Chapter 85: 5.9 – What Lies Beneath

Robin sank to the cold stone of the floor so he could catch his breath. It wasn’t a pleasant process. The dead bodies of the various monsters that had attacked them had already begun to stink. Worse even than when they were alive.

Still, the bard was thankful for the opportunity to rest.

Rerebos was chasing a lone surviving ghaz-ur up among the stalactites. Robin could feel his bloodlust through their empathic bond. The little dragon should be fine. The rest of the party’s attention was firmly on ground level and the carnage around them.

Savra was seeing to several small wounds Khavren had sustained. Drev and Jhess had taken less damage but were (like Robin) exhausted by the exertion.

Drev was probably particularly low on magical energies at this point. Robin had sent the barrage of missiles that had reduced Drev’s double to a bloody mist. The mage had to have spent some serious juice on that attack.

‘Did you even find anything?’ Khavren was demanding of their rogue.

‘No,’ Jhess said. ‘We were interrupted.’

‘Which honestly just goes to show that we’re on the right track.’ Robin had extra reason to know that was so, but he didn’t bring that up now.

The bard kept one ear quirked in case the dungeon let anything else slip in its ire. It had to be fuming that its attack had failed to drive them into retreat—away from whatever around here was so interesting.

‘What do you mean?’ Khavren looked sceptical.

‘If we weren’t close to something interesting the dungeon wouldn’t have sent those monsters specially to attack us.’ Robin flicked some more purple ichor off his fingers. ‘Think about it. We’ve been delving through this place for days now. It’s never sent an ambush to us before. We’ve walked into them, sure, but it’s never sent new monsters into an area we’d already cleared while we were still in it. There has to be a reason it did that, and the most likely option is we were about to find something it didn’t want us to find.’

‘I didn’t even think dungeons, even living ones, could change while adventurers were within them,’ Jhess said. ‘It’s unnatural and I don’t like it.’

Wulfram actually nodded at that.

The whole party looked at him in surprise. That was the closest the man had come to speech since the whole adventure began.

‘I don’t think it did change,’ Robin said. ‘I think this place has taken its trap mechanisms and done some incredible things with secret passages and mechanical triggers. Maybe even magical ones. But if I were a dungeon, and I had to defend myself from mobile, highly motivated, magic-wielding maniacs coming into my literal body, and I wasn’t allowed to use most of my powers when they were nearby because of metaphysical interference or static or whatever? I’d figure out ways to take what I could do and automate it so I could trigger changes or pull stunts like an unexpected ambush even when an adventuring party was around. That’s not the dungeon using its powers. That’s the dungeon using its cunning and native intelligence.’

Was it his imagination or did Robin hear the faintest whisper of rumbling approval at those words?

There was silence as the party let the thought sink in.

‘I think that’s giving the thing too much credit,’ Khavren said eventually. ‘Dungeons may have a certain base cunning, even rudimentary tactical and strategic knowledge, but what you’re talking about…Design on such a level? It can’t be possible.’

‘We need to rest up here a while anyway. Let me keep looking.’ Robin dragged himself to his feet once more. ‘If I can’t find anything by the time you’re ready to go, then we can shelve the idea that this dungeon is as intelligent as I say it is.’

A plan was forming in Robin’s mind. It was half-baked, and relied a bit too much on his assessment of the dungeon’s ego and motivations, but it was worth a shot. If they didn’t try something new, they’d just end up trailing these corridors again, fighting random monsters, and hoping to stumble across the way into the inner core of the place.

Khavren just grunted his assent and leaned back against a large stalagmite.

Robin did a pass up and down the corridor. Ostensibly he was checking the walls again, but most of his attention was on trying to get his half-baked plan to about three-quarters baked. The dungeon had a bit of an ego, was clever, and clearly had a ranked list of priority areas it liked to shunt adventuring parties along. Or away from.

The bard pulled out the map and consulted it again. Huh. The spot Rerebos had seen the secret passage open didn’t match up to the blank spot on the map. So either his cartography was way off (unlikely) or there were two secrets in this section of the dungeon!

That sort of fit with the disproportionate response they had received when they returned here. Though the more Robin thought about it, the more he was convinced those access tunnels had to thread through this whole place. And it would make sense that they would have entrances and exits near junctions like this.

Those access tunnels had to be the bigger secret. They were guarded with words in English, after all. That was another mystery Robin was eager to solve. How had the dungeon learned the language? Why did it choose to use it for its command words?

Well, the last one he had a theory for. If you’ve got a language that you think no one (or almost no one) knows, it’s a pretty good option for passwords and commands you don’t want anyone to guess. Especially if it means you don’t need to keep track of a whole series of nonsense syllables (which would be the more secure, if more inconvenient, option).

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So if he wanted to ‘encourage’ the dungeon to give them a lesser secret in exchange for ‘protecting’ a greater one, he needed to indulge in a little theatre.

Robin put on a frustrated face and stomped back to the party.

‘There’s something here, I know it,’ he insisted. ‘But maybe I’m looking in the wrong place. I thought I heard a strange voice coming from over there during the battle.’ Robin gestured generally toward the spot Rerebos has seen the fairy disappear. ‘I’m going to go check it out. Jhess can keep looking for hidden passages over here.’

The rogue nodded. Khavren grumbled. Drev looked intrigued but too tired to indulge his curiosity. Savra and Wulfram looked entirely uninterested.

Robin began drifting over toward the access point. Progress was agonisingly slow. He couldn’t give away that he knew where it was or the dungeon wouldn’t take any action which might open the secret passages near Jhess.

Maybe he should be open with the party, just tell them what was going on and charge right for the tunnel the fairy had used. It would certainly be more direct. It would undoubtedly be faster and less effort.

But Robin’s instincts wouldn’t let him. Maybe they were his from Earth, maybe it was justified paranoia after several weeks—months now?—in this new world, or maybe it was part and parcel of being a shadeling, but Robin felt compelled to keep this secret, at least a little while longer.

‘I think it came from this direction,’ he mumbled to himself, just loud enough for the dungeon to hear, as he stumbled toward the spot the fairy had disappeared. ‘I’m pretty sure there were words.’ He hummed a bit to himself, as if playing up his bardic nature. ‘How did it go? Cum-pew-tur?’

Stumbling over a word he knew well was harder than he expected. He probably came a bit too close for a first attempt. Oh well. Nothing for it.

‘Cum-pew-tur,’ he repeated, crisscrossing the general area and slowly coming nearer and nearer to the spot where the access point was concealed. ‘Clothes hack-sis point—how did it go again?’ He hummed some more for dramatic effect. ‘Oh yes! Beta twe—’

There was a grinding sound from back near the party.

‘Marq! Over here! I must have tripped something,’ Jhess called to him. ‘Hurry!’

Robin turned and hurried away, letting the dungeon think it had successfully distracted him.

The party was quickly back-pedalling as a large section of the wall swung toward them, pivoting on some cunningly concealed mechanism. The edge was jagged, not quite natural but nowhere near as regular as he was expecting for a hidden door.

Robin filed that detail away in case it was useful later. Knowing how the dungeon tended to disguise its doors should make it easier to find others in the future.

The whole wall was shifting. It was a massive double-wedge on a pivot of some kind. It moved much faster than Robin thought possible. If one wasn’t quick on one’s feet it was entirely possible to be crushed between the wall and the wedge.

The party was quick enough. They’d fallen instinctively into a defensive formation, now knowing what might be on the other side of the hidden door, if that was even an appropriate description now as the entire wall shifted.

But there wasn’t anything. Just another tunnel that, when the massive hunk of stone finally came to a rest against the opposite wall and stopped moving, looked almost indistinguishable from the previous tunnel. The only real difference was that it veered away slightly to the right instead of slightly to the left.

‘No wonder it’s so easy to get lost in here,’ Jhess said. ‘If the walls can shift like that you could end up wandering around forever without actually making it anywhere.’

Robin was furiously scribbling on the map, trying to come up with a sign that would communicate this changeable fork. And how would he make a note of which path was which to remember that you couldn’t simply access both at the same time. And—

A sharp click and a thunk came from the wall where the wedge had just settled. The click came as the edge of the pivot-wedge merged almost seamlessly with the wall and camouflaged itself once more.

The thunk came shortly after and the bard didn’t like the sound of it at all.

Robin paused, quill still in hand. This had not been easy, but even then something told him it had gone more smoothly than it should. If he were the dungeon, he would have added an extra trap element that could trigger if—

The dungeon rumbled. The ground trembled beneath them and several sharp cracks echoed from overhead.

Then the stalactites began to fall, a rain of stony death.

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