“So,” I asked, staring down at the giant half snake half wolf-lion monster in mild shock and awe. “You all make a habit of rescuing perfectly defensible damsels, or am I just lucky?”
Carlyn gave me a sly grin. “Don’t really make a habit of it, no, but if all of them damsels are as pretty as you, I just might consider it.”
I felt a hint of red rise to my cheeks at her word, flattery once again proving to be a great weakness of mine. Doing my best to ignore my own embarrassment, I raised my right arm, displaying the marriage band marking my wrist.
Carlyn glanced at the tattoo, her grin unwavering. “Yup, I saw it,” she said as if the mark representing my bond to the greatest woman to ever live was insignificant.
Deciding against pursuing the issue further, I just cleared my throat and focused on changing the topic of conversation. “So, what is that thing exactly?”
“First time doing a dive?” She asked, that expression of hers saying that she already knew the answer.
“Yeah,” I provided anyway. “Just thought, fuck it, you know, went for it on my own. In hindsight that probably wasn’t the best plan.”
“Yeah, usually not. But hey, you’re still alive, and that’s better than most who try that sort of thing.” Hands-on her hips, Carlyn gave the monster’s paw a disdainful kick. “This freak’s a fregnick, to answer your question. Nasty for a first-floor monster, but you don’t usually see a lot of them.”
“That’s a bit of a relief,” I said, watching as two of Carlyn’s party members, Nika, the soft-spoken brunette with skin the color of a starless and a short spear nearly as tall as she was on her back, and George the flabby, as I called him in my head, began breaking down the corpse.
“Why don’t you just use the system’s looting tool?” I asked, watching as the two sliced away bits and pieces of the corpse with expert ease.
“It's more efficient this way,” A tall spindly man with a gnarled black wand in the inner pocket of his overcoat said, stepping up to my left to watch with Carlyn and me. “The system has a habit of giving far less than the monsters should actually provide. Some theorize-”
“I thought we agreed to keep the technical talk to a minimum on dives, Jones,” Carlyn said with a sigh from my right.
“Technically,” Jones said matter of factly in his dry monotone drawl that reminded me of the color gray. “I made that agreement with you, not this one.” He gestured to me with a self-satisfied smile, as if his pointing out technicality in a professional agreement was somehow impressive.
Borgen, the fifth and final member of the party, and yes the same Borgen from the tavern (I was just as surprised) put one hand on the spindly man’s shoulder, making the shorter man’s knees quake. “I doubt the young miss here will be upset if you forgo the lecture for now,” the big man said, smiling down at the scrawny one.
Jones straightened the lapels of his short coat and cleared his throat. “Very well,” he said. “Perhaps I can be of service to those two then.”
Carlyn made a gesture towards them as if to say, go ahead, and the man moved to join the other two with an indignant sniff, stooping over the pair to observe their work before rolling up his sleeves and gingerly cutting away scales. There were a lot of snake-wolf things to go through, and those scales looked difficult to work around without damaging them.
“So,” I asked the big guy, looking away from the gristly work. “How'd you sober ups so quickly? You were pretty fucked up last I saw.”
Borgen smiled, leaning on his unstrung bow shaft, which I couldn’t help but inwardly gawk at. The thing was thicker around than both my arms put together. I wasn’t sure how in the hell he could shoot the damn thing, not that the caves were exactly the most ideal place to use a bow. “I’m never quite as drunk as I seem. Besides, between Jones and my sis here hangovers are small potatoes. Just one spell or two and poof, like nothing ever happened.”
“Sister?” I asked, glancing between Borgen and Carlyn. The two did look vaguely similar, what with their green hair, dark brown eyes, and being tall to an almost unnatural degree. Though, now that Borgen wasn’t wearing the coat he’d had back at the tavern I noticed several turtle-like scutes on the back of his upper arms.
“Sister,” Carlyn said with a nod. “At least by our mother. Nobody’s quite sure who our fathers are and all.”
“Sounds complicated,” I said, beginning to feel a bit awkward for having pried.
“Not really,” Borgen said with a shrug. “We just got a real big family, it's an agondlon thing. Four ma’s, five pa’s, and a few dozen siblings, it was actually kinda fun. Plus, farm chores are a lot easier when twelve people are doing them with you.”
“Oooh. Wow, that sounds like a blast.” I said, once again glancing between the two of them. I’d heard of agondlons before, supposedly a race of giant humanoid turtle people who’d died off thousands of years ago, survived only by their half-human descendants who’d taken to calling themselves by the same name. Apparently, the amount of agondlon traits one inherited was somewhat dependent on genetics so some of the sketchier groups engaged in some, let's say, selective breeding practices in an attempt to revive the ancient species.
Carlyn smiled again. “It was, most of the time anyway.” She looked me up and down and adopted a pensive expression, still smirking slightly in a way that made me uneasy, particularly because of how much it reminded me of my wife’s more mischievous smiles. “You know,” she said, sharing a glance with her brother that somehow held some sort of familial code or something because he nodded back to her as if answering a question. “You look like you could use some help. How’s about you join up with us until we beat the first floor’s alpha? The dungeon has an exit after each floor so you should be able to pop back out of here after we kill it if you want.”
I didn’t even have to think about it. Coming in here alone had been one of the stupidest ideas I'd ever had. After the fregnick I’d realized that if I actually wanted to survive that mess of a dungeon dive I’d need help, and I was only slightly ashamed to admit as much to myself.
“Definitely,” I said, resting my hand on my rapier’s hilt, drawing the siblings’ attention to my battered weapon. I rubbed the back of my neck and laughed a bit sheepishly. “So, uh, does anyone in your group know how to fix my sword? I kinda dropped it earlier and now it's, well, it's stuck.” I gave the weapon a hearty tug, failing to budge it out even so much as an inch from the sheathe.
Carlyn chuckled and held out her hand. I stared at it for several seconds, appreciating the healthy calluses on her fingers before I realized what she wanted and quickly untied the sword and sheath from my belt, fumbling over the knots in my haste before handing the weapon over to her. “Sorry, new sword, not used to all of this yet.”
“You’re fine,” The other woman said with that crooked grin that seemed to give her words another meaning. The way she ran her hand down the length of the sheathed blade only reinforced the double entendre, and the way her fingers gently gilded across the plain leather sent an involuntary shiver down my spine. I shook myself free from the spell, reminding myself that I was very much married and very much still in love with my wife. I made a mantra of ‘look but don’t touch,’ and began repeating it in my head to distract myself.
Carlyn’s hand stopped on something I couldn’t see, then gripped the weapon in a firm hand, a soft yellow glow emanating from between her fingers as the whole weapon shook. A moment later I heard a loud ‘plink,’ and, after a quick inspection, Carlyn handed the rapier back to me.
“Try it now,” she said, a self-satisfied smile playing on her thin lips.
Doing as she suggested and still repeating my new mantra, I half drew the thin sword, its shining blade as perfectly serviceable as it had been the moment I’d bought it.
“Thanks,” I said, sliding it back into the sheath with only slight difficulty. “What was that? Was that magic?”
“Magic’s a pretty relative term,” Carlyn said with a smirk and a shrug. “I like to think of it more as applied system mechanics.”
“So much for not getting technical,” Borgen said with a snort, one large hand stroking his chin as he gave his sister a taunting grin.
“It’s fun when I do it,” Carlyn said, mouth falling into a pout that made me double down on my new favorite mantra. “Jones just doesn’t have the same beautiful voice that I have. Maybe if he did it’d be less annoying to hear him rant about the nature of reality. Hmm, say, might be there's a spell that could fix that.”
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“I heard that,” Jones said, giving Carlyn an indignant glare from over the exposed fregnick flesh he was working on butchering.
“I meant it in a nice way! You know we all love you,” Carlyn said with a dismissive wave and a smile, to which Jones only grumbled before going back to work.
Their interaction helped eased a previously unnoticed tension in my shoulders. “You’re all like a family,” I said, realizing why I got along so well with them as well as I did. “I mean, you and Borgen are family, but, well, you know what I mean.”
“Maybe,” Carlyn said, then pulled my sword breaker free from the fregnick’s paw and handed it to me. “Come on, let's get to helping them before more monsters come in search of a meal.”
I took the dagger and nodded. “I will do what I can,” I said, then heard my own timid words and cursed myself. Damn it, brain, I thought to myself, she’s just one woman, and I’m fucking married.
“Don’t worry,” Carlyn said, shooting me yet another cocked grin. “I’m quite good with my hands. Just want me and I’ll show all you’ll ever need to know.”
I felt my face flush again at the obvious innuendo, but firmed my jaw and did my best to ignore it, joining her beside the carcass as if there was nothing odd going on while Borgen went back to watching the dark for monsters, a slightly sad smile lingering in his features that told me exactly what he thought of his sister’s flirtations. At least someone was on my side, I thought.
Thankfully the work went faster than I’d expected. It was somewhat difficult to skin the thing with my sword breaker, but it worked well enough and I only cut myself a few times. Few dozen anyway. Most of them weren’t even that deep so I feel like they shouldn’t count.
Anyway, by the time we were finished, there were several piles of wrapped meat, stacked squares of furry fregnick hide, a well-organized collection of bones, scales, and claws, and the beast's severed head, silvery mane, and all cleaned of gore. I thought that it had taken at least an hour, but time was difficult to gauge in the dark tunnels, and in the end, I was more curious about how we were to cart all that stuff out of the dungeon than about what time it was.
“So, what now?” I asked, somewhat out of breath from all the work. It was harder than I’d remembered from the few times I’d gone hunting with my father when I was younger, but then again that was true of most things these days. Getting older sucks, definitely would not recommend it.
Wordlessly, George pulled out a rough-cut gemstone from his pocket and pressed it against the pile of wrapped meat. Don’t ask me what kind of gem, I’m neither a geologist nor a jeweler, all I know is that it was purple and lumpy, kinda like George actually. The stone gave off a faint purple glow as it connected with the flesh, and in a sudden flash of white light that left me blinking tears out of my eyes, the meat vanished, like poof, as if it’d never been there, to begin with.
“What the fuck was that?” I said into the silence as the others all began lounging around while George moved on to the next stack of items.
“A dimensional storage crystal, of course,” Jones said with a derisive short that immediately raised my hackles.
“Well obviously,” I said, folding my arms and doing my best to feign competency. “I’ve just never seen one before is all.” I gave an indignant sniff and tried to act disinterested after that, ignoring Jones’ pointed stare, but because I’m a creature of curiosity at heart I did the stupid thing and asked another question.
“Let's pretend like I don’t know what that is though,” I began slowly. “How would you explain how it works?”
Jones rolled his eyes. “Well, it's pretty self-explanatory. Dimensional storage. That's it. You should be able to understand it with just those two words.”
I stared at the scrawny man for a moment, then broke eye contact to look at the far wall. “Um. Let's also pretend that I don’t know what the word dimensional means.”
After the most exaggerated sigh I’d ever heard from another person, Jones proceeded to explain the basic principles of physics and dimensions. I’ll save you from the boring explanations that went mostly over my head, but by the end, I did have at least a rudimentary understanding of how dimensional storage worked.
Once George was done storing everything in the stone of apparently self-explanatory magics, he knelt by the immense puddle of blood and stuck his hand straight into the shallow pool. A moment later the gore puddle exploded into billions of little glitter lights, blinding me for the fifth time in the last five minutes as the system’s looting function went to work. The glitter faded away after a few seconds to reveal several vials full of a red substance, presumably blood which George quickly stored away as well.
“Incoming,” Borgen said from one side of the tunnel, as we all began preparing to move on at last. The big man brandished his massive bow shaft like a quarterstaff, both hands firmly gripping the thick wood in an unbreakable hold.
In a far better state of mind, than I’d been earlier, I unsheathed my rapier in a surprisingly elegant fashion, holding it out before me as I’d seen nobles do when fighting in the city streets. I kept out the thumb biting bit though, that just seemed unnecessary in the current situation.
Nika glanced my way and gave me a somewhat deceived snort, which was only slightly hurtful, and, unprompted, started roughly adjusting my stance, kicking my legs further apart, pushing my heels into a near-right angle relative to each other, front foot facing the dark tunnel. She moved my arms so my left was in the air up and behind me, the right-angled towards the unseen attackers with my elbow bent, ready to thrust forward like a spear with my rapier.
“Ow,” I protested weakly as she twisted my arms around, earning myself a glare from the tight-lipped young woman.
“You stand like that,” she said, then immediately fell into an Identical stance opposite me and made several lunging motions with her air rapier before falling back into the resting stance. “And you strike like that. If you want to cut, you do it like this.” She moved the invisible weapon around, stepping into my guard and hitting me across the head with the thing, or well not but you get the idea. “You’re best off just stabbing through. Cutting isn’t usually a good idea with rapiers unless you're just trying to ward off your opponent.”
“Thanks,” I grumbled, genuinely grateful for the help, but also a bit miffed about the manner in which she gave it. The shorter woman just nodded and turned away, short spear in hand as she faced the darkness with the rest of us.
I glanced around at the others as a faint scratching sound came from the tunnel ahead of us and my unease grew. While everyone else appeared to be wielding relatively normal weapons, George, curiously, seemed to only be wielding claws the size and shape of steak knives from the knuckles of his fist. Well, I suppose Carlyn was also just scribbling in a book and Jones was picking at the tip of his wand, but they still seemed like more typical weapons for adventurers than claws.
When several moments had passed and still nothing but that distant scratching sound, I turned a questioning glance towards Borgen. “Are you sure there’s something coming?” I asked, receiving a frown from George for some reason.
“Absolutely,” the agondlon man said. “It should be here in just a second.”
I squinted into the dark, straining my eyes, but unable to see anything. Which makes sense, you know, since the dark is, like, dark and all. Feeling a bit restless I shrugged and decided to do something monumentally stupid. “Hey fuckers, we’re waiting!” I shouted into the tunnel, the tingling of my skill activating now a somewhat familiar sensation. So either there was something out there, I told myself, or I’d just taunted the darkness itself, which was a terrifying prospect to ponder.
Almost immediately, a dozen meatcubes leaped from the shadows, flying straight toward my dumb-ass self. They weren’t those small fuckers either, they were each at least the size of my arcana damned idiot head.
Panicked, I swung my blade, forgetting everything Nika had only just shown me, and to my surprise, it sort of worked because I cut one of the monsters in two and nearly got a third of the way through a second one in the same arc of steel. If you, like me, are questioning how I managed such a feat with but a simple rapier, well, let's just say luck is indeed a mighty ally.
Unfortunately, that lucky strike did not stop the other ten meatcubes from all latching onto me with those lamprey-like mouths. Most of the little shits only got to my arms and legs, but as I was falling over from the weight of several dozen pounds of half-rotted flesh bricks slamming into me, one landed right on the side of my neck, its razor-blade teeth going to work immediately to rip and rend, spraying blood everywhere.
I like to think I would have screamed had my windpipe not been well and truly crushed at that point. Instead, I only let out a pathetic gurgling sound as blood poured out between my teeth like water through a cracked damn.
Thankfully for me, the others all sprang to action almost as quickly as the meatcubes had. Borgen kicked at the monsters, crushing one after another under his boot while Carlyn lit one on fire with fucking magic. Damn that girl was way too hot, and yes, that is the blood loss speaking, or at least I’d like to pretend that’s what it was.
As I kept bleeding out, George proceeded to crush two of the cubes in his clawed fingers and slashed another to pieces with another strike. Nika impaled the last two on her spear, and Jones began muttering ominously from behind them all, arguably the greatest contribution as I learned later that his muttering was what was keeping me alive.
How do I remember this you might ask? Well, fair question. Turns out trauma is a great device for remembering horrific things, the brain's way of saying ‘hey stupid, don’t do that again,’ or so I guess. That could be very wrong and you should not be looking at a litRPG book for reliable information anyway. But you all know that, right?
Once all the meatcubes had been thoroughly crushed and were being converted to jerky cubes by the system, Jones’ healing magic had finally managed to heal me enough that I could sit up. I immediately felt all over to make sure nothing was missing. That middle finger was still gone, but I’d long resigned myself to my poor digit's fate at that point.
“Not bad for a first-time diver,” Carlyn said, stooping over me. I was overcome by an almost overwhelming urge to tell her to step on me but thankfully resisted. My wife was a sacred being after all, and I would never go back on a promise, let alone a wedding vow. “Welcome to adventuring, sister,” the woman said, offering a hand to help me up.
“Thanks,” I said, taking the proffered hand and smiling as she pulled me to my feet. Our hands stayed together for perhaps a second longer than they perhaps should have, and that wicked look in the other woman’s eyes made my knees weak. Look but don’t touch, I began repeating in my mind once more.
Someone cleared their throat behind me, startling me from my thoughts. “Should we perhaps get going?” Jones asked in what I was quickly learning was just his normal miserable drawl.
“After you, my dear friend,” Carlyn said, gesturing toward the darkness. Jones grumbled slightly about bossy women, but took a lantern and made his way into the darkness, glancing back after a few steps to make sure the rest of us were following.
As we walked, Nika wrapped one arm over George’s shoulders and the chubby man gave her an affectionate smile while Borgen and Carlyn bickered in the typical teasing sibling manner, Carlyn throwing the occasional glance in my direction, sometimes with a slight grin I know wasn’t meant for Borgen.
Arcana, I thought. I don’t think I could have stumbled upon a better party. Well, it would be nice if my wife was here, and Carlyn’s flirtations were annoying, but at least I wasn’t alone anymore.