Chương 178: Chapter 176: Chimneys and tunnels

The next morning, we head down the darkened tunnel. Ash stands behind me with her glowing mace, and I keep an eye out for more trip wires and other traps that might stand in our way. I keep glancing at the walls to see if I can find slits or holes or seams or anything like that. These walls are not as smooth as the last tunnel, which tells me that the rock eater didn't make this tunnel. But this tunnel definitely seems like it was worked with sapient hands.

It was carved out, not naturally formed by creature or by nature. It does head downwards, but only at first. After a few curves, the tunnel starts to head upwards at a pretty steep angle. And I can see why. Right at the base of the incline there is a pit trap. It's only about five feet across, but it looks like it goes pretty deep. And I can definitely see spikes down there. It's meant so that people will slip on the incline and fall down into the spikes. We use our pick axes to make sure that we don't fall.

The slope is probably like sixty degrees, so we could in theory just brute force our way up. But that pit trap is a constant reminder of what might happen if we slip, so we take the cautious route. The slope heads straight for a good hundred feet, then settles back to a relatively flat plane. Still no sign of Amanda, though I have come across a few other traps. Mostly simple ones, like the crossbow trap that Amanda set off. This one is untriggered, and I cut the string rather than pull it, disarming the trap.

My disarm traps goes up to seven, and my detect traps goes to thirteen. We soon come to another chamber. This one is only about ten feet across, but the ceiling is easily two hundred feet above us. And there is light coming in from up there. It's like a chimney in the mountain. Tall, but not too tall. We've got the rope to get out of here if we want to. The question is whether or not that's the right way.

"Do you think Amanda came here and went back, or just went up?" Ash asks, looking around the room. The floor is covered in bones. Old bones, bleached white, piled up so much that there's no way to avoid stepping on them. There have to be fifty or a hundred bodies here. Maybe climbing this chimney is dangerous.

"I don't know," I say, looking around. I'm trying to find some sign of her, some disturbance. Something on the walls that tells me she went up, or something on the bones that tells me she was at least here. Maybe she didn't go up the slope when she found the pit trap. Maybe she turned back after getting hit by the first crossbow bolt. There's just no way to tell. I smell for her, but the air in here is crisp and clean. There aren't any lingering scents.

"Should we go up or go back?" Gigi asks.

"Let me check what's up there," Vincent says. He starts to fly upwards. I watch him float up pretty quickly, then start to slow down. He desperately reaches out and grabs the wall, clinging with his fingertips about halfway up.

"What's wrong?" I shout.

"My magic is gone!" he says. I can hear the panic in his voice.

"It just dispelled. All of it. Shell too." That's not good.

"Can you climb down?" He shakes his head, pressing himself against the wall. One of us is going to have to go up and get him. Or be ready to catch and heal him if he falls. When he falls. He can't hold on forever.

"Just climb up!" El shouts.

"Get to the top and see if you can use your magic again." It seems like he's going to try, when suddenly something darkens the hole at the top of the chimney. Then something is falling. It clips Vincent in the shoulder, knocking him free and dropping him down onto the pile of bones. It's another cave spike. It lands a half second before Vincent, scattering bones everywhere. The shards of bones pepper us all, and I take 64 damage from the spray of them.

The cave spike might have a lot of hit points and a lot of armor, but it can't stand against all of us. I keep hitting it with Ice Spear to stun it, and the others just pulverize the thing. We get our rush of experience pretty quickly, and then check on the groaning Vincent. His health bar is down by more than half. I cast Healing Touch to bring him back to full, and he gives me a smile of thanks.

"That sucked," he says.

"The anti magic starts about halfway up?" Ash says, looking up there.

"Maybe we could fasten a rope at that point, and then climb the rest of the way?"

"What if there are more of the cave spikes?" Gigi asks.

"We'd be sitting ducks."

"And the fall really sucks," Vincent reiterates.

"I say we go back to the other tunnel," I say.

"Chances are Amanda did the same when her magic failed. If the other tunnel is a dead end, we can come back and figure this out." The trip back down the slope is a difficult one. We have to drag our pick axes behind us so we don't move to fast, so we can jump over the spike pit without any difficulty. It's actually kind of fun, when I let myself just enjoy the slide down. This story has been stolen from Royal Road.

If you read it on Amazon, please report it Then back to the chamber with the rock eater, and up the second path. This one smells more like the snake, and the walls are pretty smooth, so I think this one is more what the rock eater preferred. What was the point of that other tunnel? Was there something in that chimney that Amanda took with her? Did we need to take one of the skulls or something? I hate not knowing.

The second tunnel is a bit taller than the rock eater, which explains how it's still relatively well lit. The mushrooms are glowing up on the ceiling. There are spiders up there, too. Big ones. Nothing so big as to think we're going to have to fight them, but bigger than you'd find even in Australia. I swear one of them winks at me. It's about the size of a flat screen television, crawling around among the mushrooms and watching us with its eight eyes. We don't bother the spider, and it doesn't bother us.

We move past where it waits to ambush whatever food it can find and soon find ourselves hiking up what looks like a spent rock slide. Another trap, maybe. It could in theory have crushed Amanda, and maybe even killed her. But I doubt it could do that much damage. More likely, it crushed and killed some other explorer many years ago. We climb over the rocks and wedge our way through a small opening, having to widen it a little bit so that Ash and Gigi can get through without taking off their armor.

The little rock slide gives way to a cave, and we stumble out into the cave before taking a good look around. There are bears here. We've fought dire bears before, and they were no real threat. But this isn't a dire bear. God bear. Mythic elite creature, level 57. HP: 285, 000/285, 000. And of course, there isn't just one of them. There is a whole colony of them. Six of the god bears push themselves to their feet and start to move towards us. One of them roars in challenge.

It feels like a gale force wind, and actually pushes me back a step. I don't take any damage from the roar, but I can tell it's a spell. Pebbles and scree fly towards us, and the dust blinds me for a second, but otherwise no ill effects. When I can see again, the bears are all much closer to us. Two of them are standing up, their fifteen foot tall frames barely fitting within the cave. One of them swings a paw the size of a flatbed at me, and I barely manage to jump back out of the way.

They're too close for my bow, so I draw my sword and dagger while I cast Mab's Rage. It's not going to kill any of them, but it will do more than thirty five thousand points of damage to all of them, and it will slow them for three and a half minutes. That, to me, is worth it. There are more of them than there are of us. And Vincent can't go toe to toe with a bear by himself. So Gigi and Ash take on three bears between them, and El and I take on three between us. Our three bears don't seem to know who to swing at.

We're both moving incredibly quickly, slashing and bringing them stinging bits of pain as they roar in frustration. I focus my damage on the shared bear, though I don't get any bonus for flanking in this position. I'm hoping that at some point El's mad whirling dance will take her around to the other side of the bear, and then I'll get the bonus. For now, it's enough that I'm still doing 502 points of damage when I swing my sword at the bear in question.

I mostly defend myself with Stinging Defense, chipping away at the bear to my right as it tries to swat me aside. Stinging Defense does 284 damage every time the bear swings at me, even when it doesn't make contact with me. When it does hit me, the hit is pretty severe. I take 1, 593 damage from the claws digging into my Shell. That means the bear starts off doing two thousand damage. That's a lot. The bears are slow, but out numbering us kind of makes up for it.

I'm moving fast, trying to do as much damage as I can while they are slowed by my spell. Even using Stinging Defense, I'm still able to lash out every three seconds or so, letting me deal ten thousand damage a minute. I'm not using my other abilities yet, in case they have some trick I don't know about. I know that my stamina is going to drain sooner or later, and I don't want to drain my pool prematurely. Though why not? I'm being stupid. I'm making the battle drag out, fulfilling my own prophesy.

If I do more damage, the battle will end sooner. Then the stamina won't drain as fast. This is what abilities are for. I should use them. I start with Killing Blow. It does 600 damage. That ability never fucking works. It would've been super convenient to take one of these monstrosities out early, but I guess I have to do it the hard way. So Bleeding Strike, and Vital Slash are the way to go. It drains my stamina really fast, but I have a lot of it to drain. Vital Slash only takes 25 stamina every time I use it.

I can afford to use it pretty frequently. I get hit again, and this time the bear gets a good solid blow on me. It knocks me aside several steps. I might be super strong, but the physics of our comparative body sizes still matters. The bear that knocked me aside lumbers past me, heading for Vincent. I quickly get back into position and stab it in the back, getting back stab damage and doing a full thousand points to it. Then I have to leap out of the way as the bear is blasted backwards by a spell.

It very nearly bowls me over, and it doesn't seem happy about the whole thing. I get back to my feet quickly and go back to attacking that bear. It means I'm leaving El to face two bears at once, but I'm pretty sure she can hold her own for at least a while. Vincent can't. I need to protect him. He keeps pelting the bear with spells with a desperate speed I've never seen from him before. I guess I can understand it; a few quick swipes from this bear will kill him.

That second swipe that knocked me aside did 2, 093 damage, a full five hundred more than the first blow. That means it could potentially kill him in three strikes. Maybe only two. Another minute passes, and I look at the bear's health bar. It's down below half, which is amazing.

Vincent has been pounding it with spells, and I've been doing my very best to carve this thing to pieces, but it's still incredible that we've managed to do more than a hundred thousand damage between the two of us over the course of two minutes. The bear keeps turning to swat at me like I'm some kind of annoyance, but it also keeps moving towards Vincent. This is bad. This is really bad. There isn't anywhere for him to be able to quickly retreat.

Looking past the bulk of the god bear, I can see that he already has his back to the wall. The tunnel we climbed through is there, but it will take him several seconds to get into that tunnel. We had to crawl out of there, and he just doesn't have the time to make it to safety. I try to circle the god bear, wanting to put myself between it and Vincent. But the bear keeps swatting at me as I move, and the cave just isn't wide enough for me to make it through without getting hit.

I eventually just dive through the gap and accept my fate. The bear hits me twice as I'm moving through, knocking my Shell down another four thousand points. It's at about eleven thousand now, but I'm at least between Vincent and the bear. Unfortunately, being here means I don't have much room to maneuver. Unless and until I can push the god bear back a few steps, I'm going to be trading blows with him. And that's not going to end up in my favor.