I climbed down a metal ladder that descended into the dark. Glum grabbed the hound in an awkward carry and followed me down the ladder. A few patches of glowing moss lit the sides of the wall next to the ladder, but they were too dim for me to spot my destination. After what felt like an impossibly long time, I could finally see the ground below me. A small fire, several tents and a few torches were placed around a camp that seemed to draw me forward.
There was nobody else in the camp, but it had the feeling that it had just been vacated. So far, the system hadn’t given me a heads up on what to expect for this final challenge, so I took stock of what I had to work with. My wand was full, my other weapons were good. Rupert’s figurine had also been regenerated, and he was ready to be summoned again.
I called forth my dwarven minion, and I immediately regretted not bringing any weapons with me from the orc camp. I’d have to start remembering to bring something for him to fight with. The hound sniffed around, and Rupert and Glum walked the perimeter, looking into the darkness for any threats. I couldn’t see very far past the small ring of torches driven in the ground around the tents.
This underground rest stop had an eerie feel to it, and looking into the dark gave me the creeps. I ordered my minions to keep a watch on things as I explored the largest tent, hoping to find something to give me directions. After entering the tent, I finally had a system prompt appear.
The final leg of the arena challenge stands before you. This challenge is a simple journey through the cavern and out onto the arena floor. Follow the lit path and defend yourself against the horrors of the dark.
After reading the prompt, a string of torches appeared, spaced about every twenty yards or so and stretching out into the cavern as far as I could see. The torches created small islands of light in the pitch black of the cavern, giving me a path toward my goal. All I needed to do was walk out of this cavern and back to the arena. Of course, the system was more than likely going to throw something horrible at me as I went.
“Grab a torch, and let’s get going. Pup, you let me know if you sniff anything out,” I ordered to my stalwart band.
The hound seemed to understand my command and began to sniff its way toward the first torch. Rupert and Glum grabbed torches and followed behind me. I also grabbed a torch in one hand, and my hammer in the other. It would be a bit cumbersome to drop the hammer and pull my wand if I needed to fight at range, but something told me that the dangers we would face were going to be a bit more up close and personal.
We’d made it past the third torch when the hound stopped, turned to the right, then spun around and growled. I held my torch high, trying to peer further into the gloom, but I couldn’t see anything. The hound was insistent that there was something out there, but he seemed to be having a hard time pinpointing the location. I heard a scuffle behind me and turned to see that Marvin Glum was gone. He had been at the rear of our column and only his torch and shortsword were there on the stone floor of the cavern.
“Rupert, grab that sword,” I ordered. The dwarf moved to comply, but the blade turned into mana vapor as Glum was killed by whatever was lurking out there. I couldn’t stay here and wait for whatever was out here to kill us off one by one, so I ordered the survivors forward, moving our way to the next patch of light.
The hound stopped and growled again, this time looking toward our rear. I turned back toward our path just in time to see a tentacle drop from the darkness above and grab Rupert. The dwarven minion was hauled up into the dark, but he had kept the presence of mind to retain his torch, which the dwarf hammered away at the tentacle with.
Sickening crunching sounds were heard as the tentacle tightened its grip. Rupert burst into mana vapor as he was crushed, but his torch did finally give me a brief glimpse of the ceiling. There were things moving around up there, they looked like living stalagmites, stalactites, or whatever those things were called. Clusters of them hovered in the area above the pathway torch, and even now, I could see more of the impossibly long tentacle-like appendages reach down for me.
I ran into the dark, but my poor hound was a bit too slow to follow. One of the tentacles snatched him up, my hound giving a whimper before he too disappeared into mana vapor. I waited for one of the things to grab me and haul me up to my fate, but there didn’t seem to be any above me.
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Thinking about the brief glimpse I had of the monsters, and the fact that I was in the dark without being eaten by anything, I began to wonder. Was moving into the light the true danger of this challenge? While I considered it, I could see one of the long arms of the monster drifting down into the light of the torch that lit the path ahead. It began to slowly move toward where I was crouching.
Taking a chance, I hurled my torch as far as I could. Just before the tentacle disappeared into the dark, I noted that its direction had changed. Instead of heading toward me, it moved toward the light of the torch I’d thrown. I finally had this challenge’s number. To survive, I had to stay in the dark, using the path of torches to guide my direction while never straying into the light if I could help it.
It was slow going, as the ground in the cavern wasn’t exactly smooth. I had to make sure I didn’t walk off the edge of a cliff or something, so I had to slowly creep along. After a good thirty minutes of shuffling in the dark, I heard something moving in the distance. Further back along the trail I saw something light up the dark.
A young woman was running from torch to torch, a glowing white shield of energy encasing her. Near each torch, tentacles dropped down, but electricity shot up the limbs when they encountered the shield, causing them to retract into the dark. As the woman drew closer, I could see she was dressed in a mages robe, with glowing sigils on it. The thing that struck me about her was, oddly enough, her footwear. She was sporting a pair of iconic black Doc Martens boots.
She had to be from Earth, and she was about to get ambushed by the creatures on the ceiling. My instinct was to call out to warn her, but I was here to win, and fellow earthling or not, she was the competition. Neither of us could be permanently hurt here, so it was up to her to figure out how the monsters in this cavern worked.
I continued my slow and steady pace in the dark, careful not to fall off a ledge or slip into a sinkhole. The woman made it to the torch closest to where I was and stopped to catch a breather. That was a mistake, and one she paid dearly for as several of the tentacles dropped down and slammed into her glowing shield.
More of the electric shocks burst from the shield, but each was a bit less powerful than the previous one. She seemed to realize that standing there was a bad idea and began to run toward the next torch. Just as she left the circle of torchlight, the shield protecting her shattered. A tentacle grabbed on and began to reel her up toward the monster that waited above.
The woman muttered a spell and a burst of electricity flew from her hands rippling up the tentacle for a good ten feet before fizzling out. A rumbling roar of pain echoed from the cavern ceiling, and the girl was dropped to the stone floor. She grunted and had trouble making it to her feet, it seemed like her left leg was injured or broken. More tentacles dropped down, and she blasted a few more with spells, but her mana wasn’t unlimited and before long, she was out.
A final shriek was heard as the girl was hauled up to meet her fate. Thankfully, she’d just become a puff of mana vapor. I shuddered as I thought about something like this being my true end. Being hauled up into the dark, helpless to defend yourself against the hungry monsters waiting for your arrival. As difficult as my life was, at least the deaths I faced while summoned were only temporary inconveniences.
I shook off my fears and plowed ahead. It was slow going, but after about an hour of stumbling my way forward in the dark, I could see daylight. The cavern ended at a set of wide double doors that opened onto a green field of grass with the very welcome sight of a summoning portal waiting for me to enter.
Another contestant passed through the torchlight, running wildly for the exit. It was a halfling, which were a common enough sight in Somhagen and during my various summonings, but they weren’t a species that I could remember seeing as actual summoned beings. Most came from mana-rich worlds, but there must have been at least one world out there in the same condition as Earth, only populated with extras from The Hobbit rather than humans.
The light ahead beckoned and as the ground around me brightened, I made a dash forward. I lost sight of the halfling, but it didn’t matter as the light was now bright enough to see that there were none of the strange creatures hanging on the ceiling above me. Sprinting toward the portal, I hoped that I’d place reasonably high in the rankings.
Just before exiting the cavern, pain lanced into by back, and I lost control of my body. I collapsed to the ground in a heap, my vision fading as I spotted the halfling jogging past me, cackling as he looked from me to the bloody pair of blades in his hands.
You have been killed by stab wounds to your spine and kidney inflicted by the competitor Erton Deeptopple. Congratulations, you have completed the arena challenge and have placed 67/1000.
You are not eligible for the completion enhancement for ranking in the top 10, but your rewards will reflect your final ranking. All rewards will be calculated once the last competitor has completed the arena challenge or been eliminated.
Do you wish to watch the remaining challengers compete, or would you prefer to return to your personal space?