Chương 155: Chapter 153: Heading for the dungeon

The dungeon is in a cave. At the front of the cave, there's a backwards castle wall. By backwards, I mean that as we walk up to it, we're walking up to the inside of the wall. There are crenelations and places for people to stand, but the wall faces into the cave rather than out of it. Like they're waiting to defend against an attack from the cave. Which, maybe, they are. There's no one manning the walls when we come up to it.

The portcullis is down, but the winch to lift it up is right next to the door, so we have no trouble getting in. Seems weird, but I guess maybe they have this set up so they can watch the executions as they get started, at least. The first part of the cave is covered, absolutely covered, in bones. Mostly humanoid looking bones, too. I don't know if the wings are all cartilage, but there don't seem to be that many wing bones around.

There are some, to be sure, but not enough to justify all the bodies, all the skulls and other bones. The bones have been chewed on. I take that as a good sign. It means that whatever lives inside this dungeon is actually alive. It's not undead. Which means it can bleed. Which means my bow will be more useful. I keep an arrow nocked as we walk, listening carefully and looking around. Something killed a lot of people in this room. Presumably, that something is still in this room.

I look upward, trying to pierce the darkness of the ceiling, but it just looks like stalactites – those are the ones coming down from the ceiling, right? – and cave roof. I can't make out any detail. But I definitely have a bad feeling about it. I've got a lot of arrows. Even with all the arrows that break when I use them, I still have a lot. I collected them back from the dire lynxiths as best I could, and I helped myself to probably a thousand of them before we left Elmspire. So I've got arrows to spare.

I pick a particularly large patch of darkness and shoot an arrow into it. I hear the arrow clank against the ceiling. I shoot another one into another patch of darkness. Still nothing. A third patch of darkness. Once again, I hit the roof of the cave and nothing else. It is at that point that I remember that I can just use Fire Bolt.

It would have the same effect, it wouldn't break any arrows, and, more importantly, it would provide a flash of light up there, to make it easier for our dark vision to work out what might be up there. I pick a patch of darkness over a large pile of bones, and throw a Fire Bolt up there. Something screams. Then the darkness itself drops down onto the pile of bones. Shadow ooze. Very rare elite monster, level 45. HP: 20, 994/22, 500. It's hard to really make out, even when Ash's mace starts to glow.

It doesn't seem to have an edge. It just kind of fades out, darkness made solid. Feels weird when we cut it, too. Apparently. I don't know; I kept throwing Fire Bolts at it because they seem to do double damage. And I kept going throughout the chamber, finding more and more of the creatures as we went. It doesn't take us long to kill them, and I don't bother with Mab's Rage. The individual oozes fall pretty quickly, and they don't really seem to be able to do us all that much harm.

They can't even move into the ring of light that Ash produces with her mace. They get to the edge of it, and then they seem to burn a little bit from the light itself. When she hits one of them with the mace, she tears huge chunks away from them. After about ten minutes, we have the first chamber completely clear. You have defeated shadow ooze x6. You gain (135, 000/4) 33, 750 experience. We keep moving in, and find a passage at the back of the chamber. This one doesn't seem natural. Something dug it out.

Maybe we'll get really lucky, and this will be the whole dungeon. One room full of creatures that couldn't do enough harm to us for us to really even notice them, then a big old room of treasure. I can hope. The passageway is immediately suspicious. It's clearly carved by intelligent hands, but it's still mostly rough stone. Almost like it was a mining passage. The floor, though, is covered in a loose sand.

There are a few tracks in the sand, where apparently some of the prisoners, at least, made it out of the room with the shadow oozes and made it to the rest of the dungeon. The footprints help. When one of them suddenly ends, I know to look for a trap, and manage to spot and disarm a spear trap that probably ended the life of some poor prisoner. Who may or may not have deserved it. I'm not sure. Then we come across an area that I don't need any skill to tell me has a trap in it.

The walls are absolutely covered in holes. They're maybe three inches apart from one another, and they go from floor to ceiling all the way across about fifty feet of hallway. The ceiling is only about eight feet above us, so too low to be able to fly very effectively. And if you did fly, you'd be flapping your wings the whole time; it would be exhausting. But I think this place was designed so that you wouldn't, or couldn't fly the whole fifty feet. That's not the only interesting part.

In the middle of the tunnel there is a very clear bump. It's about two feet wide, maybe an inch off the ground, and it runs all the way down the fifty foot corridor. I look at the others.

"Either the bump is the trigger or it's the only safe path," I say.

"I bet it's the trigger," El says.

"Make you feel stupid for setting it off, when there was clearly a safer way to go." Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. Gigi shakes her head.

"No, I bet the middle is the only safe place. Same basic reasoning." I take a deep breath.

"I guess I'll go first?" I say. I doubt that the trap, whichever way it ends up being, will actually kill me. But it might be uncomfortable, to say the least. I look at the corridor. It doesn't take me long to decide that I have a better chance on the bump than off it. If the holes are where arrows come out, and they just fly all the way across the corridor and into the hole on the other side of the wall, then I'm going to get stabbed no matter which way I go.

But if they hold spears, those spears might just shoot out to all the way and stop right at the edge of the bump. So I might just be able to avoid being lightly stabbed. I take my first step onto the bump. I feel it click beneath my feet, but nothing happens. I take a second as nothing continues to happen, waiting like a tensed spring. I'm ready to jump back if anything does come shooting out of the holes. But nothing does. I take another step, standing sideways on the bump.

I start to move, putting my heels together and then taking a step. Heel together, step. I'm almost ten feet through the corridor before anything happens. It is spears. Jagged looking spear tips with thick poles. They come shooting out of the holes in the wall, snapping into place. Just inches from my face. If I'd been standing straight on, I probably would've been stabbed in both shoulders. I think my shoulders are more than two feet across.

I might be fooling myself into thinking I have broader shoulders than I do, but I'm still glad I turned sideways. It occurs to me that someone with wings would be getting stabbed in those wings right now, even standing sideways. The only way for one of them to cross would be to shuffle along the side the way I am with their wings completely unfurled and held out to either side. Which I imagine would be painful and exhausting. The girls follow before I make it to the other end.

Once the spears are out, they probably aren't going to do anything else, so it's safe to follow. There's a two foot wide gap between the spears, and while it feels really close for all of us, I'm not sure how close it actually is. I just know the experience leaves me with sweat dripping down my back, and a little bit short of breath. On the other side of the spears, there are bats. Large bats. Dire bat. Very rare elite monster, level 50. HP: 25, 000/25, 000.

There are at least two dozen of them waiting for us, and they start to screech and fly all around as soon as I step out of the spears. I do my best to dodge and weave around them, sending a Power Shot into one of them as they swarm past me. Seems like the sword would be more useful here, though the Power Shot does a fair amount of damage and does in fact cause bleed. The bats swirl around me, and I'm notified that I've taken 1300 damage. As they fly past and start to regroup, I draw my sword and dagger.

Then I do my best impression of the way El fights when they swarm back past me, swirling around and striking out randomly, trying to catch something on my blade. The battle is utter chaos. I move away from the spears so that there is room for the others to come through, and soon all four of us are swinging wildly at the bats as they fly past us. At one point, El puts one of her axes away and just fucking grabs one of the bats as it flies past.

It's got about a four foot wing span, so it's not all that hard for her to do. Once she does that, we all gang up on the one she grabbed. That seems to be a winning strategy, and we systematically go through the bats as they fly around us. You have defeated dire bat x25. You gain (625, 000/4) 156, 250 experience. That's what I'm talking about. That's enough for all of us to level up. We stop for a minute or two to figure out how we want to spend our points.

I'm still getting twelve per level, so I put three each into strength, agility, vigor, and willpower. Our Shells are all holding, though mine is down below two thousand points, so I know I'm going to have to recast it soon. I decide not to wait, and just recast it before we move on into the dungeon. We've already found enough for me to be happy with this expedition. I'm one level closer to another talent. El got to pick one.

"I'm sorry I'm taking so long," she says, clearly still going through menus.

"It's not an easy decision to make."

"It's okay," Ash says.

"I don't think we're in a rush or anything." Just then, I get a message. From Vincent. Have made shore fall. Going to sleep. Will contact you when I wake. That's not exactly time pressure, but it does matter.

"Vincent made it across the ocean," I say.

"He's going to sleep now; he'll let us know when he wakes up."

"So we should probably finish up here so we can meet up with him," Ash says. Then she looks at El.

"We still have many hours. It's no big deal if you take a few more minutes to decide."

"Do you guys think I should go with more regeneration or better armor?" she asks.

"More armor," Gigi says.

"Better to take less damage than to heal from it faster."

"I don't know," Ash says.

"Some things are going to get through our armor, no matter how high it is. I think it would be better to heal faster."

"Anything you can take that will get you more hit points?" I ask. It's mostly a joke. Right now, El has 28, 800 hit points. She's like an old school modem. Bad joke. Point is, if she got something that doubled her hit points again, she'd probably never even have to worry about her Shell going down.

"Sadly, no," she says.

"I've checked." She would, too. El scratches her hair. Then she pulls something out of her hair and throws it on the ground. It looks like a bit of gore from one of the bats. She shudders, then casts Refresh on herself. All the blood falls off her, forming a macabre ring around her feet. She takes a deep breath, and she chews on her lip for a while. She's shifting from foot to foot. Clearly, this is not an easy decision for her. Both options are going to make her even more of a beast in combat.

But which one is going to serve her best?

"Do you have anything that boosts stamina?" I ask.

"That seems to be what we are most in danger of running out of in combat. So that would help more than armor or healing." She throws up her hands.

"Great, just give me a whole other option to choose." She grumbles a bit to herself, her eyes darting around a menu that only she can see. Finally, she sees something, and it makes her smile.

"Oh, yes," she says.

"That's the one." She then seems to inflate a bit. Not literally, but I don't know how else to describe it. She inhales, standing a bit straighter, a bit more firm in her place in the world.

"That's perfect," she says.

"What did you pick?" I ask her.

"It's called Stalwart," she says.

"It does the same thing as toughness, but for stamina." So it doubles your stamina? I might want to pick that one up too. My stamina is already really high. It's at 6, 996. But doubling it would really help with those long, drawn out battles. If I can't find something that will drastically increase the amount of damage I can do in a single hit, it would make sense for me to take that one, so that I can last longer in a fight. We move on, away from the smell of guano and dead bats.

The corridor curves around, and we come to a crossroads. It's a small chamber, but three tunnels lead out of it.