Once Kontor was in on the plan, I placed my illusory wall and we caught the attention of the Rock Worm Young by attacking them from the upper platform, but from there the whole ordeal was rather underwhelming. They never reached us, flailing their way up the rocky terrain at a laughably slow pace while my Magic Arrows, and to a lesser extent Cuby’s thrown attacks, cut away their hit points until they collapsed.
We listened for a while, but there was no distant vibration, nothing to culminate in the sudden bursting-forth of some giant rock worm parent now eager to destroy us.
“Looks like we got away with it!” Cuby said. “Loot time!”
The rock worm young hadn’t dropped anything, but the stones around the nest were lootable:
Common Item - Natural Glowstone
This stone glows with a faint green light, and is useful to multiple professions.
We split them up and then continued on along the cave. The next gallery had some familiar sights—weblings.
“Well then,” Cuby said, drawing her dagger. “Where do you want to stick the illusion?”
- - -
We didn’t find any more rock worms, but we found plenty of weblings. Mostly in groups of two or three, and one more group of four—Cuby had taken a little hit point damage by the time we made it out of the natural caves and back into the mine shafts, but that was the only sign of the time we’d spent in combat. We were closing in on level 4.
“It’s not too far to the lift,” said Kontor. “Through here.”
He took us into a room that seemed to be a kind of merger area for mine carts: several sets of tracks merged in the middle, with a few rusty carts, some of them missing wheels, removed from the tracks and stacked haphazardly to one side. Two of them were still on the tracks, but were empty of ore.
Some simple wooden stairs led up to a scaffold that had a small cluster of barrels on it, along with another cave-opening.
“It’s just up there,” Kontor said, pointing with the torch.
“Hold on,” said Cuby, holding up a hand for us to be quiet. She listened a moment. “Hm,” she said loudly. “Could be loot around. What do you two think we should check out first—the mine carts or the barrels? The mine carts, right?”
But as she spoke, her other hand came to hide behind her back—where she started to repeatedly clasp and unclasp her fist. She was trying to tell us something, I realized.
And just as I thought this, three people emerged from the barrels and started to attack us. An elf woman with a dagger and the same padded armor that Cuby was wearing:
Messouri - Level 3
A human woman with a glowing blue staff and the same Simple Robes that I was wearing:
Taela - Level 3
And a tiny being—a gnome? Who looked like a man and wore chainmail, wielding a glowing hammer:
Haritien - Level 3
The mage started casting their Magic Arrow—but the glow of the energy on their hands seemed different from what I was used to, a deeper blue. The rogue and the gnome leapt down from the scaffold, both of them running at Cuby.
“Run!” Cuby shouted, pulling free her dagger.
“This way!” I heard Kontor shout from behind me.
I had a sudden idea. As Cuby wheeled to face me and Kontor and begin to flee, I materialized one of the glowstones we’d looted, shouting: “Watch out!” as I raised it to toss it at the ground.
It worked. For a short moment, just as the two attackers reached Cuby, both of them instinctively raised their arms up and looked away from the stone as I threw it on the ground, pivoting in place before it even struck.
Sure, the stone didn’t do anything—but as I’d guessed, they hadn’t passed through the natural caverns. They hadn’t seen any glowstone, and so they they didn’t know it wasn’t some kind of weapon. Having turned, I could see that Kontor was at the head of one of the mine-carts that had been mounted on the rails, pushing it along. I joined him alongside Cuby right as I felt a painful flash of freezing cold connect with my back.
Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.
“Stop them!” a woman’s voice called out from behind us.
But it was too late. Cuby’s warning meant that we’d acted fast, and the cart was well in motion by the time we all hauled ourselves into it—the rogue caught up to us, but Cuby turned and hit her once with a blinding strike before she got even a single attack in.
Then we were barrelling into the dark, stuffed uncomfortably into an iron cart, the flames of the torch flickering in the rushing air so that we could barely see ahead of us.
“They’re going to follow us!” I said, leaning in to practically shout into Kontor’s ear so as to be heard over the sound of scraping metal and rushing air. I was thinking of the other cart: at least one of them in that room still had wheels on it, and one was all they needed. “Is there anywhere we can lose them? Anywhere that could give us an advantage in a fight?”
The mine cart rattled as it rolled forward, wobbling, clearly not designed to transport people at high speeds. Kontor seemed to think a moment, then said: “We need to bail in a second!” he shouted. “Ready?”
Cuby nodded. “Ready!” I shouted.
“Go!”
All of us tried to hop the edge of the cart at once, to varying degrees of success: Kontor actually got out and landed on his feet, while Cuby and I went sprawling. I took a few points of damage to my Mana Shield.
Kontor held the torch up, illuminating a long room with two nearby exits. The rails for the mine cart extended away into the dark, but the cart itself had fallen onto its side from the sudden, chaotic forces of us jumping off it. “Come on,” he said. “This way.”
“Wait,” I said. “Get the cart off the tracks and I’ll hide it with an illusion. It might confuse them a little longer.”
It was only when I set my weight against it that I really felt my own strength for the first time—apparently having a score of 8 was still substantially stronger than I’d been back on Earth.
No time to think about that stuff now, I thought to myself as I cast my illusion, covering the cart with the image of a large outcropping of rock. Then we both rushed after Kontor, and were soon hurrying through a narrow passage of the cave.
“Listen,” Cuby said as she fell in beside me. “There’s three of them, which means plenty of skill points. Someone’s going to have tracking. If they figure out where we got off the track, they’ll find us fast. If not, they’ll find us slow.”
“I know,” Kontor said, his voice serious. “But Alatar asked for an advantage. I think I’ve got one.”
“Oh,” she said, her voice brightening. “Well that’s good. Also, while we’ve got time, I just wanted to bring up how much I told you so, Alatar. I told you so bigtime.”
I let out an exasperated sigh, certain that I had no way to explain to Cuby that killing people you didn’t know anything about was wrong even if they later turned out to be as murderous as you were.
“Okay, okay,” she said, raising her hands. “We’ll talk later about how fiercely correct I was.”
We came into another large gallery—this one half-natural, half-dug by the looks of it. There were a half-dozen working carts filled with dirt and rubble along one exit that bore a set of rails. One wall had been dug into, and a very low-ceilinged area had been braced with timbers, and extended into the rock further than I could see. What was more….
“Oh,” I said.
Cuby was so excited that she clapped her hands. “Kontor, are those explosives?”
Near the dug-out section of the wall was a row of four barrels, the likes of which I’d seen before in many, many virtual spaces: they were painted red, and had white skulls on them. It really is a universal sign, though seeing them in perfectly simulated reality was a little bizarre.
“An advantage,” he said. “Hopefully enough.”
“Who takes the time to paint them red and put the skulls on,” I mused. “You’d think a label would be enough.”
“No,” said Kontor, shaking his head. “No—people are incredibly stupid and lazy. Trust me, it’s best to use every precaution you can think of.”
“We should hurry,” said Cuby. “They could be here—”
The earth shook.
We all shared a moment where nobody said anything, but it was clear from our faces that everyone knew what was coming. A sort of—oh, goddamnit—that didn’t need to be vocalized.
Seriously, now of all times?
One of the natural walls of the cave crumbled, dust coming off it, then cracked, then burst open. The flash of a red eye preceded the massive body of a burrowing worm ripped itself free of the wall and thrashed out into the open. It was covered in metal spikes.
Bladed Tombworm - Level 5
I’d started casting a Magic Arrow as soon as its head had appeared, and as it pulled itself free of the wall I had loosed it. The arrow connected—and did a dishearteningly low amount of its hp bar despite not being resisted any more than if it had struck a webling.
Not good. Not good at all.