Saul’s stone troll manifested with bright flames whirling around its rocky frame on the bridge before them. There was a door on the other side of the chamber.
As far as they could tell, the bridge led right to the door. It was their only means of escape.
“We need to get over there,” Saul said. “Whatever’s going to happen, that’s got to be our main objective.”
The two golems brought up the rear, and Elman, Zorea, and Brand crowded behind Saul. The bridge was so narrow that they could only go in single file.
“Keep back a bit,” Saul warned them. “Don’t lose your heads. If you stick that close, you’ll hit each other with your weapons. Remember your training.”
The others spread out a bit. Saul could tell they were rattled. He wasn’t at his calmest, but clear heads were essential. The deep, disembodied voice continued to boom through the chamber, laughing and issuing threats and predictions of their imminent demise.
“Show yourself!” Saul challenged, hoping to rouse the denizen of this green chamber to some kind of action.
The voice just laughed. “You must make your move first, little humans,” the voice said. “It’s been such a long time since anyone has come this far. Usually, the blue dungeon spirit in the other chamber gets them first. I want to see you try to get out before I kill you.”
With a shrug, Saul sent his stone troll forward at a run.
The bridge was an impossibly long construction. It baffled the eye—in reality, there was no way it should have worked. A human hand couldn’t have designed and built such a bridge. Only magic could keep it standing.
The crossing was a single span of stone, a clear quarter mile long. It leaped up over the stinking, bubbling soup below in a graceful curve, until it reached a height of thirty feet from the surface of the liquid, then eased down again toward the door at the far end. Below it, there was no arch or column or any other sign of supporting structure.
The bridge was so thin and narrow that it looked like it would collapse at any moment, but still, crossing was definitely preferable to trying to wade through the green bubbling stuff, so Saul and his friends went for it.
The stone troll led the way, a huge, lumpy creature of living rock, flames streaming out behind it as it dashed forward at a pace hardly to be thought of in a creature so big and ungainly. Saul came up behind, worried at first that the troll’s weight might take the bridge down but, thinking that since the whole chamber was probably magical and under the command of this evil spirit, the bridge was likely to hold unless the spirit decided otherwise.
They reached the apex of the bridge when there was a rumble of laughter, a flash of livid green, and the section of bridge below the troll gave way. With an immense crack, the bridge broke, and the troll plummeted through, down into the green slime.
The troll splashed heavily into the green sludge, and a ripple of liquid preceded a forest of suckered tentacles that exploded from the bubbling lake and gripped the troll, drawing it into the depths.
The destruction of the troll was a horrible sight. Even though Saul knew that the troll was a monster made of pure magic and didn’t actually have any feelings or sensations of its own, he shuddered at its fate.
And that was when Saul felt the magic that had been System magic that had been driving the troll being stolen away.
He gasped and let out a cry of pain, stumbling a few steps as the magic was torn from him and devoured by the foul, laughing spirit of the chamber. That energy should have been recycled into the System to power future spells, but now the magic was gone, consumed by the green spirit of the chamber. It was a horrible sensation.
“Something wrong, Magician?” the spirit gloated. “Can’t refill your mana pool quick enough, is that it? A mage is unwise to enter a chamber such as this without a stock of mana potions, or at least a powerful replenishment level.”
The terms were new to Saul, but he could guess their meaning. This spirit must have been here for a very long time, and it was referring to a way that magic hadn’t been done in the world since the days when it first occupied this chamber.
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That laugh…the thing was mad, whatever it was. There was no sense in trying to reason with it.
“Damn, we didn’t sign up for this!” Brand gasped. Through the Squad magic, he felt an echo of the distress caused to Saul by the theft of his resources. “I guess this means we need to keep a close eye on these two golems as well and make sure they don’t get eaten?”
“If possible, that would be best,” Saul said. “I don’t know how many of my monsters I can handle being eaten by this spirit.”
“Probably best if we don’t die either,” Elman suggested.
“Ideally,” Saul said. “Come on, let’s see if we can get a bit farther before our host pulls his next trick.”
The spirit of the chamber evidently heard their conversation and appreciated their light tone. “Oh, very good, very good!” the manic voice boomed, cackling with laughter that rang like hammers round the walls of the chamber. “Excellent! I do like dungeon runners with a bit of spirit.”
Dungeon runners, Saul thought, remembering the term his System had used to name the crate full of treasure they’d picked up in the other chamber. Dungeon Loot. That term, dungeon, wasn’t one he’d heard before, but his system seemed to know about it at least, and this spirit was familiar with the idea as well.
He approached the gap in the narrow bridge where the troll had fallen through. The gap wasn’t too wide, maybe two yards, and he was confident he and his friends could jump it.
That was when the tentacles made their reappearance.
“Agh, look out!” Brand cried as a single thick, green, slimy tentacle whipped up from the slime lake below and batted at him. “This is one stinking monster!” he said, gagging at the smell as he set about the tentacle with his sword.
The voice laughed, booming around the chamber, and a host more tentacles appeared. They all seemed driven by a very deliberate purpose, almost as if they were being controlled by a single intelligence. They swiped and slashed at the companions, and they were so quick that even Saul had a challenging time trying to fend them off.
The only good thing about the tentacles was that they were very soft. It was as if they belonged to a creature that spent so much time immersed in the poisonous green ooze that it had lost any external carapace it might have once had.
All the better for Saul and his friends; their blades sheared through the thick tentacles as easily as if they had been made of rotten fruit, and the thick chunks of tentacle they cut off dropped and splashed thickly into the green slime below with wet splashing noises.
Every tentacle they destroyed, however, was replaced by another, and sometimes with two. It was all Saul could do to restrain himself from casting spells against them, but he knew that was the last thing he should do. He couldn’t handle the shock of having another chunk of his magic sliced from him at that moment.
Elman Tell, who had fought his way closest to the bridge, hacked three tentacles with a single sweep of his blade, clearing a space, and then without warning flung himself across the gap onto the other side of the bridge.
“The adventurer gains the second half of the bridge!” the spirit’s voice boomed, sounding impressed and perhaps a little worried. “This one has bravery and pluck!”
Saul glanced in Elman’s direction. The old armsmaster had drawn some of the attention off the rest of them, and that gave Saul and the others the opportunity to catch their breath. A host of tentacles left off swiping at them and turned to focus on Elman.
“Make for the gap,” Saul said to Brand and Zorea. “Go on, I’ll follow.”
They both dashed forward on his orders. He swung left and right, severing tentacles at every cut, and saw with satisfaction his friends making the leap and landing beside Elman.
Saul cut a last tentacle and prepared to sprint for the gap himself, and that was when his two golems were caught in a single monstrous swipe from the largest of the tentacles.
The metal golem, unarmed, had been sheltering behind the air golem which, though it didn’t have armor, was too quick for the tentacles and had a blade made of Air magic. But as Saul’s attention was distracted from the golems by his friends’ leap, disaster struck, and the tentacles smashed through the two golems, sweeping them both off the bridge.
The monstrous arm wrapped the two summoned creatures in its length like a hunting snake and dragged them down toward the green soup.
Before they could touch the surface of the liquid, however, Saul reached for the spell and de-summoned it. He had a sudden thought that if he could get ahead of the spirit, he might be able to retain control of the energy of the spell before the spirit managed to consume it.
There was a moment of tension between himself and the spirit. Saul felt the magical energy floating for a moment, suspended in the air between the two of them. Then, like a man reaching out and grabbing a falling glass in midair before it smashed, Saul reached for the magical energy and reabsorbed it back into his System.
The effect was staggering.
The whole chamber rocked, the green slime below them bubbled and smoked more fiercely than ever, and the horrible green light that permeated the room flared as bright as lightning for a moment before wavering.
“What…what is this?” the spirit’s voice boomed. “How can this be? You dare to renege on the ancient contract between the adventurers and the dungeons? Give me your magical energy!”
The tentacles wavered, and then suddenly withdrew into the green stuff, and Saul took his chance. He dashed to the gap in the bridge and leaped for it. Even as he ran, the bridge crumbled.
The collapse of the stone started at the break in the bridge where the troll had fallen through and traveled back along the bridge from the middle in both directions. Saul just made it, landing on the stone and wobbling on the edge of the crumbling section.
“Run!” he shouted to his friends, and they did.