartbeat, a pulse of mana that flared profoundly throughout the planet.
It meant that this raid was on a timer. If they had not destroyed the dungeon heart by the following morning, it would be able to bring across more monsters, returning the full complement of guardian fiends.
Alexander hurdled a fallen tree, thankful to all the gods above, below, and in between for his freakish eyes as he did.
The Guilds, especially the top ten, could afford human wave tactics, bringing in six members, hammering through the creatures while their guys were fresh, then pulling them back. Then another six could come in, repeating the process until all the monsters were gone. Of course, they didn’t then finish the job but instead waited until the dungeon repopulated to repeat. Sometimes, they would just go in with eighteen at a time, practicing large unit tactics, completely rendering the dungeon inert.
The Falcon’s Rest team couldn’t afford that kind of luxury, they had to get this done with these six men and women, and that meant efficiency. Rest was something that had to be taken sparingly.
Howls behind him announced that the pack was coming. Curses in Dracul language said that his alpha strike had done the correct amount of damage: debilitate without killing.
There! Mark with his belted lantern, feet set and shield ready, with the rest of the party in formation, about a hundred feet away as he came over the rise. On the downhill, Alexander ran so fast he threatened to topple, careening wildly over and around the trees, shrubs, and rocks mirrored from the Maine landscape beyond the dungeon.
Mark covered the lantern on his belt, casting the group into the dungeon’s stygian atmosphere.
Alexander made the group of waiting adventurers with about ten seconds to spare. He now knew how the last one had caught him despite his similar Impetus and a head start: the Dracul had closed the gap at flying velocity, having assumed the form of giant bats, their membranous wings carrying them with incredible speed. The only barely audible clicks of echolocation said that the creatures knew where their foolish prey, mice biting at the feet of the barn cat, now sat. They dove and transformed, every bit as smooth in the act as the werewolves were, never breaking stride as they drew their weapons.
“Ben, twelve, Mark, one, Melinda, two, Georgia ten, but hold, Cervantes is in front of you, Cervantes, twelve. Targets average height man-shapes.” Alexander called targets, letting his blind party mates know where to aim.
How the fuck do they carry weapons as bats? Alexander had time to wonder, before noting with a smile that the vampiric eyes were not able to regenerate to completion under the assault of his chaos magic. These were still making the clicking sounds that the first had not, which meant they couldn’t see what was coming.
This time, Melinda had her crossbow out, and, this time, she was concentrating her power into the bolt of it. The vampire that had a much smaller hand-held job, compared to the heavy crossbows, fired a shot that Mark intercepted, the bone tipped thing barely denting the metal sheet riveted to its oak backing. The Luminous Pathfinder’s retort was a bolt carrying a daylight globe that sleeted into the group, taking the leading Dracul with the huge cleaver in the neck, which brought it down instantly.
Rather than brought down, Alexander decided that scattered was a better way to describe the result: the vampire exploded into gibbets that cindered into dust before they landed.
The two next to the blast of light screeched, their pale flesh reddened instantly by the hanging globe, which now burned in place of the destroyed vampire, and they transformed into bats, trying to flee into the sky, protected in that form from the killing light.
Now illuminated by Melinda’s arts, Ben and Georgia, calling left and right respectively, put their own heavy crossbows into the creature’s backs before they’d cleared the ground and gone a dozen yards. Alexander put two arrows into one and a third into the other, crippling the attempted flight. The vampires reverted to human form, and started pulling the darts, but were assaulted by the day globe. Within that sphere of sunlight above the pair, they were inside her forty-foot reach with the spell. Blinded as they had been, they could not know how strongly the Luminous Pathfinder had broken the dark.
The same sight as the first vampire repeated, the two arrow fixated forms flailing against the fire that greedily consumed their flesh before violently combusting. Of note, the flame burned a sickly green and it took eight or nine more seconds for the creatures to expire, compared to their previous comrade, a fact that did them no favors. Outside the sphere of that daylight, Alexander saw the pack coming and called a warning.
Mark uncovered the lantern and opened up its wick, extending the light to its full radius in time to catch the charging werewolves.
Sudden glare hammering them in the eyes staggered the creatures and Ben got on top of them, braining one with the haft of his spear before impaling the other two together and throwing them to Cervantes, who rang the bone powder tune across their heads, stilling them. The last three, blinded by Alexander earlier, rushed into the light and froze with unnatural stillness. Alexander saw Georgia’s runes flare angry blue light and understood.
These three were now stopped, Georgia’s Temporal Ward had captured them. She must have activated it after the first three came into the light, to prevent a possible overrun.
It was an overly cautious move, but he was grateful to her. Impervious’ secondary Anchor-tank was all about keeping her team alive.
For five minutes, these three werewolves would hang midstride, locked out of time’s flow. The vampire dust was collected, Dracul and werewolf cores collected, and the shapeshifters came out of their stasis surrounded by the greatest Adventurers Alexander knew. They lasted a couple of seconds, before they too were added to the collection of cores.
“Ammo check!” Ben barked, which was Getsome parlance for ‘how we doing?’.
Everyone reported green, Alexander had burned about a third of his mana on the salvo, drawing simultaneous Chaos Strikes took more out of him than the same number sequentially, he was finding. Melinda reported eighty percent. Georgia was at seventy, same as Mark and Ben. Cervantes was at ninety, barely having tapped his reserves.
“Okay, let’s find this camp Commandant Alexander mentioned and take five. If I was a betting man, we’re starting to find their pickets.” Ben suggested, noting the difference in armor, thicker leather, more metal plates indicative of skirmishers than scouts, that had been worn by the vampires.
Most of the leather had burned to crispy bits when the Dracul perished, but the metal plates, a grey-green about as heavy as bronze hadn’t. The same material made up the creature’s weapons. On further inspection, the colors of the plates were striated, fanciful banding patterns that Alexander had seen before but couldn’t recall the name of.
Curious, he employed Greater Analyze to see if this dungeon stuff was worth the weight of packing around.
Twilight Damascus: alloyed Darksteel and Ur-nickel forged under the two moons of Nut, by a Dracul smith. The resulting metal deflects sunlight, nullifying a portion of its damage. The alloy has a low density but is surprisingly resilient, and shapes with incredible ease at working temperature. Techniques for hardening are possible, as well as for imbuing with dark mana to create a sun-eating effect or, if the enchanter or alchemist with sufficient skill can be found, a light bending invisibility.
Alexander sighed and knew that Granny would laugh at him as he stuffed the armor plates into his pack and tied the curved cutter and rapier to its exterior. He was bad as she was for refusing to let useful things lay.
Together, they made for the vampire camp and took a fifteen-minute rest, eating a little from their rations, and drinking a from their canteens. The cooked meat on the spit they did not touch, but kicked off the fire pit. Alexander didn’t know what cooked werewolf tasted like, and he had no intention of finding out. An ever so brief eating of fresh shapeshifter had been thoroughly vile.
It was just as well the party followed the veteran monster slayer’s advice; the next six miles of forest were different from all that came before. More populated, firstly. The Adventurers slew four more camps of vampires and bypassed what appeared to be a werewolf kennel by the chorus of howls and wolf yips coming from a small walled enclave. Alexander circled the kennel and killed three vampire sentries, his silver coated Messer buried through their hearts from behind, and Baleful Smite doing to the creatures’ insides with entropic force what it did for everything: make endings.
No vampire dust could be collected from the Dracul killed in this fashion, but the Adventurers took no chances leaving enemy agents in the field behind them, and did not raise alarms by the bringing of light.
Speaking of, were it not for Nut’s strange property of imprisoning light to within sharp boundaries of intensity, the party would have been led by Alexander in single file almost exclusively after the first few hours or risk being spotted. Fortunately, the realm of eternal night hated sunlight and suppressed it mightily. He shuddered to think what it was like for the others, wandering about in a land where your vision extended only to the edges of the lantern light, with all beyond pitch blackness. They were braver than himself, these folk who journeyed unhesitant into the endless blackness of the dungeon forest.
There was another feature that now loomed different than the Gaian wood outside: a pyramid. Mayan by its design, or, perhaps, Aztec, Alexander had no clue how to even begin to differentiate Mesoamerican constructs.
Where there had been forest, it was cleared for the various camps, kennels, and even small scatterings of dwellings. Here, within the confines of the tier three closed dungeon, was a budding army of nightwalkers. This was the difference between tier one, and tier three. Where tier one had barely altered the silver mine in which it had budded, the tier three was actively creating an expanded space, warping it to its own realm.
“How long, do you think, until it managed to, I dunno, consume the area around it?” Alexander asked his teammates, in a hushed whisper while they recovered from the last fight.
Ben shook his head, bald head gleaming within the lantern, but he scrubbed a hand through a thick growth of beard as he did, saying “No telling. All we know, we know by first hand wading through the shit, or hearing about someone else that did. The laws that govern these places have their own goddamned rulebook, and they ain’t feeling like sharing.”
“Perhaps never,” Georgia chimed in, running a honing stone across her sword’s edge, “What if the contested zone grows inside, cannibalizing the above terrain until it forms its own world? Maybe these closed dungeons are more like seeds of the other realms, like a cancer that consumed from inside, rather than the rash of the field dungeons.”
A fascinating thought.
“Ayuh,” Cervantes agreed, cradeling his helmet in his gauntleted hands, “And maybe while it does, it eats the mana of the host world, weakening it. We didn’t come across so many Gaian spawned monsters on the way here, like they avoided the area. Or, maybe, like the magic that is needed to create them, that lives in them, was eaten to support this place.”
Another interesting perspective. But they had no data.
“Speculation, friends. Useful, if we can find a way to study the dungeons safely, but moot if we can’t.” Mark said, curtailing the conversation.
Melinda spoke for everyone when she added with a most uncharacteristically caustic tone, “If the goddamned Guilds had been doing their job, instead of milking the things, maybe we’d know more about how they worked. But nobody was allowed to go that didn’t have a Guild fist up their butt, and Alexander kept ruining things with his magic so they stopped letting him go in.”
It was a fair assessment of the situation, he granted. Ruining shit with his magic and his being too useful putting together steam engines and work shops for the artisans. How different would things be now if he’d never killed the stray dungeon?
That was a fruitless ‘what if’ if he’d ever seen one, so he abandoned the attempt to pour sand back into the hour glass.
Looking past the glow of the lantern, Alexander gazed at the pyramid that rose a few miles distant, the fitted stone road that they had traveled the last mile leading to it. He had a feeling that the dungeon heart was at the top of that pyramid. Along with whatever horror that guarded it.
“Friends, if you’ve rested up, I think we ought to go climb the pyramid this road leads to. Whatever answers we’re going to find, that’s where they’ll be.” He told the party.
Ben grinned and Alexander already knew what the monster slayer was going to say.
“And one, soon to be deep sixed, motherfucker of a dungeon boss to sweeten the pot. Let’s go get some.”
“Ayuh.” Chorused the party.