Michael
Two of the fire lizards circled them with hungry looks in their eyes, the humans had nowhere to go now that the tunnel had collapsed.
Just as Eydis turned around with Michael under her arm, a group of small bronze-furred creatures appeared in a nearby treetop. They looked vaguely humanoid but were smaller than even Michael and hunched, they also had a tail with a small fire burning at the end. The word monkey came to mind out of nowhere.
Some of them pointed at Michael’s group with their hands and began to raise a hellish ruckus with their screams and jumping.
Michael slapped his hands together and began constructing a large sigil as more monsters appeared every moment.
Next was a triplet of serpentine creature with nearly glowing scales, that was as large as the lizards. The air around them seemed to vibrate with heat and toxin dropped off its fangs, sizzling wherever they landed.
More howls and growls came from the forest, promising more beasts to arrive shortly.
“Let me go and fight,” Michael ordered; Eydis dropped him after a short delay and charged forward to join the others.
The fight quickly got chaotic with the small humanoid creatures throwing small balls of cinder from the treetops, the lizards shooting torrents of fire from afar, and the serpents extruding heat that made it hard to close in.
Erhen and Lance were on defense duty and blocked as many of the attacks with their shields, but the wood was already starting to give under the heat and wouldn’t hold back the attacks for long. This was a bad matchup for the knights.
While Eydis was jumping around the serpent group to avoid their fangs and figure out how to close in against the heat, Silas and Zeke were trading potshots with the lizards.
Michael concentrated on his sigil as it grew and grew.
One of the serpents was the first to fall when Eydis jumped forward and sunk her axe into its head with a blurry motion. She instantly jumped back but Michael could hear a pained noise coming from her. Her axe was starting to glow while the serpent's blood sizzled on the metal, so she threw the axe at another one of the snakes where it stuck in the glowing body.
Another three salamanders emerged.
Silas ducked under a flame breath of the salamander that had already been hurt in the first attack and flung a mana blade right under its jaw. The creature fell into a puddle of steaming blood and convulsed while it died.
The fight was starting to go their way, the little cinder-throwing creatures weren’t of much danger their attacks having little effect on the augmenters.
But more monsters began to file out of the forest, a couple of smaller frog-like creatures, a hedgehog the size of a dog with fire covering his back, and lastly a huge at least three-meters-tall humanoid creature with the same fur as the little cinder-throwers but much bigger and with mounting muscles.
The humanoid charged at Eydis with thunderous steps, pushing the serpents to the side, it was so huge it used its hands to support its steps. The woman began jumping back to get some distance between herself and the raging monster.
“There are more coming,” someone yelled but Michael was concentrating on his spell. Pressure was building up inside of him when he released it with a scream. Mana shot out of his hands in waves as a large barrier of light began to form around Michael and his guard, separating them from evermore emerging monsters.
Waves of pain began to shoot through Michael’s arms and down to his hands while he pushed more and more mana out, red liquid emerged in drops from his skin and after a few moments covered both his hands, but he kept pushing.
The barrier closed right in front of the monsters, and they began banging their heads and claws against it to get through, but Michael kept on pouring in more and more mana.
The huge humanoid reached the barrier and crushed its fist into it with a howl. The moment the first connected an explosion shook the forest and a small part of the barrier began to crumble.
Michael staggered back a little bit from the impact but managed to keep control of his mana.
The gap was too small for the monster, so it plucked its meaty fingers through it, braced its feet against the barrier, and began pulling with an infernal scream.
The word 'gorilla' appeared in Michael's mind even though he wasn't quite sure how he came to that.
“Hold it back,” Zeke yelled and flung a mana blade at the gorilla, it managed to inflict a gaping wound on its chest, but the size of the monster made the cut look small.
The beast let go of the barrier nonetheless and stared at them with its beady eyes.
Blackness closed in on Michael's vision while he strained to keep the barrier up, but he still noticed that some monsters had started consuming the monsters that they had already killed.
He wasn't the only one to notice, the gorilla monster swung its head around and screamed at the fire lizard that was currently ripping pieces out of its kin. With a strong leap, it traversed the distance and hit the lizard so hard that the following explosion tore its head off clean.
Other monsters tried to move in on the carcass, but the gorilla pounded its chest. Michael and his guard watched as the monsters stopped pounding on the barrier and eyed the power struggle.
Everyone seemed to grind to a halt for a moment when a single cinder bolt hit the gorilla in the back of the head. The monster instantly turned around and charged the nearest monster in a frenzy. Chaos instantly ensued and the mana beasts began tearing each other apart.
Michael looked up into the trees and saw a couple of the small monkey creatures snickering.
“Let's get out of here,” Silas yelled and pointed to the right-side wall. The knights and Eydis moved immediately but Michael didn't. His body had started to cramp under the strain of mana, so Lance picked him up in a smooth motion, he had apparently dropped his shield sometime earlier.
“Open the barrier,” Zeke said as they approached the sport where it connected with the cave wall.
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Michael raised his trembling hand and released some mana under a pained growl. The barrier opened just enough to let a fully grown man through, and they made their escape.
“Keep your mana low. The carnage over there should mask our presence,” Zeke ordered and continued following the wall. It wasn't hard for Michael to oblige, every vein and artery on the way from his heart to his fingertips was burning the moment even a little mana touched them.
Without the strengthening he felt the heat much more though, it was easily over thirty degrees in the cavern, and he was far from dressed for these kinds of temperatures with his chain mail and gambeson.
They followed the wall of the cavern and Michael felt his spell collapse behind him without his constant supply of mana. The screaming of the fighting monsters followed them until they found an opening in the wall which hid a small cave.
They pressed themselves through the opening and the knights moved a large rock into the entrance to block it at least partially.
Lance put Michael down and immediately turned his attention toward his blood-soaked hands.
“What the hells happened,” he asked, and the others also gathered around them with partially confused and partially concerned expressions.
Michael was light-headed from the blood- and manaloss, he didn't manage to give them an answer immediately and had to drink and eat something first.
"Was that blood magic,” Erhen asked carefully once Michael had strengthened himself.
“What? Hells no,” Michael quickly shot down the idea. “It is no wonder that you don't know what that was, it is a mage-specific thing.”
He held up his hands which had stopped bleeding and started to explain, “You all know that mana flows in the same paths as your blood does. Augmenters are pretty much limited by how much mana a body part can actually take so you can't push unlimited mana somewhere because it will just be full at one point. Mages however can push their mana out so my hands for example will never be full.”
The knights nodded; this was basic knowledge.
“That also means that a mage can put as much mana into a spell as he has but the astral body of the mage might not be up to move such a volume. What happens then is that the mana exits the arteries forcefully and doesn't split from the blood correctly. It pulls the blood out and damages the flesh around it, hence bleeding and pain. That barrier drained more than two-thirds of my entire mana well, so my hands will be out of commission for a while.”
He began slowly dripping mana back into his appendages; it hurt like hell, but he needed the enhancement of his regeneration. He was proud that he was already able to direct his mana to enhance a single feature instead of the whole body part, this reduced the pain considerably because he needed much less mana.
“So, you hurt yourself with your spells if they are too big,” Silas asked with a frown.
Michael shook his head and clarified, “Not exactly, I hurt myself if I try to put up a large spell too quickly. If I give the mana enough time to flow safely through my body, then I can throw most of my mana at once. This is also the reason why mages don't obliterate everything with ginormous fireballs in the middle of a fight for example, because they don't have the time, and also concentrating while in pain is hard.”
“Alright, this is enough for now. Let's get you cleaned up,” Eydis interjected and stopped the rest from asking more questions.
They turned to take care of their own injuries which were mostly centered around Erhen and Lance who had braved the fire, but they were all breathing heavily under the heat.
Eydis looked to be doing the best of all of them because she wore little metal armor with only bracers and the rest being a mix of leather and cloth armor for maximized agility.
“So, how are we going to get out of here,” Erhen asked while poking at a nasty burn on his shield-elbow.
“Our way in has been blocked and we don't know how much of the tunnel collapsed,” Silas noted with a grim expression.
“We should look for another tunnel leading to the surface. Dungeons tend to grow toward it earlier than later and with the tunnel we have entered being so close we might be in luck,” Zeke replied and slapped Erhen's hand away from his wound.
“Dungeons grow? What exactly is a dungeon, is it an animal,” Eydis asked with an interested expression toward the veteran knight.
“You don't know about dungeons,” he asked with surprise, and she simply shrugged. The knight wiped the sweat out of his neck while he answered, “I will try to explain to the best of my knowledge, if you have additions, milord, please just interject.”
Michael nodded; his knowledge of dungeons was probably not that much more extensive than the knight’s, but he might know some things that were unimportant to a warrior.
“A dungeon is a kind of mana beast in itself. It might sound weird, but it is true. Monsters gather mana in their body and grow into more impressive beasts. Dungeons are similar, they start at a certain level and begin pulling in mana from the surroundings, creating an extremely mana-rich area.”
Everyone could feel the truth in his words. It wasn't just the heat of the temperature but also the heat of the fire affinity mana that was pressing in on them. Michael could feel his mana reserves being refreshed at a greatly increased rate down here.
“This mana-rich area that the dungeon creates becomes a mana beast spawning ground. They spawn at rates that may be as low as double of what they do on the surface to extremes like twenty or more times as much, depending on the dungeon, there will also be higher skull levels that can appear than on the surface. If that wasn't bad enough, they fight and consume each other down here and evolve to the extreme if left alone enough. It wouldn't be strange to find a multiple times evolved three-skull down here.”
Michael could see the uncomfortable glances of the knight's faces while Eydis stayed strangely calm.
It was basically like this; an unevolved zero-skull could be defeated by a determined adult with no martial experience, an unevolved one-skull would be the same for a militia man, an unevolved two-skull for a trained soldier, and lastly an unevolved-three skull by a normal knight. After this, it was hard to say because the levels became more of a guideline than a strict rule. With possibly evolved three-skulls existing down here even the knights could be in trouble in a one-on-one situation.
“Like with monsters dungeons can have affinities, like the fire affinity of this one, and the monsters inside of it will share this affinity because the dungeon will convert all the mana it pulls in,” Michael added in the short pause and Sir Zeke nodded.
“So how do you destroy a dungeon? Do we have to collapse the cavern or something? You said it grows and digs its way up to the surface, so that seems wrong,” Lance asked.
“That's right, a dungeon will grow with the increasing mana, but it has a weakness. Every dungeon has something to anchor it in this world, a kind of core. They are called Dungeon Guardians, and they are monsters of much increased strength. Most of the time they will be some kind of extremely evolved creature or even a higher-skulled one than what is normal in the dungeon. I am talking about five or more evolutions or something like a four-skull monster if there are only three-skulls here tops.”
“How is a stronger monster a weakness,” Erhen asked with a frown.
Silas rolled his eyes and asked, “What does an anchor do?”
“Keep a ship in place,” the young knight replied with a questioning tone.
“And what happens if you cut the anchor?”
“The ship drifts away,” Erhen answered after a short moment of understanding and embarrassment.
“It is a little more dramatic than the mana just drifting away though,” Zeke interjected. “The mana is pulled in here by force so if the Guardian is slain then it will leave violently, ripping the dungeon apart.”
“And us with it if we are inside,” Lance concluded but Zeke shook his head. “No, it takes a little bit until everything comes crashing down. We will have some time to get out before it collapses but we would need to find an exit, or we would be trapped in a collapsing dungeon.”
“I have read that in dungeons of old, that defied the laws of existence, an object could also be the anchor, but I doubt that it will apply to a dungeon like this,” Michael threw in the little extra information he had.
“Okay, so we saw at least evolved two-skulls out there but it was the edge of the dungeon so we can expect three-skulls or even four-skulls further in,” Silas said, and Zeke nodded in agreement.
“Now most of you have never seen a three-skull monster, so I will explain something. Zero to two-skull monsters are the beast types, they are basically monstrous animals, but after that, the monsters become more like magical creatures. Brace yourself for strange sights, because being surprised can get you easily killed down here.”
“Good, then we will just keep to the walls and walk around until we find another tunnel that leads out, right,” Michael said.
“Yes, that would be the best way, I think. After that, we should return with a stronger unit and destroy this dungeon before it can grow too much.”
“Agreed.”
They continued caring for their wounds for a while longer, especially bandaging Michael's hands took a while before they made ready to emerge from their hiding spot again into the dungeon.