The pit went deep, and we followed the walls of smooth stone downward at least 30 meters before it opened into a massive chamber below. It was a loading bay of some kind: beneath where the pit made a hole in the ceiling I could see a circular platform that was painted with the motif of a star, its size matching that of the opening—probably a lift of some kind. Empty metal racks stood at the far sides of the room, and rails hung with chains that were fixed to pulleys were set into the ceiling.
But I had only a fleeting second to notice this before we passed the threshold of the opening and glided out into the chamber. There were almost two-dozen demons looking up at us, mostly the corrupted gnomes and dwarves but some morthoths. Almost as soon as we left the opening, chains lashed at us from all sides.
Cuby let out a Jolting Shout, momentarily interrupting the entire room, then used her Mighty Leap to jump back up into the opening and cast my Hardlight Construct there, making a little platform on the inside of the pit before falling back into the room and using a strike on one of the corrupted.
I jumped up onto this makeshift ledge and began to load her up with Purging Destructive Waves, enjoying my new Spell Augment in action as Cuby, her blades a whirl of glowing destruction, laid into the demons around her.
The monsters were all level 13, which was nothing to our combined levels of 26. I watched Cuby with fascination as, virtually invulnerable, she shrugged off knockdowns, firebolts, and more than a hundred melee attacks—when she used Withstand, many of the attacks hit her but did no damage at all.
I didn’t know what her Strike Cooldown reduction was, but it had to be very high: her silver-blue sword flashed with inhuman speed, obliterating demons into blue-white cinders even as it beat back their weapons, protecting her.
Soon there were so few enemies that I was investing her with Purging…
Wait. Purging Purging Radiance? The prefix for my new spell augment didn’t make any sense. Worse, this was the spell it was most likely to be used with.
Superpurging Radiance? Doublepurging Radiance? I let out a laugh.
I’m enjoying this also, Cuby said below me as the Mana Shield recharged to full and she mopped up the last few monsters.
It’s just… I don’t know how to sufficiently describe the amount of purging that’s going on, here.
What?
“It’s a Purging Purging Radiance,” I said, leaping down and starting to cast a Supercharged Emotive Attenuation. “One second.”
The spell took 8 seconds to cast, and then I was plunged into a whirlwind of strange mental sensations, each of them seeming to carry a kind of volume that was proportioned to how close they were. I could feel Cuby clearly, excited, determined, and a little confused—probably because of Purging Purging Radiance.
And I could also feel, raging like a stormy sea below us, an overwhelming chorus of pained hatred, seething uncontrollably, unpleasant even to behold. But in that sea there had to be something else, something more sophisticated….
“There,” I said, beginning to cast the spell again. My monstrous Power bonus meant the spell had a range of 226 meters when it was supercharged.
“You felt them?”
But the spell had a verse oral component and a full movement component, and so I had to finish doing my strange interpretive dance-chant before I could answer her properly.
“That way,” I said, pointing through the floor at a diagonal. “I sense a constellation of trepidation, outright fear, anticipation, frustration… the emotions of people, not demons. One moment.”
I cast the spell again, but this time not as a Supercharged Spell. “Gone,” I said, reaching out with my senses again. “They’re further than 113 meters. My investiture ability has a fairly high range from what we’ve seen—how about you use Haste and run ahead, gather whatever demons you can find. I’ll catch up.”
Cuby grinned at this idea, then ran off into the doorway that was closest to where I’d pointed, finding a stairway that she leapt down before meeting another room full of demons. I followed, but more slowly—I was looking through her eyes with our mind link, casting more Purging Destructive Waves for her to unleash.
The room she’d found herself in was a kind of stable, but she didn’t stick around, turning through a nearby doorway to find another, narrower stairway that funneled all those demons she’d pulled into the narrow passage behind her. That stairway opened onto a flat stone road that seemed to have been carved out a dark cavern, the edge of the road dropping away into shadow below, the far walls invisible.
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A few steps and Cuby found herself immobilized, her feet stuck to pads of what she looked down to see was almost completely transparent webbing.
Oh no, I thought.
What is it? Cuby asked as she struggled to free herself, twisting in place to throw another Destructive Wave at the howling horde of demons behind her.
Spiders, I said. Then, as I took the narrow stairway down into the cavern where she fought, I watched through her eyes as they came out of the dark, running toward the ledge of the roadway on their near-invisible webs with the graceless, twitching movements of an arachnid: giant demon spiders, each of them with a body the size of a horse.
Cuby saw them and let out a shapeless cry of horror. “No!” she said, finally freeing herself and leaping to the other side of the pack of demons. “No!” she cried with uncharacteristic emotion, smashing them with another Destructive Wave and then laying into them with her strikes. “No, no, no! Alatar, you do it—I’m going to lose my self-mastery!”
I still had the focus potion on me, so it was no trouble for me to step out in front as Cuby dealt with the demons—they had broken her Mana Shield, but her weapon was healing her every time she killed one, enough so that she stayed close to full.
The spiders spat venom at me as they closed in, and the debuff that the fourth attacker managed to hit me with was called Paralytic Venom and mostly worked as expected. As they stepped into the light of our weapons, I got a better look at them: they were big and ugly giant spiders, red and black with glowing eyes and thick blades on their front two legs.
They closed around me and began attacking with their bladed legs while the venom still had me paralyzed—one of them even clutched at me and started gnawing on my shoulder with its massive, dribbling mandibles.
This is horrible, Alatar, Cuby wailed in my mind. Why do I feel this way?
You’re afraid of spiders, Cuby, I said as their debuff wore off and I started casting a Hardlight Tether. It wasn’t to bind any particular monster—instead I simply conjured it running parallel to the road, but at the highest, furthest range I could place it, far out into the dark.
The tether seemed to fall for a moment, but the line struck the invisible webs seemingly everywhere after only a couple of feet—-and what was more, it illuminated more of the cavern around it—a vast chamber with a set of tiered levels leading away from us, each of them a roadway in front of a set of buildings. Ahead of us, I could even see the stairway leading downward into what had once been a district of the town of Mirrakatetz.
But this was all an afterthought: what the tether really did was illuminate, by way of glittering lines, the fact that the cavern was strewn about at all levels by near-invisible spiderweb, and that hanging in the air as if floating were almost two dozen of the horse-sized spiders that had not yet come to engage us.
They began to move toward us as soon as the light touched them.
I don’t like being afraid of spiders, Alatar, Cuby said, sounding in my mind almost like a wailing child, the elation from becoming chosen having evaporated.
Rest assured, I said, casting a Purging Destructive Wave as four spiders attacked me from all sides, I would be having trouble with this right now also if it weren’t for the focus potion blunting my emotions. I hesitated, then added: but don’t drink your potion, we need you to keep True Sight on.
But as frightening as they might have been, they were no more threatening than the wyverns: they had their claws, a bite, and a venom that paralyzed for a few seconds, but my Defense Rating, Resistances, and high Hit Point pool rendered them impotent. Cuby finished with the flock of demons she’d pulled from the other room, and I loosed my fragmented missile just so that I could cast more Destructive Waves without worrying about interruption. Once it cooled down, Haste made me nigh-unhittable so that I didn’t have to worry about the paralysis.
Cuby got over some of her initial trepidation and joined me, striking them with what looked like a cleave ability and slowly grinding down what I guessed to be Hit Point bars of almost 6000 health. It was clear that the room hadn’t been made to be challenged all at once, but we were so overleveled it didn’t matter: in a minute or so, the spiders were dead, their corpses thankfully obliterated by divine damage.
“These human feelings aren’t always pleasant,” Cuby said, panting.
“No they are not,” I said, wondering again at the absurdity of my situation. They had a holodeck. Who uses that for giant spiders? Giant, demon spiders?
But then, in the distance—
“Shh,” Cuby said, apparently hearing the same thing. Echoing through stone hallways, perhaps from somewhere below us:
“—Tire of these pointless games. Prepare to die, you pathetic fools!”
“They’re fighting another boss,” I said, already casting another Emotive Attenuation. The spell finished, and I reached out with my senses….
“They’re almost right below us,” I said. “Closer, now.”
“Let’s go.”