“I know time is of the essence, but I think it’s foolish to go in without working together a bit,” James said. He seemed like the natural leader for the group, and being the tank, he’d normally be the one to set the pace of our little adventure.
“There is a danger in waiting, the longer you take, the more powerful this dungeon will become,” Lopez warned.
“I think we can just spend a few minutes on some standard tactics before heading it, it won’t take long and will give us a feel for working together,” James said.
Lopez and the rest of the team had no problem with this, and we gathered in a cleared area behind the house. We practiced a few formations, and reactions to different situations. For initial attacks, James would lead the way, with the other tank, Melissa, either taking on any surprise attackers, or helping James with crowd control.
I would add my minions as soon as we entered, and they’d help keep James from getting flanked, since the barriers his class created could only face one direction. My minions would also cover those of us in the back ranks. The two Grulnoks would remain with James, while Lillia and Rupert would be positioned to cover our rear. My mana would be used to focus on buffing my minions, but I would also try to keep enough mana reserved for a healing spell if our healer, Nicolas, needed help.
Marie would be on the lookout for traps and would summon illusions to engage particularly difficult foes. Nicolas would reserve all his mana for healing, and after a fight could shift his aura from healing to toxin removal if needed. Eliza was a magic missile spamming machine, and once we found out how tough those little tiki creatures were, she should be able to thin out any huge waves of them.
After an hour of work, we were far from being a well-oiled machine, but I figured that we’d have little trouble working together. With our brief practice completed, the team entered the house. Like the dungeon inside the mine ride, this was located underground. The entrance had spawned in a dark corner of the basement, and we had to walk through the house to reach it.
We had to be cautious as there weren’t any guards inside the house, only a few cameras to monitor any of the creatures leaving the dungeon. Their perimeter was set up outside the house and from what Lopez had told us, there were even more forces on the way. As of now, they had two squads from the National Guard, who had arrived in their armored personnel carriers. To supplement the military, at least a score of Lopez’s agents was on site, all armed with long guns, not just their pistols.
The vehicles were used as a makeshift barricade to surround the house, and there were actual building materials and an Army engineering company on the way to build more substantial defenses to contain the threat. Despite us going in to clear the dungeon, the government was hedging their bets in case we failed. For us, failure was not an option, because once we entered the dungeon, we would kill the boss, or be killed.
I noticed that the house had that musty, old person’s home smell. The pictures on the wall were of a couple that looked like they’d had a long and happy life together. I felt a bit guilty that I hadn’t asked Lopez about what happened to the old couple that lived here but given the stains on the carpet and the handful of empty shotgun shells scattered about, I feared they had met a bad end. Whatever had happened to them, they’d gone out fighting, as the empty shotgun shells attested to.
Resolved to get revenge for the old couple, I followed Nicolas and the others down the basement stairs. I was expecting something dark and creepy, but the owners of the house had turned the basement into a nice media room, with a big screen, couches, and even a popcorn maker. At the far end of the basement, the wall was torn down, revealing the dark opening of a dungeon.
“Everyone ready?” James asked us. My hand hovered near the small pouch where I held my figurines. Once inside, I’d get to work on summoning them. After everyone confirmed they were good to go, James stepped into the dungeon. Melissa followed on his heels, then Marie. After Marie disappeared into the dungeon entrance, it was my turn.
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I felt a slight tingle as I entered the dungeon, which I hadn’t experienced when we entered the mine ride dungeon. The dungeon I stepped into was vastly different than the mine ride. Instead of a cavern or stone tunnel, it looked like we were outside, with sunlight streaming through thick jungle foliage. We landed in a clearing, near a pair of fallen trees. Nicolas appeared behind me, quickly followed by Eliza, which completed our small team.
“Let’s get our bearings before we head out, this place is weird,” James said as we all looked around.
While the rest of the party checked out the clearing, I began to summon, starting with Grulnok. Once he was out, I hit him with an Empower Minion, and then Duplicate. With both Grulnok’s ready to go, I summoned Lillia and Rupert. Grulnok had good armor to work with, but I’d brought body armor for Rupert and Lillia. This time, I had found a tactical tomahawk in the pile of supplies the government had for us, and I gave it to Rupert to use.
He looked funny as a dwarf with modern tactical gear and a tomahawk in his hand, but he was much better armed and armored than he had been before. Lillia specialized in spears, and there wasn’t anything similar in the supplies outside. She would make do with her normal weapon while sporting the better armor and a ballistic shield instead of the wooden one she normally used.
Sadly, Melvin was on cooldown again. While we could really use him here, I didn’t think that we would have made it out of the other dungeon without casualties without his help there. Melvin would have to wait before he could spend more time in our world.
“Even though it looks like we’re outside, this place really isn’t much different than a normal dungeon. The foliage around us blocks our movement anywhere except there,” James said, pointing toward a gap in the trees that led deeper into the jungle.
As we sorted ourselves out into our order of march. Before we started moving, James held up his hand as a signal for us to stop and remain quiet. At first, I couldn’t tell what had spooked him, but then I began to hear it. There was rustling in the plants around us. It was subtle, but it was definitely there. Everyone got ready for an attack, but nothing revealed itself and the noise continued until it surrounded us completely.
A chorus of shrieking voices, chattering in a language my Linguistic Adaptation Interface hadn’t deciphered yet, began to sound in the clearing. We readied our weapons, spells, and abilities, and waited to see what would happen. All at once, the chattering and vague hints of movement stopped, and the clearing returned to an ominous quiet.
“What do we do now?” Nicolas asked.
“Let’s give it a minute, they sounded like they were all around us, but we have no idea if that was just some sort of magic at work to throw us off,” James replied.
“It’s not a trap, or at least not one I can detect. There also isn’t any illusion magic nearby,” Marie confirmed.
The silence was broken a moment later as a chorus of tiny war cries were shouted, and the small tiki creatures flooded out of the foliage from all sides. Eliza ripped off a series of a half dozen magic missile bolts, and I fired one from my magic missile pistol, noting that it was the charge I had for the weapon. I’d have to manually charge it after this fight if we survived it.
James shouted for us to draw near, as he summoned his barriers. I could feel a small weight settle over the front of my body as the barrier appeared. It would protect all of us from attacks from the front, but the problem was that we were not only surrounded, but also hopelessly outnumbered as more and more of the tiki monsters charged into the clearing.
In addition to their spears, about one in five of the little monsters had blow guns that they fired poisoned darts from. Most of the darts deflected off the barriers, but a few occasionally reached us. Some of those that hit were foiled by the armor, but enough were finding flesh to become a problem.
One pricked me on the back of my neck, and as I pulled the small needle out, I could feel a numbness flow from the area. Marie slumped over next to me, a dart embedded in the back of her neck, and one had pierced through her ear. She and the others didn’t have my Toxin resistance, and even my summoned creatures would eventually slow down if they kept getting hit. The Grulnoks were like a blender of axe and mace, pulverizing and slashing the tiki creatures around them.
James stumbled as the blow dart firing tiki’s focused on him. His barrier skill eliminated more than a few enemies, as each hit on a barrier reflected part of the damage back on the attacker, but he had fallen to his knees from the few lucky hits that the poisoned darts had scored. On the other side of me, Nicolas fell, still alive but paralyzed from the toxins.
Without our healer, and with one of our tanks struggling, I needed to do something to turn this around. My consumables were all depleted, save for two that I had wanted to save for emergencies. Sliding my hand into the consumable pouch, I found the cool metal of the MESS key. Without hesitation, I activated it. One second, I was standing at the back of our formation, and the next, I was strapped into the cockpit of gnomish engineering’s finest work.
Several blow gun darts pinged off the metal exterior of the mech, but I was in no danger from them, or from the spears that the little tiki creatures wielded. These little monsters were about to become nothing but stains on the jungle floor.