Pocket Dungeon, page 37
Yasha looked less than thrilled as she continued to flick her tail in some sort of agitation. This was obviously not a situation she had ever expected to find herself in, or at the very least, it wasn’t one she had trained for.
“Only if she tries to hurt us first,” she replied.
I supposed that was good enough.
“We aren’t going to hurt you, okay?” I said to Iris. “Do you promise not to try and hurt us, too?”
There was a long pause as Iris studied us for a few seconds longer. Then she gave a nearly imperceptible nod of her head. If I hadn’t been studying her and waiting for some sort of reaction, I probably would have missed it entirely.
“Step back,” she said. Once again, it wasn’t an answer to any sort of question, but we were making some progress.
I straightened up from my crouched position next to Yasha and took a step back from the wall. Yasha lingered for a moment before she did the same and moved back to join me.
As we stood side by side, a few feet from the stone wall, I passed her the dagger I had borrowed. She slipped that and the Talon Blade back onto her belt with a well-practiced ease. Her posture was tense as she clearly waited for the worst to happen.
I couldn’t really blame her. It was hard to expect anything good to come from the random woman in the wall giving us orders, but what else were we supposed to do?
I kept one hand on the hilt of Doomslayer as I watched Iris’ eyes disappear from the gap in the wall. It was replaced by the sight of what I assumed were her shins.
Okay, so that answered one question. She wasn’t supremely short, and by all intents and purposes, the brief glimpse I had of her legs made her seem human enough.
I wasn’t exactly sure what we were waiting for, but seconds later, it became clear.
A grinding sound came up from seemingly out of nowhere. It sounded like two stones grinding together with a substantial amount of force. For a moment, the noise was the only thing that indicated something was happening, but then the wall began to move.
It was just a twitch of the stones at first, and then the entire stone wall in front of us started to shake like it was something out of a funhouse. And then, to both my and Yasha’s utter shock, the wall began to recede.
It reminded me of how the doorway had disappeared upward and into the ceiling before we were faced with Bizarro Wes what felt like hours before now. But instead of moving upward, the doorway moved to the side and disappeared into what had also looked like a solid wall.
What the hell was happening here?
My shock abated only for a second before it returned in full. Iris stepped out from the narrow opening the wall created. Or at least, I assumed it was Iris. The only thing I had to go off of was her dark blue eyes and the vague impression of her shins, which wasn’t really much when it came to discerning what a person looked like.
The woman in front of me was a few inches shorter than I was, and a few inches taller than Yasha. I’d have put her anywhere from five feet seven inches, to five feet nine inches. She had a lean, tapered waist and long, long legs that disappeared into what looked like genuine suede boots that stopped just below her knees.
She had on some sort of tiny jumpsuit or romper. The hem of the shorts ended at the tops of her thighs and the curve of her ass. A few of the buttons that ran down the front of the jumpsuit were open down her chest, revealing just a bit of perky cleavage. It had short sleeves that stopped just below her shoulders and revealed a tattoo on her arm that I couldn’t distinguish. The jumpsuit was a bright pink and yellow combination in a psychedelic pattern, but it looked like it had been through hell. The colors were significantly more faded than I assumed they were supposed to be.
There was a belt made out of metal coin-looking things pulled taut across her narrow waist, and it clanked with each slight step she took. She had a small dagger strapped to the belt, but it didn’t look like it was supposed to attach that way. It was as if she had shoddily managed to affix it to what was definitely a decorative belt not meant for battle.
Her platinum-blonde hair was cut in choppy, shaggy layers with fringing bangs that looked like something out of the seventies. It brushed just past her shoulder blades and flipped out ever so slightly at the ends. There was a little bit of dark root regrowth at the top of her scalp that matched her dark eyebrows.
Despite her strange attire, the thing that stood out to me the most were her eyes. They were large, fringed with fine, dark lashes, and a deep blue that I’d never seen on a person before. They stood out in stark contrast to her lightly tanned skin and the freckles that dotted across the bridge of her nose.
She was pretty like no one else I’d ever met before. It was different from Yasha, who was gorgeous in a way that was both fascinating and terrifying.
Iris looked like she could have stepped off the album cover for one of those big seventies rock groups, a real-life Penny Lane, or something like that.
The strange woman’s hand hovered over the dagger hooked into her belt as her eyes darted rapidly from me to Yasha.
I slowly moved my hand away from Doomslayer’s hilt and raised both of my palms up toward her in what I hoped was a sign of good faith.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I said. “I promise. I just want to know what you were doing back there. I didn’t think there was anything behind these walls.”
“I did not, either,” Yasha chimed in. She clearly hadn’t let her guard down yet, and her ears were both perked and alert as she stared at the stranger in front of us.
Iris didn’t move her hand from the dagger. There was a strange, skittish feralness about her that I hadn’t anticipated. If anything, I had expected Yasha, who was part fox, to be more feral than anyone else in the tunnel. But Iris was clearly gunning for that prize.
“Who are you?” she asked, and I was once again taken off guard by the slight West Coast quality of her accent. This was the first time I’d come face to face with anyone else from Earth in any of the dungeons I’d been in so far, and I was intrigued.
“My name is Wes, Wes Rhodes,” I said slowly. “I’m a mechanical engineer from Chicago. And this is Yasha el-Nasir.”
I gestured to Yasha as I spoke and gave her a chance to make her own introductions.
“Yasha el-Nasir,” the fox-woman repeated. “First daughter of the el-Nasir family, keeper of the crystal, and dungeon warrior.”
Her tail twitched as she spoke, and Iris seemed to be trying rather hard not to look at it. If we weren’t in what was constantly a life-or-death situation, it might have been funny.
After a moment, the strange woman across from us spoke again.
“Chicago,” she repeated. “I’m not far off from you, then. Well, I wasn’t before I moved. Ohio.”
“Midwest represent,” I joked, but my tone was thin.
“I do not know what a Midwest is,” Yasha added, but she didn’t seem to be too pressed by the issue.
“And you’re Iris?” I led. She had yet to answer most of my questions, and if I wasn’t so curious about her, I might have been annoyed by the evasiveness.
Iris shifted from foot to foot in her boots, like she was debating answering me.
“Iris Tucker.” She clearly had made her decision.
There was something oddly familiar about her name, but I couldn’t quite place it. I decided to put that on the back-burner for the moment.
“Nice to meet you Iris,” I said. I felt like I was trying to soothe a wild animal that had been caught in a trap. “Now, what’s going on? Why are you behind the wall? How did you even get back there?”
Iris’ eyes darted between the two of us again, and apparently she decided that she liked what she saw, because she finally seemed ready to give me any sort of answer.
“It’s safer back there,” she said in a guarded tone. “Safer than out here.”
It was clear from the way she was shifting and eyeing us that she didn’t trust me or Yasha yet, but that was understandable. We were two strangers who had effectively just ruined her hiding place.
“Why are you hiding?” Yasha spoke this time. “It is safer, but you will lose your time and get stuck here.”
Iris frowned, but even the new expression couldn’t make her heart-shaped face less stunning.
“I am,” she said. “Stuck here, I mean. I’ve been stuck here.”
I blinked in surprise. I clearly still didn’t have the full picture yet, but things were beginning to make a little more sense now. I knew that if I had managed to get stuck in a dungeon, I probably would have tried to find a safe place to hunker down while I tried to figure out how to get out, too.
“Well, we still have time left to finish the dungeon.” As I said it, I flicked my eyes back over to the timer just at the edge of my view. We had wasted twenty minutes prying the stone from the wall and talking to Iris. We were down to nearly an hour and a half.
“You can come with us,” Yasha said, so apparently she had decided that she trusted the other woman after all. “Right, Wes?”
Yasha looked at me with her wide golden eyes. There was a pleading look on her face that I hadn’t expected.
“Of course,” I said quickly. “Obviously, you’re totally welcome to finish the dungeon with us if you want. And, because you’re still from Earth, it shouldn’t be too hard for you to get back to Ohio from where we’ll exit.”
“It is the noble thing to do,” Yasha added solemnly.
Iris’ eyes widened as she seemed to process everything Yasha and I had said. The new woman didn’t say anything for a moment, and if anything, she seemed to be at a loss for words as she gaped at us.
The only sound in the narrow hallway was the noise of the torches flickering on the walls.
“I…” Iris began. “Okay, yeah. I haven’t been in Ohio for a while, though. I’ve got a room at the Marmont. My manager does. Did.”
I had a hard time following what Iris was saying for a moment.
“Marmont?” I asked.
“The Chateau Marmont,” Iris clarified. “On the Strip.”
I frowned and racked my brain as I tried to place exactly where or what she was talking about, and then it hit me. I’d seen some sort of documentary about the Chateau Marmont before. I think it had been one of those that played on the History Channel or something like that. I tended to let documentaries play in the background while I studied in college, as if I could feasibly manage to learn two things at once.
Well, apparently I had managed to retain something.
“In L.A.?” I asked, just to make sure I was on the right track.
“What is an L.A.?” Yasha asked me quietly.
“Los Angeles,” I answered. “It’s a famous city in California, where a lot of famous people live.”
Yasha mouthed the word “California” next to me, but she didn’t ask for any further elaboration. I would have to walk her through all of that later on.
“That one, yeah,” Iris answered my question. She cleared her throat and shifted from foot to foot again. “That doesn’t matter, though. I’m sure I can get home one way or another. We should go, right? You said there’s a timer still? That’s the thing that makes it so people can’t get out?”
I blinked at the abrupt change in conversation, but I wasn’t going to question it too much, not when we really did need to get going so all three of us didn’t end up trapped inside. It was strange, though, that Iris didn’t seem to understand how the dungeons functioned. Then again, maybe this was her first dungeon. I’d been pretty confused at first, too.
“Yeah, we have an hour and a half left. I think that should be enough time to get out if we hurry, and with three of us, I’m sure it’ll be fine.” I gestured for her to follow us as I turned back toward the main hallway we’d just come from. “Follow me.”
I started toward the large hallway with Doomslayer extended out in front of me, just in case any sort of monster had decided to randomly spawn while we were talking with Iris. I heard the sound of two sets of footsteps behind me, and that was all I needed to be sure both of the women were following me.
I poked my head out into the larger hallway with a cautious glance, but when I was certain nothing was waiting to jump out at us, I stepped onto the stone tiles and started down the way I had originally been headed before Yasha had made her surprising detour.
The hallway was illuminated with the familiar blue aura I was getting used to with each passing minute. There were a few more offshoots from the main hall cropping up with each step I took, but I didn’t stop to give them anything more than a cursory glance.
Nothing in the narrow halls illuminated in yellow, red, or green, so I figured we should keep going.
Yasha came up to stand at my right as we moved carefully down the wide hall, and I could just barely see Iris behind me in the corner of my eye. But she was still following behind us, and that was good enough for me.
“Is there anything we should prepare for up ahead?” Yasha asked. She’d pulled her katana out from her belt and had the dangerous-looking weapon braced for combat as she matched my steps.
“Nothing that I can see,” I told her as we quickly cleared the hallway. We were nearing the end, and I could see that it branched off into two separate pathways.
Great.
I hoped there was something that made it clear which one was the right choice, otherwise we were at risk of wasting our time again.
“Maybe the rest of the dungeon will be easy,” Yasha said.
It was as if just saying the words had incurred some sort of jinx. The words were barely out of her mouth before something that sounded like an explosion echoed from the end of the hallway. It was so loud that it was nearly impossible to hear anything else. The ground shook with the force of the explosion, and then a loud crashing began to sound.
I couldn’t quite place what exactly it was that was falling, but whatever it was, I had a sinking feeling that it wasn’t going to be good. It reminded me of white river rapids, or something else huge and threatening.
“Come on!” I shouted over the loud, terrifying rumbling as I broke into a sprint to clear the rest of the hallway.
I was grateful for the Pauldrons of Wisdom, because they meant I could run without any sort of fear. It was obvious, thanks to the easily discernible auras, that there weren’t any sort of traps marking the end of the hall I was about to run headfirst into.
I skittered to a halt at the mouth of the hallway’s split with Yasha and Iris both on my heels. The two women nearly slammed into me as I gaped at the sight before me.
One end of the hallway led straight to a wall and marked it as a clear dead end. But on the other side of the hallway, I was able to make out the clear cause of the rumbling chaos.
A large mass of stone blocks that made up the wall cascaded in a cloud of dust and particles into a massive blockage that stopped up the hallway like a clog in a drain. Stones continued to drop from the walls and the ceiling and shattered on impact as they hit the ground and other nearby stones.
It was nearly impossible to see anything at all through the wreckage that was befalling the area, but one thing was clear.
Through a narrow, rapidly closing gap in the rockslide now blocking the tunnel, I saw someone move.
It was like trying to see through a sandstorm, but I could make out the shape of a person. No. A man. He looked like he was about my height with partially obscured features thanks to the cascade of rubble between us, but he was definitely human, and he was definitely from Earth.
The American flag patch on his jacket gave that away.
He also had a douchey half-grin on his fucking face.
Before I could get a better look at him, the remaining gap in the stones closed with a crash. The dust began to settle, and as it did, I realized just how screwed we were.
Somehow, the man had blocked off the pathway that led to the end of the dungeon. His stupid grin left me with no doubt about that.
And we were trapped on the other side.
Chapter 26
“Fuck!” I shouted. My voice echoed loudly off of the walls, and I coughed as some of the dust from the falling debris settled into my lungs.
The stone blocks in front of us looked nearly impenetrable. The blocks were thicker than the one Yasha and I had just pulled from Iris’ hiding place in the hallway alcove. That block had been about the size of a large shoebox, but these were the size of an average cooler. I assumed those were the ones that had come from the ceiling or something.
I reached out to push against one of the stones with my free hand, and it didn’t so much as shift against the force.
Shit.
“What do we do?” Yasha whirled around to look at me. Her pupils were blown so wide that they took up the majority of her golden eyes. She let out a cough of her own before looking back at the stones that blocked our path.
Then, in the blink of an eye, she whipped her katana out and slammed it into one of the stones, as if she could somehow catch it by surprise and cut it in two.
The metal clanged raucously off the stone and didn’t do anything more than make my ears ache and my teeth grind. The blade of the katana harmlessly bounced off.
Yasha snarled and bared her sharpened teeth at the blockade like she could scare it into submission. Before I could stop her, she whipped the katana’s blade out again toward the rockslide and began to hack at the stones like she could manage to get through that way.
“Yasha!” I shouted, but she didn’t seem to hear me. “Yasha!”
The fox-woman was clearly dialed in and dedicated to the task she’d assigned for herself. I had to reach out and plant my hand on my shoulder to get her to actually stop trying to batter the rocks into submission.
“Oh!” she exclaimed as she stopping hacking. “I am sorry!”
“It’s fine.”
Yasha made a small sound of understanding before sheathing her blade and planting her hands on her curvy hips. Her lips were pressed into a thin, unhappy line, and her eyebrows were knitted together in clear annoyance with the situation.
