image [https://i.imgur.com/3eVseK6.jpg]

Playing The Book of Dungeons involved machines stimulating our brains while we slept. Blyeheath reached a new degree of realism that Fabulosa and I felt the following morning. I’d been sore before from hiking across Miros, but never like what I experienced a day after plowing through soft mud.

We set our alarms at the same time, letting us experience the day’s agony together. I could hear her moan from another bunk. “Oh! Patch. I can’t move my legs. Can we take a day off?” She laughed while complaining, so I knew she wasn’t serious. Spending a full day in the Dark Room would make me stir crazy, but I knew what she meant by giving up.

My legs felt like someone injected them with a hardening solution. They felt plastic, and I massaged my thighs, wincing at every exertion. I made it out of my bunk by rolling.

Fabulosa groaned at the sight of me in action. “I hate you so much for getting out of bed. Now I have to get a move on.”

The only pleasure breakfast brought us was that it delayed putting on our boots, a feat we performed with whimpers, groans, and soft cries. We dropped out of the Dark Room without bothering with the rope, landing with a Slipstream.

The first minute of walking brought on sheer agony, but it became easier as our leg muscles loosened. Our pace couldn’t have been more than two miles an hour, and we stopped frequently to massage our legs. The constellation of brill we moved through reminded us every step forward made progress.

Soon, we walked without wincing or making robotic motions. Hours after we started, the ground hardened. As if the universe pitied us, Blyeheathe’s floor turned to an unyielding topsoil, making for much easier travel.

We barely noticed the ground descending and our foggy ceiling growing higher. The fields of small mushrooms thinned, leaving only scattered clumps of fungi structures as large as automobiles. Some mushrooms grew thick as a pumpkin. The tallest fungi issued streams of spores, making them look like smokestacks sprouting from bulbous factories. We stayed well clear of any sizable mushrooms.

Lily pads floating on the surface cast diffuse shadows. Tendrils of vines cascaded to the ground, anchoring the vegetation. The fog repelled the flies that pestered us on the surface.

But other critters than brill filled the atmosphere. Transparent, inch-long ribbons drifted, as well as star and ring-shaped creatures that were too small to see unless I focused on them in front of my nose.

Things lived in the ground, too. We happened across a field of sparse reeds, which disappeared below the ground when we neared. The reeds were obviously alive. Once we stopped to stretch our legs, the nearby reeds poked out of their holes, tiny filaments extended to catch their next meal.

Giant fans extended from the ground, filtering brill like great wings, trapping and feeding off Blyeheath’s bugs and particulates. The wings encrusted themselves to the bottom, extending into the soil. They resisted casts of Animal Empathy, so they were probably plants or something in between.

Once, a three-foot creature propelled itself past us, swimming overhead. It looked like a centipede, except instead of legs, its locomotion stemmed from hundreds of tiny, feather-shaped flippers along its sides. At level 3, it counted as the most powerful creature we’d seen.

We stayed clear of it all. Fabulosa and I did not investigate drifting lifeforms and fungal structures. Fighting beasts would only slow us down, and we had gained no time on our shortcut. We periodically checked the aerometer. The lower we went, the more the puffball pulled the spring, but so far, it stayed above the toxic hashmark.

The white-out of Blyeheath hid the thin veil of vapor covering the ground. Once again, we couldn’t see our feet, for another layer of white vapor coated the ground. I pulled out my Wall of Wind and triggered its hourly ability to manufacture a gust of wind, sending brill and vapors scattering, revealing nothing special about the low-lying fog aside from it being the unbreathable aerocline where dangers lurked.

I made a pointing down motion that became our signal for talking, and Fabulosa accommodated my request by planting the battlefield standard.

Apache This is the lower aerocline, the one we can’t breathe.

Fabulosa I reckon we ought to head east anyway. It’s getting late, and we should have hit Farseed by now.

Apache Roger that.

Turning east put us on a course parallel to the edge of a hill that dropped into the lower aerocline, and we followed it, keeping the aerometer in the safe range.

We chanced upon the carcass of a giant brontosaurus. It reminded me of whalefall at the bottom of the ocean. Great bones and canopies of decayed skin towered over us.

Fabulosa covered her scarf over her mask. “That’s a leviathan! They’re rare, but they come ashore from Blyeheath. They supposedly feed on things inside the fog, but their long necks let them enter it. Once they run out of air, they poke their head over the surface.”

“Are they aggressive?”

“Nah. They don’t eat people but can cause damage. Villagers band together and herd them back into the aerocline. Folks make it a festival, like a Rite of Spring.”

Detect Magic showed no reason to investigate, and we didn’t, avoiding entanglements with scavengers and the foul taste of rancid fog.

An hour later, strands of lower aerocline came up to our knees, prompting us to check the depth device. The vapors grew more opaque, and Fabulosa fell into the mist. Quicker than I could cast Compression Sphere to push away the obscuring fog, she Slipstreamed back to her original location and planted the battle standard.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

We used the contest interface to navigate. We assumed Duchess stood at our destination, Farseed. Once the game listed our names next to hers on the map, we couldn’t tell which direction we needed to go to meet up with her.

Fabulosa There’s a ravine below. I should have been using infravision. It works through the fog, but my eyes hurt. It’ll probably blind me after too long.

Apache Your eyes look red.

Fabulosa Do you have infravision?

Apache No, but I have Magnetism.

Fabulosa Fair enough. But keep Slipstream handy in case you fall.

Instead of using Slipstream, we just avoided venturing into the lower aerocline altogether, but Fabulosa’s sudden stop made me double-check my footing regardless. The opaque fog filled the lower depths.

Something as big as a roof stirred beneath it, swirling the vapors of the aerocline—which hid the disturbance. I didn’t get close enough to cast Magnetize.

We backed away up the hill. I’d had enough of Suffocation for one lifetime, and if the fog Blinded Fabulosa, it made no sense to take chances.

As we walked, I watched the lower aerocline for movement, but slight air currents made mirages of giant creatures beneath the lower fog plane. Perhaps they weren’t mirages at all. But staying on higher terrain cost us more time, and when light waned for a second evening, I invoked Hot Air to periscope above the fog to see if I could spot the peninsula where Farseed supposedly awaited.

Fabulosa planted the battle standard and guarded my flank while I breached the surface.

The sun hung low on the western horizon, leaving Owd alone to preside over this strange ocean. In the southeast, I spotted a sliver of land rising above the aerocline. If Farseed had buildings, they were too small or distant to see.

Apache We’re a little too far north. There’s land a few miles to the southeast.

Fabulosa Can we make it before it gets dark?

Apache No, it’s almost sunset, but between your infravision and Magnetism, the dark isn’t our problem. My legs are killing me.

Fabulosa I heard that. There’s no point in pushing ourselves. There are no skiffs to Oxum until the afternoon, anyway. Let’s hole up in the Dark Room for the night and start fresh tomorrow.

After I put up the dark room, we Slipstreamed to its opening and quickly covered the opening with wet blankets and unused mattresses to keep the fog from filling it. Our precautions weren’t necessary—aerocline and air didn’t mix for whatever reason, but we didn’t want to risk contaminating our sleeping quarters. Both of us enjoyed a good night’s sleep.

Fabulosa’s plan seemed the perfect end to an arduous journey until we dropped out of the Dark Room the following morning. The vapors seemed thicker, and the aerometer showed the fog had risen overnight, placing us near an almost toxic level.

Nothing attacked after we dropped down, so we moved southeast. When the terrain rose, the aerometer approved, showing our movement from the dangerous vapor. It looked like we’d only skirted near the dangers of the lower aerocline.

When a forest materialized at the edge of our vision in the milky whiteness, I nudged Fabulosa to get her attention. I pointed at the swaying tree shapes. An enormous nameplate appeared over them.

Name

Sunspot Aeroclast

Level

36

Difficulty

Challenging (yellow)

Health

3,030/3,030

The swaying trees connected beneath a bell-shaped hood resembling the mantle of a giant jellyfish. Two types of tentacles hung from it. It used its larger limbs for locomotion—they thinned and stretched as it released its hold on the ground thirty yards beneath its radial canopy. Beneath its head drifted a bloom of thinner tendrils that no doubt fed on brill and other fog creatures.

The creature’s transparency gave its prey no advanced warning of its approach. Nor did it make any sounds which carried so well in the haze. Had I not been scanning the ground with Magnetism, I wouldn’t have detected it so early.

Fabulosa and I picked up our speed to evade the thing until we saw how fast it moved. With a dozen tentacles propelling itself along the ground, the buoyant, ethereal creature was catching up with us.

Fabulosa cast Ignite Weapon and slashed at the first tentacle that reached for her. She struck, but the tentacle Grappled her and inflicted 32 constricting damage. She cast Rejuvenate to stave off the loss.

A fishy stink overwhelmed me as its great mantle loomed, and a tentacle wrapped around me.

I landed four attacks with Gladius Cognitus, hitting for nearly 100 damage per strike.

Subsequent attacks fared poorly. I produced only misses until another tentacle reached for me. More tentacles wrapped around me, blocking my vision and negating sword swings. As the Grappling tentacles curled, they lifted me off the ground, further weakening my ability to wield my blade. I couldn’t see my partner, but the battle standard lay on the ground beneath her.

She’d missed her chance to plant it, and with these masks on, we couldn’t hear each other.

Fabulosa had tried to plant it but failed. The combat log scrolled with her escapes by using Odum’s Spectrometer, followed by attacks from her and the aeroclast. When it reported the creature Grappling her, she escaped it by becoming immaterial.

I hit her with a Restore when her Rejuvenate ended. The combat log showed her using a spell called Elemental Blast for 124 damage—an impressive amount, for she most likely had primal magic rank in the low twenties.

The aeroclast had less than 20 percent of its health pool, while Fabulosa and I teetered midway through ours from repeated constricting attacks.

Notifications appeared in the contest chat. I wasn’t crazy about Fabulosa using the open channel to discuss combat tactics, but without the battle standard, it remained our last option.

Fabulosa I’m grappled, and my Spectrometer is out of juice. Do you have any ideas?

Apache I can’t see anything right now. Tentacles are blocking my vision.

Fabulosa Watch out for those little ones. They probably sting.

Duchess What monster has tentacles? Are you fighting a giant octopus?

Audigger That doesn’t make sense. They’re not that close to the coast.

Toadkiller They’re fighting an aeroclast. I fought a small one a while ago, but they’re not that bad.

Ignoring the chatter, I craned my neck to peer over the tentacles wrapping around my torso. The creature had lifted me so high I was almost near its mantle.

Skinny tendrils curled around the aeroclast’s main tentacles. They stung and leeched more life out of me, but no Slowed or Paralyzed debuffs appeared. The creature didn’t need toxins to Stun its food with tentacles so strong.

I downed a set of stat potions, not that any except stamina did any good.

Not long ago, I’d convinced myself that Time Stop applied to every situation. While wrapped in tentacles, my newest power gave me no advantage whatsoever.