I’m not certain if I could say that the three mushroom monsters standing around in the middle of the darkened cavern look surprised, but I like to imagine that they do. My healing points are already less than half, far better than I expected when I first climbed up over the ledge, and the stab straight through my chest is reduced to only being an incredibly painful cut that still sends pinches of pain through me whenever I move. I think that the damage inside, my organs being cut up, either was never too bad or has been fixed already. I can judge that my experience inside my soul space only took a few seconds by the recovery of my mana, but I still have most of it. I can do this.
The spear-wielder lunges forward. I have never fought someone using this kind of weapon before, nothing even close to it that I can think of. My first inclination is to stay far out of its reach. I run from the monster, not bothering to toss a bolt of fire at it as I dance away. Behind it, the monster with the sword is taking a more measured approach, trying to cut off my retreat as the one with the spear presses in on me. The original monster, now disarmed, stands in the middle of the cavern, its chest heaving as it glares at me with one amber eye.
I might be faster than the monsters themselves, but the flicking spearhead stabbing at me is faster still. The monster continues to chase after me, using my inability to maneuver to its advantage. My focus is on keeping the spear monster between me and the one with the sword. A flash of burning pain scrapes through my side as a rock hidden beneath the moss at my feet throws me just a hair off balance. I gasp, trying to move to the side, but the monster is already following up its attack, spinning its spear to try and bash me in the head with the haft.
I raise my left arm over my head, doing my best to set my feet. The full weight of the spear haft coming down on my forearm tears a scream out of me, the snapping of my arm flashing through me. My block breaks my arm and stops the monster from braining me with the rod of metal. Even as the mana running to my left hand begins to fade, my fingers brush along the length of the weapon. Before the monster’s foot can even land from completing its strike, its spear has vanished, neatly stored into the twenty-third box of my inventory.
The monster doesn’t stop, even momentary surprise discarded as it plants its foot and delivers a forward punch into my chest that knocks me back into the cavern wall. I bounce off the rock, my eyes wide, air gone, seeing the sword-wielding monster lunging forward. My left arm flags uselessly through the air, and my right is still channeling a Dragonfire Bolt. I gamble, choosing to advance rather than retreat. The monster plans to cut me in half before I can even hit the ground anyway.
A spout of fire pours from my mouth, as thick as the trunk of a pear tree, bathing the monster in front of me in flames that roil orange and white. The head of the sword slams into the stone behind me, its blade cutting a line along my cheek as fire and rage pours from my lips. Even as my feet finally meet the earth again, even as I let the flame pouring out of me die–the drain that breathing out dragonfire has on my mana is too intense–my left hand flails towards the blade. Useless fingers miss, and my feet carry me away before the monster can launch another attack.
The next attack doesn’t come, not from the sword monster anyway. The disarmed spear-wielder chases me as I make a circuit of the cavern, the one with the sword lingering at the edge of the room. Dragonfire spreads over its form sticking to it as if the fire had real substance. There is panic in the monster as it claws at the fire crawling over it, wiping it away with its hands. Globs of fire fall away from the monster, igniting the moss-covered floor in a blaze that starts to spread. It takes ten seconds for the sword monster to scratch away the lingering flames as it walks backward out of the fire spreading around it, and when it stands, turning its wicked, rusted blade in my direction, it appears relatively unharmed. Aside from the peeking growth between its white plates that has turned ashen and gray, the odd monster appears cleaned from my attack, the dirt and filth that earlier decorated its features burned away.
The spear-wielder continues to press on me. Its swings are brutal things, blows strong enough to break bone or even kill if I let it hit me in the wrong spot, but it is also clumsy. The previous grace and expertise that it showed with its spear completely absent. A novel feeling starts to come over me as I step in and out of the monster’s attacks. It never ceases its aggression, always pressing forward, always trying to crush me with a blow. When I step to the right, it tries to hammer me in the face with a wild haymaker from its left, just the same as it tried the last two times. I spring off my lead foot, the monster’s plate-covered knuckles passing just in front of my face, stepping into it before it can recover.
“Am I a better fighter than you?” I don’t even realize the words have left my mouth as I plant my right hand into the monster’s neck, just beneath the chin. The explosion of dragonfire in my palm drenches me in burning flames as the monster is launched away from me. The fire clings to me like tar, and it feels almost as if there is a real weight to it.
I don’t pay it much mind, all it does is lick my skin with a light warmth as it eats into my already ruined clothes. Watching the monster sail into the air in front of me, puddles of flame erupting across the mossy ground all around me, the novel sensation continues to grow, pulling my lips into a smile despite the pain shooting through my arm. That had been almost easy, almost. Before the body of the monster can even hit the ground, a solid object thunks into the moss at my feet. The monster’s head smolders in front of me, the round, thin hat-like cap burning away inside of the orange and white dragonfire. No light shines from the hateful sockets in its mask.
Metal sings through the air before I can admire the kill. I leap away, a rusted sword cutting into the ground at my feet. The sword-wielding monster jumps through the climbing fire around me, but I spit a gout of flame over its form before it can land. The creature freezes, the bare second of fire pouring forth from me enough to set it ablaze. Before it can start patting the flames away, I put my heel into its chest with all of my strength. My strength might not be my best attribute, but all of my weight and will goes into the kick I use to knock it back into the mossy fire on the ground.
It lands on its back, immediately trying to jump back to its feet, hand reaching out for its sword, but I press in on it. I kick the sword away with my boot that is already disintegrating under the rising heat and flames around me, spraying flames out of my right hand all over the creature as it struggles on the ground. The constant onslaught of fire seems almost to press it into the ground as if it is as heavy as a waterfall. My naked foot falls onto its chest, pinning it to the burning ground as the flames erupting from my hand continue to pour into it. A scream begins to rise from the monster, not a sound that any beast should be able to make, but a high whine that shakes straight through my bones. I hardly notice the inferno rising around me, the wash of dragonfire gliding off the monster’s body as much as it sticks, spreading into the moss and trapping the two of us in the center of a bonfire. The longer I stare, the better I can see it, one hand clawing at the flames dripping through its mask while it hammers my leg with the other. Blood starts to trickle from my leg, my shin groaning and splintering beneath the assault. I just can’t bring myself to care.
My vision flashes black. Only when my face collides with the floor of the cavern, now a rocky surface burned bare by the climbing flames all around me, does the pain in the back of my skull register. Somehow, my head hitting the rocks doesn’t snap my neck, and I flail to the side, barely avoiding a stomping heel. Rolling to my bare feet, I try to run back from my unseen attacker, but a flare of blinding pain in my left leg turns my sprint into a hobbling limp.
Another monster explodes out of the inferno after me, its mask a ruin, flames climbing all along its body. It grabs me by the hair before I can get away from it, jerking me backward. The bulging arm of the ax-wielding monster wraps around my neck as it coils its body around me. I try to suck in air, failing, its heavy body dragging the both of us to the ground. Its other hand pushes against the back of my head, the strong white plate across my throat choking off any air.
Panic sinks into me as it hauls on my neck. I try to flail away from it, but its legs lash out, trapping my own as darkness starts to press in at the edge of my vision. My injured left hand grabs onto the arm around my throat, pouring as much of my fire into the arm as I can, while my right scratches at its broken mask, spraying even more flames into its exposed mockery of a face. I let go of any restraint that I have left, draining as much mana as I can to burn this bastard to a crisp. The heat in the air rises hundreds of degrees, the hungry flames around us spiraling fifteen feet in the air as the world turns into what I imagine the Second Hell to be.
Darkness continues to creep in on me. I feel the veins in my eyes bulge, the muscles in my neck groan from the abuse. The world is a sheet of orange light, but even that begins to turn gray. Still, I do not stop.
My hand catches, the finger of my index finger digging into a hole in the monster’s face. I feel the monster shudder through the arm around my throat, not even thinking before I push my finger deeper into its ruined eye-socket. The fire pouring out of me chews through the creature. I continue to push my hand deeper.
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The world is black by the time that I feel any give. My mind, deprived of air or thought, commands my arm to pull. I am faintly aware of a terrible struggle, a screaming madness driving the two of us to kill one another.
Sight comes back to me, not a slow and creeping restoration, but a sudden awareness that I am sitting amid the flames. My left hand digs into the lifeless arm around my neck, pulling the stiffened and charred thing away from my throat, allowing more breath. In my right hand, I hold half of the monster’s head, my dragonfire having eaten through the fungus monster enough to allow me to pull it apart. I have no idea if it was still alive when I did so.
Coughs shake up through me, but I ignore the pain and pressure inside my chest. Pink smoke rises from the corpse of the monster, swirling and mixing with the flames around me as I push myself back to my feet. My eyes spin, but the only thing I can see anywhere is fire. The moss-covered floor is alight with flames, and I stand in a burning sea of my own making.
“Where is it?” I manage to choke out, still looking about.
“It is dead!” Galea yells over the screaming fire. “They are all dead!”
“I need to find it before it can heal or regroup.” I step through the fire, finding my leg healed enough to walk on already. I am quickly coming to appreciate my specialty. “Where…”
You have defeated ???(???)x3
THRESHOLD FOR SOUL REINFORCEMENT REACHED!
THRESHOLD FOR SOUL REINFORCEMENT REACHED!
I stop in my tracks, the golden dragon in front of me holding up the sign. “You did it!” she cheers, but there is a wariness in her voice.
“I did?” I pause, the entire cavern burning, the flames clinging to the stone on the floor and cavern. Ten steps away, two bodies burn in the wreckage of the cavern. I walk over, nudging the bodies with a toe, disenchanting each of them. “That is three.”
A bucket falls into my hand, and I splash the water inside over my head, returning it to my inventory before the wood can burst into flame. The world is a calamity around me, the water evaporating off my naked skin before I can even cross the cavern. I glance down at myself, flush spreading across my face as I realize how utterly naked I am, my own fire having burned away my clothes. I thank Exeter that the only one to see me flailing around, fighting weird fungus men in the nude, is a spirit that can only speak to me. I want to cover up right away, but my one change of clothes would just burn up as soon as I put them on. I need to get out of this sea of fire first.
I look up at the wall of stone above me, the vine that I used to scale down here gone now.
“Can’t go back this way,” I say.
“Mistress Charlene might attempt to climb the wall once the flames have died down,” Galea put in.
“How long will that take?” I look around the cavern, but the inferno doesn’t look anywhere near to dying out.
“It cannot continue to burn forever.”
I wait for two minutes, standing naked in the middle of the fire, and the flames do appear to burn a little less high, but it is so slow that I don’t want to wait around for it.
“There is another direction that I can go,” I say.
“Down the hole,” Galea answers.
Padding over to the dark hole that leads down into the unknown, I prepare to toss a bolt of fire down to see how deep it goes. I freeze just before I launch the ball of fire. Setting everything down there on fire might not be the wisest idea. I find it simple to pull the Growth Affix out of my dragonfire, leaving it the same old orange flame that I am used to. The ball sails down the hole, splashing against rocks far below, failing to set the next cavern ablaze.
“Quite a climb,” I sigh, wiggling my bare toes.
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The bottom of the pit is a world so foreign to the dungeon that I was in before that it shocks me the two are connected. The still burning flames in the cavern above offer enough light to see the entirety of the chamber when my scraped feet touch down on the cool, slick stone. I am not entirely sure what I had been expecting to find, but it had certainly not been the towering monster in front of me.
Mycose Colony Ancestor(Level 83)
I take a hurried step back when I realize the shadowy mass in front of me is a monster and not a giant boulder. The fungus climbs into the air in front of me, a mass of green matter more than twenty feet tall. A dizzying mix of flowers cover the surface of the huge monster, a haze of spores that smell like roses drifting in the air around it. The monster is beautiful in its own way, but the mar to its beauty is the same thing that allows me to relax. Across the entire mass of the growth a jagged scar of gray ruin cuts deep into its flesh, carving a path through the flowers that reach far into the monster. Six gray tendrils lay limply on the floor in a pool around its base, one struggling into the air in my direction like the hand of a dying man.
Slapping the tendril aside, I circle around the monster, aware that this weakness it displays may be an act. I stop again as I spot the glint of metal, the second odd sight in the chamber arresting me. The Mycose Colony Ancestor rests at an odd angle, its base sitting on a tube of steel as large around as a parlor room and at least ninety feet long. Strangest still, there appears to be an open door on the surface of the tube.
“No point in turning back now.”
The steel beneath my foot creaks as I step into the room on the inside of the metal tube. My toes dig into the dust and dirt of the chamber while stale and dry air attacks my lungs. I try and fail to stop a sneeze as I stumble forward, fanning the dirty air in front of my face as I look around. By this time, I have given up on finding anything that makes sense to me. Arrayed in rows along the length of the metal room I stand inside of are glass tubes set into the walls. My foot sticks to the floor as I step through a long dried puddle of something that was once green, stepping up to one of the tubes. Inside lay the long perished body of a familiar creature, yet odd and different at the same time.
It appears almost identical to the three unknown monsters I killed in the cavern above just a few minutes ago, white interlocking plates covering its body like skin. The difference comes in that I can see desiccated muscle peeking through the breaks in the plate, any trace of fungus absent. The rest of the tubes are similar, each housing a dead monster inside. Two of the forty or so tubes stand uncracked, a green fluid filling them, though the monsters inside of these two are as dead as all the others. In the last three tubes near the end of the room is the difference. The dead monsters inside of those three lay still, fungi creeping over their corpses, strands digging into the separations between the alabaster plates of their skin.
“Gross,” Galea comments as I look over them.
“I can’t disagree.” I attempt to disenchant one of the corpses with the fungi on it, but nothing comes of my magic, the same as all of the other dead monsters. Before I set everything in the chamber on fire, I opt to go ahead and check the next room over.
Steel crates are scattered throughout the room, and they come in all different shapes and sizes. Most sit open, their frames bent and broken. Inside the open crates rest rusted weapons and armor, which at least solves the mystery of where those monsters found their weapons. I spend a good thirty minutes digging through the storage room, finding nothing except ruined metal. For the most part, the crates themselves are the most valuable things that I end up pocketing.
Just before I am about to give up on the storage room to go inspect the last chamber, Galea yells at me to stop. Turning, I find a crate and a box sitting whole beneath what had been a pile of metal mess that I had stolen on a whim. The two containers almost shine in the weak light of the room. The seals on each of them are terribly difficult to open, requiring me to use my green fire to melt through them, each requiring me to spend a good half an hour to get through. When at last I have them open, I cannot keep the stupid smile off my face. Finally, this excursion down into this dungeon has been worth it. I put everything away before exploring the last room.
I leave the final room almost as fast as I enter it, finding only a mess of broken objects and indecipherable mechanisms that look to have eroded over the course of hundreds of years. It is the oldest looking part of the three-chamber metal tube that I walk through, and by far the least interesting. I spare a bit of time to copy down the strange symbols that I find embedded into the ancient looking mechanisms, but the room offers very little of interest on the whole. Fire burns through the tube as I make my way out, sure to set all of the bodies ablaze even if I might not strictly need to.
The light from the fires above has faded to a slight glow as I stand in the open cavern. There appears to be a small branching pathway that leads further into the earth; this open chamber may just be the entrance to a cave mouth. I stare up at the monster above me, still as naked as the day I was born, and feel a bit sorry for the monster as I channel a Dragonfire Bolt, adding the Growth Affix to the magic once more. Though, if I am really honest with myself, I don’t really feel all that bad for it as I start walking back toward the wall that leads up and out of the chamber, tossing the fire back at the immobile monster over my shoulder. It’s a monster after all. It’s my job to kill monsters.
You have defeated Mycose Colony Ancestor(Level 83)