Chương 34

Fritz and his crew rushed forward to meet their enemy, now they knew the threat they were up against the fight went a lot smoother. For one Bert didn't melt his fists, nor lose the black chisel in the snail's guts. For two Sid didn't waste another conjured arrow when the snail retreated into its shell after having a hole drilled through its spongy rust-red flesh by her initial wind-infused arrow. The battle felt rather rudimentary once they had the creature's measure.

Bert was able to smash the snail's shell using only his Concussive Blow empowered fists, causing the monster to ooze out its life sustaining goo, perishing before it could recover its punctured body. The only injury they suffered was a stray sweeping slash of a fanged tendril that sawed into Bert's ankle. That wound, however, quickly scabbed over and he was walking again in minutes, albeit with a slight limp.

Fritz felt a little redundant, almost useless during the fight, but knew if he engaged the creature with Bert he would have just gotten in the way. Just not a foe I'm suited to, in fact, if I didn't have the cursed dagger I think I would have died against the first one that found me, Fritz reflected dourly. Bert seemed to notice his mood and said, "Cheer up, Fritz. If it weren't for you we'd have been melted away by a surprise attack or something."

Fritz felt it wasn't entirely true but he was still reassured by his friend's irrepressibly optimistic presence. They continued on, Fritz leading the way and pointing out any suspicious quartz boulders. They only met another two snails, one larger than the one Fritz had beat himself and then another smaller, as they searched. They were quickly and safely dispatched by using the same tactics as before.

"Too easy," Bert complained, then looking for something to occupy his attention; he fetched out the clothes-wrapped chisel and searched it for any signs of wear or rust.

"Chisel is fine, not a pit or scratch. I wonder what it's made of."

"You shouldn't whinge about a floor being too easy," Fritz said.

"Easily gained Power is still Power. Plus I almost died."

"You always almost die, Fritz. Quite frankly your brushes with death have become predictable, uninspired even," Bert blandly taunted.

"Uninspired?" Fritz replied his face going blank.

"Tedious," Bert agreed, opening a side pouch on his pack and placing the chisel by its paired hammer.

"Do you two ever stop bickering?" Sid bickered, frustration evident in her lowered voice.

"Yes," Fritz said.

"No," Bert argued. Sid let out a wearied sigh.

"Maybe?" Fritz and Bert said together, smirking to each other. Sid sighed again, but Fritz thought he saw her suppressing a small smile of her own. They quieted down and kept moving forward to the sound of dripping water and their own near-silent steps. Occasionally they would come across the melted bones of some kind of hound-sized rodent, but they never saw hide nor hair of a living one.

After almost half an hour of sneaking through the long and large tunnel, avoiding snails where they could, they came across a fork in the cavern. Fritz stood before the two passageways and pondered which way to go. He listened, peered down each and then when he couldn't make up his mind he decided to try his Senses. He f elt, standing still and trying to absorb and sort as much detail as he could perceive.

He included his new ephemeral sense of Awareness and touched on the Power of his Door Sense Trait, adding it to the myriad of strange sensations coursing through his body and being filtered into his mind. It was like he could feel the whole tunnel, hear every drop and trickle of water, the soft hiss of a snail's soft, hissing exhalations, the humid warmth and smell the ever-present scent of salt. Under all the other impressions though, he felt something else. Something on the edge of awareness.

It was slight but it was there, like the lightest of breezes a small tingle in his chest that entreated him to go left. He smiled wide, glad and giddy that his Door Sense had given him something to go on and a clear direction forward. He motioned to the left giving his crew a confident smile then led the way ahead. This tunnel sloped downwards, which was not the way he would have usually gone had he chosen without the knowledge his senses gave him.

Climbing higher was the safer bet after all, but he didn't dare distrust his Door Sense. No matter how faint the sensation was he felt confident that it was steering him the right way. The sloping of the tunnel continued downward until it sank below a pond of still, cloudy water, that was occasionally rippling from falling drops, dripping from the roof. It was a shallow pool that rose to their knees.

Fritz worried about the noise they would make wading through its not-quite- clear depths but decided it was worth the risk and ploughed on until the tunnel opened up into a large cavern. Now that he was in the tall room he could hear a soft pattering. The unmistakable sound of rain. The cavern was at least a hundred yards across and filled with quartz-walled pools.

Some were higher and some were lower and each pool's water was varying in its clearness, but in the centre the largest and tallest pool collected cloudy water as it drizzled down from the middle of the cavern's roof. The constantly dripping drops in the centremost pond encircled a spiralling, porous quartz pillar, internally inlaid with green-marbled steps. It protruded from the pool's bottom and reached to the ceiling connecting them like a tendon.

Right by the pillar was exactly what Fritz dreaded to see, but expected all the same, a white quartz boulder twice as tall as himself covering what he supposed was the entrance to the Stairway. Sid and Bert waded to his side and stared at what he was staring at himself. Bert whistled and Sid scowled.

"That's a big one," Bert observed.

"No chance it's just a normal hunk of quartz?"

"None," Fritz said trying his best to keep his sourness to himself.

"Let's get this over with, same plan," Sid stated, plucking her bowstring.

"Get out the hammer and chisel, Bert," Fritz said sternly.

"I don't think your fists will cut it for this one's shell." Bert looked over the huge boulder sceptically but nodded in grudging acceptance of Fritz's claim.

"Sid, focus on the maw, keep it from spraying us, I'll try and do as much damage as I can with my dagger," Fritz ordered.

"Bert make a hole as big as you can, and Don't. Get. Hit." Fritz's feet squelched in his boots but he didn't dare take them off, every layer of clothing between his skin and the corrosive snail's fluids was greatly needed in his opinion. Bert however, abandoned his with glee, not even deigning to place them in his pack and instead just thr ew them over his shoulder and behind him like trash.

"Water's nice here," Bert commented, with a sigh of contentment as he wiggled his toes in the pool's salty warmth. They waded towards the great quartz shell and it took all of Fritz's focus and courage to keep approaching the waiting snail. He felt the burning on his melted skin more keenly, almost to a distracting degree and tried not to think about being showered with the corrosive spray again, tried not to contemplate his fate if he was doused directly by a geyser of the salty acid.

He shuddered, and his legs threatened to freeze, as he imagined his flesh being stripped away leaving only melting bone behind.

"Bert, please don't get hit," Fritz whispered, it sounded almost like a prayer to his own ears.

"Same goes for you, Sid." His soft words were lost amongst the sloshing of their steps. They reached the quartz wall of the tall pool in the centre of the room and placed their packs upon it, balancing them precariously. They shared meaningful looks, coloured with equal measures of apprehension and reassurance.

"Limber up first?" Fritz suggested, intent on delaying the inevitable fight. Bert shrugged and Sid nodded, then they practised the stretching exercises provided by the Arte Pugilist. Finishing up the set of warm-ups, they went over the plan one last time.

"If the snail moves out of the Stairway we take it right?" Sid asked, worrying at her scarf.

"Yep, get the packs first though," Fritz affirmed and Bert nodded along. They stood in silence for a moment then Fritz moved and spoke, "Over the top then. To victory." He swung his body up and over the white lip of the pool and splashed into the water that crept up to his waist. Damn it's deeper than the last one, it's going to make moving even harder. Ripples cascaded from them as their bodies hit the water's surface, rolling away and sloshing against the great boulder no more than seven yards away.

Fritz had suspected that even that small amount of disturbance would alert the beast causing it to unfurl and attack. He was glad to be wrong, it seemed the rain of salty drops would cover their approach. Still, they acted with caution standing in place prepared for the snail to react, but after a full minute of waiting Fritz let out a tensely held breath. Now that he was closer he could see the cloudy water drawn down and under the boulder, like it was being sucked in.

Then after a bout twenty seconds, the water reversed, rushing up and out, clear and as pure as any rainwater.

"It's drinking the salt?" Bert asked softly.

"I thought snails were killed by salt. Makes no sense," Sid grumbled softly.

"Monsters. Magic. Can't rely on reason," Fritz espoused.

"Anyway enough monster watching, let's get into place." Sid stayed back, placing a conjured arrow to her bow, Bert and Fritz waded forward together as gently as they could manage, both taking the right side of the boulder-like monster. Bert prepared to place the chisel to the huge shell, holding it a couple of inches away from the quartz. He glanced to Fritz, who signalled 'Go.'

The spike of black metal clacked against the white shell and in one swift movement Bert empowered his hammer with rapid waves of force and stuck with all his considerable strength. With a crack the chisel stuck in the shell, jutting out like the tap on a keg of ale. Bert hastily readied another hammer blow but the shell shuddered, spun and rose, putting the spike out of his hammer's reach. Bert leapt after the escaping chisel, striking down with a glancing blow that only drove the black metal a little deeper.

He fell, flopping face-first into the water and losing his hammer in its murky depths. The snail's massive almost eighteen foot tall bulk unfurled, its great jagged maw opening and orienting in the direction of the attack on its side. One fanged tentacle twice as thick as Fritz's arm sprang out of the shell and swept towards Bert as he staggered to his feet spluttering. This was all part of the battle plan though, and Fritz was prepared.

In a moment he gauged where he needed to be to intercept the tentacle, and raced into place. It was a near thing with the water slowing him down but he interposed his bone dagger between Bert and the thick tendril. He called upon the dagger's curse and it writhed with its nigh invisible energies. Fritz swept down the bone blade catching the toothy tentacle in one of the fleshy gaps between fangs, hewing away at its slimy muscle.

It was like trying to slash a taut rope, complete with the stringy fibres snapping as they were cut by the cold, sharp edge. He grimaced as burning blood split onto his hand, trickling down from his dagger's hilt as the blade was covered in the foul fluids pouring forth from the snail's hacked-in-half limb. Fritz dragged the blade down and away, then dived into the pool beneath him as he spotted the second terrible tentacle whipping towards his head.

The sound above Fritz was muffled under the water, but he could still hear the shrill chirruping which precluded the spitting of corrosive, foaming spray. He poked his head out to see where the snail was aiming, only to see the creature's maw be hit dead on by a whistling arrow and slam closed as yellow slime glugged out from the fresh puncture wound. To Fritz's horror, he saw another smaller maw open on the rust-red snail's right side right in front of Bert as he rose from the roiling pool.

He only had a moment to move, as the new fanged opening released a jet of misting spray into his chest. Bert's reaction was quick as he lunged to the side but not nearly quick enough as the liquid covered his left shoulder, upper arm and chest. Bert threw himself into the now chaotically sloshing pool, bubbles rising to the surface as he screamed his agony under the waves. Fritz stared on in shock as dread filled his heart but was sh a k en free of his inaction when Sid shouted something at him.

"Fritz the other tentacle!" She ordered again on seeing Fritz's confused expression, loosing a wooden arrow dripping with some viscous green-black substance covering its head. It struck the creature's bulk and stuck there before sizzling and falling away leaving behind a patch of dark pulsing veins.

"Get Bert the health potion," Fritz begged over the raucous splashing. Then watched for the remaining undamaged tentacle. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road. Sid ran toward where they had last seen Bert and Fritz turned to stud y the tentacles and their slashing arcs. To his surprise the tendril he had cut had retracted back into the shell, obviously the curse was doing its job preventing the snail from regenerating its hideous appendage.

Gritting his teeth and leaving Bert for Sid to worry about he traced the sweeping movement of the second tentacle as it came swooping down at Sid. He executed the same maneuver as before, running in and hacking his dagger down in the tendril's predictable swing. Unfortunately, the snail snaked its tentacle at an odd angle, abandoning its attack and pulling its fleshy, fanged limb out of his dagger's reach.

Fritz cursed, then noticed that each of the creature's bulbous eye-stalks were swivelling to keep its baleful, mustard-yellow gaze on each of them. Fritz felt it was now watching and wary of his cursed blade. Fritz grasped at the shifting shadowy power in his centre and an orb of darkness enveloped the stalk watching him. He felt the fatigue hit him as the magic left, but it didn't drain him as much as it had done before. His new Endurance was already paying off.

He sprinted towards the snail's body, right for where the still active tendril originated, the water around him crashed in his wake and he activated his barrier ring. The near-invisible skin instantly enveloped him and he ducked under a wild sweep of the tendril, slipping it by an inch. Maybe he could have timed his approach better but he didn't feel he had t he speed to plan out the perfect counter.

Instead, he did what he could, running to the base of the snail's tuberous body and in front of the thick stem of the constantly slashing tendril. He wr ea thed his bone blade in its cold, keen curse and plunged the dagger down into the connective tissue between the loathsome limb and the rust-red slimy mass. The bone point pieced easily and stuck in the writhing flesh. Fritz was almost pulled off his feet as the snail lurched away from the bite of his blade.

Still, he held on to the dagger as it stayed buried in the tentacle's ropy muscle. As he steadied his legs Fritz saw a third gnashing maw open right next to him, lined up perfectly to spray him full in the head and chest. The monstrous snail undulated and warbled its warning. T error suffused and stiffened his body, h is muscles froze, those same images of being melted away pounding across his weary skull. Move, Duck, Anything, Stab! His mind ordered and he was s hocked to find it easy to obey.

Shocked and thankful. Fritz yanked his bone blade free of the tentacle's base and he called upon what he was sure was its last curse, felt the w oeful power suffuse his next and possibly final strike. In a spinning motion and using all the momentum of pulling the dagger free, he thrust the bone blade using both hands into the quivering, squelching maw. He drove the dagger deep, cutting a rent in the spongy mass and nearly impaling himself on the maw's finger-length fangs.

He was a moment too late, or maybe it didn't matter, yellow goop poured from the gash but still the caustic, foaming spray geysered forth, catching him full in the chest and arm. I n that moment Fritz suspected he was dead or dying as his vision filled with white mist so he let his dagger go, leaving it stuck in the snail and dived into the water. His head crashed below the shallow pool's roiling surface, and he was rocked and pushed away as new waves came from the now-heaving snail.

His mind raced in confusion and absolute horror. Maybe the water can get some of the acid off? Maybe the health potion hasn't been used? Maybe I can be dragged to safety? Fritz clenched his eyes closed and waited for the searing agony to ravage his flesh as he floated away from the thrashing monster. The pain never came. That's funny, my death by agonising melting doesn't hurt as much as I thought it would, it only stings a little.

He didn't dare risk opening his eyes not with the risk of them being burnt away by the acid, so he let the waves push him away and he swam with them gaining distance from the snail. After a few moments he regained wits and set his feet to the ground standing up, opening his eyes and assessing how badly he had been hurt. To his great surprise he was mostly fine. But I'm sure I was hit directly, what happened?

Baffled by his apparent uninjured state, Fritz rapidly looked at his hands checking his palms then quickly flipping them to see their backs. Then he spotted the ring and felt stupid, a moron even. Of course! The barrier saved me from the worst of the spray. He didn't have time to stand around thinking and thanking his lucky Spires. The fight was still on and his crew were in trouble.

Bert was up and attempting to climb the snail's shell while Sid was loosing another green-black envenomed arrow that thudded into the snail's bulk. Bert was favouring one arm as the other looked like its skin and muscle were peeling away, revealing the bone beneath like his flesh had all the solidity of a soggy pastry. Fritz couldn't comprehend how much pain his friend was in or how he even kept on moving with such an injury.

Bert's face was contorted in a feral snarl and in some mad rage he was putting everything he had into hammering away at the still stuck chisel with his rippling, bare fist. His hand bled and broke as he punched, then with sickening cracks and pops the bones would reform whole again only to be wreathed in the waves of force and slammed down over and over, splattering the black metal and white shell with his bright-red blood. Every strike was driving the chisel deeper, but only by a tiny, almost non-visible amount.

Small cracks in the quartz shell were forming around the black metal but far too slowly. Fritz desperately watched the struggle as the first tentacle he had cut unfurled, not fully healed and still leaking yellow blood but now strong and nimble enough to sweep Bert off its shell and slash him to pieces if it reached him. It's not enough, we'll never break through it before we tire or are killed, the shell is stronger than stone. Wait, stone?

He reached for his P ower, aiming his Stone Pit Ability on the quartz around the chisel. He felt the spell touch the shell, then began to slip. No, no, no. Fritz thought furiously. He redoubled his effort and the magic stopped sliding and sank into the shell's surface. Once he felt the Ability take hold he forced it to push, to make a hole, any shape and size. Just. Make. A. Hole. He ordered.

It didn't make a hole, but he could feel the shell shift under his magic, the layers of stone or crystal that the creature used, thinning in such a way as to cause it to crack easier as Bert hit it again. It wasn't perfect or even effective, but it would serve. Fritz cast his S tone P it again, weakening the same spot and feeling his stamina leave him as the quartz shell thinned and became even more brittle. Again he cast, then again, he was suddenly on his knees from the drain.

T he water lapped at his chin as he kneeled, sunk up to his shoulders. The was a tremendous crack and the snail shrieked a pained or enraged chirruping note as Bert finally caved in the weakened and cracked spot on its shell with a powerful force-rippled strike. A three foot crater was opened in the white crystal, and salty yellow blood oozed out like a waterfall of chunky mustard. The snail screamed and thrashed, letting out a warbling high screech so loud that it threatened to burst Fritz's ears.

Feeling no more stony resistance to his fist, Bert looked around in a daze and saw a fanged tentacle descending to swat him away. S o in his haze of madness, he did the most insane thing Fritz had ever seen. Bert dove into the opening he had made in the shell, plunging in both arms, tearing away at organs and other fleshy sacks.

He was pulling them, heaving guts and goo out of the breach like someone digging a hole with their bare hands, yelling curses the whole while as the yellow sludge scoured his skin as he hung halfway out of the shell. The tentacle was slowed due to the cut it had received earlier and Bert was able to quickly slip inside the beast just before the fanged feeler came down where he had been.

More yellow putrescence flowed forth from the hole in the snail's shell, and each of the maws on its rust-red bulk began spraying unfocused streams of mist that billowed into caustic, white clouds.

"Bert!" Fritz cried out. Over the shrill warbling of the snail, he could hear Bert's answering yell, "Fritz! Get me out!" Fritz cursed under his breath and spun on Sid, "Sid, make a path in the mist. I'm going in, Bert needs me." Activating his ring he waded steadily towards the fog, not even waiting for Sid's response. The air around him swirled.

An arrow passed by his head dispersing the fog in its wake and shattering against the shell with a burst of wind that further cleared the area around the breach in the quartz. The powerful gust also had the effect of cleaning the shell of most of the snail's acidic blood. Fritz was running, splashing through the pool as fast as he could, reaching the shell and leaping onto its rough surface avoiding any patches of yellow ooze.

He clung to the excruciatingly warm shell and climbed until he was peering into the hole Bert had smashed. There his friend was, crouching in a dug-out hollow of the creature's yellow, red and white insides. Bert had made an astonishingly deep tunnel in the creature's body but Fritz thought he should've been able to make it out without help. Bert only had to grab the hole's edge and pull his body up and out and he'd be free. But he only thought that until he saw his friend's condition.

Bert was as red as a boiled lobster, his clothes were in tatters, slowly melting away and he looked to be on the edge of consciousness, his milky eyes searching blindly for a way out.

"Bert! Catch!" Fritz yelled as he slipped the stamina potion from its hidden pocket in his sleeve and dropped it down to him. Bert's practised thief reflexes took over and he snatched the vial out of the air effortlessly. He stared at it dully and Fritz rapidly yelled, "Potion! Drink it!" Bert obeyed slowly, unstoppering the vial as the shell shuddered. Fritz's heart stopped in his chest as Bert almost dropped the vial, instead of letting it spill he swept the potion into his mouth, glass and all, and swallowed.

It wasn't a healing potion so Bert's wound didn't mend and close before his eyes but a certain strength and vigour returned to his stance and stature. He looked around wildly with his unseeing eyes and Fritz called out to him, "Here! take my hand Bert I'm right here!" He stretched out his arm to his friend and Bert staggered forward and seized his forearm in a vice-like grip, bursting the now fading barrier. Fritz heaved and Bert scrabbled up and over the edge and together they fell into the warm pool below.

Fritz's skin began to sting, the pool's water was so polluted with the snail's fluids and slime that it had become viscous and was starting to take on some of its caustic qualities. He got his feet under him, stood and grabbed Bert's floating form, dragging him away from the thrashing beast, away to the relative safety of the pool's wall. He propped him up on the quartz wall then pushed him over the lip of the pool, into a more shallow one below it.

Sid was still fighting, he could hear her loose another whirring arrow at the snail so Fritz turned to help. What he saw heartened him and lent his limbs a new burst of vigour. The monster was struggling, its warbling was falling in pitch and volume, sounding more and more like the beating of drums. It was punctured in many places and its wounds and rents poured out its corrosive blood.

S howing no signs of healing soon, i ts two tentacles lay floating on the pool's surface, twitching but seemingly unable to pose any further threat. Was it the curse? Was it the venom arrows? Was it the enormous damage Bert did digging through its entrails, that had left it so weakened? Fritz couldn't say but he strode to Sid's side to help all the same.

The snail dragged itself toward them, so horribly slow that Fritz almost felt pity for the creature, but when he remembered how much pain it had put Bert through that pity evaporated instantly. Sid was panting, sweat and dripping water plastered her darkened hair to her brow. Fritz could tell she was at her limits, her legs shaking from exertion and the use of her magic. She glanced tiredly at him when he was at her side and in a croaking voice she said, "One more. To make a path."

Fritz nodded, exhausted, but prepared to charge in. He readied himself to grab his bone dagger from where it still protruded from a gurgling maw. Air gathered around Sid's last real arrow, whirling the wind then she loosed. The arrow cleared a path through the still-swirling, stinging mist. The wind wreathed arrow drilled another hole in the creature's slimy bulk and stuck there, not bursting like it would have against the shell and Fritz followed the path it cleared in the light fog.

Again he used his ring's barrier and forced his leaden legs to r u n. Within moments he was stand ing, panting before the creature's towering body. He reached out, pulled his dagger free from its fleshy prison and he slashed at any piece of the snail's slimy flesh he could reach. The rust-red hide was both slippery and rubbery but the blade edge was as sharp as any physician's scalpel and it parted the snail's hide easily as he cut it. More gashes were slashed, more yellow sludge splattered.

Fritz's arm began to burn from overuse and stray globules of acidic blood so he switched hands and kept cutting away, leaving countless rents in his blade's wake. E ventually, with its mangled tentacles wobbling uselessly and its unfurled flesh scored all over, the snail shuddered one last time. I ts great tuberous body crashed ponderously into the polluted water and it lay twitching, dying. Its chirrups stopped, and its skin paled around its wounds.

The paleness slowly spread to the rest of its body and finally its twitching ceased. He staggered away, exhausted, back to Sid who was sitting perched on the low quartz lip. She hung her feet over the edge and upon Fritz's return she slipped into the pool below. A sensible choice now that this tall pond was being slowly filled with the snail's caustic fluid s. Fritz joined her, sloshing down into knee-high water and lying against the wall feeling the warm pool reach his waist.

He searched for Bert for a moment and upon seeing him floating peacefully, made to walk over and check his friend's condition. His legs failed him, sore and shaking he splashed back onto his backside. Bert saw his struggling attempts to stand and waved him off with a groan. Fritz was glad to see that Bert's skin looked better, a less deep red than it had been before. He seemingly, was on the mend. Fritz waved back tiredly but couldn't bring himself to speak. He was so tired, absolutely drained. Probably even dead.

Melted away by acid.

"Oh. Woe. Death comes so slow. Death comes you know. Death comes you see. Death comes for me," He rattled off in a soft, low tone. T hen Fritz died.