Chương 109: Penicillium - Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Eighteen Phillipe missed the flying mushroom with the pebble he flung. Tyro didn't. The [Magical Dead Man's Cough] burst apart with a splat, then it continued to arc down while spinning and spreading a thin cloud of spores out above itself. It fell right into the slime pen with a dull thump. A few of the goblins made inquisitive sounds, but that wasn't an alarm, just curiosity. Phillipe carefully pulled the door shut, then reached over and patted his son on the shoulder.

"Nice throw," he said. Tyro grinned back.

"Thanks. Think that'll be enough to clear the room?"

"Maybe," I said.

"It'll depend on a bunch of things. Air currents, how many spores were dispersed and where the goblins were and where they'll move. At a guess, we might end up with a couple of them affected, but it's not going to be perfect," I said.

"Can't you do something for that?" Tyro asked. I stared at him.

"Like what? Sneak in and force them to breathe harder? I don't have any real combat skills, that's about the best I can do." We all paused as we heard a faint coughing on the other side of the door. So, at least one goblin had gotten enough of a lungful of spores that it was probably going to die soon. Now everything depended on the intelligence of the goblins. Would they see one member choking to death with no obvious explanation as an attack, or would they chalk it up to something else?

What would humans do in the same situation? Honestly, a group of humans just minding their own business? Probably just pretend they couldn't hear someone choking to death and continue to fixate on whatever they were working on. In rare situations someone might try the Heimlich manoeuvre. Maybe. I didn't rate the average person as terribly helpful or all that great overall. The goblins might actually be more empathetic for all I knew. Phillipe waited a little while before he cracked the door open.

The goblins were congregating in the centre of the room, around one who'd fallen and who was still clawing at his own throat. We could barely see them, what with all the stuff in the way, but it was clear that they didn't know what to do to help. Honestly, there wasn't much they could do. I don't think a medical professional could even help at this point.

"Hey, give me another one of those poison cloud mushrooms," Tyro whispered.

"A juicy one." I looked up to him, one eyebrow perked, then I opened my satchel and handed a [Magical Dead Man's Cough] over. He weighed it, then looked to his dad.

"When I tap your foot, open the door, then shut it after I've thrown," he instructed. Phillipe nodded. This didn't look like something they'd practised before, but the two did seem to have a decent amount of coordination between them. I guessed that Phillipe had been training his son for a while, and they did seem fairly close. Closer than most parents were with their children in City Nineteen from what I'd observed so far. Raising a family took time that took away from the constant grind.

Besides, I suspected that the average person didn't live past their thirties in this shithole. There wasn't much of a point in getting attached.

"Ready?" Tyro asked, and that pulled me out of my thoughts. Phillipe nodded and tugged the door open wider. Tyro threw, and there was a loud 'thump' a moment later. All I saw was a big cloud of spores expanding out and a goblin falling to the side, the crushed remains of my mushroom flattened against the side of its face. Phillipe shut the door, quickly but quietly. This time, the alarm was well and truly sounded, but it didn't last long. Had every goblin congregated next to that first body? If so...

yeah, they would all be in the dispersal range of my mushroom's spores.

"Nice thinking," I muttered. Tyro just nodded at me, and I figured that was enough. We waited until there wasn't any more coughing from the other side, then Phillipe opened the door and stepped in, bold as day. Tyro hastened to follow in after him, and I took up the rear, moving far more cautiously while making sure my mask was fitted on correctly. There were corpses littering the ground. We stepped over and around them as we crossed the middle of the room, then Phillipe stopped by the pens and shook his head.

"Look at that," he said. This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. One of the goblins had a little fist closed around the crude mechanism to open the slime farm's walls.

"Close one," I said. He nodded.

"That would have been trouble. But nothing we couldn't handle. Let's keep moving. Ideally we want to be on the fifth floor before we call it for the day." I frowned. We basically had four more rooms on this floor, then how many on the next?

"We're going to stop so soon?" I asked.

"So soon?" He repeated.

"We're going to stop just before evening. Eat, replenish ourselves, then we'll be in bed by seven."

"Seven?" I asked.

"We need at least six hours of sleep, and I intend to start pushing through the fifth floor at around seven tomorrow morning."

"That's twelve hours after seven tonight," I said. Even discounting time spent on breakfast and such, that didn't add up.

"We're sleeping with a watch rotation. That's a lot less sleep than you'd think. And it's surprisingly tiring. Trust me on this. Experience says that more downtime in the dungeon is better. More sleep means fewer mistakes." I shrugged. If he said so. Maybe he was even right to think that way. I was impatient but... for what? There wasn't much of a point in me needing to hurry. And a full twelve hours would be plenty of time to grow a fresh supply of everything I needed. I was thankful that Phillipe was here.

Not only did he intervene with other delvers, making everything seem far less suspicious than if I was alone, he also knew his stuff in a way that I didn't. What would happen if I'd gone along with some of my crazier plans to take on the dungeon solo? I imagined that I'd be going much, much slower. Filling every room I crossed with spores and having to stop every so often to replenish what I'd spent. No, this was already leagues faster, and safer.

I couldn't complain if Phillipe said we needed more downtime, or to slow down. I'd always hated it in the before when someone disagreed with an expert. It bothered me. This room led directly into the next. According to Phillipe's map, it was much smaller, but he still paused by the entrance and stared at the solid wooden door.

"I don't like this one," he said.

"Why not?" I asked.

"Slime room. The floor is covered in little wooden bridges over these trenches. Sometimes you'll find goblins in there, most of the time you won't. It's one of the only rooms in this entire dungeon that might be considered a trap room," he explained.

"Tyro, trap room?"

"Uh. A room whose entire purpose is dedicated to, well, traps?" Tyro tried. I had the impression he was fumbling a bit there. Phillipe did too, judging by his snort.

"Close enough, this time. That's correct. A trap room is nothing but traps. This one doesn't count if only because it's so easy to navigate."

"Then why do you hate it so much?" I asked.

"Because it's easy to navigate with a team of engineers and a crew of labourers. Just lay down beams and a temporary bridge across the room and you're done. Most crews that are as early as we are need to cross it the old fashioned way. It's not hard but it's risky. I had a friend lose a foot in this very room some years ago..." he trailed off. Then his jaw clenched and I had the impression he was working past something. Trauma? From this room in particular? Well, that was just fantastic.

"Should we wait, then?" I asked.

"If a team hasn't shown up behind us yet, then they'll probably either show up much later, or not at all," Phillipe said.

"Most teams either leave in the morning to get somewhere first, or they wait until noon has passed and the early rush is over to delve. The latter makes a lot of sense for a team hitting the lower floors." I didn't point out that we hadn't done that at all. I had the impression that Phillipe was just an early-bird sort of guy. He opened the door into the next room, and I could see why he hated it.

The entire place was lit only by a faint glow from below, a glowing coming from the dozens, if not hundreds, of slimes slurping their way through a maze of trenches dug into the ground. The only way across the room would be by jumping from thin platform to thin platform.

"Great," I muttered.