Chương 159: Chapter 157: Deep Depths

The room has one door leading out of it. That's the first door we've seen since we came into the dungeon proper. I move towards it, Ash stepping behind me to provide light. The door is heavy. Looks like it's made of steel or some other metal. The stone down here looks much more worked than before, too. We're not in a cave anymore. This is more like a castle. A proper dungeon. The door has a handle, and the handle has a needle on the inside of it.

I bend the needle out of the way almost as an afterthought as I examine the rest of the door. Based on the hinges, it opens outward. So I just need to pull it. There doesn't seem to be a lock, but that doesn't mean there isn't a bar on the other side locking it. I move close to the edge of the door and see if I can see anything through the break between the door and the jam. There doesn't seem to be anything blocking it. But when I pull on the door, it doesn't want to move.

There's obviously something stopping it from opening. I slide the blade of my dagger through the crack, right near the bottom of the door. Then I start slowly sliding it up, waiting for it to catch on a drop bar or something that will allow me to get the lock to open. I slide the blade all the way up the door, but it doesn't catch on anything. Maybe I could wrench it open. I'm pretty strong. The four of us together are positively mighty. We might be able to rip the door right off its hinges. Wait. The hinges!

I move over to the hinge and start poking at the pins from underneath. Once I get the point of my dagger in there and the top of the hinge pops out a bit, I can pry the rest of the hinge open. I give the handle another tug, and the door pops off its hinge. There's a little brace at the top of the door frame that prevents the door from opening. On this side of the door. If I'd looked up, I would've spotted it. Yep, my 134 awareness is sure doing its job today.

I put the door over to the side, and peer into the doorway to see what's beyond. There's a hallway, lined with doors. And lined with torches. Unlit torches, resting in their sconces. I'd be worried if they were burning. That would mean that we were expected. And the smell of sulfur has only gotten stronger. I'm hopefully going to go nose blind to it soon. It's pervasive, and I can't really smell anything else. I don't dare to take a breath through my nose to see if I can sift anything else out.

I think that I'd make myself sick if I did that. So my nose is effectively neutralized. My eyes work just fine, and I spot a pressure plate just on the other side of the door. I bend down and take a look at it, then go back into the room with the pit above us and take some of the broken leg bones from the skeleton we found there. I use a shard of bone to make a shim and lock the pressure plate in place. The rest of the tunnel looks pretty clear, as best as I can tell.

Just in case, I fire another Fire Bolt, this time trying to light a torch with the spell. The air erupts in flame, and the force of the explosion knocks me back into Ash. If she wasn't standing there, I probably would've fallen on my ass. So the room filled with a flammable gas. That's an interesting trap. On the plus side, all the torches are burning now.

"Looks clear," I say, pushing myself away from Ash. I give her a thankful smile as she helps me get my footing. There are five doors in this corridor. Two on either side, one on the far side. The doors are spaced far enough apart that they seem to each lead to another room. What if they lead to another hallway of doors? What if we're getting into the maze part of the dungeon, and there are just endless rooms filled with traps and monsters? Well, if there are, we have to go through them.

Our goal is to clear the dungeon, not just complete it. We need to go through every door we find, explore every room, and make sure there are no more monsters. Might as well start with the first door on the left. I examine all around it, making sure to check the jam around the door to see if there's something obvious there that might tell me that there's a trap waiting. No scoring from acid on the floors, no loose bricks, no poison on the handle. The door isn't even locked.

I push it open and step to the side, half expecting a bunch of crossbow bolts to fire out of the doorway. But nothing happens. There are a lot of traps in this dungeon, but maybe not as many as I fear there are. I step into the room, then wave behind myself to invite the others to join me. It's an armory. There are racks and racks of halberds lining the wall, along with a huge rack of swords running down the middle of the room. There's enough in here to arm maybe fifty people.

And there are shields along another wall, stacked across a platform for easy grabbing. Yeah, looks like fifty of them.

"Do we take these?" I ask.

"I mean, they don't look like they're magical, but they might be worth selling."

"Not worth the weight," Ash says, stepping to investigate the weapons.

"Most of them are rusted, too. Not in very good shape. We probably won't get much for them."

"Leave them then," El says, heading across the hall to start examining the next door. I don't know if she knows what she's doing, but I let her work at it while I examine the door next to the one we just went through, on the same wall. This time, the door is locked. And trapped. There's a hole in the ceiling right above the door. Maybe that's the vent where the explosive gas gets pumped in from, maybe it's a spout for molten lead, maybe it's somewhere that a spear comes through.

I don't know, I just know that it's a trap. But what triggers it? Traps always come in at least two parts. There's the trigger and the trap itself. A pressure plate by itself does nothing but make a clicking sound when you step on it. It has to set something else off for it to really be a trap. What sets off that hole in the ceiling? Is it opening the door? Is it unlocking the door? If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

I kneel down and examine the lock, taking out my picks. It doesn't seem like a complicated lock. Only three or four pins, near as I can tell. Should open pretty easily. But will that set off the trap? There isn't a pressure plate in front of the door. Maybe it sets off when the door is opened? That could make sense. I slip the lock pretty easily. Around the time I do, I hear El yelp in surprise and annoyance. I look over my shoulder and see her hold up her hand. There are five tiny darts in her palm.

Looks like they shot into her hand but didn't make it through the Shell. Good thing; those were almost certainly poisoned. At least she found the trap.

"Can we check this one first?" I ask. Then I push the door open and jump backwards. A jet of flame comes out of the hole above me. It doesn't reach far enough to actually have burned me even if I'd stayed where I was. It's just more of the flammable gas pumping into the room, but catching on the fire of the torches before it gets to me. This room is filled with barrels. The barrels are filled with salt and fish.

"So we've got weapons and we've got food," Gigi says as she pops open another barrel just to check.

"Seems like someone wants to be able to live down here."

"Maybe that's the plan after we clear it out," Ash says.

"Why would the supplies be here first?" El asks. A good point.

"Maybe the supplies were always here, and the maester knows about them, but can't get to them?" I don't want to argue with Ash's theory, so I don't say anything. I just move back into the hallway to examine the door that El already set one trap off on. It doesn't seem to have any more traps, so I push the door open. This room is like a dormitory. There are two dozen rotted cots taking up almost every available inch of floor space. It would cramped as hell to live in here with a bunch of people.

The room looks like it could comfortably fit about six or seven people, with plenty of room to move around and to feel like you have at least a modicum of privacy. But two dozen? It would be miserable. The next door leads to another dormitory style room. This one is only half as cramped. Still uncomfortable, but they at least wouldn't be tripping over themselves. Now we just have the final door. Whatever is beyond this door is the rest of the dungeon. It's where the smell is coming from. It has to be.

"I really hope there isn't much more after this," Gigi says.

"There could be another hundred levels below this one," I point out.

"We have no way of knowing."

"If there are that many, we'd better get more treasure," El says. I bend another poison needle from the handle, and two more from the lock in the door. It isn't locked, but I disarm the traps anyway. It raises my disarm trap to 6. The more the merrier. I push the door open, but it only opens a crack before something stops it. It feels like I just bumped into something. Or someone. They don't push the door closed, so I assume that it's either a corpse or just some stuff in the way, and I keep pushing.

I don't realize my mistake until I look down and see the edges of a pressure plate, and hear it pop up as whatever I was pushing gets pushed fully off the plate. The bolts do come flying at me. They bounce off my Shell, but not before doing 1, 628 damage. That would be two thousand without my defense. That's a lot of damage for some crossbow bolts. We step into the room. It's a great hall from a giant castle, or the main room of a cathedral, or something like that. It's absolutely massive.

Probably about three hundred feet long, with a ceiling that goes up at least fifty feet. I wonder if the pit traps above fall into this room. That would be an efficient design. The room is almost completely empty. Perfect for someone to fly around in. After all the cramped spaces we've moved through so far, this one really stands out. And it feels wrong. The whole room feels like a trap. Ash's light penetrates the room, but only enough for dark vision to show us the other end, and even then in kind of a haze.

We step cautiously into the room, weapons drawn, and I keep my eyes darting around, looking for whatever enemy must be waiting for us. Most of the room is caught in gloom, and I can barely make out anything more than the general shape of the room. The ceiling above me is almost completely shrouded from my vision. There could be monsters up there waiting for us. Maybe more dire bats? Maybe there are bats and rats in here. Or maybe that isn't just a haze I'm looking at. Maybe those are spider webs.

I shoot a Fire Bolt up at the ceiling. The webbing ignites, and five large forms drop to the floor, though not as fast as gravity would account for. Dire spider. Legendary elite monster, level 50. HP: 50, 000/50, 000. Five of them.

"Go for the legs!" Ash shouts, moving towards the nearest one. Mab's Rage isn't going to come back online for almost an hour at this point, so we have to kill these things on our own. I don't have time to switch to my bow, so I step up to another of the big bugs. I know, I know; they aren't really bugs. They're arachnids. Too many legs to be bugs. But still. They have what looks like little pincers on the tips of their two front legs, and that makes them look more like scorpions than spiders.

Scorpions are arachnids too, aren't they? At least the spiders don't have big tails that can strike down at us. They do have eight eyes, and a pair of very large fangs. Probably hollow, probably filled with poison or with acid. Either way, not something I want to get through my Shell. How much leeway do I have with the Shell? It's at around ten thousand hit points, so I don't want to recast it just yet. We have to wait and see how much damage the spiders do.

We can't surround them, and we can't take them on one on one. There are five of them and four of us. Our best bet is to cluster together so we can defend each other, and let them surround us. I hate it when the best best it to get surrounded. I swipe at the pincers as they reach for me, trying to lop them off the ends of the spider's feet. My sword does the normal 500 points of damage with a hit, which is at least a little bit encouraging.

Sure, I have to hit each of these spiders a hundred times to kill them, but at least they don't have armor soaking up part of my strikes. And I can use a few other tricks to make the damage more impressive. Bleeding Strike brings it up to 702 damage, which resolves to almost 1400 total. This is going to take a while, but I don't think I'm in any real trouble. The only one having any real difficulty is Ash. She's facing off against two spiders at once.

She's more or less just pushing one of them away with her shield, but that leaves her pretty vulnerable to the other one. I should try to help her as soon as I can. Which means as soon as I can take out the spider in front of me. I use Killing Blow. It doesn't work. I go with Vital Slash. That works and does a fair amount of damage. I've got stamina to spare right now, so I'm not worried about using my abilities. In fact, I'm trying to use them as much as I can. Especially Vital Slash.

It has the shortest cooldown, which means I can use it the most frequently. It also does the most damage of all my melee abilities, doing 803 damage every time I use it. It doesn't cause bleed, but that's okay. It's still more damage. And I'll use Bleeding Strike again when it comes off cooldown. The spider's claw catches me on the wrist, just between my shield and my hand. It deals 378 damage. If that starts happening a lot, I might be in trouble. But I'm hitting the spider a lot more than it's hitting me.

It keeps moving forward and backwards, skittering in to attack and they trying to withdraw before I can get a hit in. But I manage to get one hit as it moves in, another hit as it attacks, and a third before it can move back. A minute into the battle, I've taken about four thousand points of damage, and I've dealt about eighteen. My Shell still have six thousand points of capacity, and I'm settling in to a pretty simple rhythm of combat. It's weird, but now that I'm fighting, I have time to think.