Today’s Earth date: September 26? 1991
A fucking earthquake hit while we were using a tunnel to get through the Breaker Mountains. With the tunnel blocked on both sides, our only option was to go into a dungeon that opened when the earthquake cracked the tunnel in half.
I hate it. All of the monsters are statues that come to life, and we’ve gotten lost three times. Even worse, Horcus is down. We found out the statues were monsters when one nearly ripped his arm off.
Wilmond was able to keep him from dying, but he can’t contribute to a fight anymore. As I write this, I’m sitting in a dungeon room with the rest of the party in some kind of old laboratory. I don’t know how long we’ve been down here. I don’t know what day it is. We don’t even know if this dungeon has another exit, so we could be wandering around here for nothing.
-The Journal of Laszlo the Paladin
***
To simplify communication, the party agreed that the floor they started on would be “floor 1.” That didn’t make sense for the overall structure, because it seemed like their journey began somewhere in the middle, but they needed a common frame of reference for navigation. They could adjust the numbering in their post-crawl notes and reports.
With nothing of note beyond death on floor 1, they decided to explore the “basement,” going down the stairs instead of up. Where they saw rubble and signs of battle above, this floor seemed untouched by the Chosen Heroes. A line of statues, all dwarven warriors with great axes hugged to their chests, greeted them in the first main corridor.
Instead of watching Wayne spend the next twenty minutes sniping every one of the statues from a distance, Gus proposed they bait them to come to life one at a time or in small batches if waking just one wasn’t possible.
Without the element of surprise, the enemy warriors went down quickly. As soon as their stone exteriors fell away, the rangers ran them through and cut their throats. Wayne and Fergus debated whether these monsters were statues brought to life by magic or were real, living creatures forced into gargoyle slavery.
Saying for certain was difficult, but they agreed the former theory was likely the case. When a statue came to life, it was powerful and aggressive and composed of flesh, but its eyes never shifted, its chest never moved from breathing, its muscles didn’t flex or tense, and it had no reaction to pain.
They studiously mapped that floor and two more floors below that, needing about two hours for each. They found more signs that this used to be a settlement–various apartments, laboratories, dining halls, storage rooms, and so forth. They found nothing worth taking, though. Every book Fergus picked up crumbled to dust in his hands, no matter what he did to be more gentle, and any item they could take had little value, like bottles or plain wooden boxes.
Though their trip had yielded little treasure, Wayne found another use of his Crosshairs, his new ability that enabled two reticules to his right and to his left where his cannons would fire. Since they turned red when they were on an enemy, he enlarged the Crosshairs so that the edge of each was always in his peripheral vision, just barely.
Fighting gargoyles wasn’t very useful for testing his idea, but he was certain he was onto something useful. In many FPS games, the outer edges of the screen would blink red to indicate the direction of an attack. So, if someone was hitting you with the Needler from your right, the right edge of the screen blinked red, giving you a big clue that something impolite was that way.
Crosshairs turning red to indicate an enemy could serve the same function, Wayne hoped, giving him a little bit more information in battle.
On floor B3 they came to a set of large doubledoors, and the hallway increased in size, giving them nearly triple the space vertically and horizontally than they had previously.
“Should we be worried this is trapped?” Wayne asked.
“Unlikely,” Fergus said. “Most dwarven security measures are based in enchantments. My peers who study dwarf history believe that’s because magic can be timeless whereas anything mechanical is subject to eventual decay. The first dwarves built everything with the intention of it lasting forever.”
“Are there magic traps?” Dekar asked.
“Potentially,” Fergus answered.
“A trap is a trap,” Dekar said, which Fergus said was fair.
The party debated their next move for some time, and the exhaustion of a long day spent in fights and in hypervigilance had drained them further. When it was obvious they were talking in circles, Wayne volunteered to open the door. Perhaps today would be the day he got isekaied again.
He pulled on the giant handle, and the door didn’t budge, not in the slightest. Gus stepped forward to help and Wayne waved him back.
Urg.
The door cracked open.
Urg.
Urg.
Urg.
Urg.
Wayne scooted the door open like he was moving furniture back on Earth. If it was too heavy to lift, he could usually push or pull it across the floor with the right leverage, and this door was no different. Yanking the door open little by little looked weird though, like his whole body stuttered.
Gus looked at the Zero Hero curiously, as did his fellow rangers, but said nothing.
Beyond the door, they found a room so large that entering felt like emerging from the tunnel of an Earth football stadium, a drab concrete hallway suddenly opening into a staggeringly expansive open-air space. Instead of bleachers and turf, the dungeon had a grand staircase that descended several stories, depositing the party at the bottom of the vast chamber. On their way down, they got a clear view of the room’s central feature: a large pit akin to a suburban home in square footage, its wide black mouth bordered by a sculpture of interlocking demons.
The demons ran the full perimeter of the circular pit, so by the time the party reached the floor, that border was more like a wall, the twisted mass of devil sculptures blocking the pit from their view.
Scattered about the room were shards of crystal that looked like quartz to Wayne, semi-transparent but foggy from imperfections and internal cracks. Each piece was about the size of his hand. Before he could offer his own guess, Fergus suggested that they all belonged to a singular crystal at one point. He estimated that it was originally ten feet tall and four feet wide, roughly.
The party had not yet left the bottom step when Fergus said, “The composition matches what I’ve read about the crystals in the Temples.”
“As in the Water Temple or Earth Temple?”
Stolen novel; please report.
Fergus nodded. “I have no hypotheses as to why we’d find that here, but if I am correct, this crystal was originally suspended over the pit by magic.”
“Thoughts on what would break a crystal that size?” Gus asked.
“I’ve nurtured a thought for much of the last two floors,” Fergus answered, “but I must warn everyone that I have little evidence for this, and my hypothesis might be driven more by my love of drama than by science.”
“Thank you for the disclaimer,” Wayne said. “What’s the theory?”
“We typically think of dungeons as being designed to keep people out, protecting their contents whether their builders were still alive or not. What if this structure was instead designed to keep something in?”
“Like what could come out of a pit surrounded by demon sculptures.”
Fergus nodded. “Ancient cultures often used symbolic communication to make warnings timeless. Writing ‘beware of pit’ in dwarvish wouldn’t be effective if the language was lost, so they used art, visuals that transcend language.”
“What purpose would the crystal serve here?” Wayne asked.
Fergus couldn’t say for sure, but the crystals in the Temples kept their world stable and held the doors between this world and the hells closed, except for every hundred years. Whether the crystal here served the same purpose or not, it went inactive long ago. Picking up one of the foggy white pieces, Fergus used his thumb to wipe a thick layer of dust aside.
The crystal lit up.
“Oops,” Fergus said with an awkward smile. Fergus had forgotten about an early lesson all scholars are taught at the Royal Library: Don’t touch unknown, potentially enchanted objects.
Which came with a footnote: Especially at the bottom of a dungeon.
“What’s that noise?” Wayne asked. To him, it sounded like fabric snapping in a strong wind.
“Wings,” Gus said.
A gargoyle shot up and out of the pit, the force of its flight sending several crystal fragments rolling across the room with each flap. Wayne covered his eyes as dirt and shards blew toward him, and a smell like gasoline and sulfur filled the air.
The monster had dark red skin with wide, leathery wings. Its teeth were impractically long, like kitchen knives sticking out of its mouth, and it had four eyes, two for each side. Its body was humanoid and had the dense muscle of a Silverback. If Wayne were to stuff the gargoyle head first into one of his Goods Storage Units, it would barely fit.
More troubling: Various scars crisscrossed its body in dozens of places, suggesting it had fought several times before and came out alive. Its enemies likely did not.
Artie shoved Fergus behind a pillar. The party would have preferred to flee, but turning their backs to climb hundreds of stairs would only get them killed. The group knew they had to stand and fight without uttering a word to one another.
“Bows!” Gus barked to his rangers while he drew his sword to protect the archers from melee attacks.
Wayne drew his sword as well, ready to put Christmas List to a real test, but Fergus distracted him. “The pit!” he yelled.
Wayne had followed the gargoyle up into the air. He looked down when he heard Fergus.
The conga line of demons wrapped around the pit began to come to life, flecks of their stone bodies giving way to all ranges of orange, yellow, and red skin. When the process was complete, twenty or so more enemies would rush the party. Thankfully, these demons didn’t appear to have wings, but that quantity was a problem for a party of three rangers and two scholars.
They didn’t have wings!
“Cover me!” Wayne yelled, rushing forward. He squatted, hooking his fingers low on the statue.
Urg.
Like he was flipping a tractor tire, he yanked upward. Nearly a third of the demon circle broke off and fell into the pit. The second piece of the braid was awake enough to scream when they were cast into the pit. He was too late to Urg the remaining demons into the hole, so he went at them with his sword. Because of their tangle, he was able to slice through most of the monsters.
“Look out!” Gus yelled.
Not wanting to take the time to look for what prompted the warning, Wayne turned to the outer edge of the room.
Blitz.
He looked back at the end of the dash to see the gargoyle landing where he recently stood, the impact cracking and shattering the pavers of the floor. Four of the braid demons were completely free now, but Artie and Dekar promptly filled them with arrows.
Wayne pumped a stream of Missiles at the demon, the first several missing, but once he properly led with his attacks, they peppered the gargoyle like hail.
The spells left scorches all over the monster’s body, fist-sized cigarette burns, but the monster seemed more annoyed than injured. Sword of Water didn't leave a mark at all.
The rangers’ arrows were similarly ineffective, sticking to the gargoyle like nuisance thorns or bouncing off entirely.
“It’s resistant to magic and too tough for arrows!” Gus yelled. The gargoyle dove at him, cutting a long trench in the floor as the ranger rolled out of the way. “We need to bring it down!”
Fighting a flying enemy put them at a grave disadvantage. The gargoyle could safely pick its attacks, and its speed made baiting a dive from the gargoyle incredibly dangerous.
If they couldn’t bring the gargoyle down, could he take himself up?
Wayne had a stupid idea. Tucking his sword tight to his ribs, pointing it straight forward like a lance, he ran, jumped, and activated Blitz.
Blitz-Blitz-Bliz-Blitz-Blitz.
His body flew through the air, slowing somewhat when his dash reached its full length, but not by much.
The gargoyle spun to escape the attack, but it detected the danger too late. Wayne and his sword tore through its left wing. The beast’s yell was like the howl of tornado wind coming across a prairie. The monster fell to the ground, its injured wing looking like a flag left to rot on a flagpole. Ratty. Tattered. Frayed.
Interesting that this gargoyle felt pain.
The Zero Hero was still airborne. Botching his timing, he crashed into the wall before hitting Brake. He still pressed it though, so he remained pressed into the brick like a cartoon character for an extra second before falling. His hitpoints dropped from 124 to 53, and he suspected his left collarbone was broken. As he struggled to clear the fog from his brain, one of his Crosshairs at the edge of his vision turned red.
Blitz.
The gargoyle smashed into the wall. Wayne felt the edge of a claw graze his shoulder but avoided the worst of the attack. Even without wings, the gargoyle was fast.
His hitpoints fell to 42.
The rangers had their swords out now, but the gargoyle’s size gave it a massive reach advantage. They couldn’t get close enough to do meaningful damage, and they too were trying not to get crushed or clawed to death as the gargoyle’s rage grew.
The monster’s good wing swiped at Dekar, bowling the ranger over. With a claw, the monster knocked Gus’ sword from his hand.
A party wipe looked imminent. The rangers were tough, but they weren’t enhanced by the system.
Wayne ran forward with his shoulder leading like a battering ram.
Blitz.
Fire a Broadside.
The moment he felt his shoulder collide with gargoyle skin, he punched a cannonball into its torso, leaving a hole large enough to stick an arm through. The gargoyle didn’t die immediately, but its speed and power were reduced to dragging itself across the floor, ineffectually flailing its claws at the party, and then it died. Its body returned to stone.
Wayne’s hitpoints fell again to 37. A broken collarbone made a shoulder ram painful.
But they were alive, and he felt multiple system vibrations. He checked his status:
Hero: Wayne the Guy
Level: 7
HP: 37/146
STR: 17
AGI: 13
VIT: 14
LCK: 21
He had leveled up.
He closed the window without looking at the rest. Artie and Dekar were banged up, and Fergus already tended to Dekar, helping him improvise a sling from a tunic. He said he'd take care of Artie next. As Wayne walked across the room to check in on Gus, a column of red light shot upward from the pit. When it touched the ceiling, a web of runes that were invisible before shined red.
And the mountain shook.