Three separate groups of sapients had invaded. Aby knew they were separate, because of the defined groups they put themselves in, and because Sela had something about it being so. She had also mentioned that they were likely, if her memories were to be believed, not here for conquering, but to explore. Aby was told that if it didn’t attack them, they in turn may not fight back, and that it could be wise to do so.
Aby watched as the group of five bipeds said a curt farewell to the other ten, and walked in deeper, and decided not to rely too heavily on “might not” when it came to them fighting back.
~~~~~~
The groups of explorers had settled into the first floor. They had decided that they would go down one at a time, and the next group would follow after the first made it back. One of the adventurers had brought up what should be done if an entire group was wiped out, and the amphibians and adventurers both took this into consideration, saying that they’d follow deeper in eight hours should the preceding group fail to return.
And so, the first group began its descent. Five seasoned adventurers walked to the end of the hall, surrounding the shaft to descend downwards, and took a deep breath, diving to the bottom. Three humans and two elves, all unused to being in such a wet environment, emerged on the second floor, trying in vain to wring out the water from the cloth they wore beneath their armors. Thankfully, the clothing was thin and form-fitting, not hindering the movements of the group. The two swordsmen of the group were in a moderately thick hide armors, and along with the tank as she termed herself, in a light plate mail, this was already the best they could do at raising their in-water mobility. The two elven magic users were better off, though they still didn’t find being out in the ocean very pleasant.
They looked around the second floor, and it was much the same as the first, corals lined the edges of the long hallway, and it looked like there had been a branching path at one point, as the hall suddenly got wider, then narrower with the path veering left and a solid wall to the right. Along the ground could be seen many small fish and other critters, all of which behaving rather passively, though they wouldn’t be able to inflict very much damage on the group even if they were aggressive. They walked along slowly, remembering that this was the floor that managed to deafen the A+ rank that guided them here, something that left a deep impression on them given that he claimed it to be a creature no larger than a hand.
Just as they were told, the second half of the floor was submerged, and the exit was out of sight down that hallway. They had trained their bodies well enough to handle holding their breath, and their mana could sustain their lungs for a while, but they would send their vanguard first, just in case it was less subdued underneath those waters.
She filled her lungs, then started walking deeper and deeper in those waters. Once there was almost a meter of water beneath the surface and her head, the group witnessed streaks of silver dart past, attempting to score wounds on her, but not having the ability to pierce the plate, and not being aimed at the joints, thankfully. It seemed that most of the aggression had been placed on her, and the other four tentatively followed behind. They were beset upon by one creature, though the human rapier wielder managed to dispatch it before it managed to bite through the hide armor he wore, or set its sights upon any of the less protected mages.
He did make note, however, that it was an inexperienced dungeon. Normally they tried their hardest to get at the mages, understanding the differences in armor types and knowing that the cloth and leather that a mage typically wore weren’t very protective. Rather, it seemed to be allowing its creatures to respond to their tanks passive attention drawing, seeing as how aggressively they were hounding the plate armor.
Finally, right as the two elves seemed to be growing rather panicked for air, they felt the slight slope of the passageway start to incline upwards, and knew this to be where the next floor was situated. The tank emerged from the water and took a mighty breath, and her pursuers lost interest, starting to go after the others. The rapier user was able to defend himself and one of the elves that stuck close to him, and the offensive mage took care of the other swordsman, though not as effectively. By the time they had emerged out of the water, the four of them took a moment sputter and hack out the water that so rudely found its way in. Nobody was seriously hurt, and the worst that had happened was a small chunk of flesh being bitten out of the calf of the elven light mage, which was promptly healed.
They took a moment to gather their bearings, and searching through the sea-grass to look for any shrimp, before diving to the next floor. They knew the dungeon would be testing, and they’d even brought water-breath relics should the need arise, but they were inefficient and delicate, thus relying on them would be unwise. They would be useful to make an escape, should that need to happen, and hopefully this core didn’t get into the habit of chasing escaping adventurers.
The third floor was just as monotonous as they’d heard, separate branching paths that were all so grey it was hard to recognize. Luckily, they were mostly prepared for something as such, placing a beacon by the shaft back to the second floor. A simple glowing orb of light, affixed to the ceiling, this ball would be able to last three hours before the source of light, a wisp, fades and gets absorbed by the dungeon. Hopefully, there weren’t any other threats that could take it down before then, getting lost would be unpleasant.
They continued on, through the dull hallways. Oddly, some of them were thinner than others, and in their experience, different meant dangerous, and they opted not to take them should they be able to. It appeared that that option was available, and they found another hole in the ground that lead downwards, out of the dull grey that had been their surroundings for far too long. What welcomed them was a sight that would be carved into their minds.
The floor was huge, a visible shelf that separated the ledge they stood upon from the depths of the floor, over fifty meters deep by their best guess. The entire floor was literally glowing, providing a light show unlike any they’d seen before. The walls and ceiling were illuminated by colors that danced and played underneath the unnaturally clear waters, something that took their breath away. Seemingly trying and outdo this show, dozens of sea-snakes of any color that could be imagined played and coiled on the floor and in the waters, turning to lock eyes with the invaders. However, what truly cemented the scene in their hearts and minds was at the center of it all, a gargantuan serpent stared at them with a measured gaze, the intensity with which this lesser wyrm stared them down was telling them that, even on land, this creature would be able to fight the group on even footing.
At this point, they turned to one another, nodded, then went back to the third floor. They were being paid to map out the dungeon and describe its threats, not to kill themselves by fighting an A- ranked beast in its natural territory, which happened to be underwater. They may have a chance should they be able to get it on land, but as there was none of that in these halls to begin with, they weren’t pleased by their prospects. They made their way through the third floor and its maze-like halls, and at one point one of the elves spotted exactly what lay down those ominous halls they avoided, a shrimp of absurd proportions, a claw much larger than its body. It matched the description Rok had given them of the pistol shrimp, though it was much larger now. They decided against finding out what else had changed, and walked on by as it opened and closed its claw provocatively.
The second floor was just as simple, though the fish seemed to spread out their assault this time, and actually managed to draw blood from the short-sword wielder, along with both mages, to varying degrees. Beyond that, however, the worst that happened was the offensive mage running out of breath shortly before the end of the halls, and passing out. Thankfully, she hadn’t gotten a lungful of seawater, the swordsman helping her in time, and they were all healed in short order. She remained unconscious, though, but could be carried the remainder of the way anyways.
~~~~~
The two groups on the first floor had settled into a conversation with one-another, and had been talking for roughly two hours, when the adventurers emerged, looking unharmed but tired and frustrated. The Atlanteans and amphibians gathered around them, cutting short the discussion they were having, and did their best to help. The adventurers sat down in the relatively shallow waters of the floor, before telling them what they had encountered. Both groups were listening intently, but seemed upset when they were told that they hadn’t made it past the fourth floor. This cleared up when they were told that there was a lesser wyrm, something that they all understood the threat of, and nobody could fault them for not attempting to fight such a beast fifty meters underwater, with lungs weighing them down, so to speak.
The Atlanteans were next, all five mer-people realizing that this was more than they’d initially anticipated. They had no experience with dungeons before, and had no idea what to expect as they descended to the second floor. They tried to be cautious, but still hadn’t understood the gravity of what they were exploring, a sentient collection of halls with control over everything they would encounter. Even the fact it had a lesser wyrm didn’t shake them as heavily as it seemed to for the amphibians, they had subjugated one within the reef before.
They went through the second floor much quicker than the group before them, feeling a little perturbed by the barracudas that harassed them for a lot of it, and mostly out of spite they spent extra time hunting down as many as they could. The group itself was a simple composition, two harpoon wielders in scaled leather, a healer in a simple watertight robe, and two mages in similar robes, but decorated with dazzling scaled leather. These mages were the main targets of the assault, and one of them was nicked rather badly on the arm, much to his chagrin.
He was healed shortly after, but had wasted a fair portion of his mana in order to cast a spell of lightning and have it not harm his party members.
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What surprised him was the rate at which his mana regenerated, he was used to fighting at the Trenches by this point, so having so much at his disposal made him feel ecstatic, and he decided that he’d not need to hold back nearly as much. They were on the third floor when he fully decided as such, and he had started swimming much more proudly than before, after all, the dungeon had given him the key to its own failures, the mana he had access to was invigorating. They came across yet another branch in the path, and seeing as how nothing was hounding them, he would be the first through it. After all, he was likely the strongest now, apart from the other mage. He went in proudly, thinking nothing of how the branch he selected was thinner than the other.
His team watched on, they too were feeling the effects of the dungeon. The deeper in they went, the thicker the mana had grown, and even on the third floor it was already magnitudes stronger than the Reef above. They were all rudely pulled from their prideful musings when a snap resounded throughout the halls, and they watched the mage clutched his head and wailed. He did his best to retreat, though he was wildly disoriented by the noise, even the rest of the team was shaking the ringing from their ears. They were told of pistol shrimps in the depths of the dungeon, but as their partner managed to reach them and they pried his hands away from his head, they saw blood leaking slowly into the surrounding waters.
The healer worked fast, doing his best to heal the mage, but as was the case with the amphibian who brought them here, his ears were mangled, to put it lightly. They stopped the bleeding, but it seemed that he was also concussed on top of being totally deaf. Thankfully, they didn’t have to deal with the same balance issues that Rok did, and he managed to shake off his disorientation rather quickly, replaced by anger. He tried to cast the spell to electrocute that accursed hallway, but found his power output dramatically decreased. He was unable to chant properly, and though the words remained as muscle memory, he was already starting to sound slightly slurred.
His party members too seemed rather irate at that, they were completely unprepared for something like that, and were not pleased, to say the least. They talked amongst each other, sans the now deafened mage, and were dedicated to push forwards. After all, if five surface races could get past this floor, so could they.
So, after finding their way through the floor, having to make sure they weren’t going through any halls that would result in a second member being placed out of commission, they arrived at the entrance to the fourth. They had already readied themselves to face the wyrm, and the mage was able to keep up despite the concussion. They descended, and they too took a moment to marvel at the sights of the floor, something that even the Reefheart may not be able to match.
However, they noticed that something important was missing: the floor was lacking a wyrm. By this point, the group had stopped thinking as rationally as they should, and were blaming the adventurers for this lack, cursing them for their cowardice and making up an excuse to avoid going deeper.
They ignored the swaths of snakes that eyed their every move, staring especially intently at the injured mage. They swam off the small shelf and deeper into the waters around them, putting any snakes that swam too close to a swift end, taking pleasure in the lack of blood they were dealing with, the visibility remained absolutely sublime since it hadn’t been clouded. They also quickly spotted the next floor, wondering if there was even a B ranked starfish like they were told.
So caught up in their anger that they failed to notice the gargantuan head staring at them with her regal amber-gold eyes from within a hidden outcropping nearby. They had just started descending, moving in decently organized formation, when the injured mage spotted, all too late, the behemoth dart out and open its jaws wide, rows of horrifically sharp teeth glinting and showing off the two fangs on either jaw that were as long as he was tall. He was last in line, the group had already moved into the shaft before him to keep him safe at the rear, while still protecting the healer. And yet, by the time he had noticed the monster moving upon him, all that he could do was open his mouth in the beginnings of a shout, before the mouth snapped shut onto his body.
The party turned just in time to witness the mage staring in horror at something unseen, before the witnessed his torso impaled by two criminally large fangs, and the daggerlike teeth puncturing his chest and head without resistance. They had no way to respond, he hadn’t even made a noise, or bled a wisp, before his lifeless body dissolved into motes of light.
It took them but a moment to respond to what they saw, readying themselves for a fight with the creature that murdered their teammate and their friend, but the harpoon wielding mermaid squeaked out a noise, and they turned and saw a long limb wrap around her tail, and drag her into the darkness of the fifth floor with a rush of water, and then an unseen crash.
They couldn’t afford to leave her there, and they bolted into the shadows, leaving a wyrm with an amused expression watching them go. They threw out a light relic, similar to the beacon, though this one used an Undine rather than a wisp. They were designed to light up the darkness of the Trenches, but seemed that they worked just as well, drawing in the ambient mana and illuminating the walls on all sides.
They also saw their partner squirm her way out of the grasp of an ink black brittle star, glaring at it cautiously, though a little dazed. It appeared that it had swung her into the wall, something she was not expecting, and she had lost her harpoon in the daze. The merman wielding his own launched his attack, hoping to draw this creature’s attention as the mermaid grabbed her weapon. The sole remaining mage had started casting spells, revealing her affinity to ice, as the waters themselves started trying to spear the creature. The healer was doing her best to fix any minor wounds the mermaid sustained.
The star was very hard to attack, however. Its thin body lent itself well to avoiding the stabbing and piercing attacks of the offensive trio, and nobody had any attacks that were able to get around this. The mage lost would’ve been a great counter, his large scale attacks are the bane of a creature as such. However, they were without that luxury, and could only work to put pressure on it as well as they could. They were still a collection of A- rank Atlanteans, and managed to keep it on the defensive throughout the halls.
However, after rendering a second arm unusable, the star shifted into retreating, something it did astonishingly well. The group was unable to find it within a matter of moments, and lamented this fact, along with a truth they didn’t like to hear. They were lost. They few wounds that were inflicted to them were healed easily enough, but what they had heard about dungeons meant that the star, too, was likely also healed, and this was not good, especially now that it got the element of surprise back. And so, they continued wandering, the Undine casting a soft glow and lighting up only a few meters ahead, something that meant that it was slowly losing its power.
Thankfully, right as the light flickered out, they saw the faintest light from a path they were about to pass, and they were ecstatic. Their formation further fell apart as they rushed forward through the halls.
However, they were forced to turn around when they heard a yelp, and then a sickening crunch. The healer who’d been right behind the mage, last to turn the corner, had been struck in the chest by a limb, driving her into a wall while the star once more retreated. Unfortunately, while the healer was durable, she was less so than the harpoon-mermaid, much less Rok. Her lower ribcage broke, and was forced in, and while she could heal another with those injuries given her rank, she was overcome by the pain of a few punctured organs. She stayed conscious just long enough to have a health-shell forced into her mouth, chewing and swallowing as she was dragged to the sixth floor of this nightmare.
The rest of the team watched as she passed out, cursing the star, and the dungeon as a whole. They weren’t expecting this, not at all, and they were paying for it. It was like their first summons to a Trench all over again, everything was so different from what they were used to. As they watched over their injured comrade, they were relieved to notice the lack of anything trying to maul them. They had to slaughter a goliath grouper that seemed to have it in for them, but beyond that, they weren’t accosted. After entirely too long, the healer woke up, still pale and obviously in pain as she worked to heal herself. While she was able to fix the internal bleeding, and remove most of her discomfort, the fact remained that her ribs were in poor shape and made her much less effective.
They decided that they would wait here for the amphibians, hopefully they’d be better prepared for this place. As they discussed those plans, they seemed to get a little more excited, and even the walls seemed to be singing, something that only further elevated their mood.
The melody was soft, slow, but also frantic and upbeat, something that sounded unreal, and the fact that it was so distant also added to the ethereal quality it had. In fact, the harpoon merman decided to go search for the source, leaving behind the other two to guard the healer as she recovered. He swam aimlessly throughout the halls, growing more and more lost in the song as he did so. He even came to be aware of just how hungry he’d gotten down here, he should’ve had a larger meal, or maybe packed more than just the shells.
However, he was snapped out of his reverie when he’d heard the panicked shrieks of the mage, and the shouts of the harpoon-maid. He rushed towards them, cursing himself for not paying better attention to his surroundings at the branching paths he was facing. Finally, after over a minute, of full blown swimming, he came upon his teammates. The healer appeared frenzied, and the harpoon maid was doing her best to put the girl into some fashion of headlock.
Meanwhile, the mage was writhing in pain, torn between pain, fear, and anger. Her tail had chunks of flesh torn out of it at the base, and her torso too had bloody teeth marks gouged into it. With the blood streaming out of the healers mouth, the source of her injuries was obvious. He snapped back to reality, rushing to help the harpoon woman restrain the healer, finding himself being bitten as he tried to subdue her.
He was stunned, the level of viciousness was terrifying, she’d ripped a portion of his hand off, one of the few places not covered in scale-leather, and was still biting. Even worse, all this effort only fed into his ravenous hunger, the blood in the water doing naught but whetting his appetite
The harpoon woman noticed his own gaze spacing out, and finished getting the mage to choke down a health shell before punching the merman in the chest, hopefully snapping him out of his stupor. It seemed to work, as he looked at her seriously. They were unsure of what exactly was happening, but it seemed to be a problem on this floor. The healer was gnashing her teeth wildly, bloodshot and unfocused eyes intent on finding something to sate her hunger. The two functional mer-people needed to change that, and wound up giving her a quick blow to the back of the head to knock her unconscious, before carrying her and the mage along through the halls.
The mage too succumbed to whatever spell was present, starting to wail and bite at the mermaid whose arms she was in, meeting a similar fate and being carried lifelessly. They hoped that they returned to their senses soon, whatever they were listening to had started becoming truly grating. The previously gorgeous melody had shifted into a grating cackle without their knowledge, a terrible wailing that ate away at their patience, and even worse, they were only starting to feel hungrier. Finally, the mermaid seemed to snap, throwing the helpless mermaid to the wall and moving to take a bite.
The mage, too, was awoken by the impact, and turned to the attacker, seemingly unfazed by the ridiculous impact she’d been dealt. As the two started to attack one-another, the merman tried to snap them out of it, only to have both of them focus their attention on him, wounds in their necks, tails, and faces still clouding the waters as the blood flowed out.
His final conscious thought, was that they looked so much more appetizing like that.