We held the line at the doorstep of the forge room, cycling out and finishing everyone's bonus objective within 5 minutes. Kazek took a mandible to the eye and switched out with Bomilik on the shield wall, and all of us in the front two ranks were marked with crisscrossed scratches and bites. Yet Chane’s training had prepared us well, and we managed to hold through sheer determination and violence of action.
The minty chemicals that had held them off at first were washed away almost as soon as one of the dwarves released another blast, but were still effective when sprayed directly onto the advancing swarm. Instead of a line of repellent, the poisonous chemical was instead used as a direct weapon. Each dwarv taking turns to turn the next wave of swarming and biting insects into curled up balls of carapace that choked the tunnel and blocked the way of the next group.
The constant use of the spray left me feeling tingly, cold, and a little numb. The water running along the floor and slowly seeping over the threshold was lukewarm in reality, but the abundance of menthol left me feeling chilled and my nose numbed. My height gave me a slight advantage fighting over top of the shield wall, but also meant I took on more of the minor injuries and soon my arms were bleeding freely from dozens of little cuts and scrapes.
“I'm tapped!” Lokralda yelled out after misting the roiling wall of raging insects again.
“Kikk, give them a final blast, then we all retreat to the elevator chamber!” Kazek yelled from the back of the formation.
The dwarven lass nodded and pushed forward, switching places with Lokralda next to me as our metallurgist fell back. We all knew Kikkelin to be our weakest fighter of our group, yet she did her part. Holding onto our reserve of the necessary compounds as the only one who had not sent repeated bursts of the chemical weapon over the shield wall. Everyone other than myself had depleted their own stores of the concoction, and I was pretty sure I didn’t have the components in my mostly barren satchel to make the formula anyway.
I was unsure how the inner workings of the dwarves, for lack of a better word, worked. I knew they were really giant beetle-like beings. They had large rounded pressure-vessel bodies, and could do amazing things simply by spitting or breathing out various compounds, but how they managed to produce the variety of effects I’d seen from them was still a mystery to me. As far as I could tell they carried stockpiles of various base materials within their bodies and could quickly synthesize pretty much anything liquid or gaseous, but I had no clue if they used special glands or extra stomachs or how it worked at all.
“One more push, then retreat!” Kazek called out, setting his hands on my shoulders and pushing forward as I did the same to Bomilik in front of me.
“Maybe you can figure out how they work if you give it some more thought, you’re not putting together all of the information. Think about your hands-on experience and what it means.” Max chimed in, but I was too caught up in the fight to examine the thought more closely.
We braced as a group and rammed our shields into the wall of freshly poisoned insects, jamming them all together and packing them into a plug of rolled up bodies. After two steps back, there was a split second of peace. It would take a moment for fresh monsters to push forward through the mass of poisoned scolo, and we used that time to shuffle backwards in an organized retreat.
We moved as a block across the chamber for the first few paces, walking backwards and keeping our two shields between us and the tide of centipedes. Lokra broke from the formation and ran ahead of us, while Kazek produced a round stone about the size of my head from his inventory.
“Break and retreat! We regroup ten head back from the chamber entrance!” Kazek called out before he touched a thin wire that hung from his rock to the lamp strapped to Sallis’ shoulder. The wire burst into a bright white light, and he tossed the stone at the enemy horde.
Kikkelin broke immediately, turning and running across the domed room just behind Lokralda. I turned along with Kazek and we both started to run after them. Our frontline fighters Bomilik and Jozoic were slowed by their heavy shields, Jo especially was looking ragged and worn. Unable to lift the huge slab of bronze, he shuffled backwards while dragging the bottom of the man-hole sized plate of metal against the rough basalt floor.
I stopped at the side of the double-door sized entrance to the elevator chamber, placing a hand on the rough stone lip of the portal while I looked back at our frontline-turned-rearguard. Kazek stopped beside me, giving me an appraising look, then turned just in time to see one of the beasts splashing into the clear space of the room after us.
It clacked its mandibles and scurried through the thin coating of water along the floor, charging over the remnants of a pile of ore. Without the close pressed confinement of its swarming brethren and the narrow tunnel, the long creature was free to take advantage of its speed and maneuverability.
The scolovian coiled up and then straightened out as it leapt onto Jozoic’s shield, bowling him over onto his back as he took cover. Bomilik roared and bashed his shield into it, knocking its head back before it could wind around the bronze plate and bite at our downed fighter. The beast’s rear end curled around and pulled Bomilik into the pile, its stinger narrowly missing jabbing into his side as the fifteen foot long insect wrapped up both of them.
I didn’t even register charging into the melee myself, but suddenly Kazek and I were standing next to the brawl and raining blows down on the creature. My hammer rebounded off the thing’s outer shell, springing back as the chitinous plate flexed but did not break its thick back plating. The next moment, it felt like I was picked up and tossed across the room by a wall of force as the stone-bound concussion grenade Kazek had thrown into the tunnel exploded.
The pressure wave tossed a thin wall of water and scattered bug parts into the confined room, shredded my eardrums, and knocked me down into the churning water at our feet. I caught a half inhale of the murky half-inch of liquid and coughed, my already abused lungs screaming in protest and demanding my undivided attention. I pushed myself up into a crawl and hacked through a few more coughs.
Something grabbed my ankle and pulled, and I kicked backwards without looking as I coughed up some of the foul water. Whatever it was let go, and I finally got myself under control enough to think about anything other than clenching my diaphragm. I looked back, and found Bomilik right there with a muddy footprint across his forehead. He was still wrapped up by the beast and wrestling with the thing’s stinger, holding the blunt edge of it under his arm and pressed harmlessly against his side. His dropped shield lay over his legs while Jozoic continued grappling with the monster's front half. Jo had its head held against the lip of his shield while he used one of its mandibles as a leaver to keep it there.
Kazek was now wrapped up in the coils of the beast as well, somewhere in the middle and stabbing down at the thing with a small dagger he had produced. His little blade scratched and gouged at the plating, but the writhing motion of the brawl kept him from striking accurately between the armored segments and actually doing any damage to the creature.
I pushed myself to my feet as a light flashed across the darkened chamber. Sallis stood in the doorway and was shining her light back at us to brighten the otherwise dark room. I think she yelled something, but I was too deafened to hear it. I saw the light reflecting off the marred bronze of Bomilik’s dropped shield, and wrapped my cold hands around the edges of the metal plate. I raised it above my head before bringing it down on the creature like a massive blunt cleaver.
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The beast’s shell finally cracked, somewhere between where it held our two leaders. It shivered and redoubled its squirming, trying to pull its head away from Jozoic’s dogged grip to bite at me instead. I brought the round slab of metal up and down again, bending my legs and adding all of my own weight and power behind the blow and probably making a goofy noise I couldn’t hear at all in the process.
This time, the inch-thick plate of metal broke clear through the creature and chipped the basalt floor underneath. Its rear section went limp and released Bomilik, who surged to his feet and used the thing's own weapon against the front two-thirds of the beast. While I repositioned and prepared to smash the shield down on the creature's new middle section between Kazek and Jozoic, he jabbed its own stinger into its broken and oozing new rear end.
Looking back, it was super gross. After he had stabbed the monsters own stinger into its smashed apart back end, he reached into the broken-off section of body all the way up to his shoulder, making a face of stern concentration as he felt around inside the creature's innards.
“Oh man, that's gnarly.” Max muttered in the background, his voice surprisingly clear without the distraction of being able to hear anything else at all.
Whatever he was doing drove the thing into a frenzy. It lifted Jozoic off of the ground and body slammed him back down when he refused to let go, still holding its head pinned to the top lip of his shield. The scolovian let out a long hiss and thrashed around some more, but it let go of Kazek and rapidly slowed its movements. I tried to pull the shield into my inventory to free up my hands, but got another ‘Inventory full’ chime. Not wanting to leave the valuable thing behind in the slowly rising water, I shifted my grip to one of the arm straps and freed up one of my hands to help pull Kazek up to his feet.
As soon as I had him up on his feet, he grabbed a hold of Jozoic by the strapping around his chest and started dragging him back towards the exit. “Pull back! Lokralda, throw another grenade!”
Bomilik moved to help haul Jozoic back, taking his shield from him and presenting it towards the enemy. I glanced towards the smoking tunnel at the far end of what used to be our workshop. The room had almost felt homey for a short time, filled with the familiar sounds of work and reassuring presence of my row. It had been swiftly transformed into a dark, wet, battleground full of horrible sights and tinged with dirty black smoke.
I formed up with Bomilik, walking backwards towards Lokra, who was struggling with shaking hands to light the length of wire that stuck out of the somewhat spherical sealed stone explosive. Max, sensing that the fight was mostly over, decided to capitalize on my deafened state and his monopoly on my sense of hearing.
“Seeing the ass-half of a giant centipede wielded like a turkey baster to inject the other half was not on my trial bingo-card. That was wild. You gotta let me post that clip on one of my pages. He reached in and squeezed the venom sack!”
We made it to the threshold, Kazek giving me a signal pat on my shoulder to alert me to the step up. Lokralda had built up a long mound of discarded ore about 8 inches high and sprayed it with a compound that caused it to form a thick protective outer shell of hard oxides. The mound held back the water while the bowl shape of the floor slowly filled.
Kazek turned and took the grenade out of Lokra’s shaking hands. His face grim, his nose broken and knocked out of place to the side. He lit the grenade and threw it over the shield wall, landing it just shy of the smoky swarm’s tunnel entrance. He looked at me and said something but his words literally fell on deaf ears. Frankly, as someone who had recently experienced true deafness and managed to regenerate and lose it a number of times all over again in the recent past, I thought the game was doing a rather poor job with the simulation.
My ears should be ringing, or sending muffled and distorted signals to my brain. Instead, it was pure and complete silence. A little ‘deafened’ debuff tag had appeared near the top of my HUD and was counting down from 20 minutes. Before I could shake my head in response to Kazek’s attempt to talk to me, stark white text began to type itself out next to him like a speech bubble minus the bubble.
“I got you.” Max commented.
“Go, you’re the slowest climber!” Kazek pointed again over his shoulder, before turning to Lokra, and a scared looking Kikkelin who stood a few paces into the tunnel. “Kikk, spray down the walls with the mentha breath. Bo, you’re on rear guard! Lok, go with Nick.”
I gave him a wide eyed look, then nodded and pushed the shield into his hands. “Take this!” I said, probably too loudly because I couldn’t even hear myself at all.
I’d honestly rather have kept the shield, but my inventory was full and I knew that trying to carry it down the sheer cliff was a bad idea. Plus, I wanted it to stay near the frontline where my teammates needed it more. While I’m being honest, I’d also rather have stayed up there and fought as well. I was mad, and despised these things. I wanted to stay with my row and kick some ass.
Despite my own desire, I turned to retreat with Lokra. Even with Sallis’ disparaging nickname for Kazek, I respected him as a leader… for the most part. He had given me a chance within their team and never been cruel, or anything other than professional the entire time I’d known him. Like Tevin or Ali back home, I trusted his judgement enough to follow my ingrained Arktrian reflex and obey my orders.
Lokralda slid over the ledge and began to climb down ahead of me and I quickly followed. The dwarves had carved a series of handholds down the side of the sheer cliff in my absence. If this was a training drill the holds would have made scaling down the thirty feet or so to the bottom a trivial task, but the stressful situation inflated the difficulty substantially. Halfway down there was a terrifying moment that I was forced to cling to the handholds for a moment when another coughing fit took me over. I clenched my eyes closed and fists tight against the rough volcanic stone and held on while my body flexed and expelled some more gross stuff, worried I would cough myself right off the side of the cliff.
I managed to keep my grip through the fit and forced myself to stop coughing as soon as I could fight off the reflex, then continued climbing down. When my feet touched the bottom, I found the lower portion of the cave filled with crunchy gravel and even caught the barest hint of sulphur and soot through the heavy menthol smell. I looked up from the floor and was temporarily blinded by Lokra’s bright lamp. I blocked the bright point out with a raised hand and stumbled across the room into the previously raider-occupied tunnel.
We were soon joined by Sallis, then Jozoic who was being helped by Kikkelin, then another explosion from above tore through the cavern and stirred up the soot and stone dust in the bottom of the chamber. The pressure wave rocked us all back a step, but we had just enough distance to keep our footing. I still couldn’t hear anything, but was forced to blink my eyes rapidly to clear the dust from them. Someone grabbed my shoulder and guided me further down the tunnel while I was blinded.
A few seconds later, we were joined by Kazek and Bomilik and in a loose version of our fighting formation again. When my eyes cleared enough for me to see I realized I was at the back of the pack, or the front depending on how you looked at it. Sallis let go of my shoulder and handed me off to Kikkelin, then taken Kazek’s place as a shield bearer. While I couldn’t smell it any more, I could feel a fresh cloud of the mentha breath settling down around us in the still-dry passageway.
We continued to back up, retreating a further fifty feet behind the new line of repellent under the pressing silence. It only took 10 seconds for the first of the advancing centipedes to catch up to us, but they stopped before crossing the latest line of chemicals. They swarmed up and down the walls and clacked their mandibles before skittering away, only to be replaced by the next half dozen of them that danced out a similar reaction to the poison. Within a minute, enough of them had made it through the forge chamber to start to pile up. The ones within sight started to fight against the pressing horde, struggling against being forced over the slightly darker band of misted stone marking our defence.
Kazek ordered a full retreat, his words again appearing as white text that floated next to his head. “We need to move back and find a path to divert the swarm to. Nick and Jozoic, scout ahead and see what else has changed with the stoneshift. Our main party will lay down a line of defence and hold the bismuth chamber near the stairwell until you report.”
I caught Jozoic’s eye, and the haggard dwarv gave me a nod. Lokra grabbed my arm before I could run off and pressed her still lit lamp into my hand. She didn’t say anything, but her face was a mess of fear and shame. I gave her a smile and returned her gesture with a brotherly pat on her own shoulder, hitting a little harder than normal to show my confidence in her. She grinned in return, looking like she understood what I meant by the gesture and unfazed by the blow due to her natural sturdiness.
I clipped the new lantern to my chest then turned and rushed down the tunnel, chasing after Jozoic who was already double marching forward.