It felt good to be back in a dungeon, though part of the reason that Hannah had said yes to it was a smidge of guilt. She had been spending time with Marsh, probably too much. He was a distraction from what she was trying to do with her life. If she’d known, going in, that she was going to be seeing him almost every day for many hours at a time, or if she had realized that they would fall asleep cuddled up together, she might have rebuffed him. But he was fun, and it was as he’d said: she should live in the moment rather than trying to chart some path of optimal freedom.
And even when she was in the dungeon, she caught herself thinking about him. She could be obsessive, that was in her nature. It was one of the things that made her a good cleric. Thinking about a boy while in life or death situations was a bit much though. The suddenness with which they’d decided to do this dungeon had made it more difficult for her to switch gears, that was what she told herself.
The curved corridor led to a small room with a crude fire in it, which thankfully vented upward into a chimney, as otherwise it might have smoked them out. Alfric had said that one of the things they’d eventually have was a way to keep them from having skin contact with anything, as well as complete air filtration, but that was quite a bit down the line. Over the fire, supported by a few branches, was a bubbling pot of brown, and Mizuki wrinkled her nose but said that the pot was magical.
Sometimes Hannah thought that Alfric enjoyed spending time and money having an organized response to every single situation more than he actually enjoyed the dungeons. The acid — though it hadn’t been acid — seemed to have rattled him, and his face was only slowly returning to normal.
The cauldron of soup was kicked over and the rest of the room was searched, and then they moved on.
It was a normal dungeon, more or less. They’d been in enough of them that there were surprises, but really, it was more variations on a theme. The ‘trap’ had been a surprise, as had Mizuki’s tumble, but Hannah could already see that they were nearly seasoned. The surprises would be fewer and further between, and their gear would be better each time, and with Alfric having undone days left, there was really not all that much danger.
They killed a two-legged creature with a single arm and no face or sensory organs that they could see. It held an axe in its hand and swung it at Alfric with wild abandon, but Alfric put it down, and they moved on.
They fought bushy-tailed animals that leapt onto and off of the walls, making leaping attacks with foot-long claws, and Hannah waded in with her plate armor, which made her impervious to their hits. She swung the hammer wildly, crushing ribs and skulls, until at last she was panting in the center of the room, having done the majority of the killing work.
They came across a pack of creatures with intense magic, ones that could go insubstantial, like a ghost. There were six of them, and they had a habit of becoming material with a weapon midway through them, fused there and stuck in place. They had no special weapons though, only brute strength, and eventually the hits that landed were able to put them down, and the weapons that had been embedded in them were retrieved and cleaned.
A room with a foot of brackish water had slow-moving humanoids covered in hard minerals. Despite their slowness, they were incredibly strong, and their mineral armor made them very hard to kill. Alfric’s bident was useless, and he was grabbed by the arm, squeezed so hard that his wrist broke in two places. Hannah came in with the hammer to save him, and once he was clear, it was a matter of moving away, down the corridors, enough so she could heal him. With a corridor between them, they were able to take the creatures on one at a time, though Hannah’s arms were aching by the end of it. She had transferred the liquid metal of her armor to the head of her warhammer, and swinging it a dozen times had left her winded and slightly numb.
They made their way back through the jumble of rooms, with the chest trundling after them. Mizuki and Alfric handled most of the appraisals, which amounted to piling things into the chest and occasionally having Mizuki mark them as entads. Across six rooms they’d found four entads, and to Mizuki’s exaggerated disgust, one of them was yet another bow. The other two, aside from the soup pot, were a pen and a dirk, neither of which seemed on the face of it particularly good, but it was hard to tell without testing or a query from a cleric of Qymmos.
They pushed on, through yet another doorway, and stopped there together to look at what had been unveiled.
It was a huge room, a theater, and they were at the back of it, looking down a long aisle between the seats. There was a balcony overhead and dozens of rows of seating, all done in cushioned red velvet and embossed gold leaf. You didn’t need to be Alfric to think that this sort of place was worth a lot of money. The seats would be torn up and put into the garden unless they had too many nails, in which case they would be carefully loaded into the chest up to its limits, which Hannah didn’t really know anything about. There were thousands of seats, which meant that they might be there for a day or more.
The stage wasn’t empty. Many rooms had monsters, and this one was no exception; they were all crowded up on the stage, two dozen of them, each with their own instrument of unique design. Only one faced away, taking the place of the conductor, and he was the largest of them, standing twenty feet tall. It was, altogether, a symphony of monsters, and as the party watched, the concert started in earnest.
When the music started, it was a horrible racket, but when silence followed that, Hannah realized that they’d only been making sure their instruments were in tune. The proper music followed, and it was … not all that bad, for all its strangeness. Hannah looked at Verity, whose eyes were wide.
Alfric looked around at the theater they’d found themselves in.
said Mizuki.
said Verity.
Verity gestured to the theater, as though that proved her point.
said Alfric. He fell silent.
said Alfric. His mind was still on the oddity of the theater, which was a bad place for it to be.
said Verity. She had closed her eyes.
They worked out as much of a plan as they could, though the music started to grate on everyone after not too much time had passed. Whether or not Mizuki’s attack would bear fruit was an open question, but if she were able to handle the conductor, then Isra could move in and puncture the players with arrows, and Alfric and Hannah could do the work of tearing through whomever remained. Verity would be shifting focusing, first on Mizuki, then Isra, and finally Alfric. For the last phase of the song, she was going to attempt something that she’d never done in a dungeon before: a progressive melody, one which would compound his strength the longer she played. Eventually she would lose it and the whole thing would fall apart, but for a time, Alfric would be able to fight with enough sheer muscle to make up for their lack of numbers.
Mizuki’s spell did not disappoint. It brought the music to a screeching halt, and the conductor turned toward them as though he was going to roar in anger before promptly falling apart. Whatever she had done, it had caused his internal organs to all slip right out of his torso onto the floor of the stage. For a moment, it seemed as though he might keep going anyway, but he fell shortly after, and the concert members rose from their seats as if to avenge him. His body tipped over and he fell into the front row, gushing blood and unmoving.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
Isra zipped back and forth, and the creatures thankfully fell to an arrow each, at least if it was well-placed. As she thinned the crowd, Alfric and Hannah moved in, weapons at the ready. The creatures were humanoid, using their instruments as weapons, a shiny brass horn raised like a hammer, or a string violin that would surely explode into pieces of wood the moment it hit their armor.
All of the monsters were humanoid, though there were variations among them, extra arms, extra legs, patches of hair on the sides of their faces, horns in awkward places and bits of what looked like rot. They were dressed, though, in different outfits of black. Too human for Hannah’s tastes, but they attacked without any apparent cognition and uttered nothing that sounded like a word.
Hannah beat and bashed her way through them, bringing down her hammer on their heads or aimed squarely for their stomachs. The hammer felt better with a big wind up, its massive head crunching bones when it hit, but she was already worn down from the earlier battles, and found herself winded after three giant swings. Hannah backed off, going defensive as she tried to catch her breath. The musicians were beating against her with their instruments, and there were too many of them, threatening to mob her. While her armor was protecting her, she was going to be bruised and broken.
The song had transitioned into its progressive phase, and Alfric came to Hannah’s rescue. He’d dropped his shield and was using the bident with a two-handed grip, plunging it into the humanoids and using his whole body weight to fling them away, as easily as if he were using a pitchfork to move hay. He flung one of them to the side with the bident, moving it with such power that the floor cracked beneath his feet, and it twisted through the air, slamming into several others. One of the musicians came at him from behind, and he elbowed it in the face, splitting the skull in two. In no time at all he had cleared her, and he went at the others, slicing the bident through the air with enough speed to shatter bones.
Hannah did nothing more than watch while trying to recover her stamina. Her arms felt like jelly, and she set the head of the hammer on the ground so she wouldn’t need to hold it up. She was going to have to call it after this room, if there were any rooms left. The might of Garos was incredible for healing, but her god was limited in his ability to help with endurance.
Alfric moved with such speed and power that it seemed like he was fighting against himself to keep from over-rotating or sending himself into the air. Verity’s progressive song was making it so that instead of normal footwork, he was leaping from enemy to enemy, those that remained. When he physically connected with one of them, the counterforce pushed him back, with the power of a punch not fully contained by his connection with the floor. Alfric was a fantastic fighter, Hannah had seen that, but he was in a new circumstance, and having trouble adapting to it. It was getting him into bad situations, mobbed by the musicians, which he got out of primarily with brute strength. At one point he grabbed one of them by its wrist to throw it off balance and ended up ripping the arm off entirely.
The song faltered, then ended, right as Alfric was dispatching the last of them. He’d dropped his shield and lost his bident, and now he was barehanded and in the thick of it. They grabbed him, having already smashed their instruments, and he allowed them to, then launched himself up in the air with the helmet. It was slow, with two of them dangling on him, but he reached the top of the expansive theater within twenty seconds, and from there, he peeled them off, letting them fall down to thud, lifeless, against the ground.
said Verity.
said Isra. She was rolling her right shoulder, stretching to alleviate the overexertion.
Isra had a rotator cuff injury, which was no particular surprise. She pushed herself hard when she was using the time-dilating bow, and the last shots invariably had worse form than the first ones. She’d been working on her endurance, but there were limits to how much endurance a person could have, especially when drawing back with full power so much in such a short amount of time, and also doing that while walking. The problem, at least so far as Hannah could diagnose as Isra’s cleric, was that Isra was engaging in an all-out sprint, but for her arms rather than her legs.
Alfric smiled.
said Hannah.
Mizuki was staring at the theater.
said Verity.
Hannah looked around the group and saw that no hands were going up.
Mizuki turned to Verity, and before Hannah could intervene, said the less delicate version of what Hannah had been thinking.
said Verity. Her eyes had a spark of defiance, and whatever was going through her mind, Hannah thought it likely that her current disposition could be traced back to her feelings about her mother.
said Hannah.
Mizuki flipped the spoon around, so fast that it was a blur in the air, and it clattered to the ground on the stage floor, facing up. Mizuki stared at it for a moment.
said Mizuki.
It took some time to bring Mizuki back to the dungeon entrance, and once she had left, there was some sense of enormity hanging in the air. Mostly it was the size of the job in front of them, and the knowledge that they would be in the dungeon for multiple days doing back breaking labor. At least a little bit of it was knowing that they would have only each other for company, and only what comforts they’d brought along.
Hannah was hoping that Alfric’s over-preparedness extended to long stays in a dungeon.