A couple of hours later, Jeremy found himself poking around in the woods and by the highway, calling out Atticus’s name to see if she might pop up now that the storm had moved on for the most part. Zanie and Caleb were keeping an eye on the dungeon entrance, resting up after having practiced spellwork for a while.
Zanie had figured out that touching something directly to zap meant she usually got zapped less frequently herself, but not never at all. And Caleb had been very deliberately trying to modify and practice his spell that created space so that it covered more area. Jeremy had spent most of his time tossing mana at a pile of downed limbs he collected from around so he could see when it crushed their leaves and broke their sticks. He played around with some of the modifiers he had found in various places in the book, making the mana move more quickly and do more apparent damage.
After about thirty minutes of searching for Atticus, Jeremy admitted defeat and headed back to the house so he could take a rest as well. A few of the neighbors had gathered around to raise their eyebrows at the dungeon entrance and chat with one another. Jeremy’s chair in the garage had been taken, so he went further into the back of the garage and leaned against the counter to listen to the conversation.
“You’re telling me that the monsters are coming out of those things.” One of the neighbors pointed with his beer at the dungeon entrance. Caleb sighed and explained that some of them did, but maybe not all of them, and nobody really knew what the hell was going on anyway.
The topic turned to politics, which was apparently the focus of the news as of late. Jeremy found himself caring less about what the Federal Government was mandating now that there were more pressing issues, like dealing with the dungeons right in front of him. Especially since it seemed to still be sticking to encouraging the population to just sit tight and not mess with magic unless one was told to evacuate, in which case, sit tight in the refugee camps and not mess with magic. Especially since entire incident responses, such as the National Guard group they had run into, were already working independently of the mandates coming down from up top.
According to one of the neighbors, a young woman who had somehow managed to throw together a bean dip and bring it over for everyone to dig into, some of the countries in South America and Europe had already seen a breakdown of government leadership and were run by factions, some of whom used magic and some who rejected it. Jeremy figured the states would not be far behind. Long-distance transport had already been fractured, and state governments were the ones making most of the decisions about where to send resources. Outside of the major evacuations around the gates, the feds had mostly been running around like chickens with their heads cut off. That was the general consensus in this neighborhood, at least.
“How long do you think it will take for something to come out of the gate?” Henry asked, coming to stand beside Jeremy with his hands tucked under his arms.
“I have no idea,” Jeremy told him. “Like Caleb keeps saying, we are just starting to figure all this stuff out too.”
They watched as Caleb and Zanie demonstrated a couple of simple spells when a couple of the older adults asked about how they conducted magic. They explained that it had to do with the visualization of the intended effects and that you would really only be able to accomplish what you were capable of given your skill level, but there was a risk of visualizing something beyond your capabilities and having it backfire and harm you.
“See,” one of the mothers turned to her teenage daughter, who was leaning against one of the cars, fiddling around on her phone. “It’s dangerous to mess around with this stuff.”
A bunch of the neighborhood kids had come out after the storm, just like their parents, although they were less interested in the dungeon and more interested in the puddles. Although that might have to do with the ass-whopping, the parents gave them every time they went near the swirling portal of energy. The last thing they needed was a kid wandering through it.
“Mom,” the daughter dropped her phone against her thigh and rolled her eyes, “They just said the chance of it backfiring is only if you try something really difficult. I’ve been like…lighting candles and stuff. Not exactly rocket science.”
One of the guys who had pulled out a pack of cigarettes and started trying to light it with a snap of his fingers was finally successful. He let out a whoop of triumph and got mixed reviews from the rest of the group. Some of them seemed impressed by the magic, and others less than impressed by the cigarette smoke. The conversation turned toward using magic for chores, like mopping the floor or something, which, in turn, brought up Caleb’s skill with telekinesis.
He had to demonstrate that for them, of course.
Neither Caleb nor Zanie said much about the fact that instead of visualizing the results of a spell, you could visualize the runes that denoted it. They probably did not want to have to get into Jeremy’s unique personality trait or the book of runes that they carried, which would require an explanation of where it came from and the council.
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“Do you think something is going to come out of the dungeon today?” Henry asked.
Jeremy sighed and looked at the sun, which was beginning to sink below the tree line. “I haven’t got a clue. But we’ll pitch our tents and keep an eye on it through the night if nothing does.”
“Oh,” Henry nodded, “Alright.”
“Alright?” Julie scoffed. “I’m certain we can put you up inside. We’ve got our son’s old bedroom, which he’s not using because he’s stuck at college, and the couch. At the very least.”
“No thanks.” Jeremy declined. “Better to keep an eye on it from outside. And if something does come out, it’s best if all three of us are out here to deal with it, just in case. The monsters from the other one-ring dungeon weren’t difficult to kill on their own, but you never know.”
Julie shrugged, muttering, “Suit yourselves.”
Eventually, the congregation of neighbors dispersed for the night after a conversation about the food shortages and making plans to have a big produce potluck/swap the next day so that nobody’s huge ten-pound bags of potatoes from Costco would go to waste.
They set up their tents in the front yard, not too far from the garage, on a tarp that Henry had brought out from his shed and shook all the cobwebs and dust from. The ground and the grass were still wet from the storm. Just like the other night, they took shifts, keeping an eye on the dungeon entrance while the others slept. And just like the other night, nothing much happened.
“What if,” Zanie said over breakfast the next morning – hardboiled eggs courtesy of the chickens to doors down and some of the final granola bars from their bags, “nothing is going to come out of the entrance?”
She wanted to go inside as badly as Caleb wanted to never step foot in that dungeon. “We could be out here waiting while everything inside is getting stronger.”
Jeremy crumpled up his granola wrapper and looked around for the trash can. “She has a point. We don’t actually know much about these dungeons. Who knows how long it would take, if ever.”
Caleb glowered at the egg he was peeling. “Let’s wait a little longer to see.”
“Alright,” Jeremy said, but as soon as he got back from throwing his trash in the bin around the side of the house, he started doing weapons checks on all of the M4s.
“I read up a little bit on how lightning works,” Zanie said to make conversation.
“Okay,” Caleb put his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair, the picture of nonchalance even though his eyes kept darting toward the dungeon entrance.
“So, I think that since heat is also all about molecules moving faster, right?” She waited for a response, so Jeremy hummed even though the last time he thought about physics stuff like that was back in junior year of high school. “I think that, actually, this magic type is all about things speeding up. And it just manifests as heat.”
“That’s a good theory.” Jeremy set the last M4 down. “So, now that Zanie has figured out what her Unique Personality Trait is, we can go into the level one dungeon.”
And so they decided to go ahead and see if they could clear the dungeon that morning because Jeremy was impatient, and Zanie was tired of shocking herself by practicing and wanted to put her new spell to use. Caleb scowled but looped the strap of his gun over his head and marched along with them. Jeremy knocked on Henry and Julie’s door to thank them again for the hard-boiled eggs and tell them they were going to head into the dungeon. They stood on the front porch and watched curiously with coffees in their hands as the three of them disappeared into the swirling blue energy.
Jeremy shook off the feeling of static that clung to him after he stepped through and peered around at their surroundings. They were in another stone structure, but this one was much less grand and well-lit than the Gothic dungeon. It looked like a cellar, the stonework crude and damp with moss and trickles of water darkening it. Instead of vaulted ceilings and massive halls, they were in a chamber that was so short that Jeremy had to curve his back and hunch his shoulders slightly so that he was not getting a face full of the dusty cobwebs littering the ceiling. Three short corridors led away in different directions.
The only light that illuminated the cool, damp area came from glowing clusters of crystals sprouted from between the stones in the walls and out of the packed-dirt floor. They looked like a cross between the tiny clear quartz crystal that came out of the nightmare dungeon and streaks of glass that formed on beaches when lightning struck the sand. And they emitted a soft blue glow.
“Wow, it’s like…a literal dungeon,” Caleb said. He had yet to step more than a foot away from the portal. Zanie, on the other hand, had gone to one of the walls to peer at the glowing crystals more closely. She touched the very tip of one, and it pulsed just slightly but did not do anything else. So far, no monsters had come rushing at them the way the mini goblins did.
“Do you think that these are the creatures?” Zanie asked, pointing to the crystal cluster. Jeremy went over and looked down at it. Even though there had to be some kind of accumulation of mana or something to make them glow, he could not see an overlay, so it could not be a very large amount.
He shook his head, “They don’t have overlays, so I doubt it. I think they are just…crystals. Like that one, we found in the other dungeon, maybe?”
“Should we take them then?” Zanie looked back down with wide eyes, the glow highlighting her skin and making the whites of her eyes look blue. “If that tiny one we found was a reward for the last dungeon…”
“I don’t know if they are the same thing.” Jeremy tapped the end of his rifle against one of the more crystal-like protrusions and it made a clear ringing sound but did not break off. He hit it a little harder, and still, it held firm to the wall. “I think we should focus on figuring out what lives in here first.”
Zanie touched the crystal again with her fingertip, then followed him as he went to the narrow, cobweb-laden corridor that led away from the left wall of the chamber. He glanced over his shoulder at Caleb, who stood stiffly by the portal, the uncomfortable clench of his jaw softened by all the glowing light. “Are you coming?”
“I hate this,” he muttered but also followed along. Each step he took was as if he expected the dirt floor to crumble away like he was walking on a rotten wood suspension bridge with thousands of feet of empty air below it.