NOVEL NEXT Chapter 50: Error
The rest of the journey went as smoothly as could be expected from a ragtag group like what Dominic’s was shaping up to be. The albuhas were wary of the more cohesive lions and amesheks – having newcomers in the group seemed to have brought together the two species who had been in the Pride for longer.
Dominic took advantage of the journey to test his new wings and get used to moving them at the same time as the rest of his limbs. With his significantly greater senses, smell included – the change obvious enough that even the former-human with less focus on things like odours noticed it – finding his route back was even easier. As a result, using his greater speed to his advantage, he tended to run a bit ahead of the pride, practised a bit until the rest caught up, then ran ahead again.
He and Leo swapped over when the lion decided that he wanted to experiment a bit too. Figuring that it was a sound idea for them both to have a good grasp of how to use his new appendages, Dominic agreed to Leo’s demand to take control easily enough. Once Leo had had enough, he swapped back, saying that he wanted to ‘rest’ after the ‘tiring fight’.
After the first time he ran ahead of the group, Sekhmet started doing the same. Since the two amesheks were both higher level than her, he figured that there was no harm in it and so didn’t tell her not to follow him. She couldn’t keep up with his speed, but she arrived earlier than the rest of the pride and spent the time watching him curiously.
After three times, he started slowing down and letting her almost keep up with him. It was…oddly companionable, even if they didn’t actually speak about it in any way. Dominic was curious about what Sekhmet was thinking – whether she was interested in him having wings, or if she wanted wings like him. But he feared that if she said the latter, she’d expect him to help her do it and he had absolutely no idea of where to start with that. There was no guarantee that she’d be able to Challenge a creature for its wings like he had. Before he could summon up the courage to ask her, he noticed that he recognised some landmarks in the area.
Instead of running ahead the next time the pride caught up with him, Dominic, back in control of their body, decided that he’d better travel with the pride. Finally, they entered that dip between kopjes where he remembered running away from the hyenas when he’d been nothing but a lowly level 3. Or was I even lower? I don’t remember….
There were some immediate differences, the most obvious of which was that the tunnel which he’d used to protect his flanks and back against the more numerous hyenas was gone.
In its place was a large metal door. It was a pale gold colour, gleaming dully in the sun, though not mistakable for gold at all. Seeing it, Dominic paused, and his pride with him.
‘Well, that’s new,’ commented Leo in the back of his mind.
‘Yeah. Seems like the dungeon has changed.’
‘We were expecting it to,’ the lion reminded him.
‘I know,’ Dominic replied, unease still going through him. It was true – they weren’t expecting the dungeon to somehow be the one thing that had stayed the same when everything else changed. But seeing that the very entrance had changed this drastically just brought that home to him once more.
‘Problem?’ asked Sekhmet, her eyes and ears alert as she stepped closer to Dominic.
‘Not exactly,’ he replied, then shook himself. ‘It’s different from the way it was before. There’s no problem; we’ll just have to be alert to everything that’s changed.’
Walking forwards cautiously, he moved towards the dungeon entrance, his pride following him. As they got closer, he started to see marks on the surface of the metallic door. By the time they were only a few paces away from it, the marks were clear enough that they could make out pictures which almost made sense.
A hyena merged into a warthog which then turned into a tree. Behind the tree hid creatures which looked rather like meerkats, though they were large in comparison to the hyenas. The design repeated itself, the animals sometimes interchanging with each other or even with other creatures entirely – Dominic was pretty sure he saw a trodil somewhere and a lizard of some sort.
‘Do you think it’s giving a warning as to the dangers we will encounter?’ Leo suggested tentatively. Dominic considered it.
‘Possibly? But it could also be to mislead anyone who comes across it. I don’t think we can trust this in any way.’
The lion agreed wordlessly with Dominic as they closed the gap. There, they hesitated again. Occupied by the ornate decorations on the door itself, they had failed to notice one very important point: there was no way of opening the door.
No handle, no button, not even the space for any sort of key. If Dominic hadn’t known that there was a dungeon in this area, he might have just thought it was a large sheet of metal which had been decorated and then left in this place for no real reason.
‘You know,’ Dominic said to Leo with humour in his voice, ‘when I thought about the challenges potentially waiting for us here, simply getting in wasn’t one I anticipated.’
The lion growled back at him, obviously irritated.‘Problem?’ Sekhmet asked again, though this time also sounded a little bit irritated. The rest of the pride were getting a little bit fidgety too. Well, not the two amesheks who seemed happy to wait patiently for something to happen.
‘We don’t know how to get in,’ admitted Dominic, a little shame-faced. The lioness cocked her head at him, then stepped forwards to be almost nose to nose with the door. Before Dominic could say anything, she lifted a paw and poked at the door.
To Dominic’s surprise, the surface rippled.
‘Huh,’ he commented while Leo emanated interest at the sight. ‘Wait!’ he told Sekhmet when it looked like she was about to do it again. ‘Let me try.’ With a sense of smugness, the lioness backed off a little. Dominic decided to give her that one – he should probably have thought about touching the damn thing too. Especially when it could have returned out to be a giant cat-flap.
Lifting a paw, he poked it himself – Sekhmet had managed to do it with no obvious ill effects, so surely it wouldn’t be any different for him. A tingling went through his paw at the same time as a series of messages flashed up in front of his eyes.
[Welcome to the F-Grade Savannah Plains Abandoned Temple dungeon.]
[Objective: Find the reason for why the temple has been abandoned.
Bonus objective: Rid the temple of its infestation/s.]
[Rewards: XP, ?, ?, ?]
[Type: Unlimited, Instanced]
[Only six party members may enter at a time.]
‘Is it just me, or does that seem like a completely different dungeon?’ asked Dominic.
‘I don’t remember this bit,’ Leo admitted. ‘What did it say before?’
‘Well, I remember that the objective before was something about putting my hands on the altar – I accidentally triggered a trap because of that. And I’m pretty sure it didn’t talk about a ‘forgotten’ temple, though I might be mistaken on that one. Plus, I think it was G-Grade before? I remember that because it looked like a stutter. And I don’t remember it saying ‘instanced’ before, though I can’t remember if it was limited or unlimited – not that I know even now what that means. It certainly didn’t limit my ‘party’ numbers.’
‘Could that be because we weren’t in a party before?’ suggested Leo. Dominic thought about it for a moment, then shrugged.
‘I suppose. Anyway, it’s different.’
‘Which we already knew.’
‘True.’ Dominic supposed that it might be a good thing it was so obviously different from before: if it had only been slightly changed, perhaps he would have become overconfident, or assumed he knew the right paths to take. If the dungeon master had changed things so that what wasn’t a trap before suddenly was now, or vice versa, that could have proved deadly very rapidly. Though, to be fair, Dominic had been planning on investigating everywhere either he or his pride members would put a paw anyway since the dungeon had proven itself keen on putting traps in place.
More of an issue was the fact that he wouldn’t be able to take everyone with him. Even his original pride was six-strong, not including him, and he now had eleven more albuhas to add to the mix.
Although…what if he could? He’d got past the kesh by abusing the storage ability of his gorget. He decided to do a quick test.
‘Sekhmet, I need to put you in my storage space, OK?’ The lioness sent him a sense of confusion, but didn’t object. Instead, she approached him and let him absorb her. ‘Alright, if I don’t come out within a few seconds of going in, then follow me in one at a time. If you can’t come in, go hunting and then return here at every dawn and stay here for a while.’
‘At sunrise try again enter?’ Jenkins asked inquisitively. It was a good question.
‘No,’ Dominic answered after a moment of thought. The description of the dungeon had included ‘instanced’. Though he wasn’t sure what that would mean exactly in this situation, he was familiar with it meaning that multiple games could be going on in the same place, but in different ‘instances’. If that was the same here, they could end up all doing the dungeon but not together. ‘Just keep coming back until we come out.’
Once he’d had acknowledgement from all the Tier 2s, Dominic headed towards the dungeon door and prodded it with a paw.
He immediately realised that his plan wasn’t going to work: the door remained hard metal instead of the rippling substance it had been before. And a notification flashed up in front of his eyes.
[Error: only one user may enter at a time.]
Well, that was disappointing, though Dominic supposed he’d better be grateful that he and Leo apparently didn’t count as two users otherwise he would have found himself barred from the dungeon entirely.
He quickly let Sekhmet out, who immediately started licking herself – she wasn’t keen on his storage compartment.
‘What you tested worked?’ she asked him.
‘No, it didn’t,’ he sighed, then got down to thinking: if he could only take in five others, he was going to have to leave a large number of his current group outside.
He quickly decided not to bring the albuhas with him – this recently after the battle, Dominic wasn’t sure whether he’d be able to trust the winged coyotes to have his back…or to sink their teeth into it. And frankly, if they died or decided not to stay as part of his pride, it wouldn’t be a big deal, as long as Dominic was right and the enhancements they’d ‘bought’ with the Pride Points earned didn’t disappear. All evidence so far seemed to indicate that benefits earned wouldn’t be taken away, so Dominic had made hay while the sun shone and was currently sitting at 0 Pride Points.
Ten of the points had gone into buying the shield ability. It was a hefty investment, but with their ability to absorb carcasses to heal themselves and Lionel’s healing abilities, it might give them the breathing space in a difficult battle to turn things around. It did use the pride members’ defences to determine how strong the shield was, which with lions who didn’t specialise in defence, probably meant it wouldn’t be all that strong. On the other hand, at least that meant that if it broke and they lost their defences for five minutes, they hopefully wouldn’t be as affected as someone like a rhino whose survivability counted on hefty defences.
Maybe we should recruit a rhino, thought Dominic briefly, but then pushed the thought away. Both he and Leo had agreed on that investment, as well as the next: spending five points to give Powerful Swipe to Sekhmet.
Their reasoning had been that her only combat Ability was the automatic one all lions seemed to get: Pounce. Her half-step Ability had been Sharp Mind, and her Tier 2 Ability had been Telepathy. Since Dominic’s Powerful Swipe was already at level 5, and therefore not at risk of him losing it as he gave it to his Pride member, it made sense to offer Sekhmet more offensive power. She hadn’t had the chance to test it in a live battle, of course, but the indications he’d seen so far were that it had taken hold.
Finally, with the last three points remaining from previous Pride Points and the level up from 5 to 6 of the Pride as a whole, he’d decided to purchase the upgrade to range for the Pride chat. Though so far it hadn’t proven to be too short range, he’d thought that with the Pride being more likely to be spread out over the forest around the Place of Power, it could be useful to have a bit more range. Given that they were now going to have to split apart from one of those they’d travelled with from the Place of Power as well as the whole group of albuhas, Dominic was doubly glad he’d managed to convince Leo of that one.
Which brought him neatly back to the dilemma: who to take with him, and who to leave behind?
