The hanging lights are not lanterns at all. One of them is attached to the thing that hit me, and it’s anything but pretty. I get pulled close enough that its light illuminates its owner, and I yell again.

The thing that has me is big, as big as a horse, but it’s clinging to the wall with what looks like a dozen legs. Every inch of it is armoured in plates of chitin. The light dangles from a long arm-type thing that seems attached to its head. It takes a moment to realize what it reminds me of: a deep sea anglerfish with its glowing lure on its head. Its head is complex and covered with grasping little arms that sweep eagerly toward a mouth that rivals mine for teeth. From the mouth projects a long, ugly tongue, and that’s what grabbed me in midair.

The wound in my belly is leaking something clear and cold, and I see what made the hole in me when it lashes out again to attack. The monster has a long arm, a pair of them actually, jointed and flexible and tipped with a spike. It jabs into me again and pulses when it pumps its poison into me.

This must me what injured the dwarf king! For a moment I’m thrilled but then I realize it’s poisoning me, too. Already I feel sleepy, but my trollish metabolism seems capable of fighting it off, at least a bit. I need a plan to kill this thing!

The monster hauls me in. Its tongue retracts in jerks, as if a mechanism inside it is reeling it in. My claws can’t get a grip on it and I can’t seem to pierce the thick layer of muscle that covers the tongue. My talons just slide off. It feels wrong somehow. When I struggle, the thing jabs me again, pumping more venom into me. The chill is getting worse; I can’t take much more of that. I stop fighting and let the monster reel me in a little. As soon as I relax it stops trying to stab me with its stinger, and I get a moment to think.

The poison is making me slow, and I keep losing track of my thoughts. Focus, Ellie! What do I have that could kill this thing? Acid? Desiccant? No, those aren’t gonna work. I doubt I could make a potion big enough or strong enough to melt this monster or to dry it to death. The effects of the poison make me a little silly and I giggle. Dust to dust, as they say.

But also, ashes to ashes. An idea takes hold in my mind. I have a fair amount of ingredients, and I could maybe make something out of…

“Create a potion of explosion.” I whisper the words in case the thing can understand me. It feels less silly than it should; it seems my brain is getting more and more affected. The vial appears in my hand. It feels more fragile than most others I’ve made; that might be good. I mentally name it grenade potion. I throw the vial at the monster’s mouth, but when I do the monster gives me a good yank. Instead of getting close to it, my throw goes wide and the vial flies off in the dark. I hear a loud, concussive sound, but the monster doesn’t seem to notice or care. It drags me ever closer.

I’ve got less than five feet before those eager mouthparts are in range of me. They gleam like blades, although they must be covered in chitin, not metal. I’m a lot less afraid than I should be; is it because I’m a troll? Maybe it’s the poison. I create another potion and try another throw, but it goes just as wide. Another bang and another shockwave hits me, but the monster is unrelenting.

There’s no flame from the potions. It seems they’re just pure force. My ashes to ashes idea doesn’t seem to apply, but the grenade potions are still good. An idea gets into my head just as the first tickle of the monster’s feelers touch me. I create yet another explosive potion and this time I don’t throw it. Instead reach my arm forward, towards the monster’s mouth. There’s a moment where its mouthparts gently caress my hand, and then they grab it and yank me forward. I let it pull me arm in up to the elbow, and then I squeeze as hard as I can.

My hand and arm explode. The pain is blinding, more than anything I’ve felt yet here. I had honestly thought that being a troll dulled my pain receptors or something but this puts that idea to rest. But it works; the explosion blows apart the monster’s head and a good part of its body too. It instantly falls from the wall and I find myself with a problem of a different sort. It’s bigger than me and I have no time to try to break my fall.

Its corpse lands on me and crushes my ribs. Breathing becomes agony; it’s like my chest is filled with shards of glass. Just to make things worse, something crawls over me, poking me with pointy feet. I just know it’s one of the cave crab things and I immediately panic. I just escaped getting eaten by a giant cave mutant monster thing; I don’t want to suffer the same fate at the hands—claws?—of its smaller cousin.

With effort I restrain myself until my chest has healed enough to draw a good breath. It takes almost ten seconds and feels like hours. Then I twist until I can get a grip and drag myself out from under the dead crab monster. Immediately I see that I have made a mess. The thing’s lure globe burst when it hit the cave floor and splashed glowing bug juice all over. There’s dozens, maybe hundreds of the smaller crab monsters all skittering and climbing over each other to get at the remains. Cave monster cannibalism!

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One of the little guys nips at the stump of my arm. For a moment I’m distracted by the strange sensation of my bones regrowing; it seems that troll forearms have three long bones, not two like humans. Then the little bugger nips me again and I have had enough. With my good hand I toss him away, towards the swirling light on the floor. It bounces twice and then lands squarely into the magical phenomenon and disappears.

“Ow.” I scrape myself free and do a quick once over. The poison in my system is fading fast and as it does my healing seems to be accelerating. My hand is sprouting from my wrist like a flower blooming and as it does I regain sensation. My ribs are healed now and I am basically back to normal.

“Need that poison.” I’m pretty sure the monster I just killed is the one that attacked the dwarf king. Same size of puncture wound, sleepy poison… gotta be. I am about to start ripping into it for its poison when I am reminded that I saw other lights on the wall before I was attacked. This reminder comes in the form of another long tentacular tongue lashing towards me , but this time there’s enough ambient light from the splashed globe fluid that I see it coming. I twist aside and shake my finger at the spot in the darkness that it came from. “No! Bad…crab… thing!”

The globe of light attached to the owner shakes and waggles. Then it lashes out again and I have had enough. I know how to deal with these guys; I create a potion grenade and throw it straight at the globe. The concussion hits me a split second later and there is a loud crunching sound when the monster hits the cave floor.

“Anyone else? Plenty more where that came from.” That’s kind of a lie; I have maybe three potions worth left, but they don’t know that so I make another grenade potion and wave it at the lights. I glare defiantly at the remaining globes; there’s four in total. None of them make a move towards me. “Yeah, didn’t think so.” I get back to work.

A couple minutes later I am covered in giant cave bug guts and have not found what I need. It seems that exploding the monster from the inside out was an error. With a sigh I turn towards the other one and hope it’s in better shape.

It is, but only because it’s not quite dead. It’s missing legs and my grenade potion seems to have crushed its thorax. It waves its mouth bits at me and I feel a little bad. Then it tries to poison me and I feel less bad and more angry. With a growl I dodge its attacks and close in. It’s not a fight; I just tear into it and keep ripping things out of it until it stops moving. The explosion tore a lot of its armour plates off, so it doesn’t take long. The dwarves said you need magic to kill these things, but my claws work just as well. Maybe I’m magic. Thanks, Jinx.

This time I’m rewarded. I know which limbs inject the poison so I know where to start looking, and it takes less than five minutes of talon work to find it.

Dimensional Mutant Crab Venom - Lethargic Poison

That sounds like exactly what I need. I grab the little organ—it’s really cold, for some reason— and stuff it into my pouch, then I start looking for the other one. No sense wasting good materials. Also, Dimensional Mutant Crab is a mouthful. I mentally rename it DMC for short.

I am yanked off my feet by a familiar sensation. As I fly backward I grab at the thing wrapped around my waist; it’s another tongue! These things just don’t learn. I grab the grenade potion free and turn to see what has me.

It’s another crab thing, but this one is crawling out of the floor! No, that’s not right; it’s crawling out of the swirling magic on the floor. It’s some kind of portal, it seems. My mind goes back to the crab I threw and I realize I made this monster myself.

“So that’s where you guys come from,” I growl. The portal mutates the crabs! Unluckily for this guy, I know exactly how to deal with him. I don’t really want to have to regrow a hand, though. That hurt way more than I thought it would. I just need to time it so that it doesn’t get a chance to poison me again. I can outlast the poison but I don’t feel like getting eaten.

When I’m close enough, I throw the grenade potion. This time my aim is true. It arcs through the air and lands in the thing’s mouth. It doesn’t shatter and for a moment I think I might need to go with the hand plan after all, but then it bites down and that’s all she wrote.

When the gore and the shell parts and the rest stop raining down, the little crabs find themselves with a feast. I find myself even filthier than I was, and when the little ones try to pick at me I am careful not to throw them toward the portal. Last thing I need is more aggressive crab monsters!

I’m pretty sure I wrecked this one’s poison glands so I don’t bother looking. But I need to deal with the source of these things. The little ones are just animals. Weird animals, but nothing unnatural. It’s only when they come in contact with the portal that they turn big and nasty. It’s a good thing they don’t seem to be that interested in it. While I watch I get a new piece of information.

I watch as a little cave crab ambles towards the portal in its quest to get to the dead monster. When it gets into the circle of light the portal casts, a tongue lashes out and catches it before it can contact the light. It’s the DMCs themselves that are limiting the number of mutants! They must be trying to maintain their food source and reduce competition. Too many giant bugs would mean not enough little ones to eat.

Okay, enough amateur ecology. I need to close that portal. I walk towards it and stop just outside the range of its light. It is perfectly circular and surrounded by runes carved directly into the stone floor. I recognize the writing; it’s the same as the dwarves’ secrets on the walls. But this doesn’t seem to actually say anything. In fact trying to read it is giving me a headache. It’s like when you see something written in Cyrillic letters and your brain tries to read the backwards Ns and Rs as English.

The dwarf king’s secret was that he could do magic. Did he open this portal? Are these runes magic? My eyes narrow. Maybe it’s the runes that keep the portal open. That’s easy enough to test; I can just destroy them and see what happens. There’s no possible way this can go badly, right?