I dunno what the GTA feeds its horses, but riding behind Adam’s warhorse was like driving behind a farmer who exclusively breeds pigs for farting contests.
It was unavoidable, too. Every time I tried to hurry up my half-lame rotten blasted filch of a beast, Adam would flick the reins and cut me off. His horse was about eight times more agile than mine, so I had no choice but to resign myself to its unfortunate flatulence — burying my face into my horse’s mane was the best relief I could find, and there I was greeted by a more tolerable combination of sweat and dirt.
When we passed the section of road where our burning carriage had left deep furrows in the bank, I whistled and pretended not to notice Adam’s raised eyebrow and accusatory glance. The deed was done, my punishment was in full force, and there was no way to un-crash the cart.
Soon, we arrived back on the Ripping Warriors doorstep, though there was none of the savory smells of cooking or the raucous sound of guild members that had been present previously. A quick check revealed a solitary guard outside the processing shed, but the cart of Gunk and other paraphernalia weren’t there. Adam waved to the guard and approached.
“Howdy! We’re from the GTA, and we have some questions for Veronica — can you point us in the right direction? Seems a bit quiet around here.”
The woman seemed at ends on whether she should cooperate or not. As on Earth, the tax authorities weren’t the most well-regarded government bodies around. At last, she relented.
“Veronica and the rest of the team are in a dungeon — big one popped up about a mile yonder, you can see the Gate from here. They’ll be back in, aw, six hours?”
Adam sighed and squinted down the road where a pearly white circle shimmered. I hadn’t seen a dungeon entrance before, but unless the Haverbark residents had an interest in placing fourteen-foot structures out in the plains, I was confident it was a Gate.
“Can we follow them in? I don’t have six hours to spare,” he asked.
“You may, if you have a death wish. Our best fighters are in there, and they’ve been fighting those specific monsters for years. You’d have to be a fool to think you’d match ‘em.”
Adam looked at me, probably sizing up my ability to meat-shield for him. There wasn’t much meat to shield with though — I was all skin and bone.
“Marcus, did you ever think about getting yourself a weapon? You’re dead weight at the moment — unless you plan on whacking lizards with your fists.”
“I only saw my first weapons shop yesterday, and I have no money at all — you saw to that.”
The Ripping Warrior lady seemed to enjoy our in-fighting and took mercy on me.
“We’ve got some spare shit you can take — some swords rusty enough they might fall apart, but it’s better than nothing.”
“Perfect! Two of them would be lovely!” Adam answered for me.
The lady trotted to a box on the side of the house and jumbled around until she found two blades. One was curved like a scimitar, the other a straight doubled-edged thing. Both were brown with rust and pockmarked where oxidation had worn holes through the thinnest edges.
She presented them to me with a smile and a look which said, ‘If you two go in that Gate, that’ll be two less GTA employees to bother us.’
I took both swords and held them loosely in one hand. Adam thanked the lady and we returned to our noble, stinky steeds.
“We’re not actually going in there, right? I have literally zero EXP in anything Combat-related,” I asked.
“We are.”
It was clear that it wasn’t up for debate. I would’ve loved to say no, but I didn’t think Work Health and Safety existed yet here — nor a Human Rights Commission, nor Anti-Discrimination policies — the list goes on.
The gate was only a short canter away. The short stint off the horse had replenished my ability to feel things in my butt, and now the pain of inexperience reared its head once again. I had to stand awkwardly in the stirrups to save myself from bruises that would stop me sitting on the loo for days.
I wished I had a bit of Adam’s confidence — he sat primly on his horse, whistling out of tune and flipping his dagger around in the sunlight, sending flickering glints of yellow off the silver blade. Unless that blade could turn into twenty heat-seeking indestructible versions of itself, I failed to see how our venturing into the dungeon could go well.
At the Gate, Adam dismounted and motioned for me to follow suit.
“We can’t take the horses in. Reptilian dungeons are usually pretty swampy, and we don’t have the floatation devices or other tech to keep the horses out of danger. You’ll understand when we go in — the Ripping Warriors have some ingenious stuff for such a low-ish tier guild.”
“And do we have any devices to keep us out of danger?”
“Aye, the big mushy thing floating around in your head.”
Fair enough.
With that, Adam readied himself and stepped through the shimmering Gate.
I followed suit.
###
Stepping through an interdimensional portal kind of feels like you’re a big glob of toothpaste being squeezed through a pin-hole tube. I put an arm in first, and immediately lost all feeling up to my elbow. Afraid to retract it and find half my arm flailing around on the other side, I committed to stepping through, and found myself in a dank cavern with dark green stone walls studded with aquamarine.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
If not for the braziers lining the walls every forty meters or so, the place would’ve been completely dark. Assuming the Ripping Warriors had to bring and set those up, and they weren’t some pre-placed conveniences generated by the Gate, it was clear why the process of clearing this Gate would be at least a six-hour affair.
We’d journeyed only a couple hundred meters deep when the bodies of humanoid reptilians — surprisingly Zuckerberg-ish — greeted us. They’d been tossed to the sides of the cavern, and tire tracks from the carts sketched their way through the middle of the expanse or skirted the edges of bogs.
“Check this out.”
Adam was standing next to a hole — about the size of your average sandpit on a golfing green. The ground inside it was moist, and the dregs of unprocessed Combusto-Gunk sat at the bottom.
“This is where your favorite delicacy is sourced. They suck it up from these deposits and slop it in the cart, then ship it back to headquarters.”
It wasn’t exactly appetizing anymore, especially now that I’d learnt about the power — and relative ease — of prayer.
“How many carts do they usually get? There was only one, last time.”
Adam looked up, did some mental math, then glanced up and down the slimy walls before answering.
“It depends on difficulty, which you can usually estimate by the size of the Gate. This one was about a twelve-footer I’d say, so maybe six carts? Seven?”
The braziers grew farther apart as we descended the slight gradient. After a half-hour of hiking, there were now patches of near-darkness between the light cast by neighboring braziers. I tiptoed through these spots at about the speed a caterpillar might, but Adam continued through with no issues. When I queried him, he said something about night vision.
“And how’d you manage to get night vision while working at the GTA?”
“I wasn’t always at the GTA. I spent a couple of years—”
He paused and held up a palm to me.
Stop.
I froze in place, teetering next to a bubbling, goopy pond holding a boot in its iron grasp.
Nothing.
Or maybe?
My Navigator buzzed.
{Keen Hearing : Level Up! Current Level: 1}
I didn’t have the time nor capacity to see what specific buff that would grant me, but it seemed standard. As soon as the level ticked over, the rasp of something became a little clearer, and I shut my eyes to focus on the noise.
It was approaching fast. Adam stepped back now, just slightly, but it was clear he was as confused as I. He drew his dagger, and I dropped my rusty scimitar in preference of my other excuse for a weapon, holding it out in a two-hand grip like I’d seen in the movies.
I hate to go off on a tangent at a time like this, but standing there, I couldn’t help thinking of that scene from Game of Thrones where Jon Snow is facing down the Bolton army. He readies his blade to take first strike at the horde which is inevitably bearing down upon him, and just before he is crushed, the rest of his army crashes through and joins him in the melee.
God, it was cool. Chills, literal chills.
That’s an estimate of my vibe at the time. You could call it naïve, sure, but I was ready to make my stand and face down the mob of monstrous lizards and frogs — I could take down a few Zuckerbergs no problem.
When a barrage of people rounded the bend in a manic roar, it is safe to say that I lost my Jon-Snow-bravado. And when I say people, I mean the most gnarly, chewed-up-and-spat-out warriors this side of the Mississippi. The woman in the lead was clad in purple silk clothing — completely insufficient for the circumstances — with a spiked pauldron on her right shoulder that was more rusted than the sword in my hands.
She ran at a great rate, kicking up a cloud of dust and grime that plastered those behind her. She whipped past us in a flash, shouting as she passed.
“—need to go, Boss right th—”
She didn’t have time to finish, but we got the message, and were soon engulfed in a squadron of dusty warriors, bumpy carts and awkward braziers. The twenty or so Ripping Warriors reclaimed most of their gear as they evacuated, some of the stragglers carrying six or seven thin braziers each.
They each smiled and laughed like it was a great piece of fun, though how they came to that conclusion I did not know, for behind them, screeching and rampaging out of the darkness, was the foulest being I ever had the displeasure of meeting.
If this thing was a reptile, then my grandmother was a goddamn Toyota Hilux. It was a mess of scales and limbs, thousands of them rolling over each other in a wet jumble. The sound alone was terrible — a million lasagnas dropped from the Eiffel Tower would be an apt description of the noise it made as it chased us down. At the top of its head, dangerously near the ceiling, three acid green eyes bore into me, and the snapping jaws at the end of its snout flung buckets of goop that I was pretty sure would put Combusto-Gunk's volatility to shame.
Adam shook me and grabbed my collar. I turned and ran with him, feeling [Anaerobic Endurance] activate. It wasn’t much, but we were gaining on the brazier-carriers. I threw my sword behind me, worried that I would slice my leg off in the mishmash. I must have hit one of the monster’s many oozing limbs, because soon enough my Navigator was vibrating again.
{Blade Throw : Level Up! Current Level: 1}
Thanks, Navigator. Good to know that at least I will die as an apprentice ninja.
When we caught up with the brazier holders, they decided to lighten their loads by dropping a couple torches. No one wanted to be at the back of the pack with Adam and I, and they zipped off again, just about flying over the bog-holes dotted around the floor. My Navigator was blipping and shaking like crazy, but I didn’t even have time to read the summary — I could feel the monster breathing down my neck.
Adam shouted something at me and threw his knife behind him, recalling it and repeating the process whenever he could. I didn’t think it was making a difference until about the twentieth throw, when the beast let out a piercing shriek, and blue ropes of blood jetted out near our feet and all over the walls. I followed his example and aimed both palms behind me.
[Venta!] [Venta] [Venta] [Venta!]
Only the first cast worked, and my Navigator notified me that the skill was on cooldown, but it was worth a shot. The light of the explosion brightened the cavern to near daylight, stunning the creature so that for a moment, the splashing sound of its movement slowed.
Ahead, Veronica was dropping back through the pack, relieving her employees of their excess burdens. She slowed until she was running with us. I was slacking off, near exhaustion, but she pushed me along with a hand at my back.
“What the fuck are you motherfuckers doing? You’re gunna fucking die!”
Language, please!
I couldn’t speak, too busy putting one foot in front of the other. Adam tried to explain.
“Needed to...see you! Have some...ques...questions!”
The Gate was in sight now, but every time the monster roared, I could feel its spittle on my back and hair. Consuming that Combusto-Gunk had saved me — [Poison Resistance (5)] had given me immunity to the severe effects of basic poisons.
Wait...that’s not all.
I stopped pumping my arms for a moment and rolled back my right sleeve. I turned the Navigator on and found [Poison Resistance] in the Health skill-tree.
Poison Resistance (5):
{Resist all severe effects of basic poisons.}
{+10% chance to negate severe effects of intermediate potions.}
{+5% movement speed upon consuming poison.}
Oh god, I’m gunna have to do it.
The Gate was so close, but even with Veronica shoving me along, I wasn’t going to make it. The monster wailed, a guttural, awful noise that brought with it the pitter-patter of reptile poison splattering around me.
I checked I wasn’t going to fall into a hole, then turned my head.
I saw the globules of poison coming toward me.
I opened my mouth.