Pocket Dungeon 2, page 18
“Shit,” I sighed. “This isn’t going to be fun.”
I turned to the side so I was walking in while facing the walls that made up the hallway. I had to take small, awkward, sideways steps, but I slowly started the process of shuffling down the hallway.
Iris slipped in behind me, and Yasha followed suit after her. The three of us slowly walked in a strange, shuffling crab step all the way down the hallway until we emerged on the other side, and the hallway opened back up again.
I felt as if I could breathe once more as I stepped out into the open air of the small space that marked the fourth, and what I hoped was the final fork in the road.
I looked around and saw, much to my dismay, that instead of two potential path options now, there were five. They shot off in all directions like the points off a star, and each of the paths seemed uncrossable for its own reasons.
“Fuck me,” I gasped and spun in a small circle as I looked around to see if there was anything we should be aware of.
Yasha finished exiting the hallway, and as soon as her feet were firmly in the space of the circular opening, I felt the ground shift beneath my feet.
“Fuck!” I exclaimed once more.
The ground was highlighted in red, and before I could figure out what that meant, and what it was going to do, the ground started to shift once more.
It felt like a very centralized earthquake, and after another rumble that knocked Iris off her feet and into my chest, the ground beneath us began to spin.
It started out slowly, like a carousel at a fair, and then it started to move faster and faster until I was barely able to stand on my feet.
Iris let out a shrill, panicked scream in my ear, and she clung to me like her life depended on it. Yasha also threw herself at me, and I was left struggling to stay upright as the two women held onto me so they wouldn’t fall.
And then, just as quickly as it had started, the ground beneath us lurched to a sudden halt.
I was nearly sent flying into one of the narrow walls that bracketed the hallways, but I managed to stay upright. My stomach sloshed around like it was a shaken-up soda, and I was glad I hadn’t had anything to eat that morning, because otherwise, I probably would have thrown up all over the dungeon.
Wouldn’t that be a sexy look?
“Oh, god,” Iris mumbled as she took a step back from me. She blinked a few times and planted one of her hands on the wall to support herself as she tried to get her bearings.
Only Yasha seemed to adjust at a quick speed, though she didn’t look thrilled about it, either.
Now the ground had gone back to its pale blue aura, but the damage was already done.
“What was the point of that?” Iris wailed.
“So we wouldn’t know which hall we’d just come from,” I said as the realization struck me. “Shit. It was meant to confuse us.”
“Well, it is foolish,” Yasha announced. “Because I am not confused.”
“You aren’t?” I asked her in surprise.
The fox-woman shook her head. “No. I am not. We came from that hall.”
She pointed to one of the narrow hallways, and to be completely honest, it looked exactly the same as all the other narrow hallways.
“How can you tell?” Iris asked her. She took a stumbling step toward Yasha and followed the line of her finger to gaze down the seemingly random hall. “It looks the exact same to me.”
“Our scent,” Yasha said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Our scent clings to that hall, but none of the others.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said. “Do you still hear the water? I can’t hear much of anything right now over the sound of my own blood rushing in my ears.”
Yasha cocked her head to the side as she clearly made an attempt to listen to wherever the water was, if she could still even hear it.
After a few beats of tense silence, she nodded. “Yes. It is that way.”
She pointed to a hall across from the one we had apparently just come from.
“Are you certain?” I asked. It wasn’t that I doubted her judgment, but I wanted to make sure we were going in the right direction. We had already lost twenty minutes in our slow, shuffling pace through the increasingly narrow hallways, and I wasn’t exactly looking forward to potentially being wrong.
Yasha nodded again, but it was after a beat of hesitation.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Are you not certain?”
She bit her lower lip. “I believe I am right, but… the two paths are so close together, it is hard to tell where the sound is coming from. I fear that it might be either one of the pathways.”
Shit.
I looked between the two passages that Yasha had indicated. They looked identical, but neither of them looked particularly pleasant. They were both no more than a foot wide, and it seemed as if the ground sloped at about a yard into the hallway. I couldn’t tell for sure, but it definitely appeared to drop down, and keep dropping down further and further until the floor was gone from the end of the hall.
It didn’t look like a pleasant place to be wrong.
“We’re just going to have to pick one and hope we’re right,” I said.
“Wait,” Iris spoke up. “I think maybe I have an idea?”
She sounded uncertain with herself, but she looked from the concerned expression on my face to the matching one on Yasha’s and seemed to steel herself. Her skin was still pale, and her eyes were still glassy, but it was clear she wasn’t going to let her fear stop her.
“What is it?” I asked her.
“It’s… it’s something that I learned while I was in my dungeon,” she explained. “It might not work here, but it’s worth a shot.”
“Please, by all means, if you think it will help us.” I gestured for her to do whatever it was she needed to do.
She took another step forward closer to the two branching passageways and placed her hand on the wall between the two of them and closed her eyes. Her face knitted up into a look of deep concentration, and she cocked her head to the side in thought.
“What are you trying to do?” I couldn’t help but ask.
I couldn’t see anything happening. Both of the halls, and even the wall Iris’ hand was on, were all still blue.
“The dungeon didn’t stay the same,” she said while her eyes were still closed. “The one I was in. It never changed much, but it was never quite consistent. The walls would move, and I know now they were probably moving every twenty-four hours. But while I was inside, I didn’t have much notion of time, or any way to keep track of something like that. But even though the walls moved, they were still the same walls.”
“Okay…” I trailed off and tried to piece together where this was going. But thankfully, Iris continued.
“I noticed that all the walls that were important and had something to do with puzzles or the correct pathways were always the same,” she elaborated. “So even though they moved, the walls were still the right walls.”
“How could you tell?” I asked, but as soon as the words were out of my mouth, Iris opened her eyes and took a slight step back from where she’d been resting her hand on the wall.
She reached into the mouth of one of the narrow passageways, and without any hesitation, she unsheathed the Talon Blade of a Silver Dragon Wyrmling from her belt and drove the tip of the blade into a gap between two of the stones that made up the wall.
The blade slotted into the crack as easily as a knife slicing through butter, and to my surprise, when she pulled the blade away, the crack that she had formed instantly healed itself in the stone.
“What the fuck?” It felt like the only thing I could say.
Iris wore a small, pleased smile as she stepped back and slipped the blade back into her belt.
“The stones in the walls don’t come out of place,” she explained. “Not unless that’s what they were designed to do. I noticed it when I was looking for a hiding place in the dungeon. Some of the walls, I could chip away at and get inside, but others wouldn’t let me. I figured out that the walls that wouldn’t let me change them were the walls that were part of the puzzles.”
“That makes sense,” Yasha said. “We did not find you in a place where the walls matter.”
Yasha was right. We had found Iris hidden behind a wall in an offshoot passageway that wasn’t actually relevant to escaping the dungeon.
“So, this is the right passageway?” I asked.
“I think so,” she said. “But just to be sure.”
She moved her hand over to the other passageway on the opposite side of the narrow wall and pulled out her blade once more. She repeated the process like before, only this time, instead of pulling the blade out cleanly from the wall with no change, a large hunk of stone came out with it.
“If we had enough time, or desire, we could chip our way into the wall,” she said. “Which means the other hallway is the one we need to get down.”
“You’re brilliant,” I told her with a grin. “Come on. Before we waste any more time.”
Iris seemed pleased with herself, and her small victory seemed to have shaken some of her fear and terror away. She followed after me as I sucked in my stomach and started the slow, tedious crawl through the hallway.
My nose was practically against the wall as I shuffled sideways through the passage. I prepared myself for the ground to dip, but even my attempts at preparation hadn’t been enough to stop my stomach from lurching straight into my ass the second I took a step and the ground seemed to disappear entirely from beneath my feet.
It didn’t actually disappear, but it certainly felt like it. It hadn’t been a smooth declining ramp like I’d expected, but instead was a set of crumbling stone stairs. I couldn’t look down to make sure they were stone, but they felt different beneath my feet than the dirt had.
“Be careful,” I shouted to warn my two companions before they could drop down. “The ground lowers, but it’s some sort of stairway. Just take it slow.”
I kept my pace careful as I took each step with an appropriate level of caution and made my way down deeper and deeper.
The sound of rushing water was back now, and it was louder than ever. In fact, it sounded as if we were entering some sort of underground cavern. The air around me had gone colder, and it even started to smell different. It was the sort of scent I associated with caves, and it was simultaneously dank and pure at the same time.
After what felt like an eternity, but according to the timer in the corner of my vision was only about fifteen minutes of mind-numbing creeping, I stepped out of the hallway and into a much wider space.
I exhaled a breath and felt a sense of relief wash over me as the temporary feeling of claustrophobia that had overwhelmed me vanished.
I looked around to take in my new surroundings, and I let out a sharp gasp at the sight. It was the first time I had been truly overtaken by the beauty of the dungeons, or maybe it was just the first time the dungeons had been beautiful.
We had crawled down the stairway from hell straight into a vast, underground cavern.
Chapter 13
The sight took my breath away.
We stood on a small outcropping of craggy stone and sand that hung about a foot above a gigantic underground lake.
The lake itself spanned the entirety of the cavern, with only another small outcropping on the other side with a large, dark doorway to indicate we should continue on that way. A waterfall spilled over from one of the far walls in the cavern, and that was clearly where the sound of rushing water came from.
It was so loud now that it felt silly to think I had ever struggled to hear it.
Stalagmites and stalactites filled the space, but they were unlike any I had ever seen before. Instead of the same gray-black stone that made up the rest of the dungeon high above us, they were a soft, opalescent green that emanated with some sort of light from within. I wasn’t sure how it was possible that they glowed like that, but it was beautiful nonetheless.
They reflected off the shockingly blue water of the lake itself, but when I peered down into the water’s surface, it looked black. I couldn’t see down into the depths at all, and immediately, that sent warning bells into my mind.
The water and the rest of the massive cavern glowed with the blue aura of safe items, and the doorway on the other side was highlighted in yellow, but I knew to trust my gut.
“Step back,” I warned the other two women quickly and thrust my arm out as I took my own stumbling steps backward to push them with me.
I moved just in time.
One second, the surface of the water was still and unmoving in front of us, and the next, a monster unlike anything I had ever seen before burst out from the surface.
Iris let out a blood-curdling scream and threw herself backward toward the passageway that we had just come out of, and she pressed her back firmly against the wall of the cavern as far from the edges of the small stone platform as she could manage.
Meanwhile, Yasha whipped out her katana and launched into a fighting position at my side as I pulled out Phantom Doomslayer.
My blade matched the underground cavern and reflected the glow of the stones above and below us, but now wasn’t the time to focus on something mundane like that.
The creature that had burst from the water disappeared back under the surface of the lake with a loud crash of water, but it was visible for just long enough that I was able to see the stats above it for a split second.
Megafauna Gator: Level Eight.
“Well, this isn’t going to be good,” I muttered.
“What do we do, Wes?” Yasha asked me. Her tail flicked rapidly from side to side, and her eyes skimmed over the surface of the water in quick motions as she tried to track the progress of the megafauna gator under the surface.
I tightened my grip on my own sword and stared down into the water as well.
The only thing that was illuminated in yellow in the room was still the passageway far on the other side of the water, but clearly, we couldn’t just cross the damn water.
I looked around the room with a rising level of desperation as I tried to find something that could be used to fight the megafauna gator. We couldn’t just wait for it to spring back up to the surface again. We had limited space on the platform to move around, and there was no way the three of us could easily jump back into the tunnel we’d come from in a few seconds.
But there had to be some way we could fight the gator.
That was obviously our next task in this damn dungeon.
“Yasha, any sign of the gator?” I asked the fox-woman. Her eyes were bright and trained on the water’s surface. I didn’t see anything, but I was relying on her superior vision.
“No, there is no movement near the surface yet,” she said. “Have you come up with a plan?”
“Working on it,” I murmured as I scoured over everything in sight.
Finally, I was hit with an idea.
“The rocks,” I said and pointed up to where stalactites hung over our heads like naturally glowing chandeliers.
“What about them?” Iris asked as she followed the line of my finger and looked up at the rocks.
“I’ve been trying to figure out how we could possibly fight the gator with such little ground to cover, but I think I’ve figured out the answer,” I said quickly. “We fight dirty.”
I quickly unslung the Ivycaster from my back and nocked one of the arrows in place. I hadn’t used a bow since summer camp back when I was in middle school, but apparently, it was very similar to riding a bike. My muscles still remembered just how to hold the weapon so I could pull back on the string without losing the arrow.
I shot at the stalactites that hung overhead and watched as the arrow slammed into the opalescent stone with enough force to send it falling back down to earth. It crashed into the water with a loud splash that echoed throughout the cavern.
A grin spread across my face.
Okay, so the rocks could be dislodged from the ceiling.
“How will that help us fight the gator?” Iris asked, but at the same time, Yasha spoke up in clear alarm.
“Wes, it is coming!” she shouted and drew her katana.
“Iris, stay back,” I told the blonde woman. “Yasha, get ready, as soon as it breaches the water, I’m going to knock rocks down, but it may still try to lunge.”
“I am more than ready,” the fox-woman snarled.
As if on cue, I finally caught sight of the ripples in the water, and tension permeated the air as it ratcheted up even higher than before. I barely had time to slide another arrow into place when the megafauna gator exploded from the water.
This time, I was actually able to get a view of the creature that wanted nothing more than to eat us as an after dinner snack.
It was larger than any alligator I had ever seen on television, and it looked like it had crawled straight out of the cretaceous period and right into my nightmares.
It was the size of a fucking semi truck’s flatbed trailer, and it looked like it was on a serious dose of steroids. The creature’s hide was as black as the water that it lived in, save for its eyes. Those were the same pale, opalescent green as the stones that lined the cavern around us.
In fact, its massive teeth seemed to be made of the same material.
It looked like a goddamn dinosaur, and I could see straight down its ugly gullet as it opened its maw wide and lunged straight at the three of us on the stone platform.
The creature let out a loud, ear-shattering bellow from deep in its chest and snapped its gigantic jaws with a vengeance. It landed just on the edge of the small stone platform.
Yasha snarled and lunged forward with her katana to jab at the creature’s eye, and just as it whipped its head in my lover’s direction, I let my arrow loose.
I watched with bated breath as it flew toward the rocky ceiling of the cavern and collided with a few of the dangling, opalescent stones. They cracked free from the cavern’s roof and came tumbling down at increasing speeds.
The moment Yasha’s katana sliced along the side of the massive monster’s jaw for one percent of its health, all of the rocks slammed down into its back and drove it down underwater.
