The heavy door slammed shut behind them. The room ahead consisted of a small hut, a bubbling cauldron, and a peaceful meadow that set Emrys’s teeth on edge.
He hung back near the door as Zereh crept further in. He flashed back to Merv, hanging back while he and Jefferson engaged in the fight. It had seemed weak and pathetic then, that an adventurer would shrink from a fight they had signed up for. But here he was, doing the same thing.
Well, in this scenario he was weak and pathetic. He had bitten off more than he could chew, and in the future he would stick to dungeons he knew he could survive with or without his teammates. He would never be in this position again. Live and learn, his mother would tell him. Just do better next time.
A high-pitched cackle startled the arcanist from his musings. The noise seemed to come from everywhere all at once, and Emrys instinctively conjured fireballs above his palms.
“Two little mice have come to play,” crooned the voice of a woman. “But didn’t your mothers tell you that it’s rude to show up unannounced?”
The bubbling in the cauldron intensified. Thick green fog began to roll over the lip and onto the grassy meadow. Rather than spreading out and dispersing, it all coalesced in a steadily growing pillar. As they watched, the pillar developed a few exaggerated curves, two arms, and a tall, pointed hat. One of the arms lifted up, developed fingers, and snapped. The sharp crack reverberated through the room, and all at once the bubbling stopped. The fog sharpened into features, and a witch stood before them.
She wore a floor length gown that was the same deep emerald green of the fog. In some places, the dress seemed to still be fog, and a transparent slit showed the curve of her thigh.
Around her neck was an obsidian necklace. Thick, wavy red hair fell across her bare shoulders all the way down to her waist. Atop her head was the type of pointy black hat young witches dreamed of, complete with the little down-turn at the tip.
“A bog witch,” Emrys murmured.
“Silence, boy,” the witch snapped. “I watched you sneak through the tunnel like a rat. I saw you run and hide rather than fight like a man. If you think–”
“It’s not just men who can fight, bog bitch,” Zereh snapped. “And he’s not the one you should be worried about.” Her swords glinted with an otherworldly shine. Her brown eyes flashed bright for a moment, and a soft glow traveled up from the hilt of her swords all the way to the tip, until it looked like the blades themselves were emitting the light.
No sooner had the spell completed than she pounced. Her swords flashed almost quicker than the eye could follow, but they met only air.
The witch had vanished from where she stood and reappeared on the other side of the cauldron. “Not so fast, girlie. I like to play with my food.” She cackled, and again the sound of her laugh traveled across the walls. The witch stretched her hand out over the cauldron and started chanting. “[not sure if I want to put a real chant here, or just some chanty nonsense]”
The bubbling in the cauldron returned, this time an overflowing of red fog.
“Don’t let it touch you”, said Zereh. “I think it does poison damage.” She lunged forward again, and again the witch evaded her. Emrys watched her move. At first glance, the witch seemed to teleport, but the second time he realized that it was more of a fast side step. It wasn’t a straightforward teleport, because she had to step into what was probably a portal…Not that he had seen a portal. But her movement was portalesque.
He held his breath as he waited for the right moment. Just after Zereh dashed forward, he sent out both fireballs, each one just a few feet to either side of the warrior.
His gamble paid off. One of the fireballs was a direct hit on the witch’s shoulder, leaving behind a black scorch mark. The witch shrieked.
“You fools! You have no idea who you’re dealing with or what hell you’ve unleashed. It would have been better for you to have let me kill you quickly.” She threw her hands up, her painted nails poised, and screamed. Emrys clapped his hands against his ears, but it did nothing to dampen the sound.
The witch vanished, reappearing just outside the hut. The grass surrounding the cauldron bulged and bubbled, blurring the lines between solid ground and liquid.
Zereh backed up, her swords held at the ready. Emrys had to admire the way she never let down her guard, even for a second. She was prepared for anything, and she walked with the coiled confidence of a warrior who knew what they were capable of.
One by one, the bubbles burst. Pockets of earth opened up to reveal the ancient lake that rested below the surface, and out of each opening rose the long, flat head of a monster. Lips curled up to reveal a row of teeth that stretched across the creature’s entire face. Ninety percent of its head was jaw. One of the closer ones widened its mouth experimentally, causing its entire head to hinge at the back. When the creature snapped its mouth closed, the action sent a loud crack through the air.
Zereh wasted no time admiring their teeth. The monsters were beginning to claw their way up onto the grass, and once they did they would become that much harder to fight. She brought her blades down on the neck of one such creature. In one powerful blow, she carved straight through its scaled flesh.
For an eerie second, black eyes continued to blink and wide nostrils continued to flare. Then, it stilled. The body of the beast sank back down into the water. Zereh was already moving on to the next one.
She killed as many as she could before they could get their feet on land, but the red fog pushed her back. The fog was low, but the creatures’ stubby legs kept them mostly below it. Only their eyes and nose were above it, like disembodied heads swimming towards her.
Emrys tore his eyes away. The warrior fought with mesmerizing grace, and he understood why she had been so confident in clearing this dungeon on her own. But she wasn’t alone, and he owed it to her to make the fight that much easier.
He knew she could handle the creatures on her own, so he searched for the witch. She had portaled to the hut when the creatures appeared, but she wasn’t there any longer. At least, not obviously.
The hut itself was round, just large enough for one room and made of stone. Rose bushes decorated the front step, and there were two round windows on either side of the wooden door. It had a thatched roof which, if he squinted a little, resembled the witch’s hat. The stone could be a problem, but the roof looked flammable.
The arcanist hesitated. If the witch wasn’t so obviously evil, he would have said the house looked cute. It was like something out of a children’s story.
“They just keep coming!” Zereh interrupted his musing. “There’s something I’m missing, something to get us to the next stage. Do you see anything?”
Emrys shook himself. “I have an idea!” Before he could second-guess it further, he shot both of his fireballs at the roof of the hut. Just as he had suspected, the fire caught quickly and the whole roof went up in flames. For a moment, the flickering flames sharpened into the image of a pointed hat.
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The witch herself came screaming out the front door. “My house! My home!” she shrieked. “You rotten children. You venomous wretches.” She waved her arms in a pulling motion, and a wave of water came out of the ground, crashing over the house to douse the flames. The roof, once a light brown, had been charred to brittle black. “I’ll show you what happens to vandals.”
With a wave of her hand, the red smoke and scaled creatures sank into the earth. Black smoke gushed from the cauldron and immediately funneled into the holes in the earth. The witch chanted unintelligibly, her fingers twisting like she was conducting a symphony. Out of the earth rose skeletons. Instead of bone-white, they were black as the smoke that had risen them.
The witch cackled. “Meet your forebears,” she sneered. “They too tried to fight me and met their foolish end. I will spill your blood and suck the marrow of your bones, and you will join them.” She clapped her hands, and a lightning bolt struck the ground at her feet. Electricity arced across the wet grass to every skeleton, so that each was coated in a thin armor of lighting.
Emrys blinked rapidly, trying to disperse the after-image of the lightning bolt. When his vision finally cleared, the witch was gone. The skeletons were already converging on Zereh, who wove through the battlefield like a dancer. She slapped the skeletons with the flat of her blades, cracking their bones and moving on before they could touch her. Each attack only did partial damage, but she ducked between them and circled back around to hit them again.
She could hold her own against them, so Emrys knew he had to look at the bigger picture. He had seen bosses like this before. They threw endless waves of minions out to fight for them, and if the adventurers got caught up fighting them, they would never truly advance the fight. They were a distraction, and an effective one at that. It was the most dangerous boss-type to fight as a solo dungeoneer, because on top of clearing out the minions, you had to be on the lookout for ways to attack the main boss–in this case, the witch.
The roof had been somewhat obvious. The hut was a centerpiece, so damaging the house was as effective as damaging the witch. With her being inside the house, it was even more obvious that damaging the house would be damaging to her.
But the lightning had caught him off guard, and he didn’t know if she had gone back inside the hut, or if she was hiding amongst the trees.
He fired off a spell at the next best thing: the cauldron. He worried that just heating the cauldron would activate whatever was cooking inside, so he focused his attack on the ground below it. He sent a superheated line of fire in a circle near the base of the cauldron, burning through the grass and weakening it, until it began to tip over. Just as he’d expected, by the time the thin layer of dirt and grass had weakened enough to tip over the cauldron, the potion within had also heated enough to begin bubbling dangerously. With that in mind, Emrys had lined it up such that the cauldron tipped over in the direction of the hut, sending the potion straight for the rose bushes.
The bubbling black liquid wilted everything it touched, and within moments the rose bushes had warped into a twisted, decayed version of what they once were. The petals were overgrown with mold, and they wept thick gray drops. The skeletons sank to their knees and collapsed, their bones clattering against each other in a haphazard pile.
Once again, the witch appeared before her hut. “My roses! That’s it,” she snarled. “I will carve out your eyes and melt the flesh off your bones. I will snap every ligament and sever every nerve. You pathetic little twerps don’t deserve to take another breath. I will cleanse you from this earth!” Lightning crackled behind her.
Zereh kicked a skull. There was no rhyme or reason to the action, just pettiness. Emrys watched as she conjured a vial of health potion out of her pack and sucked it down. She had been able to stay a step ahead of the skeletons during that battle, and had even downed just over half of them, but it had taken a toll.
She was clearly a high-level warrior, and Emrys could see how she made it so far in the dungeon on her own. But he couldn’t help but think this final boss would have been too much for her on her own. A battle such as this required a multi-pronged approach, or a complete wipe of the minions before focusing on the true target. Even Zereh didn’t have that kind of stamina.
Probably.
To be fair, he didn’t actually know everything that she was capable of. But he also liked the feeling that he was contributing in a very real way to the fight.
Zereh grinned. It was the first time Emrys had seen her smile, and it was a vicious thing, all teeth and no mercy. “Now I’ve got you,” she muttered. “If you think a little lightning is enough to scare me off, you’ve got another thing coming.”
She and the witch circled each other. The witch was acutely aware of the damage Zereh could do with those swords and didn’t want to get too close. Zereh lashed out with a blade. The witch smirked, knowing she was out of range.
But Zereh’s blade was assisted by a skill. Two feet further than the tip of the blade, a blue light trailed through the air, cutting through the witch’s midsection.
She screamed in pain and stumbled back. Green lightning sprung from the witch’s fingertips. Zereh tried to dodge, but the lightning followed her. For a moment the warrior lit up as electricity crackled across her body.
Immortals never truly felt pain, Emrys had noticed over the years. Oh, they noticed when they took damage, but it was more of a detached recognition than actual pain. It made them reckless, but it also gave them the ability to push past an injury that would have been debilitating for a mortal. Emrys had once seen an immortal keep fighting on a broken leg. It slowed him down for sure, but it didn’t stop him.
So when Zereh froze as the electricity traced the contour of her armor but didn’t cry out in pain, her muscles locked up in shock until the magic ran its course, Emrys connected a few dots. She was a powerful warrior with a heavy stock of healing potions. She was entirely fearless running a dungeon on her own, and though she had demanded his share of the loot, she hadn’t made any mention of the manaroot at the core of the dungeon.
Zereh was an immortal. Just hours after he had made a vow never to party with an immortal again, he had broken it. He wanted to scream, to cry, to rage at the injustice of the world and his own impotence. Of course, he hadn’t had a choice. Of course, he would have died without her assistance, and if he was being honest, the chances of a purely mortal party finding him at the right moment was so unlikely as to be nigh impossible. It was pure desperation that had prevented him from realizing the obvious immediately.
And of course, none of those things were the priority in that moment. The witch’s lightning spell had Zereh in a full-body lock, and it was steadily draining her health. There was no telling how long she’d be able to keep the spell going and how much damage she would do in the process.
Emrys began chanting the spell for his most powerful attack. He would only get one shot at this; once the witch’s attention had shifted to him he would be as good as dead, so he had to do as much damage as possible in one hit, to give Zereh the chance to finish her off.
Thick clouds of smoke formed above the witch. They swirled above her head, steadily brightening with red and orange. He let the spell charge as much as he dared – Zereh’s health was still draining with every second he spent casting – and unleashed. Fire rained down on the witch. Each drop of fire hissed when it touched her skin, and she jerked away. She dropped her spell to try and dodge away from it, but the clouds followed her.
Emrys turned to Zereh. Quickly, he cast a defensive spell on her. “You’re fire resistant for forty-five seconds,” he said.
“Plenty of time.” Zereh’s grip tightened on her blades and dashed into the firestorm. Emrys quickly lost sight of her and heard only the furious screams of the witch.
“It’s resistance, not immunity!” He sensed his teammate’s health slowly ticking down as she too was caught in the storm. She ignored his cry. The firestorm was preventing the witch from using any of her spells, which made it the only way Zereh could get close enough to use her powerful melee attacks. And it was working. The witch was getting weaker every moment.
With a shriek of desperate triumph, the witch teleported away, appearing on the other side of the hut. The smokey clouds moved to follow her, but she had some time before they caught up. Zereh dashed back toward Emrys. There was no sense in taking any more damage from his spell.
The witch’s dress was blackened and torn. Smoke was rising from her hair, and she coughed fitfully. “I will end you,” she hissed. “I will roast you on a spit and boil your blood into my potions. I will carve you up piece by piece and when I do, I will relish the sweet taste of vengeance and victory.” The witch scratched her long nails against her arm hard enough to draw blood. Instead of dripping down, the blood flowed out of her body into a sphere in front of her. The witch chanted quickly, her eyes darting to the approaching firestorm. She didn’t have much time and she knew it.
Green fog left her mouth as she spoke. It entered the sphere of blood like a ribbon, wrapping around and through until the orb was a mix of red and green.
The witch’s eyes lit up with a wicked, triumphant grin. “Begone, mage.” She flicked the sphere, and it zipped toward Emrys almost too fast for the eye to see.
“No!” Zereh used a movement spell to dash toward the mage. She slammed into him, pushing him out of the way of the witch’s spell just in time – but too slow to save herself as well. The spell hit her in the shoulder at full force, sending her spinning into the dirt.