Despite my demands, the two returning adventurers would not talk about what they had been going through without something to eat first. Well, Cojisto wouldn’t; understanding Moose was just out of the question. Against my wishes, my stomach growled loudly, and Ferrisdae ushered us all to the mess hall.
Any worries I had about waiting in line for food was alleviated almost instantly. Ferrisdae had told Oakley what we had wanted back when she had asked for a table and, with her previous meeting with Carr, the Dwarven chef had taken it to mean she was a priority. Eating in the mess would have left Moose unattended, though, which meant we had Cojisto demanding we eat out by the stables.
So we sat behind the mess hall, on the ground, eating unfortunately bland pork and cabbage stew out of wooden bowls. Moose was given a big bowl of beets, lettuce, and cabbage, and happily munched away.
“Alright, we have food,” I said between bites. “What happened out there?”
“Mmhmm, mmhmm, sho Moosh an I-“ Cojisto tried saying with a mouth full of food. Ferrisdae cleared her throat, and the man swallowed and gave her an apologetic grin. “Sorry, Ferry.”
“It’s fine. I would just prefer if you would stop losing your manners,” Ferrisdae said, referring to a line similar to the one he told us when we first met.
“Of course, I’ll try to make sure they don’t go missing again,” Cojisto replied, smiling. “So, Moose and I were going down the road that was supposed to go to Antrinarc, yes? We were galloping away quite fast, Moose is really fast, you see, and we were making what I assumed was good time.”
Cojisto stopped talking to slurp some of his stew. Ferrisdae gave him another look, and he stopped slurping, wiping his mouth with his sleeve. “It’s a well traveled path, wide road, you know the type,” he continued. “And everything’s quiet for a while. It’s peaceful, just me and Moose passing through the countryside. The weather’s perfect. But, suddenly, men gathered in the road ahead of us!”
Moose snorted, and Cojisto stood up from his cross-legged position without shifting first. “Ten guys, all Human except a single Avian. He’s short, about Ferrisdae’s height, with colored feathers around his head.” Cojisto took a bite of pork, but waited until he swallowed this time to keep talking.
“I get excited, because it’s an Avian, you know? We haven’t seen one of those yet, but that’s why we’re here,” Cojisto explained. He paused as Moose snorted again, stomping on the ground twice, and shook his head. “I didn’t know it wasn’t Razorbeak at the time!”
Moose croaked, but Cojisto shook his head again. “I’m ignoring you now,” he claimed. “So I ask, ‘Where is Raitheus Razorbeak?’ Because we’re in a dungeon, but it’s also not a dungeon, right? It doesn’t have the brain thing of the dungeon, but I felt it there around those people. Like there was a dungeon in the middle of the road. Never felt anything like it.”
I had to put my head in my hand. Cojisto noticed that the DTER wasn’t active. Cojisto! I exchanged a look with Ferrisdae, and her face told me that she was concerned that we took so long to figure it out, but Cojisto just knew it intuitively? Silently, we agreed to never bring this up if we could help it.
The man in question didn’t seem to notice this exchange. “So the Avian laughs at us. He says we’re at the end of the line, and says that we’re decades away from fighting Razorbeak, centuries even,” Cojisto said, then looked down at me. “Which is a problem for us men, right? Because we’re not going to live that long. Ferry could take him, but the wait would be outrageous, right?”
“Yes, that sounds right, Cojisto,” I said, exasperated. “But please continue with the points of the story that are important.”
“It’s all important, Badger,” Cojisto snorted, then turned to Ferry. “He has no appreciation for storytelling, does he?”
“I think we’re all just a bit anxious, Cojisto,” Ferrisdae said diplomatically.
Stopping, Cojisto considered this for a moment, then nodded. “That is fair, okay. But I protested, and instead of bantering like a proper dungeon minion, the Avian said to attack. The nine men jumped into action, coming after us. I jump off of Moose, doing a front flip as I did, and charged at them in turn. Fight first, ask questions later, I could get behind that logic.”
“So you fought nine guys,” I said. “Then got information from the Avian, right?”
“Well…”
“You got information from the Avian, right?” I asked, my tone more serious.
Cojisto set his bowl on the ground. “We’ll get there. So we were fighting, me and the nine guys. Now, I’ve been in brawls like this before, you should know. I’m ducking, I’m dodging, weaving between people like no one’s business, but…” he paused, as if trying to find words. “But it was just disappointingly easy, you know?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Ferrisdae asked. “Like they weren’t good at fighting?”
“No, no, no,” Cojisto said, shaking his head rapidly. “I could tell these guys were good fighters. Fight enough people, and you get really good at seeing it in the first few seconds. The difference between someone who’s on your level, or better, or just plain worse. Right, Badger?”
“Yes, I understand what you’re saying,” I said. “But is a fight you win easily really disappointing?”
“It is if you’re constantly trying to improve yourself,” Cojisto complained. “They put up a fight, but I punched through them like they were made of thin wooden boards. Not through through, but it only took a couple of hits to bring them down. The Avian joined in, but it was a similar fiasco. I thought he could take some punishment, but he just… couldn’t. You know?”
“No, Cojisto, I don’t know,” I said, trying to keep my tone even.
Ferrisdae snapped her fingers. “This is probably what Himia meant by the tiers,” she said. We both looked at her, and she explained. “Well, Cojisto and I were supposed to get some kind of boost in our respective powers, right? This could have been what Himia meant. Cojisto, you said these guys weren’t bad at fighting, but it was too easy. Easy in what way?”
Cojisto exhaled. He crossed his arms and thought about it for a moment. “It was like they were moving too slow,” he finally said. “And those who did hit me with their swords, clubs, whatever, it didn’t seem to do a lot of damage to me like it should have. I know I have some tough muscles, but a sword is a sword, right?”
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“You were probably seeing things like a top adventurer would,” Ferrisdae said, jabbing her spoon at Cojisto. “Think about it, how many adventurers above your level have you seen shrug off attacks like it’s no big deal, even though those same attacks would be devastating to anyone else?”
“Huh,” was all he said as he mulled it over.
Ferrisdae turned to look at me. “Himia said that you were in tier two, right? How durable are you?”
“Fairly?” I responded. “But it’s less about taking hits and more about moving my body so that attacks turn to glancing blows. I’m pretty sure that if someone came at me with a sword, like Cojisto said happened, then I’d be skewered as easily as anyone else if I just let it happen.”
“Most people wouldn’t be able to shrug off a charging moose attack and go on to walk two hours to the nearest town without being very durable,” Cojisto said, rubbing his chin and looking down at me.
“I was in a defensive stance,” I said.
“You went tumbling twenty feet backwards into a tree,” Cojisto retorted.
“I weigh 45 pounds, Cojisto,” I snapped. “I don’t know what you want me to say, I’m not going to defend myself for being a Halfling.”
“I’m just saying, it’s pretty miraculous,” Cojisto mumbled, picking up his food from the ground. He frowned at it and brushed off some ants that were making their way up the side of the bowl. Then he continued eating.
“It’s just something to think about,” Ferrisdae said. “But, how about we move on to what happened next. The Avian couldn’t take their lumps?”
Cojisto nodded. “Yes, that’s a good way of putting it,” he said. “So he jumps in after I take on a few of his men. A couple go after Moose, but he’s Moose so he’s fine. The Avian’s wielding a very fine one handed sword. He’s obviously better than the others, but he’s still moving far too slowly. Still, he’s the leader of these guys, so I take him seriously.”
Downing the rest of his stew in a couple of gulps, he tossed the wooden bowl to the ground. Cojisto jabbed at the air twice, followed by a left hook and an uppercut. “And that was it,” he said, looking down at us. “Well, for the Avian. There were about three men left, and they ran off. The dungeon tingle disappeared after that, and with it, the bodies, too!”
“If the bodies disappeared, then how do you have the bag and the stuff in it?” Ferrisdae asked. I frowned as I thought things over.
“This stuff was left behind,” Cojisto said with a shrug. “It was the damnedest thing. The bodies disappeared and there was stuff laying where they had been like they left it for me and walked away.”
“And the DTER,” I started, then paused. “The dungeon tingle, that disappeared, too? Without any prompting from you? The dungeon was just gone?”
“That’s what it felt like, right Moose?” Cojisto asked, turning to face the animal. It nodded, and snorted. “Right! It was strange. The damnedest thing.”
“Nothing about this makes sense, but I suppose asking for sense hasn’t worked so far,” I said, throwing my arms up in the air. I had since finished eating my poorly flavored stew, so I tossed the bowl next to Cojisto’s. “So did you make it to Antrinarc, then?”
“Tried to, but no,” Cojisto said. He fell back into his cross-legged position easily. “But after we collected the spoils, which we’ll get to soon, I promise, we tried to move forward. But there was an invisible wall in the road not two hundred feet beyond that. We ran right into it.”
“That must have been the edge of the dungeon’s influence,” I said. I knew it couldn’t have gone on forever, though it had already proved to be outrageously large. “Do you have a rough estimate of how far it took you to get there?”
Cojisto looked at Moose, who croaked and snorted. “You’re sure? I don’t think they’re going to believe that number, friend,” Cojisto said. Moose nodded, and the man shrugged. “Moose said that we were going for just over two hours, so even with me on his back then it’s somewhere in the vicinity of forty miles? Though it was a winding road, so he thinks the distance is closer to forty miles from the settlement.”
Ferrisdae spit out some of her stew back into her bowl. I had to agree with that sentiment. "Forty miles?” I asked, incredulously. “The biggest dungeon Razorbeak had access to was his lead wagon and that was only around five square miles.”
“You were also gone for more than four hours, where did you go for the rest of your time out?” Ferrisdae asked.
“Look, you can doubt me all you want, but I won’t have you doubting Moose. He’s the heart of any team. Of all the teams,” Cojisto stated, and it was clear that he believed it. “If he says we traveled forty miles, then I believe he is correct.”
He turned to Ferrisdae. “We rested, because Moose got tired from running for just over two hours,” he said. “And then we decided to see about this invisible wall. We followed it for about an hour, and came across another dungeon, and then one more on the way back through the woods.”
“You came across three dungeons while you were gone?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Very well spaced out, but yes,” Cojisto confirmed. “The one after the bandits was an ogre boss with some goblin minions. That was a harder fight than the Avian and his bandits, but the ogre only got one good hit in. Moose patched me up with his new Holy Moose magic. The third one was one of those natural lairs you guys told me about. There was a bear, but it was much larger than normal and had a head of an owl. Some kind of bear-owl hybrid.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Ferrisdae said. “I mean, I believe you when you say that you fought one, but why would anyone make a… bear owl.”
“Owls are terrifying predators to things smaller than themselves,” I said, knowing all too well. “There was a big nest of Dire Owls near where I grew up. They were mean things, and liked to take Halfling children who wandered out at night. Literally, it wasn't just a story to tell young ones. I don’t know who decided merging a bear and an owl together was a good idea, but they probably wanted a strong, competent predator.”
“It was really weird is what it was,” Cojisto said. “But like the bandits, the goblins and ogre disappeared, and so did the bear owl. This gambeson is what was left in the bear owl’s place once the body disappeared. That, and a big egg that I think will make for a fine breakfast.”
“If it had the body of a bear, why did it leave an egg?” Ferrisdae asked slowly.
“It was really, really weird, Ferry,” Cojisto said with a shrug. “Anyway, here, I’ll let you two look through the bag of wondrous body disappearing loot.” He took the bag off of the stable’s post it had been hanging on and dumped its contents on the ground.
There was indeed a speckled egg. It was bigger than my head and looked like it belonged to an owl. Further in I found a Human-sized round wooden shield, a gardening trowel, a rolled up scroll, a blue potion, a green potion, a tarnished silver ring, and several coins clattered to the ground.
Ferrisdae’s eyes flashed purple. “Some of these are magical,” she said. “The scroll, obviously, and the potions, but also the trowel. Did they drop magical crystals?”
“No magical crystals anywhere to be seen,” Cojisto answered. “Which is weird. You’d think there’d be plenty all over the place.”
“You don’t generally get magical items off of anything but corpses, either,” I stated.
Normally, the only loot you get in a dungeon was the magical crystals needed to create and power magical items. Artificers and wizards were the most common to make use of them. Some dungeons that had a plot around them would give out some already crafted magic items, of course, especially if the dungeons were meant to be completed in a specific order, but that wasn’t this.
What this was doing was giving me a headache. “I feel like I’m a Junior Dungeon Inspector learning the ropes all over again,” I lamented. “This Dungeon Master guy really is throwing the entire rule book in the trash.”
“Yup,” Ferrisdae responded, not bothering to complete the title. She was too busy staring at the magical items. “Want me to identify them?”
“Sure, why not,” I replied, falling backwards so that I could stare at the cloudless sky. The sun was behind the trees now, and the first sprinkling of stars were beginning to show. “Please, figure out what the magical items that appeared because the dead bodies disappeared are for. At least that should make sense.”