Bjorn kept casting simple light as he continued down the tunnel heading into the earth. Hours passed with no change in sight. There were of course side tunnels he could try and follow but each of them were too small for him to fit into. Moving onwards he traveled until he didn’t have enough mana to cast his simple light spell again.
So he stopped moving in the middle of the tunnel and took stock of his situation. He had 3 potions of healing, and 5 mouthfuls of the moss left over. With no way to regain mana at an accelerated rate he soon would be in darkness again. Not knowing what else to do he intentionally snuffed out his simple light spell, crawled into a small rocky alcove and went to sleep.
When he next awoke his timer on the moss and the clock told him almost an entire day had passed. Taking another mouthful of moss he was about to cast his simple light spell and continue when he realized he wasn’t in complete darkness. There was a super dim light coming from his backpack, Opening it up and digging through the contents he found the small glowstone that he had grabbed from the gnome’s home. He had completely forgotten about the stone, it had lost its glow as he and Medera had climbed up to the surface. Not even contemplating the fact that it could have been triggered by the depth he was underground. He had kept it because he thought the fact that he found a glowing stone to be cool, and kept it as a keepsake. But his keepsake was paying dividends now, the rock provided just a little less light than his simple light spell.
Holding the glowstone in one hand he continued to track down this passage. It was by no means straight, it went down, then up, then it seemed to go back on itself. The short of it was not long and Bjorn had no concept which direction he was actually traveling. It was around an hour after he felt truly lost when he got a notification.
Your tamed Tamber Wolf Kris has no clue if you are alive or dead anymore, seeing how you haven’t re-emerged from the cave Kris has assumed you are dead.
Kris has lost the tamed status and has returned to a wild animal. If you ever cross paths again it will be easier for you to tame the wolf again.
Due to the fact that you sucked as a master, leaving poor Kris all alone, you have lost some of your beast taming progress.
Pulling up his character sheet he was dismayed to find that his beast master skill had decreased all of it’s progress all the way back to 0%, luckily he hadn’t lost any of his skill levels.
Swearing under this breath, Bjorn continued to trudge onwards. Following the twisting paths. He soon came to a side tunnel that was actually big enough that he was able to squeeze through. Not knowing if it would be any better he started doing eenie meenie miney moe settling on the path that he was currently traveling on. He started to continue onwards when his sense of curiosity overtook him and he went back to the offshoot.
Crawling into it the tunnel started off at a steep incline, which eventually grew into a shoot almost vertical that traveled upwards for 5 feet before opening up back the way he was going. Turning himself around precariously he grabbed the ledge above him and pulled himself onto the ledge. In front of him were two items, one was a dead creature, the second was a mushroom growing out of the body of the creature.
The creature looked like a large earthworm. It was about 6 feet in length and over six inches thick at its thickest parts. The entire length was segmented every few inches. Without a clear head or tail of the creature Bjorn didn’t know what to make of the thing. The body of the monster had not hit a stage of decomposition yet. Moving up to it, its body was cold. So at least it wasn’t recently dead. Moving to the mushroom Bjorn looked at it. It had a white stem with a black cap. The cap had spots all over it, and all of the spots were of different colors, although the most common spot color was also white.
In a move which was probably stupid he grabbed the mushroom at the base of the stem and pulled, and it came free without much effort. At the base of the stem the roots were still intact. Only the roots were actually moving. They were like tiny tentacles slowly flailing about in the air.
With a very manly screech Bjorn dropped the mushroom. When it landed the roots maneuvered the stem and cap so that it was upright again and it started to crawl forward towards the worm's body again. Shuddering at the sight in front of him Bjorn carefully grabbed the mushroom by the cap again and moved it further away from the worm's body. Yet the mushroom continued to crawl forward towards the dead worm. Grabbing his knife and the mushroom he laid the mushroom down on the ground holding it in place with one hand and used the knife to stab into the stem of the plant. A tiny squeak escaped the mushroom as a dense cloud of spores escaped from the cap covering Bjorn’s hand. Not to be deterred he continued and pulled the knife downwards towards the slow flailing roots.
Once the knife cleanly bisected the stem of the mushroom in two the roots of the mushroom stopped moving and the mushroom laid still. Not one to trust the treachery of moving plants Bjorn stayed in place and watched the mushroom for over twenty minutes. When it didn’t move anymore he turned to the worm. It’s body laid right where he had left it. Walking over to the body he took a look at the place where the mushroom had been attached and to his surprise there was a small hole leading into the worm.
Shuddering at the thought of what he was about to do Bjorn positioned his knife over the hole and began cutting the worm trying to open it up and see what was inside the creature. Bjorn had flashbacks of dissecting worms in school growing up. The process was pretty similar to that, and the interior of the worm was also similar. The hole in the body led to one of the hearts, which the creature had eight in all. It looked like the roots had dug into the heart and was feasting on the blood that remained inside the heart. Small tendrils of root could be seen still moving about inside the heart.
Moving further down into the body of the worm Bjorn found the stomach of the creature. Using his knife he opened the stomach up and a thick viscous liquid spilled out and onto the rock at his feet. The Rock started to hiss and a thick smoke came up from the places where the bile touched the ground. Taking out his 2 free vials he collected some of the bile. Next he took a piece of cloth that had been left over from patching his backpack and wrapped the mushroom up in the cloth.
Storing both the mushroom and the vials, Bjorn turned back to the worm’s stomach. Prodding around with his knife the blade didn’t seem to react to the liquid. His knife caught on something, Pulling hard a small bracelet came out of the stomach. It was still covered in the fluid so Bjorn just held it at length. It was a simple band of metal, a smoky white color, in the center of the bracelet there was a small pink stone set into the metal. Still not wanting to touch it he held it at arm's length with the blade of his knife. Going back to the worm he searched but didn’t come across anything else of importance. Leaving the body behind he first dropped the bracelet down on the ground in front of him and then crawled his way back down.
When the bracelet hit the dirt a small poof of smoke came rising up out of the ground and the dirt mixed with the metal. Grabbing it with his knife again he continued onwards. All in all a successful side mission. Making his way back to the main path he kept moving in the direction he was heading before. He kept moving until a faint sound came down the tunnel in front of him. He moved forwards towards the sound. After a time the sound became clear enough that he could make out the fact that it was running water. The way that the sound reverberated off of the tunnel walls was deceptive. He kept taking wrong turns as he was moving towards the water. It sounded like the water was off to his right, he would take that path and then after a few minutes of travel the sound was clearly growing quieter. So he would backtrack.
Progress was slow because of that, it took well over half a day to get to the water. Coming around a final corner he beheld the water he had been seeking. Calling it anything more than a trickle of water was a mistake. The sound was actually surprisingly quiet when next to the water. It just sounded louder due to the dead silence he had for ambient sound under the ground. The only thing that could be heard other than the water was the sound of his boots either hitting stone, or shuffling through dirt.
Regardless, the water was a welcome find. His own water was running low, and he wanted to clean the bracelet off. It had a weird mixture of goo and dirt. So it was like mud, but it wasn’t really mud, somewhere in between. Cleaning the bracelet wasn’t an easy task, Not trusting that the bile wouldn’t have a reaction to his body Bjorn slowly let the water sluice down on the bracelet at the end of his knife. The water slowly washed away the mud, not mud. Fully washing away the gunk took the better part of an hour.
Examining the clean bracelet it looked much as it had before, only this time the metal shone under the light of his glowstone. Turning it over in his hands there was a faint warmth that came from the stone in the center of the bracelet. Looking closer at it he got a sense of warmth, of peace, and home from the stone. Putting the bracelet onto his arm there wasn’t any apparent change immediately. Shrugging he left it in place. With nothing else really pressing at the moment Bjorn backtracked to one of the larger offshoots. After exploring it making sure that there wasn’t anything in them and that it was a dead end Bjorn laid down to go to sleep.
A splashing sound awoke Bjorn. Joulting upright he took stock of the situation. He was still safe, using his glowstone he found that there wasn’t anything nearby to worry about. When he had sat upright the sound stopped. After sitting there in silence for a few minutes the sound continued. Coming slowly to his feet Bjorn stowed his glowstone, donned his pack and slowly made his way back to the stream in the pitch black darkness.
Moving as fast as he dared in the pitch black Bjorn Stealthed slowly back towards the water. Moving slow enough so his boots wouldn’t scrap on the rock to produce a sound, but fast enough that hopefully he would come across whatever creature was making that noise before it decided to move on. Feeling forwards with his hands he found the corner of where the stone turned opened up to the trickle of water. As quietly as he could and as fast as he could he cast simple light.
Blinding light flared in the tunnel and there was a shriek of pain as Bjorn could hear something flopping around on the ground. In the corner of his vision a small little eye with a red circle with a line going through the middle of the eye icon appeared. Underneath the eye icon a small timer saying 5 seconds also appeared. Focusing on it a prompt opened.
You are blinded for 5 seconds.
Throwing himself backwards, back the way he came in hope that he avoided whatever was making the sound's defense mechanism. As he jerked himself backwards he also threw the simple flame into the section he had just vacated. Waiting for his timer to hit zero Bjorn chided himself, it was an awfully boneheaded move. He knew that the flame was going to happen and yet he didn’t shield himself from the light. After the timer hit zero his vision returned to normal being able to see light coming from around the corner.
Moving around the corner Bjorn stopped in his tracks. Writhing around on the ground was a scorpion the size of a dinner plate. Its claws and stinger were a white creamy color while the rest of its exoskeleton was black. The scorpion was rolling around on the ground, obviously the light was affecting it. As he watched the scorpion put one of it’s own pinsers into one of its eye sockets. The pincer pushed into the socket, from where Bjorn was standing he could see the eye start to bulge as the claw pushed into it. The eye ruptured and a thick liquid spurted out of the socket. Once the eye had popped the scorpion stopped thrashing about and turned towards Bjorn and started to move towards him. In a panic he threw the knife at the creature, the knife flew at it and severed one of its legs, slowing its progress forward. Casting his cast stone spell he also threw it at the creature, the stone came in contact with the carapace and there was a loud crack as cracks spider webbed throughout the creature's carapace.
But still the scorpion came towards Bjorn, casting his spell again he threw it at the scorpion one more time as it continued to get closer. Without anywhere else to go but back down the tunnel Bjorn took a step forward and stamped down hard on where the scorpion's carapace was cracked. This time there was a crunch as his boot came down hard on the scorpion, killing it. Not to be outdone, the scorpion’s stinger curled down stabbing into Bjorn’s leg, which was still positioned on top of the corpse.
You have been injected with a pain amplifying poison.
Pain shot through his entire body as what had become a dull ache flared up. Dropping to his knee a second shot of pain coursed through his body as it felt like a hot knife was digging into the calf muscle of his left leg, right where he got stung by the scorpion. Reaching down he yanked the stinger out of his leg. A timer appeared on the corner of his view, counting down from 4 minutes and 10 seconds. Curling up into a ball Bjorn just lay there waiting for the timer to go away. The little over 4 minutes felt like half an hour as he waited for the poison to work its way out of his system. Throughout the entire ordeal the pain hadn’t subsided at all.
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Once the time had elapsed, he looked first at his health and then his stamina. His health, which was 88, had dropped down to 85. The poison wasn’t deadly, but it sure sucked. His stamina had taken the biggest hit, it was already down a half. Apparently the pain was enough that it had forced all of his muscles to contract in a vain attempt to protect itself, and having all of your muscles contract for 4 minutes straight sure took it out of you. Thinking about it, the real danger from that poison wasn’t the initial hit, it was the debilitation your body would be affected with each time you took any new injury. Nasty little creature.
Looking down at the dead scorpion he first carefully snapped off the claws and the stinger of the scorpion, the carapace was hard, but the tip of the stinger and the pinsers were hard like metal. When the stinger came loose a small sac came loose with the stinger. Figuring it was the venom sac he tucked both the stinger and the sac away. Retrieving his knife Bjorn drank his fill from the water and started to wash the grim from his body.
Bjorn realized entirely way too late that when he was in his weakened state trying to recover his body had kept doing its normal daily needs. His backside was entirely coated with dried and caked on shit, and the front of his pants didn’t smell any better. Shuddering he removed the soiled clothes and began to slowly clean himself in the slow trickle of water. After he was clean he took the clothes back the way he came and just left them in a pile on the floor. Standing buck naked in the middle of a tunnel Bjorn decided that this wasn’t the wisest choice he had ever made. Then looking back at the pile of gross clothes he decided that he didn’t care.
Going back to the water he then proceeded to clean whatever he could off of his leather armor. Which for the most part was almost all of the gunk. With a shudder he slowly donned the leather armor again. With his more important parts covered, but not his most important part he took off back down the tunnel.
Three days were spent moving down tunnels, the tunnels were confusing, they never seemed to go in any particular direction. With no way to guess where he was in relation to anything, he tried his best to move upwards. Which didn’t always seem to help, he would start taking a new path and it would seem to move upwards for a while, then it would change and move downwards, or even level out. No matter what he did though, he never backtracked. There was no way he could know if he was moving in the right direction, so he figured that moving backwards was foolish. Most of the time he moved by his glowstone, but whenever his mana was close to maxing out he would cast simple light and use that to see for a time. Doing so had brought his light magic skill level up to level 5. All in all things were quite similar over the three days.
One the fourth day something changed. As he was walking down one of the tunnels a horrible stench started to waft towards him. Which was odd, this entire time he was underground the air felt stale, there was no wind moving the air around. For there to be a breeze was odd. Marveling at the feeling of wind on his face Bjorn made the only logical jump he could think of.
With excitement at the thought of potentially getting out from underground he rushed forward. What he stumbled upon wasn’t actually open air, but he burst into a cavern. Looking around for the source of the wind Bjorn stopped. All around him laid dead bodies of gnolls and what looked like goblins. Only they were bigger than what he imagined a goblin would be. The skin of the creature was orange. Looking around there were over 50 dead bodies, almost equal numbers. Quickly moving back into the tunnel he entered stealth and looked out over the battlefield.
From where he stood he got a decent view of the battle, laying there were 2 other tunnels leading out of the cavern. From the way that the bodies lay it looked like the goblinoids were set upon by the gnolls, on the outskirts of the cavern was the largest grouping of goblinoids. As the battle progressed the goblinoids seemed to have lost ground, but they had rallied and that was where the first gnoll bodies could be found. There was one cluster of goblinoids up against the wall, and ringing that was the largest grouping of gnoll bodies.
Not trusting that the cavern was fully empty Bjorn stayed there crouched hiding just past the entrance to the cavern, after a time when there hadn’t been any movement in the cavern Bjorn decided to chance it and started moving through the bodies on the ground. The goblinoids were better equipped than the gnolls were. Moving from body to body he found various useful items. There were tinderboxes, various glowstones like the one he had, vails full of liquid, handfuls of coin, rope, and innumerable other useful items. There were also weapons and armor. Most of the goblinoids had a mix of no armor, some chainlink, and some leather armor. The gnolls on the underhand were mostly bare, they did have weapons and the odd piece of something that could be passed as armor. One goblinoid stood out from the rest, it was larger than the rest and had a set of scalemail on it, it also was at the center of the goblinoids. He also found enough unsoiled clothes on the goblinoids that were big enough to fit him, that he was able to redress himself. No sense running around a cavern almost stark naked after all.
Searching the goblinoid that Bjorn assumed was their leader he found the best of all of the loot. It had a well made sword which he took. It also had two rings on its fingers, also which Bjorn took. Around its shoulder and down towards its hip there was a satchell. Opening it up he found two books, which looked similar to the cast stone spellbook he had found earlier. A small pouch of coins, a rolled up piece of paper, and a small vial of a honey looking substance. Taking it all Bjorn retreated back to his tunnel entrance.
First he opened both of the books and he was greeted by two prompts.
This spellbook contains the spell Purify water, it is a level 1 water spell. Would you like to attempt to learn this spell Yes/No?
This spellbook contains the spell Light Bolt, it is a level 4 light spell. Would you like to attempt to learn this spell Yes/No?
Doing a mental fist pump, Bjorn first clicked yes on the purify water spellbook. The book started to glow as the pages quickly flipped through its pages until the book rested on the last page filled with letters, this time the book slammed shut as the arch of light came out of the book and entered his eyes. The book then crumbled to dust in his hands after he finished reading. It was a success and Bjorn gained another new spell.
Drunk off of the success of his last book he repeated the progress a second time with the Light bolt spell. And once again the same thing happened, only this time when the light entered his eyes Bjorn didn’t gain a new understanding of how to cast a magical spell. With a frown he got a new notification.
You have failed to learn the spell Light Bolt from the spellbook. Better luck next time.
Annoyed that he had actually failed to gain anything from the second book he was still happy about at least one success. Quickly he pulled up the info for the purify water spell.
Spell Purify water
Cast time:Channel
Components: Verble, Somatic
Range: 5 feet
Duration: Channel
Mana Cost: 6 per second
Effect: This spell will purify water into drinkable water at a rate of 1 liter per 2 seconds channeled. Will remove most diseases both magical and non-magical. Will also remove trace minerals helping avoid poisoning from element toxicity.
Looking at the vial of liquid he debated on drinking it, it looked good. What could possibly go wrong right? Quickly pushing that thought aside he stored the vial for later use, there was no guarantee that it would do anything beneficial. Lastly he turned towards the piece of paper, he unrolled it and began to read it, speaking the words a little under his breath.
Unbeknownst to him the gnolls had come back. They were slowly and quietly picking their way through the battlefield collecting anything useful from the dead. Once finishing the first line of words that were written on the piece of paper it glowed and then caught on fire burning up in less than a second.
The gnolls looked over at the bright flare of light seeing Bjorn. In a harsh guttural language they said something. That was when Bjorn was alerted to the gnolls as well. There were around 9 or 10 of them standing spread out throughout the room. A small cluster of the gnolls stood around where the goblinoids had made their final stand. Turning towards Bjorn they all started to run towards him.
The light show didn’t end there, after the roll of paper went up in flames a small piece of the flame no bigger than the head of a needle stayed and it started to grow. It quickly grew over the next 3 seconds until it was the size of a softball. After it grew to the size of a softball it shot out away from him shooting towards the gnoll in the lead.
Seeing the ball of flame rocketing towards its face, the lead gnoll quickly dropped to the ground, and the ball flew directly over its head. Unfortunately for the gnoll behind the lead gnoll its reaction time wasn’t quite as quick and the fireball hit it in the face. Upon coming in contact the fireball exploded, fire flew out 10 feet in every direction from the impact point.
From where he was standing Bjorn could feel the heat from the fireball wash over him around 40 yards from the impact site. What quickly followed were howls of agony as the flesh of the gnolls around the impact site began to melt from the intense heat. 4 of the gnolls were affected by the fireball spell. The first one that the ball hit laid headless on the ground, the remaining 3 were howling in agony as their flesh caught fire from the intense heat. Quickly burning to death. The remaining gnolls continued to run towards Bjorn, each was brandishing some sort of weapon in their unnaturally long arms.
Not waiting around for the remaining gnolls to catch up to him Bjorn took off down the tunnel. Minimizing the prompts that had popped up Bjorn just kept running. Words that sounded like a mix between a barking hyena's laughter and harsh human language, almost like how Rammstein sounded in their song du hast, could be heard echoing down the corridor behind him. Bjorn ran for all he was worth, but his headlong run down the tunnel he had just traversed seemed futile. There was no way he would be able to take on 5 of the remaining gnolls, he was lucky to have even taken care of 4 of them. But regardless of the futility of running Bjorn wasn’t going to just give up. He ran until he had a stitch in his side, all the while the sounds of pursuit didn’t seem to close in or fall further behind. Once as he was running his foot landed wrong on the rock below him and he slid face first on the ground as he fell, he was able to get back on his feet quickly, but the sounds of pursuit came closer behind him because of his mistake.
The sound of gnolls in the tunnel in front of him brought Bjorn’s headlong reckless charge to a halt, he was trapped. With gnolls in front and behind him he had little chance of escaping. From where he stopped there was one of the small dead end tunnels not 5 feet in front of him. Taking his chances Bjorn ducked into the tunnel, this one was similar to the one he went down before. Only this time it went down, traveled for a few feet and then shot up to a platform which he was able to pull himself onto. He had no way to escape from where he was. Drawing his newly found sword he set up and waited. If the gnolls were going to come for him he would make the pay dearly to pry him out of the rocks.
Not a minute after he got situated he could hear the sound of the gnolls talking just outside of his cave entrance. They stopped talking and a new sound came out of the dark, it was a snuffling sound. Swearing internally they were tracking him by sight, he had hoped that they would just continue down the tunnel or start to fan out, and he would be able to sneak past them. But no, he had no such luck now.
Soon he could hear the sound of a gnoll making its way into the tunnel he took as the snuffling sound grew louder. When the gnoll poked its head up over the ledge Bjorn lashed out with the sword. The sword sunk point first into the gnolls head and the entire sword grew heavy as the gnolls lifeless body pulled the sword downward, the added weight was so rapid and unexpected that it pulled the sword from his hand.
Loud exclamations could be heard as the gnolls saw their brethren fall. There was a dragging sound as the gnolls pulled the body of the other gnoll out of the way. Pulling his dagger Bjorn set to wait for the sight of the next head poking up over the ledge, he would do the same to the next curious head to show itself. And so he waited, after a few minutes there was the sound of retreating footsteps down the tunnel. It was hard to tell, but it didn’t sound like 4 sets of footsteps, figuring they left a guard he stayed there and waited.
He was waiting for over an hour, as he was about to go out and check and maybe take off again the sounds of footsteps approaching came echoing through the tunnel. A voice right by his side tunnel entrance called out to the encroaching footsteps. He had been right, they left at least 1, probably 2 gnolls there to keep him cornered. There was some quieter speech between the gnolls when the parties reconvened.
An odd sound could be heard from where he lay in wait, it sounded like wood being piled in the tunnel. A bright flash of light illuminated the tunnel and then a persistent glow remained. Quickly smoke began to fill the room he was laying in, they were smoking him out. This made him unreasonably angry, and a thought crossed his mind. They were likely going to kill him if he left the tunnel, if he didn’t leave the tunnel he was going to suffocate down here. So instead of giving them what they wanted he was going to make sure that no matter what they did to his body he wouldn’t have anything useful on him when they came for him.
Opening up his pack he began to dig around, pulling out all of the items that he could eat Bjorn began eating them one by one. First he ate all of his remaining food, there wasn’t much, but he would be damned if he let the gnolls get the spoils of his labor. Next he pulled the ring of health off of his finger and ate that too. Taking his two healing potions he drank them both down, next he moved on to the vial he pulled off of the dead goblinoid drinking that down. Looking at the vials of bile he got off of the worm he couldn’t force himself to drink those, he tried but the smell from the bile was too much for him and made Bjorn start to gag. Recorking them he was almost out of clear air and was starting to get light headed. Finally he pulled the orb that he got from the farmer back at the market day, it was just the size that he wasn’t sure if he could swallow it but damn it he was going to try. Sticking the orb in his mouth he tried to swallow, it took a few tries but eventually he got it to go, and he could feel it move all the way down his throat and into his stomach. If somehow he survived this endeavor he didn’t look forward to what it was going to be like to pass that orb. As his final act of defiance he smashed the vials and started on his alchemy set as the smoke finally got to him and his world went black.