Chapter 15: Chapter 14 – Obvious ending

As we walked through the portal the party was assaulted by a wave of scorching heat that was so hot we almost had to turn back right then, fortunately we all were high enough level that even though we couldn’t outright ignore the heat we could at least stand it as long as we didn’t stay on this floor for too long. I was expecting something like this as I noticed the portal into the dungeon had two very different sections too it and the second half had lava in it but I wasn’t too sure who else had noticed that.

‘Fucking hell its hot in here’ Henry complained, making it obvious that he hadn’t noticed the portal, ‘let’s get this over with as fast as possible.’

I looked around the floor to see that we were surrounded by a river of lava except for a path that was about 5 meters wide. I followed the path with my eyes to see that it wound around the floor so that we would have to double back on ourselves multiple times, this is going to take a while. As I looked around I couldn’t see any monsters anywhere on the floor which was odd so I immediately had my guard up, expecting some sort of trap.

‘I can’t see any monsters, this is going to be easier than I expected’ Henry said, unfortunately not thinking about why a dungeon wouldn’t have any monsters on its floor and quickly walking away.

‘Hey, wait a minute’ I said, I doubt anything I said would work but I had to at least try to get him to see reason, ‘Dungeons don’t just have empty floors, there are probably some traps around here’

‘Are you questioning my judgment,’ Henry shouted at me, ‘We were told that this is a new dungeon, maybe they haven’t put any monsters on this floor yet.’

At this Henry turned around and kept on walking with the rest of the party following him. However he didn’t make it five more steps before three magma people jumped up from the ledges that they were waiting from and tried to attack Henry. Luckily we were all able to react in time, Henry and Lois stopped one each with their shields while I created an earthen wall to stop the third attack.

They didn’t look like anything I had seen before; they had an obsidian body that had lava flowing through cracks kind of like blood, they were slightly taller than me at 5’10’’ and had deep orange flames instead of eyes. It looked like they had fire on the tip of their hands which is what they were trying to hit Henry with, that would probably not be pleasant to experience.

Somehow they could tell that I was the one that had cast the earthen wall and so was a squishy mage and started to turn around to attack me, fortunately both Henry and Lois used their taunts to get the attention off of me. I started to channel a [Stone Bullet] while the rest of the party attacked the monsters at random, not doing much damage. Once my spell was fully charged I sent it through the nearest fire elemental and the effect was instant, the monster shattered into thousands of obsidian shards.

Seeing that I could do so much damage I shouted, ‘Everyone target Lois’s one I will take care of the one attacking Henry’ at this Lois and Ant targeted the same elemental and even managed to take it down by the time I fired my spell and took down the last elemental.

‘I don’t appreciate you taking charge in the middle of combat’ Henry stated indignantly ‘I am this party’s leader if you have forgotten’ I decided to ignore him as I didn’t want to get into an argument in here.

‘Is everyone OK?’ Kyra asked, ready to heal anyone that needed it. No one spoke up as we had reacted fast enough that the elementals didn’t get a chance to hit anyone. Once we had had a minute for the adrenaline to leave our systems we carried on, a little more cautiously this time. While we walked I cast another stone bullet but held it in preparation for the next encounter, Anthony had knocked an arrow in case something happened.

About five minutes later we came across the next encounter, it was another 3 of those elementals again, except this time I was prepared so as soon as I saw one I shot my bullet at them, instantly killing it before the fight could even start. Lois and Ant were also prepared and attacked another one of the elementals but couldn’t take it down, getting a bit more confident and deciding that she didn’t need to save all her mana for healing Kyra cast [Spiritual Weapon] in the form of a quarterstaff and hit the elemental, dealing enough damage to take it down.

The final elemental was taken down before I could recast [Stone Bullet] and we kept on going, Kyra could keep the spell active for 10 minutes before she had to cancel it to conserve mana for emergency heals so we needed to hurry if we wanted to use it efficiently. Unfortunately we weren’t lucky and the next encounter took 8 of those minutes to find, this time it had 3 elementals again but this time they were joined with 3 red slimes that I assumed were fire slimes.

By this point even if our leader was incompetent we had fought together enough that we knew what everyone else would do without thinking about it so we just did it. I stone a bullet at the chest of one of the elementals while Lois and Ant attacked the slime that was in melee with Lois, killing it in an instant, while Kyra brought her spiritual weapon to one of the elementals and smashed down on it from above.

The elemental received heavy cracks but it was still alive, maybe if Henry was paying more attention he could have finished it off but he was too preoccupied with a slime and an elemental. Instead of attacking the weaker opponent Henry just waled on the elemental just chipping away at it slowly. As I was charging up my second bullet Kyra hit the cracked elemental again this time destroying it completely, Lois and Ant took care of another slime which just left what Henry was fighting.

He looked pretty intent on killing the last elemental and I didn’t want him shouting at me for stealing his kill so instead I shot the last slime. The bullet hit the slime but it was slowed considerably by its bounciness so I was worried that I hadn’t done enough damage, luckily I barely did enough and the core split in two killing the slime. It seemed as everyone else had also had the same idea as we all stood around and watched for the next minute as Henry hacked at his target, we would have stepped in if we felt like he needed us.

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Eventually Henry smashed the elemental and turned around to us before saying, ‘Right, better keep on moving before we get boiled alive’ clearly not having noticed that we were waiting on him. We kept on walking for four minutes before we saw six slimes that were just bouncing around on the path, I thought it was a bit odd but I doubted every encounter on this floor was a trap so we approached them.

When we got about 50 feet away from them they started to shoot some firebolts at us so I used my stone bullets to stop as many as I could while Henry and Lois used their shields to bloke the rest, a few bolts managed to hit out front-line but it wasn’t enough to deal any serious damage. Kyra was still recouping her mana so she stayed out of the fight for now while the rest of us slowly whittled the slimes down one by one.

When there was only two slimes left and we had let our guard down the elementals struck, by the time I had noticed them three elementals had managed to take down Anthony. Reacting as fast as I could I cast [Stone armour] to encase myself in stone and stood between them and Kyra, I didn’t have time to cast a [Stone bullet] so instead I just tried to be annoying as possible to them.

It only took a minute for the two paladins to take down the slimes and return to me, my armour had taken massive damage in that time so I retreated behind Lois while channeling my [Stone Bullet]. Lois took the two on left while Henry only took one on the right, I used my first spell to even the odds and take down the undamaged elemental and by the time I had cast the second bullet Lois had taken down her other elemental so I hit Henry’s elemental as we couldn’t wait for him to finish it off.

With the fight over Kyra ran over to Anthony, unfortunately it was too late so we had to wait for the dungeon to revive him in an hour. In that time we didn’t talk much other than when Henry said how stupid we were for not expecting the elementals to come up behind us even though he also failed to see it coming.

Once Anthony had been revived I spoke up ‘It is clear that we are not going to be able to beat this floor. We are too disorganised and we even lost one of us in this last encounter, the boss fight is going to be too tough for us and if we leave then we won’t get punished.’

‘I am sure you would love for us to turn back now’ Henry stated, clearly annoyed at me ‘from what I can tell we are almost halfway to the boss and they only took down Anthony by luck, it won’t happen again.’

No one else spoke up as they didn’t want to anger Henry so I reluctantly followed the rest of the party. About five minutes later we came across a chest which just made Henry more sure of himself ‘see, if we had turned around like you said we wouldn’t have found this loot’ Henry said as he opened the chest. It wasn’t much better than the chests on the first floor as it had a total of 6 gold coins in change, 2 healing potions and an iron helmet. Henry took the iron helmet, a healing potion and 2 gold coins worth of the loot, he gave the other healing potion to Lois and then gave each of us 1 gold coin each.

After we had split up the loot we kept on going for 3 minutes until we came across the next encounter, this time it was only 4 elementals and we cleared them up pretty quickly, not needing any healing. Then the next encounter was 4 elementals joined by 4 fire slimes, in the past few encounters we found that one of Anthony’s arrows could take down a fire slime so I took down an elemental with a stone bullet and Anthony killed a slime with an arrow before the fight even started.

Henry and Lois taunted the rest of the monsters but it looked like we were going to get overrun so Kyra recast [spiritual weapon] and helped Henry deal with his elementals, one of the slimes had slipped past the taunts so Anthony quickly took care of that. I sent another bullet to kill the last elemental that was fighting Lois before turning to the slimes as by this point Kyra and Henry had taken care of his two elementals

The last two slimes weren’t much trouble and we were quickly on our way again. We may not have been hit much but Kyra and I were running low on mana again and Anthony was starting to run out of arrows but we were close to the end so I didn’t bring up returning to the surface.

We walked a bit more before running into a single slime and two elementals, which was a bit odd so this time I kept my eye out for some sort of trick. Ant and I took care of one of the elementals and the slime immediately and Kyra still had her spiritual weapon up so she started to work on the other. The last elemental suddenly started to crack and we thought that it was dead but instead of its body falling to the floor and leaving nothing behind this time it left behind a body of pure lava as it turned tail and ran away at a speed that I didn’t realise they had.

Before I could react Henry shouted after it and chased it, we couldn’t really leave him to die in the obvious trap so we raced after him. Unfortunately that just put us in the trap as well as after a minute of running three more elementals and four slimes popped up from the side and attacked us. I had been to focused on running to cast [Stone Bullet] so I had to start as soon as I saw them and by the time it was ready they had already taken down Anthony, he took down two of the slimes with him but I doubt that would help.

I shot my bullet at the closest one and killed it but I couldn’t cast it before the rest of them got to me and without either of our paladins to protect me I went down incredibly quickly, as I went down my point of view left my body so I was able to watch the rest of the fight but I couldn’t help. By this point Kyra and Lois had noticed them and Lois was standing between them and Kyra tanking a lot of hits, Kyra was using all of her energy trying to keep Lois alive and using her [Spiritual Weapon] to whittle down the elementals.

Unfortunately she could only take down two of them before she ran out of mana and Lois went down with Kyra soon to follow. During this henry had kept on chasing the runaway elemental like the idiot he is, it had stopped running when I went down but started to dodge all of Henry’s attacks. By the time Henry had managed to land a lucky hit and kill it the rest of the party was down and he was too distracted to see the elemental sneak up behind him and strike his back, instantly downing him.

With the party defeated I felt my consciousness fade as we were transported to the dungeon entrance where it would revive us with our punishments, I felt annoyed that I wouldn’t be able to adventure for a while but I felt like the experience was worth it and I got to meet Kyra. Before my consciousness fully faded I heard a voice in my head say ‘hmm, I could use you, maybe a different punishment will be useful.’