Pocket Dungeon, page 36
The snake was gearing up to launch another attack, but something else caught my eye. The top of the giant serpent’s tail was on top of the leg bone that Yasha had shown me earlier.
To my surprise, the bone was highlighted in the same yellow light that the key had been.
It hadn’t been illuminated earlier, though, had it?
I quickly thought back to just a few minutes before, and sure enough, the bone hadn’t been yellow, but it had also been in Yasha’s hand.
Of course. Why would the item tell me that it needed to be interacted with if someone was already interacting with it? That just felt counterintuitive.
The bone was the key. Goddamn it. We didn’t need to break the jars in the first place.
“Stupid, suspicious jars,” I hissed before I raised my voice to call out to Yasha. “The bone! It’s the key. That’s what we need.”
“The bone?” Her voice was full of disbelief, but she followed my gaze over toward where the leg bone lay abandoned on the ground and studied it for herself.
From our position backed against the door of the room, we could still see that the edge of the bone where it would usually connect into a socket or a joint was smoothed down. There were a few strange-looking ridges carved into the organic material that must have functioned as the locking mechanism for the door in front of us.
“I’ll distract the snake again,” I told her. “But hurry.”
I didn’t give her a chance to reply before I threw myself at the snake with as much force as I could possibly muster. I needed to take this thing out if we wanted any chance of actually getting out of this room, but that wasn’t going to be easy.
Its scales were seemingly impervious to damage, which only left one prime place to injure it: its mouth. If I could aim my blade right, I could stab the creature as it opened its mouth to attack. It wouldn’t be easy, but it was probably my only chance to take the snake out.
I heard the sound of Yasha’s boots behind me as she made her way around the outer perimeter of the room while I headed straight for the angry creature’s head.
I brandished Doomslayer in its direction and gave a quick jab forward as I had done before, just to test the waters. The snake spewed out a stream of venom in my direction, and I had to throw the shield up in front of my face as quickly as possible to avoid getting sprayed.
As the droplets of acidic venom hit Golen’s Shield, I could hear them cracking and sizzling against the metal, but I took advantage of the snake’s momentary pause in attacking.
I lunged forward with the Doomslayer protruding in front of me and slammed the sharpened tip of the sword straight into the roof of the snake’s mouth.
The creature let out a terrible, pained hiss of distress as blood began to seep from the wound. My blade had gone straight through the snake’s soft palate and through its skull, and now, the snake began to whip its head back and forth in a frenzy with my blade still stuck through its face. Its glassy black eyes started to go a little dull, and its thrashing started to slow. As it opened and closed its mouth in an attempt to free the sword from its jaw, it only pressed the blade in farther.
I stepped back and watched in a mix of both horror and fascination as the snake killed itself on my own sword. Then its massive head dropped back down onto the mosaic floor with a wet, squelching thunk and did not move again.
A treasure chest made a soft chiming sound and appeared on top of the creature’s corpse. I waited a few seconds just to make sure the snake was really dead before I crept forward and stuck the box into my pocket inventory.
Then came the part I wasn’t really looking forward to.
I needed to get my sword back and out of the creature’s mouth.
I braced my foot against the snake’s head and slowly started to pull on the handle. The sound of the blade freeing itself from the meat of the creature’s face and skull made my stomach churn with disgust, but slowly, I managed to pull the weapon free.
I felt like a much, much grosser King Arthur.
“It fits!” Yasha exclaimed and broke my disgusted reverie.
I looked over at my foxy companion and saw that she had managed to wedge the bone into the door just like a key. I held my breath as she turned the bone in the lock.
There was a faint click, and after a few gut-wrenching seconds, the door swung open so we could pass through unscathed.
“Thank God,” I muttered as I followed Yasha out of the room.
The fox-woman waited for me and came to a stop before venturing more than a foot out of the room’s doorway.
I slid my sword back into its sheath as I glanced around the hall.
Unlike the other hallways we’d been in inside of this dungeon, this one wasn’t just a simple straight path. There were what appeared to be a few offshoots that jutted off the center of the hallway in both directions before the entire hallway itself made a sharp left turn a dozen or so yards ahead.
The torches were illuminated in the standard blue, and nothing looked overly dangerous, so I started to lead the way. Yasha fell into step behind me, but she was still carrying the giant bone key in one hand.
I had to bite back a laugh. “I don’t think you’re going to need that again.”
“I know,” she said. “But it is as you said, better safe than better sorry.”
“Better safe than sorry,” I corrected, but there was a smile on my face as I did so.
We slowly came up on the first side hallway, and as we did so, I slowed my pace just in case something was lurking in the shadows just around the corner to try and jump out and kill us. Given the experience we’d had so far in the dungeon this evening, it didn’t seem all that unlikely.
I peered around the corner with Golen’s Shield up, but nothing jumped out to try and rip my face off without mercy. In fact, the hallway looked just like the hallway we were in now. It had the same stone tiles and walls with the same torches mounted every few feet. There wasn’t anything interesting or worrisome about the hallway whatsoever.
The hallway even looked like it led to a dead end.
Nothing was illuminated in any color besides blue, either, so I wasn’t all that dedicated to venturing down that path.
If we weren’t on a timer that could leave us trapped in the dungeon until we died some sort of gruesome, untimely death, I would have been more than happy to actually venture down the dead end hallway to explore, but the time limit was taking precedence now over any unnecessary exploring. We were down to only two hours already.
“Come on,” I said to Yasha. I stepped away from the entrance of the side hallway and started back on the path toward the end of the main hall.
It took me a few seconds to realize that Yasha hadn’t followed me at all.
I frowned and glanced back over my shoulder at the fox-woman. I trusted her expertise in the dungeons, because after all, she really was the expert compared to me, but I had a hard time believing that now was the proper moment to go down dead ends with no clear benefits.
“What is it?” I asked, but instead of answering, my companion simply ducked down the hallway and disappeared.
Well. Shit.
I sighed and turned around. I wasn’t going to let her go do something stupid alone, where was the fun in that?
I made my way back into the hallway and saw that Yasha was standing at the dead end. Her ears and tail were both twitching rapidly, and that caused me to speed up my pace. It was like she sensed something that both I and the Pauldrons of Wisdom hadn’t been able to detect.
It was strange, there really shouldn’t have been anything the pauldrons weren’t able to detect, but maybe they only picked up on things that could hurt or help me? I still hadn’t gotten an entire handle on the way the piece of armor worked yet.
“What is it?” I asked Yasha again.
Her brow was deeply furrowed, and her pupils had narrowed to slits. She ran her sharp nails over the stone tiles in the wall with a clear purpose, but I had no idea what that purpose was.
“There is something here,” she murmured. Her ears gave another twitch, and she cocked her head to the side as if she heard something.
I strained my own ears in an attempt to listen, but all I heard was the sounds of our breathing and the general dank creaking of the dungeon itself. If there was something else going on, I certainly didn’t hear it.
“Are you sure?” I asked her. “What does it sound like?”
I had no reason not to believe that she was hearing something, even if I wasn’t. After all, she was an entirely different race than I was, and if she had the fox ears, it made sense that she would also have a better sense of hearing.
“I am not sure,” Yasha said as she continued to trace the stones embedded in the wall. It looked like she was tracing each and every groove that formed the wall, like she was trying to find something in the grout.
I frowned and reached over her shoulder to knock on the wall. It sounded solid, but then again, I wasn’t exactly sure what a hollow stone wall was even supposed to sound like in the first place.
Before I could ask her another question, however, Yasha made a small sound of excitement. I looked down at her hand just in time to see her dig her nail under one of the stones that made up the wall.
Holy shit. It was loose.
She gave the stone a slight wiggle, but it was clear she wasn’t going to be able to get it out alone, much less with her nails.
“Wait,” I said. “Hang on. You’re going to break your nail and hurt yourself like that. You need something to get a little bit more leverage. Can I see the dagger I used earlier?”
Yasha scowled as she seemed to realize I was right and digging her nail into the wall was only going to successfully hurt her nail. She pulled the sharp little dagger off of her belt and passed it over to me. Then she scooted a little bit out of the way so I could actually slip the dagger into the very narrow gap between the stones she’d created.
The tip of the blade easily slipped inside without any issues. With the blade wedged in between the blocks now, I was able to use it to create a bit of leverage between the stones. I started to wiggle the knife, and sure enough, the stone block that was propped up on it started to wiggle as well.
“It’s working!” Yasha exclaimed in delight.
“Come on,” I said. “If you use the Talon Blade, we can probably get this thing wiggled out of here entirely.”
“Good idea,” Yasha agreed. She pulled the other shorter blade from her belt and wedged it under the opposite side of the stone.
Together, we worked in tandem to raise and lower our blades to wiggle the stone out of place as much as we could manage. It was slow work, but after a few tedious minutes of wiggling and wedging, the stone was finally loose enough that I could simply grab it and yank it free of the wall.
But before I did so, I paused. I didn’t think knocking one stone out would cause all of the others to fall, given how asymmetrical they were arranged, but I didn’t think collapsing a wall was a particularly great idea one way or another.
“Can I see the bone?” I asked Yasha when an idea came to me.
Her brow furrowed, but she traded me the dagger for the bone key nonetheless.
I studied the femur closely. It was too long to fit in the wall at an entirely upright angle, but if I forced it in diagonally, it should be able to fit in the opening that the removal of the stone was going to create.
I’d have to be quick about it before anything else could start to fall, but it should work. The femur was the strongest bone in the human body, and while I had no idea if this femur belonged to a human being at all, I had to hope that that fact of anatomy was the same across different species.
“When we pull the stone out, get it out of the way as quickly as possible so I can wedge the bone inside,” I told Yasha. “That way, in case any of the stones come loose, it shouldn’t make the entire wall collapse, at least not for the time being.”
Yasha nodded and sheathed her blades. “I understand. I will be quick as I move the stone.”
“Ready?” I held the bone in one hand and gripped the edge of the loosened stone with the other to help pull.
Yasha nodded, and I took that as a signal to yank the stone.
It slipped out as easily as if it had been greased. Yasha jerked it away quickly and grunted from the weight, and within seconds, I slotted the bone into the newly opened gap.
Nothing clattered down, and we weren’t crushed in an impromptu rockslide, so I took that as a good sign. Once I was certain that we were in the clear and that Yasha had found somewhere to heft the huge stone down to, I took a moment to study the gap in the wall we had left.
It was about a foot and a half wide and a little less than a foot tall. The darkness from whatever was behind the wall made the space look like it was a hole made of nothingness in the stonework with only the bone to break up the black.
I felt a shiver roll down my spine as I stared at the opening.
“Here,” Yasha said and jarred me from my concentration. I hadn’t even realized that the fox-woman had stood up, but as she crouched back down beside me, she passed me one of the torches from the wall.
“Thanks,” I said. “Ready?”
“Yes,” Yasha assured me. “Let us see what is inside.”
I tightened my hold on the torch and slowly leaned forward toward the hole in the wall. I brought the torch forward with me and angled the flame toward the empty space.
For a moment, I saw nothing as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, even with the flame to aid me, but then…
“Fuck!” I shouted in surprise.
Peering back at us through the hole we’d created in the wall was a pair of blue, human eyes.
Chapter 25
The pair of eyes went wide as they stared back at us through the narrow gap in the stone.
“What the fuck,” I breathed. “Holy shit.”
My breath caught in my throat as the pair of eyes continued to peer back at me and Yasha. Next to me, my companion looked equally as startled by the sight. Her tail had puffed up, and her eyes narrowed to what were practically slits as she looked back and forth between me and whoever was behind the stone wall in front of us.
“What is going on?” she asked, though I wasn’t exactly sure who the question was actually aimed at. “You are behind a wall.”
That, I realized, was definitely aimed at whoever was, you know, behind the fucking wall.
The eyes blinked, and for a moment, I thought that whoever they belonged to was going to bolt and make a run for it. I had no idea how someone could have even gotten back there, much less how Yasha had even realized it.
“Did you know there was someone back there?” I asked the fox-woman without breaking eye contact with whoever was behind the wall. I assumed the other person was dropped into some sort of low crouch to be eye level with the stone we’d pulled out. It was either that, or whoever was back there was definitely shorter than anticipated.
“No,” Yasha said. “I heard something strange, but I did not expect… this.”
Whoever was attached to the eyes still hadn’t fled yet, and I wasn’t sure if that was a good or a bad sign. If anything, it was just… a sign.
“Who are you?” I asked the person behind the wall. “How did you get back there?”
I figured those were probably a good set of starting questions to ask.
The eyes darted from side to side, and I had a feeling they were investigating me and Yasha both. I was sure we made for an interesting sight, but then again, everything in the dungeons made for an interesting sight.
No response came for a few long seconds. I was beginning to wonder if maybe it was just a pair of eyes and half of a face back there behind the wall. I had no idea why there would be something like that, but I guessed that maybe the dungeon could have some sort of built-in wall monsters?
The more I thought about it, the stupider it sounded, but I was very clearly grasping at fucking straws here.
I was about to ask my question again, followed by “can you talk” when an unfamiliar voice drifted out from behind the wall.
“Iris,” the voice said.
It was a fairly small logical leap to assume the voice belonged to whoever the eyes belonged to. And it was a woman. I hadn’t really known one way or another, but her tone gave her away.
There was a slight musicality to her voice. It was almost lilting. There was also, strangely enough, what sounded like a slight West Coast leaning to her words, like there was an accent just barely beginning to form. It jarred me further from the already jarring situation, because I hadn’t expected her to sound like she was from Earth.
“Iris,” I repeated the name. “Can you tell me why you’re behind the wall?”
It felt almost like I was talking to a child as I tried to coax answers out of the strange woman. I had so many questions bubbling around in my mind, and they were all fighting to get out of my mouth and into the open at once. Like, why was she behind the wall, for starters? And then, how did she get behind the wall? Who was she? What was she doing here? Was she part of the dungeon? Did she have a crystal?
Yasha peered in closer, and her tail gave another warning flick. It appeared she wasn’t too fond of Iris and her hidey-hole behind the wall. I couldn’t really blame her. There was something decidedly disconcerting about seeing nothing but someone’s eyes at shin height as they hid behind a stone wall.
I mean, for fuck’s sake, I’d just been assuming there was nothing behind the walls at all. We were in some sort of strange pocket dimension, and the second I felt like I was beginning to understand the rules, something new shifted and changed to make everything that much more confusing.
“Are you going to try and hurt me?” Iris asked.
I didn’t need to see the rest of her face to know there was fear written all over her features. She hadn’t answered the question I’d asked aloud, or even any of the questions I’d kept to myself, but she had, inadvertently, given me a whole new set of questions.
“No,” I said quickly. “No, of course not. Right, Yasha?”
