This corridor was short enough that Jeremy could see where it ended, opening up into another softly glowing chamber. Everything here seemed much more condensed than in the Gothic dungeon, and the spacing of the rooms along the corridor was no exception. The glowing crystal-glass formations that snaked out from the walls turned the corners of a series of open doorways. Here, they were less clustered and more sprawling in patterns that looked a bit like lightning bolts but also like vines creeping over the stone.
Jeremy peered into the first open doorway and saw a brighter blue light, nearly white. It hung in the air, not in the shape of an orb like the dungeon entrance, but instead in a burst, almost like what a cartoon star with lots of spikes and a long tail looked like. And from its center, arched and fizzles little bolts of electricity. This being did have an overlay.
“That’s the creature,” Jeremy whispered. Although it was nothing biological, and he could not be sure it could hear. But then it floated toward them, and a few of the bolts of electricity slammed into the doorway right near Jeremy’s head, knocking off little shards of stone. He reared back.
“It’s just a red overlay. Nothing too powerful.” He told Caleb and Zanie, before ducking forward again, M4 pulled up between both of his hands so he could pepper a few rounds into it. It did not seem to take any damage or even be phased by the bullets. They passed right through its blinding form and smacked into the stone wall behind it. He reared back again.
“Bullets don’t work.”
“Maybe since I use electricity, I can get close to it?” Zanie said. “Or maybe if I hit it with a bolt of lightning, it might cancel it out or something?”
“Those both sound like massive stretches to me.” Jeremy shook his head, and a moment later, a bolt of electricity bounced out of the room and zapped her, making her body go rigid and her eyes pop wide. Jeremy threw a barrier over the doorway to cut off the electricity and stop the creature’s progression out of the room.
Zanie rubbed her arms. “Ow. Okay, so it can shock me. Maybe I can shock it back. I’m higher level, after all.”
“Fine, let’s just take a step back, though.”
They took a step back, and he waved the barrier down. Before the creature had a chance to make it even halfway through the door, Zanie held a palm toward it and the runes of her lightning spell flashed. The bolt successfully connected with the creature but was simply absorbed. It had absolutely no effect on it whatsoever.
“Okay, so maybe because it’s literally made of lightning, it can’t get zapped like you.” Jeremy put up another barrier. “How the hell do we deal with this?”
Its lightning crackled and flashed against the barrier a few times, dropping it after only a couple of seconds. Jeremy cursed and threw a projectile of pure mana at it to see if that would do anything. It slowed it down minimally, perhaps, but not enough that he could avoid throwing another barrier up almost immediately to stop it from electrocuting the hell out of them.
“Does it look like there is a spot where it is brightest? Maybe there is a core of some kind. I mean, there’s got to be something we can target it. Let me try…” Caleb frowned at the creature, then flicked his wrist. Jeremy barely saw the runes of his slicing spell before there was an explosion of sparks and bright blue electricity, filling the air with a buzz that set Jeremy’s teeth on edge and made his hair stand on end. Then the creature’s overlay disappeared, its glow dissipated, and something fell to the ground and shattered.
“Nice,” Caleb pumped his fist, “If I can break their cores apart, maybe you could manage to hit it with a bullet. Just aim where the electricity keeps arcing out from.”
Then the hallway glowed an almost blinding white as every single doorway lit up with at least one, if not multiple, of the creatures.
“Holy hell.” Caleb gasped. Jeremy took a startled step back, bumping into Zanie.
His barrier lit up with a spiderweb of so much electricity that his skin crawled. It was gone in an instant, so quickly that a few bolts flashed forward, zapping the shit out of them before he managed to throw up another one. He did not even bother to say the word run, just turning and grabbing both Caleb and Zanie to drag them down the corridor to the dungeon portal, tossing up barrier after barrier behind them. They fell just as quickly as he could create them, but it was enough to keep the electricity from reaching them before they could throw themselves through the portal.
They stumbled out onto the court. Zanie tripped over a pothole in a dramatic splash, going down on her hands and knees, hissing out a curse as her palms scraped across the asphalt. Their footsteps came to a thundering stop and Jeremy whirled around to see if anything might follow them through the portal. But it remained quietly swirling.
“That was quick!” Henry called from the porch. He and Julie still stood there, holding their coffees, speaking with one of the neighbors. Caleb put his hands on his knees and let out a harsh breath. They had not needed to run very far, basically just across the length of the small chamber, but it had been such a great burst of effort to flee as quickly as they could that they were all gasping for breath.
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Jeremy kept one eye on the dungeon portal and shouted back, “We couldn’t clear it.”
“Oh,” Henry walked down the steps toward them. Zanie picked herself up from the ground, brushing pieces of asphalt from the scrapes on the heels of her palms and grimacing at the splashes of water which had soaked her pants. Blood welled from the scrapes and dripped down her wrist.
“Here,” Caleb stood up and held his hands out for hers, “Let me heal those.”
She put her hands in his. Henry looked on curiously as he passed them, but headed for Jeremy without hesitation. “What happened?”
“There are a bunch of lightning creatures. Like elementals made completely of lightning, so the guns were not very effective against them and Zanie could not do much against them since she uses lightning.” Jeremy sighed and looked around the neighborhood at all the houses with people getting ready for their potluck/produce exchange later today. At least the lightning creatures did not seem like they were going to pour out of the portal. “There were too many of them to handle.”
“Well, what now, then?” Henry asked. “Call the National Guard?”
Jeremy did actually have the phone numbers to do that. He chewed on his lip, but before he could think too hard, Zanie shrieked and yanked her hands away from Caleb.
“What the hell?” She shouted, holding her hands up and staring at her palms.
“Shit.” Caleb reached for her hands again, brows drawn down and lips pressed into a frustrated frown, “What was that? Let me see.”
“No, no!” She backed away, snatching her hands to her chest, “I think you’ve done enough. Ow. What the hell?”
Jeremy frowned and walked over to them, “What’s wrong?”
Caleb put his hands up, a confused expression on his face. Zanie glowered at him, then held her palms out for Jeremy to see. The scrapes were gone, only smears of blood left behind, but her skin was bumpy as though the gravel from the broken asphalt around the pothole had gotten stuck beneath it. Jeremy grimaced. The spell had healed the cuts, but only by knitting the skin back together, no by cleaning them out. Caleb looked over Jeremy’s shoulder and hissed.
“I know I did the spell right.” He muttered. “Where’s the first aid kit?”
He stalked toward their tends and bags, past Henry, who was pursing his lips at the whole affair like he was about to tell them ‘I told you so.’
“What do I do now?” Zanie stared at her hands in horror.
“Well,” Jeremy put a hand beneath one of hers and poked the little bumps gently, but she still flinched as though he’d punched them. He noticed the red splotch from where she had burned herself yesterday and shook his head. “You need to go easier on your hands.”
“That is not a solution.” She cried. “What am I going to do? Cut my hands back open?”
Jeremy sucked a breath in through his teeth, “I guess. Then we can heal the cuts after we’ve cleaned the gravel out.”
Zanie clutched her hands to her chest again and trailed after Caleb so she could get into the first aid kit. They would need something to cut her palms and something to flush out the wounds. Jeremy pulled out his knife and felt the edge with the pad of his thumb. It would work well enough if he sterilized it first. He walked toward the first aid kit as well.
“I cast the spell correctly.” Caleb insisted, tapping the backs of his fingers against the stack of papers with all of their healing spells on them. “Did you see the runes? This image is exactly what I imagined.”
“I wasn’t watching.” Jeremy told him, then under his breath muttered, “What a mess.”
For the next thirty minutes or so they sat in the driveway, their fold-out chairs arranged in a circle in front of the cars, and Jeremy sliced open Zanie’s palms. Blood dripped onto the gravel driveway. Every so often he would pick up the hose that Henry had pulled out for them and rinse her palms off so he could see what he was doing and get the gravel out.
“It’s not like you’ve been practicing healing magic a lot,” Zanie told Caleb, who sat with his head in his hands, “Makes sense that it would go wrong sometimes. I’m not upset. It was just startling.”
“Yeah, well, I’m still sorry.”
There was only so many times that Zanie could tell him it was okay, so she just twisted her lips together and let her head fall back. “So, what are we going to do about the dungeon?”
“Henry wants to call in the Calvary,” Jeremy poised the knife above one of the bumps, “Here comes another one.”
Zanie grit her teeth together and he cut the piece of gravel out.
“I don’t think we need to get the National Guard involved,” Caleb said, excited to think about something other than his botched healing spell. “I was able to kill one of them.”
“Yeah, but there were so many of them. Maybe we should get some backup.” Zanie said through her gritted teeth.
The neighbors were setting up a table in one of the driveways down the court, a good ways from the dungeon portal and more central to all the houses. They were piling all kinds of produce, from wrinkly peppers to sprouting potatoes. A lot of people actually had backyard gardens and brought forth buckets of jalapeños, tomatoes, and zucchini’s the size of his forearm. They glanced toward the three of them curiously, but mostly kept their distance from the sight of the blood and the dungeon entrance. News of their failure to clear it had spread fast.
Caleb disagreed with needing backup. “I think we should just practice for a couple of days and try it again. We know what we are up against and we know they can be defeated. They have those little cores, so if we target them and if we make a plan, we should be fine.”
“But I can’t do anything against them.” Zanie complained, maybe just feeling grumpy because her hands hurt so badly.
Caleb rolled his eyes at her. “You don’t have to do anything against them. Think about it. If you shooting lightning at them doesn’t have much of an effect since they are made of pure lightning, then if they shoot lightning at…say a barrier made of lightning, their attack should not have much of an impact. I know Jeremy is the one who has been focusing on making barriers, but that doesn’t meant that you couldn’t figure out how to make one with your magic.”
Jeremy pursed his lips and set the knife down to reach for the hose so he could rinse Zanie’s palms out. “That’s a good point. You can slice their little cores pretty well and I’m sure I can figure out a way to cast something from behind a barrier using mana. When I shot mana at one, it did seem to slow it down a bit, so I’m sure pure offensive mana does some damage.”
Caleb smacked his hands together and rubbed his palms, “Great. We just need to build up our stamina some.”
“How about a new rule,” Jeremy said as he turned on the hose, the water pouring over Zanie’s palm and washing down the driveway tinted slightly red. “No going into dungeons with a ring unless you already have a ring.”