NOVEL NEXT Chapter 260: Dirty Dealing
Two days had passed since Sevastion's eventful visit to the dungeon, although truth be told virtually no one outside of the dungeon's staff actually knew about that particular event. No, what was really going to mark this week in the calendars is that today would be the day that Floor Nine would be fully put to the test by a brave crew of Masters and Experts. This, everyone knew about because the brave crew in question had spent the entire night before announcing it to everyone in Worthy Inn.
The Dirty Dealers were an experienced team from the Valleylands, who had gotten their name in two ways. For one thing, the team included a Stonefist Brawler, a Pyroclastic Geomancer, and a Cleric of Stone among its five members, which meant that there was often quite a bit of dirt and dust being thrown around when they fought. The other was that, well...they had several people on their team who could manipulate rock and stone with relative ease, allowing them to easily bypass many dungeon challenges. These often resulted in accusations of 'cheating' from various dungeon masters, and Challenger parties without geomancer skills to make use of, but the Dirty Dealers simply suggested that if the dungeons wanted to make things harder on them then perhaps they should 'get good' at designing their traps.
This heavy focus on a single element had even worked to their advantage when fighting Parker on Floor Eight, as when the man transformed into a giant wolf the party simply trapped him within a cage of stone, and the guardian was left without any ranged abilities to strike back with.
That relatively easy takedown of a monster who had halted almost every other party to come by meant that when the fivesome stepped into the first room of the floor, they were feeling rather confident about their chances. In the lead were the party's two frontliners; Waller Mudcleft, a minotaur man who was the aforementioned Stonefist Brawler, and Palush of Niad'osh, an orcish Vanguard Charger. Slipping off to the side after them came Alesha of Niad'osh, an orc Shadow Sapper who nearly seemed to fade away in the darkness created by the room's poor lighting and irregular walls. In the rear were Elissa Wheatscythe, a minotaur woman who was the party's Geomancer, and Reardon Ironspike, a half-dwarf, half-orc Cleric who avoided being mistaken for a goblin thanks to his short ears and thick beard.
As the party's leader, it falls to Elissa to take charge of reminding everyone of their task. "Okay! Everyone watch the ceilings and the walls, and get your light sources ready! Those Rainlander mucky-mucks barely poked their heads in here, but they were kind enough to let folks know that the floor includes ambushes by what's almost certainly some sort of Horror! Despite their name and how ugly they are, Horrors are just dungeon monsters like any other, and they can be killed like any other!" The minotaur slams her crystal-tipped staff onto the ground for emphasis, and the motion of her arms sets the many pieces of jewelry hanging from her horns and neck swinging. "Do. Not. Panic. Now, everyone got your crystals ready?"
The party nods, and all of them except for Alesha lift a pale yellow gemstone in her direction, each of them bound around their necks by a chain. Elissa utters a quick spell in the direction of each of them, and three glowing gemstones soon add their light to the dim room, followed by a fourth as Elissa activates her own. "Now, the monsters ambush through small tunnels, so shout them out as soon as you spot them, and Reardon and I will pinch them shut. Alesha, make sure you keep an eye out for any the rest of us might miss in the darkness."
The orc nods, and Elissa can just make out the glint of a glass bottle already being held in one of her hands. "Sure thing - if you want I can toss in a little treat for the beasts before you seal them up, too."
"Not to start with - for all we know the place could have dozens of decoy tunnels, and I don't want you wasting your supply. If there's something actively crawling out of one, though, it could be useful in pushing it back before we seal it shut." Looking around, she spots the destroyed fungal pods the nobles had noticed on their visit to the floor. "There's the odd mushrooms they mentioned, too. Sapper, you're our expert on poisons and toxins, anything odd about those? I doubt the dungeon put them here for no reason."
The orc smoothly steps forward and analyzes the nearest pods, both by sight and with the aid of a few tools, including a magic gemstone and a small stick coated in chemicals. "Nothing airborne coming out of these. Dunno if they're toxic to eat, but, y'know...if anyone here plans on eating a weird dungeon mushroom, whatever happens is on you."
"Alright then, moving on. Waller, Palush, take the door." She points her staff towards the odd metal door with the large, wheeled control mechanism, and Waller gets to the task of spinning it open. As it swings wide Palush quickly steps forward, his shield held high, eyes scanning the room for threats. The rest follow in behind him, and Elissa again begins issuing commands.
"Okay, this is as far as they got, so expect an ambush. I see two, no, three holes - " She's interrupted by the sound of an echoing, inhuman cry, and the urgency of the party increases dramatically.
Chhhhhaaaa-cak-cak-chakkk...
"Reardon, on those hollows, quick!" Elissa and the party's Cleric both get to work reshaping the stone of the ceiling, and the pair seal one grated entrance shut just before sounds of claws scratching on stone tell them they picked the right target. There's still plenty more such openings for the two to address though, and by time they get to the last such ambush point there's already a clawed limb pounding at the grate covering it, knocking it loose just before it needs to pull back in order to avoid being trapped by the closing stone. The whole affair is made even more tense when the room's light crystals suddenly 'malfunction', but the portable gems the party carry with them provide sufficient illumination to allow them to finish their task.
When at last the sounds of scratching claws and angry hisses fade away, the team takes a moment to catch their breath before Elissa gets their attention once again. "Okay - good work! Keep your guard up, we may still have to fight that monster elsewhere on the floor, but now it won't be at its ideal ambush point, at the least. Easy mode stops here, though - from here on out, we've got no idea what lies ahead. But is that going to stop us?"
Recognizing the call-and-response moment, the party shouts back at her. "Hells no!" After sharing a few smiles and half-confident laughs, Palush points at the runic ring on the floor at the opposite side of the room.
"Looks like the floor uses portal transport from here. Shall I take the lead? Or do we search out an alternative strategy?"
Elissa nods towards Reardon, and the party's shortest member nods before approaching each of the room's walls. At each one he plants a palm against the shiny black surface before tapping it with his heavy metal staff, and closes his eyes before moving on to the next. By time he's done, he has a frown on his face as he makes his report. "Bad news. For one, the walls of the place are coated in something organic - it's not obsidian or any other stone or mineral. It is just surface-layer, there's dungeon stone beneath, so we have what we need to seal those tunnels with. Making tunnels is another matter entirely, though. We'd need to take the time to smash through this...outer shell, whatever it is, with brute force. On top of that, this floor is...not arranged in a way that makes easy sense to me, from what I can tell."
Alesha has a followup to ask, although she's interrupted as the room's lights return, and she's left blinking as her eyes adjust. "What - ah, dammit! Stupid...what do you mean, Reardon, how's it laid out?"
The green-skinned man points at several walls and the ceiling. "For one, there's disconnected rooms around us - but they must be linked by portals, there's no hallways to indicate a path. If we bust through, and just one of them has a portal to the boss room, we could totally miss it...or get 'lucky' and stumble into the damn arena without being ready for it." He pauses and points along the length of another wall. "The other thing is, there's a lot of empty space in that direction, and I sense more further away...but I don't sense the magic of dungeon stone that way. It could be another void in the mountain, like the great abyss on Floor Six, though it ain't hardly that big. If we bust into that though, I reckon we've gone the wrong way."
Elissa considers his words for a bit before sighing. "So the short answer is, if we try to make a shortcut, we could end up just taking the long way around by accident. Suppose we play it the dungeon's way, for now - Palush, lead us in."
The heavily-armored orc nods, and soon enough he's vanished through the portal ring. The others follow behind, giving each a second or two to clear the ring, and are each relieved to find no immediate ambush waiting for them on the other side. They're less amused however to find three new portal rings waiting for them, and Waller groans. "It's a damn maze, ain't it? And one where we can't just bust the walls down, either. Well, I assume we're not splitting up, so which way first?"
"Hold - we can take some precautions first. Alesha, mark the exit for us, would you?" The Sapper nods before reaching for one of her bottles and smearing her fingers with the luminescent ink inside. With them she paints a symbol over their entry point, marking it as their way out, and the symbol remains visible even as the lights flicker out yet again. The act makes the party immediately tense up, but no monsters make their appearance - there aren't even any ambush points in this room, as far as they can tell. Elissa chuckles with a slightly embarrassed tone.
"The dungeon is playing with us, wouldn't you say? But nothing to fear - Palush, take us on straight ahead!"
The Vanguard nods and again steps through a portal ring, taking the exit directly opposite of their entrance, and Alesha marks it as well with a simple symbol before she follows the rest of the party through. When she arrives however she finds that this time the party was far less lucky, and had stepped into an immediate ambush by two horrors. In the dark.
The light generated by the party's necklaces swings and flashes wildly as the Challengers fight, with Palush in the front and doing his best to hold one insectoid monster back with his shield. Waller meanwhile has taken the bold move of grappling with the other, stone forming from nowhere to coat his body and fists as he slams them into the creature as dark as the room's odd walls. The blows from the minotaur would be sufficient to kill a normal man in a single hit, but their impact on the horror seems...unsatisfying. Not only do his fists not break the creature's exoskeleton, but the monster's body seems to...squish slightly under the blows, bouncing back rather than fracturing. He can't even pin it down properly, as even when he grabs its forelimbs, its tail snaps out to attempt to penetrate his stony hide with a stinger.
Elissa doesn't plan to let her frontliners handle the fight alone, however. "Reardon, help Palush pin down his opponent! I shall aid Waller, Alesha, keep an eye out for additional ambushes!" With that said she sends mystical energy through her staff, generating a dart of molten stone which flies through the air and impacts the beast snapping at Waller with its mandibles. This attack does manage to penetrate the monster's hide, thanks to its heat and sharpened edge, but Waller perhaps wishes that it hadn't. The monster's blood splatters with the impact, and while some lands on the minotaur's stone armor, a few drops do manage to come into contact with his upper arm, making the man shout.
"Gah! It - it has some sort of toxic blood! It's burning!"
"Then shove it away, Waller! Unless you plan to strangle the thing, we're going to need to make it bleed!"
The man follows his leader's command, and after grabbing hold of one of the horror's limbs he spins and tosses it against a far wall. For all of its monstrous appearance, the beast seems to be surprisingly thin and light, relying more on its flexibility to survive blows rather than heavy armor. It's already scrambling to its feet when Elissa sends a swarm of magma darts following after it, but a glue bomb tossed by Alesha stops it before it can reach Waller once again. As Waller warned, the more the monster bleeds, the more it burns away the substance holding it in place, but to her credit Elissa quickly recognizes the risk and focuses on accuracy over quantity. A trio of darts puncture their way through the horror's ugly skull, and with a final cry its mandibles grow still.
For their part, Palush and Reardon had been having slightly less luck. The organic substance covering much of the room's walls and floor had limited the Cleric quite a bit in the use of his magical toolbox, but a bit of teamwork had eventually proven up to the task. The chamber's coating wasn't uniform, leaving some places bare and uncovered, and with some careful coordination Palush had eventually managed to push the horror beneath a smooth bit of ceiling. At that point Reardon had triggered several hundred pounds of stone into falling onto the monster, and with a rather unfortunate amount of splatter the monster is slain. As he looks over the steaming pits on his breastplate and sword, Palush curses.
"Dammit! Not just toxic, it's acid! Its claws have trouble getting through my armor, but just having the thing bleed on me is going to cost me a small fortune in equipment repairs!"
"Hold on, I got you." Alesha quickly rushes over, another bottle at the ready, and splashes a foul-smelling substance on the worst-hit parts of the man's plate. "Neutralizing agent - won't repair what already got burnt, but will keep it from getting worse. Next time we do this floor, I'll make sure to have a bottle or two for everyone."
"Good planning, and an excellent response to the ambush." Elissa smiles at her team, but frowns as she sees what waits for them on the other side of the room. Five pillars sit, each about chest-high and coated in ridges that seem like spines in some places and horrifying human faces in others. On top of the pillars are positioned fungal pods like they had found in the first room, but unlike those, each of these appears intact, the flaps of the bulbs held closed. The minotaur considers the sight, and purses her lips.
"Hrmm...now what strange test has the dungeon devised for us now?"
