Chương 156: Chapter 154: Deeper into the dungeon of foul depths

"What do we do now?" I ask.

"Always go left," Gigi says.

"Because the boss is to the right. Go left and clear out the dungeon before you go to the boss." I don't know where her logic comes from, but I support it. It's as good a decision making method as anything. We start heading down the left most path. This one is much more clearly a mining path. There's even a track going down the center of the tunnel, for a mining cart. I'm not sure why, but I don't want to walk on the cart track.

I feel like maybe there will be pressure plates under the slats of wood that go across it, or that the space between the slats will all be quicksand, or something like that. I have to approach this dungeon thinking as if I had wings. The ceiling is even lower here. I can reach a hand up and drag my fingers along it. And the tunnel doesn't seem to be wide enough for someone to spread their wings here. This is not a place for those who can fly. So what's the trap here? Just force them to walk on the ground?

That doesn't make sense; they walk on the ground most of the time. Flying is too energy costly. But why make it so that they can't extend their wings? Is there a point to that? My detect traps goes up to ten as we come across the cart. I see that it's sitting on something, triggering a trap. Or rather holding down a pressure plate that prevents the trap from going off. We move around it, almost having to scrape our way along the wall. I see that the walls are covered in a sort of spongy moss. I wonder.

If I had wings, moving around this cart would be impossible to do without scraping my wings along the wall. And that would mean disturbing the moss. I can't make out what color it is in the dark. I have Ash step forward with her glowing mace, and in the bright light of that thing I can tell that the moss has a reddish color. A deep red. Like crimson. Like blood.

"Don't touch the walls," I say.

"Why not?" El asks, instinctively reaching a hand out to do exactly what I told her not to.

"I'm pretty sure it eats people," I say. As I say it, I spot a skeleton propped up against the wall a few feet away. It's almost entirely covered in the moss, even the splayed out legs. I gesture to it.

"See?" El snaps her hand back to her side and just moves around the cart. The tunnel ends at a treasure chest. It looks suspicious. I don't know if there are mimics in this world. I know that they exist in a lot of fantasy worlds these days, largely thanks to dungeons and dragons. I wouldn't put it past this world to have what appears to be a chest turn out to be a monster. Just in case, I shoot a Fire Bolt at it. The flame splashes against the chest, leaving a small scorch mark but not seeming to do anything else.

"Good call," Ash says. She was apparently thinking the same thing I was. I move up to the chest and investigate it. I don't get close enough to touch it yet. I just want to see what's around it. Is it sitting on a platform? Is there moss around it? Are there creatures hiding above it, waiting to drop down on me? What kinds of traps are set on and around this thing? I know there's no way that the chest itself is safe. That would just be insane. It does seem to be sitting on a platform.

It's circular, and barely bigger than the chest. But if I stand right in front of the chest, I'll be standing on the platform. Which is probably a pressure plate. So I have to lean forward a bit when I'm picking the lock. No problem. There is a bit of a tunnel above the chest. I throw a Fire Bolt up the little chimney. It doesn't hit anything, but it does go up for about twenty feet. I'm going to guess that something either falls or pours out of there. Maybe a heavy stone, maybe acid, maybe something else. Okay.

That's probable the other part of the trap. The wall around the chest is covered in the blood red moss. I can handle this. I take a deep breath and step a little bit closer. I'm still not on the platform that the chest is resting on, but I can reach the lock at least. I have Ash come closer and shine some light on the lock. And that's when I see it: a pair of needles. They're inside the lock, but they might be spring loaded. They probably have poison on them – why else would there be needles there?

– and I don't know if they will bypass my Shell. As I think about it, I go to check how strong my Shell is, and I find that it isn't there. I'm about to just cast it again when a theory occurs to me. I have Ash step closer, ostensibly to give me a better view. She takes one step towards me, and the light goes out. I hear her slap the mace against her hand, like a flashlight with bad batteries, but the light doesn't come back on. As I suspected.

"Step back and try it again," I say. She steps back. Sure enough, the light returns. I smile. There's some kind of anti magic field around this chest. Which means I can't use any defensive spells to protect me from the poison on those needles. It would've gone directly to my hit points, and would have started draining my health. Probably pretty quickly, too. But I saw the needles, so I can work around them.

I can use my lock picks not to just get the lock open, but also to bend the needles back, pushing the points out of line and effectively disabling the trap. They'll still shoot out the way they were supposed to, but only a blunt side of the needle will make any kind of impact. My disarm traps goes up to five, and by the time I've got the lid open, my pick locks has gone up to seventeen. I hesitate right when I'm about to open the lid. This is still too easy.

I take a deep breath and hold it, then step back and use my sword to push the lid of the chest open. A spray of something comes out of the lid as soon as it's cracked. And a cloud of gas erupts from it as the lid is thrown open. That's two more traps. I keep holding my breath as I lean forward and look inside the chest. That's when I find out what's inside, and I realize that there's another trap I haven't considered yet. Congratulations! You have opened a granite chest. You gain 15, 000 experience.

You find 15 platinum, 30 gold. Mace of Destruction, Armor of the bright, bracers of the stone giant, gloves of the dragon, spellbook: poison cloud. Spellbook: blood spear. Spellbook: heat metal. Spellbook: water breathing. Ability scroll: primal scream. Ability scroll: leaping attack. Ability scroll: tackle. It all looks so good. Ideal, even. It looks like exactly what we've been looking and hoping for. Which in and of itself would be a reason not to trust it.

But it also confirms a theory that I had when I first opened it. The items in the chest weigh a lot. I'm not saying we're going to have to worry about carrying any of it or anything. But the chest is holding down a pressure plate. One that probably sets off a trap when more weight is put on it, like if I were to stand on the platform when I was picking the lock, or if too much weight is taken off of it. Like if we loot the treasure.

We need to keep the weight more or less the same, or else we're going to set off the trap.

"We need sandbags," I say.

"What do you mean?" El asks.

"Like in Raiders," I say.

"We need to make sure that the weight on the pressure plate stays the same." She doesn't need any further instruction. A few minutes later, we have several small bags full of sand. I move back to the chest and start calling out what's inside. We'll pick things one at a time, hopefully replacing with a similar weight of sand. It went so well for Indiana Jones, I'm sure it'll be fine for us. Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

First thing I grab is the mace, for Ash. I reach in and grab the mace with one hand, bringing a nice heavy bag of sand into the chest with the other. I could probably put the sand outside the chest, now that I think about it, so long as it was still on the platform. Too late now. It's awkward, but I manage to get the mace out without any trouble. Now it's Gigi's turn. She wants the bracers. How much do bracers weigh? This is so not going to work.

Maybe I should just grab everything I can and jump out of the way of whatever is going to be coming down that chimney. I pick a bag of sand that feels like it weighs about seven or eight pounds, and I make the switch with the bracers. Still no trap. Okay. El wants the gloves. They don't look that heavy, so I decide to take the gloves and one of the spellbooks at the same time. I go for water breathing. That seems like it would have the most utility use for me, and it is my turn to pick a treasure.

I grab another bag of sand and make the switch, managing to get everything out without setting off the trap.

"What should we try for next?" I ask. So we go through another round. Ash gets the blood spear spellbook. Gigi takes tackle. El grabs primal scream, and I decide to go for the money. Money is pretty easy to move, and we know basically how much it weighs. Unfortunately, when I pull out the money, the trap goes off. Maybe the money was specially set up to make the trap go off. Maybe the weight of the sandbags wasn't as close as we thought. But the trap goes off.

There's no giant boulder to chase us down the hallway, but I leap back as soon as I realize the trap has been triggered anyway. And it's a good thing I do. From the chimney comes spilling a river of molten lead. It fills the chest, destroying what was left inside, and completely covers the platform that the chest was resting on. I barely managed to get out of the way, and I credit that escape to the 190 points of agility that I currently have.

I put the spellbook away, while the others take the time to learn their new abilities. By the time they're finished, my heart rate has settled down to a normal pace, and it no longer feels like my heart is going to crack my armor from the inside. I don't know how much damage the molten lead would have done to me. I know that it would have hurt. It would have burned my skin, and I know that burns are one of the worst pains you can feel. The burning just keeps going, almost no matter what.

Heading back out to the room with the three corridors, we take the central tunnel to see where that one leads us. I notice that the walls are again covered in the same moss as before, but there is a large section where the moss is missing, from about two feet up all the way down to the floor. That might not be noticeable by most people, and wouldn't really change things if we were just trying to avoid touching it. We're not crawling on the ground, after all.

But the bare patch of wall makes me think that there's something in here that is preventing the moss from growing there. Or something that is eating it when it does grow there. I point it out to the others, and I draw my sword and dagger. There's going to be something here to fight, and it's probably going to be small, or at least low to the ground. I smell them long before I see them. They smell like rats. Like if you've ever gone to a pet store where they have a hundred or so rats in the same cage.

You go near the cage, and you can smell them. Pungent. They don't come out as a swarm of small rats. I half expected them to. A swarm would be hard to fight with anything other than magic. And I don't want to waste Mab's Rage on a bunch of rats. I would, if there were enough of them. Maybe a hundred or so. But there aren't that many. There are a lot of them. I think there are at least thirty or forty of them. But they're not just little rats. They're big rats.

Not quite rodents of unusual size or anything like that, but still pretty big. They're maybe two feet from nose to rear, with another two feet of tail trailing behind them. They're only about eight inches at the shoulder, but those teeth look sharp. And, like I said, there are a lot of them. Dire rat. Rare elite monster, level 44. HP: 11, 000/11, 000. It's still almost worth using Mab's Rage. The rats don't do that much damage to us. When one of them bites me, it only does 46 damage.

But it does it directly to my health. I forgot to recast Shell. I cast it back up before I take another 92 damage from other bites. El starts sweeping her axes almost along the floor, just cutting into the rats as she goes, swatting them out of the way as she makes her way up and down the tunnel. Ash and Gigi fight in a much more organized style, bending their knees and sinking down until their shields touch the floor before swinging at the creatures.

I start just stabbing and slashing, trying to use the advantage of flanking to increase my damage as the rats try to swarm us. I think I get bitten at least a hundred times. Even dodging as much as I can, the rats still take their toll. The battle isn't exactly difficult, but it takes a long time. My sword does about a thousand damage every time I hit a rat with flanking, so I can easily take out three or four a minute. The others seem to be able to do about the same.

So within maybe five minutes, we've killed all the rats. But it's still kind of exhausting. For one thing, the way Gigi and Ash had to stand leaves them groaning and stretching out when the rats stop moving around us. For another, I'm pretty sure that the bite that got me poisoned me. It isn't doing health damage. Instead, my stamina has stopped regenerating. I normally regenerate two stamina per second, so that means the poison is draining about that much.

It doesn't last much beyond the battle; maybe seven and a half minutes all told. That talent, rugged, really helped. You have defeated dire rats x46. You gain (506, 000/4)126, 500 experience. That's nice. I think that brings me about halfway to level forty five. And it brings Gigi up to thirty six. She hasn't caught up to my hit points yet, but she's getting closer and closer. I currently have 16, 942 maximum hit points, and she's up to 13, 320.

Still the lowest among us, but I know that it's just a matter of time, now. She seems to be putting at least five points per level into her vigor, and I've only been putting three. And honestly, I'm not sure I want to keep pouring points in there. I've got a lot of hit points already, and my vigor is at a nice round 200 at this point, so I might want to use those points elsewhere. We keep talking about how I've been spreading my points around all my stats, making me kind of a jack of all trades.

But for last dozen levels at least, I've been prioritizing strength, agility, and vigor. I'll probably keep putting points into agility; that's my primary stat and the one that I want to get as high as possible. It helps with defense and with speed. But I don't need the other two to keep going up. Not just yet. They're both at 200. That's pretty damned high. My dagger skill goes up to 16, but my sword skill hasn't increased in a while. Maybe it will soon.

We move past the rats to explore the rest of this particular mine shaft. This one seems like it has been put to use more recently than the first one. Maybe they mined the first one dry before moving into this one, and before all the monsters moved in. Because this tunnel isn't exactly freshly used. We find some mining equipment, a few pickaxes and shovels, but they are covered in dust and cobwebs. There's another track and another mining cart, this one full of ore.

I notice that there are also some remains ringing the cart. It looks like when the monsters came, they came kind of suddenly. The miners, or whoever was in here, were overwhelmed and killed by whatever came into this tunnel. Maybe the swarm of dire rats. There are a lot of dire things in here. I know that dire is basically a prefix for any monster that makes them giant and nasty, but it seems weird that there are so many varieties of them in this dungeon.

It makes me think that we're going to run into more dire things, and I have to wonder what else there is to find in here. As the mining tunnel goes on, we see an exposed vein of ore.

"Can anyone tell what kind of metal that is?" I ask as we stand around. The moss isn't covering this part of the wall, which makes me wonder. The metal looks dark colored, almost green. That might be oxidizing or something like that. I don't know. I'm not sure how mining really works. I mean, I know the theory; you hit the wall and break free rocks, then you pull the rocks in the mining cart. Then you melt it all down and separate out the ore you want from the rest of the rock surrounding it.

But I don't know how the refining works, beyond that.

"I'd guess copper," Ash says, looking at the metal in the wall and the rocks in the cart.

"Doesn't copper turn kind of green?"

"That might explain why the moss isn't covering it, too," Gigi says.

"I know copper has some properties that make it repel germs and stuff. That's why it's used in cooking. And I know it's used for brass, too, which also is antimicrobial."

"How do you know that?" I ask. She shrugs.

"I saw a movie once where the villain had copper poisoning. I thought that was the stupidest thing I'd ever heard, so I looked it up. Turns out you can't get poisoned by copper, because copper doesn't do that."

"That does sound stupid," El says.

"Can we move on, please?" We head further down the tunnel. It ends kind of suddenly in a solid wall. I guess they would keep mining it out if the ore was there. If it isn't, there's no point in continuing the shaft. I get that. Just in case, I examine the wall. If there's a crease in this wall, I'm going to find it. If there's a secret door, I want to know about it. I've never found a secret door before. But it would be so cool to find one now. Dungeons have secret doors in them, right?

I run my hand over the wall, looking for a crevice or something that will push inwards. Nothing. I tap on the wall with the hilt of my dagger, listening for different sounds, to see if it sound hollow anywhere. Still nothing. Eventually, I give up. I let out a disappointed sigh and we all head back to the forking chamber, and take the tunnel that, according to Gigi, leads to the boss of the dungeon. It does not lead to the boss. Instead, it starts to almost immediately curve downward.

I can feel the incline, and it's a bit difficult to walk down it. By the time the tunnel curves all the way around, I'm pretty sure we're directly under the mine shaft, and there's at least five feet of stone between us and that tunnel. It's pretty steep. That makes sense. It was called the dungeon of foul depths, after all. If it didn't go down at some point, I'd have to complain about the name.