Chương 157: Chapter 155: The foul depths

There's a lot in this dungeon that seems to be meant to just tire us out. The battles are not all that difficult, though they probably would be for normal adventurers. But even then, the battles might not be that deadly. Certainly not the rats or the bats. But they would definitely take some time to complete, which would drain stamina. And the traps that we've found so far are the same way. Most of them have a way around the trap, but that way is uncomfortable and unpleasant.

It's like the whole place is meant to just exhaust us. When we get down to another chamber, a new problem asserts itself. The dungeon starts to really earn its name. I pinch my nose to try to avoid too much of the scent getting to me. It really is foul. Like a mixture of rotten eggs, which I know is sulfur, and badly rotten meat, which could be anything. It makes the bile rise up in my throat. I feel like I can taste the bad meat, and I don't like it. I wish I had a clothespin or something to wrap around my nose.

Ash doesn't seem all that bothered by it. But then, she doesn't have enhanced olfactory senses like the other three of us.

"What do you think that is?" El asks, also holding her nose.

"Maybe a demon," Ash says, taking a quick sniff and then making a face.

"Or maybe a bunch of them?"

"But what's the rotting smell underneath that?" Gigi asks.

"It smells like someone left a butcher shop without power for a month and a half during a heat wave." That's a very apt description. There aren't any bodies on the ground to account for the rotting smell. The chamber we're in is pretty big, maybe fifty feet across. It's still very cave like in its aesthetic, though the floor is clear and once again covered in sand. I bet there are traps in here. I start to scan the floor, looking for small indentations.

If there are trigger plates, they probably have a small groove for sand to fall into. But I don't see anything as I look. The floor isn't exactly even, but no clear lines of indents or obvious piles jump out at me. Maybe I should start putting more points into awareness again. Not only would that improve my magic resistance, it would also help me with finding traps and with finding people who might be following us. Shit. I completely forgot.

"Do you think that assassin servant from the maester's castle is following us?" I ask.

"She probably didn't follow us into the dungeon," Ash says. She doesn't seem surprised by my mentioning of the girl, so she probably didn't forget about her. I'm glad someone thought about it.

"She's probably waiting outside by the door, to see if we come out. If we don't come out after a few days, she'll probably go back and report us dead."

"So we're not being watched right now?" I ask. Ash shrugs.

"I doubt it," she says.

"Too risky. What if a monster got past us? What if we avoid a trap that she falls into? She's not here to clear the dungeon. We are. If we come out, she'll be able to listen to our conversation and find out if we bailed or if we made it all the way through. If we don't, she has a different task. There's no point in actually following us in." We start our way across the wide room, walking single file. I'm in front, so that I can find any traps that might be in here.

Everyone else follows my footsteps, walking where I walk, in case there are traps that I don't find but avoid through sheer dumb luck. About halfway across the room, a bear trap goes off when I step down, slamming metal teeth into the sides of my boots. It does almost three hundred damage. My Shell is barely above ten thousand points right now. I reach down and push the jaws open, grunting at how much force it takes. I hear a click when I get them all the way open. Great; I just reset the trap.

I point it out to everyone else, and they manage to avoid stepping in it. I notice the next tiny mound and set off the trap with a Magical Dart. It slams closed, sending a cloud of sand into the air. I start casting the spell every time the ground swells even a little bit, and on the way across the room I set off four more of the bear traps. There are a lot of traps in this dungeon. I wonder if I'll get experience for them. I do get another level of detect traps. That puts me up to eleven.

I'm becoming a decent thief. I can detect traps, I can disarm them, I can set them. I can pick locks, I have a really high agility, and I've got a decent throwing skill. I still like being a ranger, so I'm not going to change classes any time soon, but I definitely feel like I'm getting good at this particular role in the party. That's the thing about being a jack of all trades. The whole statement is "Jack of all trades, master of none; still better, than a master of one."

It sounds at first like there's a problem with being a jack of all trades, but the ending kind of saves it. Still, I want to be a master of a few trades, if I can manage it. That's the thing with building a character sheet. When you first start off, you can either pick one pony to ride and make yourself as good at that thing as possible, or you can go with a more generalist route.

As you get more points, you can either start picking an additional pony or start picking particular things to be slightly better at, while you continue to generalize. The women I travel with have all gone the first route. El has her three pillars of stats right now: strength, agility, and vigor. I'd be amazed if any one of those stats was below 250. Gigi and Ash seem to have followed the same basic path, though they don't focus on agility as much as El does.

All three of them, though, are masters of their particular forms of combat. They've chosen the thing they want to be good at, and they're all very good at those things. I went from the beginning with a variety. I chose to learn to use archery as well as sword play. That's why my bow and my sword are both only 41; I bet all three of them have their weapon skills in the seventies. But I focus on two different styles of fighting, so I'm less good at both of them, but I still have a nice variety.

And I'm still pretty good at both. They're probably both on the cusp of leveling up, too. Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there. My point is, I am finally at a point where I can start focusing on different things. I can pick a pony for a few levels, and become a master of that trade. I can be a jack of all trades and a master of some. I can do that. The pathway out of this room leads through another set of pit traps.

These ones are devilishly designed, with at least two pits at a time. One that's pretty obvious, and another one that is jumping distance over the first one. Designed so that you try to jump over one and land in the other. The ceiling is still too low here for anyone to be able to fly. Maybe they're expecting the people to be less careful without being able to rely on their wings. I'm not sure. I can jump really far.

With a running start, it's pretty easy to hurdle both pit traps, though I have to stop myself pretty suddenly after the first set of traps so that I don't accidentally fall into the next set. And I don't have the running start for the second set. So how am I supposed to get past them? I don't think I can do a standing long jump and make it all the way across the second pit. Which also means I can't go back the way I came. I'm just stuck here, on a little island, between the two sets of pit traps.

"This is awkward," I say, looking around. There has to be a way past this. Aside from that fact that it's only fair for there to be a way past the traps, there's a more practical reason for that to be true. If you have traps all through your fortress, you need a way to get past them. Probably pretty quickly, without letting anyone who might be chasing you know that the traps are there. There has to be a way around them, one that someone would be able to find if they knew to look for it.

I know to look for it, so I should be able to find it. The little island I'm on goes all the way from wall to wall. But the pit trap doesn't. There's a tiny ledge along the wall. It's maybe six inches wide. So not even as wide as my feet if I try to inch along the wall. And almost impossible to inch along if I have wings behind me. I do manage to make it across the wall. Thankfully, there's no moss on the wall to scrape along. The pit trap does open up as I'm moving across it; it's apparently very fragile.

But only the first one does that. The second one stays closed as I inch past. It's a frustrating trip, and it takes a lot longer than I'd like it to. The worst part about it, really, is that I can't cover my nose while I'm going. I need both hands for balance. So I have to suffer the horrible stench the whole time I'm moving. It almost makes me vomit. That then gives me the image of the pit trap being filled with vomit, and that falling in would make one have to tread water in everyone else's sick.

That almost pushes me over the edge, but I manage not to retch too badly. I don't explain the image to the others, because they're my friends and I care about them. After that corridor, we come to a room that is filled with rotting meat. Huge piles of it, like someone just dumped it into four mountains of rotted flesh. They smell atrocious, and they look disgusting. They're a mixture of red and green and yellow and other colors that make me wish Ash's mace wasn't glowing. Dark vision is more or less color blind.

I think I'd rather not be seeing the meat. We're about to move through the room, as quickly as possible, when I realize that doing so would almost definitely be a bad idea. Why would there be random piles of meat? And, more importantly, why would there be four of them? Why not just one big pile?

"Get ready," I say, and I use Rapid Shot on one of the piles of meat. It does 3, 737 points of damage to the meat. And the meat makes a wheezing, gasping, screeching sound. Then it starts to move towards us. Putrid meat ooze. Legendary elite monster, level 50. HP: 46, 263/50, 000. It's hard to fight something that smells this bad. I don't want to use Fire Bolt, because the only thing that would make this meat smell worse is to burn some of it.

I end up deciding that it's better to use Mab's Rage now; the cold air will settle down some of the odor, we'll be able to get through them faster, and maybe with the storm of ice, the others will be able to take how much worse this thing probably smells up close. Mab's Rage is only good for 28, 620 hit points. That's more than half what these four piles have, but it's not going to end the fight in just three minutes. We're not going to be able to move past them super quickly. We have to fight.

Thankfully, the cold air and the whirling of the storm does help with the smell. El and Gigi are able to move forward with Ash to start carving the meat monsters apart. I stand back and keep firing arrows. I think I might just leave these arrows in and not bother recovering them after the battle. I'm not sure I want to get that close to the carcasses when the battle is over. Maybe I'll just shoot for a little while. Mab's rage does make shooting a bit more difficult.

I really have to adjust for the gusts of wind that come from the spell. They don't so much as ruffle my hair, because the spell doesn't effect me or my party, but it still effects the arrows once I fire them. They wobble a bit through the air, and it's only the fact that these monsters are so big that makes it easy to still hit them. I use Power Shot, Killing Blow, and Rapid Shot again when it comes off cooldown. My arrows do a lot of damage, and the meet oozes puss along with blood from each of the arrow wounds.

It's disgusting. Once Mab's Rage ends, I put my bow away and gird myself for the smell as I draw my sword and dagger. One of the oozes is already dead, cut apart by the girls and by my magic and arrows. But there are still three more. Rather than moving forward, I shout for the three women to come back and join me. We stand in the entrance to the room, forcing the oozes to come to us one at a time. I don't know how much more difficult this would be if we tried to take them on individually.

And we don't have to, so we're not going to. This battle is going to be on our terms, even if that means the battle is going to last longer. I get hit by a spray of blood when I slash at the creature. The blood sizzles as it hits my Shell, and it does 128 points of damage. Good thing my Shell is there; that's clearly acid, and it would clearly keep burning if I didn't have that magic to protect me. That spell really is the most overpowered thing we have.

I do my best to avoid being hit by more blood, but I know that it's a losing battle. It spews blood and ichor and puss every time one of us hits it, and it's impossible to avoid the veritable cloud of the stuff coming from the creature. We cut the second one down in about two minutes. During those two minutes, I take another 3, 840 damage from the acidic content of the ooze. It doesn't seem to really have any other attacks.

It does try to rise up and crush El a few times, almost like it's trying to cover her and absorb her. But she doesn't stay still long enough for that to happen, and she gets two massive hits on the part of the blob that raised up. I think that's its other attack. It tries to absorb its foes. Makes sense. It's strongest attack, though, is its defense. By the time we kill the fourth one, I have to cast Shell again.

It's getting too low for me to guarantee that it won't get through to my hit points, and I don't want to feel acid burning me. It's bad enough that some of it got through El's shell. I can see it bubbling on her skin, and I can tell by the clench of her jaw that she doesn't enjoy the experience. It only lasts about a minute after the battle, though. Which is good.