4. Chapter 4 The Descent
Sif was already twenty feet in. She’d gone low and quiet the moment we cleared the entry passage, her stride shifting into something I hadn’t seen from her before, a careful weaving line that kept her between the shadows and the stone pillars where Astrid would have gone straight up the middle.
Liv had stopped three steps behind her, ears locked forward, scanning.
“Eight,” Liv said. “Standard. Two archers in the back near the far wall. Rest are melee, no clubs. They’re bunched.”
Bjorna came past me on the left, her shield already on her arm.
She didn’t give an order. She just moved to the front line and set her feet, and the rest of us adjusted around her like we’d rehearsed it.
It was amazing how the party just became all business so quickly.
There was no more banter or joking. They were here for a specific purpose.
Nott raised a hand. An [Ember Bolt] formed at her fingertips and crossed the chamber in a low arc. It struck the center of the bunched group and two goblins dropped. The rest scattered, screeching, and the two archers in the back fumbled for their bows.
Liv’s first arrow took one of the archers before it got a shot off. Her second arrow caught the other one mid-draw. Both went down clean.
“Bullseye! I got those little green bastards!” Her voice was high with excitement.
The remaining goblins charged. They hit the radius of Bjorna’s [Imposing Presence] and their feet stuttered, that same half-step hesitation I’d seen the first time, legs committing to a rush their instincts told them to abandon.
Bjorna brought the longsword across the first one and it dropped.
Sif appeared behind the cluster from an angle I hadn’t tracked, put a dagger through the back of one and kicked another into the path of Bjorna’s backswing. It lasted about fifteen seconds.
The chamber went quiet. The only sounds were breathing and blood pooling on the floor.
I stood behind Nott with [Mend] ready and nothing to use it on. Nobody had a scratch.
The last time I’d been in this chamber, Astrid had led, and the six goblins had given us a real first encounter. These four women knew where to stand and when to swing, and the goblins hadn’t had a chance.
“Maybe you guys don’t need me at all. That was impressive,” I said.
Sif sighed. “You’ve gone and done it now. The next chamber is bound to have fucking ten-foot-tall hobgoblins with axes as big.”
“Ah, back on my world, we call that ‘jinxing it.’”
Sif rolled her eyes. “Whatever it’s called, don’t do it.”
Bjorna wiped her blade on the nearest body and sheathed it. “Let’s focus, please. Sif, next chamber.”
The second and third chambers went the same way.
The twelve goblins in the second chamber included two bigger ones, and Nott dropped three of the regulars with a forked [Static Shock] before Bjorna engaged the big ones.
The third chamber had the chieftain-tier and the hooded caster in the back.
The chieftain—who had put up a genuine fight—had gone down in seconds.
Bjorna caught its sword on her shield and drove the longsword through its chest while Sif came in from its blind side and opened its throat.
Nott put an [Ember Bolt] into the hood’s chest before it could raise the bone weapon it held.
Liv put two arrows into it on the way down.
That creature never stood a chance. The precision and efficiency of my teammates was extraordinary.
Nott checked the chieftain’s belt and came up with a handful of mixed copper and a dim crystal. She dropped the crystal and coins into her Ring of Holding.
“Pitiful drop, but a drop nonetheless,” she said.
Bjorna nodded. “We loot on the way back up. Keep moving.”
I healed a scrape on Bjorna’s forearm where a goblin’s crude blade had caught her between the vambrace and the elbow.
The gold went in and the cut closed. There was a nick on Sif’s knuckle from a deflected strike.
I took her hand and ran [Mend] through it in about two seconds.
She gave me a look, her blue eyes warm in the low light.
“My hero,” she said.
“It was a paper cut.”
“And you healed it with such dedication.”
“I live to serve.”
Bjorna was already at the steps. “Move. We’re going deeper.”
We went down.
[Cold Hollow. Depth: 2.]
The steps were cut stone, narrow and uneven, dropping at an angle that put my hand on the wall for balance. The cold deepened by a degree and the ambient glow thinned. When we came out into the first depth-2 chamber, I stopped.
The stone was different.
It took me a second to see it. Dark streaks on the walls, thick and uneven, clinging to the rock in patches like something had been smeared across the surface and left to harden.
The streaks weren’t mineral. They had a texture, raised and glossy, like dried sap.
I reached out and touched one. It was warm.
“Don’t touch that,” Liv said behind me.
I pulled my hand back. “What is it?”
“Resin. Organic.” Her ears were swiveling, fast and independent, pulling sounds from deeper in the passage. “It wasn’t here last time. The dungeon’s instance is different.”
The first cluster sat against the wall twenty feet into the chamber. Translucent sacs, each about the size of my fist, clumped together in a mass the size of a bushel basket. Half of them were empty, split open at the top. The intact ones held shapes inside, small and curled, not moving.
“That’s new and kind of gross. What the hell is it?” I asked.
“The ecology changes the deeper you go in some dungeons,” Nott said.
She was studying the cluster with that focused look she used when she was reading something the rest of us couldn’t see.
“Cold Hollow has layers. Standard goblins at depth one are the surface population. Below that, the structure shifts.”
The goblins were different at this depth.
Six of them waited at the far end of the chamber, arranged in a loose semicircle near a second cluster of eggs with their weapons up. They didn’t charge. They held position, watching us approach. They were less feral than the ones above and more organized.
“Sentinels,” Bjorna said. She stopped and studied them for a count. “They’re guarding the eggs.”
“[Imposing Presence] isn’t going to scatter them,” Sif said from somewhere to my left. I hadn’t seen her move. “They’re set.”
“Then we go to them,” the bear-kin said through gritted teeth.
Bjorna advanced. The sentinels held. When she reached their line, they came at her together, coordinated, three on her shield side and three on her sword side.
It was the first real fight of the descent instead of a cleanup.
Bjorna planted and braced, and the three on her shield side hammered into her.
She held the line. Sif came from behind the egg cluster and took two of them from angles they hadn’t been watching.
Nott dropped one with a bolt. Liv put arrows into the last two as they tried to circle behind Bjorna.
The next chamber had more resin on the walls and two separate clusters of sacs.
Under the mineral cold, something warmer sat, organic and alive.
The resin was thicker here, the patches spreading across the stone in connected streaks that ran from floor to ceiling.
One of the clusters was pulsing, a slow dim rhythm, and the shapes inside the intact sacs were larger than the ones upstairs.
“They’re getting bigger,” I said.
“The deeper ones are closer to maturity,” Nott said. “We’re going toward the source.”
Eight sentinels held this chamber, arranged around the clusters.
The fight was tighter. Bjorna’s shield took hits that rang off the stone walls, and one of the sentinels got past her line.
Nott dropped it with a [Static Shock] at close range, the white-blue fork splitting from her palm and catching the goblin in the chest from six feet away. It went down smoking.
I healed a bruise on Bjorna’s shield arm between chambers. The magic blossomed and the purple faded. She rolled her shoulder and nodded.
“How are you reading it?” she said to Liv.
Liv’s ears were angled forward, one tilted higher than the other.
“The organic material gets thicker the deeper we go. The passages ahead are warmer. The air has moisture in it that wasn’t there at depth one.
” She paused. Her ears adjusted. “Something bigger moving down below. Not close. But down there.”
Bjorna turned to me. “How are you?”
“I’m good. I’ve barely had to work. I’m feeling like I’m not carrying my weight.”
“Hopefully this dive stays that way. We have a long way to go.” She turned and took the steps down.
[Cold Hollow. Depth: 3.]
The next floor looked like a nest.
Organic coating covered the walls and ceiling in a full layer now, not patches.
Stone showed through in places, but less of it than before, and the gaps were shrinking as we moved deeper.
Sacs lined the walls in bigger, denser clusters, glowing with a faint bioluminescence that pulsed in the same slow rhythm I’d seen at depth two.
The ceiling had dropped to eight feet and the passage narrowed.
The cold that defined Cold Hollow was fading.
The air was warm and humid, and it carried a smell I couldn’t place, organic and sweet and wrong.
That was the strangest part. Cold Hollow had always been cold. But the deeper we went, the warmer it got, and by depth three I was sweating under my coat. Whatever lived at the heart of this place was generating heat, pushing it outward through the walls.
“New contacts,” Liv said. Her voice was quieter now. “They are different from sentinels. Larger, but slower."
We came into the first chamber. She’d undersold it.
The new creatures were bigger than any goblin I’d encountered. Bloated, hunched, their arms thicker and their hands wider. They crouched near the largest sac clusters, their bodies curled around the eggs, tending them. They didn’t look up when we entered. They didn’t seem to care about us at all.