Chapter 20: Chapter 20: Dungeon Virgin No More

CHAPTER TWENTY

Dungeon Virgin No More

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“Duck!” someone yelped.

I dropped to my knees out of instinct, which was when I heard a squeaky bellow of challenge come from behind me, and I glanced up just in time to see the creature’s sharp-nailed attack blocked by Morph’s battered-looking kite shield.

“Sorry,” Morph squeaked. “I know you don’t need help, but—”

“Don’t sweat it.” I rose back to my feet and then hefted my glaive in both hands. “Teamwork, I get it.”

Despite looking like it had been through the wringer one too many times, a dull bluish glow emanated from the dark metal Morph’s shield was made out of.  

“Cold iron?” I guessed.

Morph nodded. “We learned that cold iron repels monsters in Blacksmithing. So, I asked Delphine to forge me one.”

“Delphine?” My brow creased. “That’s the redhead dwarf girl, right?”

“Yes.” Morph aimed his shield forward, keeping the creature back while maintaining his aggro on it. “Her work’s cheap and go—”

Morph hadn’t noticed that another creature had appeared at the edge of the miasma, so I grabbed him by the collar and yanked the infernal away from the attack aimed at his blind side. Then I twirled my glaive around so that the blue stone pommel would be right-side-up and ready to amplify my next spell’s power.

Now, Volcanic Step might have been overkill for these guys, so I opted to use a simple blast of arcane force all mages could theoretically use. With a cry of, “You shall not pass!” which any proper nerd would yell at these moments, I slammed the pointy end of my glaive down on the craggy stone floor, causing a near-invisible wave of magical energy to burst outward from the point of impact and force the two creatures stalking us to stumble backward.

“Now, Morph!” I yelled.

Morph took the opportunity I gave him to rush forward and skewer one of the creatures in the gut with his scimitar. Meanwhile, I dispatched the other one with a sideward swipe of my glaive that sliced through its poorly protected neck like a knife cutting through a slab of butter.

We’d killed two of the creatures in that one-two combo, although it wasn’t much of a victory now that many more of these little monsters were appearing out of the miasma to surround us.

“Why are there so many of them?” I heard Dess complain, to which Lohgan responded with, “Less chatter and more slaying!”

The growing number of monsters didn’t worry me much though. I was sure I could have dealt with these creatures easily enough if I needed to, but I also wanted to see just how talented my teammates were, which they proved quickly enough once Dess, Lohgan, and Brunhilde each dispatched a creature without much effort.

I watched Dess throw her shield accurately at the head of a monster that had been gunning for Scaredy Cat, who, as the team’s healer, didn’t have anything to do because no one in my team had been injured yet. As soon as this creature was forced back, two daggers embedded themselves in its chest, causing it to topple over and die.

The two daggers that had been embedded in the creature’s chest blinked out of existence only to reappear in Lohgan’s hands. Meanwhile, Dess caught her shield as it bounced back to her, and her delight at that successful ‘Shield Throw’ was conveyed on her face.

Brunhilde wasn’t being idle either. She’d just finished lifting two of the little monsters into the air with a pillar of wind that had been so subtle in its activation that I didn’t even sense her cast the magical pillar.

I whistled. “We’re a mixed bag of talent… groovy.” 

Things got a bit tougher once the number of enemies grew to three per novice, which weren’t good odds for apprentices no matter how talented we were. So, it was a relief to hear the war cries resounding all around us which signaled the arrival of our reinforcements.

“Yo-yo-yo, get your wee heads in the game, supply team!” Koby Grimm yelled. “Light those sage lamps, and cream these fools with its magic beam!”

Despite his lame rhyme, Team Six was quick to follow Koby’s advice. We disengaged from the fight so we could join Scaredy Cat who’d been waiting for us beside the supply cart we were responsible for.

“Um, here you go...” He passed each of us an iron candle lamp he pulled out of the cart. “One lamp each...”

“Let’s light them up!” Dess said with glee. Although this was easier said than done.

I quickly discovered that something as simple as lighting a candle wick became a challenge when one was being pressured by the threat of violence so close by, and a glance at my teammates told me I wasn’t the only one having an issue with shaking hands.

Again, this wasn’t fear. It couldn’t be. Although I will admit to feeling the pressure of my first dungeon experience. It was both a weird but refreshing sensation for me, the dungeon virgin, who faced death on an almost daily basis without flinching.  

“Baldr’s balls, relax, pal,” I chided myself. “Do it just like we practiced.”

When I finally managed to light my lantern, the scent of sage wafted out of it. I breathed it in and felt a calm return to my senses.

“Finally...” I raised the lantern high. “Eat sage, you evil little veslingrs!”

Now that I was seeing them at work, I realized that these sage lamps were pretty damn useful. Not only did their light dispel the creeping shadows gathered around us, but the scent of the sage molded into the candle repelled the miasma’s evil taint which I belatedly realized had been the cause of my slow descent into a panic. Sage lamps also had the bonus effect of revealing what exactly was lurking in the dark to attack us.

As the shadows and miasma receded around us, nearly two dozen sluagh came into view, and our raid’s first monster encounter truly began.

“Salt grenade!” Helm Grimm yelled.

His cry was answered by Liara, who’d come into view on my right peripheral with a metal canister about the size of a soda can in her hand. She threw this ‘salt grenade’ at these hobbit-like monsters that I’d read in the bestiary of Divah’s guide were like the Irish cousins of goblins.

The canister flew in an arc and then dropped in the middle of a cluster of sluagh. Pressurized vapor burst out in all directions, spraying the sluagh in a liquid salt solution that burned their skin as it made contact.

I heard their ear-splitting screeches of pain as the salt’s purifying nature caused the sluagh damage, and I couldn’t help cheering along with everyone else.  

“Do all monsters burn at the touch of salt?” Morph asked.

“I’m certain I’ve already explained this in past lectures, Mr. McMorbid.” Mistress Lorelai appeared between the two of us like she’d been spit out of the shadows on the ground. “Salt works best on undead creatures, which is what sluagh are.”

Mistress Lorelai’s wolf-eyed stare was enough to make the sluagh near us flinch away from her gaze, giving our dökkálfar instructor the space she needed to turn this fight into a field lesson.  

“Now, who can give me more details about this specific breed of undead monster?” Mistress Lorelai asked.

It was impressive how she managed to make it seem like we were in the safety of a classroom while she pierced the gut of a sluagh that had been suicidal enough to charge Mistress Lorelai solo with her spear.

“Anyone?” she called, her tone sounding more insistent.

“The sluagh are said to be minor demons born from the souls of Irish sinners,” Dess answered quickly.

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“That’s the myth. I want facts.” Mistress Lorelai shoved Morph forward and right into the path of a charging sluagh. “Come on, novices... this is an easy question!”

“Sluagh are creatures born of a child’s petty envy for things that belong to other children,” Liara spoke up.

She’d arrive to assist Morph with the sluagh hacking away at his kite shield.

“They share physical similarities to Alfheim goblins, but also possess qualities exclusive to the undead category listed in the book Monstrous Beasts and How to Hunt Them.” Liara’s explanation came at the end of another sluagh which had been cut down by her spell-saber’s gleaming blade.

I noticed that her spell-saber sparkled like it had been coated in a sheet of frost, and I wondered just how many spells Liara’s grimoire had given her as a signing bonus. Surely not more than mine, right?

“A point to the tower for your thorough answer, Ms. Lockwood,” Mistress Lorelai smiled. It was a smile that turned upside down when her gaze fell on Morph. “Perhaps you should pay attention in class more, Mr. McMorbid... It might just save your life next time.”  

Now, what was I doing this whole time, you ask? Nothing. Unless you count keeping my lantern raised high an achievement, which I didn’t. Honestly, though, there were way too many competent cooks in this kitchen, and, like Sun Tzu said; The mark of a great warrior is that he fights on his own terms or fights not at all.

A wounded sluagh drifted toward me with wide, weepy eyes that were just pitiable to look at. My pity evaporated the instant it hurled itself at me with outstretched claws though. And, while I smacked it away with the butt of my glaive as if it were no more than a mere nuisance, I reminded myself of another lesson from Divah’s guide.

Too many adventurers have been led to their deaths by a monster’s smile. Learn from their mistake. See beyond the glamour and into the heart of one most vile.

Our two teams and one instructor made short work of the remaining sluagh. Then, with the battle ended and the miasma temporarily receding, Mistress Lorelai led us to the rest of the raid group, which was also showing signs of winning a recent battle. The tiny bodies of the same undead monsters that had attacked us littered the ground around them with most of my fellow novices looking relatively unscathed.  

“We’ll take a short rest here,” Mistress Lorelai announced.

At her words, my class’s resident blonde Viking, Bjorn, approached one of the sluagh corpses with a carving knife in hand and a greedy look in his eyes.

“Do you even know how to carve out a sluagh’s corpse, Bjorn Ericsson?” Mistress Lorelai asked.  

“Uh…” Bjorn the Viking looked flustered under the scrutiny of our dökkálfar instructor’s steely gaze. “I was just trying to—”

“Can you guarantee you won’t spoil the quality of the materials?” Mistress Lorelai’s eyebrow was arching slowly. “Need I remind you that none of the shops in Lower Yggdrasil will buy anything in poor condition?”

With his pale cheeks turning a bright shade of apple, Bjorn the Viking began backing away from the monster’s corpse. Interestingly enough, several other novices who were attempting to do the same thing quickly jumped back into their teams.

“This is why we hire professional collection crews”—Mistress Lorelai’s milky purple eyes scanned our faces—“who will come to do the work for us once we’ve made this floor safe for them to traverse.”

No one seemed inclined to disagree with her, although I thought this step of having someone else farm your materials sounded lazy and expensive. Especially since material farming was an important and necessary skill all adventurers should have. At least that was Divah’s excuse for being stingy about hiring outside help.

“Clean yourselves up, eat a power bar or drink some sage tea. Those of you with professions can set up shop here... We’ll move out in forty-five minutes,” Lieutenant Doyle recommended.

After begging off from following Dess around the hastily raised stalls of my fellow novices, I found a nice little corner to lay my sleeping bag on. One far away from the hammering of apprentice smiths or the chanting of enchanters-in-training.

“You’re going to sleep?” asked a voice from right behind me.

I couldn’t tell Liara that taking a thirty-minute nap for me was like making a save point in a video game that would, in the unlikely chance of my death, ensure I wouldn’t have to redo the entire day and just come back to life at this moment in time. Instead, I simply said, “A nap a day will keep the doctor away.”

Liara sat on the floor next to me. “No one says that...”

“I say that,” I countered.

I noticed her brows were furrowed more than usual.

“What is it?”

“Keep this to yourself, alright?”

“Who would I tell? I barely know anyone here.”

Liara wasted another precious minute of my nap time before the she-elf revealed that she’d overheard our instructor and guide discussing how there were way too many monsters present on the second floor when another raid group of adventurers had already swept through this dungeon’s first five floors only a few days ago.

“Lugh’s Lament only has ten floors, and the official dungeon suppression force led by the Golden Bow is already clearing out its sixth floor,” Liara said.

“But if they’ve already eliminated the bulk of the monsters on the upper floors, then what about our quest?” I asked. “Weren’t our targets supposedly down on the third floor?”

“They must not have found the specific monsters responsible for the situation in Kells Falls,” Liara reasoned. “It’s impossible to fully explore a dungeon floor in one run... there are far too many hidden passages that would take a group even as famous as the Golden Bow more than a few days of dungeon delving to discover.”

I noticed a strange melancholy flash on Liara’s face after she mentioned the Golden Bow a second time, and I wondered if she was somehow connected to the popular guild that I’d often read about in the Realmsverse Times.

“You know someone from the Golden Bow?” I asked.

Liara deflected my question with one of her own. “Weren’t you planning to take a nap?”

I didn’t pester Liara for an answer though as I had already decided earlier on to wait for her to tell me her origin story. Because, as Divah’s guide suggested; Information given freely is unspoiled by coercion’s guiding hand.

“Maybe you’re right about this dungeon having secret passages...” I stifled a yawn while tactfully changing the topic. “Maybe the sluagh hid in one of these passages and they’re just now coming out because they think our group’s too weak to fight them.”

“Maybe... but Mistress Lorelai sounded worried,” Liara insisted.

“Lorelai, worried?” I glanced over at the dark elf who was teaching some spear-wielders how to properly twirl their spears in ways that would keep enemies at bay. “Does that monster look worried to you?”

“No. I guess not.”

I lay on my sleeping bag and shut my eyes with the vision of Liara’s worried face being the last thing I’d see.

“She’d tell us if there was a problem...”

“And if she doesn’t?”

Then me taking a nap would be a good thing for everyone, I thought, but I didn’t say it out loud. “We’ll deal with it... that’s the job.”

On that confident note, I let sleep take me while wondering if Liara planned to sit by my side throughout my nap.