"Careful!”
Nim saw everything go out of control, and his golem-arm clenched its metal fist until steam hissed from the exposed gearworks. He saw his allies sprinting towards the promise of wealth, and he froze for an instant, realizing he couldn’t control them. They were veterans, yes, but not of delving. They were soldiers, bandits, monster hunters.
They knew how to cut their fortunes out of the world; they had no experience in the underground realms of Dungeons, where the world took its pound of flesh in return.
He watched as the thin man, Chaith, dodged a sweeping lunge by the fungal lion. His dagger scored a long raking cut over the beast’s side, but as it flicked past him, it smashed backwards with its hindpaw, striking into the meat of his calf with long, curved claws of chitinous black.
Chaith cried out and toppled to one knee. Instantly, reinforcements were there to cover him, but the lion was gone; it vanished with a swish of closing foliage into the dense, swaying stalks of luminous fungal blooms.
Two men stumbled through a patch of bubbling, piled-up puffball blooms, their fat white surfaces dotted with knobs of hardened chitin. There was a thunderous crumpling of noise and the puffballs burst apart in a brief roar of flames, an eye-searing and ethereal puff of white fire. Those chitin knobs became flying shrapnel that tore the men apart. The one that lived was blind in one eye and scarred with burns across his body, a walking corpse.
Of the ten he’d brought, two were gone already, two more wounded. "Touch as little as possible!” Nim roared into the ringing aftermath of the explosion. He took three steps forward, and some instinct made him turn back.
A spider perched over the fallen man, the one who’d been bitten by a snake. It was bone-white, thick plates of shaggy, rough material covering its bulbous round body. Its fangs descended for the wounded man’s throat.
Nim twisted his wrist around just so, feeling the machinery in his arm, the little pistons and pulleys, pull taut. Deep inside the spellwork-inscribed bronze gears began to turn, and a golden light built around his knuckles as he took three running steps forward and swung his fist - engulfed now in golden fire - towards the spider’s skull.
He should have listened to his own advice.
The spider’s body blossomed into flames in an explosive clap, the wave of force lifting him off his feet as the world turned white with glinting spears of crystal flowering out from the spider’s detonated body, from the thin slime of viscous yellow blood splattering outwards, a husk around an inner core of molten flame and fury.
Nim saw the world in frozen moments.
The fire erupting outwards from cracks breaking open in the spider’s calcified form.
The crystals fanning towards him as he floated, weightless, mid-air.
The breathless, crashing halt as he hit the floor and saw above him the light shining through the ruptured ceiling.
And then time restarted, and there was blood on his face. There was blood everywhere. His metal arm was punctured, the gears and pulleys clicking and hissing in protest, setting up a thin whine of failing machinery as he tried to lift his bronze fingers skyward. He tried to speak and felt something wet blossom from his chest.
Looking down, he saw a spear of white crystal thrust through his lung. Froths of mixing air and blood heaved out around the edges of the wound with every rise and fall of his chest, a foaming pink mixture that was his life and his breath all leaving him.
Fumbling into his shirt, he drew out the tiny vial Eyfrae had awarded him. It hadn’t fractured, thank god. Mageglass was harder stuff than steel. A tiny drop, just one drop, of shining elixir sat in the bottom of the rounded vial.
He tilted it down.
A briny, alcoholic heat spread down his throat, into his chest. He could feel the torn fabric of his body starting to writhe, the individual strands of his flesh rippling and flowing with a resurgent motion as they stitched themselves together.
The next part would hurt, and all he could do was breathless curse the heavens. Reaching up, Nim took the spear of crystal that had fixed him through his chest, and ripped it free. The shout of pain bubbled out of him in a little surge of bloody spume.
Over the course of three heartbeats the hole sealed itself shut. The ringing in his ears subsided, replaced by the shouting and clamour of the battlefield. Strength surged through his limbs. He felt incredible, for a man back from the dead.
The look on his men's faces as he stood made it clear they thought he was dead. He wiped his bloody face, a thin peppering of crystals still trapped in his skin; shining shrapnel pockmarking his ugly mug. With a vicious grin, he clapped his stunned second-in-command on the shoulder and went running towards the promised treasure. The elixir was like a fire beating through his veins. It made him want to move, want to fight, want to win.
His men were stomping through a shallow pond in the shadow of an enormous statue of a crude manlike figure, his face propped against his fist in thought and his feet dipping into the pool. Bright, golden-scaled fish tried to escape, but they were chased down and seized, hauled out of the water still flopping and fighting. A knife slitted their fat, pale-spotted stomach, and gold-tinted pearls came spilling out. Fat little pearls as big as an eye. Puny ones the size of a bead. All with a lovely, butter-gold hue, shining in rough fingers as his men scooped them up to stuff into packs and pockets.
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"C'mon then! Do you want to be rich men or rich corpses?!” He slapped them on the shoulders, gripped them with his mechanical hand until he felt bones begin to creak. “We have to keep moving! There’s better stuff deeper in, I promise you that!”
It was hard to get men moving when they'd caught the scent of gold, but they weren't idiots. They knew they were in danger the more they lingered.
"Let's scout out the gazebo." There were three paths through the jungle, three locations that the Dungeon had highlighted. One was the pool with the golden fish, and the other looked to be a gateway. The third was an enormous gazebo made of shining glass. Something about it just pulled him; the little voice that whispered danger was drowned out by the elixir’s lingering, heady rush of strength.
“Are we-” Chaith was feverish, his face pale. His comrades had his leg bandaged up but the blood was leaking through the cloths. “Are we smaller?”
“We’ll get you home soon enough, old boy.” The man tending his wounds laughed, but Nim paused, looking around. The jungle loomed above them. Corkscrew sprouts of fluorescent mushrooms lifted higher than his head, their tall stalks lined by dozens of delicate spines jointed together by membranous frills in helix patterns.
“No, we are.” That brought them all short, pausing to glance around, to confirm for themselves the worst. It was true. They were shrinking, vanishing into the dense and luminous undergrowth. “Come on. Move it! With me, now!”
Shouting, he led the way towards the palace of glass, letting his men cut down the fungal blooms in his wake. A sudden shiver in the moss warned him a second before it was too late- a half-transparent green viper reared up, coming waist-high now, a goliath. Its pink mouth yawned open, twin fangs bared.
It lunged for him.
His metal fist caught it in the side of the head, sparks bursting from the breach in the upper arm as the vicious haymaker spread the creature’s brains and skull into a long spray of gore. Its headless body twitched and writhed and he continued forward, running now, heading for the gates of the glass gazebo.
As he pushed open the door and stepped through, there was a moment of disorientation. He was his own size again. Behind him, his men seemed to step through the lens of a telescope as they crawled through the doorway.
Only five of them, now. Three more gone. Chaith was the last through, limping heavily, needing another man’s support.
The inside of the gazebo was octagonal. It was a house of treasures, the walls glittering so beautifully, redolent with beams of light bouncing back and forth from one mirrored surface to the next, spinning an opulent web of gold; Nim felt dazed. He stepped forward, towards the long table of faintly-blue glass - like ice - where chalice after chalice of gold sat waiting, all but crying out to be taken as prizes.
A cry of warning came from behind him, and he threw himself aside. Nim rolled across the ground as a blade slammed down where he had been a heartbeat before. No, not a blade- a leg. One of eight. A creature, half-man and half-spider, its face hidden behind a white-pink helm, its body covered in armor of the same pale and pearlescent stuff.
In its hands it carried a long glaive, and with one sweep, two heads went flying.
Nim lunged forward, throwing his all into a blazing punch. The arachne lifted one arm and caught the blow full on. He felt the bone beneath the armor bend in the moment of contact, heard the hiss of pain, felt the impact rock through his own body and press his back foot down into the floor until the grass began to crack. The armored spider was thrown back onto its hindlegs, using the front two to slash at him, forcing him to duck back.
Its weight came crashing down behind a brutal overhead sweep that Nim ducked away from, playing for time now. His arm needed time before he could strike with full force. Behind him, the men were frozen, unsure of what to do. Skittering around the edges of the room trying not to attract the beast’s wrath.
A dagger bounced off the armor’s shoulder. Chaith let out a weak laugh, incredulous at himself. Before he could make another sound or take another breath, he was skewered through on the glaive’s point. Blood dripped down as he was lifted from the ground and flicked off the blade.
Another man lunged forward, hacking with an axe. The haft of the glaive whirled and struck him stupid, stunning him with a blow across the back of the head. A bladed leg stabbed through his calf, and as he fell, another pierced through his torso.
But Nim could see the weakness, the slowness, in that left arm that had been used to block his blow. One more. He curled his metal hand into a fist and ran forward.
The glaive swept so quickly, so neatly through the air, he never saw it coming. Only instinct let him dodge to the side in time, his fist sweeping upwards towards the arachne’s left shoulder. This time, he never made contact. Instead, he caught a vicious kick across his chest, tearing open his leather cuirass and throwing him back.
The glaive blurred through the air, and Nim thought he was dead; but no, it was claiming another life, a man trying to creep up on the arachnoid monstrosity.
By the time Nim managed to stand, blood weeping from his chest in a long gash from shoulder to hip, there was not one man of his crew left alive. None except him had survived.
And he wasn’t far from joining them. The strength the potion had lent him was leaving, ebbing out of him with the relentless drip of his blood, leaving his flesh arm trembling. Smoke wafted from the metal one.
The dark sockets of the creature’s helm stared at him, and then it reached out, lifting a cup from the table. “Drink.”
“Hh. And why not kill me?” The words came out of his mouth before his woozy, injured mind could think better of asking a question for which there were no good answers.
“The Maker wishes to put his other creations to the test.” The armored creature replied, simply. “It is a chance. However small.”
It stepped forward, offering him the cup.
He could smell the blood dripping from his weapon, filling up this beautiful room.
And gods sight watch over him, Nim couldn’t stomach that. Couldn't live with himself - or die with himself - if he went out any way but struggling to the last drop of blood.
Nim lunged- and was stopped short. The beast let its glaive fall aside and simply shoved its five sharp fingers through his chest. His ribs broken like tinder. A cough, a spew of blood down his chin, and he tilted his head down to see the creature’s hand flexing tighter. He felt his heart beat being crushed between its fingers.
"A poor choice."
They pressed down, and that was the last thing he felt. Darkness rushed in.