Chapter 55: 14- Forget All About The Taste Of Prissy’s Ex

Corbin was not confident in the amount of plot armor he had at his disposal, and advocated getting the hell out of here just as soon as possible. The hill giant and the dragon were way beyond his abilities and the abilities of his compatriots. Even if you added up all their levels, they didn’t even reach Todd’s, and would just top the dragon’s… if they could manage to get Brosh and Dvelderrin to contribute. There’d been one too many close calls–

Kyessy stopped them just outside the doorway. “Hold.”

The room shook again, and more dust fell. “Not a good idea,” he said. “We need–”

Kyessy put a finger up to her lips, and Corbin used the time to get a good look at her. She was covered in cuts and scratches, and her HP bar appeared above her head, about 80% of the way filled. She was covered in grayish dust, from the building being invaded by a too-heavy giant, but had a sword slung across her back he hadn’t noticed before. He wondered how the last hour or so had gone for her, and resolved to ask about it soon.

“Whass the holdup?” Prissy breathed.

Kyessy darted a look back into the room, bonked her head against the door frame when the place shook again, then peered in again.

He knew. She was hoping the dragon and the monster ex-husband would mash each other up and she could dart in for a few final HP to kill them off. The xp haul would be insanely good. The problems began when you considered the instability of this place, and how many tons of rock were hanging over them right this second. Thousands? Probably more like millions. Sure if they died they’d respawn where they’d last slept, but that wasn’t a guarantee for Corbin. He had yet to experience the sweet and sublime kiss of death, and had no wish to start. His status as familiar made it real iffy. His card could just evaporate out of Prissy’s inventory, or he could respawn right next to her. The unknown of it was awful and he hated it… especially since he was in mortal danger every thirty-odd seconds.

So they might grab some bunches of experience, but the risks (to Corbin) weren’t worth it.

“Are you sure–”

“How many times do I have to shush you?” Kyessy whispered.

A blast of sleepy poison came hurtling through the doorway a moment after Kyessy jerked her head back.

Instead he communicated with Prissy, since theirs could be telepathic.

“She wants to get the final couple of strikes in against the dragon and your ex.”

“Does she now?” Prissy returned.

“Mental, right?”

“Kill me ex? Sounds like a bloody brilliant idea, if’n I do say so.”

“Not you too.”

She smiled in his mind, which felt distinctly uncomfortable. It was like having his emotions forcibly changed by drugs, except in seconds instead of a course of an hour or more. Dark anticipation rolled out over him, and he pushed it away. Both of them were insane and would get him killed.

“You brought ‘im down ‘ere. Ya fight with the bull, ya get the horns, know-wha-mean?”

He shuddered. People shouldn’t talk that fast. “I just want you to be ready to Sabaton of Springing us out of here when the whole place falls down on our heads, okay?”

The battle between the dragon and Todd’s lower half seemed to be winding down. Either Todd was immune to its sleepy, Endurance-draining poison breath attack, or he was so big it affected him really slowly. The glimpses he got of the dragon put its health at a thousand HP, then 800. 

Another blur of black dragon scales rushed by and another series of roars announced the wyrm was doing battle with Todd again.

“Ready all the attacks you have at your disposal,” Kyessy said.

“This is a terrible idea,” he tried. That wasn’t true, it was just a super risky idea.

“Just do it.”

He did, grabbing for Evoker’s Fiery Blade. That would give him fire damage when he used his only Enervating Strike… if this thing was a much higher level, his regular bite probably wouldn’t damage it at all, and he’d probably only have one chance at this. If only he could use Spectral Blade at the same time… he doubted the draining heal would help much if it hit him, so he put that one out. Berserker’s Bellow was also unlikely to work on something so powerful, but he would have a few mana left over afterwards to maybe get the dragon to back off and let him turn tail and run.

Just beyond the doorway, the battle raged on. At one point, a block of stone four feet long crashed into the gold hoard, splashing gold coins everywhere and cracking the stone block into a bazillion tiny pieces.

He considered begging them to just loot a bit of the treasure here, but knew Kyessy wouldn’t hear of it. She didn’t care about the loot, or whether it could buy her better ability cards; she wanted the share of the kill. The stoic part of her apathetic side had merged with the furious raging side, and become this efficient killer. And while he didn’t want to wildly speculate about dying the moment this offensive started, his brain ran the math. They would have to do hundreds of damage all in a single burst or be poisoned, then bitten and swallowed.

“Three hundred,” Kyessy said, her eyes tracking the situation. “Two hundred… Now!”

For Kyessy’s part, she phased through the wall to appear somewhere other than in plain sight of the doorway the very same moment several copies of Prissy sprang to life. They all dashed in, two immediately sprang thirty feet towards the apex of the gold pile… and Corbin followed, ever the loyal companion.

War is too fast to follow. Watch videos and you’ll see people who just look the other way for a second suddenly drop dead. People are standing there one second and just red mist the next. Certainly for Corbin, it was too much happening all at once.

The one big takeaway he got was that Todd had freed up his trapped arms. He’d blasted through several more stone floors and got the leverage to squeeze the other arm through. He was hunched down and protecting his gigantic head in this huge hall, which stretched on easily a hundred feet and perhaps even more. This inverted temple, if indeed it was Ullennai’s former temple, was not the same as Densmeer. This was a much larger complex, with each smaller temple devoted to its own god. This building had once been absolutely gigantic, stretching up some sixty or seventy feet. The draklings and groblins had really done a lot of work to integrate this huge space into this new underground network of rooms and tunnels that had appeared.

The dragon didn’t have wings, but instead clambered around on its six legs faster than Corbin could track. It came at Todd over and over, raking those long claws against his bloodied forearms, blasting forth with poison breath, and lashing with its tail again and again, and while it was something like thirty feet long, it was still only about two feet thick in the trunk, while each of Todd’s fingers was easily that thick. The behemoth swatted at the dragon ineffectually, and eventually slapped the wyrm down. He went to follow up on this, but Kyessy had already sent an entangling arrow at his face, so his eyes were crawling with vines.

Prissy was already on top of the dragon when it fell, raking her blades over its soft underbelly over and over again. Corbin saw its health bar, only the tiniest morsel of red, and leapt to attack as well.

Such a bad idea.

He got there and leapt in just as the thing twisted, righted itself, and zipped out of reach. He managed to scrape a tooth against its spiny back leg, and dealt 4 fire damage, 7 necrotic damage, and got 2 Strength and Endurance damage. This was only on account of his high Luck, the game said. The wyrm had a great deal of resistances and was high enough level to shrug off such effects normally.

Then the dragon’s tail came out of nowhere, whacked him for 35 damage, and he rebounded off the wall for another 10. Luck had failed him that time.

Everything got hazy after that. Todd may have seen Prissy but maybe not. He might have snatched up one of her shadow clones, or he might still have been clutching at the vines growing out of his face. As for Kyessy, he was pretty sure she pelted the dragon in the face with a dozen flaming arrows, but wasn’t sure, because the dragon was going straight for her.

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His HP started coming back after that, and again he wasn’t completely sure what had happened, but it was clear Prissy was healing him.

Yes… his vision cleared, showing him that the wyrm was indeed slain.

 

You have helped defeat the Wyrm of the depths!

You gain 10,000 xp!

The wyrm has dropped its hoard.

 

“Holy–” More surprising than their success was that he didn’t automatically level up.

Prissy had climbed up Todd using her daggers as climbing aids, and Corbin yelled out. A bolt of panic went through him– if she was taken by this gigantic asshole, first of all some asshole would have his friend. Secondly, he would have no choice but to take off after them both, because she had his card.

Then he got one look at Todd’s HP total and goggled. Down to only 600!

That dragon had done a hell of a job. Now he was taking a steady rain of arrows in the crotch region from Kyessy, and was flapping his arms wildly from becoming Prissy’s pincushion. He was beginning to stand up, but bashed his head against a portion of the ceiling here, and dealt himself another 40 damage. Unreal.

Well… Corbin had no other choice. He and Kyessy were responsible for Todd being here in the first place. He surged forward, put on the last Enervating Strike he had mana to fuel, and latched onto Todd’s foot. Mid-bite, a prompt appeared that caused him to forget all about the taste of Prissy’s ex-husband and how close he was to death.

 

New Quest Received! – Run For Your Life!

This mid-level dungeon has become frightfully unstable! If you’re not lucky, you might have to learn what it’s like to die of thirst, unable to move. And if you are, you’ll just be crushed to death. Get moving!

Reward: FORGET THE REWARD, GO!

 

Todd was dying. The behemoth had been on the brink when they arrived, and now Kyessy had turned his entire crotch area into an art nouveau version of a porcupine. Resistances or not, she had enough residual fire damage from Fireburst Arrow to do the trick.

 

You have helped defeat the Hill Behemoth!

You gain 14,000 xp!

The Hill behemoth has dropped its putrid loincloth.

 

That did the trick, and leveled him up again. Meanwhile the whole place now reverberated with groans and cracks. Great chunks of stone were now detaching from the walls and tumbling at random all around them.

“Prissy!” he called. “Come on!”

Kyessy, too, was using Todd’s crumpling form as a series of steps. He turned, remembering, and found both Brosh and Dvellandrin at the doorway, agog. Their mouths hung open at the sight of the dead bodies. A realization struck him at the same time: if they were killed by this place collapsing, chances were good both shared a spawn point: the dungeon that was about to be trapped under tons and tons of cave-in. 

“You guys need to get out!” he barked.

Brosh seemed to get this before Dvellandrin, or perhaps he succeeded a check of some kind. It was even possible the game prompt appeared for all of them, and Brosh just read through it first. He bent and produced inventory items, then began snapping them together. The contraption he began to create was clearly a jetpack.

More debris kept falling, and in one case a piece landed directly in front of Corbin’s face, blasting him with dust and little chips of stone. He backpedaled in terror, only to have another mammoth piece land behind him. He turned just in time to see it beginning to totter and fall in his direction, when hands scooped him up, he was introduced to Prissy’s bosom area, and she launched them into the air.

“Boy am I glad to see you,” he said, muffled by her breasts.

She snorted laughter in response.

Gauging by the slight bounce, they’d landed on Todd’s upturned ass. Another thirty foot leap brought them to a small outcropping of stone, which fell away just as she sprang out again for another piece of ruined tunnel. Another two leaps later and she was tumbling onto grass. Sweet wonderful grass!

He reluctantly pulled away from Prissy and surveyed the area. A huge hole had been torn in the landscape not far off, in a teardrop shape, but that hole was expanding as the seconds ticked by. The crystal guy was gone, and there went a tree as well. He did spot Kyessy a ways off, making sure there was plenty of space between her and the hole.

A few seconds later Brosh rocketed out of the hole with Dvellandrin held in his beefy arms. The two landed, and the fae sorcerer nearly tipped backwards when another section of earth collapsed behind them.

One mighty crunch later, the whole section of earth, containing Prissy, Corbin, their two new allies, and even Kyessy, shifted and fell. For a few terrifying seconds, he was in freefall. A second later though, he slammed back onto the grass, the slightly more uneven grass. They’d only fallen about ten feet… but that was it.

Nobody moved or spoke for several minutes, waiting for the other shoe to drop. When it didn’t, Corbin breathed a sigh of relief. The prompt appeared and let him know that he’d succeeded in his quest not to be buried alive… or just crushed to death. It even rescinded its panicked reward of just living through the ordeal, and gave him a bonus 1000 xp.

“Come on,” he told Prissy, “let’s get away from this death trap and get some answers.”

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