Chapter 127 – Dungeon Dreams II

Alfric moved slowly to the room’s brass door. They were well and truly lost in the dungeon, which wasn’t a good thing to be, especially not so quickly in. This was worse than the shifting of the earlier dungeon, where they’d been poisoned, and the periodic thrum took on an ominous quality now that they were trapped. Still, there were doors, ways out, paths that might lead them further away or closer to the exit. What would have been worse was nothing to try, if there had been no clear route by which an attempt at escape might be had.

He wondered whether this, too, was Verity.

It might represent her feeling lost in her life, or her disconnection from her parents, or it might have just been random. The thrum that washed through the dungeon was definitely her, or if it wasn’t, then an enormous coincidence. The hundred lutes were her, or — no, definitely her.

They’d come into the dungeon early in the morning, which meant that they had time. That was the one thing on their side.

<We make our way through the rooms,> he said. <Just like normal.> He was painfully aware that it wasn’t normal, and that they hadn’t done a dungeon in a long time. The party hadn’t rushed back into the dungeons after the failures, which meant the party had a long lag between when they’d fought.

<Brass or wood?> asked Mizuki.

Alfric had been moving toward the large brass door rather than the smaller sliding wooden one. He stopped and considered.

<Wood is less defensible,> said Hannah. <Should something try to come through, at our backs.>

<Brass is larger,> said Alfric. <More likely to be a big room, which is more likely to have exits, which gets us closer to the end.>

<Your call,> Hannah nodded.

Alfric could feel that he’d changed. He’d lost confidence. The answer of which door to pick should have been obvious, or not obvious, but at least the arguments should have sprung clear and fully formed from his mind. He should have made a decision. He took in a breath and tried to focus himself. He thought about what his mother had said, which was that training was something you carried with you, a tool that never left your side, and if you had it, then you could use it even when your mind was failing you in other ways. He let out the breath.

<Isra, we’re going to use the bucket of mice,> he said. It wasn’t the time to creep along, it was time to use contingencies.

She nodded, slowly.

The bucket of mice wasn’t an actual bucket, that was just what Mizuki had called it. Instead, it was a wooden box held in the garden stone which had a number of cubbies in it for the mice to sit in. Isra could control them with relative ease, given their small size, and better, she could see through their eyes.

It took time to get the mice out. They transferred the box into the trunk, where it fit somewhat snuggly, by design. It was on top of the lutes, and Alfric once again had cause to thank the trunk’s ability to stop things from crushing each other.

<One mouse in each room,> said Alfric. <Keep them stationed. Some of them we’re using for scouting.>

Isra frowned. <We’re doing this?>

<I think so, yes,> said Alfric. <We have a windfall, we’re trapped in here, and I want to have a handle on this shifting dungeon. Give them a small bit of food, make sure they’re comfortable.>

Isra nodded. She opened the box and took a mouse out, then set him on the ground with a bit of food. A second and third mouse were held in her hand. They were small brown field mice, skittish little things, captured from a meadow earlier that morning, before breakfast. Isra hadn’t liked this contingency, and hadn’t been able to articulate why, but she had agreed to it.

<Both at once, or together?> she asked.

<One just inside the wooden door,> said Alfric. <We’re only opening it a crack, will confirm that there’s nothing, then have it sit there. Second one goes through the brass door, in the same way, but that one we’ll send running.>

<They’re not going to like the sound,> said Isra. She had wanted the mice to live. She was comfortable with killing, even with killing animals that she had touched with her druidic powers, but there was something in the nature of this that gave her pause. It gave Alfric pause too.

<You’ll be able to compensate?> he asked.

<Yes,> she replied.

They waited as the mice did their work, particularly the right mouse, which was scouting ahead. It was dark, and the mice had no light to move by, but Alfric was hoping they could make their way anyway. Animals had better night vision, but dungeons could be brutally dark.

Alfric waited. He tried to keep his eyes from Isra, who was, at the moment, the only one actually doing anything.

She swore, a sharp Kiromon curse she must have picked up from Mizuki, and shook her head. <It’s dead,> she said. <Attacked. Something big and fast.>

<Should they be attacking a mouse?> asked Mizuki.

<It’s one of the things I talked about in the guild,> said Isra. <The consensus was that they wouldn’t attack an animal unless I had a piece of myself in it. It’s not clear why.> Her dark skin was looking more pale than usual.

<Are you okay?> asked Alfric.

<I didn’t like that,> said Isra.

<No scouting then,> said Alfric. <We need to get moving anyway, we don’t want to be in —>

The thrum happened again, cutting him off. He hadn’t forgotten about it, exactly, but he hadn’t been tensed for it. He covered his ears, as they all did. It was five seconds, and then he went back to talking.

<We don’t want to be in this dungeon too long,> he finished.

<Does it make sense to keep them in these rooms?> asked Isra. <The mice?>

Alfric chewed his lip as he thought about that. <You can sense how far away they are. In theory, that means if the rooms and hallways are shifting, you’ll be able to tell that you have a weaker connection, right?>

<Yes,> said Isra. She still seemed uncomfortable. <How would we get the mice back?>

<You’d call them,> said Alfric.

<If the dungeon keeps shifting?> asked Isra.

<Then we wouldn’t get them back,> said Alfric. He didn’t like to say it, but it needed to be admitted up front. The death of a single mouse had affected her more than he had thought it would, for as proficient of a hunter and trapper she was.

<Okay,> said Isra. She nodded. <One in each room, until we run out.>

There were ten of the mice in total, which was more than they had thought they would need. Really, they hadn’t thought they would need any of them. The hope had been that they would release the mice back into the meadow they’d been taken from that morning, having given them treats for their service. One was already gone.

<So we kill the thing that killed the mouse, right?> asked Mizuki. She was looking at the brass door. <Fireball time?>

<Yeah,> said Alfric. <Fireball time.> He looked at Isra. She was subdued, and he wished that he could help, but they were also stuck in the dungeon until they could find the entrance again, and he needed her to be sharp and ready. He didn’t have the words though. He watched Verity squeeze Isra’s arm, and Isra nodded. He hoped that was enough.

When he pushed through the brass door though, Isra stopped him.

<It’s different,> she said. She pointed down to where the wall met the floor. <There was wooden trim there.>

Alfric nodded. <Shifting rooms. Everyone stays together, whatever we do. We’ll have the party channel. If we get split up, hang tight until we can talk it over.>

<Split up?> asked Mizuki. <I’m not good solo.>

<You’re not good solo?> asked Verity.

<Does she think that healers are good solo?> asked Hannah.

<You’re like the best solo,> said Mizuki. <You’ve got armor, a giant weapon, self-healing, offensive magic, what’s not to love?>

<Focus,> said Alfric.

<Fine, sorry,> said Mizuki with a wave of her hand. <It’s just you also want me to be loose and not worried, you said, because I almost killed you last time.>

<Focus and also relax,> said Alfric. He took a breath and tried, again, to steady himself.

<We could just stay here,> said Hannah. <Close doors, open doors, see if we happen to be right next to the entrance. No knowin’ how long it would take, but we might be able to get out that way.>

<Or we might be moving further away from the entrance,> said Alfric. <We don’t know how big this place is.>

<Fifteen rooms, on the high end, should be,> said Hannah.

<If the number of rooms matches the number of entads,> said Alfric. <That would be one hundred and fifty.> This was a horribly rough approximation, an attempt to make sense of the dungeon. <We close doors, we open doors, we could be trapped here for ages. And if we’re still here when we’re anywhere approaching the witching hour, it has to be a reset.>

<You think that’s realistic?> asked Hannah. <A hundred fifty rooms?>

<Yes,> said Alfric. <Which yes, would mean so many fights we’d only get through them all — I don’t know.>

<If they were easy?> asked Verity. She had a mild expression, which was good. He didn’t want her to feel as though this was all her fault.

<We should get moving,> said Alfric. He was keenly aware that they were saying they would start and then stopping again. He blamed himself, but they were in an uncertain situation.

The brass door led down a hallway with thick brick walls and a stone floor. It, too, was dark, illuminated by the lantern disc that was hanging around his neck. Alfric kept his eyes ahead, to the room at the hallway’s end. He was able to see two pale green reflections of his light far before the beast came running towards them.

It was small, as the beasts went, the size of a goat, with an oversized head and eyes that were each the size of a ripe orange. The head lolled as it charged at them on thick hooves, and it gave a high, piercing screech. It had no horns or antlers, and not even really a flat, thick skull like Alfric would have expected. Instead, it opened its mouth wide, showing teeth that weren’t particularly sharp, as though it was planning to do a charging bite.

Alfric had his armor ready to spring into action and his bident held in front of him. He was worried about what the catch was, but there was no catch. The creature cleanly impaled itself on his bident, its screech brought to a sudden end by the bident going into one of its lungs. Alfric held it there for a moment. It couldn’t have weighed more than eighty pounds. He detonated the bident and the creature died in an instant.

Alfric withdrew the bident and looked back down the hallway. Where there was one, there could be two. He moved forward, stepping over the creature’s body, until he was in the room. There were no other creatures in there, nor any doors. There was a dresser, with a jar of honey sitting on top of it, and a vase with fresh flowers. A counter ran across one side of the room, like something that you’d find in a general store, but the shelves beneath it just had little glass sculptures of indistinct things, if they weren’t just meant to be abstract bits and bobs of glass.

<Clear,> said Alfric.

<That thing was dumb,> said Mizuki.

<Yeah,> said Alfric. <From my understanding of things, at our elevation, most of them should be like that.>

<What was its game plan?> asked Mizuki. <Bite you? You’re wearing an absurd amount of armor.>

<Dungeon madness,> said Alfric. <It can make things easy. They see you, they charge, you kill them. It’s one of the ways that it can work.>

<No magic,> said Mizuki, looking around. <Though I guess we should check the dresser.>

Alfric looked back the way they came while Mizuki was piling clothes into the chest. The door was still open.

<Incoming thrum,> he said. He was watching the other room, or at least what he could see of it. He slid the armor down so it wasn’t covering his head, then clamped his hands over his ears and replaced the armor. It wasn’t necessary, the thrum wasn’t that loud, but it was more comfortable. Alfric was very aware that they might be caught out by the sound at some point and need to tough it out in the middle of combat, and he was trying to prepare himself for that eventuality. He was also aware that they might be hearing the sound another hundred times. The interval was regular, and each one represented time slipping away.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

<Nothing magical,> said Mizuki. <Also most of those wouldn’t fit a human unless she had a double torso. Which I don’t think is a thing.>

<Still useful to take,> said Aflric.

<I know, I know,> said Mizuki. <Alterations or rags or whatever. I put them in the chest, didn’t I?>

<Sorry,> said Alfric.

<You were watchin’ the end, ay?> asked Hannah. She’d come to stand next to him.

<Yes,> said Alfric. <I didn’t see it change, but … I don’t know. It might have. We’ll see when we go back.>