Pocket dungeon, p.10
Pocket Dungeon, page 10
“I’m working on that now,” I assured her as I realized this definitely could all be gone over later.
I quickly scanned the room for some obvious signs as to how the fuck we were supposed to get out. I’d sort of hoped that once we killed the dragon all the fire would just… disappear, but that clearly wasn’t the case. I could only see one door past the blazing walls of fire, and that was clearly the door I’d burst in through.
How the fuck were we supposed to leave?
Then I remembered how the first puzzle in this dungeon had worked. I turned my focus down to the floor and saw that the thick puddles and pools of silver blood from the dragon wyrmling had started to… congeal?
Maybe the heat of the room was getting to me, but I could have sworn they looked solid now. I dropped down to my knees to investigate them a little further.
The stone floor was surprisingly warm through the singed denim of my jeans, but I supposed that came with the territory of being in a room on fire.
The pools of blood had definitely hardened. I reached out to gently poke at the edge of one with the tip of my finger and found that they were practically cemented into the ground. But that wasn’t the only thing I found. The stone tile around the blood looked as if it had eroded slightly.
It was a faint, nearly imperceptible thing, but luckily, I was still an observant son of a bitch. It was almost like the silver blood was enough to eat through the floor. And if it was eating through the floor, that had to mean there was somewhere else to go, right?
A plan quickly started to form in my mind.
“I think the dragon’s blood is eating through the stone tiles,” I said. I looked up to where Yasha stood above me and was met with a view of her absurdly lovely thighs.
Then I quickly cleared my throat and looked back at the metallic silver pool so I would actually focus on the task at hand.
The fox-woman leaned over me to study the pools. Her long, soft red hair trailed over one of her shoulders and absently tickled the back of my neck. There was an earthy, spicy scent about her that was entrancing, but just like her accent, I couldn’t quite place it.
“You’re right,” she murmured. “What should we do? Do you think it’s like the beginning of the dungeon?”
“That’s exactly what I think,” I agreed with a grin. “I’m going to try to break through the floor. Do you think you’ll be alright if we have to drop down another level?”
“I’m Arcadion,” she said. “I will be fine.”
I had no fucking idea what she was talking about, but that seemed like par for the course for my last forty-eight hours, so I decided to have a therapeutic mental break later and focus on the task at hand for now.
“Stand back,” I warned Yasha as I rose up to my feet. I hefted Golen’s Sword up in the air with the tip of the blade aimed downward at one of the largest puddles of blood. I remembered the sword’s stats had geared it toward strength, and I really hoped that those would help out.
I waited until Yasha was a good few feet away before I slammed the sword down into the blood. I was glad that the stats seemed to have strengthened the blade, because when I thrust the sword into the stone tiles with all of my force, the blade cut through the floor like it was made of butter.
The force of my thrust and the softness of the floor combined was enough to nearly knock me off balance. Luckily, I managed to stay upright as I slid my blade all the way to the hilt in the ground.
“Incredible,” Yasha gasped.
This was fucking crazy. Admittedly, everything that was happening was fucking crazy, but this was a whole other level of fucking crazy. Sure, I could attempt to rationalize away a sexy fox-woman, genetics were weird, but this?
This was insane. My sword was buried into a seemingly solid stone floor.
Slowly, I started to move the blade. It slid through the molten silver pool like it was water. I had to keep my movements slow, but I realized I was actually carving out a hole in the floor.
This was fucking insane.
After a few seconds, I felt some resistance from the stone, but I pushed through. By the time I had carved out an approximately manhole-sized square in the floor, I was out of breath and drenched in sweat.
I yanked up on my sword to pull it from the ground, and as I did so, I felt the ground loosen beneath it.
“Did it work?” Yasha asked. She took a half step closer to peer over at my work.
Before I answered her, I raised up one of my boots while keeping the other flat and steady on the ground to the left of the carved square. Then I slammed my foot down on the center of my handiwork.
The stone slab dropped down in one fell swoop. It slipped out of place with ease and slammed heavily into the ground below. The sound of it colliding with the stone floor on the level beneath echoed up and off the walls. It was just barely loud enough to be heard over the roar of the flames.
“It worked!” Yasha exclaimed in delight. “You are brilliant, Wes!”
I grinned. “Thanks. Here, the drop doesn’t look like it’s too steep. I’ll go down first, and then you can sit at the edge and drop down into my arms. I’ll catch you so you don’t land on your injured leg.”
“You would do that for me?” She seemed shocked by what I thought was a pretty regular kindness.
“Of course,” I said like it was obvious. “You’re hurt. You might be an Arcadin-”
“Arcadion,” she corrected softly.
“Right, but that doesn’t mean you don’t get help,” I said. “I’ll be waiting for you below, okay? I’ll call up when I’m good.”
With that, I sat down on the edge of the stone ledge I’d created and dangled my legs into the open hole. The drop was probably about eight feet, but if I aimed for the thick stone block I’d cut free, it probably lessened it to about seven feet. If I slowly inched my way to the drop and lowered myself instead of just jumping, I’d be fine.
I sheathed my sword, which was a little awkward at the angle, but I realized that maybe jumping down into a pit with my sword out a second time that day was just asking for trouble. I sucked in a breath, and then I pushed off of the floor and lowered myself down into the unknown.
Chapter 7
I really needed to hit the gym more. I kept myself suspended in the air in some sort of pseudo pull-up as I gently lowered myself toward the thick block of stone I’d carved from the now ceiling above me.
I let go of the ledge above me after I was fully extended and landed on the carved block. With my careful planning, I’d really only had to drop through a foot of empty space.
The air around me already felt a thousand times more breathable than the air in the flaming room above. I had never expected I’d be so glad to smell the reek of a damp basement, but by God, I was glad to smell the reek of a damp basement right now.
I took in a deep, gulping breath to fill my lungs before I turned my attention back to the empty space above me. It was like the world’s shittiest skylight. Well, if skylights led to flaming rooms with dragons.
“Alright!” I hollered up to Yasha. “Sit on the ledge and start to lower yourself down, I’ve got you!”
I hoped the fox-woman had been able to hear me over the roar of the still burning fire above us, but seconds later, I saw her boots as she swung her legs over the edge of the hole.
I hadn’t really had a chance to take in how fucking insane it was that I was now partnered with a woman that was part fox. But holy fucking shit. I was now partnered with a woman that was part fox. She was sexy and a clearly competent warrior, but also, oh yeah, she was part fox. What the hell? I had about a thousand questions, but I’d wait to ask those until I knew we were in the clear.
“Just push myself downward?” Yasha asked. She had managed to shrink Golen’s Shield down to the size of a watch on her wrist and sheathed her katana along her back.
“Yep!” I shouted.
I braced myself on the stone and held my arms out as the sexy fox-woman above me began to push herself off the ledge. She was clearly hesitant to put herself at risk, but I was a man of my word.
Thanks to my height and the boost the stone block gave me, she only had to dangle her legs for a foot or so before I was able to curl my arms around the soft skin of her exposed thighs.
I was careful not to put too much pressure on her injured leg, as I helped guide Yasha downward, but somehow ended up with the woman in my arms in some sort of fireman’s carry. She looked just as surprised at the turn of events as I felt, but she gave a surprised little laugh.
It was a delightful sound.
“You okay?” I stepped off the raised stone block I’d used as a platform and gingerly started to lower the fox-woman to her feet.
“Yes,” she assured me. “Thank you, Wes. I do not think that jump would have been good for my foot.”
“What happened to your foot, anyway?” I asked.
“The first trick floor,” Yasha explained. “I broke through easily, but more pieces fell from the ground than I had anticipated. One of the large chunks landed on my leg. I’ve had to manage the rest of the dungeon with only one leg.”
It was a horrible thing to have happened, but I couldn’t help but be impressed that she had made it this far on one leg alone.
“I don’t know if I could have done that,” I said truthfully. “But I can help you now. How much time do you have left?”
Yasha paused for a moment. “Forty-seven minutes.”
Her words were like a punch to the gut.
She only had forty-seven minutes? It was understandable given the state of her foot, but fuck. That wasn’t much time at all. I had no idea how much more the dungeon held, but now wasn’t the time for questions. We had to get a move on, or both of us would be stuck here forever.
“No time to waste, then,” I said. “Come on.”
The hallway we’d dropped down into looked identical to the main hall of the floor above. The floors and walls were the same grimy, dark stone, and torches were spaced evenly along the walls to bring some much needed light to the space.
It wasn’t like the hallway was any nicer than any of the others, but it felt like a goddamned paradise compared to the flaming room we had just escaped.
I sucked in a deep breath of the substantially cleaner air. The sweat that coated my body felt like it had started to cool against my skin, which was a whole separate kind of gross than I had anticipated from the dungeon. I’d just take a long, long shower when I got back home.
I crept slowly along the hallway with Yasha next to me. Despite the injury to her leg, she kept pace with me well. I didn’t want to force her to exert herself too much, but we also didn’t have much choice. I could practically feel her timer hanging over our heads like a guillotine ready to drop.
The hallway made a sharp left turn up ahead of us. I gingerly pushed Yasha behind me as I pressed into the outer wall to take the corner. After the giant rat encounter earlier, I was definitely going to keep taking the safest option around sharp corners.
To my relief, there weren’t any dangerous or deadly creatures waiting for me. Instead, it was just a long stretch of uninterrupted hallway. There were only torches at the beginning of the hall and at the very, very end where it branched off into another turn.
The hairs on the back of my neck began to stand up immediately. Something was off about this, but I didn’t know what yet. I’d never seen a hallway in either of the dungeons I’d been in where there weren’t torches on the walls. Even in the hallway where the floor had dropped out under the wrong stones, there had still been torches.
That led me to one conclusion: There was something wrong with the walls.
“Wes?” Yasha asked.
Her husky voice was closer to my ear than I had imagined, and her breath on my neck sent a chill down my spine.
I swallowed. “Yes?”
“Shouldn’t we keep moving?” she asked. She made a move to take a step ahead of me, but I raised my arm to block her.
“No,” I said quickly. “There’s something going on with the walls. I think it’s some sort of trap.”
“How will we find out?” she asked.
That was a good question. Instead of answering her aloud, however, I pulled out The Oculus and held the pommel of the dagger up to my eye. The room sharpened into focus, but nothing looked amiss. Despite what the pommel showed, I wasn’t convinced.
“No torches on the walls…” I slipped the blade back into its sheath when another idea struck me.
I quickly reached into my pocket and pulled out one of the chests I’d stashed away for later. It felt strange to pull something out of my pocket that was definitely too big to fit, but I ignored the mind-boggling sensation as I produced a chest.
I quickly opened it, reached in, and grabbed a handful of gold coins. I closed the chest and slipped it back into my pocket like it was a packet of gum. I jiggled the coins in my hand as I took a hesitant step forward.
I made sure not to move past the last torch on the wall. I marked that as the end of the sort of safe zone the dungeon provided. Then I picked up one of the coins from my palm, and without hesitation, I threw it down the hallway.
Everything happened in a blur.
A set of sharp blades slashed out from the walls on both sides in an attempt to bisect the coin. It fell to the ground with a metallic clank. The coin looked like it was unharmed, but I had a feeling that if we had tried to walk through, we definitely would not have been.
“Shit,” I hissed.
“Oh,” Yasha gasped. Her golden eyes were wide, and her slitted pupils had expanded to take up most of her eyes.
I was very glad that we hadn’t barged in with our metaphorical guns blazing. I was honestly surprised I didn’t see any ominous skeletons floating around the space from idiots who had done just that. Maybe the dungeon was self-cleaning.
“What do we do?” Yasha asked.
“Figuring that out,” I assured her. I took another inching step forward to study the hallway a little better. I tossed another gold coin, but this time, I was able to watch the blades as they extended from the walls because I knew what I was looking for.
They were large, sharp blades like the ones I expected to see on a guillotine. Which was to say they looked like giant sheets of metal with a sharpened edge. They were cut on a slanted angle, so when both blades extended from each wall at the same time, they formed a crisscrossing pattern.
But they didn’t touch the ground. There was about a foot and a half of distance between the bottom of one of the blades and the stone tiles beneath it.
Interesting.
I was curious as to how the mechanism for extending the blades actually worked, and if we had more time, I would have stuck around to study it a little longer. It was the sort of thing that fascinated me. It wasn’t every day that I had a chance to put my engineering degree to use for traps in a magical dungeon, after all.
I had expected the blades to retract back into the wall like they had the first time, but it appeared they were now frozen in their current positions.
Also interesting.
Maybe they were only set to shoot out twice.
If they were, that made things much easier for us.
“We’re going to have to crawl under the first set,” I told Yasha.
She looked a little pale, but the look in her eyes was determined.
“I can do that,” she assured me.
“I’ll go first, just to make sure it works how I think it works,” I said. “If I make it under without getting chopped to bits, follow behind me.”
I cracked a smile like it was a joke, but I was only half-kidding. There was still like a thirty percent chance I was going to end up cubed like a block of cheese, but I tried to ignore that percentage.
I dropped down onto my stomach and began to inch my way forward at a slow creep. Crawling on a dungeon floor wasn’t exactly easy, but I managed to make it to the heavy-looking blades.
They were even more menacing from so close up, but I tried to ignore that. I pressed my body as flat to the ground as I could possibly make it and began to drag myself underneath the blades.
The two blades weren’t flush against one another like I had anticipated. Instead, there was about a foot of space between them.
I tried to study the wall they extended from as I moved through them, and there was a small, nearly imperceptible slit in the stone. If I hadn’t been looking for it, I don’t think that I would have seen it at all, even The Oculus hadn’t picked it up. It blended into the dark stone tiles far too well. But now I knew what I was looking for.
As soon as I cleared the blades, I pushed myself up to my feet without taking another step forward. There was another set of slits a mere two feet ahead of me. Instead of being in the walls this time, they were in the floor and ceiling. If I had wandered any farther forward, I would have set off the next trap.
“Okay,” I called back to Yasha. “Come on, carefully.”
I heard the soft shuffling and scuttling sounds of the fox-woman clambering onto the ground. She inched her way underneath the blades, and I reached out my hand to help her up once I saw her head poke through, ears first.
She accepted my hand, and together, we carefully got her back up onto her feet.
“There is another trap, isn’t there?” she asked. She followed my gaze forward to the floor with a frown pulling at her lips.
“I think so,” I said.
I didn’t want to keep wasting my gold coins, but I would rather lose a few bucks than lose a finger.
I tossed another coin forward. The blades snapped out of the wall like the jaws of a shark. This time, instead of crisscrossing at an angle, the blades shot straight out from the floor and ceiling of the narrow hallway.
They slammed down together in a quick motion before pulling back and settling apart. It left a space approximately a foot and a half wide between the blades in the center of the hall.
It was the only opening left.
Shit. That wasn’t going to be easy to get through.
I waited until the blades retracted before I tossed another gold coin.
Just like before, the blades shot out from the walls and stayed there. It looked like it would be a struggle to lift my legs up and duck through the hole. I’d have to bend at a near impossible angle to get through. That left the only real solution being to jump like some sort of fucking show dog.
