19. Chapter 19 The Succubus
The fire was out by the time Bjorna woke us.
She'd been up for a while. I could tell before I opened my eyes all the way. She was standing near the portal anchor point with her shield on her arm and her longsword already belted.
Liv stirred against my side. She'd slept pressed against me all night, her ears drooped and her breathing deep, and she made a sound that was half-groan and half-protest when I moved.
"Five minutes," she said.
"Now," Bjorna said. "First light. We enter."
Sif was on her feet. She had her daggers on her hips and the stalker-hide boots laced tight. She caught my eye across the dead campfire and gave me a look that lingered a moment longer than it needed to.
"Morning, gorgeous," I said.
"Don't start," she replied, smiling.
Nott emerged from behind the shelter with her cloak pulled around her, silent and precise. She'd been organizing her ring, probably.
"Same formation. We walk back through the portal to Depth 5. The dungeon resets the creatures, but the portal scroll holds our depth. We fight through whatever is on the floor and keep going down."
We all moved toward the portal. I was a bit nervous and my stomach was queasy.
I should have gotten up earlier to eat something, but I chose sleep over sustenance.
We all looked at each other and then back at the bright portal.
I guessed everyone was wondering the same thing: what was waiting for us on the other side?
"Here we go," I said.
“Take a deep breath. We’re halfway to the end and I know we can make it,” Bjorna said.
Nott broke her silence. “We will be successful. I can feel it. We just need to watch each other’s backs and we’ll be fine.”
Sif chuckled. “Listen to Nott with the pep talk. That was good.”
“Thank you,” Nott replied with pink cheeks.
We stepped through.
[The Splits. Depth: 5.]
The stone was darker than I remembered. Almost black, veined with the same dull orange glow we'd seen at Depth 4, but the corridors had changed.
They were wider, more structured, the walls cut in clean angles instead of the rough carved grooves from the upper depths.
The heat sat in the air like a living thing, heavy and constant, and the light came from deeper in the stone, a red pulse that throbbed every few seconds.
Bjorna set formation. Shield up, Sif on the flank, Liv and Nott behind, me at center-rear. We'd been running this setup for two dungeons and it was automatic now.
"Something is different," Nott said. She was looking at the walls. "The architecture here is intentional. The upper floors are natural formations carved by mana density. This is constructed."
"Constructed by what?" I asked.
"By whatever runs this side of the dungeon."
The first creatures came around a bend in the corridor and I stopped thinking about architecture.
They were demons.
Six feet tall, bipedal, muscular, dark red skin over bodies built for fighting. They had clawed hands and crude weapons, stone axes and bone clubs, and they moved in a group of four with the coordination of things that had been told where to go.
"Here we go," Bjorna said, and planted her feet.
The demons hit her shield in a coordinated rush, two high and two low, working to get around her guard. They were smarter than salamanders. They feinted. They communicated in grunts and sharp clicks that sounded almost like language.
Bjorna held the line. She braced against the two high ones and drove one back with a shield bash that crunched its stone axe against the wall.
Sif came in from the flank and the boots did what the boots did.
She was between two demons before they noticed her, daggers finding the gap between the neck and the shoulder on the first, punching through the ribs on the second.
The remaining two tried to break past Bjorna and come for the backline. One got three steps before Nott dropped it with a bolt that punched through its chest. The other made it to Liv. She put an arrow through its eye from ten feet away and stepped sideways as it fell past her.
"These are smarter than the lizards," I said. "They actually tried to flank."
"Demons." Nott crouched beside the body closest to her, already studying it. "Bipedal construct, higher cognitive function than the fire-side creatures we've seen so far. They're responding to some external direction."
"External direction from what?"
A voice drifted up from deeper in the corridor. Distant, echoing off the stone, female. The words blurred into nothing at that range, but the tone carried. She sounded like she was coaxing them along, encouraging them the way a mother would when her children weren't measuring up.
Everyone stopped.
"Did you hear that?" Liv said. Her ears were locked forward, straining.
"She's directing them," Bjorna said. Her face had gone still. "This isn't random spawning. There's something down there giving orders."
"A sentient creature controlling the dungeon's ecology," Nott said. She sounded fascinated and concerned in equal measure. "That's unprecedented in the literature I've read."
Sif cleaned her daggers on the dead demon's arm. "So the boss talks. Wonderful."
We pushed deeper. The second group of demons was bigger, six of them, and they hit harder.
They came from two corridors at once and they knew what they were doing.
One of them got past Sif and swung a bone club at my head.
I ducked it and Liv put a poisoned broadhead into its back.
It stumbled, slowed, and Bjorna finished it with a backhand swing of her longsword.
I healed a cut on Bjorna's shoulder where a stone axe had gotten past the breastplate's pauldron, and a scrape on Sif's forearm from a claw she'd deflected a half second too late.
"These things are annoying," Sif said while I closed the scrape. "The salamanders were dumb. These ones think."
"You're faster than they think," I said.
"I know. But it's rude of them to try."
I healed the scrape and she pulled her arm back and flexed her hand. Her blue eyes held mine for a second.
"Thank you, healer."
"Anytime, gorgeous."
Bjorna was already moving. "Enough. We're burning time."
We looted fast between encounters, everything into rings, no sorting. Bjorna's rule from yesterday still held: grab it, store it, keep moving.
[The Splits. Depth: 6.]
The corridors branched. The passages split and reconnected in a maze of stone that had been designed by something that understood ambush.
The walls closed in, the ceiling dropped, and the heat pressed harder with every step down.
Sweat ran down my back under the torn stonethread robe and the three claw rips from yesterday let hot air in against my skin.
"Your robe looks terrible," Sif said from ahead of me.
"Thank you for noticing. Just imagine what my other kit would have looked like.”
"I notice everything about your body." She said it without looking back. "The robe is the least interesting part."
Liv snorted from behind me. "Are you flirting with my boyfriend in a dungeon?"
"I'm multitasking. You should be impressed."
The voice was closer now. I could make out words. She was saying something about visitors. About guests arriving. The tone had shifted from encouraging to anticipatory.
"She knows we're coming," I said.
"Obviously," Nott replied. "We killed her soldiers and walked through her territory. She's aware."
"Nott, I'm just saying it out loud for the record."
"Okay."
The fire snakes hit us from the branching passages.
They were long, fast, serpentine, and they came from three directions at once.
Their bodies were four feet of scaled muscle that moved through the branching corridors faster than anything that size should have moved.
Fire erupted from the lead snake's mouth in a tight cone that Bjorna caught on her shield.
Two more came from a side passage. Sif intercepted one, the boots carrying her to the intersection before the snake cleared the opening. She drove both daggers through its skull and rode it to the floor. The second snake got past her and wrapped itself around Nott's leg.
Nott's eyes went wide. She fired a [Static Shock] point-blank into the snake's body and it seized, but it didn't let go. Its coils tightened around her calf and she stumbled, her concentration breaking.
I was there in three steps. The snake's body was hot against my hands as I grabbed it behind the head. The gold came up.
[Mend.]
I healed Nott's leg through the snake's body, the gold reaching through the coils to the compression bruising underneath, while Liv put an arrow through the snake's spine. It spasmed and the coils loosened. Nott kicked free and I pulled the dead snake off her calf.
"Are you okay?" I said.
Nott was pale but composed. "It constricted around my leg. The pressure was significant."
"The bruising is gone. I healed it while it was still wrapped around you."
Nott's eyes went to my face. "That was creative."
"I've had worse field conditions. Are you good to keep going?"
"I'm good."
More snakes came from deeper in the passages.
Bjorna and Sif handled the front while Liv's arrows covered the side corridors and Nott dropped the ones that came from above.
I healed a burn on Bjorna's hand where a fire snake had breathed on her knuckles through the gauntlet gaps, and a scorch on Liv's shoulder where she'd been a half second too slow ducking a fire burst.
The voice was louder now. Clear enough to hear the words.
"Come deeper. I've been waiting."
Everyone stopped.
"Was that directed at us?" I said.
Sif looked at me. "I think it was directed at you."
"Why would it be directed at me?"
"Because she said 'I've been waiting' and she sounded like she was talking about a date, not a fight." Sif's grin came up, sharp and bright. "The dungeon boss is flirting with our healer."
Liv's ears went flat. "She can get in line."
Bjorna sighed. "Keep moving."
[The Splits. Depth: 7.]