“Well,” Zanie crossed her arms and grinned at Caleb, who rolled his eyes, and Hazel, who raised his brows and smiled back. The four of them stood in front of a dungeon entrance, swirling and sparking just like the others they had seen.
After spending the rest of last evening and night at the barn, continuing to scrounge every single spare board they could find and use for practice and taking naps in between, they continued their journey down the road, guided by the bare utility poles. Eventually they found a bare strip cutting through the forest on the side of the road, where a line of transmission towers had obviously once sat. This led to a decision to either continue following the road or veer off and try to follow the missing transmission towers.
It was a good thing they decided to take a chance on checking out the now void area cut through the woods. After slogging for an hour or so through waist high grasses that were wet from the rain and totally soaked all of their pants and shoes–half of which were uncomfortable briars that snagged and tore their clothes–they finally came across this dungeon entrance.
Zanie noticed Caleb’s discomfort and bumped him roughly with her shoulder. “We’ve got a level five elf with us now, you can stay behind instead of having to come into the dungeon with us.”
“Hell no,” Caleb scoffed, looking a little wide-eyed but flapping a hand at the dungeon entrance like it was no big deal. “You aren’t leaving me out here by myself.”
Now it was Zanie’s turn to roll her eyes.
“We might all need to go anyway, because that dungeon has two rings.” Jeremy said.
“Oh,” Zanie squinted at the entrance.
“Are you able to record everything that you can see in the dungeon’s overlay?” Hazel asked.
“I can,” Jeremy pulled out his notebook and a pen, “But it might be useful for you to cast the scan spell, honestly, because it picks up things in the overlays that I can’t see with my eyes.”
“That’s true.” Hazel nodded. “Zanie, can I see the draft of the spell?”
“Sure.” Zanie pulled the duffle off one shoulder and held it out to Caleb, “Here let’s find a place to stash our bags.”
As soon as she handed the scan spell over to Hazel, she took Jeremy’s bags and went over to where Caleb was stashing the bags under the edge of a thick briar patch while cursing up a storm about getting scratched, but Jeremy appreciated the effort to hide their bags somewhere they wouldn’t be messed with. Even if it was unlikely they would be messed with way out here.
“Are you going to be alright to go in there after casting that?” Jeremy asked, giving the scan spell a nod. “After all, we certainly cannot handle a two ring dungeon without you.”
"Well, given that it is the slimes inside, I think we should be fine.” Hazel told him. “So long as we don’t encourage them to group together like we did last time.”
He cast the spell with relative ease in comparison to how much it impacted them at level one, but Jeremy figured they should still probably give him a little bit to recover, so they took their time discussing how they planned to deal with the slimes. They may not have known the layout of the dungeon or exactly what they might run into, but they could plan a bit.
Hazel pulled out his massive hammer once again, as well as another spear. This one was much simpler than the last one, just plain wood and a simple blade. He held it out to Zanie.
“You can help me out a bunch.” Hazel told her. “You don’t have to go all out each time, but a little stab with a sizeable jolt should be enough to shatter their cores.”
Zanie took the spear from him and flipped it slowly a few times between her hands like a color guard flag or something along those lines.
Caleb watched her with a contemplative expression, fingers rubbing over his mouth. “Do you think we should try to harvest some of the cores?” he asked. “If she could melt them instead of zapping them?”
“I don’t know if I would be able to melt them quickly enough.” Zanie argued.
"You melted the one at the end of your spear before all the cores shattered in that big one the other day,” Caleb pointed out.
“Yeah, but that might have been because they were all combined together.”
“Maybe not.”
“How about you try to do one of each while we are in there and you can then decide which is more efficient.” Jeremy suggested.
Zanie shrugged and went back to looking over the spear. She’d apologized profusely for ruining the last spear Hazel gave her, which he assured her he was not worried about. It had been heavily enchanted and was probably just the first thing that Hazel grabbed out of his bag, without thinking of the consequences of running however much amperage Zanie had run through it, but it had not apparently been his best nor favorite spear. This time though, he was definitely deliberate about giving her just a plain old spear.
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“So, if we are just going to be hanging out in the back, not really doing anything,” Caleb leaned toward Jeremy and murmured, “what’s the point of us going in at all?”
“Well, if one of us gets hurt we can do a healing spell. Plus, we don’t actually know what the boss is going to be and so all four of us might be useful at that point, especially if they are tuckered out from killing all the slimes.” Jeremy listed out. “Plus if we aren’t in there with them, we won’t get any experience from the fights.”
“Okay, okay,” Caleb tossed his hands in the air and laughed helplessly. “I get it.”
“Just don’t put up any barriers unless absolutely – and I really mean life or death – this time.” Hazel said. “We don’t need them coalescing the way they did last time.
“Got it.” Jeremy gave him a salute.
“You guys ready to go in then?” Zanie asked, bracing the butt of the spear against the ground and leaning on it a bit.
“As I’ll ever be,” Caleb muttered.
Hazel nodded and propped his huge hammer against his shoulder. Jeremy squinted at it and saw that one of the enchantments on its handles was indeed flowing with iridescent mana, which presumably made such an unwieldy weapon manageable to lift and swing. He followed Zanie through the dungeon portal, then Jeremy gestured for Caleb to go through and took a deep breath before plunging in himself.
They’d made a rule that you needed at least one ring to go into a one-ringed dungeon. Hopefully it would not bite them in the ass to go into a two-ringed dungeon with only one ring. Hopefully all of Hazel’s rings and experience would balance out their own lack of experience.
Once he stepped through and brushed off the static clinging to him, Jeremy glanced around to see what the inside of this dungeon had manifested as. It was a forest. There were large, gnarled trees with massive trunks and limbs that were tangled together above their heads. Jeremy glanced over his shoulder and saw that they even extended out behind the dungeon portal so that it seemed to actually be in the center of the space.
He did not like that they would be unable to linearly clear this dungeon like they had the ones. The area of the forest extended out in a huge circle around the dungeon portal, somewhat like the field that the nightmares came out of. Along all the edges of the trees, where regularly they might give way to a field or something along those lines, they gave way to a void. Just like in that field that the nightmares had come from the void then extended out and above their heads in all directions.
The only light came from the dungeon portal itself and the Hazel’s camping lantern, which he had pulled out of his pocket and was now holding up so they could all peer around. The dungeon portal cast everything in an ambient blue glow and the camping lantern splashed bright white light on a circle around it. This cast the bare, gnarled tree trunks and limbs, which were layered around each other, into a creepy glow.
It also illuminated the many rock features below the trees, from which lightly glowing iridescent crystals. The rocks themselves were oddly shaped, some incorporated into the tree trunks, with roots growing over and around them. They were all pockmarked as though they had been eaten away by an acid or something and in many places, there were holes through which Jeremy could see straight through. And dispersed between these large holes and divots in the rock protruded crystals just like the ones in the last dungeon.
“Mana crystals?” Zanie asked out loud, approaching the closest rock formation and running her fingers over a cluster of crystals.
“Yes.” Hazel walked forward a bit and held the lantern higher, looking around. Caleb shuffled from foot to foot, standing with his arms crossed, frowning up through the tree limbs at the void above their heads.
Jeremy joined Zanie in inspecting the rocks, specifically the crystals, while she moved to check out the strange voids in their structure. “What on earth is this?” She wondered.
“Do you think the slimes, like, ate the metal out of the rock? Like it they had iron or something in them.” Jeremy wondered aloud, still poking at the crystals, and leaning in to see that they did indeed have mana running through them.
“Yeah, I mean, I guess if the dungeon made rocks with metal in them, then the slimes would have eaten it all before going out into the world.” Zanie shrugged.
“Hazel, how do you mine these crystals?” Jeremy raised his voice to be heard. Even as he said this, he wiggled one of the crystals and yelped in surprise when it simply cracked away from the rock into his hand. Hazel gestured to the crystal in his hand as though this were the obvious answer and chose not to say anything in response.
“In the last dungeon, we could not break them away,” Jeremy defended.
“They may not have actually been mana crystals.” Hazel said. “I’ve been inside another dungeon where they were simply decorative, like the stone walls themselves, rather than something you could actually use. This dungeon seems to populate more than just walls and such, it actually has living trees and mana crystals.”
“Huh.” Zanie turned away from the rocks to look at the trees, but then her eyes widened as she looked into the space between them. “Hey, Hazel, I think there’s a bunch of them coming toward us.”
Jeremy glanced back and saw that indeed there was a whole crowd of metal slimes plopping toward them through the trees, swarming around the trunks and over the roots. Jeremy turned around fully and squinted at them. He had been curious to know if the level of the dungeon impacted the level of the monsters inside. Apparently, it did not. These were all red, level zero creatures.
“Well, okay.” Hazel held the lantern out. “Will one of you come be the light bearer?”
“Sure!” Caleb leapt forward and grabbed the lantern from him, probably excited to make sure he could at the very least remain in the circle of light, so that maybe he could forget the void yawning all around them.
Hazel nodded in appreciation, then swung the hammer around a few times and waited for the slimes to come reach him. Jeremy wondered if it was his hammer and Zanie’s spear, which she also held at the ready as she stepped forward, that drew the slimes toward them or if they were attracted to something as simple as the metal in their belt buckles and knives, or even just their blood. They did, after all, seem to leach all the metal out of the rocks inside the dungeon.
As soon as the slimes got within range, Hazel began his game of whack-a-mole with them, flattening each into a thin pancake with a shattered core in the center. Zanie poked one and tried to melt it first, which worked pretty well. Within about five seconds, it began to lose its form and after only a few more it melted completely. The metal slipped away from the in-tact core and flowed across the dirt, forest floor.
And just like that, Hazel and Zanie began to efficiently dispatch every single slime that came their way.