Duskbound-Chapter 152 - Book 2, 73

Dungeons could shift their layouts, but it was a slow, gradual process that took days to complete. That was why the last dungeon Velik had been in had blocked off tunnels with some sort of monster that hardened itself into volatile, acid-filled blocks of stone strong enough that he hadn't been able to bust through on pure physical strength.

This dungeon didn't seem to know that trick, however, and so the way remained open. That was good, because Velik was eager to find a monster that he could rip to pieces. All he'd done so far was hurt the people who were supposed to be on the same side as him, easy as that was to forget in the heat of combat. Now he wanted to find the rest of those parasites and tear them apart before they could claim new victims.

He prowled the tunnels in wolf shape, his injuries already closing up again and his energy reserves full enough from the last fight to carry him to the next. Torwin and Aria trailed behind him, silent and grim. They knew full well what stakes they were fighting for.

The scent trail led inexorably to a single location: the dungeon core. They passed small caverns filled with empty flesh sacs—the spawning pods for monsters, now abandoned. They crossed treacherous, winding pathways over deep chasms filled with jagged stone teeth. The expected ambushes never came, but Velik could see the spider-riding trolls being a nightmare to deal with here. He wondered if they'd originally been assigned to defend this part of the dungeon.

And then, finally, they found their way barred by a narrowing of the walls. Where every tunnel before had been smooth, wide, and identical, this one was pinched with a cap of rough stone slowly inching out of the walls in an attempt to close itself off. Even as they watched, they could see it grow just a little bit thicker.

The gap was only a foot wide, tight enough that the humans could just barely make it through, and Velik would have no choice but to shift back. It was also a perfect spot for an ambush, something he could tell they were both thinking just from the looks on their faces. They looked to Velik, who sniffed at the hole and caught the faint, acrid tang of monster in the air.

Shifting back, he quietly said, "Monsters on the far side."

"I'll handle this," Aria said. "Back up a bit."

She gestured with one hand, and Velik thought he sensed something ripple through the air for just an instant. Then the rock cracked. Flakes of it came loose and tumbled to the ground. More cracks appeared a second later, then chunks the size of a grown man's fist fell away. Within moments, the rock had been pulverized, leaving a rough hole big enough for them to walk through in its place.

No monsters poured out of the new opening. In fact, there were none to be found at all. Velik's nose didn't lie, however, and he knew they were waiting there somewhere. Warily, with his spear leading, he advanced through the breach. Are they invisible? Or did they just run when we didn't oblige their ambush?

He shifted back with [True Form] once they were past the gap and sniffed around warily. The scent hadn't changed, but it was partially masked by all the stone dust in the air now. They're here… somewhere. Wait, is that…

"What the hell is that?" Torwin hissed.

A carpet of insects swept down the tunnel. It grew thicker with each passing second as more and more poured out of minute cracks in the stone to join the swarm. It numbered in the thousands, and worse, Velik's nose smelled monster on them. Monstrous insects weren't anything special, but ones as small as regular insects certainly were. He was preparing to shift back into human form to better use [Dread Lance] in hopes of obliterating the largest part of the swarm when Aria stepped past him.

"What would you both do without me?" she asked. Then she held out a hand and brought it down, her palm flat. Thousands of insects died, crushed under her skill, but it was barely a dent in their numbers.

Until it happened again, and again, and then a fourth time. The leading edge of the carpet crumpled into nothing, but that didn't stop the rest from continuing their suicidal charge. Aria snorted as she crushed them. "Nothing more than another attempt to drain my mana and weaken me," she muttered. "They'll have to do better than this."

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Velik wasn't the expert, but he was pretty sure the monsters' tactics were doing exactly that. Maybe her smashing skill didn't use as much energy as something like [Dread Lance], but he couldn't imagine it was easy to do it a dozen times in a matter of seconds. On the other hand, he could smell the familiar stink of the agent that had taken Emberson's body. He'd been tracing it through the dungeon, and now the smell was strong enough that he knew the monster was close.

Aria cleared the way, and they advanced. Velik pulled up short at the end of the tunnel and tossed his head. His eyes widened, and his lips peeled back into a snarl. Found you.

* * *

Torwin had been letting Aria take the lead where she could. He'd worked with her plenty, and he knew her strengths and weaknesses. She was an excellent scout, good at logistics, and great for clearing away large numbers of weak or mid-level monsters. Her weak spot, as much as any gold-ranked hunter could be said to have one, was high-powered individual monsters like elites or champions.

If the enemy thought they were weakening the team as a whole by throwing these obstacles in front of them, they were mistaken. The final battle was always going to come down to Torwin and Velik, especially with the prodigious strength the boy's new skill gave him. Torwin wasn't fond of shape changing skills himself—they had far too many communication issues that hindered the team—but he could admit that they were powerful additions to any hunter's toolkit. Velik's, on the other hand, was going to be a problem with that golden blood.

Velik's hackles rose, and a low growl reverberated from his throat. Torwin immediately materialized an arrow onto his bow string and checked his remaining supply of real ammunition. Despite his best efforts, he hadn't been able to afford enhancing the bracer that supplied the magical ones to make them fast enough to keep up with his firing speed.

To some low-level laborer, it would have seemed like Velik had vanished. Even Torwin had trouble keeping up with the speed he'd moved, going from a stand-still in one moment to a hundred feet down the tunnel in the next.

No! Idiot! What if it's trapped?

There was no time to shout admonishments, though. Torwin sprinted after Velik, only for the tunnel to curve just before opening into a huge silo of a room. Two hundred feet across and a thousand feet high, he was almost sure it had to lead all the way back to the surface. In the center, hanging fifty feet overhead and suspended on what looked like thick, stone strands of spider silk wider around than Torwin's leg, was the dungeon core.

Massive lizards hugged the walls, their sticky-padded feet easily keeping them there. Reflexively, Torwin used [Identify] on one of them.

[Shadowbite Monitor- level 36. Stats: 51ph, 24me, 49my. Skills: Phantasmal Maw, Acceleration, Venom Gland, Contortionist.]

That wasn't so bad, individually. Any monster with a high mystic score was apt to cause trouble, but against something more than fifteen levels behind him—something which wasn't even an elite—the outcome wasn't in question.

Of course, the fact that there were about fifty of them somewhat evened the odds.

Worse by far was the thing crouched on the dungeon core. It looked something like a great, armored tick, fifteen feet across not including the arms. Torwin's mind immediately flashed back to that lift shaft with the scraped walls as he looked at the monster. It was busy ripping the dungeon core free of its mooring, but it paused when Velik dashed into the room.

Its singular eye threw a baleful glare at the wolf, then it chittered something in an awful, clicking drone. Whatever the noise was, it must have meant something to the monitors. In unison, they surged down the walls to converge on Velik.

"We've got to support him, or he'll be overwhelmed," Torwin said.

"We'll die with him if we run out there," Aria argued. "We need this chokepoint held until we thin down their numbers."

She was right. He knew it. Velik had foolishly surrendered the defensive position the tunnel had offered them, and now he was outnumbered fifty-to-one. He'd be overwhelmed in seconds, and that thick hide that had protected him from the pygmy trolls wouldn't do much against the pack of four-hundred-pound lizards with teeth that could pass through steel to tear the meat beneath it.

Torwin loosed the first arrow at a monitor lizard that had just reached the floor, putting the feathered shaft directly into the monster's eye. It let out an awful hiss of pain, but didn't fall back. A second arrow finished blinding it.

"I'm not letting anyone else die," Torwin said. "No matter what."

Aria swatted another monitor that had gotten close to Velik away, but they both knew they couldn't save their young companion from what was coming. Then he did something neither of them had expected.

Ignoring the swarm of lizards, Velik crouched low, then he let out a howl and leaped straight up to land on the webbing supporting the dungeon core.