Gregory and Cooper started fighting. With ten skeletons, they prioritized conserving their energy. The skeletons were all the same type, with rusty swords and rotting shields, one and all. Cooper eliminated three of them in quick succession before allowing his stamina to recover. Gregory used a more elusive style than he had thus far, more similar to what Cooper was doing. Jumping in for a few quick hits, then getting out before the skeletons could hit him.
Their strategy was working out perfectly. Almost. Seven was still a few too many skeletons to come out completely unscathed, but it was working out well enough. They steadily eliminated the last three.
Once the last skeleton fell, all the bones in the room glowed for a moment, then vanished.
----------------------------------------
Trial of Resolve, Round 2
----------------------------------------
Skeletons appeared again. This time was very different, and Gregory had to learn that the hard way.
He leapt forward, engaging the first skeleton. As Cooper shattered the skeleton next to him, a bright pain flashed in Gregory’s shoulder. He looked down and found an arrow sticking out of his cloth tunic. Blood began to well from the wound, staining his shirt.
“Gregory! Focus!” Cooper called with a bark. He dashed towards the back line where five skeleton archers stood. Cooper dodged an arrow aimed at him, and plowed into one of the skeletons.
Gregory spotted another one with an arrow trained on him. He lunged forward, striking a skeleton in melee, and hearing an arrow whiz by just behind him.
That was too close, he told himself.
As quickly as Cooper decimated the archers, Gregory still had to dodge a shot or two. In turn, he ended up taking a lot of cuts from the rusty swords of the skeletons he was fighting. His body was becoming one big, burning blob of pain.
When Cooper joined him, they again made short work of the last few skeletons.
“Damn! That hurts.” He examined his wound. The arrow had punched straight through his shoulder. Fortunately it was on his non-dominant side, so he could still swing his sword. But he couldn’t keep fighting with an arrow stuck in him. He got ready to snap the end off and have Cooper pull it through, but he didn’t have time.
----------------------------------------
Trial of Resolve, Round 3
----------------------------------------
The next round was absolute chaos.
Four melee skeletons appeared in front of Gregory, and he spotted four archers in back. Between them, he spotted two skeletons that looked like Cooper. Hound skeletons.
Cooper was torn. He needed to put down the archers before they turned Gregory into a pincushion, but those hounds were probably just as fast as he was. If he didn’t put them down quickly, they would tear Gregory apart. He thought of one possibility.
“Gregory! Cower!”
Gregory almost didn’t do it, he associated using that skill with giving up, but he wasn’t giving up, it was strategy.
Gregory dropped to the ground and curled up into a ball. The arrow poking out of his shoulder stent another bright stab of pain through him, but he was still able to tuck in enough to activate the skill. His constitution increased enough that the first archer’s arrow just bounced off of him.
The melee skeletons were free to rain blows down upon his curled up form, but they barely did any damage, and swung slowly enough that it wasn’t adding up too quickly.
Cooper ignored the archers since they were now doing no damage. He was lucky that they seemed to focus on Gregory instead of him. He directed his attention to the new threats, the hound skeletons. They were as quick as he expected, but not quite as fast as he was.
Cooper had no stamina left after tearing through the archers so quickly in the last round. He couldn’t just rip these dogs apart with the same speed. He lunged in and bit, and they did the same. His superior stats won the day, with him eventually able to take them down.
Gregory was just starting to panic when he felt the skeletons slowly pulling off of him. He would have been relieved, but he still heard the “plink!” of arrows hitting him and the ground, so he didn’t drop his cower skill yet.
“Last one…is down. Need help…with archers.”
Cooper was so tired that his pauses for breath were coming between his thoughts. Gregory had to help, he dropped his cower and rolled immediately, avoiding another arrow.
He jumped to his feet, retrieved his sword, and charged in. He channeled his mana into the sword, hoping that maybe it would do something.
When he caught the skeleton with the empowered hit, it broke before him like Cooper’s special attack.
“Nice!” he managed to shout between his labored breaths.
The last skeleton fell.
Gregory looked again to the arrow in his arm.
“How are you doing?” he asked Cooper.
If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
He finally got a good look at the dog, and it broke his heart. He wasn’t sure why, but seeing a dog in that kind of condition twisted his gut into knots. Cooper was still on his feet, but he was definitely bleeding and one of his eyes was swollen shut.
“I think I’m past the point where things still hurt… eighteen health left.”
“Me too. I can’t feel this arrow anymore,” he checked his health. “Oof, I’m at nine health remaining. I don’t think I’m recovering either, bleeding too much.”
----------------------------------------
Trial of Resolve, Round 4
----------------------------------------
Gregory grimaced, but he held his sword ready.
Instead of some combination of skeletons, only one appeared, but it was a giant humanoid skeleton with a crown and a huge hammer. It hefted its hammer and started walking towards them.
“I have enough mana for two more infused attacks, you?”
“One bite, maybe two if we last long enough.”
“You want to give up?”
“Not a chance.”
Gregory gave Cooper a determined nod.
His blade glowed with a blue light as he slid under the slow moving hammer. He managed a direct hit through the skeleton’s empty gut and into the spine. Blue power coursed through the undead monster, but it kept coming. A boney knee caught Gregory in the chest and launched him backwards.
One more hit. He could take one more hit.
As Gregory was flying through the air, Cooper jumped in for his chance at the huge skeleton. His teeth flashed, and he aimed for the same spot that Gregory had hit.
His jaws came down on the spine, and the bones had just started to creak when the skeleton's arm came around, battering Cooper away.
Cooper came to a stop, managing to stay on his feet, but he was a little disoriented. That momentary disorientation was all it took, and the skeleton closed the gap. Its hammer came up in a sweep that hit Cooper directly, laying him out.
Gregory saw Cooper take a huge hit from the hammer, sliding to a stop and not getting back up.
“Noooo!” he screamed, enraged at this monster, at this dungeon, and at this damn trial.
He pushed the last dregs of his mana into his blade and then some, his mind flashing with pain. He jumped forward as the skeleton was about to make a finishing blow on Cooper, hammer high overhead. Gregory’s blade bit into the bones of the creatures spine, blowing them apart.
Gregory felt a powerful moment of triumph; he had done it. He had saved his friend and refused to back down before a terrifying threat.
Those were the great thoughts passing through his brain as the skeleton’s war hammer fell out of the air and hit him directly on the head.
* * *
Back outside the Dungeon. Olivander was working on another painting. This time, he was attempting to capture the malice contained in the eyes of the troll that composed the dungeon entrance.
For an unliving piece of rock, it elicited a stronger emotion than Olivander had felt from nearly any other work of art he had seen. He couldn’t capture it on canvas though. Clearly Thorgar was a true artist.
He had felt some people approaching for the last half hour. Gregory and Cooper had been in the trial for around five hours now, and that had been long enough for some riders to be sent out from Serin to take a look at the dungeon. Olivander just hoped they weren’t idiots.
When the guards from Serin arrived in the clearing in front of the dungeon, Olivander was just packing up his painting supplies into one of his bags. A discarded canvas burned quietly nearby.
“Ho there. We’re constables from Serin, sent to investigate this dungeon. I’m Emelia and this is my partner Gorvin. The other man here is a junior in training, Darren. May I ask your name?”
“Good day to you officers. Emelia, Gorvin, Darren. I am Olivander. What can I do for you on this fine afternoon?”
“Do you know anything about this dungeon? A caravan said they spotted the dome and watched it come down. They said someone was going to try to clear it, but that we should send some people out to keep things under control.”
“That all makes sense. I was the one who sent the caravan to inform your city. I am traveling with two young warriors, who are, at this very moment, trying to clear the dungeon.”
“You didn’t go in with them?”
“I’m afraid not. I’m far too strong for that.”
“I see. Do you know the strength of this Dungeon?”
“Not precisely. I should have asked. Anyway, I believe it will be around the level two to five range. Standardized levels of course.” Standardized levels could be calculated from the level of an adventurer. Common rank was the baseline, so a level five Warrior — a common class — would have a standardized level of five, but a level five Magus, an Epic class, would have a standardized level of around twelve.
“How confident are you?”
“I’m a skilled magician, and have been in more than my fair share of dungeons. I’m very confident.”
“What do you think, Gorvin? Too low?”
“Yeah, if it was something like four to eleven, we’d probably be ok. That low though? It would get ugly fast.”
“Sorry, am I missing something?” the junior constable asked.
“Dungeons have a specific level range," Gorvin said. "Some are wide, like the run dungeon in Du’la’melio. That can accommodate virtually any range of levels. But other dungeons, especially temporary ones, have really tight ranges. You can go in if you’re lower level, and while they’ll be dangerous to you, if you’re close to the range you might be ok. But if you’re above the level range, it triggers a reaction by the dungeon, and all of the monsters in the dungeon scale up dangerously. If there's too much scaling, then the dungeon ruptures.”
“Ruptures? Sorry, I don’t think they covered this in my classes,” Darren said.
“When a dungeon ruptures, it starts depositing all of the monsters that are supposed to be inside of it into the world. It’s not good,” Emelia said.
“If you ever see a dungeon rupture, I suggest getting as far away as possible, as fast as possible,” Olivander chimed in.
“So it might rupture if we went in?”
“Possibly. The scaling will happen regardless. But it will only rupture if the power is too far out of alignment. The local mana density is very low here, so a rupture is likely with very little extra power inside the dungeon," Gorvin said.
“The other factor,” Olivander said, “is that the dungeon will scale up for everyone inside the dungeon. If any of you entered the dungeon, it would virtually guarantee that my two favorite students would be killed. I would really like it if that didn’t happen. They are probably doing a fine job of that on their own and really don’t need any outside assistance.”