image [https://i.imgur.com/ZtTlHt0.jpg]

Thanks to our internal alarms, we awoke, ate breakfast, and began walking in the twilight hours before sunrise. Owd, Nassi, and dim Tarnen appeared in various lunar phases. The sun almost breached the horizon, but we felt cocky enough to risk encountering kobolds.

Hours later, we neared the summit on the gentler slope at the source of the smoke we’d seen the evening before. The entire top of the mountain looked rocky, and some formations looked carved like a quarry whose edges had rounded with age. Small bushes covered half of the topography. If this had been a quarry, it’d been out of use for many years.

Beneath the crags, we spied a dungeon entrance.

I fist-pumped the air in vindication. Investigating the orcs led to the lizardfolk temple and now this hole in the ground. None of it made sense, but if the breadcrumbs led to dungeons, it didn’t matter. Dungeons served as cornerstones for RPGs.

Our previous night’s observations echoed what we saw on the slope, dozens of yards away from the hole in the ground.

We saw a dark shape beneath a net. After we finished exploring the dungeon, we ought to take this net. Beneath the net lay the body of a dead griffon. It looked like it had been dead for at least a couple of days, although it hadn’t entered a state of decomposition. I poked it with my spear, being sure to stand at a distance, but nothing moved. The game made us jumpy, but it only counted as paranoia if we were wrong.

This site resembled an organized dig that fell short of archeological standards. Someone left behind crude pickaxes, shovels, and small sacks of dirt around the opening. The poor craftsmanship and size betrayed their kobold origin.

We didn’t need Mineral Communion to know who dug it, but I cast the spell anyway. I searched the most recent stone memories and saw three gnolls attacking and scattering a camp of kobolds barely knee-high to the upright hyenas. It wasn’t an awe-inspiring battle. They made short work of the ratfolk, and at least one gnoll looked like a spellcaster using Scorch, Shocking Reach, and Compression Sphere.

To the side of the dungeon’s entrance rested the smoldering ruins of a wooden structure, the source of smoke we’d seen the day before. I told my companions about the visions of three gnolls rampaging through the kobold camp. We reached only a few minutes from the mountain’s summit, but I saw nothing else but rocks and bushes.

I gestured toward a stretch of ashes and charred logs. “The kobolds built a shelter, and the gnolls set fire to it while they slept. The skirmish took place during daylight.”

Fabulosa’s lips curled. “What a bunch of cowards. I don’t have a problem killing gnolls.”

“Yeah, those thugs in Tully’s weren’t exactly honorable. But none of the gnolls here look as old as Ruk—who translated my journal. Maybe it’s the handiwork of his lackeys.”

I looked closer at the griffon corpse and decided it involved an encounter a few days ago. A dead kobold also rested under the net—a rope attached to a stake in the ground tethered to its ankle. Mineral Communion revealed the rats using one of their own as bait.

I shook myself out of the visions and fired up Presence and Heavenly Favor. “Mineral Communion is already burning, so we can’t waste time out here. Are you guys ready to go in?”

Charitybelle and Fabulosa quickly agreed. My stone sense would help us evade traps, but it only had a 90-minute duration, so it put us on the clock. Charitybelle summoned her pet badger, and we approached the earthen opening.

I wouldn’t use kobolds if I ever excavated a ruin. While adept diggers, they made for sloppy grave robbers at best. Their tunnel burrowed under a car-sized block of stone over the entrance. We crawled underneath it, careful to avoid touching anything.

Focusing on the block above, I nearly grabbed a dead kobold’s tail sticking out of the dirt. The vermin leaving behind fallen coworkers didn’t surprise me.

After clearing the stone block, the tunnel opened into a sturdy hallway tall enough to stand. Its masonry reminded me of the demon-ridden lizardfolk dungeon.

I ran Mineral Communion and saw lizardfolk again. “This place is old, like the last dungeon. Judging by the architecture and costumes, this place looks ceremonial. The lizards move around in organized processions. It’s like they’re getting communion or something.”

I moved carefully to avoid getting caught off guard. With Mineral Communion active, the overlapping images confused me with a double-vision that blinded me to present dangers.

The painted frescoes bore columns of symbols—half-writing and half-pictures like hieroglyphics. They depicted aquatic creatures performing actions so abstract I didn’t understand the scenes. I didn’t see blossoms of fire or rows of weapons, so they weren’t war-related.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

Fabulosa pointed to the hieroglyphics. “Is this place as old as the worm room? Are these what your lobster critters looked like?”

“Yeah, you see the two front tentacles? That’s who built the worm room. But I don’t think this place is as old as the worm’s lair. I don’t see scenes of this place ever being underwater.”

We walked down the corridor and through a doorway whose hinge aligned against the ceiling. The entry looked like a giant pet door or an upside-down drawbridge. A metal door loomed overhead, and luckily, it was ajar. I gazed upwards for the second time today as I crawled through the portal. If it swung down, it would jellify me. Although the likelihood of another infernal welcoming party made no sense, I kept an eye open for overhead demons.

Beyond the door, a high ceiling offered plenty of overhead to search. We entered a tall, pyramidal space whose ceiling peaked in a square oculus. A bright patch of sunlight illuminated the opening. A shaft of light would have lit the dusty floor at midday, but the side of the sloped ceiling glowed from the morning sun. After crawling through the collapsed tunnel, it comforted me to see sunlight. What gamer wouldn’t want a cheerful dungeon?

The ambient daylight from the oculus illuminated a heaping mound of chitinous body parts. We studied the scene. Someone stacked half a dozen giant scorpions into one corner. Their rigid limbs twisted at odd angles, so they weren’t playing possum. Someone recently killed them.

The chamber’s four walls each had an opening. A narrow doorway similar to the one we passed through and a closed door to the east. The fourth opened to a wide, dark hallway that disappeared beyond the extent of our vision.

“Do y’all see that?” Fabulosa pointed to a rope dangling from the oculus 200 feet above us.

Fabulosa moved to the room’s center to test the line’s strength. She wrapped her legs around it and bobbed up and down. The line held and looked secure.

“Y’all reckon we should climb it? It probably opens further up the mountain, not too far from where we entered.”

My stone sight confirmed gnolls using it. They rappelled down the line. The oculus offered more practical ingress for the oversized creatures—better than squeezing through the perilous entrance. We crossed the room, looked down the long, dark hallway, and saw a glowing pair of eyes. Their height over the floor implied they belonged to something big.

Fabulosa ran forward. “Move into the hallway. Maybe the tighter space will bottleneck it.”

The hallway wasn’t particularly narrow. I didn’t think we could use it as a chokepoint, but presenting a unified front allowed us to synergize. Charitybelle tossed a glow stone down the corridor to reveal oncoming monsters.

Unhurried, the eyes moved forward, but something looked odd about them—they looked sideways instead of towards us. And only two clopping hooves echoed as the creature approached the open chamber.

Name

Winterbyte Chimera (8)

Level

29

Difficulty

Challenging (yellow)

Health

1760/1760

Everything about this monster felt wrong. Dungeons usually start with low-level monsters so players can establish a rhythm. Unless the boss monster killed its own trash mobs and relocated to the entrance, we’d stumbled into a dungeon way over our level. The name resembled nothing I’d seen before in this game. Not only did the parenthetical 8 after its name make no sense, but it spelled “bite” with a “Y” instead of an “I.” Was this an Easter Egg reference to computers or hackers I didn’t understand?

I realized why the glowing eyes angled to the side. The chimera had three heads—a hellhound, a torodon, and a turtle. A turtle shell wrapped around its bovine body like a taco. Its hind legs ended in hooves, but its pawed forelimbs thickened into those of a mastiff. The center head, the torodon, lowered in a challenge as one of its forward paws scraped the hall’s flagstones.

Fabulosa ran back. “We need to get out of the hallway!” This wasn’t the time for a bottleneck. We couldn’t withstand a head-on charge of a creature that size. We also needed to spread out to avoid everyone taking breath attack damage.

Charitybelle followed her while I moved to the opposite side of the pyramidal chamber. I had twice as much health as they did with my Prismatic Shield and could take the brunt of the damage.

I had already begun imbuing my weapon when I saw the hellhound’s glowing eyes. A silvery, mirrorlike glow encompassed my spear as the creature walked down the corridor. Oddly enough, it didn’t rush us.

When the creature emerged into the sunny, pyramidal chamber, I Charged it. The chimera met me with its horns like a battering ram. My spear caused damage, mostly from its magical imbuement. The chimera’s horns gored me before I got trampled, its back hooves inflicting additional harm.

So many things happened at once, I checked my combat log to parse it.

/You charge Winterbyte Chimera for 56 damage (8 resisted).

/Torodon butts you for 36 damage (9 resisted).

/Winterbyte Chimera tramples you for 27 damage (5 resisted).

/Fabulosa hits Winterbyte Chimera for 12 damage (24 resisted).

/Charitybelle hits Winterbyte Chimera for 56 damage (6 resisted).

/Dragon Turtle hits Charitybelle with Breath for 35 damage (9 resisted).

/Dragon Turtle hits Fabulosa with Breath for 46 damage (6 resisted).

/Hellhound bays.

I checked my interface for a debuff from the hellhound’s howl, but nothing appeared. The dog-head’s noise didn’t give buffs or debuffs. Why the combat log included a baying action remained a mystery. Perhaps it signaled to the other heads that we’d escaped its bite range. But didn’t hellhounds breathe fire?

The hellhound and turtle faced opposite sides of the creature, which pivoted so every head could attack. Its shell prevented flanking bonuses, so avoiding its breath weapon seemed the only advantage to spreading out.

Another peculiarity involved how the combat log displayed the monster’s name. Not only had it dropped the parenthetical 8, but it also broke the monster’s attacks into separate heads. It hadn’t done this with the hydra, whose heads had the same attack, so I assumed the game broke them up for clarity, distinguishing one attack from another.

Unlike the hydra, each head didn’t have a unique health bar, so we couldn’t wear it down incrementally. Our collective output of 114 damage and the incoming sum of 134 didn’t bode well against an opponent whose health pool tripled ours combined. The math wasn’t with us.