The dungeon started off fairly mundane, all things considered. The walls were made of compact stone bricks that mirrored the appearance of the sewers themselves, right down to the glowing runes on the walls providing their only source of ambient light, and the enemies defending the sparse rooms were both simple and repetitive. The first slime didn’t even bother to ambush them! For that matter, neither did the second, nor the third. In fact, it wasn’t until the 7th time that a wall of living sludge attempted to drown and/or dissolve them, moving at a snail’s pace the whole time, that any of them dared to say what they’d all been thinking.
“Isn’t this going a little too well?” Damaia asked as she used her flame launcher attached to one gauntlet to boil the latest ooze. “I mean, we haven’t found any treasure, sure, but these monsters have all been really, really weak. The worst thing we’ve seen so far is this thing. It kinda reminds me of the sneaky slime that ruined Lucas’ armor back in Westwind!”
“Most of these have been Stonemaw Slimes,” Lucas confirmed tersely as he kept his distance from the sludgy mess. “They eat rocks, minerals and, most importantly, metals. They don’t mind having adventurers for dessert, either.” He calmly aimed his crossbow at another slime, which had been ‘sneaking up’ on the party for the last couple of minutes. Most slime type monsters were roughly as intelligent as the minerals and detritus they tended to eat, so pelting the thing with his diminishing supply of crossbow bolts while slowly walking away proved to be an incredibly effective strategy.
It was also, however, a somewhat costly one. “In case anyone’s forgotten,” the mercenary added calmly as he loaded his last bolt into his crossbow, “I’m not exactly a world class mage, and I’m about to run out of ammo. Some help would be appreciated.”
“Can’t you do the lightning thing you used against the werewolf?” Jubel asked as he took aim at the slime that’d eaten a dozen of Lucas’ bolts already. “It seemed pretty effective.” The pitch black ray of energy that leapt from his palm slammed into the ooze, splattering its already wavering gelatinous form across the nearby wall.
“Blood magic is exhausting,” Lucas said dryly. “It doesn’t work too well with ammo, either - I’d need to cast it on each bolt separately, so I’d probably pass out before I got halfway through a fight. It’s less a weapon, more a desperate last trick.”
“That’s disappointing,” Damaia said as she stared intensely at one of the walls. “Imagine what I could do with portable, rechargeable sources of electricity. We could replace power crystals altogether!”
“Running the whole world on lightning?” Lucas scoffed. “No way it’d work. Give me tried and true magic any day of the week. Why are you glaring at that wall, by the way? Did it call you a demon when I wasn’t listening?”
“You should always be listening in a dungeon,” Damaia and Vivi said in unison before sharing a laugh. “V told me that secret passages show up in almost every story about dungeons, so I’ve been looking for them in every room.”
Jubel blinked. “No you haven’t,” he objected. “You haven’t done more than glance at the walls in any of the other rooms!”
“The slimes in the other rooms damaged the walls,” Damaia said as she ran her hands slowly along the seemingly normal wall. “Any hidden seams or mechanisms would’ve been made plainly visible. But this one didn’t react to the presence of our little friend’s acid in the slightest. No damage, no discoloration, nothing. So I figure… aha!” She pressed in one of the gray bricks that comprised the wall, jumping and punching one hand into the air in triumph as a nearly seven foot tall slab of stone in the rough shape of a door swung slowly outward.
She raised an eyebrow and smiled brightly at the rest of her party, who simply stared dumbly at the newly revealed passage.
“Even I wasn’t expecting us to find one this soon,” Vivi admitted with a shake of her head. “Shows what I know. Good work, D!” She looked down the passageway, her eyes narrowing. She quickly muttered a few indecipherable words, a floating orb of light shot from her fingertips, racing down the dark hallway before coming to a halt as it reached a large wooden door.
“Age before beauty,” she said with a smirk to Lucas.
“Good point,” the mercenary said with a nod. “Go ahead.”
Vivi froze, and Jubel struggled to suppress a laugh, disguising it as a cough.
“You walked right into that one,” Damaia said cheerfully.
“... Shut up,” the elf muttered, pouting as she stomped into the passageway.
“What? You did!”
“Hush,” Lucas said abruptly, cupping one hand to his ear. “Did anyone hear that just now?”
“You mean the scratching noises?” Vivi said tersely, tightly gripping the hilt of the rapier at her hip.
“Pretty sure slimes don’t make much noise,” Jubel said with a sigh. “What’re the odds that things are about to get more difficult?”
The answer to Jubel’s poorly timed question was, of course, very high.
The moment they opened the door they saw what’d been making the noise. Three humanoid skeletons, each dragging a sword along the floor as they walked, were pacing around the edge of a large wooden table, which seemed to take up the majority of the space within. Shadows still shrouded the corners of the room, but Vivi’s floating light was still bright enough to draw the undead’s attention.
Maximus had told them that nearly an entire team of guards had died down here, but somehow, it hadn’t seemed real until they saw the bloodstained black and silver livery each skeleton wore over their chainmail. Jubel wasted no time, pointing one hand at the nearest undead as it lifted its blade in both hands. “The void beckons,” he hissed in an unknowable tongue, a shard of absolute darkness ripping its way through the air and slamming into the monster’s skull, tearing a hole straight through it.
The skeleton promptly ignored its impromptu craniotomy, charging blindly towards the nearest living thing with reckless abandon.
Vivi, realizing she was the nearest living thing, darted into the room as she drew her sword. Rather than trying to stab at the creature, she slammed her pommel into its skull, sending a fresh spiderweb of cracks through the already damaged bone. Sadly, the lack of anything resembling a brain meant that the creature was unphased by the sudden blow to its temple, even as chunks of its skull fell to the floor. It lashed out as its brethren moved to surround her, scoring a shallow cut across her left forearm and eliciting a hiss of pain from the blonde bard.
The trio of skeletons' jaws all moved in unison, clattering rhythmically as they raised their blades. It took a moment for the adventurers to realize what was happening, but when they did, it sent an ominous chill down their spines.
The skeletons were laughing.
Lucas surged into the room, tackling one of the creatures to the ground with a snarl and savagely smashing its skull against the cold stone floor over and over again. “Keep them off me!” he shouted without looking at the others. He heard the somewhat gruesome sound of breaking bones from behind him as the team followed his orders, but didn’t dare to take his eyes off the monster in front of him. It dropped its sword to clutch at his hands, trying desperately to break his grip. The magic that animated the bones also imbued it with strength beyond that of the average man, but Lucas was far from average. Realizing the futility of trying to break his grip through strength alone, the undead switched tactics. Thin pinpricks of a cold, blue light appeared in the creature’s eye sockets as it grabbed him by the throat, hoping to weaken him before he could shatter it.
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The Man felt a dim sense of panic as hind windpipe was forced shut.
The Beast laughed through his lips as fingers became claws, shattering the skull in his grip. The remaining bones fell to the floor as the magic animating them faded, and Lucas gasped, filling his lungs with the stale, rank air of the dungeon. He forced himself to his feet, turning to face the sounds of battle, but he needn’t have worried. The skeleton that had wounded Vivi was little more than bones and dust on the floor by this point, and the final undead had already had an arm ripped off by a rather angry looking felblood engineer, who was proceeding to beat it over the head with said arm.
Before he could even register what he was looking at, Damaia had already used her steel clad fists and pilfered arm bone to knock the undead guard to the floor. “Bye, Skelejerk!” she said as the creature fell to the floor, her tone only slightly less cheerful than usual.
Then she leapt into the air, landing feet first on her opponent’s skull.
“Well done,” Lucas said, still breathing heavily. “Everyone ok?”
“Vivi took a couple hits, but I’m fine,” Jubel replied, trying to hand the aforementioned elf a healing potion from his bag. She shook her head. “Keep it,” she insisted, humming a short tune while touching her wounded arm. A pulse of bluish light washed over her wound, sealing it shut in an instant.
“Damaia?”
Damaia opened her mouth to answer, only to cry out in alarm as something pulled her feet out from under her and began to drag her towards one of the still dark corners of the room. Vivi immediately moved her glowing orb to illuminate the corner, only to reveal -
A chest? A treasure chest, the sort only found in stories of buried treasure or deep within dungeons, sat in the corner of the room, with one long, dark, fleshy tendril extending out the side of it.
“MIMIC!” She shrieked, springing towards her felblood friend. Her hands wove an ornate pattern in the air as she spoke words of power, her voice echoing in a way that made the shapeshifting horror pause. “Be torn asunder by the roar of thunder,” she commanded, casting one hand towards the creature with a hateful glare.
The chest shuddered and convulsed, a dark purple liquid flying from its now open maw as the sound of thunder filled the room. The mouth of the creature, which lined up perfectly with the lid of the chest it was pretending to be, was filled with row upon row of razor sharp teeth. Refusing to let go of its prey, the wounded thing tried desperately to pull the fully armored woman into its mouth, but a shard of something that looked like the night sky flew from Jubel’s hand and severed the tendril wrapped around her ankle.
A scream from behind them drew their attention as the large table in the middle of the room abruptly sprang into action, trying to catch Lucas off guard and devour him. Much to the second mimic’s astonishment, however, its lunch underwent a transformation of his own, fur rapidly covering his muscular form and a wolf-like snout replacing his human face. The sticky tendrils wrapped around the lycanthrope strained as they tried to pin him to the floor, but he flipped the vaguely table shaped mass over his head almost dismissively, locking eyes with his teammates as he did.
“I’ll handle this one,” he snarled as one of the tendrils struck him just below the eye. Snarling, he whirled around, vicious fangs and razor sharp claws shearing through the twisted monstrosity’s flesh with astonishing ease.
“Not happening,” Jubel said firmly, shooting another dart of magical energy into the table-mimic. “Why not?” The lycanthrope growled.
“Because that’s a stupid plan,” The half elf said bluntly. “The whole ‘I’ll get this one, you get that one’ thing only works like half of the time at best. We have four people and two monsters. We can outnumber both of them.”
Lucas considered that as he ripped a few freshly regrown tendrils off the snarling table. “Fair enough,” he conceded reluctantly. “Besides, it’d be rude of me to hog all the fun to myself.”
“If wrestling something that is 90% teeth and tentacles is your idea of fun, I think I’ll pass!” Damaia half shouted as she bathed the chest-mimic in a fresh wave of flame.
“Agreed,” Vivi said as she slashed away another tendril with her magically enhanced blade. “These things are beyond disturbing. How the hell does that table-mimic even eat? It’s mouth is so small!”
As if in response to her comment, the edges of the table sprouted teeth while a hole slowly formed in its center, turning the entire structure into one huge mouth.
“You had to ask?” Lucas snapped as the massive maw slammed shut on him, even his enhanced strength barely able to keep the beast’s jaws forced open.
“I’ll buy you a whole bag of coffee beans later,” the elf said glibly by way of apology.
“You joke, but I can already tell he’s gonna hold you to that,” Jubel said as he looped around behind the table. It formed an eye on its ‘back’ to watch him, but that was exactly what he was waiting for. He immediately stabbed the newly formed green sphere, eliciting a shriek of pain from the beast and weakening its grip on Lucas. The werewolf wasted no time, leaping back out of the thing’s mouth only to sink his own fangs into its rough hide.
Meanwhile the chest-mimic had begun spitting globs of something foul smelling at the girls, leaving searing welts across their skin and melting off one of Vivi’s sleeves. “I love combat banter as much as the next girl,” she said with a hint of exasperation, “but can we please focus on killing these things?! This one’s spitting acid now!”
“Almost done with ours!” Lucas snarled as he hurled the bleeding mass of wood toned flesh into a wall. “You got any ideas to speed this up, Jubel?”
“As a matter of fact -” the half elf leapt onto the table-mimic before it could recover, plunging his sword into the wound where its eye had once been. Focusing as best as he could while the beast flailed about trying to throw him aside, he channeled his magic down the length of the cheap iron blade.
The larger mimic froze. Then it twitched. First once, then twice - the third twitch became a violent series of convulsions as black sparks flew across its body, its mouth wrenching open into a soundless scream.
It wasn’t until the thing’s body slowly crumbled into dust that Jubel finally stopped channeling his power, his heartbeat pounding in his ears. The strain had been more than he’d expected… but he’d won.
He looked across the room at the girls, only to see a glob of acid headed his way. It struck him on the shoulder, eating through his clothes in seconds before it got to work on the flesh beneath.
That, however, turned out to be the mimic’s last mistake. Vivi took advantage of the creature’s distraction, dazing the vicious chest with a spell while Damaia gave it a taste of its own medicine by tossing a vial of acid down its throat.
Much like the table, this mimic’s death was a silent one - save perhaps for the occasional gurgle.
The mimic wasn’t the only one with a foul taste in their mouth, though. As Lucas watched the second mimic’s form crumble away, leaving behind only a strange red gemstone, he couldn’t help but see a pattern. He glanced at the girls, and saw the same concern on each of their faces.
“I’ve heard stories of dungeon monsters working together,” he heard Vivi mutter, “but never in a dungeon this young.”
“Then we have quite the story to tell back at the inn, don’t we?” Jubel pointed out. In spite of his injury, the half elf wore a bright smile as he turned to face his team, one hand behind his back. “That’s great! It’s not a proper adventure without a good story, right?” The swordsman’s good cheer was practically infectious.
“Well,” Vivi said slowly, her worried frown giving way to a small smile, “I suppose you’ve got a point. We’ll certainly be the talk of the town!”
“And we’ve got a trophy to prove it! Ladies and gentleman, may I present our first magic item!” The half elf held up a small, dusty leather bag, opened it, and reached inside.
All the way to his wounded shoulder.
Damaia squealed with excitement. “I KNOW THAT ONE!” she said, practically vibrating with excitement.
Lucas stared in wonder at the item that had apparently been found amongst the remains of the table mimic. “Fine,” he said with a chuckle. “You win. It was worth it! Now… who gets to keep it?”
A rousing game of rock, paper, scissors ensued - complete with what Lucas called ‘the customary storm of swearing.’