The day proceeded almost the same as the previous. They descended another stairway and encountered a group of kobolds, and Jace landed the finishing blow on four of the five. Kinfild lit the way with a candle’s worth of flame clinging to his fingertips, and Lessa swung her tail out in front of her, providing an extra source of light.
Another staircase down, and they reached a winding tunnel filled with dark barnacles and a colony of ink-covered muscles clinging to the walls, opening and closing their shells and drinking in the shadow. A herd of salamanders with glowing purple tails scattered when Kinfild and Jace approached, wary of the approaching predators.
“You’re sure even those guys eat flesh?” Lessa asked, bending down and staring at the hole they’d scampered out of. “They’re kinda cute…”
“They’re smart, that’s what they are,” Kinfild grumbled. “They know enough to not chase after us, who could crush them in a stomp. Yes, even you.”
Lessa stood back up and put her hands on her hips, and once Kinfild had walked past, she made a face at him. It felt just a little too real, a little too indignant, to have arisen solely from Kinfild’s comment.
“Let’s try not to rip each other apart,” Jace whispered. There was something between these two, but he didn’t know what.
They kept walking and passed a tunnel filled with dark gray spiderwebs, nearly invisible in the dark, but when spotted, an obvious trap. The tunnel fanned out as they travelled along it, and the dark shadows at the edges ate up the meagre lights they had. Jace could barely see a few feet in front of his nose.
And then a tendril of slimy darkness wrapped around Jace’s ankle. It was the same texture, same substance as the hanging vines, just thicker.
And moving.
It tugged, and he stumbled. He ripped the Whistling Blade out of its sheath, but Lessa already had her rifle out. She aimed and blasted right through the vine. The tip that had wrapped around his ankle shrivelled and faded into black ash, and the rest of the tendril rescinded into the depths of the hallway.
“Uh…Kinfild, what’s that?” Jace asked.
Kinfild took a wide stance and pointed his hand down the hallway, then blasted a bar of flame into the darkness. It writhed away, illuminating the hallway—and, thirty meters ahead, a swirling, kraken-like maw of black vine arms and sharp, hooked teeth. They all pointed inward, focussing on a single mouth.
It hooked onto the wall, growing like a conk on a tree, and a nest of black vines surrounded it.
“Ah,” Kinfild said. “I see.”
“What?” Lessa and Jace both exclaimed. Lessa readied her next shot, then drew a pack of plasma shells from the soldier’s ammo pouch and recharged her rifle. Jace pointed his sword down the hall.
“A Cleaner,” Kinfild said. “It’s a shadow-feeder, a beast that thrives in the darkness, an apex predator to anything that gets within its range.
Jace hadn’t caught a long enough glimpse of it while Kinfild had illuminated the hallway, but after a few seconds of gazing into the depths of the cavern, he picked out a faint tag: [Level 24 Cleaner]. It was closer than he’d thought.
More vines rushed toward him, Lessa, and Kinfild. He slashed them away with his sword, creating vibrant white arcs in the air and patterns of sparks that illuminated the next rushing tendrils. Lessa swept her tail side-to-side, spreading her portable light as far as she could, and bashed the vines with the muzzle of her plasma rifle. Whenever they gripped her arms, she fired a shot and blasted them away.
Kinfild used powerful swipes of his rifle to beat back the approaching tendrils, swinging it like a staff. A swirl of flame wrapped up around the muzzle of his rifle, strengthening it and spreading flame to any tendril unlucky enough to touch it.
“Beware of the pit!” Kinfild called.
“The pit?” Jace took a two-handed grip on the sword and slashed at a nearby tendril. Its tip broke off into black ash, but there were ten more following behind it. Three gripped his right arm, and he switched hands and hacked through them all in a single swipe.
It wasn’t graceful, but it got the job done. It wasn’t the first time he’d used a tool. Sure, a rake or a shovel wasn’t close to a sword, but he knew how to swing heavy things around.
“The pit?” Lessa repeated. “Like, it’s mouth?”
“Where it stores its defeated prey!” Kinfild replied. “It saves it for later!”
“How do we destroy it?” Jace yelled. Its individual limbs might have been weak, but there had to be hundreds of them. They slithered along the edges of the walls, writhing like snakes, and lashed out at the best moment to ensnare their prey.
But its maw couldn’t move, otherwise it would’ve already. “Kinfild! Lessa!” Jace called. “We just have to get close to it!” If he hit it near its mouth, it’d have to die—or at least, it would have to be close to a mortal wound. Its body hadn’t extended far beyond the maw. “Don’t let it restrain me.”
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“You trust me to not blow off your head?” Lessa exclaimed. She swatted a tendril away with the still steaming barrel of her rifle, then readied another shot and blasted a vine that had wrapped around her ankle.
“We won’t,” said Kinfild. He fired a condensed bar of flame straight down the center of the hallway. It cleaved through one tendril, but the beast raised a clump of vines in front of its face. It burned away the surface level of the vines, and nothing more.
But it gave Jace an opening.
He sprinted down the center of the hallway, holding his sword out to the side. A vine reached for his neck, but he slashed it away. Another reached for his ankle. He kicked and stomped it until it retreated. A third gripped his left wrist, and Lessa shot it at the stem.
By the time he’d gotten close enough that the light of his Whistling Blade illuminated the beast’s toothy maw, it focussed all its attention on him. Much like the elite kobold, it didn’t have the senses to know exactly who was more powerful, and Jace was the closest threat.
It sent two tendrils out, each reaching for one of his legs, and he let it grab hold of him. It’d just drag him closer, and he didn’t need his legs to swing a sword.
The vines tightened around his ankles, leaving behind a slimy black residue, and then it tugged. He shot along the ground. One of his backpack’s straps ripped, and it fell off. He bounced along, sliding on just his armour. Another vine reached out, trying to snatch his sword arm. Kinfild blasted it with a beam of fire.
“Jace!” Lessa shouted. “Are you—”
Before she could finish, a vine snatched her ankle up from behind and hoisted her, then turned her upside down.
Not good. She was still only rated around level five, having no magic whatsoever. Given the chance, the Cleaner would make short work of her.
He had to destroy it quickly.
And then Jace saw what Kinfild meant by ‘pit.’
A yawning opening in the ground spread out before him, dug cruelly into the stone by whipping vines and limbs, and now, it reached fifty feet down. Networks of thin holes occupied the walls, and a few writhing, broken kobolds lay at the bottom, snarling but incapacitated. They’d be the Cleaner’s snack for later.
Jace pushed himself up, and at the last moment, activated his hyperjump card. He flashed through the air and emerged right in front of the cleaner’s maw, free from its grasp. He rammed the Whistling Blade straight into its maw, and there it stuck, lodged blade-first into the swirling mass of teeth. His feet hung over empty air—over the bottom of the pit.
The Cleaner let off a high-pitched screech, then whipped its vines all toward Jace, ready to push him in and devour him, but he wrenched his body to the side, drawing a glowing orange gash across the side of its mouth.
Destroyed and defeated, the Cleaner dissolved into a cloud of black ash. Aes poured into Jace’s chest, rewarding him for destroying his foe, and its vines released Lessa before crumbling to ash as well.
But that meant there was nothing to support Jace.
He plummeted through the empty air and fell into the pit. Ramming the Whistling Blade into the side of the pit, he slowed his fall, but he couldn’t stop it entirely. He tried to activate his hyperspace jump card, tried to launch himself out of the hole, but it was still on cooldown. His backpack was still up at the top, and the reset card was still in the front pocket.
So he slid down to the bottom of the pit, the Whistling Blade and the molten gash in the wall his only light. The wounded, trapped kobolds at the bottom snarled and gnashed their teeth, and one lunged at him, trying to bite into his calf. He ripped the Whistling Blade out of the wall, then stabbed it into the kobold’s skull. There were three more, and they didn’t put up any more of a fight.
But he was stuck.
Kinfild and Lessa ran to the rim of the pit and peered over, their faces illuminated in orange flame.
“Jace!” Lessa shouted. “Are you alright?”
“I’m okay!” he called back, swishing the Whistling Blade to cast light around the hole. It wasn’t just a single cavern. Tortuous tunnels carved through the stone, winding away from the pit, and the distant chittering of kobolds seeped out of it. “Are you guys alright?”
“A little bruised, but I’ll live!” Lessa yelled. “And Kinfild’s still grouchy as ever!”
“I am not grouchy,” the Wielder grumbled.
“Sure thing,” said Lessa, nudging him. “Can you use a hyperspace jump to get yourself out?”
“Give me…like a minute and a half,” Jace said. “And I’ll try.”
He paced around the edge of the pit, marking out a five-pace wide area of the main hole, until he was certain the hyperdash was available. He looked up, picking a spot on the ridge where Lessa and Kinfild stood, and activated the technique card.
He emerged from hyperspace three-quarters of the way to his destination, mid-air, and immediately began to fall again. He jabbed the Whistling Blade back into the wall and slid down to the bottom. By the time he reached the bottom, the card was still on cooldown.
“The distance of the jump is limited by your Aes output!” Kinfild shouted. “You just aren’t advanced enough to make it the full distance.”
Jace tongued his molars, then scratched the back of his head. “Alright. Can you toss the reset card down? It’s in the front of my backpack. I’ll use a jump, swap mid-air, reset myself, then use another hyperjump.”
“In the time it took you to swap your cards,” said Kinfild, “you’d have fallen back down to the pit floor. You only have one card slot at the moment!”
Jace had swapped cards mid-air before, when escaping the skytower, but he’d been travelling horizontally, and he’d wanted to go downward anyway.
“But what other option do I have?” he asked. He could effectively only use each card once, otherwise he’d never make it up to the top of the pit. “Wait…Lessa, could you enhance the reset card? Would it do me any good?”
“Where is it?” she asked.
“In the front pocket of my backpack!”
She scampered away from the edge, only to return moments later with the backpack and card in-hand. “Let’s see…” She laid at the edge of the pit, flat on her stomach, and stared directly at Jace. “It’s weak, but I can get enough of a grasp on you now. I should be able to enhance the card.”
“What’re the potential routes?”
“I clearly see a route that reduces its cooldown,” she said.
“Which doesn’t much help us,” Kinfild grumbled.
“And a route that provides some slight bonuses to the next skill you use.”
“That one,” Jace said. “That’s the one we need.”