Chương 67: 67 Loop 2, Part 21

"What the fuck is that thing?" I shrugged and said, "Uh. A winged skeletal ape thing."

"Very helpful." The winged skeletal ape thing came up to about my chest height while floating. Its skull was squat, and almost too wide for the neck holding it to its skeletal torso. Two wings jutted out from the shoulders, black and bony, fused to the top of the back and the spine. The featherless wings beat in the air, and just like us, it floated just a few inches off the ground. The monster didn't attack right away. It jumped back and hung there in the air about forty feet higher, beating its wings slowly.

It turned its head to look right at us. And then its eyeless gaze focused in on Axe.

"It's looking at me. Good. I am ready to fight!" The damn thing was fast. It crossed thirty feet in the blink of an eye, passed right by me, and headed for Axe. Both of its hands grabbed for his haft and lifted him into the air.

"What the fuck? Oh, God." It swung Axe like a normal weapon. Why I am no longer in control of my faculties? Stop swinging! Stop swinging! Thankfully, Finn proved his worth in a fight yet again, and a ward shimmered into place right as Axe came down. His head sparked against the magic, but the ward held. And then the skeleton swung again, and again, over and over. I had a lot of different contingencies for a lot of different things. But I wasn't quite sure how to fight back against a skeleton with fucking wings.

My first idea went about how I'd expected. The skeleton practically just shrugged off a [Gust] of wind. And why wouldn't it? There wasn't really a lot of surface area for the wind to push against. My second idea would have been [Slick] to place on the stone under its feet. You know. If it hadn't been flying. Bones didn't really react to fire. But my [Third Arm] spell could theoretically grab its wings. Finn was holding up his side of the fight by keeping the two of us alive.

"Work faster," he said. The ward held, but for how long? The added weight of Axe's giant size and the clearly magical strength of the monster made for a deadly combo. Think. Think. As soon as Finn's ward was shattered, he'd be dead. Nothing we had in our arsenals could protect for long against an actual bladed axe. A giant bladed axe. But it didn't have to remain giant. Did it?

"Axe. Cancel the spell."

"How do I do that?"

"Just think about being small again."

"I do not want to be small again."" Axe," Finn interrupted.

"If you don't, we die. That's not good battle strategy."

"Fine." Despite having no face, I could tell that Finn's words cut through. In the middle of a swing, Axe shrank. One second, there was a giant blade of steel bolted to a painted boulder with tree trunk sized legs, about to crash down. The next second, he was normal-sized again and barely made a thunk. The skeleton looked at the squat, axe-headed golem in its hands, and then threw him. Straight at me. I dodged quickly. He went past my ear, bounced off the balcony stone, and came to rest against the north door.

"I am undamaged," he reported.

"But I request to be made large once again."

"We don't have the time right now, dude." The distraction almost proved costly. The monster went for Finn before I could do a thing. It dove with its wings folded back and its arms spread wide, low and fast. But it wasn't going for the ward at all. It was going to try and go over the ward and straight for Finn in an attempt to push him off the second floor. I guess the monster thought you didn't have to break a ward if you could break the man.

But it seemed like Finn was ready for this, because he dropped his ward and shouted." [Force Bolt]!" The air cracked, and the bolt caught the skeleton thing across the ribs. The magic enveloped him and he was sent backward off the balcony. For a moment, I thought that was it. However, it flew back up over the railing on its stupid bone wings, faster than before.

"Do it again." I demanded.

"That was most of what I had left." Finn said"Then do a smaller one."

"Laz, I'm not cut out for this."

"Dude, you've won more tournament fights than me. Come on."

"That's the worst argument you've ever made."

"Is it working?" If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. His wand lit up, which let me know it was. He got three more bolts off, but two went wide, because he wasn't me. I never missed, after all. I checked my bar. It was in the yellow, almost red. Deep enough that my next attack could've been my last, depending on which spell I decided to use. I glanced down and spotted the mana battery nudged between my leg and the seat.

I grabbed it in my left hand. I knew just what I had to do. For all the effort I'd have to put in now, at least we'd be done with this fight. And the quicker a fight was over, the less work I had to do later. But I was not happy with my only choice here. I did the part I knew I was going to regret. I kicked myself off my chair, angry at the fact I had canceled [Float] earlier, and cast [Gust]. But I didn't aim for the skeleton. I aimed at my chair.

It sped across the balcony fast enough that the skeleton had no time to react. It caught the skeleton square in the ribs, taking it down over the rail. And then my chair broke. The second it hit the stone railing, it shattered against the balcony. Four or five pieces of wood rained down into the forest below. Flag. Get everybody against the wall. The one farthest from the balcony. Right now, quickly. Oh, hello. Is there anything else we need to do? Move, buddy. Quick. Oh. Okay. We're moving.

The golems are very good at moving when you tell them to. I counted to ten, which was much longer than I probably should have. I gripped the mana battery in my left hand, rushed over to the railing, and threw it down at the skeleton. Thankfully, there was a wall of trees between where the monster landed and my golems. Before the skeleton could do anything else, I cast [Spark]. [Spark - Manifestation] Cost: 10 mana. Manifests a single spark at a designated point. Duration: 1 second. The 10 mana spell did its job.

The spark lit the mana battery. With a flash, everything went white. My ears screamed in agony. And the world exploded. The tree balcony shook, like the whole room was trying to get out from underneath us. I fell down to the stone and felt it in my teeth as I held on for dear life. A sudden jolt of panic went through me at the thought that the balcony would collapse. But it held firm. A few minutes later, my world stopped rocking, and I looked down. Hoping against hope that I hadn't ruined everything. Flag?

But I didn't hear him respond. Flag, are you okay? Oh, hello. That was very loud. Reminds me of when I was in the dragon. It was just like that. Did you know that? It was so loud I couldn't hear the dungeon anymore. And the dungeon is always saying something to me. So that was strange. The dungeon is talking to you? Oh, yes. He's been narrating the entire time. He likes how you solved this puzzle. I continued laying down on a balcony floor because I didn't want to stand, and I put my hand over my eyes for a second.

We didn't have time to deal with this right now. But it was definitely gonna need a conversation. Flag and the dungeon were talking? Finally, after a few minutes, I got up and looked over the rail with [Wideview]. The blast had gone off maybe twenty feet above the ground and had clearly caught the monster in its radius. In fact, a lot of things had been caught.

There was an entire sphere taken out of the middle of the room—about a quarter of the whole floor, and everything inside it had been torn up and thrown outward in a ring. Trunks, roots, rubble, dirt, all gone or displaced in an instant. Along the outside of the ring, working its way through what was left of the room, was fire. What was with this place and fire?

"Laz."

"I'm having flashbacks to an hour ago. I don't want to have to go back to the entrance just to fix this damn room."

"We don't need to," Finn said.

"We can't solve it. Not with our mana pools blinking."

"I can." I gestured for him to continue. He got up his wand and prepared to cast.

"You just said you didn't have more mana." I said, frustrated with his behavior.

"I said that spell would be most of what I had left. Not all of it." In any other situation, I would've protested here. I would've spent the effort and argued that saving these trees would be more work than it was worth. That, with the exception of Flag, our golems could withstand the fire. But if I knew one thing about Finn, I knew he wouldn't let this go." [Water Ball]," Finn said. And then he said it again, and again. And I got to work watching my red bar slowly drain away. [Enlarge]. [Enlarge]. [Enlarge].

[Enlarge]. They came off his wand as fast as Finn could manage, each one directed at a different blazing tree. I enlarged what I could until we both ran out of things to cast. Thankfully, the vast majority of the fires had died. What we'd been unable to put out would die out on its own, with no real source of dry kindling nearby. He sat down against the rail with his legs straight out in front of him, sighing. Axe joined us at the rail. Being thrown hadn't done him good.

There was a chunk of stone missing from his golem body.

"That was a good fight."

"You were being used by the wrong side." Finn said.

"I still got to be strong. And fight! Fight! Fight!" He stood there a while, looking me square in the face. Or at least trying to. It was hard to take him seriously.

"Why am I still small? This must be changed."

"And I said I'd get to it later."

"It is later right now." To his credit, he had waited. But I couldn't quite justify the mana yet.

"A bit later. I'm out of mana at the moment," I told him. Which was true. I definitely needed to sleep again.

"How about as soon as I'm full on mana?"

"I will remember this."

"So the other doors out of this room were all locked. Except one."

"Yep. It's open." Finn said.

"Which means the dungeon wants us to go through it."

"Yep."

"So we're going through it, and into an obvious trap."

"Most definitely."

"Bring it on." But behind the door was not really a room. It was barely an alcove. Nothing inside, except a chest sitting on the floor against the back wall. It was flat and wide. About half the size of a classroom desk. Plain, wooden, and had a small, red-rimmed clasp keeping it closed. I opened it. But there wasn't a key. Or a map, or anything else I could use. No, it was a hand crank. Like the keys, though, it was iron and heavy, and the length of my forearm.

There was a square socket on one end and a wooden handle on the other. And, of course, it didn't help me figure out where to go next. Because we had gone down all eight tunnels, and nobody had seen a fucking spot for a fucking crank. And besides we were still locked in that room. But as soon as I picked it up out of the chest, the chains came off the balcony doors, and the ones below. The chains all clattered to the floor before disappearing. I walked back.

For the first time in what felt like a year, I wasn't [Float] ing or [Strid] ing. I handed the crank to Finn, because I didn't want to spend the effort to carry it.

"Is that a crank?"

"Yup. Instead of a key."

"So what are we supposed to do with it?"

"I don't know. Find a mill we need to turn."

"Ha ha."

"I'm pretty sure there's something we missed our first time through the waterways. Let's head back to the entrance. And we can figure out what to do from there."