Chapter Seven
Skylar had the golems take up positions around the Sanctuary to keep a look out for anything that might move toward them.
The blood elflings were pseudo-sapient, which meant they used weapons.
Since spells and projectiles cast outside the Sanctuary could still fly through its perimeter, they had to watch out for anyone wanting to snipe them.
Krysta’s power let her actually push the stone pillars into a new shape.
She shoved her staff into the stone, then pushed upward until it parted like clay.
Another shove and the crack turned into a bubble large enough for them to use as tents.
They looked like something a glassblower might have produced, and only three of the pillars were big enough to convert into a bubble, but it gave them a trio of two-person shelters.
She also softened the ground to turn it into a suitable mattress material.
“It’s a good thing we brought our own wood,” Kora said after scanning the ground and surrounding terrain. “I do not believe the larger mushrooms we have seen would serve as firewood, and it’s a little on the cold side.”
“That’s one way to put it,” Skylar complained. The djinn was shivering, and Vester saw that she’d pulled out a warmer shirt to put on under her armored coat. “It’s almost freezing in here!” Now that Vester knew she came from a desert people, her dislike for chill made sense to him.
Though I could have sworn deserts got really cold at night… Maybe that’s just an Earth thing. He put his arm around Skylar and hugged her close to warm her up a little. He didn’t think his body was putting out much heat, but she curled into him like he was a campfire.
Vester relaxed, leaning into Skylar, and called forth his Grimoire to see if the chaos of their entrance had caused him to miss anything. A quick skim of his tome revealed that he’d gotten credit for causing the deaths of several “goliath scorpion swarmers” but hadn’t earned a new level.
But he had also gotten a Quest.
Floor Quest: Swarm Maintenance
Requirement:
Slay 400 goliath scorpion swarmers. Slay 75 goliath scorpion soldiers. Slay 1 goliath scorpion queen.
Conditional: This Quest becomes invalid past level 55
Reward: Attribute boost or skill level.
Punishment: none
As Floor Quests went it wasn’t the most impressive, but Vester wasn’t about to skip a chance at earning a skill boost.
Looks like we’d have to slaughter an entire swarm to get these numbers done in a single go, he mused.
If what Kora learned about the floor is accurate, then each of those swarms is basically a moving colony.
The goliath scorpions don’t burrow or build nests—they just migrate constantly across the floor like army ants.
Their ability to walk along the walls and ceiling means there aren’t any real safe areas on the floor. A colony could pass by at any time.
Some of the Adventurers had theorized that the reason the blood elflings weren’t automatically hostile was because the migrating scorpions posed such a huge threat to anyone who wanted to spend any time on this floor;
that the Great Dungeon was balancing the threat by offering a potential positive interaction.
Vester wasn’t sure he believed that, but he was holding off his judgement until he reached the elfling island with the secret Quest Elondolin had told them about.
“Everyone get the Swarm Maintenance Quest?”
he asked, and once they’d all confirmed it, they put their books away.
None of them had leveled, though that didn’t surprise Vester much.
Their arrival had seen them almost immediately flee the swarm on top of them, so he doubted they’d killed many of the monsters.
The creatures were also individually weak, the real growth would have come from wiping out the entire horde.
Soup arrived, with Krysta planting a kiss on his cheek to get his attention and make sure he ate.
Vester’s mana reserves were still incredibly low, so the Party unanimously bullied him into getting rest.
He curled up in one of the shelters Krysta had created and let himself drift off.
They’ll wake me for my third shift watch, and I really, really need to let my mana refill…
He wasn’t sure how long he’d been sleeping when the first sounds began invading his dream—chittering, hissing, clacking—which turned a delightful dream about taking Krysta to a cooking competition into something foul.
The fridge had just opened to pour out a horde of ants, when a hand on his ankle woke him.
“We’ve got a problem!” Li Ra said, having to shout to be heard over the chitinous cacophony that threatened to deafen Vester. He resisted the temptation to stuff his fingers in his ears while he rolled off the bedroll and slipped out the entrance of his stone tent.
What he saw horrified him.
The Sanctuary… was underneath a swarm of goliath scorpions.
Vester’s eyes rose, following the squirming mass from the ground up above them in a solid dome of arachnids.
“Fucking… hell…” he breathed. “Is Krysta okay?”
He wasn’t sure anyone but Li Ra—maybe Reve with her Perception Aura—could hear him without shouting.
“She’s meditating,” Reve replied, proving she could hear over the monsters. “Holding the Sanctuary against the swarm’s mass is draining her mana slowly, but the regeneration boosts are staving off disaster for now.”
Reve’s wings were pumping steadily to keep her hanging in midair, where the bat-winged woman had four disks spinning around her.
These sawblades were gifts from Skylar: a five-foot-wide disk of dungeon iron with serrated edges tipped by Sargo’s fangs.
They were currently sweeping outward and slicing into scorpion bodies with a horrendous ripping sound that had chunks of bug falling all around the perimeter of the Sanctuary.
The ichor splattering across the rocks fell so thick it sounded like rain.
Vester turned in a circle, looking for the rest of his Party.
Li Ra was next to him, having woken him up.
Skylar was standing on one of the tents Krysta had created, and Vester could tell from her expression that she was guiding her golems.
He’d also bet real coin that Krysta was inside that tent and Skylar was protecting her.
With Reve above him, that left him looking for Kora.
Moments later, Vester spotted her when the kitsune slammed her shield forward and rammed it into the head of the biggest scorpion Vester had ever seen.
She was on the opposite side of the camp from Vester—the monsters on her side were all roughly the size of sedans and minivans, not counting their legs.
Lightning was covering the face of Kora’s shield and it discharged into the huge creature when the shield bash landed.
The goliath scorpion skidded backward upon impact, but it responded by spraying webbing across the Sanctuary perimeter and trying to drag Kora out so it could bury her under its brethren.
Before the sticky silk could yank her, however, Ripper tore past and completely shredded the lines.
The puppet was a mass of sticky webbing, and one of its legs actually appeared to be glued to its belly.
Dent trudged up in Ripper’s wake and swung a massive hammer down at the returning goliath scorpion.
The boom of that iron sledge crashing into the monster’s chitinous head echoed within the dome of squirming beasts.
Cracks fissured out across the scorpion’s faceplate, and then Dent’s ax came down to split the skull in half.
Vester cast three Labyrinth Wards across the arc of the Sanctuary.
With the overlap, it gave him a little over a hundred and eighty feet of coverage, and the bugs that were standing directly over the traps began slumping immediately.
I hope these fucking things aren’t smart enough to solve that maze anytime soon.
Then he saw something he’d never encountered before.
The goliath scorpion swarm was stomping over the bodies of the fallen arachnids—and Labyrinth Ward wasn’t trapping them. The pile was so thick that it completely insulated the monsters climbing above. “Can’t say I’m happy to see that,” he muttered.
“It’s still useful,” Li said with a bump of her shoulder against his. “You must have caught a few dozen of the things in those traps. Maybe you can create some illusions that will discourage them from trying to come in?”
It wasn’t a terrible suggestion, though Vester had no idea what kind of sights or smells might scare off an army of spider-scorpions. “Is this the same swarm we ran into when we arrived?”
“We think so!” Reve called down. “They came from the same direction we did. I suspect the swarm turned to hunt us down because we killed some of its members.”
“Is that normal?” Vester asked, annoyed he had to shout to be heard. He didn’t remember anything in the dungeon reports about the swarms hunting the delvers… but if the people it happened to got eaten, there would have been no one left to file a report.
“I have seen it before,” Reve said, “though not in this species. There are many territorial monsters in the Great Dungeon that will hunt down creatures that escape them. Devouring powerful prey is how they gain energy to evolve, and variety increases their paths to power.
Anything strong enough to survive and run away is strong enough to offer benefits.”
The strangest part about that biology lesson was that Reve was slowly pirouetting in the sky the entire time she lectured him.
The blades spinning in her telekinetic grip continually ground through the scorpions trying to enclose them.
It only took a few moments of watching for Vester to realize something strange was going on.
“Why aren’t the bodies falling into the Sanctuary?” he called in surprise. “Where are they going?”
Because every time Reve split a giant bug in half, the corpse seemed to vanish and a new, living creature took its place.
The goo from their bodies was pattering down all around them and the stone was growing slick and slimy, yet Vester didn’t see more than a few chunks of legs, a claw, and one singular tail.
“They’re stealing them,” Li Ra said in annoyance.
She’d been taking measured shots the entire time they’d been standing there, pacing herself.
The hiss-crack of her rifle discharging acid bolts into the goliath scorpions was like a metronome.
“We think they’re carrying the bodies back to the queen so it can eat the dead and produce more swarmers.”
“Wait, what?” Vester blinked, then grimaced.
“If she’s laying more eggs, does that mean there’s no way we’re getting out of this?”
Theoretically eggs and young insects wouldn’t be as powerful as older members of the swarm, but Vester kept in mind that he was dealing with dungeon magic, and bullshit might see new bugs spring forth fully formed.
“We can,” Kora contradicted, backing away from the edge of the Sanctuary and taking a moment to come drink some soup from the pot Krysta had cooked earlier.
So long as they ate regularly, they’d get the full benefits of Krysta’s regeneration bonuses—though she’d eventually have to stop meditating to cook new food.
Kora set down the ladle and straightened before twisting her back to pop her spine in several places. “It will be a grind, but we can wear the swarm down so long as Krysta’s mana holds. If the Sanctury collapses… things will get unpleasant.”
“Unpleasant,” Vester repeated. “That’s one way to put it. Can you see any reason for me to hold off on using Unfettered?” With Vester’s speed, the ability to do direct damage and a divine blade went a long way.
“The cooldown is a concern,” Kora admitted, “but there’s no point in having a power if we’re afraid to let you use it and that results in someone’s injury or death. Li Ra’s pistols will eventually need true maintenance, Skylar’s already keeping them going with her Repair Aura,
but she’s got her own problems. Three of her golems have been pulled down and destroyed. Eventually Reve’s mana will run low if she pushes more aggressively. Our survival at the moment hinges entirely on resource management.”
Vester nodded, understanding Kora’s point; Krysta’s Sanctuary lets us fight longer, our stamina and mana refilling. But we’re not going to keep regenerating so fast we can fight forever… and once our reserves drop too low, if the Sanctuary fails, we’re dead.
Vester rolled his wrist and swept Trickster’s Cane in a circle, revering his grip so the knob was against his wrist.
Activating Unfettered felt good, and a pulse of magic reinforced his Avatar’s Raiment into divine armor.
Trickster’s Cane rippled like water as wood transformed into a slim, black-steel blade.
The dragon-shaped grip curled around his hand, shielding his fingers and thumb in its protective basket, and then Vester blasted forward in a lunge that used every ounce of his dexterity.
Trickster’s Cane offered no bonuses to Vester’s strength, nor did it hold any enchantments to make it more lethal—it was simply a tool that allowed him to conserve his mana.
But in its rapier form the blade was still divine quality.
Its edge sliced through chitin like paper as Vester began to dance along the edges of the Sanctuary, stabbing over and over into the swarm.
The cuts he left gaped open, dripping ichor, and it only took a minute for him to learn where the creature’s brains were hidden.
Stabbing something in between its “middle” eyes while making a downward twist of his wrist took practice, but with a dexterity of over one hundred, Vester was quick to get the motion locked in.
For forty-five minutes he stabbed, twisted, and stabbed again.
Vester’s arm felt like it was on fire by the time Unfettered faded, and his entire left side was splattered with sickly green goo from the number of scorpions he’d impaled, yet despite killing dozens, possibly hundreds of the bugs, the swarm was still covering them in a mountain of bodies.
He was breathing hard, leaning on Trickster’s Cane, when Kora put a hand on the middle of his back.
“Don’t look so discouraged,” she said in a soft voice, which was what made him realize that the endless tide of arachnids definitely was ebbing—the deafening hiss of chitinous bodies had grown into a mere whisper of its former volume.
“I suspect you killed almost half the swarmers coming at us.”
With him handling the smaller bugs, Li Ra, Reve, and Kora had been able to focus on the larger beasts.
Dent and Ripper had maintained their tasks of ensuring no one got webbed and sucked out of the Sanctuary, though Vester saw that Skylar had had to clean Ripper off several times.
He suspected she’d just sucked all the silk into her inventory and hit the golem with a Repair spell, then sent it back out to fight.
“I believe we can break the dome with one solid push,” Reve shouted from her position above them.
“Then let’s do it,” Vester said with a nod.