Jeremy stood frozen in shock. Everyone else remained still as well, staring into the room at the witch’s body and waiting to see if any more imps would come spilling out of the chamber. It had all happened so quickly, but what surprised Jeremy more than anything was the way their overlays changed.
Daugherty was the one to make the kill, but his overlay had barely bumped up from its burnt orange color, hardly shifting at all. Jeremy would not have noticed it if he hadn’t been watching closely, to begin with. And Jeremy’s own overlay, now bordering a green color after throwing up the barriers and killing a few imps, shifted relatively the same amount. It wasn’t any more experience than he would expect them to gain from killing an imp. A witch doing experiments on said imps should have counted for more than that. Or so Jeremy would expect.
But even more confusing than this was that Mwai, Ashford, and Rossi all got more of a substantial shift. If he hadn’t been looking at everyone to watch how the kill impacted their experience, he might have chalked it up to their volley of kills as they wiped out the rest of the imps. Except, at the moment after the witch went down, when everyone’s overlays shifted in sync, Rossi and Ashford’s went from light orange to nearly yellow and Mwai’s from red to orange. It was a perceptible change, unlike the one in Daugherty’s overlay, which could easily be missed.
Jeremy frowned. Perhaps proximity to the kill had to do with how much benefit you reaped. The witch had been a couple of hundred feet away, so even though she was at a higher level than the imps, they did not get much more experience from killing her than they did them. And Mwai, Ashford and Rossi were closer to the chamber by several meters. He shook his head and put a pin in that. He would revisit it.
“That felt way too easy.” Ashford reloaded his gun while keeping one eye trained on the witch’s body.
“Easy for you to say,” McGraw groused. Daugherty had already turned to kneel beside him, tear open a first aid kit, and wrap his arm. The bullet only grazed him, and it seemed like a terrible idea to do much more than staunch the bleeding and cover the wound when they were surrounded by goop. Jeremy cursed himself for not copying down the healing spell into his notebook or trying to memorize it better.
He chewed on his lip and considered doing the spell even though he couldn’t visualize the exact runes. All he really had to do was visualize the wound knitting back together, and the runes would take care of themselves if it all went well. But the risk of something going awfully did not seem worth the risk of healing what probably amounted to a scratch to these guys. He’d offer once they were out of the dungeon if the medics did not already know the spells – which they probably did.
He should check with them to see if they have any additional information that the civilian hospital did not.
Daugherty and the shotgun guy, Rossi, hauled McGraw to his feet and essentially told him to walk it off. They gave him a pat on the back and then joined Ashford and Mwai, who peered into the chamber. Their rifles followed their line of sight until they determined that nothing else remained alive to leap out and attack them.
“Doesn’t look like it goes anywhere,” Ashford noted. He craned his neck to look up the stairs, past where Jeremy could see into the room. He looked down at the sludge of disease-giving bodies and debated just turning tail and marching back down the corridor to the entry chamber and the other team. He looked at the witch and the ruined glass equipment surrounding her. Curiosity got the better of him.
He picked through the sludge, avoiding where it was taller than his boots, and followed the rest of the team over the rumble of the collapsed wall. Ashford had been talking about the fact that the stairs led to another archway of yawning blackness. Yet another place that appeared to be unfinished.
Jeremy approached the table and looked over the contents, hoping that there was some crazy spell book or record of experiments kept by the witch. He found no such thing and saw nothing on her corpse to indicate she might have something useful tucked away in her skirts. They were too tattered to imagine any functional pockets among the folds anyway.
Her corpse did not decompose into a gelatinous goop, so it was probably safe to check for pockets, but Jeremy gave her a wide berth regardless. He turned his attention to poking around at the glass instruments but decided against touching much of that as well. Spilled liquids ran together on the tabletop and where they dripped to the floor. A few bubbled, hissed, and steamed where they came into contact.
“Nothing behind the stairs,” Rossi reported.
“Anything looking interesting to you, Miller?” Mwai called. Jeremy shook his head and looked up from a particularly strangely shaped glass instrument. He could not for the life of him imagine what the functionality of having all those twists and turns could be.
“No,” he said. “Nothing.”
“Anti-climactic,” Daugherty muttered from a few feet away, where he peered into the fireplace. “Not everything in life is like a movie.”
Jeremy felt a little like he was living in a movie right now, but he didn’t want to argue with Daugherty, who seemed like the type of guy to find something about anything to be grumpy about.
“Hang on!” McGraw hollered. “There’s something over here.”
He’d been standing in the center of the room in front of the staircase. He pointed up the steps. A small stone podium had appeared in the center of them, looking as if it had always been there. It was fitted into the stone blocks of the steps with the same perfect seams that constructed the rest of the dungeon walls. And above it floated a scroll.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“It’s the reward!” McGraw laughed, a huge grin on his face. “We cleared the dungeon, and now we get a reward.”
They crowded around the base of the steps and looked up at it. There was no ethereal glow about the scroll. The only thing that made it strange was how it was suspended in mid-air. Jeremy whipped out his notebook and pen and then climbed the first step.
“Hold on,” Mwai stopped him. “What are you doing?”
“I was going to copy down whatever was written on it,” Jeremy said. “We don’t know anything about this thing. What if it cannot be removed from the podium? What if it only exists in the dungeon and simply disappears when we go back? A second copy would be useful.”
He was also one hundred percent certain that the military folk would keep this scroll for themselves, and he did not want to miss the chance to copy down what it said so he would have the information, too. Mwai accepted his logic and let him climb the rest of the steps, leaving behind black boot prints of gross muck on the pristine stone.
The scroll was plain, its parchment secured to two unadorned wooden rods. There was no frilly script, only a set of runes arranged into a spell. A few looked vaguely familiar as if Jeremy might have seen them while flipping through the book, but he did not know what any meant right off the bat. Surprisingly, there were also a few words written among the runes in the same unknown language from the old book. He copied it as accurately as he possibly could onto one of the pages of his notebook, then flipped to the back and started copying it again. One could never be too careful. They might confiscate the notebook when he got back.
Inspired by Jeremy, Mwai remembered that they carried a camera with them to take pictures of important stuff like this. They didn’t stop to record every single room because all of the soldiers wore little recording cameras on their helmets, but for something like this room, it was probably a good idea to get out the camera and take some stills of the chemical equipment and the scroll.
“Do you know what it says?” Mwai asked, coming to join him on the step below the podium.
“What, is he an expert in magic runes or something?” Rossi asked. The rest of the team also climbed up the steps and surrounded the podium, Ashford trailing behind as he finished photographing the table and fireplace.
“Hardly,” Jeremy said. “Is there anything written on the back?”
Rossi hopped up a few steps to look at the back of the scroll. “No.”
Jeremy slid the pen and notepad back into his pocket. Ashford snapped a couple of pictures, and then they all stood staring at the scroll and waiting for Mwai to decide what to do.
“Do you think this is gonna be like Indiana Jones, where it's like a booby trap?” McGraw asked. Daugherty sighed.
“You are the one who said it is a reward.” Mwai reached out and picked up the scroll. It did not disintegrate into dust as soon as his fingers touched the parchment. No door opened to roll out a great round boulder to squash them. Nothing happened for several seconds, so Mwai just shrugged and started to carefully roll the scroll.
“Ashford, can I get a bag?”
“Yep.” Ashford tucked the camera away and pulled out a zip-lock baggie.
Then, a tremor vibrated beneath their feet. Everyone exchanged a glance that held a million unsaid words. Daugherty glared at McGraw as if daring him to open his mouth. Another tremor passed beneath their feet, this one violent enough to jumble the stone blocks of the wall against one another and make dust rain down from the ceiling. McGraw held up his hands with a smirk on his face. He did not need to say anything.
“Shit.” Mwai hastily stuffed the scroll into the bag, fumbling to zip it and then tucking it into his jacket. “Let’s get out of here.”
They flew down the steps and began running for the rubble-strewn corridor but were nearly thrown off their feet by the next tremor. Through the once-blocked doorway, it became obvious that the corridors were collapsing. They could not return the way that they came. Jeremy shook his head in disbelief.
If the scroll was a reward, as McGraw thought it might be, then why would the dungeon begin to collapse around them, preventing them from leaving? He whipped his head around to search for whatever it was that they must be missing. His eyes landed on the top of the steps.
Where there once had only been a black void now stood an exit. An archway loomed at the top of the steps, opening to a hallway with rows of torches, disappearing into shadow just like the other corridors had. It might be a dead end like the others had been, but Jeremy did not see what choice they had. It was the only thing that remained firm while everything else around them was beginning to literally crumble down.
“There.” He pointed, turning on his heel and nearly face-planting when the undulations of the massive flagstones beneath his feet threw him off balance. They scrambled for the steps, climbing up them on their hands and knees as though climbing up the side of a mountain. The stone blocks had been jostled out of place so badly that it was like scrambling up the side of a rock fall anyway.
Large stones began to fall from the ceiling, landing with great crashing booms and cracking into smaller pieces. Jeremy kept an eye overhead as he climbed, unsure if one of his barriers would protect him from something like that but wanting to have some time to get one up if he saw a rock falling toward him regardless.
The radio crackled, the men shouted to one another, and the entire chamber continued to collapse around them. But they managed to all make it to the entrance of the corridor before the ceiling began to collapse in earnest, carpeting the steps with massive broken stones.
“Holy…” Rossi gasped. The entire team looked worse for the wear, covered in stone dust and bloodied in various places from where shards of rock had broken off and struck them. Daugherty's face shield had a crack across it. Ashford was missing his helmet entirely.
Then the rumble rippled down the corridor, and it, too, began to collapse. Nobody even got in a curse before they all turned and ran away from where the stones simply fell away into the black void that surrounded them. All the anxiety Jeremy had been feeling about their apparent suspension in a space of nothingness reared its head, and he could hardly breathe from the panic. His heart thudded in his ears, and he could see nothing but the torches flaring to life in front of them, leading the way to hopefully somewhere.
It led the way to the original chamber. After about thirty seconds of sprinting down the hall in a blind panic, they spilled into a huge chamber with a vaulted ceiling and a very startled Sergeant Warner and team.
“Woah.” Warner and the others sprang to their feet and watched them carefully. Jeremy dropped his hands to his knees and gulped in huge breaths of air. Everyone else adopted similar positions, looking around in amazement. Jeremy glanced over his shoulder to see that they had come through the same door they had originally gone into. That should have been impossible, but he did not think too hard about it.
“Jesus,” Warner said. He glanced behind them into the corridor, which was still falling away into nothingness. A tremor traveled through the stone of the entry chamber. His eyes widened. “Christ.”
“Go,” Mwai barked. “We need to go. Pack it up.”
Everyone scrambled to gather up their packs and whatever else they had put down while waiting for Mwai and the team to return. Then they sprinted through the portal, one by one, as the ceiling rumbled above them, and dust began to rain down. Jeremy spared one last glance back, then jumped through himself, grimacing at the strange build of electricity that buzzed along his skin.