Pocket Dungeon 3, page 3
“Yasha!” I shouted
I was on the Beast in an instant, and I just barely managed to grab Yasha’s shoulder and yank her away from the monster just as it fell backward like a slain giant.
The sound of it hitting the ground was deafening, but it wasn’t dead yet. The Beast roared, snarled, and gasped as it writhed like an overturned bug.
“You saved me,” Yasha gasped. Her eyes were wide as she looked up at me. “Thank you.”
“Any time,” I told her. “Now let’s finish this.”
The Beast flailed miserably and desperately as it tried to flip back up onto its feet to no avail. I felt no sympathy for the monster as I readied my Talon Blade and drove it down straight into the center of its newly exposed belly.
I slit the creature from top to bottom in a motion so smooth and fluid, it felt as if I was cutting through nothing.
Entrails and blue blood slopped out of the Beast as its health bar hit zero. It gave one final, desperate twitch, and then it was dead.
A small chiming, popping sound filled the air as a treasure chest approximately the size of an average suitcase appeared among the bloodshed.
I sheathed my blade and snagged the treasure chest. It slipped into my pocket with ease, which was generally crazy and still amazed me no matter how many times I was able to do something like that.
“I’m glad that’s over with,” I sighed.
“As am I,” Yasha agreed. She kicked the corpse of the Beast with the toe of her boot. “It nearly crushed me.”
“Like a bug,” I confirmed. “Come on, let’s get out of here before it starts to stink.”
The two of us quickly headed toward the large, open passageway highlighted in blue. The timer in the corner of my vision indicated that fifteen minutes had passed while we fought with the Beast.
It somehow felt like too much time had gone by, while simultaneously like none at all had passed during the fight. My body continued to thrum with adrenaline as we moved through the arched exit and into a long hallway.
I scanned the area and took everything in under my Pauldrons of Wisdom.
The entire space was highlighted in a soft, butter yellow, and nothing looked amiss. The walls were the same whitewashed stone as the room we’d just vanquished the Beast in, and the floors were much of the same.
Torches were mounted every couple of yards about six feet up on the walls and burned a warm orange. The light combined with the pale stonework made the entire space feel weirdly cozy, which was not something I often thought about the dungeons we went into.
The hallway itself was long and narrow, and despite the high, arched ceilings, Yasha and I were only just able to walk shoulder to shoulder without brushing against the torches as we ventured down the hall.
“Do you see anything?” Yasha asked. Her golden eyes moved as she seemed to take in the scene, but unlike me, Yasha didn’t have a way to see the potential dangers presented in a dungeon.
“Nothing’s red,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean everything’s safe. It wouldn’t be the first time there was something tricky at work.”
“Then we will be careful,” Yasha said.
I nodded, and the two of us started the slow creep down the hallway. Each step I took was cautious, and I never put all of my weight down until I was certain the stones would hold under my weight. After one too many times of nearly falling into a chasmic abyss thanks to breakaway paths, I had definitely learned my lesson.
I was hyper aware of the timer in the corner of my vision as we walked, but I wasn’t about to let my eagerness to get out of the dungeon cause me to make any mistakes.
The end of the hallway branched off into two separate pathways that looked identical at first glance. Both led straight to a large, ominous-looking stone door that hung halfway open on each side.
“Which pathway do we take?” Yasha asked me. She looked back and forth between the two doorways before turning her focus up onto me.
Both of the doorways were illuminated in yellow, so at least there wasn’t a clear and obvious threat, and I was about to tell Yasha that we should just pick one and guess when I caught sight of something in one of the rooms.
The sconces on the wall burned like usual, but in the other room, the flames burned blue.
It had to mean something, I was sure of it. Nothing in the dungeons was ever truly accidental, save for finding Iris.
“This way,” I said and gestured to the hallway on the right.
Yasha nodded and followed close behind me as the two of us inched down the short hallway. I pressed my palms against the massive stone door to try and push it open just a little further, but it barely budged.
“Shit,” I sighed. “I guess it’ll be a tight squeeze.”
I turned sideways so I could better slip through the doorway, then stepped aside to make room for Yasha.
The fox-woman barely even had to squeeze as she stepped sideways through the partially open doorway. She barely had time to finish getting her tail pulled all the way through the entrance, though, when all of a sudden, the large door swung closed the rest of the way with a loud, thunderous slam.
The force of it shook the room around us, and I reached out to grab hold of Yasha and make sure she stayed steady on her feet.
“What the fuck?” I murmured, more to myself than Yasha. I walked over and pressed my hands to the stone door that was now clearly and firmly locked in place, and I gave it a hard push, just to test it.
It didn’t so much as budge a centimeter. So. We were locked in here.
I turned back around to study the room at large, but there really wasn’t much of anything to see.
Across the room on the opposite wall was another door that looked just like the one that had just closed us in, and I had a feeling if I moved over to try and shove on it, I’d be met with the same result as before.
The floors and ceiling were the same whitewashed stone tile as the rest of the dungeon had been, and really, the only thing that set the rooms apart were the sconces on the wall.
There were six in total, and they all looked nearly identical to the ones that had been in the narrow hallway, except instead of flickering with the usual warm, orangey flames, the fire burning in these was a menacing blue and were encased in glass bulbs all the way around, like some sort of rudimentary light bulb. I couldn’t make out any seams on the bulbs, either. It was like they were perfectly formed for the torches without a way to remove them.
Not only were the sconces the only thing of note in the room, they were the only things in the room period. There was nothing else to fill the empty space, or to offer any sort of explanation as to why the door had slammed shut on us.
I took a step further into the room, and the second my foot pressed down on a stone a yard from the closed door, a faint, almost imperceptible click resonated through the air, followed by a strange, hollow-sounding hiss.
Yasha looked at me with a frown marring her face.
“Did you hear that?” she asked me. “The sound?”
Her ears twitched as she spoke, like she was listening intently to what was going on in an attempt to figure out where the sound was coming from.
“I did,” I said. “It happened as soon as I stepped down.”
I looked down to where my foot pressed onto an inconspicuous-looking stone. The tile glowed the same yellow as everything else, but I wasn’t crazy. As soon as I’d stepped down, something had clicked, and now an unplaceable hissing noise filled the room. It was just faint enough that I might have been able to convince myself it was nothing more than a rapidly developing case of tinnitus, but Yasha heard it, too.
“I do not know what is causing the sound,” she said slowly, and her eyes drifted upward to the closely packed wooden planks making up the ceiling. “But it seems to be coming from above.”
I followed her gaze as I frowned, but there wasn’t anything to see. It was just a ceiling, but if Yasha thought that was where the sound was coming from, I believed her. After all, her hearing was definitely far better than mine.
Slowly, I lifted my foot up off the tile, and I hoped the movement would make the strange hissing sound stop, but it continued without pause.
The sconces on the wall continued to flicker and burn and both of the doors remained steadfastly closed.
“Keep looking to see if you can find the cause of the noise,” I said to Yasha.
“I will,” she assured me and took her own slow steps toward the center of the room, like she was tracking the noise.
While she did that, I made my way over to the door on the other side of the room and pressed my palms flat on the stone. I shoved against it with all the force I could muster, but it remained lodged firmly into place.
“Shit,” I muttered to myself.
My head was beginning to feel a little strange, not quite like I was developing a headache, but there was something undeniably strange about the sudden sensation. It was almost like I was lightheaded.
Wait.
I tried to suck in a deep breath, but it felt like it was coming up short, like I wasn’t able to get enough air no matter how hard I tried. I’d felt this way before, when my family had taken a trip to the mountains as a kid. We’d been so high up the air had literally felt thin.
Just like the air felt now.
“Something’s sucking the air out of the room,” I said and tried to keep the panic from my voice. The last thing I needed was for either one of us to start hyperventilating now. We were, apparently, working with a rapidly depleting supply of air.
“What?” Yasha looked at me with her golden eyes wide. “What do you mean?”
“That sound.” I gestured vaguely into the air around us. “The hissing sound. I think it’s something sucking the air out of the room. We need to figure out how to get out of here fast.”
It was like as soon as the words were out in the open, I couldn’t help but feel the air dwindling with each passing second. I didn’t know the rate the air was being sucked out of the room, but it certainly felt like it was happening fast.
“There is nothing through the Pauldrons to show an issue?” Yasha asked. Her head whipped around as she began feeling at the walls, like there might be something there to help us get out.
“No,” I said. “Nothing’s illuminated differently. It all looks normal.”
I had to work to keep the panic from my voice. This might not be a monster, but it was certainly one of the trickiest situations we’d ever been in. It felt like some sort of stupid hypothetical. Like, you’re trapped in a room with the air rapidly being sucked out, what do you do?
Think, Wes, think.
I took a step back from where my palms were still planted on the second door and studied the room again as Yasha felt her way around the walls.
The lightheadedness I’d noticed before was even more intense now, and even without an exact time of how long we had left, I knew it couldn’t be much. My vision was already starting to blur and go black and fuzzy at the edges, like an old, grainy photograph.
The only thing in the room aside from us and the dwindling air supply were the sconces.
I quickly moved over to the nearest of the six on the wall and reached up to touch the glass bulb on the outside of the flame.
It was definitely fire inside the bulb, so how was it staying lit without air? Fire needed oxygen to continue to burn, that was just a cardinal rule of the universe, which meant the bulbs had to have some sort of continuous air supply that wasn’t connected to the room.
“The sconces,” I told Yasha. “It’s something with the sconces.”
I was short of breath, and it felt like my lungs were constricting and spasming inside my chest.
This wasn’t good.
I fumbled my way around the sconce to try and find some sort of switch or button, anything that would keep the remaining air in the room, or at the very least open the other damned door.
It was just a normal fucking sconce!
Anger and panic mixed in my gut, and in a fit of frustration, I yanked hard on the sconce like I could pull the damn thing from the wall.
Then, something happened.
While the sconce didn’t break off from the wall like I’d wanted, it did pull forward like it was on some sort of hinge and clicked down into place.
The flames in the sconce stopped, and a small puff of sweet, pure air blew into my face. It was gone before I could even think to savor it.
“Pull them!” I shouted to Yasha.
The fox-woman didn’t need to be told twice, and she grabbed onto the sconce above her head with both hands and yanked down hard. Just like mine, it hinged forward into a locked downward position with a click.
Yasha gasped in relief as a small gust of air puffed out into her face.
I stumbled my way over to the next sconce and repeated what I’d done before. I was ready for the air this time, and when it puffed out into my face, I tried to hold it in my lungs for as long as I could.
The air was already dangerously thin in the room around us, and my vision swam. We didn’t have long left, and there were three sconces to go.
I tripped over my own feet as I made it to the third and final sconce on my side of the wall. I could barely even get my arms up above my head to grab at the sconce, and when I grasped the metal in my hands, I had to latch myself onto it to even stay on my feet. Pulling it down toward me was easily one of the hardest things I’d ever done.
It clicked, but this time, there was no complimentary puff of air to sustain me any longer.
My lungs burned, and my entire body felt like it was on fire as I fought against the lack of oxygen.
I sluggishly turned my head to the side as I hung onto the sconce for dear life and saw Yasha slumping down toward the ground. Her eyes were heavily lidded and glassy as she gasped for breath like a fish tossed onto land.
No, no, no, no.
There was one sconce left, but it was clear the fox-woman wouldn’t be able to make it to it herself.
I sucked in the last breath I might ever take, braced myself, and let go of the sconce I’d been hanging onto.
My body flopped and swung precariously from side to side as I struggled to maintain my balance. I flung myself across the room with a final, desperate lunge and slammed into the wall beneath the final burning sconce.
I opened and closed my mouth as I gasped and gaped for air. Unconsciousness swam at the edges of my vision, and the promise of darkness hung over me as I struggled to keep my eyes open.
Yasha was fully on the ground now.
I had to save her. I had to save the both of us.
I groped at the wall to claw myself up high enough, and just as I felt myself beginning to slip away entirely, I locked my hands around the sconce and pulled. I dropped down to my knees with the force of the gesture.
A loud click sounded throughout the room, and then like magic, the second door swung open.
A rush of perfect, sweet air fanned into the room, and it was like someone had doused me with a bucket of ice water.
I dropped down onto all fours and sucked in greedy gulp after greedy gulp before crawling over to Yasha.
I cradled the fox-woman’s head as her eyes snapped open. She arched upward and spasmed from head to toe as she began to breathe in needy lungfuls of air. The color slowly began to return to her tanned face, and the bluish tinge to her skin began to creep away.
“Are you okay?” I asked her. It felt impossible to do anything but whisper, like I couldn’t bear to lose the air I’d just gotten back.
“Yes,” she exhaled the word like a sigh and basked in her renewed deep, easy breathing. “Are you?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I was worried we were both goners there for a moment.”
“As was I,” she said.
The little red timer in the corner of my vision showed we had just slightly less than an hour to spare. Shit.
“Come on,” I said and gently nudged the fox-woman up. “We need to keep going.”
The two of us got back onto our feet together, and without a look backward into the room that nearly suffocated us, we barreled out into the next unknown portion of the dungeon.
But nothing could have prepared me for what I saw next.
In the center of the hallway leading from the fucking airless deathtrap room was a gigantic glass tank of water that took up nearly the entire hall from floor to ceiling.
And weirder still was the woman floating inside the tank.
Chapter 3
For a few seconds, I had no idea how to react. It was one thing to find another person in one of the dungeons, but it was another thing entirely to find that person trapped in a giant tank.
The hallway surrounding the tank was illuminated in the usual soft yellow, but the tank itself was like some giant deadzone. It wasn’t highlighted in yellow, blue, or red. It was like the dungeon, and through that the loot and equipment given to me by the dungeon, had no idea what to make of the situation at hand, either.
Her long dark hair looked black as ink as it floated up around her head and face in the water. Her eyes were wide with fright as she banged on the top of the glass tank with balled fists, and her pearly white tail thrashed.
Yeah. Tail.
She had a tail.
It looked just like every mermaid’s tail I’d ever seen depicted in the media, at least it did for the most part. It was white and pearlescent and even in the water, it seemed to shimmer under the glow of the candlelight. The scales looked like individual, glimmering gems from where they dotted her bare waist, all the way down to where they smoothly transitioned into an honest-to-God tail.
The tailfin was a dazzling array of soft pastel colors that looked like a watercolor painter’s palette as she thrashed in the water.
Panic was clear on her gorgeous face as she tried desperately to break the glass from the inside.
Something was very, very clearly wrong. Her eyes bulged from her beautiful face, and she looked as if she was struggling to breathe. What sort of mermaid couldn’t breathe underwater?
