The words ‘poop monster’ kept going through Mizuki’s head. The smell was surprisingly not terrible, maybe because it was herbivore poop, or maybe because they were in a self-cleaning dungeon. She was also sure that there was a good joke in there somewhere, but she was having trouble finding it, and the opportunity for it to be a good joke was quickly passing.
She didn’t like the weird stone that seemed to suck up things and leave no trace. So far, it hadn’t tried to eat her boots, but there was a feeling that it might, if she stayed still too long. Isra had thrown up, which was super gross, and the dungeon had absorbed it all in the brief time before they got moving. When they got back to the room of the dungeon that the poop golems had come from, all the poop was gone, though some of the ‘pellets’ were still around, barely moving and no longer a threat.
Laying on the ground was a full suit of entad armor, and Mizuki went over to it, slightly ahead of Alfric.
Mizuki helped to put it into the chest in pieces, though she did try to think special thoughts while she did so, in the hopes that she could think it into slapping into place on her. It had a motif of skulls, and looked evil, but in a cool way. Mizuki could imagine walking down the street with a giant skull on her chest, skulls on her knees and elbows, and more gnarled bits. With glowing hair to boot, she’d be a sight to behold. When she’d met Lola, she’d been impressed by the purple eyes and the overall style, but Lola hadn’t even scratched the surface of what you could do with entads.
They moved through the poop room, down another gray hallway, and Mizuki tried to figure out what she was going to do with the mood of permanency that was floating in the air. A weapon of some kind was obviously on the table, but even if she could craft some kind of blade with an anchor in place, it felt like it might not be quite what the situation called for. Besides that, she wasn’t entirely sure how ‘permanent’ she might be able to make something, and if she made a blade, she sure as anything wasn’t going to be able to make a sheath for it, which would mean that she would have to be extremely careful with it, especially since the blade was likely going to be invisible.
But even if she did make the invisible blade, what was she going to do with it? Hand it off to Alfric, most likely, and then she’d just be sitting there twiddling her thumbs.
There was a reason that the good old fireball was Mizuki’s favorite spell. It was clear and direct, and got things done. It made her useful to the team, and even outside of a dungeon, she could use it to blow up a stump or shatter a rock into pieces that could be carted away.
In a dungeon like this, with very little ambient magic to work with, Mizuki was pretty useless. What she really needed was a powerful entad that could make her into a threat even when her magic wasn’t booming, or better, she needed to hurry up and become a wizard so she could never not be throwing fireballs.
The hallways of stone eventually opened up into a room with a ceiling so high she might have mistaken it for being overcast sky above. The stone had changed, no longer the cleaning kind, or maybe just a different, more jagged version.
The monsters dropped down from the sides of the walls, high up, and for a moment Mizuki was reminded of the rain of bats, but these creatures weren’t committing suicide in the hopes their body could batter the party, they were coming in fast for an attack. They looked like women, naked women, with the exception of their arms, which were long and bladed, no hands, and their legs, which were scaled. There was a name for them, which popped into Mizuki’s head as she tried to scrape together some magic, harpy.
There were three of them in total, surprisingly human-looking, with none of the strange or exaggerated features on their faces that Mizuki had seen in other roughly humanoid monsters. They had long black hair and pale skin, and in fact, the more Mizuki watched them, the more she thought they had a resemblance to Verity.
Mizuki hung back, with Verity, who was playing her lute with too many fingers on each hand and was so focused on the battle that Mizuki was worried about accidentally breaking her concentration.
There was nothing that Mizuki could do. Verity was putting imbalance into the air, quite a bit of it, but most of it must have been to pump up strength and speed for the others, and that didn’t give off the right flavors for Mizuki to do anything.
Isra was moving around the battlefield with her normal insane speed, appearing only for long enough to fire off another arrow before she would zip off somewhere else. The arrows pierced holes in the harpies, then vanished, leaving gaping wounds that leaked frothy pink blood, but didn’t seem to fell the creatures. Alfric was getting hammered, the bladed arms coming down on him like in a frenzy, and it was only his armor that was saving him.
Hannah gave a grunt and was pulled forward, which Mizuki only belatedly realized was because one of the long bladed arms had slipped into her armor at the armpit. Alfric moved over to her and thrust his bident into the harpy, pushing one of the others away from him, and with a solid kick he managed to wrench the blade free from where it had caught Hannah.
Isra appeared in place behind one of the harpies with a blade in her hand and sunk it into the back of the creature’s neck. It collapsed in a heap almost at once, and Isra pulled her bow back out, but not quite in time, because one of the other harpies moved on her, long blades swinging. Isra wore a breastplate, but her arms were covered in only leather and cloth with a few pieces of metal, and she was slashed at the sides in an instant.
Mizuki watched on in horror. There was nothing she could do, and even if she’d been able to cobble something together from the cast-offs of Verity’s song and the permanence that was floating in the air, it was a melee fight, too many people moving too close together to cast a spell that would do any good.
The harpy that Hannah and Alfric had been fighting went down, and they moved to help Isra. Alfric barreled into the harpy, putting her on the ground and then jumping on top of her. Hannah pulled Isra back and was doing whatever quick and immediate healing she could. For just a moment, Alfric was on top of the harpy, bashing its head against the ground as it weakly flailed against him, while Hannah was above Isra, closing the wounds to stem the loss of blood.
Verity was continuing on with her song, and for a moment Mizuki just thought that was because she was wrapped up in the singing. Verity liked to finish her songs sometimes, even when the fighting had finished. But no, there was something frantic about her playing, and she was staring at Isra, who was bleeding from her arms in spite of Hannah’s efforts. The stone wasn’t sucking the blood up.
Hannah turned back to look at Verity.
Verity gave no response to that, but she was actively sweating, and from everything Mizuki knew about bardic magic — which admittedly wasn’t much — she was in the midst of a progressive melody that would tear itself apart in relatively short order.
Mizuki had a feeling inside like wolves clawing around. There was nothing for her to do, all her thoughts kept driving at that conclusion, she was useless. It was the worst feeling in the world to watch a friend fight monsters and just sit by not being able to help. Hannah could heal and Verity could sing, and even if Alfric wasn’t doing anything right now, he’d fought ferociously.
The disturbance in the aether was getting intense the longer Verity’s progression went on. It must have been some kind of healing song, because the aether was getting thick with degenerative flavor, mixed in with a bit of slowness.
Mizuki pulled it all in, every scrap she could, and tried to build something with it. The anchoring was the hardest part, and she chose the end of her staff, which felt foolish as soon as she did it, because the staff was an entad and irreplaceable. Still, she pulled in more and more of what Verity was putting out, then thrust it all into a construct, which was how the books said you were supposed to conceptualize a spell. There was a moment of panic, because these constructs tended to be built to explode, but it held, and Mizuki breathed out.
The aether was flooded again almost as soon as Mizuki had cleared it out, but it was all of the same mood and none of the dungeon’s natural permanence.
The song fell apart and Verity let go of her lute, letting it hang around her shoulder by its strap. She rushed over to Isra and knelt down beside her, but Isra was already sitting up.
Alfric looked like he was going to object, not necessarily to the content, but to something else. Mizuki expected to hear him say that she could have died, but he stayed silent. Maybe he wasn’t saying anything because it had worked, at least in part.
Mizuki looked at the tip of her staff. She could see the magic there, ready for her to unwind if she needed to, but it was holding steady, the permanence apparently holding. She didn’t know exactly what it would do, but she had made a magic item, of sorts. It was a first for her.
Hannah nodded, then looked at Verity.
said Mizuki.
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Alfric sighed.
Isra snapped.
Isra rubbed her arm. Hannah and Verity working together had healed her, but the leather and cloth had been ripped to shreds, seemingly beyond the point of recovery.
They took some time to clean off using some water from the chest — there was too much blood — and Isra changed into a different shirt, then put her breastplate back in place.
Mizuki had been trying not to look at the creatures, but she got a second glance at them. She had never seen Verity’s mother, but if Verity’s mother looked anything like Verity, then yes, the harpies did bear a resemblance. They could just as well have been Verity herself though, if maybe a bit older. It made Mizuki feel a bit embarrassed about their nakedness.
said Verity.
They searched the room, moving slowly, but there wasn’t all that much to see. It was large, but without much in the way of defining features, which was Mizuki’s least favorite kind of room. She liked places that obviously had some purpose, even if that purpose was just some nonsense that a dungeon had come up with. A room packed with knick-knacks had some actual character to it.
A tunnel led out, and they headed down it, in their standard order, which put Mizuki near the back. She was careful with her staff, which was now a strong weapon, and would probably eat through a body as efficiently as it had eaten through the rocky floor. She didn’t know what she was going to do with it, because it wasn’t like she was going to rush into battle and use it as a spear, but she also didn’t think anyone else wanted to use it. Alfric had a thing about not switching up his weapons in the middle of a dungeon, even if the staff with a bit of extremely high-powered degradation magic on the end of it wasn’t that different from a bident.
At the end of the tunnel Mizuki got her wish. The room was filled with stuff, and seemed at first blush to be a classroom, with bunches of desks taking up most of the space. The sides of the rooms were where most of the clutter was, which included plants, fossils, taxidermied animals, glassware, bookshelves, and all other kinds of things.
Most of the stuff was destroyed by the time she came in, since the room hadn’t been without its monsters. They were little crab-like things, black and shiny, but with more power to jump, each as large as Emperor. The desks were tipped over by their passing and the things on the walls were smashed and shattered, but they didn’t seem all that difficult to fight, because their pincers didn’t open wide enough to crush a limb, which meant that they were left ineffectually beating against the two full-armored party members. Their carapaces gave Alfric some trouble, but Hannah’s hammer came down on them with enough power to crack the shell. The two of them worked together, taking the four crabs one at a time, with Hannah cracking the shells and Alfric leveraging his full weight to drive his bident down into them, then explode them from the inside. This was assisted by Verity, whose effects were readily apparent when Hannah was swinging her warhammer around.
Mizuki held onto her staff, hoping that she wouldn’t spend the entire dungeon being useless.
Once the crabs were dead, they moved into the room, which seemed to be a dead end, and began looking around. Hannah applied healing to Alfric, mostly to deal with the imminent bruises.
Mizuki helped to put the entads into the trunk. She set the staff down, and the tip of it ate a hole in the floor, but that was alright, because there was no way they’d actually end up stripping out the whole thing, not if Mizuki had anything to say about it.
Mizuki slapped the bracers on without even really thinking about it. Maybe it was the fact that she’d done almost nothing in the dungeon.
Mizuki was surprised that it was fine, but he was focused on moving through the dungeon at speed, and she supposed it was possible that she would get a talking to later on. If she was being honest, she somewhat missed those talking tos, though she didn’t think that was why she’d slapped the bracers on.
Alfric had taught Mizuki a lot about dungeons, and she’d retained a fair amount of it. They had been running into a problem, especially in the past week, where it sometimes felt like they were retreading things they’d already said before, especially from Alfric’s side. It made Mizuki sad. She had liked when he talked about dungeons, but obviously there was only so much to say about them, and she could tell that he was stretching more when he spoke of them, venturing far afield from vital dungeon knowledge and into realms of speculation, or sometimes dungeon stories, which he didn’t seem to actually enjoy all that much.
“Dungeoneers are fabulists,” he’d said. “I think it comes from the fact that there’s no one to gainsay them. What happens in a dungeon is between you and your party members, and there’s almost never any evidence that you were just making things up. So there are stories about all kinds of things, and it’s hard to say for certain whether or not some of these reports are lies.”
“And you think that I’m a fabulist?” asked Mizuki.
“I think you get excited,” he’d said. “I think you have an active imagination. Most people don’t intend to lie, but their storytelling instinct gets the better of them, and they think of the things they didn’t say at the time but which make them sound better, or they exaggerate what happened, and it builds over time. And then they think there’s no harm in it.”
“Is there?” asked Mizuki.
“Oh, obviously,” said Alfric. “People talk, and they give the wrong impressions of what dungeons are actually like. It’s bad if people feel the need to take things that dungeoneers say with a grain of salt. It’s especially bad for rookies, who actually depend on those reports.”
Mizuki thought about that as they went down the dungeon. Alfric liked things to be vital and true, which didn’t leave a lot of room for other stuff. He had a sense of humor, a good one, but he didn’t lean into it as much as she would have liked. She was afraid that the time would come when they wouldn’t really be friends anymore, because they had exhausted their supply of vital and true conversation, and Alfric didn’t have much interest in small talk, and even less in gossip. What would happen when they both knew all the same things?
In the entryway to the dungeon, the monster they’d killed was completely gone. Mizuki didn’t like that. One of the very few things that she liked about being in a dungeon was that it was more or less a static place, unchanging, unmoving, and when you cleared a room, it stayed cleared. The assumption had been violated in the last dungeon, and it was being violated again here, with things disappearing when their backs were turned. It was just the stone that ate things up, clearly, but there was still something unsettling about it.
All thoughts left Mizuki’s head once they went into the next room. The monster reared its head and let out a beastial roar, then charged right at them. It was huge, dwarfing them, like some kind of horrible lizard with too-short arms and a too-large mouth. It walked on two legs, like a chicken. Alfric set himself in place to meet the charge with his bident held forward, then seemed to think better of it.
Mizuki had been expecting the other call, retreat, and for a moment she was befuddled. Scatter meant something different though: it meant that they should split up and try their best to keep the creature surrounded. It was a risky play, and Mizuki wasn’t entirely sure why they were doing it, or whether they could even bring the beast down. Up close it was huge, and by Mizuki’s best guess, it weighed twenty thousand pounds. She wanted to flee down the hallway and hope that it was too big to fit, but when she looked back, there was a black wall intersecting the middle of the hall.
They scattered. The big problem with this ‘pattern’ was that it meant the attacker could focus on a single person and kill them, and the way to combat that was to keep the creature surrounded so that it was always getting attacked from behind.
The monster picked Mizuki. She screamed at the top of her lungs and dodged to the side as it tried to snap at her. The claws were on such little arms that they were a non-issue, but the mouth was so big that it could have swallowed her whole, and a headbutt could have smashed her against the floor. The long tail was whipping around, and smashed into Hannah. Teeth missed Mizuki by inches.
She held the staff out, waving it in the lizard’s face, and to her surprise, the staff actually ate through its jaw, melting away the flesh like it was candle wax. The creature roared in her face, loud enough to shake her bones, then turned around to snap at Alfric, who was up in the air with his bident, trying to get through the thick hide on the creature’s back.
Mizuki darted forward, wary of the whipping tail. She held the staff in front of her, like it would protect her, though she was certain that it wouldn’t. It wasn’t a shield, it was a flesh eater, and it would just as easily eat her flesh if it got knocked into her. She found herself wishing that she’d made it longer and more blade-like, since it only stuck out six inches or so from the end of the staff.
She got under the tail easily enough, and immediately worried that she’d get battered by it, or that the creature’s thick legs would come stomping down on her. Wincing at the danger of it all, she raised the staff up in the air, prodding at the creature’s belly. The staff cut through and blood started to drip down, and when Mizuki moved the staff, the hole she was opening widened, growing larger until the monster’s guts were spilling out onto the ground. The smell was atrocious and Mizuki was sure this was the least dignified face she’d ever made, but the monster roared and staggered.
She realized that she needed to get clear of it a little too late, and ended up getting caught by the tail as it went down. Her shoulder hurt, but it hadn’t been dislocated, she didn’t think, and she got to her feet, carefully picking her staff back up. She checked her body over twice, worried that the tip of the staff had gotten her and she just hadn’t noticed.
said Alfric.
said Isra.
It was said over the party channel, but there was still something intimate about it, and Mizuki felt a warm glow.
When Hannah was done with her “bruises” she moved on to Alfric, and placed a hand against his chest to fix him.