Chương 158: Chapter 156: Into the pit

You have defeated putrid meat ooze x4. You gain (200, 000/4) 50, 000 experience.

"This is what a dungeon should be," El says as we leave the room, and the stench, behind. I don't think there's any more of that rotting meat smell coming from the tunnel ahead of us. The sulfur scent smells almost good in comparison. I still breathe through my mouth as much as possible.

"What do you mean?" Gigi asks, wiping the gore from her blade.

"It's big, there are traps, proper monsters, and even some treasure along the way," El explains.

"Not just one floor, not just a fortification for an oncoming army. Lots of variety of monsters, lots of different dangers."

"Yeah, it is kind of fun," Ash says. I am not having fun. I want to get this over with. I'm looking forward to getting out of here. I cast Refresh on myself to get the remnants of the gore from the putrid oozes off me before we move down the next passageway. This passageway is lined with traps, but also with iron cages. I can see the tall cages on either side of the room, just waiting to snap together like a life sized bear trap. The cages are covered in spikes, and look rusty and dull.

But the springs that make the trap snap together don't look that rusted. Is someone maintaining this place? I look around for the mechanism that will set this trap off. It's got to be either a pressure plate, a trip wire, or something magical. Maybe there's a glyph on the floor that sets off the trap when its disrupted. I have to remember that not all the traps are going to be mechanical. Some of them are just magic.

I know that magic is always that kind of hand waiving cop out, a way to have things work without having to explain them. But it's also a way to have things work without having it be obvious how they work. It's like that scene in any movie with traps. There's a beam of light that sets off the trap when it gets disrupted. How does that work? We're never told. Magic is just the beam of light. I bend down and sweep away the sand with my hand as best I can.

There's got to be a floor underneath it, I reason, if there is a glyph hidden by the sand. The glyph has to be written on something. So it can't just be sand all the way down. There has to be floor beneath it. Right? I sweep away maybe two inches of sand before I find it. But the floor isn't smooth, which makes me think it isn't worked, which makes me think there isn't a glyph. So I just wasted my time. That happens a lot in this dungeon. I look at the ceiling, and that's when I spot it.

I can't read it, but I can see the lines carved into the ceiling, between stalactites. It probably does have an invisible beam coming out of it. Disrupt the beam, step below the symbol, and the trap goes off. A Magical Dart sets the trap off, and we move around the slammed together cage. It doesn't pull back apart right away, which makes me wonder if I broke the trap when I set it off. The pathway leads to a room with a big pit in the center of it.

There's a ledge around the room, but there doesn't seem to be another passage out of here. Just a six inch ledge all the way around a circular room, and a pit that goes down who knows how deep.

"What now?" Ash asks. She looks down into the pit, holding her mace over the darkness. It gives way for a little bit, meaning that the pit is at least fifteen feet deep, but it doesn't show us the bottom.

"Maybe there's a secret door," El suggests, and starts to feel along the wall. I look at the wall. It's covered in moss. That doesn't seem all that conductive to a secret door. Or to searching the wall.

"I think maybe we have to go into the pit," I say.

"What, like jump?" Gigi asks. Someone with wings could definitely do it. They could jump and just kind of glide down into the pit. It's far enough across to allow them to go back and forth a little bit. But we don't have wings. We have to do it the hard way.

"Does anyone have a rope?" I ask.

"I have a rope," El says.

"What do we tie it to?" That's the problem. There's really nothing we can tie it to. There are no stalagmites we could wrap the rope around, and no convenient poles or bars or anything that we can tie it to. We don't have a piton we can hammer into the wall, and we don't have any way to stabilize it, not really. Wait a minute.

"What about the mining cart?" I ask. Ash shakes her head.

"Wrong tunnel," she says. Damn it, she's right. The cart was in the mine tunnel. This tunnel doesn't even have tracks. This is clearly a tunnel meant to get to the next part of the dungeon, not part of the mine that was here before it became a dungeon. Still, maybe the mining equipment can help.

"Could we maybe dig a pickax into the wall at some point and use that as an anchor?"

"You wanna go back and get one?" Ash asks.

"I could," I say.

"Do you think it would work?"

"Those things are kind of designed to not get stuck in the wall, aren't they?" Gigi points out. This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

"Fuck."

"What if you all climbed down while I hold the rope?" El asks.

"At least let Caleb climb down and have a look around, make sure it's where we want to be. Then the rest of you can climb down if it's safe."

"And what about you?" Ash asks. El shrugs.

"I'll jump," she says.

"The fall won't kill me, probably." That's true. Fall damage does exist, but it isn't an instant kill. We could survive the fall pretty easily, even if it's close to a hundred feet.

"How much rope do you have?" I ask. Ell pulls a long coil of pretty thick rope out of her spatial bag.

"Maybe fifty feet?" she says. Okay. If it's much longer than that, maybe I'll climb back up and we'll see what the other options are. If the pit is much deeper than fifty feet, we'll look for a secret passage obscured by the flesh eating moss. That'll be fun. And if the pit is close to fifty feet, maybe I'll just drop the last bit. El wraps the rope around herself, giving a lot of friction points as the rope is guided up her thighs, across her back, and then back down.

She grips the rope on either side and braces herself a few feet from the edge of the pit. I give her a nod, then get down on the edge of the pit and slowly transfer my weight to the rope. I have no doubt that El is strong enough to handle my weight. But I don't want to suddenly put all my weight on the rope and risk it surprising her and the rope falling out of her hands. That might give her a nasty rope burn, and it might lead to a long fall for me.

Once I'm on the rope, I start to lower myself down as quickly as I safely can. I don't want to burn my palms on the rope, but I also don't want to to put undue strain on El's shoulders. So I make my way down, very quickly ending up somewhere with no light at all. Once I get out of the range of Ash's glowing mace, I'm pretty much plunged into a curtain of blackness.

My dark vision gives me a little bit of leeway, borrowing some of the light from Ash, but I can't really see more than the rope right in front of my face. I keep climbing down. Twenty feet, then thirty. Every time I move down, I half expect to find my feet hitting the ground. And all the while, I keep getting a sinking feeling that I'm going to run out of rope before I run out of pit to climb into. The real problem is if there are spikes at the bottom of the pit.

If I do run out of rope and fall even just ten feet, but I fall onto spikes, that's going to hurt. Ten feet is enough time to build some velocity. Not terminal velocity, but enough that the spikes will go through me. Maybe I need some light below me. I hang from one hand, dangling on the rope, and aim my other hand down the pit. I shoot a Fire Bolt, watching for how long it takes to hit and what it hits.

It takes a little bit longer than I'd like to hit – looks like I'm still about thirty feet up from the floor, which means I'm going to have to drop. But there are no spikes, so that's good. There's just a floor. Looks like a paved floor, though I couldn't really tell in the half second of light I was able to produce. I climb the other ten or so feet down the rope and dangle again. Is twenty or so feet far enough to just let myself fall? I should be able to land with only minor damage.

But then, there's the other question. How do I get back up? Dash. Dash will go in any direction I want it to, and will take me half my strength in feet. That's a hundred and five feet. Easily the whole length of the pit. Okay. I can get back out. Which means I can get everyone else back out. Probably. How will they make it up? I don't think they have anything that will get them back up. We really should have thought this through and talked it through before I started climbing. What should I do?

Do I climb back up so we can work out how to get out of here later, or do we just keep moving forward and hope that there's another exit somewhere? If someone had taken the leaping attack ability, maybe they could jump out of the pit too, but I think that was destroyed by the molten lead. Decision time. I can't just dangle here forever. Do I jump down and hope for the best, or do I climb up and plan for the worst? My dad would tell me to climb up. He'd say to always plan for the worst.

So plan as if there is no other way out. How far is it from the ceiling to the floor down here? The hole finishes off about halfway between me and the floor. I can't tell how big the chamber is because the tunnel down doesn't show the whole room. That means the room is big. It could have monsters in it, just waiting for me to land. That's besides the point. Ten feet is a long distance when you're talking about the vertical. We might be able to prop people up high enough to get to the edge of the pit tunnel.

Could they climb the walls? They aren't smooth. Maybe they could. We've climbed before; we should be able to make it.

"Everything okay down there?" El shouts down the hole. There's a little bit of strain in her voice, but not much. I don't think she's in danger of dropping me. But it does mean that I have to think fast. I really should climb back up. Unless there's a rope down here. If there's another rope down here, then we can tie the two together and I can Dash up out of the pit and the others can climb the rope. That would be fine. We should be able to get out of here no problem. Still.

I'm about to climb back up when my hand suddenly spasms, making the decision for me. I drop twenty feet, and I tuck and roll when I hit the ground. I feel the impact, and it does a little bit of damage, but not enough to really notice. My Shell is still going strong. I roll to my feet and draw my weapons, waiting for someone to attack me. I can't see a damned thing. That's going to make things difficult if there is a monster down here.

"Hey," I shout up the pit.

"Anyone worried about how we're going to get back up?" As I ask, I see the light moving down the tunnel. The light disappears when the mace leaves Ash's hand, so she must be moving down the rope already. Sliding down, from the speed. She has gloves though, so the rope won't tear her apart. She's also much heavier than I am with all that armor, so I guess it's good that she's going quickly.

"What did you say?" she asks as she lands next to me, squatting her knees and grimacing a bit at the impact. I sigh.

"I said, has anyone worried about how we're going to get back up?" She bites her lip.

"I hadn't considered that," she says.

"That's unfortunate. Should I stop Gigi from coming down?" Gigi lands next to us. Not as gracefully. Too late for that.

"Everybody move!" El shouts. Then the rope drops down into a pile. I suppose that's good; we at least have the fifty feet of rope to help us. Not sure what good it will do with a seventy foot pit, but it's better to have it I guess. El lands with a crash and a groan. Seventy feet probably does a lot of damage. Her Shell absorbs it all, but that couldn't have been comfortable. I look around the room. I already figured that there aren't any monsters in here. If there were, they probably would have already attacked.

There are a few skeletons on the floor, but they look like they have broken legs, so I think they're more the remains of someone else who jumped into the hole than any monsters we have to worry about. There haven't been any undead in this dungeon so far. Hopefully, that will continue. El pushes herself to her feet and dusts herself off, then starts putting the rope into her bag.

"That was fun," she says, though her tone tells me she did not enjoy it. I can't say I blame her. Free fall is a lot of fun, but that sudden stop at the end really kills the whole experience.

"Think of it this way," I say.

"Six months ago, that fall might have killed you." She laughs.

"Good point," she says.