Alfric was slightly on edge. Their escape had been cut off when they’d been fighting the huge lizard, and he had done his best, but there had been a real risk that with their retreat blocked off, they would be killed. He was the only one who seemed to be thinking about the close brush with death though. The lizard had been terrifying enough, so large that it was difficult to hurt, and exactly the kind of creature that the bident was weak against. He needed a new weapon, that was clear, and more than that, he wanted something that would allow him to swap between weapons on the fly. The lizard would likely be better handled by the lightning sword, but that would have required going into the trunk for it.
He was also worried about Isra. He didn’t know enough about druids, that was the part of the problem, and while a good party relied on each other to know their own specialties, there was extra burden on him as both the party leader and the chrononaut. Isra feeling sick from having mentally or spiritually touched the dungeon madness wasn’t a problem if it was only a short term affliction, but if it was something that lasted, some cumulative damage …
Hearing loss was one of the risks of dungeoneering that people didn’t often talk about. Hearing loss was cumulative: once you got hearing loss, it stayed with you, and there was no natural recovery, which meant that future hearing loss would impact you more. It was an erosion that you couldn’t really recover from, something to do with tiny hairs in the ear that got trod down on like grass in a field. The roar of a terrible lizard might be loud enough to hurt, and you might think that you had shaken it off, but the damage was still done, and the next time there would be more damage. It wasn’t any individual incident, it was the accumulation of them over time. It was also not the sort of thing that a chrononaut would necessarily reset out of, and not something that clerics could easily fix. It was a concern with fireballs, and one of the reasons they wore hearing protection, especially since blocking your ear canal didn’t interfere with the party channel.
If what had happened to Isra was like hearing damage, something that would impact her in a permanent way, Alfric had no way of knowing. In theory Isra was talking to other druids in her guild and was perfectly capable of making her own judgments on her health and safety, but in practice, Alfric wasn’t sure how much she was getting from her guild. He didn’t want to press her on it and make her feel like she was incapable of handling things, but at the same time, he wanted some assurance that he didn’t think was coming. That she’d then had her arms sliced up and exotic bardic healing applied to her only added onto his concern.
Still, there was nothing that he could do. Pressing her on it had only made her annoyed with him, and probably rightly so. He would push on and do his best. At a certain point, you had to put faith in your team.
This one was large enough to be a problem, but small enough that retreat back down the hallway wasn’t going to be an option. It was snakelike, though without scales, peach-colored flesh and a dozen tiny limbs, with a head that was weaving back and forth as it made its way to Alfric.
He charged forward, trying to see where the threat would come from. The tiny legs were too small to do much damage, without the muscles necessary to hurt him through his armor, but beasts had tricks, and the most dangerous part of any encounter was the start, where you couldn’t be certain what was waiting for you.
The head of the creature split open, with the skin around the mouth curling back to reveal long fleshy pincers that were each lined with teeth. When the skin was fully retracted, the pincers could open wide enough to engulf a person, and a slimy tongue flicked out from the midst of the pincers. Alfric moved in with the staff, extending it as far as it would go, poking toward the pincers. This was his first time using the weapon that Mizuki had made, other than a few attempts prodding at the floor. He was surprised at how cleanly it seemed to go through flesh, as though it was a lump of butter rapidly melting in a hot pan. The pincers fell off one by one, and the creature screeched and flailed. Alfric pushed forward, driving the spear into its center, and eventually he hit something vital, because the creature slumped to the ground, its little legs giving way.
The room had at first seemed to be a library, which Alfric found quite exciting, but on closer inspection, what was arranged on the walls were pieces of painted wood rather than books, with ribbing that evoked the look of a book spine. That was a disappointment, especially given that their first dungeon had a room filled with books. On first seeing the false books, he’d been hit with an unexpected feeling of nostalgia. Instead, this was a false library, with nothing of real value to be had. Two doors branched off, both of them with structural damage that on closer inspection was caused by the stone that ate away at things having chewed at the wood. They took the left.
There was something that Alfric liked about being in the lead, beyond just the practical considerations. He liked being the first in, the first to see what lay down unexplored paths. This was as close to being an explorer as it was possible to be in the world they lived in, the closest to setting foot in a virgin forest or landing on an unexplored island. It was undercut a bit by the nature of the dungeon, where nothing quite made sense, where everything had been created minutes or hours ago, where there was no weight of history and no real puzzles to uncover.
The next room was down a long tunnel, which this dungeon seemed to have in abundance. It had the same strange lighting that seemed to come from nowhere, which permeated the dungeon, and that took some of the horror from what Alfric saw ahead of him. There were row upon row of corpses, all of them human, or human enough, stacked up against the walls like firewood. There was something ritualistic about the arrangement, as though they’d been laid to rest, and Alfric knew that was something that had once been done with the dead. There was a term for it, catacomb, but here the bodies were packed so close together that Alfric didn’t believe that was how it had ever actually been practiced. The bodies were old, dusty and weathered, skin sucked in close to the bones and stretched over their faces to display too-wide smiles.
Alfric had trained himself to stomach all sorts of things. If you were committed, you could overcome any fear, inure yourself to any unpleasantness. Still, there was something about a dead body that prevented him from purging his fears. It was a deep, primal thing, to be scared of the dead.
So of course the bodies started moving, either not dead at all, or animated by magic.
Alfric swept the staff back and forth, trying to aim the melting point of it at their heads, which were their most obvious weak point. The staff ate through with less speed than before, for unclear reasons, but it was still capable of killing one of the walking corpses every few seconds. Unfortunately, there were just too many of them, and they were going to crowd around the party and possibly do some damage.
Mizuki stepped up and began snapping her fingers. The bident was gone, probably dropped, but she was determined, eyes intent. The snapping was probably not strictly necessary, but Mizuki had said that for sorcery it was all about getting in the right mood for it, which sometimes meant calling out a name for the spell, elaborate hand motions, or a stance. Here, the snapping was part of her concentration. At least, that’s what he thought.
At first, the snapping seemed to just be adding noise, but after a time, one of the heads exploded in a blue flame that flickered out as the pieces of it gently floated down to the ground. Mizuki kept snapping, focused on the corpses, and Alfric tore his eyes from her to concentrate on getting the ones that she wasn’t killing in an instant. The snapping became more steady and focused, and soon it was one head per snap, a concussive rhythm of explosions, though they were thankfully none too loud. Within moments, the front wave had been killed off, dropping down to the ground, lifeless once more.
Alfric carefully lowered the spear and watched, as there was nothing he could do that would be anywhere near as effective as what she was doing. Every now and then, Isra fired an arrow into the mob, but even with good aim, she could kill one of them with each arrow, and Alfric knew that she’d only be able to get twenty or so arrows downfield before her arm was too overworked, and that was even with a boost from Verity.
It soon became clear that Mizuki was going to be able to kill the entire field of corpses, all by herself. They were slow, stumbling forward, and she was unwinding the magic inside them, popping heads with a steady rhythm. Her face was sweaty, but the beat was staying the same, and Verity’s music had shifted to keep the same rhythm, as though they were doing a performance together. Toward the end, as the last of the corpses were exploding in blue flame, Verity’s voice grew louder, loud enough that it could be clearly heard over the popping of flesh and crackling of flame.
It was timed so that the final beat of the song happened when the last of the corpses died, and to Alfric, that was the impressive part. Verity must have been counting while she was playing, then altered the timing and made lyrics to match the necessary beat, all while not pausing in the middle of it or needing to reset.
Alfric went and grabbed it from where it had been dropped on the floor, handing it back to Mizuki, who held it in one hand while the other hand was pressed, palm forward, just above the bident’s tips. She had a look of extreme concentration, then finally sagged like the wind had gone out of her sails.
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said Mizuki.
said Mizuki.
They traded weapons again. This time Alfric had the Bident of Death while Mizuki had the Staff of Melting. Both were insanely dangerous, more so than any bladed or piercing weapon could be, especially because they didn’t have training with them, and didn’t even really understand the fundamentals of how they worked.
he asked.
said Mizuki. She was looking around the room.
Some of the corpses had been buried with things, or ‘buried’, since they had simply been there at the moment the dungeon was created. Mizuki moved through and pointed two things out, apparently thinking that it was Alfric’s job to pick them up, and he obliged, because he wasn’t about to try to push that duty off to someone else. There was a necklace with brass and pearls, and among the other jewelry, a ring with an aquamarine setting.
They pushed on ahead. Alfric felt a bit like he was rushing them, and it was possible that it wasn’t just him being self-critical. Proper procedure was to entirely clear the dungeon, then only loot things once you knew there was relatively little danger. The poison they’d experienced in the previous dungeon was a key example of why that was the best policy. Dungeons could have degenerate monsters in them, or threats that escalated with time, and while there was relatively little risk in grabbing entads they spotted, especially with the chest happily following along, every minute they waited was a minute that something could be getting out of control. The flip side was that some things would die from their own misbegotten biology, and some problems would simply solve themselves, but the balance of policy was toward doing a clear first.
The dungeon was setting him on edge. It had been from even before they stepped foot in it. The monument to a dead adventurer was eerie, and it was even more eerie because it had been so long since that person had died. It amplified the feeling of death, in some way, to know that even if the adventurer had lived, he would have been so long dead that his descendants might not know his name.
The flying snakes came down the hallway toward them, having apparently heard them from far away. Each of them was as thick around as his thigh, though considerably longer, and their tiny wings looked vestigial, reminding him of the dragons in the brief moment before they got to him.
There were three of them, and each dropped dead from a touch of the bident. They only needed to graze it for the magic to take effect, and when it did, they flopped to the ground, lifeless. The worst he got was a slap on the leg as one of the bodies fell from the air.
Alfric stared at the head of the bident. All it had taken was a single touch, and since the magic extended beyond the tips of the bident, it didn’t even take that.
said Mizuki.
Still, Alfric was energized by the pure power that the bident now represented. At least for the moment, it was like he was a proper dungeoneer, someone at the end of their career rather than the beginning, when ninety percent of the monsters would fall to a single touch of his weapon.
Three more rooms followed in quick succession. They all had monsters of one kind or another, and all of them fell to the bident of death. In a sterile kitchen, a gargantuan snapping turtle with matted hair on its back died to a poke. When they went into an oversized bathroom with a pool in the middle, the black seaweed monster that hefted itself out of the water was jabbed and then keeled over. And finally, when they reached a long garden under red sunlight from above, the three racoons they found there didn’t stand a chance. Admittedly, two of them had been killed by Isra, but the last had raced toward Alfric and met a swift death from the bident.
said Mizuki.
Alfric set the spear down.
said Verity.
The colors were something to behold, with cyan and blue leaves to them, and Alfric could see right away that Isra had a point. He wasn’t entirely sure why plants were usually green rather than some other color, but based on this, he thought that maybe it had to do with the color of the sun. If they had no red light to give the plants, that would be a problem.
Isra seemed disappointed, but she nodded, and they made their way into the large bathroom, working backward down that branch of the dungeon.
The kitchen took longer, mostly because there was more that was worth taking from it. The kitchen was strangely clean, aside from the body of the giant hairy turtle. All of the pots, pans, knives, plates, and everything else went into the trunk, though some of them had obvious defects, and Mizuki was quite critical of it all.
Mizuki nodded.
They were making good progress as they went through, stripping out everything they could, and there was a lot of chatter, but at least it didn’t seem to be getting in the way of the work. They had left Liberfell around noon, and Alfric wasn’t too worried about time, but he had also noted the structural damage that the cleaning stone was causing, and worried that there was a possibility of a collapse, which would be terrible given how much work they’d put in. More than that, Alfric was worried that a reset might come with losing lessons. The dungeon had knocked them around, that much was true, but both Verity and Mizuki had done things that were quite good experiences for later.
They made their way back to the entryway, stopping to loot what they could, putting things into the chest or the stone as the situation warranted.
That finally left them with the last grim task, removing the huge quantities of cleaning stone from the dungeon, which Alfric had no idea how they were going to do safely.