223, 1/2

 

After a thorough explanation of Vanya’s ideas for a Grand Dungeon of Storm’s Edge, Soltic was impressed. Lord Jarod and Lady Glariol had been more than that. They had begun to speak of plans, and hidden resources, and what would need to happen, going forward, for Vanya’s plan to actually happen. Primarily, they needed to link with others in the city, to get the Church and the Regency and the Dungeon Guild ready to accept an adjustment of at least one of the seven dungeons. If the adjustments went well, and if others approved, then they could go forward with all the rest of the Grand Dungeon creation.

“The first major issue to solve is getting Vanya approved by the lords. We’ll set that up, but you have to follow through.” Lord Jarod finished with, “So hide. Delve for a while. Find out everything you can. We’ll contact you in four days with more information. Be prepared to defend your ideas, and your self.”

Soon enough, Soltic and Vanya were back at their rooms in the Dungeon Guild.

It was time for Erick to learn a special technique.

They were under an Obfuscation and Privacy spell, because Erick, as Erick, stood on one side of the room and Quilatalap, as Quilatalap, stood on the other. A simple grand rad hovered in the air between them. It was not special in any specific way, having been one of any number of suitable grand rads taken out of Quilatalap’s storage rooms for this task, but it was necessary to learn this specific trick; smaller rads didn’t pull in mana like a grand rad did. Even now, the grand rad was subtly shaping the manasphere around it, drawing in mana like a siphon, like a weaker version of a dungeon’s entrance, and core.

Erick shook out his hands to loosen up, then he reached his aura out to cover the rad, manually shaping a spell, humming as he did so, locking his resonance to the crystalline growth’s own resonance. Quilatalap looked on, not saying anything; just watching. Rapidly, Erick felt a connection to the rad take hold. The malformed sphere of crystal began to resonate with the very air, pulling in even more atmospheric mana; pulling in Erick’s mana—

The grand rad shimmered and cracked, filling the air with a spark of blue fire—

“Dammit,” Erick said, knowing what was coming already.

The grand rad suddenly flashed over, igniting like black powder, sending plumes of blue fire into the air. That fire washed over the room, alighting the space with tiny blue flames that began to turn orange as the bedding, the drapes, and the floor caught flame.

Grand rads were not normally so volatile, but this particular one was, for whatever reason. Quilatalap thought that the problem was on Erick’s end, and so, like he had said a few times already—

“You’re gonna want to [Return],” Quilatalap said, nonjudgmental.

Erick sighed. And then he [Return]ed to 10 seconds in the past, sending his cognizance into his perspective of before he had fucked up the experiment. The grand rad hovered before him, and Erick did not continue as he was supposed to. Instead, he looked to Quilatalap and said, “I have never needed to use [Return] so many times in a single day. Explain it to me again, in a different way than you did before.”

Quilatalap looked at him. “… How many failures has that been?”

“Three [Return]s. Catastrophic failure each time.”

“Maybe you’re trying too hard… Or have I suggested that already?”

Erick explained his process succinctly, “Elemental Book in my aura. Surround the rad. Resonate with the rad. Feel the words spill out of it. Don’t push too hard. It’s not [Editing Aura]; it’s simply checking on the makeup of the grand rad, of the organized structure of the mana therein.”

“Let’s try it from the second part of the process; might have more luck there.” Quilatalap moved on, explaining once again, “This experiment here is simply a test run, to get you familiar with the process of interfacing with a rad, but you won’t be able to interface with the dungeon core, and the developed version of this magic isn’t meant to allow you to interface directly with a dungeon core, anyway. This magic is to allow you to look as though from a grand distance; anywhere inside a dungeon core space. Close, far, doesn’t matter.

“So, this time, I want you to hold your mana open and let Elemental Book flow through the air to the grand rad. Don’t envelop the rad entirely. Check on it from afar.

“When your mana touches the rad, I want you to take that ephemeral connection and see what the Book tells you. You might make a spell out of it here on Veird, but the only way it’s going to work inside a dungeon is if you know how to work it correctly, without Script assistance.” Quilatalap added, “And you’re not trying to [Identify] the grand rad, though this spell is loosely based on [Identify]. You’re trying to mana sense the parameters of the dominant mana controller in the area. Different applications of this magic can let you identify Domain work without [Identify]ing anything at all.”

“[Identify] without [Identify],” Erick said, “Sure. I’ll try it again that way.”

Quilatalap nodded.

Erick stood a bit straighter. And then he held out his aura, flowed some Elemental Book through all of himself and also the air, and felt the subtle pull of the grand rad’s flow, tugging his Book into the malformed crystal. He watched the world with his mana sense…

And it was working this time. Erick did not get a blue box, but he did get to read the mana in the air. It was sort of like reading, anyway. It was also sort of like listening, and feeling, and knowing—

He got a blue box.

He also got a stream of words crossing through his senses, though they were more like idea-forms, and not like words at all.

Fire. Death. A malformation of snake and bird. A trickster that has been tricked. Level 59. Forms of Couatl. Variant. Killed by Death. Illusion and whimsy and hate. Kill the living. Transform bones into babies. Spread. Plague. Grow and tear. Strength 57. Vitality 89. Willpower 38. Focus 99. Age 3. Natural Flight. Decay Venom. Toxic Immunity. Fires of the Damned. Crawler of Pestilence. Drinker of the Damned. Floater in the trees. Strikes-from-behind…

As the deluge of information flooded Erick’s Sight, he rapidly began to understand that he was seeing the grand rad through the lens of Elemental Book, joined to the viewpoint of the Script. When he had that realization the information shifted; instead of being a floating impression of Elemental Book, of words, Erick saw fragments of events inside those words. The words were not simply telling a story, they were illustrating that story.

It was a story of the largest events in the Death Couatl’s life. The moment when the couatl turned into a thing of bones and venom and illusion magics; when it killed a group of pixies at the edge of pixie lands; when it was killed in return, and yet reformed later, for it was a natural undead and it could not be killed so easily as normal creatures could be killed.

Erick watched the death couatl die to the pixies, and its grand rad harvested from the body, ensuring that it remained dead. The grand rad had changed hands many times, Erick saw, but he could not see those hands, exactly. Whatever the case, it had ended up here, in this room, under this experiment…

Erick pulled back, then looked to Quilatalap.

Quilatalap was grinning. “It worked that time. What did you see?”

“A variant couatl. Death, Decay-Fire, along with the usual couatl bend toward Illusion. Pixies killed it eventually.” Erick said, “I got a spell, too. [Mana Reading]. Not a base spell, though. What’s the base spell?”

“[Identify]. Could also be [Witness]. Not sure.”

Erick scrunched his face. “ ‘Not sure’?”

Quilatalap chuckled. “[Mana Reading] isn’t a base spell like [Witness], because if it were then you’d have 10 ranks of it. You can’t buy it for a point, which means that it’s one of the hidden spells that you have to make yourself. In addition, [Mana Reading] is only ever attained by people who put a lot of effort into Book Magic and mana sensing and aura control, so the exact way that [Mana Reading] happens is up for debate.” Quilatalap shrugged. “An academic debate, too. It’s not even a useful spell in almost all ways, because, again, it’s Book Magic. You could probably ask Rozeta if you wanted to know the real truth of the progenitor of [Mana Reading]. I certainly don’t know how all the magic of the Script got there in the first place.”

Erick smiled a little at that. Sometimes, in their teaching sessions, he reached the end of Quilatalap’s knowledge, and every time it surprised him.

Quilatalap continued, “Anyway. With the level of personal control you have shown, you should be able to read a dungeon core rather well from anywhere inside a dungeon. From there, you can use what you find to plan a course of attack, or of change. The spell doesn’t give you any real power, though. Just information.” Quilatalap said, “Like. Let us pretend this couatl rad was a dungeon core. Using this magic, I would see that the couatl is death-aligned and dislikes pixies, so, in order to infiltrate the dungeon all the way down to its core without setting it off, I could transform myself into a full skeleton, and then walk into the place and talk about killing annoying pixies. I could do that for a day or two, and eventually the core would make contact with me because it would see in me a kindred spirit. From there, if I got closer to the core, or if I could at least have a direct line of sight to it, then I might be able to cast this same sort of magic again and get even better information with which to tailor the rest of my approach. At the very least, if the dungeon does not approach you, then you can use this sort of magic to track down the flow of mana in a dungeon, in more precise ways, and figure out where the core actually is. There’s a lot of caveats to the usefulness of this spellwork, and it is very soft in its usefulness, but when it works, it works well.”

Erick smiled a little bit. “Sometimes it takes Jane a week to find an uncooperative dungeon core.”

Quilatalap shrugged. “If you want to teach her this magic, you can, but it only really works on dungeon cores that aren’t trying to fuck you over. This sort of spell can be used to get a generalized, Book Magic interpretation of any active spell effect, actually. You can even use it against other people a little bit, but biology gets in the way of that. And, like I’ve said more than a few times, it’s Book Magic; it’s not precise, it’s not foolproof, it’s not to be relied upon. But it can give you clues to follow up on, if you know how to read it right.” He added, “Those caveats are why Book Magic isn’t more widely used; it relies too much on your own vision and point of view to make sense of what it’s sensing.”

“I get it, I get it. Jane probably wouldn’t be interested anyway.” Erick said, “I still don’t understand how she goes into dungeons all the damned time. And not just the nice dungeons, but the dungeons that have gone bad or been abused and who want to kill everyone for those hatreds.”

“Aye; she likely couldn’t use [Mana Reading], or simple mana reading.” Quilatalap said, “And don’t forget that some dungeons are simply born hostile to life. It might help to think of dungeons less like gate spaces, and more like alternate realities anchored to this one via a specialized mana core. Sometimes alternate realities are simply hostile to everything.”

“Ahh… Yeah. Kinda sad, isn’t it?”

Quilatalap shrugged. “Life is kinda sad sometimes, causing all sorts of possibilities to spring to being in the Dark, as we live and work and dream of other places and possibilities.”

“… Huh. You know… I don’t think I have a single Elemental Dream spell. Are there many of those?”

“There used to be a lot of Elemental Dream. Now, though, it’d call Dream one of the Very Esoteric Elements; mostly the realm of the gods these days. Maybe some Mind Mages, too. The Red Dream of the Orcols is both Dream and the domain of Aloethag, for instance.” Quilatalap said, “Elemental Dream is close to Elemental Illusion, but heavily angled toward Chaos. Some call Elemental Dream as Pure Chaos, but that’s untrue. Elemental Dream is very good for meeting others on a level field, exposing neither side to danger. Of course, Elemental Dream is very bad about doing what you want it to do, and working how you want it to work. When Paradox Wizards talk to other versions of themselves, that’s sort of like Dreaming.”

“Well that’s all rather interesting.” Erick moved the conversation back to the current work. “What’s the spell to change the dungeon without others knowing?”

“That was a little lie of mine. It’s actually just [Editing Aura], and many small pieces of the cores of dungeons I have worked on before. The only part you’re missing are the pieces of other dungeons, but you can accrete a small duplicate fraction of your own core and use that instead.”

Erick was chuckling. “You acted like you knew some special magics back there with Jarod and Glariol! It’s just [Editing Aura]!”

Quilatalap smiled warmly. “Us ‘cultists’ don’t give up information about ourselves nearly as well as you ‘xoatists’.”

Erick felt his face heat as his expression dropped. He whispered, “Gods above, I have to act like a Xoatist now, don’t I.”

Quilatalap chuckled, transforming back into Vanya before he was finished laughing, a deep belly mirth turning into a happy woman’s giggle. “We should visit the local Xoatist church!”

“No,” Erick said, as he turned into Soltic.

“It’ll be fun! We can see what they’re saying about you, you can half-die from embarrassment, and you can also see what a Xoatist service is like! Who knows! You might have to really pretend to be one of them in front of Lord and Lady Maryol.”

“I will get by with being thought of as a yet-another lying immortal, thank you very much.”

Vanya giggled again.

Before they continued with their day, Soltic opened a [Gate] back to Vanya’s grand rad hoard and she put the couatl rad back in its stasis lock on its appropriate shelf. And then it was time for dungeon delve #2, this time in dungeon 1, the central dungeon of the 7 dungeons of the Pit.

– – – –

The last delve of the day, the 4 pm slot, was one of the worst delves of the day for a few reasons, though you couldn’t tell any of those reasons without going inside. Even from the inside, things looked mostly normal.

But the air had a sinister quality to it that it didn’t have in the earlier delving time slots.

Stone barges covered the land in every direction, looking like the tops of thick walls in an open-air maze filled with water. Iridescent white coral growths stuck up here and there, like solid, 3-meter tall messes of porous bone, frozen in an unseen current. The sky above was the underside of a water’s surface, while the water down here, between the roads, was a dark abyss. Dungeon 1 looked almost identical to dungeon 5, from yesterday, but the absolute shape of it all was very different. Only someone who looked out for details could really tell the difference, though, and only in the shape of the roads and the positions of the coral.

Soltic spotted even more extra details than the normal ones. The water looked a little red in spots, but then, when he looked directly, the red was gone. The corals looked sharper; more brittle. The sky was dimmer, as though clouds held far above the watery surface.

And the amount of loot was less. That was the major change in the late-day delving time slot. The dungeon had to grow its loot; and that growing took time. The best time to delve was in the morning, at the crack of dawn, but those slots were reserved for the Regency forces; the public was not allowed in those first-loot dives.

Vanya strode across the shimmer of darkness that separated the safe entrance from the rest of the dungeon, headed toward the first coral growth, saying, “Even if the take is a lot less than at the beginning of the day, we gotta do a full clear, because I want some new clothes.”

A minor lie. They needed to do a full clear so that all the traps were sprung and all the danger was done, and then the core would become exposed. Theoretically. At least that’s what the Maryols had guessed and Vanya had also guessed; they didn’t really know. For all of the Maryol’s nobility and connections in Storm’s Edge, they were just adventuring nobles who existed outside of the system here at the Pit. They knew a lot, but not as much as insiders, and that was by the design of the Regency.

Vanya was of the opinion that the dungeon had maybe three zones. The first zone, where they were now, a ‘free for all zone’ at the second floor, where the fish and such lived and ate and did whatever, and then there was the third floor, where the core was. Though to call them ‘floors’ was a misnomer. This top ‘floor’ was surely a floor; it was flat and expansive enough. But the space below the barges, below the abyss, was likely a series of holding tanks filled with monsters, and completely not set up for people to move through.

Whatever the case, they needed a full dungeon run in order to force the dungeon to spend enough resources on driving Vanya and Soltic away so that there was less between her and the core. A delve through the second layer, beyond the abyss below, would be better, but that was not going to happen.

But in order to do a full clear up here…

Soltic frowned as he followed Vanya, saying, “So one of us has to attack the tentacles, enraging the octopus, and then we die, and the danger ramps up considerably.”

“You don’t have to attack the tentacles with me. You can keep a lookout for the radiant eel and try to kill it when it shows.”

Soltic breathed a bit, then said, “How about we try… I don’t know. Anything else in order to talk to the dungeon.”

“Well…” Vanya glanced back at him, and then paused her walk, and turned around. “Dungeons are places of controlled chaos, with a few different ways to do them correctly for the best benefit, but that benefit is measured out by the dungeon itself, and the values of two different people are often not the same at all. And yes, dungeons are people. It’s very possible to break the systems they impose in order to impose your own solutions. The purpose of the Trials of the Dark, after all, is to help people become stronger on their own merit. So, if you can break the dungeon, then you deserve to break the dungeon and impose your will upon it.” Vanya said, “Just know that if you break the dungeon by doing something truly outside of the scope of the dungeon, then you might actually break the dungeon, Soltic. This means that all the monsters are released, the bosses go wild, and a bunch of other shit happens, but you do gain access to the core, and are able to truly impose your will.” She asked, “So? Do you want to break the dungeon, and deal with that plague? Or do you want to do it normally, allowing me to get close to the core without causing any longer-term problems for us?”

“… Let’s do it normally. I’ll stand back and you can do whatever you want.”

Vanya smiled a little. “Thank you. I’ll attack the tentacles. Let it take me, or whatever it wants to do. You stand back.”

Soltic nodded a little, but said nothing else.

And Vanya turned to the coral they had reached while talking. It was a normal 3-meter tall tower of twisting ‘bone’, with a hollow cavity in the center that was filled with liquid light, and a little collection of gold wires inside that light. The wires were much smaller than they were the other day. This small bit was only worth about 3 or 4 gold, though it would have to be mixed with other metals and transformed into coins in order to be worth that much.

With a quick ripple of Force, Vanya severed the coral growth from top to bottom right, perfectly missing the cavity in the center. As a third of the coral slid off the tower and crashed into the water, the gold stood exposed among a splash of light, and Vanya grabbed the gold.

Instantly, bubbles burbled from the waters; 4 of them. Each bubble burst, releasing a toother; a rather standard variation of what happened to normal, small fish when they monsterized. As Vanya killed those toothers and pulled out the rads from the two real ones, Soltic stood back, preparing to watch Vanya die.

… And then nothing happened. The two copied toothers broke apart into motes of mana, while the red pools from the two real ones began to drip down the sides of the stone barge, into the waters. As blood spread, nothing happened—

Vanya had been waiting for it, but she stood up suddenly.

“Oh. Right,” Soltic said, realizing what Vanya had just realized. “We got to the second growth before the tentacles came out.”

Vanya smiled, and then they moved on to the second coral growth, saying, “This place has solid-set rules! I’m impressed.” With the passing of a monowire line of Force, Vanya carved her way into the second growth and then, with other magics, she pulled out the goods and stuffed it into a bag, along with the other rads. Bubbles burbled from the waters again, and a quick whip-crack of Force ended the decay-eel threat before it could get close enough to harm.

Putrid green eel slapped against the stone road—

A thick, red-purple tentacle, lined with fangs and suckers, whipped out of the water to slam onto the fish bits. Vanya met the intruder with a line of molecular Force, while laying several other lines of molecular Force all around her battlefield.

The tentacle crashed into the cutting wire and then, like it had touched a burning stove, or like it had strummed a cutting string on a banjo, the tentacle pulled back. Or at least it tried to. The wire had dug into the flesh, halfway, and when the creature pulled back, bleeding profusely, it didn’t pull directly backward. It retreated at an angle, cutting off a good section of its body, leaving behind a meter-long section of flesh, festooned with suckers and fangs and bright blue blood.

The ocean under the barges screamed—

A hundred tentacles reached up from the waters nearby, each of them already scrambling over themselves in their haste to get to Vanya, who had turtled-up behind layers and layers of monowire Force. It was not a one-sided battle, as Soltic had initially suspected it would be. Vanya was surprised her wires held out for more than half a second, too.

The wires didn’t even break in the assault, either. What got Vanya was much more simple than tentacles reaching for her, and capturing her, to rip her apart.

She lasted three seconds. Maybe three and a half seconds. Tentacles broke. Blue blood went everywhere. The ocean screamed. And water boiled over the edges of the stone walkway. A half a tentacle got through the wire cage, and that was it. The slickness of the floor is what actually did Vanya in. Perhaps an [Alter Friction] was used, too. Vanya put [Alter Friction] on her monowires, too, and that was a Force spell, in a Force dungeon, so it made sense that the octopus could do something similar.

Vanya had secured her footing with a flight spell, but that didn’t seem to matter.

She slipped. She carved herself upon her own defenses, and from there it was a quick end. The octopus got hold of her, and through a surge of water from the side…

Soltic watched as Vanya passed through her own slicer, and disappeared into the water, into a boiling of tentacles and an exultation of triumph from the octopus, still deep under the abyss, down below the stone barges. Soltic had remained 20 meters away this whole time.

All he could do was watch.

When the disaster was over, he sat himself down on the stone ground, and waited, mumbling to himself, “I thought I was done with therapy, but I suppose I have something new to talk about.” He sat there on the cold stone and watched, almost lazily, as a slow radiant eel came out of the waters to the right, glowing as bright as the sun. It plucked a distant coral from the roads, turning the bone-like material into countless iridescent white fish, and, perhaps lazily, took the gold wires down into the depths. The eel did this once more, and then a third time, but by then, Erick’s melancholy had turned to anger. He said to the dungeon, “Fuck you.”

He took aim. A well-formed and powered [Force Beam] lanced out of Soltic’s aura, traveling a much longer distance than a normal [Force Beam], to clip the radiant eel on the tail, scattering motes of radiance off into the air. The eel yipped, then dove down into the depths, before it could take the coral and its prize.

Soltic stood up and prepared for the tentacles to come for him. They weren’t supposed to, according to the dungeon’s design and history, but dungeons got weird sometimes.

Nothing happened for five minutes, and then the safe space by the dungeon entrance flashed over, completely dark. When the dark retreated Vanya stood there, naked and cognizant and then rapidly applying magics to herself to conjure her armor. Soltic knew that she did not really die; that she was always going to come back. But still, watching her be shoved through her own magic like that was…

“That was uncomfortable,” Vanya said, walking close enough that they were together again. She wrapped Soltic in a quick hug, then pulled away. “The octopus has a [Force Domain]. I probably could have taken it if it hadn’t taken over control of my Force spellwork.”

Soltic blinked a few times. “It took over your spellwork?” And then he realized. “Oh. It has Force Weaver— Oh. The dungeon only allows Force Magic but the dungeon master has Force Weaver, so… No wonder no one has ever been able to kill the octopus.”

The author’s narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

“It has something like Force Weaver; not sure if it has that Ability specifically. Whatever it was, it corrupted my natural connection to my mana, usurping control, but if I had a [Force Domain] I could have prevented that. It didn’t actually turn my Force Magic against me, though. Nor did it conjure Force of its own.”

Quilatalap had Domains of every possible kind. Erick even had a [Force Domain]. It wasn’t nearly as good as his Benevolence spellwork, but it was serviceable.

Vanya and Soltic did not have a [Force Domain], though.

Soltic asked, “Shall we do the rest of the dungeon? Worry about [Force Domain] later?”

“Sure.” Vanya added, “I have realized why the Regency and others like this dungeon like it is; it’s near perfect in its simplicity and safety. Do you know how difficult it is to find a Domain-holding monster? Impossi— Oh… Hmm.”

“… What?”

“Maybe it’s a person— The octopus, I mean. It might be a [Polymorph]ed person, inside that octopus— But. Hmm. Then why are there dungeon breaks at all?” Vanya looked out across the waters. “… A problem to tackle another day. Did the radiant eel come out?”

“Yeah. I clipped it when it tried to take a coral.”

“Good. From what I’ve heard, the eel shouldn’t return. Maybe we’ll get all the rest of the gold today!” Excitedly, she added, “And we’ll get that wyrm, too!”

Soltic almost said something else, about danger and death and other overly-worried things, but he decided to hold that comment back until the end of the delve.

They went to the next coral, Vanya popped it, and then the two of them together defended themselves from the sudden appearance of three great black sharks. There was no shark meat to be had, though, because all three were copies.

The next coral came with a swarm of toothers; 63 of them to start, and then an additional 30 when the first group didn’t inflict any damage. Several of them were real this time, so they collected those rads and added them to the new bag, held on Soltic’s back.

By coral #13, which was 2 corals away from the halfway point, Soltic and Vanya were facing an ocean-churning horde of toothers and smaller darters and a few larger, more problematic cephalopods. The funky-looking squids, each of them two meters tall and hanging back, floated in the air and acted like turrets. They were the real problem. Those 8-legged floaters fired [Force Bolt]s at Soltic and Vanya in bursts of 8, and also in series, releasing one Bolt right after the other.

Both Soltic and Vanya each had to employ floating Shield spells in order to fend off those Bolts. They had to recast those Shield spells a few times, too, but the Shields worked well.

Soon, they had reached the end of the line; a stone barge that ended at open water. On the other side of open water lay another stone barge. Between them lay a coral, growing tall and white in the watery light from above.

A quick snap of Force released the gold wires from the center. A pull-and-stuff placed the wires into Soltic’s bag, just in time for the water to boil all around the broken coral. The boiling spread, like ten thousand fish swam under the waves all around, and something had disturbed those fish to breach the surface.

And then, the coral before them plunged into the waves, as though it was yanked down by a god. A whirlpool formed where the coral had vanished. Darkness spread upward—

White water shot into the sky, and then transformed into a sleek, white dragon, endlessly coiling up from the depths, roaring with hate—

As the beast coiled in the air, Soltic realized a few fast facts. It was neither ‘white’ nor a ‘dragon’. It was dragon-shaped, but it was made out of coral and bone and blood and viscera, with yet another glowing spot in the center of it where the grand rad usually was in a wyrm. It certainly looked like a wyrm, but it was not a wyrm at all. Soltic had no idea why the delvers called it a wyrm when it clearly wasn’t, but Wyrm Season had been a rather well-controlled phenomenon for a decade now, so maybe the newer generations were simply not used to seeing a real wyrm.

The ‘wyrm’ roared, and flew into the sky, then rapidly came back down onto the other nearest coral, left behind from the previous treasure taking. The beast flickered with power as it crashed into the left-over growth, diving back into the water, and then curling up and around the stone barge, as it headed for another coral growth that Soltic and Vanya had broken in their passage.

Vanya rushed forward, giving chase, saying, “It’s getting healthier with each coral it eats! Come on! We gotta kill it fast!”

Soltic could see that, he supposed. He kept right up with Vanya, saying, “It’s not a wyrm at all.”

Vanya laughed as she shot a person-thick [Force Beam] at the ‘wyrm’, just behind its head. She clipped the beast and trailed a line of destruction down the white-thing’s flank, carving away coral and flesh as she went. The beast began to dodge, but Vanya’s aim was impeccable, and for a full 7 seconds, she carved away bits of the monster. Finally, though, her spell cut, and the beast, sensing weakness, howled and turned toward Vanya, rushing, mouth wide open, fangs of bone and coral ready to crush down—

Soltic and Vanya both shoved [Force Beam]s through its body, disrupting its form but not killing it. It kept rushing forward, right at the delvers, but Vanya erected a quick series of [Force Wall]s, and monowire cutters between them, along with a bunch of smaller magics.