They worked their way through the rooms, trying their best to go fast. The thrum that filled the area was a constant, and they grew good at anticipating it. Sometimes someone would call it out before it was going to happen, usually Isra but sometimes Alfric, and they would all just stop and cover their ears in near-unison.
He didn’t know what that would mean in terms of how dungeons worked. Their average elevation was four, and the percentage rule meant that they were supposed to be draining four percent of the dungeon’s stored magical energy. If the dungeon was ten times bigger, it was possible they were draining thirty percent of the energy instead. They would almost have to be, to justify that number of entads. So far they hadn’t found another, but the hundred lutes, all clumped together, would still be a haul so large and strange that it would be cause for interest and alarm, even more than the theater had been.
Isra put her hands to her ears, and the rest of them followed suit. It was possible to keep talking, but they stayed quiet until the thrum had passed.
He turned.
Alfric was using an old dungeoneer’s trick and making a map using the guild messaging system. Because you could hold a message unsent, you could put in vital information and refer to it later by opening the mental interface, then just not send it so that you could avoid bothering people with things they didn’t need to know. The only real benefit over using pencil and paper was that you didn’t need to stop and shrug off armor or fish them out of a pocket.
They’d hit a few dead ends already, necessitating a backtrack, and the doors they’d left open — torn from their hinges, in most cases — seemed to be unchanging with every passing thrum. They’d stopped to test again only once, and had confirmed that a closed door would lead to a different place, which had been a bit of a relief.
Alfric moved at the front, as always, bident at the ready. He was worried that they were getting complacent. Just because they’d had six easy fights in a row didn’t mean that they would have another six, or another twenty. He could feel himself getting complacent as the fear and stress slowly waned. He killed a large bird the size of a breadbox as it uselessly slammed its stinger against his plate armor and could almost taste the growing confidence.
All this had already happened before, in their third failed dungeon. That one had also been in Herbury Meadows. That one had also been relatively sedate. There had been no constant thrumming, no shifting around of rooms, and then right at the end, or what might have been the end, they’d run into a group of monsters so brutally difficult that two of them had died.
It would have been nice to think that this was an oversized dungeon with weak monsters that would end up more of a test of attrition than brute power, but there was no reason that it should be like that, at least as far as Alfric could see. Nice ‘easy’ monsters could live in the same dungeons as incredibly difficult ones.
The series of doors — more doors than a normal dungeon — led them to a large room with a well in the center. Two humanoids in flowing cloaks stood next to the well, peering down into it. They were lit by a chandelier from above, which cast its candlelight on the wide stone floor. The bricks were arranged around the well in concentric circles, aligned imperfectly so that moss grew in the cracks between them.
Mizuki opened with a fireball. It was a wet dungeon, and fireballs were in ready supply. To Alfric’s dismay, it killed neither of them, and they picked themselves up with supernatural speed, their black cloaks billowing behind them as they ran toward the party. Isra put two arrows through each of them in the blink of an eye, and it seemed to do nothing, and then one of them was on Alfric while the other was met by Hannah as Verity’s song picked up its tempo and strength.
Alfric brought it to the ground, where they wrestled as it beat against his armor, and he pushed the plates up against it, trying his best to pin it in place. Teeth and claws were the most important things to worry about, because they could do more damage than the simple punches or kicks ever could. The monster seemed mostly to focus on its punches, and it took Alfric a moment to realize how incredibly weak these were. The creature was fast and durable, but it hit no harder than a six-year-old child, and as many blows as it made against Alfric’s chest, it had nothing in the way of weight or power.
It did, however, take quite a bit of work to actually kill it. The skull was thick and strong, and the limbs were almost impossible to snap, as much work as Alfric put into it. The joints were easier, and after some work, he had ruined them completely, wrenching the elbows and knees backward.
Alfric pulled back and took the dagger from her. It was better for this sort of work than a sword was. He was still on top of the creature, and it was still trying to hit him, but its limbs were useless to it. He pushed the dagger into its chest, and it had no response, so he withdrew the dagger, which had only a glistening of pink fluid on it. He pushed it in again at a different spot, then again. It took some heft and some leverage each time, but eventually the creature slowed and then stopped moving. There was no real blood, just the pink sheen to the dagger.
Hannah had focused on the head, and managed to make a hole in it with her pick, though that had only really weakened it. She was getting more leverage on it, with the tip of the pick inserted, and eventually with a loud crack the head came open and the creature fell limp.
Alfric sat there, breathing hard, then called that they were clear.
He was getting antsy about time, even though it was still fairly early in the morning.
She frowned a bit, then moved over to it. It wasn’t the kind with a crossbar to pull a bucket up with, it was instead open, with water down below. It was at least twenty feet of water, dark, blue, and unexpectedly clear. Alfric moved to it with her.
The entad stone with the brilliant blue gem was kept among Hannah’s things, in a pouch that she could access by shifting her liquid metal armor, not because she had any intention of going into watery places, but because it had a side effect of halting severe injury or poisoning. That was the sort of thing that he was grateful to Filera for, because there was almost no way that they’d have found it out on their own. It was somewhat poor, as injury-stabilization went, but it was far better than nothing. Hannah in particular didn’t think much of it, mostly because she thought immediate healing was a better strategy under most circumstances.
Alfric stripped off the plate armor, then his gambeson, mostly because it was impossible to take the ring off without getting quite wet. He climbed up to the rim of the well, looking down, then slipped on the ring.
He’d tried it on before, in an undone day, but it was still a shock to be transformed into water, especially with how cold it was. His body was still there, in a sense, just turned into water, and it had its own rules while using the entad. He slipped down through the well water, reaching the bottom in seconds, then spread out and tried to find whatever Mizuki had seen in the silt, if anything. It didn’t take terribly long to touch the metal, and once he had, he grabbed it, moving it into his watery body. It was hard, with his senses, to really know what was himself and what was well water, but he surged up quickly and got himself to the top of the well. There was more to climb though, and he couldn’t with watery hands, so he took the ring off, holding the sword in one hand.
Mizuki threw it down and Alfric managed to catch it, not as it fell, but as it sank through the water. Once it was on, he flew up out of the well and landed on the flagstones, moss touching his bare feet, dripping water onto the ground. He was soaked, but there was a change of underwear in the garden stone — a few, actually.
He caught the way that Mizuki was looking at his bare chest, and went into the garden stone to get dry. They had a stack of towels there, plenty of water to get clean of blood and dirt, and what functioned as a makeshift bathroom, if needed, which he’d built himself. Normally for that kind of thing though, you’d just go in the dungeon itself.
He was back out in under two minutes, just in time for another thrum of the dungeon, which nearly caught him unaware. Then he was back in his gambeson and boots, which took a bit of time, and his plate armor assembled itself around him, which took just a few seconds.
The blade was gently curved and quite thin, though he thought it probably had some strength to it. When he’d held it, it had been light too, which was important, and balanced well, which was another mark in its favor. If it could only extend the blade or handle, it was probably worth only a hundred rings or so, but given that it had taken some effort to pick up, he was hoping for more. This wasn’t how dungeons worked though. Great things could be sitting on a table, and trash could be painstakingly extracted from dangerous situations.
They backtracked to the nearest door, with Alfric updating the notes within the guild message that would never be sent. The chest marched on after them, usually following Verity, who was the last to leave its range.
He heard the buzzing before he saw the swarm. They were bees, or something like bees, each the size of a fist, twenty of them all told, and he glanced back at Verity’s glowing bubble shield he’d gotten for her, which she had spread out around her. He had been worried about a swarm, though they hadn’t had one last time. Herbury Meadows had lots of flowers, especially at this time of year, and that meant pollinators.
Alfric had plans.
He rushed toward the bees and started his own sort of buzzing. The plates of his armor overlapped, and he’d found that if he concentrated on it, he could make them open and close. Mizuki had compared his look to that of a pinecone, in the ways that the plates overlapped each other, and what he was doing was opening and closing them, as fast as he could. The armor had a force of its own, and could grip things if it had them between two plates, or crush them. The plates clanked as they spread and contracted around him, pushing against his body some, but more against each other.
The bees came at him, swarming, trying to get in between the plates, when they managed it, the plates slammed down, crushing them. He could feel it when it happened, a bee getting caught in the armor, and he pressed harder until they gave way.
The bees were still around, but they were dropping fast, and he crushed another that was trying to get through the gap he had made for it. A fist-sized creature was good for this, large enough that he could feel them, so smashing them between the plates would actually work. He was protected from the stingers by the thick quilting beneath the armor, not that they were ever against it for long enough to sting him.
He saw one of the bees make its way to Verity, be repelled by the barrier, and then get lanced through with one of Isra’s arrows.
The fight went well, very well. He hadn’t been sure about the strategy, and wouldn’t have tried it with something that had a sharper or longer stinger, but they had run straight into the slamming plates, killed before they could do much more than prod at the cloth armor he wore beneath it. It was superior in almost every way to trying to use the bident or a sword.
When the last of the bees was killed, Alfric checked himself over. He was most worried about a stinger he’d somehow missed, but nothing had penetrated, and he was feeling fine.
said Hannah, after everyone had confirmed they were fine.
As good as the fight had gone, with hardly a scratch on any of them, it was disconcerting that their progress was getting them almost nothing. It was Alfric’s hope that there was a limited number of rooms, and that they would be able to clear enough of them that they would find the entrance, but there was no guarantee that would actually happen, either because they ran out of time or because the number of rooms wasn’t actually limited. There were infinidungeons, so vast and deep that no one had found an end to them, whether there was one or not.
Hannah was right. They had only a single door left.
Alfric waited until after the thrum had passed. He was almost getting used to it. He pushed his way through the cedar door and found himself bathed in light. It wasn’t bright enough to blind, but it was strong enough that he had to blink several times to adjust to it. He’d been worried that something would come at him while he was having trouble seeing, but there was no repeat of the incident with the laser eyes. When he had adjusted, he was confused by what he saw. There was sky ahead, and it was daylight.
Beyond that was a section of meadow, one of the large rooms that they’d seen, and thick-bellied creatures crawling on all fours in among the grasses and flowers. It was the sky that drew his attention though, the clouds and blue sky, and he frowned at it. You weren’t supposed to pay that much attention to the sky, it was irrelevant in a dungeon, but two different rooms with different skies made very little sense. He didn’t think that it was unprecedented, but it was the third unusual thing they’d seen in this dungeon, with the first two being the thrum and the shifting rooms. Maybe he should have counted the room with a hundred entad lutes as well.
This particular fireball was delivered at long range, a lancing beam that zipped through the air, nearly silent, before impacting the side of one of the beasts with a deafening explosion. There were three of the creatures, and all were caught in the blast. One of them died instantly, keeling over on its small legs, while the other two were wounded in the head and hindquarters. Alfric rushed forward, trying his best to put himself between the monsters and the party, but very aware that if these things were a thousand pounds each — entirely possible given their size — he would be nearly incapable of stopping them. Given the dungeons they’d run into, he’d been brushing up on best practices for fighting large creatures like this, and most of what people suggested, aside from running away, was to use the creature’s size against it.
Alfric moved to the side as the first of them charged. The charge had weight to it, heft, and would be difficult to stop. True to form, the creature had trouble tracking him against all its weight, especially because its belly was nearly dragging across the meadow as it ran, and he plunged his bident into its flank as it passed him. He released the magical charge almost at once and withdrew his weapon so that it wouldn’t be yanked from his hand, but he still got wrenched to the side. The beast keeled over, screeching, and tumbled. Alfric moved on it and pierced its rump with his bident, releasing another charge, which seemed enough to kill it.
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The other beast was moving toward, and two arrows appeared in its eyes almost simultaneously. Isra was standing in front of its charge, appearing at the same moment the arrows did, but before Alfric could give a shout, she was gone again, having fired off her bow. The beast was blinded, and bucked, but it charged on, off-course, and slammed head first into a wall, where it went still.
She nodded.
Up close, now that he had a moment to think, Alfric decided that these creatures most closely resembled oversized hogs, or possibly boars, though Isra was right, their eyes were far too large. They also had whiplike tails at the back, more scales than skin, and the bellies were too big, but boar was the term the party ended up settling on.
said Mizuki.
Alfric slowly nodded. He hadn’t really thought about the doors, but she was right that they were of different sizes, and it did seem odd that they hadn’t come across any doors that were grossly inappropriate for the room that they were going into. The boundaries between the rooms themselves were only somewhat atypical for a dungeon, with the styles changing more abruptly, but there was still some logic to it, with brick looking like it had been set into hewn stone. They hadn’t tested it much, mostly because of the thrum whose rhythm made them feel like something ominous was waiting around the corner.
If they were going to try to find a nicely matching door, then there was one good candidate, which was the door they’d originally gone through. Though it was only roughly fifteen rooms, Alfric was thankful that he had a map, because the idiosyncrasies of dungeons made them difficult to navigate, especially as they got larger. He’d marked walls with chalk, but it was best to have two systems, especially if the shifts ever tripped them up.
said Verity.
Mizuki was silent for a moment.
huffed Mizuki.
said Alfric.
They stopped for the thrum, ears covered, then continued on.
said Alfric.
said Verity.
They walked in silence for a bit after that. Alfric was thinking about what Verity had said. He thought that she had probably meant her horrible mother. His own thoughts had gone in different directions though. They had gone to Lola, who was out of his life for good, but at the time had been a constant presence. He was also thinking about the dungeons themselves, and how you learned to live with the bad parts of them, how he was learning to live with dying in them. There were all kinds of things that were tense or unpleasant, and what could you do but learn to live with them? To endure? He thought that Verity was probably right. People would just go on. They would sleep through the thrum, somehow, they would just put in wax and cover their ears, and not even really talk about the thrum that much.
The thrum happened again right as they reached the lute room. All the open doors had stayed open, and all the rooms had been as they’d left them. Ten minutes wasn't a bad time, but any time sucked away was something he wanted to avoid.
said Hannah.
said Isra.
They filed into the lute room, and he closed the door behind them after the chest had followed them.
said Verity.
It took some time for the thrum to come, and when it did, they were less casual about it. In theory, the dungeon would shift, and their door would lead somewhere else, leaving everything they’d already explored behind. He was hoping that they’d find the entrance, of course, but he was also hoping that they wouldn’t be undoing all their work so far.
Once the thrum had passed, he pushed the door open slowly.
It wasn’t the passageway that they’d first come in though, but it also wasn’t the room that they’d entered from. It was a third place, one with copious amounts of glass, looking like terrariums or miniature greenhouses, all of them scattered around at awkward angles.
The snakes came quickly, thick and red with tiny little limbs that made them more like stunted salamanders. Alfric was caught off guard, and the bident wasn’t the best weapon against something that slithered over the floor, but he ended up stomping on them, crushing their heads and severing their midsections. They all ran to him, heedless of the danger, and one of them tried to bite him but got only a metal plate instead of flesh.
The room, thankfully, had two more doors, which meant that they had options. Mizuki checked for entads and found none, and they had a brief debate over whether to take the glass tanks, then decided against it, given their relatively poor condition. The debate then turned to the doors.
~~~~
They passed through more rooms with more weak fights, but even the weak fights introduced elements of attrition. Every minor wound that Hannah had to heal meant that there’d be a little less for later, and every time Isra fired her arrows stressed the muscles in her arm. Alfric, for his part, was already feeling a sense of fatigue, and it was exacerbated by the periodic thrum.
Ten rooms passed, then another ten.
That made Alfric tense. He didn’t like working against this deadline, which they should have been able to entirely avoid by leaving early in the morning. The dungeon shouldn’t have been so long, and even if the fights themselves were relatively easy, there were too many of them. He was getting stiff and sore. They would have to take lunch, if only to give him more of a chance to recover.
They’d been finding almost nothing in the rooms. They’d gotten two more entads along the way, but only two, a small crock and a bolt of fabric. They’d taken henlings, but it was the stuff that got sold for little more than scrap, with only one or two pieces that they actually wanted, or were worth something. It was wearing on them, he could tell, the way they were doing these rooms just to try to leave with what they’d already found.
Alfric pushed open a door and saw a wide open room. There was yet another sky above it, this one with a sunset hue, pinks, oranges, and reds. It was at least two hundred feet across, a monster of a room, but there was almost nothing in it, just a large boulder in the room’s center and some oversized pieces of metal sitting along one wall. There were also doors along the rim of the room, so many of them that it almost made Alfric dizzy. There was one every ten feet, and by a quick estimate, Alfric thought there might be as many as sixty. He desperately hoped that they were false doors, or doors that somehow led to each other, because it implied a scope he didn’t know how they were supposed to handle.
She looked at him for a moment with a cool, impassive face, and it reminded him so much of their early time together that he almost relented and told her not to do it. Keeping emotion from her face was a skill that Isra had learned, a skill she’d been unlearning, but it was here again.
They took another of the mice from their container. The plan to put one in every room hadn’t been viable, not in the slightest, but they had spread a few through the dungeon, all with a stockpile of food, and Isra had been using her weak tracking to try to see whether she could sense them. By this method, they had put an upper limit on the scope of the dungeon: it was no more than a mile from the furthest mouse. This wasn’t precise or encouraging, but it was something.
The mouse scampered off once Isra had whispered in its ear. She didn’t need to talk to them, but she was doing it anyway, and Alfric worried that he was pushing her too hard.
When the mouse was ten feet away from the boulder, the boulder lifted up off the ground. Slimy tentacles spilled out from beneath it and one of them whipped toward the mouse so fast that there was nothing that could possibly be done about it, and Isra gave a gasp of horror.
They moved backward through the room, away from the open door. Alfric had half a thought about closing the door, but he didn’t want to draw attention to himself, and the door had nothing like a latch. By the time the monster had started moving in their direction, it was too late.
The creature moved with surprising speed, given that it was dragging a boulder behind it. If the boulder was a part of the creature, then it was one of the largest that they had ever seen. That size inhibited it though, and when it reached the door, the boulder slammed against the door frame, so hard that the dungeon shook. Alfric was bringing up the rear, in the best defensive position, but the chest was following just behind him, which meant that it was in the line of fire. A tentacle shot out from the monster, which was trapped in the doorway, and snagged the chest in its wet grasp, pulling it back.
He didn’t have time to think about it. That chest, which had been trundling along after them this entire dungeon, contained all one hundred lutes. If the chest were destroyed or even just captured, the dungeon would be for nothing. Worse than nothing, if they lost the chest. These thoughts did not go through his head, because there was no time for them. Instead, there was only horror and realization, wordless and formless, and he raced back toward the monster, knowing that it had to be killed.
Alfric flew forward, and a fireball from Mizuki narrowly avoided his head. He wanted to scream as it impacted the creature, the creature that still had their chest wrapped in a tentacle, but the chest was spared and the creature was not. Three tentacles flopped to the ground, not removed from the creature, but still quite dead, and the chest was still wrapped up in a different bit of flesh.
Arrows flew past Alfric, striking the tentacle monster, and seemed to do nothing at all. Alfric gripped his bident, then looked at it. It was worthless against this sort of thing, but he had a new weapon, one which he’d put on his hip, its blade and handle both fully retracted. What a tentacle monster called for wasn’t a bident, it was something that could slice. He didn’t really have time for those thoughts, it was just his training, the idea that poking this creature would do almost nothing.
He threw the bident to one side, called for a progressive melody from Verity, then drew the sword. He was tempted to make it into a spear again, but the handle extended slower than the blade, and time was of the essence. He raced forward, toward the danger, plate armor moving in sympathy with him, sword growing absurdly long. He needed the long, sweeping strikes, and had to hope that it would be enough against the tentacles, but he had some hope, given that Mizuki had taken out a few of them.
He slashed through the grasping flesh as soon as he was close enough, and watched in amazement as the cut went cleanly through the tentacles, barely even slowing. The cut pieces fell to the ground and wriggled. He’d extended the blade to be almost as long as he was tall, which was ridiculous, really, but against something this large you needed every bit of reach you could get.
The chest was in the monster’s grasp, wrapped up and pulled toward a mouth that sat in the center of all the tentacles. Alfric moved forward and slashed through the air, once and then twice, opening up huge gouges of flesh and causing more of the tentacles to fall to the ground. Again, it was like cutting through warm butter, just the barest trace of resistance. He sliced again, a third time, this time aiming squarely at the mouth, and he watched it split open, separated.
The creature fell, and Alfric looked in amazement at the sword in his hand.
The chest came trotting over moments later, as though nothing had happened. As soon as the creature had died, the chest had slipped free of the tentacles once more. It took Alfric a moment to see the damage, and when he saw it, his heart skipped a beat. The chest was missing an entire corner, with the lid and two sides having been cut straight through. It wasn’t a large piece to be missing, but it was gone, and he could see straight inside the chest. With a sense of trepidation, he opened the chest, only to find that everything was exactly where he’d left it. It was still working, which was good, but the chest was supposed to be nearly indestructible, and the sword had cut almost straight through it.
The strength faded from Alfric, and he looked over at Verity. She was slightly slumped, and her lute had fallen from her hands to hang around her neck once more, looking for all the world like a millstone.
said Mizuki.
Isra was comforting Verity, with a low conversation that Alfric couldn’t hear. The two of them were getting along better, which was good. He was hoping that the dungeon was helping with that, as he’d half hoped that it would. In the undone dungeons, they had seemed on better terms, at least to him, making progress toward an equitable platonic friendship. He hoped it wouldn’t be undone this time.
Alfric spread his armor and put his hands to his ears too, waiting for it to come and go. He marked the time, another five minute increment had come and gone, and he waited for the sound to move through his body, to feel it bone deep again.
The thrum didn’t come. They all waited, thinking that they had mistimed it, but slowly, one by one, they began to lower their hands from their ears.
Alfric looked at the monster. It was big, larger than anything through the whole dungeon by several orders of magnitude. It had been sitting in a place of prominence, surrounded by many doors. And when it had died, the thrums had died with it.
The thrums had accompanied the shifts. The shifts had already left them in a dungeon of dead ends once before.
Alfric prayed to each of the six gods that there was still a way out.