Chapter 18
The floor broke under Luna. She fell through, vanishing in an instant.
She slid down into the darkness, accidentally positioned with her backpack and spear so as not to get stuck.
She wasn’t paying attention. She hit a wall with a crunch, fell, slid down another smooth slope, again, and landed on a floor, barely stabilizing on her feet.
Gems shone in the darkness, the only sources of light. They started moving toward her, some accompanied by rumbling, others by skittering.
She looked up into the shaft she had slid in. Too smooth and narrow to climb. “Alsen!” she shouted from the top of her lungs. “I need light! Now!”
Up above, Alsen stared at the hole in the floor. A simple hole remained after Luna, barely a few feet in diameter. He heard her voice.
It kicked him into urgency. With an instinctive thought, he summoned a mote of bright light. Having no idea how the shaft went, he imbued will into the light: Fly above Luna.
The light flew into the shaft.
Garrett, Theron, and Marena gathered by Alsen, staring at the shaft.
The light arrived at Luna, illuminating the chamber. A couple of scorpions just pounced on her. She spun with the spear, shattering their gems. Dozens of constructs filled the large chamber she fell into.
A bunch of scorpions, quite a few of the fighting statues, and a huge statue with four, insect-like legs, and two arms, each twisted into a massive blade. Large enough to be the monster that cut apart the bridge.
“Are you all right?” echoed from above in Alsen’s voice.
Two more scorpions almost reached her, meeting their end at the tip of her spear. She leaned back into the shaft. “I’m fine. Don’t worry. It’s a storage area for destroyed statues in here. But the shaft is really long and weirdly curved, so I can’t climb back up.”
“We will bring the rope,” Alsen shouted. “It’ll just take a bit.”
The other scorpions didn’t charge yet, maintaining some formation around the slower statues.
Luna shouted into the shaft, “That’s a waste of time and effort.
The shaft’s longer than the rope we have.
There’s a way forward from here, so I’ll just go there, and we’ll meet up ahead.
The paths should take you to the lower level I’m at, anyway. ”
Luna turned towards the approaching statues. With a bit of luck, she was far enough for Alsen to be unable to reach her with his scans.
These were far too many enemies to fight without any powers. She pulled on her strength.
The truth, which she would never admit, was that she had adapted to her new body within the first week. It wasn’t all that different from the old one.
And the powers of the wolf were embedded into her through the fragments of their souls having fused together.
Just as Alsen had his old understanding of magic, including his best spells, she had all her combat experience, and the skills gained from it.
The only thing that changed was that she could no longer use the excuse that the wolf was the monster.
Partial transfiguration. Ten percent.
Her bones and inner muscles shifted. They tensed, tightened, strengthened, and re-knotted, multiplying in weight due to increased compression without any change in mass. Her outward appearance didn’t change the tiniest bit.
The outer muscles, visible underneath her skin, were all exactly the same. But the inner layers, the bones and the tendons, strengthened multiple times. Adrenaline flooded through her as every cell of her body recognized she was going to fight.
May the God of Thousand Faces have mercy upon her, for she wasn’t supposed to enjoy this feeling so much.
A set of four scorpions pounced at her. She swatted them away with her spear with effortless ease. She stepped towards the statues, a murderous grin on her face. They were going to pay for what they did to Sonja.
Above the shaft, Alsen, Garrett, and Theron stared inside. Marena sobbed a bit behind them.
What were they supposed to do?
The shaft seemed to be too narrow for Garrett and Theron to even fit through. Sending down Marena was pointless, and Alsen trusted Luna’s judgment enough to not argue when she said she was fine.
“We should go,” Garrett said. “Meeting her further down the dungeon might indeed be our best bet.”
It felt wrong to leave. Too wrong. No matter how logical doing so might have been.
They tore themselves away from the kill chute, heading ahead, slowly and carefully to avoid falling into another trap.
The corridor continued its descent. Without Luna at the front, Garrett walked point alone, his shield raised, sword ready. Every ten paces, he stopped, crouched, and checked the floor with his free hand the way he’d seen Luna do it. Except that she did it once, and he did it every few steps.
He didn’t have her instincts. None of them did.
Truth be told, Alsen didn’t see the traps Luna disarmed until after she was done.
Alsen walked behind him, feeding what little power he could spare into his analysis spell, scanning the stone ahead for structural weaknesses.
Every pulse of magic deepened the chill in his chest. He wasn’t drained too badly, but he could already feel it.
That didn’t bode well for any future fight, as they had just lost two members.
Okay, Luna wasn’t dead. She couldn’t be, but they’d still have to fight without her now. He was burning through reserves he didn’t have, but the alternative was stepping on another kill chute and losing someone else.
He couldn’t lose someone else.
Theron held the rear, axe in both hands, watching behind them with the same steady patience he brought to everything. Marena walked between Alsen and Theron, staff in hand, the teal light at its tip dead.
Nobody spoke.
The formation felt wrong. Too thin, too exposed. Five would feel small after six. Four felt like barely enough to watch every direction. Alsen kept wanting to glance over his shoulder to find Luna trailing them with that half-bored expression she wore when nothing was actively trying to kill them.
She wasn’t there.
“Floor’s solid here,” Garrett said, moving forward again.
They pressed deeper. The corridor narrowed, the ceiling dropping until Theron had to duck.
The carvings on the walls reappeared, denser, more layered, spirals nested within spirals in patterns that made Alsen’s eyes water if he stared too long.
He wanted to stop. He wanted to pull out his spellbook and map every symbol.
He kept walking.
“Air’s still pulling,” Theron reported from the back. “Stronger now.”
Good. That meant an opening awaited ahead. Whether it connected to wherever Luna had ended up was another matter entirely.
The corridor turned, then turned again, descending in sharp switchbacks. At the third turn, Garrett stopped.
The ceiling had partially collapsed. Chunks of carved stone lay across the floor, some the size of a person, forming a jagged barricade that filled the corridor from wall to wall. Narrow gaps existed between the larger pieces, but nothing wide enough to walk through.
Garrett tested the nearest boulder with his shield arm. It shifted slightly. “These are unstable.”
Theron came forward, setting down his axe. He braced both hands against the top piece, pushed gently, feeling the load distribution. “The ceiling is holding, mostly, but one wrong pull could bring more of it down.” He stepped back. “We need to know which ones to move and which ones to leave.”
Right, so he’d better scan what to move or not. He fired the analyzing scan, which he had yet to formalize with a name. It wasn’t a single spell, more like an improvised framework to analyze whatever he focused the spell on. It worked, in spite of him not having precise control over the spell.
The scan went through the ceiling, the unstable sections lighting up in his mind. “This way,” Alsen said, pointing. “Push this piece forward, not sideways. Then the two smaller pieces on the right. Don’t touch the angular one near the top, or the wedge by the left wall.”
Theron and Garrett went to work. They moved the centerpiece first, Theron’s strength doing most of the pushing while Garrett guided it. The stone ground against the floor, the sound unnervingly loud in the confined space. Dust cascaded from the ceiling.
Nobody breathed. Not even Alsen, as he realized this type of spell didn’t have verifiable results.
When he fired an indirect missile, he could see it explode, verifying the result.
But a scan gave a result, and he had no way to tell if it was correct, as the only way he could detect what he scanned for was through the scan itself.
Hmph. He didn’t like the scanning spells anymore. It didn’t matter before, but now that the failure of his spell would result in the ceiling crushing him to death, he questioned the scanning spell mechanics a lot more thoroughly.
The piece Theron pushed cleared. The gap widened enough for a person to squeeze through. Garrett went first, shield raised in case something waited on the other side. He disappeared through the gap, and a moment later called back. “Clear.”
Marena went next. She turned sideways, staff held above her head, and slipped through. Alsen followed, his back scraping against rough stone, the dust thick enough to taste. The analysis spell may have worked, but he didn’t feel good about it at all.
Theron came last, sucking in his gut and contorting his massive frame through the gap with significantly less grace than everyone else. A chunk of rubble shifted behind him as he pushed through. More dust fell.
They all stood still until the settling stopped.
Theron squeezed through the final part. Nothing fell. He exhaled, wiping off his sweat. He picked up his axe from his back.
Alsen also exhaled. A point for the possibly unreliable scan.
They continued the descent. The hallways didn’t change, giving a persistent feeling of déjà vu.
The sound of steel hitting stone echoed from ahead. Was that Luna?