Alfric paused.
said Alfric.
Hannah went into the chest and pulled the entad out, taking a moment to look at it.
As mapping entads went, it was imperfect, and it only showed the surrounding area in nearly real time, with the rest being a record of what had been in those areas when they’d passed through. Alfric could see the discontinuity where they’d diverged from their original path, but there was no way to tell whether that original path was still there at all.
Alfric rose up into the sky, above the walls of the canyon and into the too-blue sky.
The canyon ended abruptly in flat land that was only slightly rounded at the edges. Alfric kept going up, with no deviation in either direction, and made sure that the rest of the party was clearly visible beneath his feet.
The gaps in the rock stretched out around him, and as he rose higher to get a full look at them, he grew concerned. There was too much of it. The gaps continued on for far too long, out into the distance, and implied that this winding, branching canyon went such a distance that it would imply the equivalent of a thousand rooms. The higher he rose, the more there was to see, until eventually he worried that if he came down, small variations on his position would mean that he’d be facing a monster rather than reuniting with his party.
Dungeons weren’t supposed to do this. They were supposed to be small, half-created worlds, only a thin imagining grown from whatever alchemy the Editors had designed to utilize abundant natural magic. There were plenty of unnaturally large dungeons, those so big that you’d run out of some resource or another before you could find an end, or anything resembling an end. There was some argument about whether the infinidungeons were truly infinite, but if they weren’t infinite, then no one had ever successfully mapped an instance of one out, and that was with entads that could expand senses out to a mile and magic that could move them as fast as the wind. Still, even those were supposed to be relatively static.
Alfric descended down, thankful that he hadn’t lost his bearings, and landed lightly next to the party.
They filed into the garden stone one by one, with Alfric going last because of the time the thimble armor took to retract. The garden stone, unfortunately, didn’t permit metal, which meant that they had to go through the work of taking off their armor, and then Alfric was worried about leaving it all outside. He decided to rise up and leave it on top of the canyon, away from where a wandering monster might go, if they were unlucky enough to find one.
said Verity.
said Alfric.
said Verity.
That gave Alfric pause. he finally said.
said Mizuki.
said Alfric.
~~~~
Mizuki was second-guessing herself from the moment she stepped out of the garden stone. She had the mask firmly in place, literally glued to her face with a tight seal. At Alfric’s insistence there were two ventstones, which was much more air than she needed, but his theory had been that this way air would be constantly pumping out of the mask, and there’d be no way that bad air would be able to get in.
The thimble took quite a bit of time, and Mizuki didn’t want to wait for it, but she’d promised that she would. She had actually never put on the thimble armor, despite her love of entads, in part because it seemed like a lot of waiting, and she was surprised that it was so easy to move in, as well as being so light. Once Alfric had upgraded to something else, she might ask to take it as her own, since it didn’t feel like the gauntlets would interfere much with spellcasting.
She rose up into the sky to get the lay of the land. It seemed endless, but she knew that it wasn’t, and that helped to tamp down the fear. Besides, if Alfric was right, there weren’t a bunch of extra monsters, it was just more space. The virtually endless canyons would only have a limited number of creatures that wanted to kill her, scattered around in unknown places.
Mizuki used Hannah’s entad and followed the trail from above, flying over canyon walls and looking down below her. The chest followed, going up the sides of the canyon and then back down, seeming none too bothered by how incredibly stupid that method of travel was. Mizuki was worried about the chest, as her friends were in there, but it was practically invincible. Alfric had pointed out that this wouldn’t stop some monster from opening up the chest and hauling out the stone, which wasn’t unbreakable. Maybe he hadn’t realized how scared she was, because it definitely hadn’t boosted her confidence.
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Mizuki wasn’t even sure why she’d offered to be the one on the outside. Maybe she had felt like Alfric always took all the risk for himself, and that he didn’t trust her to make good decisions in spite of the fact that she had made pretty much nothing but good decisions in the whole time they’d known each other. Still, the price for learning that Alfric did trust her with important dungeon things was having to go do important dungeon things.
Mizuki wasn’t even entirely sure what she was looking for. The dungeon probably still had an exit, but she wasn’t entirely sure whether it would be in the same form as it had been in before, and looking at things from above was much different from looking at them on the ground. It would have been nice if it was as simple as spotting a hole and knowing that it was the hole to go out through, but she was worried that she’d spot a hole that wasn’t the right hole, and who knew what kind of horrible monster might be hiding out in there?
She was more than halfway to where the entad was pointing when she spotted some monsters down below. They were bulbous, slow-moving things, and there was a temptation to smack them with magic just for the hell of it, but the red fleshy tubes didn’t seem like much of a threat, even if each of them was larger around than the trunk of a particularly old tree. Finding monsters meant something though, she thought, since there shouldn’t be too many of them.
The fleshy tubes began unfolding at the top, opening up like huge flowers, and once that was done, they began belching up little white sacs that wriggled on the ground. Mizuki was fascinated and disgusted in equal measure, but once the sacs split open to reveal white and red creatures, and once those creatures began to spread their wings, she took off.
She was hoping that she wouldn’t have to fight them, in part because she didn’t think the particular flavors of magic in the air would help them, but also because there wasn’t a point to fighting them. Still, the newborns took to the sky on unsteady wings and flooded out of the canyon, up into the air where she was flying.
Mizuki landed for just a moment, and the chest was next to her, since it had been following along with no apparent effort. She opened it quickly and pulled out the sword that had cut through a bunch of metal stuff on the wall, then shot back up into the sky, breezing past the winged creatures that were bearing down on her. They were more wing than anything else, and she was doubtful that their tiny claws would be able to get past the armor, but after the dive bombing incident and all the damage the bat things had done, she wasn’t about to take the risk of getting squarely smacked by them. These were more like birds than bats, with needle-beaks and significant plumage, white at the body and red at the fringes, fast, but no match for the helm’s incredible speed.
Mizuki rose into the air and spun around to face the murder-birds, checked that the chest had followed her and was out of the path of destruction, then swung the blade in front of her.
She had expected a line of force to slice through them, to see bloodied bodies whirling to the ground, but only two seemed to die, right in the middle of the flock, and the rest continued on toward her. She swung again, trying to get as many of them in the sweeping angle as she could, but again, when the cut moved invisibly through the air, it seemed to hit only in one specific spot. Mizuki flew backward and wished that she had something else, but the magic was thin up above the ground, and even if it hadn’t been, the dominant flavor of decay was ineffective. There was something else in the air as well, but she didn’t have the time or desire to ruminate on it, not when the birds were still flying after her.
There wasn’t really a battle between them, not when Mizuki could keep her distance and keep attacking, but she remembered what Alfric had said, and tried to think, as hard as that was when monsters were chasing her. There was more than one way to lose a battle, and if she kept swinging the sword too much, fatigue might set in. There were also more of the things flying than there had been at the start, and as Mizuki looked out over the battlefield, she saw even more coming up from one of the crevices. She wasn’t cutting through them fast enough to make an actual reduction in their numbers.
She circled around in the air, moving at close to the helm’s maximum speed, then dove down quickly into the canyon, where more of the sacs were rolling out of the flesh tubes. She summoned up the magic in the surrounding area and lined up an outpouring of abstract decay that in theory would hit all of them, then shot back up in the air before the birds could descend on her in such a confined space.
The fight was a slog, and though she was using both arms, she found herself getting tired. The invisible cut seemed to only make a vertical line no matter which way it was swung, and it seemed to be quite a bit more powerful if the swing was a vertical cut too. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the best way to cut down the birds, since they spread out and flocked together, and Mizuki had to be aware of her position at all times. Eventually, whether it was because she had blasted the sac-spewing tubes or because they’d simply run out, the flock of birds that had been flapping after her was diminished, and she felt safe letting them come a little bit closer.
That was when a second combatant joined the party.
Mizuki had only been dimly aware of the ground below her during the aerial maneuvers. She saw the trunk from time to time, as it would pop up and then descend back down, stupidly trying to stay close to her. Most of her attention was on the birds though, and so she didn’t quite realize that she was flying over so much of the dungeon. That there were monsters down there, that these monsters could see her, and that some of them might be capable of coming up to fight her, were all conclusions that didn’t reach her mind until a fat brown creature slithered up from the canyon.
It was massive, so big that it had trouble getting out, and its leathery wings were pretty clearly too small for it to actually fly with. It flew nonetheless, and faster than Mizuki could, which meant that in only a few moments her battle with the birds needed to be forgotten so she could deal with it.
The mouth was big enough to swallow a cart, with teeth in a zig-zag, and the long arms with terrifying claws reached for her as it twisted in her direction. She was slower than it, but more maneuverable, and managed to get out of the way of its initial charge with it not doing much more than knocking her with the side of its mouth. She pulled back and it followed, but she was ready, and blasted it in the face with all of the decay she could muster this high up. Whatever the actual effect, it seemed to work slowly, but that just meant trying to dodge out of the way of —
The hit left her reeling and unsure of where she was, with the only saving grace being that she’d been knocked far enough away that she hadn’t been killed during her moment of confusion. Her head was pounding and there was a real possibility that some of the fight had gone by without her even knowing about it.
The beast was bearing down on her, mouth open like it meant to gulp her up, and the armor had been rent at her midsection, where she was bleeding.
Mizuki’s heart was hammering in her chest. She had never been more frightened in her entire life, not even when she’d fallen down into that pit and had to kill a monster in the dark. There were times she could ride the thrill of battle, to let her instincts overtake her and flow freely through it. Sometimes it felt more like excitement than fear, and it was possible to not worry about the emotions that she was feeling, to just let it happen. This new thing was going to kill her though.
She had lost the sword when she’d been hit, and had no idea where it might have gotten off to, which meant all she had at her disposal was magic, and if decay was doing anything to the creature as it moved, it wasn’t doing enough. Worse, it had the remainder of the birds with it.
Mizuki braced herself and dodged the first clawed attack, then zipped to the side when the mouth came down on her. There was a faint hope that the decay would continue to work on him and he would simply fall over dead, but it was a very faint hope. She was going to die if she didn’t do something, but she had no way to kill this thing, not if the decay wasn’t going to work. There was another mood hanging in the air, but it was relatively abstract, and she couldn’t put her finger precisely on what it was.
The creature’s long tail smacked her, its acceleration so extreme that she wasn’t sure she’d have been able to catch it starting to move if she’d been staring right at it. She flew through the air but thankfully didn’t lose consciousness, and that thankful that she had the helm to keep her in the air, because if she’d slammed into a rock at speed, it might have killed her. Her guts felt all out of place though, and she fought back the urge to throw up. Without clerical intervention, she was going to be bruised across her whole body, and she was dimly aware that she was losing blood from the wound on her stomach.
She needed something, and looked to the chest, which had dutifully popped up on the plateau beside her, following her as she was banged around. Alfric’s bident was in the trunk, but she had no idea how to use it. She needed something better, and reached out to that abstract mood as the monster went to close the distance again.
It came to her in a flash of insight, just as the creature was almost on her. The strange mood wasn’t something natural to the dungeon, it was something generated by an unknown process within the dungeon, and the sprawling expansion must have been what she was seeing the counter of. Once she’d grasped that, it was a matter of conceptualizing the opposite, not quite expansion, more iteration on a theme, but the opposite, woven, would be a reduction, a flensing away until there was only a vital core.
The teeth almost touched her. She was very nearly in the mouth of the flying creature, its claws reaching behind her to scoop her up and prevent her escape. Then the creature was ripped apart, exploding into pieces around her. She flew back but wasn’t spared the blood or gore, and watched as the core of the creature, its spine and guts, fell limpy down, pinwheeling against the side of the canyon and splattering everything with red.
Flying didn’t take much effort, but Mizuki was tired and bruised, and there were still the rest of the birds to deal with. She flew away from them, moving slowly, and waited until they were in range to reach out with armored hands and grab one around the neck. She was worried that once she’d done that, it would thrash around and be impossible to kill bare-handed, but to her surprise, the grim work of snapping the creature’s neck wasn’t actually all that difficult.
She repeated the process a dozen times, and finally there was silence.
She was shaking, grimy, bleeding, and aching. It felt as though absolutely nothing of value had been accomplished. The monsters were dead, lots of them, but there was no reward for it, no special entad she’d received, nothing. She looked down at where the armor had already grown back over her stomach wound, wishing that she could see what kind of damage it was, whether they were shallow claw marks or cuts so deep she might be in the process of dying.
The smart thing to do was to go back into the chest, get healing from Hannah, and have Alfric take over trying to look for the exit, but the thimble armor took time to unwrap itself, and while it was doing that, Mizuki pushed on. Two flying enemies felt like more than the average, and she was hoping not to see another. She was also hoping that she’d find the tunnel, if there was still a tunnel, and then make the escape.
She’d lost Hannah’s entad. It had been in a pouch at her hip, tied in, and the pouch was gone. That was two entads down, which was horrible news. Still, the tops of the canyon weren’t as nondescript as they’d been before, not after the protracted battle, and Mizuki was able to find the one where the birds had been coming out of without all that much of a problem. From there, she was able to orient herself and fly in the presumed correct direction, hovering over the gaps in the canyon walls, looking down at all the rooms.
The exit was just sitting there, wide open, and maybe it was her imagination, but she felt there was something faux-innocent about it. It was like the exit was saying ‘oh, had you been looking for little old me?’ when it knew damned well that was exactly what she’d been doing.
She lowered herself to the ground, looked around to make sure it was safe, then opened up the trunk — which had followed all the flight with no problem, racing back and forth through the canyons — and spoke into the party channel.
Hannah was out first, and her hands were on Mizuki within seconds.
said Mizuki.
But Alfric was already moving, picking Mizuki up like she was nothing and booking it out the exit. Going from the dungeon to the real world so quickly felt shocking. Usually there was more ceremony to it, a checklist that you were supposed to follow and double-checking that nothing was left behind or accidentally taken with.
Mizuki did as he said, and felt an unpleasant squelching from around her midsection. The armor had been covering up all kinds of damage, and she felt like she should slide it back into place to protect her more, then get some sleep. The sleep did come, but not before she felt hands on her.
She woke up later, feeling fine and not entirely sure where she was. She was in a bed that smelled somewhat of pine, and Alfric was beside her in a chair.
“Feeling okay?” he asked.
“Great, actually,” she replied. She gave him a smile that he didn’t return.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Um, flying creatures which weren’t much of a problem, then a big flying creature that was a problem,” she said. “I killed them all though, then found the entrance.”
“We have a party channel,” he said. “It works through the garden stone.” He didn’t say ‘you have no excuse not to tell us what was going on’, but she could feel it anyhow.
“I was fine,” said Mizuki.
“You broke two bones,” said Alfric. “You were suffering blood loss. You were poisoned and dying.”
“Oh,” said Mizuki. She looked down at herself. The clothes she’d been wearing were gone, replaced with a simple robe. “I’m fine now though. Right?”
“Yes,” said Alfric. “The bones were healed, the blood replaced, the damage to your lungs and heart healed, and the poison removed from your system.”
“How was I poisoned?” asked Mizuki. “I was wearing a mask.”
“You weren’t when I came out,” said Alfric. “I think you must have lost it at some point. And then my guess is that you were hyperventilating, which would have made it a lot worse.”
“What’s hyperventilating?” asked Mizuki.
“Breathing really hard,” said Alfric. “More air gets in, but if there’s poison, that means more poison gets in too.”
“Ah,” said Mizuki. “Sorry. But you know, even if I’d been able to keep up a running commentary, I don’t think there was anything you could have done to help.”
“Still,” said Alfric. He shifted in his chair. It had obviously been some time, since he was freshly showered, still damp, and out of his adventuring clothes. “You did well, probably.”
“Probably?” asked Mizuki.
“I wasn’t out there to see what you were up against,” he said. “But you dealt with whatever was after you.” He swallowed. “It’s hard for me to let someone else take on the danger like that.”
“Well, next time it’s on you,” said Mizuki. She looked down at the bed. “Are we keeping this day or what?”
“Up to you,” said Alfric. “I know it didn’t go too well.”
“You should see the other guy,” said Mizuki. She was wiggling her toes. “Can I go back home?”
“They want you to take it easy,” said Alfric.
“Who’s going to cook then?” asked Mizuki.
“Isra and Hannah will handle it,” said Alfric. “If you’re ready, we can go now. We’ve been waiting on entad testing for you.”