Dalyva collapsed onto her knees, tiredness and exhaustion taking over her as her temporary rush of strength ended. I looked over to her in slight concern and slight curiosity, wondering how she did that.
“How’d you do that?” I ask in amazement, and she just smiles faintly. “I used… my mana to… empower… my body.” She says in between huge gulps of air and sips of water. My Bak lay dead on the floor as well, and behind us footsteps approached. I turn around to greet Taegan, looking him over as he gives me a nod, before he asks me the same question that I nod to. We’re both okay. Gathering ourselves up, Taegan points at where he just came from. “If you’re not too tired, there's another nest about 5 metres in that direction.” I nod, acknowledging what he said. “Cool, I think we’ll be fine to do it. I’m not that tired, and Dalyva can just grab the eggs and run behind us.” We all agree on this plan, and start to head off.
As we do, however, I can tell Dalyva wants to ask about what we did before when we looked over at each other and then just nodded, but we wouldn't tell her, not yet. As we head through the bush, I do notice how eerily quiet it is compared to a real forest, no birds or rustling of leaves… not even the sound of crickets. “Why’s it so quiet?” Asks Dalyva as she looks around nervously, gripping her halberd in fear. I shrug as I look around. “Maybe there just aren’t any other animals in this area because it's a trial room?” i say, not really sure either. “Yeah, that's probably it.” I reassure myself and her.
Suddenly I stumble, almost falling face flat onto the earth as I trip. However, my amazing brother and his quick reflexes managed to save me from planting my face into the ground. As he pulls me up, I can tell he's trying not to laugh, and I look at him with mock anger. “Heyyyyyy~~~!” I complain. “Don’t laugh at meee!!” His face starts to curve up, before he starts to chuckle, before he’s full on laughing at me. I punch his arm lightly as I say. “Stop.” Punch. “Laughing.” Punch. “At.” Punch. “Me!” One final push that sends him stumbling over as he laughs his head off. Regaining his footing, he looks at me. “So you want to do that now?” He asks, as he walks up to me and pushes me away from him, turning a peaceful walk into a back and forth pushing match.
Dalyva just sighs. “C’mon, we should finish the room before you start pushing each other.” She says. We look at each other, huff, and then both rush to her, pushing her lightly, which almost sends her falling into the mud if we hadn’t stopped her. “He-!” She gets cut off as a squeal of terror exits her mouth. As we pull her up, she glares at both of us looking like a mother over her naughty children. “Hey!” She says grumpily. “Now, no more of this. C’mon, let's get the eggs and get over with this." She says this in a harsh, motherly tone. We look at her like naughty children who had been caught doing the wrong thing, and, as she walks ahead, we share a glance. Scary.
It doesn't take long before we stumble across the Bak’s nest, the Bak’s however nowhere in sight. Dalyva carefully creeps to the tree, grabbing the eggs in there as me and Taegan are on high alert, our weapons drawn. A Bak quickly pops out of the forest, and Taegan rushes at it, before another pops out which i take. My bottle is already popped, and I let water surround my blade as I block the Baks attacks. Its attacks are simply, exactly like the Baks I fought before. They all try to stab you with their sharp claws on their feet, jumping at you weaving around your blade to do so. I take a swing at its head, but it dodges. I was expecting this though, and quickly changed the direction of my blade, but it was a bit too late, and the Bak was already flying at me. I look at it, and it looks at me. I bet if the Bak could smile, it would’ve.
However, what it didn’t account for was that I never left my bottle completely empty, in case something like this did ever happen, and as water decapitated it, the look of shock on its face was a true sight to see.
I glance over at Taegan, wondering how he’s going, and as I see his Bak dead on the floor, I walk over to him, and we high five. I then look at Dalyva, who has a full bag of Bak eggs, and we all head back to the stone that we originally got the bags from. Unsure on what to do, we just put the bags on the stone, and as a small ping sound echoes throughout the room, a token with the symbol of a clump of grass appears before me, and I grab it. As we see the door open, we smile tiredly. Grabbing our bags of goodies, we leave through the open door back into the main trial room.
Guide greets us with a- “Time taken, 47 minutes and 56 seconds.” We exchange grins, before putting all our gathered goodies and the token in the bag. Dalyva then goes into her tent, and, judging by the sounds, collapses onto her bed and falls fast asleep after using lots of mana to empower her body in that fight against the Bak. Taegan as well entered his tent, though I don't think he went to sleep, more like is just resting with his eyes closed, unable to sleep. Me though? I'm like an energetic bunny, still bouncing off the walls with energy. Instead of sleeping like boring 1 and boring 2, I decided to practice my swordsmanship, the memory of the undead swordsman still fresh in my mind. My slashes are filled with my anger at being beaten, and I really wish I had just been able to land a single strike on its undead body.
I swing downwards. Faster. The swordsman could do better. I sheathe my sword and draw it quickly. Shaking my head at myself, I sigh. Too slow. I try again and again, doing downward slashes, sideways cuts, drawing of the sword, and many other things. As I hear a rustling from one of the tents behind me, I glance back as I see a familiarly sandy coloured head. “Taegan!” I say, and the familiarly purple eye patch with a red line at the bottom that covers his eyes looks up. “Yeah?” He asks in a croaky, hoarse voice from just having gotten up. “You want to spar?” I asked him, hoping he’d be at least willing to do one. He looks me over, sees what I've been obviously doing, and nods. “Sure.” he says, and grabs the two jambiyas sheathed at his waist. “When do we start?” he asks as he grips the jambiyas tight, walking opposite me as I sheathe my sword and keep a firm grip on the handle as well.
“Three, two…” I drag it out as he looks at me with a grimace on his face. “Oneee…… go!” As soon as the sharp sound exits my mouth, both our weapons are drawn, and we collide in a crash of steel. Sparks fly and we pull apart for a mere second before colliding once again. “You’re getting better Shankhe!” Praises Taegan as he grits his teeth and pushes against my katana. He backs up a few steps to pop the cork on his bottle, sand flowing around his forearms.
I knew how dangerous that could be, having seen it first hand as it shot out at a monster and pierced them from its sharp accuracy and I stayed well aware of it. My own element creeps up my sword, covering it as it strengthens the blade, and makes the blade sharper and swifter as it cuts through the air like a hot knife through butter. Taking a step back, my weapon points to the ground as I hold it with one hand. I look at him, thinking, before flicking the sword back before I drive it forwards, right to where his heart is with deadly accuracy. His face becomes slightly panicked as he didn’t expect this from me, however instinctively his blade raises up, and he pushes it onto one side of my incoming katana, pushing it beside him as my whole body stumbles forward from having not expected that. Holding his dagger upon my neck carefully, he grinned, his face resuming its normal calmness after the brief panic. “That got really close.” He smirked. “But no cigar.”
I jumped back, wanting to win at least one. This time I thought of using what I had before in my practice, using all my muscles and swinging really hard, focusing on being like that skeleton that could deflect my blade with a mere whack of his blade and send me stumbling past. I knew though that most tricks it used on me wouldn’t work on Taegan, as his jambiyas were a lot smaller and he was more focused on agility. While I was contemplating this, Taegan slashed at me from where he stood, sending a line of sand heading straight for my heart. My water instantly detached from my weapon, flowing out like a shield to protect me from the sand as it absorbed it and stopped it in its path.
However, Taegan is still in control of it, and he manages to slip some sand out, which goes back to his arms as he races at me, knowing I'm unprepared as I try to fight his sand in my water shield, and pay attention to him so I can fight him as well. My eyes dart to both, and I start to feel cornered, trapped. I bring out my sword, but I don’t have enough focus to swing it like I had planned as I kept on bringing my focus back to the sand as it struggled. Taegan knew that he was in control, and used it to his advantage.
I blocked his strike as he came closer, stumbling back from the force of his blow and my sloppy block. He smirked, knowing that I knew that he was in control of this situation. He looked so happy as well. Grimacing reluctantly, I let my water that was surrounding his sand flow back to me, and his grin widened. I know it's a mistake, but I really don't have any choice as I strike him with all my force. He crosses his daggers as he blocks it and pushes my blade back as we’re locked in a fierce exchange of strength, pushing each other back and forth. As I push down once again, this time he removes his blades and I am sent almost falling over onto the floor, waving my arms wildly to try not to fall or drop my sword. He chuckles and takes pity on me as he grabs the back of my collar and pulls me up to stability.
“I win again.” he says in a mock condescending tone, his sand surrounding us in a circle of danger that rose up to about our hips before Taegan dispersed it and it dropped to the ground before flowing back into his bottle. I poke my tongue out at him, annoyed that he won.
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“Once more!” I protest. “But this time no specialisations.” Taegan shrugs as he gathers all his sand, and I gather all my water before we both cork the bottles. “Okay.” He agrees, and we get into our positions. I start, drawing my sword and getting onto a fighting stance as he approaches. I block his blade with mine, and we both grin as the exhilarating feeling of adrenaline kicks in. We separate, and then collide again. The ringing of steel echoes throughout the cavern, and we continue to fight no matter who would hear. circling each other and eyeing their weapons, we rush in again. Strangely though, Taegan only blocks my sword with one dagger, and before I can block his other dagger, it's already poking at my neck. I hold my hands up in surrender with a groan.
“You win…” I grumble as he chuckles. “That was still the best fight.” He compliments. “You just forgot that I'm not restricted to just one weapon.” He points out, and we start to exchange tips.“I feel that if you had done that quicker than whoever you’re fighting would get less opportunity to get used to your fighting style and you would have an advantage as they wouldn't know as much of your strategies.” I say, and Taegan nods, taking my advice to heart. We do a couple more less intense spars of just practicing tricks, like blocking, swings and cheap shots as well.
Eventually Dalyva wakes up, and we start to get some lunch. Which are some glow berries. Now, we only have 6 bags of glow berries as we ate one. We then all crowd around her notebook, and look at it as she crosses off the one labelled ‘Gatherer.’ We then look at the ones available to us- Escape, All-seeing, Dueler, Treasure, Path-Finder and Monster.
I look at Monster, that's the one I'm most interested in anyways, and then point to it. “How about the Monster one?” I ask. Taegan looks at it, and then me and Dalyva in turn, and, seeing no objections, nods. “That sounds good to me. Yeah, Dalyva?” He asks, glancing at her and asking just to make sure. She nods as well though. “Yep.” She says. We all get up and start to walk over to the door, its symbol a slime. We enter the room, and once again it's an environment. Except, this time it's a bit different.
We sigh as we all see the purple tinted room, but shrug it off as we look around at the area. It looks to be a mini desert, perfect for Taegan and right in his element. Over the stretch of desert I can see a coastline of trees, with purple water past that as we’re on a hill and can see far. There are lots of monsters.
In the desert there are two legged hopping animals, kangaroos, and then further into the plains even from here I can spot the bright red on the spider's back. The trees and everything in the forest is covered in white webs, and I can't see anything else. A stone pillar is in front of us that reads. ‘Defeat 25 monsters to leave.’ We all look at it in shock. That's more than we’ve killed the whole time while in this dungeon. Probably. Well, close enough anyways. Not wasting any time, Taegan steps onto the sand, observing the monsters. There are frilled neck lizards and their weird run on two legs except now as tall as a goblin when they do it, or up to our waist instead of their usual height of just above the knee when standing on two legs. Giant cute greater bilbies that are now up to our knees and actually aggressive looking in their purple fur instead of their normally passive and cute demeanor.
I then start to count the amount of animals in each species I can see, just as another pillar pops out in front of us like a reminder from the earth. ‘You must kill at least one of every species.’ I scowl, and Dalyva groans. “Can’t this just be an easy room for once?” She whines. There are words forming underneath the first ones on the stone pillar and I read them, but as I do I instantly regret it. ‘There are fifteen species. Some are hiding but you must find them and hunt them down to eliminate them.’
The sand beneath Taegen's feet shuffles, and I think he’s searching for animals that are underground. “Nope.” he says as he looks back at us. “There aren’t any underground, but from what I can see we still have a good amount of species. Dingoes.” He points to the golden brown with light stripes and patches of purple fur dogs that are currently lying on some rocks. “Kangaroos.” He points to two male purple furred kangaroos that are fighting each other, and we know that one is going to be a hard challenge. “Bilbies.” He points to where the bigger than usual Bilbies are all hiding in their burrows, not fully underground though. “Bats.” He points to a cave where you can hear the squeaking of some animals, and we all just groan at the thought of having to fight these animals.Finally he points to the huge purple rock on the side of the desert and says. “Rock wallabies.” And as we look closer sure enough we can see smaller kangaroos hopping around and navigating the rockface.
“What should we do first?” I ask, itching to fight something. Taegan shrugs. Dalyva perks up though. “We should fight the frilled neck lizards first, and suddenly Taegan knew that he forgot one animal. “I forgot that when I was pointing them out, didn't I?” He groans, then points to where they are. “There are your frilly friends.” He says just smiling and rolling his eyes as he sees me approach him. “Taegan forgot an animal, Taegan forgot an animal, on his own spesh no less.” I tease, and he just groans, whacks me on the back of the head lightly and says. “C’mon, lets just start so we don't end up starving here, or it turning to night time, as that's the time most of these animals are active.”
We do a fast run/jog to catch up to Dalyva before sinking into her stride. As we approach the frilled neck lizards, they start to hiss warily, and as we bring out our weapons, they attack. There are three of them, all fast, equipt with their sharp fangs and claws, and have a frilly back that serves its purpose as part that can make it harder to single out the head part from the frill. Drawing my katana, I square up against one, as each of us takes one of them, splitting them up. A grin appears on my face as I see the lizard run on its hind legs funnily towards me, excited to fight. I draw my sword and do an attack sideways where its neck would be if it hadnt ducked and dodged the attack. I needed to be faster.
Water surrounds my blade as I unpop the cork. It’s time to fight the monsters with all our strength. Raising my blade, a swift downwards motion catches the lizard unaware, and goes through its frill, cutting off a piece that soon dissolves into rainbow mist. The rest of the monster however is still keen, despite its injury and starts to leap at me. It's a stupid tactic, putting oneself in the air, and I have no clue why most monsters do it. Smirking, I cut sideways. unable to dodge, the frill neck lizard is decapitated, and as i look at the other two, Taegans is dead easily, from his specialisation being this whole place, and Dalyva did a similar strategy to me except she used the spear part of her halberd to quickly jab at it, using her spesh to make it faster and stab the lizard. “That's three down.” Says Dalyva. “Twenty-two more to go. 14 species left.”
We look at where the lizards were expectantly as we wait for our loot. A couple seconds of rainbow mist pass and soon in its place is a bag of copper and some lizard leather. picking it all up, we put it into the dimensional bag originally for the wheat from the previous room that is now on Taegans waist being used as a loot holder. It was pretty big as well, so it worked wondrously .
We walk over to where the bilby is, and looking at the cute fella I almost feel sorry for it. Almost. Until I see the sharp, strong front paws that the guy has, and how he’s rushing to me, ready to use them on my legs. All sympathy and affection instantly goes down the drain, and I swing my sword sharply down, cutting into its skull and making it collapse as it dissolves into rainbow mist.
Upon waiting for the loot, we got a small pelt, some more coin, and the bilbies front claws. Suddenly as I'm putting our loot away, Dalyva gets bitten by a dingo, one we hadn’t realised was creeping up on us until too late. Me and Taegan looked at her leg with sympathy, but we were also kind of grateful that it wasn't us, as Dayva can at least heal herself, unlike us simple folk. She hissed in pain, and glared at us two. “Can you at least kill it?” She asks, as she herself can't reach it with her halberd without it being very awkward. Seeing her angry and scary face, Taegan quickly commands the sand under the dingo to pierce its brain, and as Dalyva drops her weapon in the sand, she pries its teeth open and frees her leg.
She closes her eyes almost instantly after this, as she starts to circle mana to that area, and we can see it as her flesh starts to come back, a scab finally covering it all up as she pants from using so much energy. Collapsing onto the sand she just lies there, knowing that even if she gets sand in her golden hair, she can just ask Taegan to flush it out of her hair.
While we wait for her to rest up, we play some slow sparring in our boredom. Basically sparring but extremely slow so we don’t waste our energy that we could use on more useful things like fighting the monsters. We also look at the loot from the dingo, a pelt, some of its claws and teeth, and finally some coin. we both look to Dalyva as she slowly gets up, Taegan making the sand slip through her hair and fall in a waterfall like way out of her hair and clothes as we walk over to her. “We’ve got 12 more species to go, and 20 more monsters to kill.” I say, remembering how much we have to do purely because.
She nods, acknowledging that, and we start to head on to where the bat cave is. I can physically hear all the squeaking of the bats, and wonder how we’re going to be able to separate one from the whole swarm of them. As I think this one flies out of the cage and starts to attack Taegan. Instantly his daggers are drawn and he’s trying to chop its head off, however it’s too high in the sky. Using the sand beneath him to elevate himself, I look at him in awe of his ingenious idea as he engages with the bat. A mere second later a decapitated bat drops to the ground as it dissolves into rainbow mist, leaving behind only a small purple striped black pelt and three copper coins.
Suddenly it’s like the rest of the bats sensed its death, and the colony flies out of the cave, their eyes glowing a purple i could never comprehend how, searching for the killer to their fellow bat. once they set their beady little glowing eyes on us, we knew we fucked up, badly. We look at each other, unsure what to do but to run, and so we do. Adrenaline pumps through me as I race down on the sands, and that's when I discover running on sand, especially in a desert, is much harder than running on the beach, as all the sand is soft and ever changing beneath your feet. We run to the forest, but they don't stop, and as we put foot into the white webs of the spiders that happen to go on the path, they still chase us. Weaving around the webs, as they’re extremely sticky and we don’t want to be caught in them, ducking under branches, climbing over fallen logs, seeing some giant spiders the size of trees in the bush….
It was terrifying. My legs start to tire, but I know I can't give up, yet I am killed by the little vengeful bats. Dalyva is tiring as well, and I can see her starting to lag behind, nervously glancing at the bats just a step behind her. Her halberd is quite heavy, so I can imagine that it's slowing her down quite a bit, whereas someone like me or Taegan that have a lighter weapon can run easier. However, before we can do anything, one of the bats goes to attack her, and I glance at Taegan, who's running backwards to observe, while still glancing behind him to make sure he doesn't get caught in any web or anything. “Grab her halberd and pass it to me.” He yells over the noise of the bats, and I nod.
Slowing my pace down, I grab her halberd, and suddenly she can run a lot faster, and I realise how truly heavy this thing is. Although it is heavy, I still have enough energy to run it up to Taegan, and now we’re far ahead of the bats. Many of them have been caught in webs, eaten by a passing snake, or just disappeared from another animal, and so there weren't as many as before, however there were still quite a lot. As we finally got to the beach-after swapping the halberd a couple times- we looked at each other, unsure what we’re supposed to do.
Still with bats hot on our tails, we know that we either fight the bats, or whatever the gray thing is in the water. Taegan starts to wade in, motioning for me to make an air bubble around his head. Now, yes, I'm a water specialist, but if I make the water avoid his head by a certain amount, then it makes an air pocket for him to breathe in. I do the same for Dalyva as she dives in the water, and not myself, since I can breathe underwater due to my spesh.