Chương 175: Chapter 173: A warmer cave

So we extinguish the fire. I put the remaining wood back into my bag, and we head out again. Vincent once more scouts ahead, and we take a somewhat diagonal path from where we were. Ash wants to get out from under the shelf of ice that was melting from our fire. No idea if we did enough damage to it to cause the avalanche, but better safe than sorry I suppose. After another hour of steady climbing, we come to a sheer ice cliff.

It goes up only about forty or so feet, but there are no hand holds or foot holds to be found. It's ice, so it's going to be slippery. Thankfully, we have Vincent to once again fly up and secure a rope for us. Climbing with just my arms is much harder than using my feet to brace myself as I go. But my feet keep slipping on the ice, and I can't seem to get a grip, so I eventually give up and just use my arms to climb, moving hand over hand up the rope.

I do wrap my legs around the rope to lessen the strain on my shoulders, but it's still just my pure strength that gets me up the rope. I don't know how Ash manages it. Or Gigi, for that matter. They're both wearing full plate armor, which by itself must weigh at least a hundred pounds. But they both make it up without complaint. The top of the cliff has another cave. This one looks like it was iced over, but the ice has been chipped and broken away, exposing the tunnel that leads into the mountain once again.

It's not a big enough hole for us all to break through, but what Amanda started isn't that difficult for the rest of us to finish. I notice as we're clearing away the ice that it's wet. It's starting to melt, due to the air from the cave. That's interesting. When we get into the cave, it gets noticeably warmer. Like as much as ten or even twenty degrees warmer. Warm enough that we can take off our heavy furs and store them back in our bags.

"Why is a tunnel warm?" Ash asks.

"Probably lava," El says.

"Because why wouldn't there be?"

"Why wasn't the earlier cave warm, then?" Gigi asks. We don't really have a good explanation for it, but we start moving through the cave anyway. This cave isn't as dark as the last one we went through. There's a glowing fungus on the wall that pulses a little bit, almost like a heartbeat of the mountain itself. It's a little bit disconcerting, but it at least provides enough light to see even without Ash's mace. I'm all for Ash having her mace glow.

I know it makes her weapon do more damage and be more effective in combat, and I know it helps us be able to see details and color better. But it does also make us a beacon to anything else in the tunnels. They know we're coming from a long way away because of the glow of her weapon. That means we'll never be able to ambush or surprise anyone, and they'll always be able to ambush us.

So we walk for a little while without the benefit of her glowing weapon, and I lead the way, looking for traps and also looking for signs of other monsters. The air smells of rotten eggs and sulfur. Not as bad as it did when we were in the dungeon, but enough for me to wonder if there are demons ahead of us. It would make sense. Really, anything would make sense at this point. I'm not making any assumptions about what is still coming.

We don't see any more signs of Amanda passing, but I take a bit of the fungus with us just in case. Maybe I just didn't notice where she scraped some off the wall. Maybe she didn't take any at all. If that's the case, then I've wasted a few seconds, and that's okay. I'd rather have wasted a few seconds than have to go back through the whole mountain to find what we forgot to pick up in the first place. The passageway tilts upwards, but not nearly as steeply as the slope that we just climbed.

I do wonder where this passage came from. It feels natural, but not like it was carved by rushing water. Though maybe it was, and that's why there was all the ice outside. Or maybe something else carved this cave. This mountain seems to be like a honeycomb with all the caves and passages going through it, but that just makes it more believable that this is the way to the divine realm, or to whatever will allow us to access it. After about an hour of walking, the passageway spills out into a large chamber.

And there's a definite orange glow coming from the floor. And a lot of heat pouring into the tunnel. I glance out, poking my head into the chamber, and I look down. Sure enough, El was right. There's a big pool of lava down there. Or maybe a flowing river of it. I think this is called a caldera in a volcano. Clearly a dormant one, because there's a whole mountain above us, but still. I look at the others.

"There is indeed lava," I say.

"Magma," Vincent says.

"It's lava when it's not underground." That explains the name lava lance. I thought I was being sophisticated when I kept calling it magma. I guess not.

"The chamber's really hot, but it looks like the pathway continues across it. We just have to be careful."

"Let me go first," Vincent says.

"It might be a trap." He floats past me and out into the chamber. He's about halfway across when I hear screeching and something attacks him. He is jostled to the side, off the pathway, but doesn't fall because of his spell. He's now floating some fifty feet above molten rock. He makes it quickly across the way, and I can see the panic on his face as he settles in the next cave. He gives me a thumbs up from across the way, then points out and around the chamber. Royal Road is the home of this novel.

Visit there to read the original and support the author. I poke my head out again, bow in hand, and I see them. Magma bats. Legendary elite monster, level 48. HP: 48, 000/48, 000. It takes me a little while to count them all, but if I'm right, there are more than a dozen of them. They're hanging around the ceiling in the caldera room, just waiting for someone to go out on the path. Then they dive down and attack. They might not do much damage, but they do push, and the path is not very wide.

It wouldn't take much to knock us into the magma. I know that we wouldn't sink into the magma. Magma is incredibly dense. It's liquid, yes, but it's liquid rock. We'd fall down on top of it, be horribly burned, but we wouldn't sink into it. You don't swim in magma. But I doubt any of us would be able to get out of there before the intense heat burned away our Shells and then our soft fleshy bodies.

"This is not good," Ash says. Then a message comes from Vincent. I will float you across one at a time, the message says. I relay the message to the others, and I can see their shoulders drop as the tension drains out of them. I don't know if we can fight these bats, and I definitely don't want to try when we have uncertain footing. Some fights are best avoided because the terrain is very much not in your favor. This seems like that. El volunteers to go first, and steps to the mouth of the cave.

She waves her arms around as if trying to get her balance when she starts lifting off the ground and floating out into the main chamber. This is a real display of trust. Vincent could easily drop us into the magma below if he wanted to. I know he has no reason to do it, but the thought still occurs to me. As El flies across, she swings her axes at the bats that get near. She doesn't kill any of them, but she does knock several of them out of the way before they can slam into her.

One still does, and it does knock her several feet off the path. But Vincent keeps a hold of her, and very quickly she is in the other cave. I end up going last, and shoot at the bats as they fly around. I miss one of my shots, which is pretty rare for me, but I do manage to get a few good hits in before they hit me. The impact from the bat is negligible; it only does 43 damage. But it pushes me about four feet to the side, which would've been enough to get me off the path. So would have been enough to kill me.

Maybe I could have survived by using Dash. I might have been able to use that to get across the bridge pathway in the first place. But this is much safer. I take a deep breath once we're past the lava. We don't get any experience for getting past those things, but I don't care. That might have been the single most dangerous thing we've ever done.

"I'm so glad you leveled up that spell," I say to Vincent as he settles me onto the ground and then rises up off it himself. He smiles at me.

"It leveled up so much from crossing the ocean that I had to see what else it could do."

"It saved our lives," Ash says.

"I don't think any of us would have survived that." Vincent beams. I suppose he doesn't always feel like he's the most useful member of the group. We do tend to get along without him pretty well. I can supply the magic we need to make our group formidable. His is better and stronger, but he himself is comparatively weak, so maybe he doesn't feel like he's always that useful and appreciated. But we absolutely would not have been able to do that without him.

We are strong as four, but we're stronger still with all five of us. The tunnel continues to move upward. We eventually come to a short cliff in the tunnel. The wall is craggy and looks like it was designed for climbing, and it's only about thirty feet up. We don't even need to use the rope. My climbing goes up to eleven, and I honestly find the climb kind of refreshing. It helps with the adrenaline that was pumping from the magma chamber. Feels good to get the cortisol burned off.

At the top of the cliff is a large cavern. One that is, unfortunately, full of monsters. We're standing at the edge of a cliff, and we're surrounded. If Ash had been using her glowing mace, we might have come up here with an ambush waiting. As it is, it seems like they're about as surprised as we are. Mountain hob. Very rare elite goblinoid, level 55. HP: 27, 500/27, 500. I'm very glad we didn't try to kill the magma bats. If we had, I would definitely have used Mab's Rage.

And then I wouldn't have it here, where it will kill all of them in just over two and a half minutes. The hobs look like goblins, only with red skin instead of green. Same big ears, same wide mouths with too many teeth and too desperate a need for a dentist or an oral surgeon. A little bit bigger than the goblins we've seen, the hobs stand at about five feet tall. Their weapons are all made of a black glass like stone. Probably obsidian, which makes them incredibly sharp but also kind of fragile.

The only real danger of them is their numbers. Which Mab's Rage will take care of. We just have to survive until it does. It is a village, which gives me pause. I'm not looking to slaughter innocents. But I'm not sure there are any innocents here. I don't see any hobs without weapons. They're moving to surround us, spears pointing at us as they make growling sounds to try to intimidate us. I hold up my empty hands to try to stop everyone from doing something that these hobs will regret.

"Let us pass," I say.

"We mean you no harm, and are not here to steal from you. We just want to go past your village and up the mountain."

"No one goes up the mountain!" one of them shouts back. At least they're talking.

"We are going up," I say.

"One way or another. Please don't make us fight you."

"You will all die! We outnumber you." I nod.

"You do outnumber us. But we will not lose. We will not die. If you attack us, you will all die. I am not bluffing. Please don't test me." An obsidian tipped arrow comes flying at me from the crowd of monsters. It's not flying as fast as a normal arrow, and it's a pretty simple thing to just pluck it out of the air. I don't even cut my hand. I take a look at the arrow. It seems well made. The shaft looks like it's made of bone. I don't think that it's long enough for my bow.

By the time I draw back enough to put the required force into the arrow, I think this one would fall off the front of the bow. So it's of no use to me. I drop the arrow and look at the crowd of monsters.

"We do not need to be your enemy," I say.

"Please, just let us pass." For a second, I don't think it's going to work. I call up Mab's Rage, ready to unleash its destructive power and kill all of these hobs, whether or not they're combatants. The idea of it doesn't sit well with me, but it really would be our only option. I don't think we can take this many of them out before our stamina drains too far, especially Gigi and Ash. And I'm not going to let my friends die. But then I get a notification. My negotiation has increased to sixteen.

And slowly, the hobs begin to move, spreading out and giving us a path through their village.