29. The Echoing Abyss pt. 1
Today I had pulled the Mage card. I considered that lucky, although I would have considered anything other than the Blank and the Hail card lucky. The plan today was to clear the level thirty-five to forty dungeon in Crescentis. I didn’t even have to LFG, the moment I logged in Nefeline invited me to a group and asked me what I was planning on doing today. I received several notifications of other party invites moments later, but I ignored them. Instead I simply explained my plans to Nefeline, not bothering to pretend anything anymore. He quickly invited Tefla and two players I didn’t know; Rea, a Naiad [Water Priestess], and Kordrom, a dwarven[Stormbinder]. Nefeline I recalled was a [Soldier], while Tefla was a drow [Elf Stalker].
The resulting party makeup was one tank, one melee dps, two spellcasters, and a healer. I thought it was flexible enough to handle most challenges, so I fast traveled to the shallow pools and rode west, searching for the summoning stone for the Echoing Abyss dungeon. Rea beat me to it, however, and I was summoned while en route.
There was a moment of awkwardness when the party was all together, and I was uncertain of its source until Kordrom bluntly asked “So is you real or is you ain’t?”
“In this world I’m as real as you are,” I answered. “What else matters?”
Kordrom grunted at that. “That’s not a denial.”
“A denial of what?” I challenged.
“Are you Hail 2.0?”
“No. I’m not. And I’m done talking about this. If you have a problem with--”
“I don’t have a problem, I just want to know who or what I’m playing with,” Kordrom said, interrupting me.
“I don’t owe you anything, Kordrom,” I pointed out. “If you don’t want to be part of this, leave. Otherwise, I’m done talking about it. I can bust dungeons and destroy lairs and that’s all the more I’m going to say.”
“Fair enough, I suppose,” the dwarf admitted.
The awkwardness didn’t quite end there, but we moved past it and entered the Echoing Abyss together. The entrance to the dungeon was a large crevasse, with an elevator to lower us down powered by magic. The entrance to the dungeon itself was fifty feet below the surface; we rode the elevator through the motes of white light which signaled the entrance into the instance.
Welcome, Dungeon Master, To the Echoing Abbys
Do you wish to challenge the unique instance?
Yes
No
The prompt appeared as soon as I passed through the entrance. I swiftly selected yes, and before the prompt that would ask me for my intention appeared I simply stated “I intend to destroy this dungeon in order to claim the maximum rewards available.”
The dungeon was silent for a moment after my pronouncement, then the ropes on the elevator we were riding abruptly snapped and we were falling through air and darkness into the depths below.
I screamed. The others screamed. I had been expecting a response from the dungeon, but had expected it to be balanced. Something which we could overcome. Simply dropping us to our deaths was not on the list of things I had anticipated.
We landed in saltwater deep enough to swim in, but while our momentum was slowed we still lost three quarters of our Health. I sank to the bottom, then kicked off it to return to the surface, treading water as I waited for the others to recover. They joined me within moments, sputtering.
“Okay, so that’s not in the video I watched on this place,” Tefla said. “Normally the elevator stops halfway down, and you enter a series of caverns. We’re way below where we’re supposed to be.”
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“Has anyone ever jumped off the elevator before?” I inquired.
“If they have I don’t know about it,” Tefla said. “I have no idea whats down – oh shit what’s that? Something just brushed my leg.”
I chain-cast [Spark] to bring some light into the darkness, and we realized that we were sharing the water with a swarm of eels. I [Analyzed] them and learned that they were Jolt Eels just a few seconds before the first of the eels unleashed its ability, zapping Rea and bringing her down to ten percent health.
“Rea, quick, start healing us,” I said, pulling a health potion from my own inventory. I quaffed the berry flavored liquid and it brought me from around 4500 health to just short of 10000, but that was still only a little more than half of my maximum.
“I can’t heal and swim at the same time,” Rea objected.
“Then just heal!” I said, as my mind tried to come up with a plan to deal with the swarm of eels which was growing larger by the moment. The others had followed my lead and consumed recovery items of their own, bringing their healths up to nearly half-full in most cases, even as Rea stopped trying to keep her head above water and began chanting her healing prayers. She would sink below water as one heal went off, topping us off just as a massive current of electricity slammed into all of us, paralyzing and causing ongoing damage for its ten second duration.
I once more sank into the water while waiting for the paralyze debuff to wear off. As aggravating as the sense of my health being drained away was the water that went down my nose. I tried to think through my options.
I was a [Mage]. I had access to all of the elements because I hadn’t specialized. Fire was useless in this water, and the eels themselves were likely immune to lightning, seeing as they were themselves empowered by it. While I could likely snipe individual eels with my [Arcane Missiles] spell, I needed something to take them out en masse, and the only remaining elements available to me were earth and ice. Earth was a non-starter; it wasn’t typically very powerful in combat against smaller swarming enemies like these eels. So I decided to see what I could do with ice.
Once the paralysis ended, I once more kicked off the rocky bottom of the pool we had landed in and returned to the surface. I sputtered as I broke the surface, looking around, trying to identify the largest clump of eels that I could find. I saw a swarm swimming in a vortex, charging up another wave of their electric attack. While hampered by the water, I shouted the cantrip to [Flash Freeze] and did my best to accompany it with the appropriate motions.
The swarm of eels was frozen solid within a five foot diameter chunk of ice. My party members broke the surface. I glanced at my party interface, placed in my HUD in the corner of my vision, and saw that everyone was back down to almost twenty five percent. I cast [Flash Freeze] again, this time not targeting anything but a spot of water right next to Rea.
“Rea, climb on the ice,” I shouted. “Heal us from there!”
Rea saw my plan and tried to execute it, but it didn’t work quite like I envisioned. She kept slipping back into the water, or the ice kept shifting and flipping whenever she was close to climbing on top of it. She was forced to settle for clinging to the side of it to keep afloat while doing her best to cast her healing magic.
Another swarm of eels was swarming, and I knew that another wave of their electric attack was incoming. I began casting [Flash Freeze] once more, but the spell failed to complete due to the difficulty I was facing swimming and casting at the same time. I was bracing for the shock and fully expecting to die this time, as my potion cooldown was still down and Rea hadn’t managed to heal me yet, when a different sort of jolt hit me.
You are affected by Eye of the Storm.
+90 lightning resistance, 15 seconds
I didn’t have much time to react to what had just happened as the eel’s attack pulsed through the water. However, unlike last time, I mostly resisted the damage it caused, and the dip in my Health was negligible. I completely resisted the paralysis this time, which gave me an opportunity to realize that Kordrom had likely just saved me. As a [Stormbinder], one of his abilities conveyed a lightning resistance buff onto his allies, and he had used it just in time to save us.
The swarm continued to spiral and unleash their ineffectual attack, and I promptly hit them with another [Flash Freeze], killing or entombing the majority of the swarm within a large block of ice. There were many eels in the water with us, however, and no sooner had I dealt with one spiral than another began to form.
“There!” Nefeline shouted, pointing at something in the darkness. “We need to escape by climbing onto that ledge! I see a passageway leading back up!”
Trusting her eyes, we began swimming in the direction she’d indicated. I was forced to deal with two more spiral attacks along the way, but we managed to climb onto the ledge she’d spotted without any casualties, leaving the danger of the eels behind us.
Tefla collapsed on the ground the moment we were safe, his health barely above ten percent. He was breathing heavily, even as Rea worked her soothing magic to begin restoring our Health.
“I hate water-based encounters,” he said. He raised his head and looked around. “Did we get any loot for surviving?”
I looked around, but there was no lootbox forming. “Doesn’t look like it.”
“Damn. All that for nothing.”
“It could be worse,” I reminded him. “We could have died and gotten stuck in the lobby.”