Hari was too tired to even yell, focusing on keeping her nearly numb arm glued to the Airfoil rapier as she strung a series of jabs across the face of a human with a beetle's face, blue liquid spraying from it before it dropped.
She felt Brines's back against hers, the man slumping from overusing his dagger. Bearer was the one actually protecting her back, slamming frozen fists into monsters and forming a wall of ice around still squirming parts, the only reason the hill they were on hadn't been overrun.
Stab, thrust, back away, stab again. She resisted the urge to let Brines hit the ground. If not for his aura, she'd have fallen in the waves of monsters.
It wasn't long though. There was no end in sight, and the Spider was just sitting on a pillar of bones it made, possibly napping or just watching. Sometimes it would cough and snap at them, but otherwise it was silent.
Hari saw the last mutant penguin collapse in a puddle of it's own acrid blood, and there was a moment of silence before the next wave of monsters reached them. Hari reached down to pick up a dismembered paw and threw it at the Spider. “You Bastard! Do something!”
She was pretty sure the coughing and clicking was laughing.
The floor had started promising in Hari's mind. The spider had blasted into the monster infested terrain and started killing, using spinning sword strikes and it's teleport to create massive holes in the carpet of monsters covering the moon lit hills. Her blade toppled black trees reaching up the red-black sky, sliced through hide, flesh, fur and bone, rendered the white grass underfoot red with blood. Hari marveled at the number of skills The Spider was using over and over and over, darting around and leaving blossoms of blood behind.
After a few minutes the swarm near the entrance had been culled enough that Hari dared to step out, using her own blade on a few wounded survivors and slow moving monsters to help secure a foothold.
“Looks like a whole zoo tossed in a blender.” Bearer commented.
Brines looked nervous. “She isn't going to hit us on accident, right?”
Hari thought about it. “I suspect it's absurdly high level, look how fast it's moving even without teleporting.”
They had to kill a few more monsters, particularly a pack of four lizards with teeth so long they impaled themselves when snapping at the group. Hari knew she had gotten stronger in the last few months, as her blade punched through them without much effort.
“Even so... what's the point of taking us here? We need a power to communicate. This is just a slaughter.”
Bearer shrugged. “Either it knows what it's doing, or Corvayne is dead. No biggie.”
Brines stepped in front of Hari before she even knew she was turning to Bearer, his hands out in a placating gesture. “Hari, don't-”
“I wasn't going to do anything!” She hissed. After a moment of staring down Brines, Hari pointed her chin up. She was better than that. And she was only thinking about grabbing the woman and shaking her. Maybe a slap.
Bearer didn't seem to notice or care, doing stretches for a moment before starting to walk through a field of corpses. “I think the spider is moving away, we should follow the safe patch she makes, unless you want to walk back through the previous floor.”
Brines started trying to jog ahead of her. “Hari! Cmon!”
Hari was annoyed at Bearer for treating the whole thing as a joke, and at Brines for stopping Hari from responding to how she had just addressed Corvayne dying. She was pissed the entire time she was stepping around monster bodies and trying to avoid tripping, and was still pissed the entire way up the next hill, pouring it out in furious rapier barrages. The green tip weapon turned dozens of monsters coming at her into bloody cork.
All that did was make her madder when they reached the top and their insect guide had kept killing her way forward, forcing Hari to run. Brines was fine jogging forever it seemed, and Bearer had the boots that let her run as fast as she liked.
Hari found herself in a deeping foul mood as over three hills they tried to keep up with the spider. Maybe it was the white ground, black trees, and red moon in the sky. She would take the weird endless stone works of previous floors any day.
Hari caught up to Bearer three hills and a countless number of chaff monsters later. The woman was pounding a larger creature into an ice sculpture.
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“You! Take...” Hari had to breath in, having stomped her way up the hill double time. “Take what you said...”
Bearer laughed once. “Look, Hari, sorry, but you know Corvayne isn't the only reason we are out here. We all got reasons for ditching Cascadia.”
There was a flare of orange light as Brines used his dragon-tooth dagger to torch a line of mushroom men with jagged glass maws all over their torsos. “Ladies please!”
“Yeah, but Corvayne is the heart of it!”
“Wick is. Corvayne is a great fighter, and I respect him. A lot. But it's dumb to commit to things. That shit weighs you down.”
Brines started hollering and ran between them with a pair of gargoyles with feathery feelers instead of faces. Hari killed one and Bearer killed another, then Hari stepped past the bodies reeking of fish.
“It's important! You should see what it's like to have NOTHING and mean NOTHING to anyone!”
Bearer frowned. “You don't know anything about me, elf.”
“Same to you, human!”
Brines stepped between them, and Hari shoved him aside to go fight the next group of monsters. Bearer walked right up the Hari, the taller woman looking down from her cap.
“You lack drive. If you had it you'd not give two shits about me.” The woman folded her arms.
“Would you really not care if your friends died? Steel? Reaper-Of-Fish?”
Bearer rolled her eyes. “I fully expect to someday be at their funerals. But they are my friends because they understand I might just vanish too. I always told everyone from the get-go. Someday, things will change and I'll be gone.”
Hari was so annoyed by the attitude. “That's so rude to them!”
Brines started shreiking for help, so Hari turned and started picking off monsters. Bearer fell in next to her.
Hari started jabbing and slicing. “This conversation isn't over.”
Bearer turned a monster that looked like ripe fruit on spiked legs into a pile of shards with a single punch. “It's over if I don't talk to you. All your attachment does is cause you suffering. Attain a higher level.”
“My attachments made me who I am!”
“That's stupid.” Bearer froze a monster and grabbed a limb, throwing it into another pack of monsters climbing up the hill and bowling over a cluster of club wielding orcs behind them.
“It's stupid you don't care!” At that moment Hari had to stop arguing to focus fully on fighting monsters, as they were streaming in from one direction in twos and threes.
Bearer grunted and performed a sweep, scattering monsters before she punched the ground and sent a shockwave of ice out in a cone. “I obviously care or I'd be like Grunt and sitting on my ass. It's about being FREE to decide what's important.”
“Grunt isn't-”
Bearer laughed and huffed as she lashed out. “Are we going to argue if Grunt is lazy or not? Speaking of lazy... is that spider building a perch?”
Which lead to an hour later. They had killed the swarm on them, giving them a short break. Hari knowing she couldn't keep it up. None of the swarming monsters were strong, no, but a thousand weaklings meant that they had slowly been piling up cuts, scrapes, bruises. Brines was losing blood from a major mistake and was barely standing. Bearer had broken her act somewhere in the fight to tell the spider to fuck off.
Hari tossed the stray paw at the Spider and she just knocked it aside and coughed and clicked at her. Hari caught it's red eyes a moment, but after that moment it just pointed at a pack of giant hands using their fingers like legs to run up the hill. Maybe a minute behind them was a pack of twenty painted lions from the Cascadia dungeon was leaping along at them.
“Stupid! What is the point of dying here?” Hari hissed.
Bearer groaned. “Still... talking?”
“Yes! Say you're sorry!” Hari huffed, blinking her eyes. She was tired.
“Fine. I am really, actually sorry. I'm a jerk because I will, someday, just vanish, and I don't want my friends to miss me. Happy now elf?”
Brines groaned and Bearer laughed. “What's he saying?”
Hari cocked an ear. “I think he's just asking for a healing potion.”
“I gave all mine to Corvayne.” Bearer shrugged.
Hari turned and looked at her. “Why didn't you say that?”
“Because I know you glomp onto people.” Bearer folded her arms, watching claws start to climb up a wall of bodies.
“Well, you're right.... I have to, okay? If he passes, or leaves me I don't want to regret doing things halfway.”
Bearer laughed. “Too bad we couldn't have hashed this out at a bar rather than monster-hell floor.”
Hari felt a little embarrassed how mad she had gotten. “Yeah. I just needed to actually listen. If we come back from the dead, I'll take you to a bar and we can yell at each other.” And next time, she'd pay more attention to things like Bearer giving away all her potions. Watch what people did, more then what they said.
Bearer nodded. “Do you want to try to kill the spider before the next wave knocks us over?”
“Hey Growl-Whine! I'm coming up there!” Hari called out.
She saw the spider jolt up, and it's daggers appeared in its hands.
Bearer looked between them. “Did she just get we were threatening it?”
“No, I've been shouting in elvish I was going to kill her for... the last hour between battles?”
The spider coughed and clicked. Hari stopped. It wasn't cough, click. It was Cough-Click.
“Grow-Whine.” Hari pointed at the Spider. Then she grabbed a bloody ant soldier wing, and started to try to draw a spider with three stick figures.
“Hey elf, can you finish your will in, like, two seconds? The hands are here!”
Hari didn't look at the hands, instead pointed at the drawing she made of a spider with three people, surrounded by horned orbs. It was what she had used for monsters.
A moment later she felt a swooshing sound, and the spider squirmed into the ground.
Hari drew her blade back and started fighting, having no more time.
Bearer laughed as the sound of monsters shattering came from her direction. “All right, see you in the next li-”
Hari had trouble paying attention to Bearer, because Growl-Whine had done something that knocked Hari down with a massive cracking sound. She started pushing herself up, ready to fend off the next monster, but there was none.
All around the hill were clouds of blood, or bodies flung into the air. Parts of bodies. On and on they could see broken ground and parts of monsters dropping to the ground. Hari just stared for a moment in stunned silence at destruction Growl-Whine had unleashed.
Brines... coughing, rolled onto his back. “Oh, I get it! She...” He spit out a tooth. “She was waiting for you to ask for HER help by name.”
“... Or respond to her yelling at you.” Bearer shrugged. “I mean, I think it was talking to you.”
Hari watched as the little bug emerged from the hole it had crawled into, slightly smaller than she had been before and quickly reabsorbing what looked like spikes all over herself.
"You could have done that at any time... couldn't you?"
The spider looked up at her. Hari was pretty sure she was just projecting that the spider knew what she was saying and was just playing dumb as it's donkey ears twitched. Fairly sure. Not entirely sure.
On the bright side, her annoyance with the spider had meant that she had forgot about Corvayne for an hour. She was ready to keep going, and no longer pissed at Bearer. When she could talk to Growl-Whine there would be WORDS and...
Hari took a deep breath, trying to keep herself even like Corvayne would. It was his best trait as a leader.
“Okay Growl-Whine. We all learned a lesson in communication. Can we please, please leave this floor?”
While the Spider probably didn't know the words, it must have understood the tone because it started blinking with them across the floor, giving Hari a view of miles and miles of carnage spread across the hills. In a moment between jumps, she met Brines and Burden's eyes, all three of them sharing the same thought.
'What the hell is Growl-Whine?'