Chapter 33:

I took several steps backward, narrowly avoiding a massive paw swipe. Attacking it with the little knife in my hand seemed pointless, so I didn't even try. I didn't think I could do much damage, even if I got it in its eye. Not before it killed me. So I just dodged backward repeatedly. At one point, I even somersaulted under a swipe, coming up on its side and running several feet away.

The view around me narrowed until all I could see were its teeth and two sets of paws. As I dodged frantically, my heartbeat seemed to slow, each beat taking seconds. We danced on the edge for what felt like minutes but was, in reality, only a handful of seconds.

Then, Bjorn came to my rescue and stabbed the badger in the side, raking his blade down its ribs. A sickening thump reverberated through the cave each time it hit another slat.

Bjorn disengaged quickly, and the badger spun. I stumbled back, panting, resisting the urge to double over and put my hands on my knees. As I caught my breath, I maintained awareness and took stock of the situation. More arrows were sunk into the beast's side, disappearing, one every couple of seconds. Sometimes, extra magical effects would happen, but they didn't seem to have more of an impact than just a simple shaft.

Bjorn's approach was different from mine. He was more aggressive, his knife a little bit longer, and more experienced. He slashed at obvious openings when the badger presented its side or head. While the aggression played against him, it was no more than fifteen seconds before he slipped up and took a glancing blow to the shoulder, sending him spinning to the ground.

Helga jumped before him, sword slashing at the badger's face. It clashed with its teeth but barely did more than a flesh wound. The force and overextension of her strike forced Helga to block a swipe of the claws with her sword. She braced it on the flat of the blade on her forearm, but the blow still sent her stumbling backward. The massive badger had a path open to Bjorn, but Jonas came in and stabbed at its side, just like when Bjorn had gotten its attention away from me.

This time, the bear was too focused on what appeared to be helpless prey. Bjorn wasn't dead or anything; he was scrambling to his feet, but it wasn't very fast. Jonas looked at the knife embedded in the badger and the way it ignored him. So he grabbed its fur with one hand, vaulted onto its back, pulled the dagger out on his way up, and slammed it down with both hands right into the base of the badger's skull.

The badger didn't recognize the attack until Jonas pulled out and did it again. Then, the badger flinched and shook itself, sending Jonas flying. The dagger was still buried in the base of the neck, right next to the spine. Then, the badger turned to follow Jonas' tumbling body.

Helga regained her feet, but before I even thought about it, I was already moving, too. Jumping at the badger's head, I landed before it could duck down to Jonas and slashed at its face. I scored across one of its eyes, not doing much damage but infuriating it as blood dripped from the split brow into the scratched orb. I grasped its ear with one hand as I hung off the back of its skull, attempting to stab at the other eye. I missed, hitting bone and skittering along, digging a deep trench through the flesh on its face.

The beast roared as it went up on its hind paws, shaking me off. But Helga had reached the fight, and its massive stomach was exposed. She wound up in a horizontal slash that looked more like a baseball swing than anything resembling swordwork. The blade dug deep, cutting into the stomach, parting the fur surprisingly easily. About halfway through, it got stuck, and she changed the slash to a thrust, burying the whole length of steel deep into its stomach. She was forced to let go and dive out of the way, rolling to come up and spinning to face the bear as it landed. But as the front paws came down where she was standing, its strength left it, and its front arms crumpled. It fell on the sword in its stomach, the hilt driving it even deeper.

I found the dagger Jonas had buried in its neck and grabbed it to hold myself steady. I plunged my knife repeatedly into its other eye socket as it lay twitching on the ground, slowly bleeding out. Eventually, I managed to make it deep enough to hit the brain, and the thing went still.

***

It took us even longer to recover from this fight than the last one. My hands were shaking as I pulled the two knives out of the bear and handed Jonas back his from where he sat on the ground. Astrid was finishing up healing Bjorn, who had dislocated his shoulder and broken his collarbone. It seemed it took her two full usages of her mana pool to heal him. She spent an hour or so recovering between each use before she could even come to see the more minor scrapes that Helga and Jonas received.

I was surprisingly unharmed, mostly just shaking, bruised, and battered. After waiting for a couple of hours in what was approaching some sort of meditative trance as I recovered my energy, I felt surprisingly okay. Reflecting on the fight, that narrowing of the field of view was a lot like fight or flight instincts but magnified. I couldn't help but wonder if there was some sort of proficiency I had gained recently. Either that or a focused attribute was coming into play here, and not just in magic. It would make sense.

From the little I knew about magic from fantasy books I had read back in my youth or discussions I had with my children about video games, I remembered how vital meditation seemed to be. So, I did my best to try the few half-remembered practices that my wife had talked to me about from her yoga class over a decade ago. Sitting on the floor, I tried to calm my mind and think of nothing, but that didn't really work. So, I focused on one thing. Whenever my thoughts strayed from thinking about the color black, I brought it back to that color and tried to just exist in a void of nothingness.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

It worked better than I expected. I kept getting distracted, but after the first twenty minutes or so, my mind was beaten into submission. I could just sort of float there, feeling my breath and body and a slight bit of foreign energy tingling through my heart.

I really needed to read that book Helga had lent me. No one disturbed me as I sat. Helga and Jonas held a whispering conversation as Astrid recovered, and Bjorn was heavily concussed and still in a daze. But no one did anything to the mammoth badger sitting in the center of the room.

After the first hour, I started to grow concerned that it might begin to stink or something, but it was a magical construct. Despite it having flesh and blood, the gods thankfully hadn't given its bowels to empty as it died. So, we just sat there, unmoving, while we recovered.

Absent-mindedly, I wished I had brought some food with me because I was starting to get a little hungry. It had been almost six hours since we had entered, and it would likely be late evening when we left if we left now.

Once everyone was up and Bjorn was fully healed, he walked over to the bear and started to butcher it, carefully cutting away its hide. The bear-sized badger was slowly being dissected, with Bjorn carving out several organs and teeth. I looked over at Astrid, who shrugged.

"Seems to all be loot, as the thing didn't disappear," she said.

Once he was done, there was a pile of parts. We looked at it, puzzled.

"How are we supposed to carry this?" I asked.

"Should we head back?" Astrid suggested.

I frowned, not liking the idea of giving up so soon. We hadn't even come close to the 20% way mark. But were we really going to get much farther? We stalled in this fight, and it took everything we had to make it through alive.

"I kind of want to see what's next so we can prepare for it," I said.

No one objected, but at the same time, everyone else didn't look exactly enthused about the idea either. Still, we divvied up the loot, and I ended up carrying the pelt on my shoulder as everyone else carried sacks or bundles of other things. We trudged down the exit.

Progress: 5%, flashed in front of me. Was every chamber worth more than the last? Because then it might only be two or three more chambers, and we could be done. But Astrid had called it a boss room, so presumably, it was worth more than others. Still, 5% was 5%.

The trek wasn't that long, and soon we were in another cave. This time, though, the threat wasn't nearly so obvious as a giant monster sitting in the center. Also, the cave seemed to have been worked by something other than an animal. The dirt was patted down smooth, and the walls were more at right angles rather than a tube. I frowned, not seeing what the danger was.

We all stopped at the entrance and whispered to each other.

"Do you see anything?" I asked the others.

Astrid squinted. "There's something on the far side. Could be the exit."

Jonas and Bjorn just shook their heads. Helga kept watching behind us.

I put my burden down and drew my knife. Slowly, cautiously, I stepped out and looked around. A couple of feet from the entrance, I saw what was different. The dirt was arranged in a pattern on the floor as if the floor wasn't really dirt, but more tiles were covered up with a thin layer of dirt. I reached down and wiped it away with my finger, finding that it was only a quarter-inch deep, and beneath was a glistening rough stone slab.

"I don't think we're going to find badgers here," I called back over my shoulder. Right there, I saw what was happening. In a few careful motions, I brushed the piece of stone I was standing on free. It was about three feet by three feet and had a half-inch gap between the next one. I pressed lightly on the one over, worried about hidden traps or something. If something had evenly covered the whole thing with dirt, perhaps there was something like a pressure sensor that shot spikes out of the wall. Or maybe we'd be running away from a giant stone rolling down the corridor. Probably had seen too many movies at this point.

Examining the walls, I didn't see anything similar, but I also didn't see the threat yet.

"Astrid," I called over my shoulder. "Come here. You have better eyes than I do."

She stepped forward to join me, and I pointed toward the dark hole that she had mentioned earlier. She squinted.

"That looks like the exit," she confirmed her earlier guess.

Looking around, I saw nothing that would be an obvious threat. Still, the idea of just walking across the room raised hairs on the back of my neck.

"So, what is this, a trap room?" I asked.

She grimaced and looked around uneasily. "Maybe."