Book4 Chapter 17 (Patreon)

The hand-shaped creatures crawling along the walls and ceiling of the long hall-like room occasionally glanced at Darten and Kay as they stood in the safe zone just outside the entrance. The creatures’ bodies were two sections of a hand, sliced from the gap between the thumb up to just before the pinkie, then melded together with a matching half, making a crab-like body with six finger-legs. At the end of each finger-leg were quite large eight-fingered, two-thumbed hands that had small suctions cups at the tip of each finger and thumb, and all of the digits waved wildly as they lifted from the floors and ceilings to take a step. As creepy as that was, it was intensified by the monsters’ heads. Where a wrist would be on each hand, the flesh narrowed into scaly skin that ended in a gharial head, a kind of crocodile with a long, thin mouth. Their reptilian eyes flicked back and forth as they slowly meandered along the walls, each glance of their eyes at the two waiting adventurers filled with anticipation and hunger.

“How many rooms have you been through?” Darten asked as he stared at the slowly moving mass of monsters.

“This is my fourth,” Kay replied quietly. “If dungeons really are intelligent, someday I want to ask this one a question.”

“Is it ‘What the fuck’?”

“Yes.” He dramatically pointed at the closest monster, “Because, what the fuck? That is one of the creepiest things I’ve seen in a long time. And I don’t mean creepy like some kind of horror story; I mean I don’t like looking at it. It’s a hand-lizard-crocodile thing!”

A few of the closer monsters whipped their heads around and hissed at the sudden noise of Kay shouting.

Darten shuddered. “My second room was an obstacle course type of thing that had monkeys that threw rocks at me while I ran it, but they had backward parrot heads with spider eyes.”

“See? That’s just weird.” Kay glared out at the creatures, who were slowly gathering themselves around the middle of the room, partially blocking the view of the obelisk at the end. “I bet these things try and give creepy hugs and then bite you.”

“Bleh. Let’s not talk about that. Since there’s only the two of us, it's probably not a ‘kill everything’ type of room according to the briefings, which means it’s probably a race to the obelisk.”

“There’s only about thirty of these, though, so there has to be some kind of other trick to this. We could tear through this many in a few seconds.”

Darten’s big shoulders heaved as he shrugged, “The only thing to do is start. This is only your fourth room and my fifth, so maybe the dungeon doesn’t have enough information to really know what best to throw at us. Or it could be underestimating us.”

“You’re right; only one way to test it. Ready?” Blood dripped out of Kay’s pores and swirled out to make his armor, then expanded in his hand to form a halberd.

“You know, that’s also unsettling to look at,” Darten commented, pointing at Kay’s enclosed body.

“Sure, but it’s not deep blue finger-lizard-crocodile-things with orange heads and bright green eyes or monkeys with backward parrot heads and spider eyes. The freaky factor here is a lot worse than a second or two of blood and then armor.”

Darten glanced over with skeptical eyes but didn’t say anything. He grabbed his staff off his back and stood at the clearly marked line where the safe zone ended. “You’re faster than I am, so I’ll draw them in, and you head for the end?”

Kay crouched down like he was at the starting line for an Olympic race and started pumping mana and blood through his veins. “Sounds like a plan. Shout, if you need help, I’ll charge back over.”

“Alright. Three, two, one.” Darten stepped and planted his foot on the other side of the line. The waiting monsters started charging forward, finger-legs thrashing as they slammed into one another, some of them falling to the floor and writhing to right themselves. As part of the same motion, Darten slammed his staff down onto the floor, and a wave of the stone tiles ripped free and shot out toward the monsters. Some of them managed to hang on as the surface they were clinging to bucked and threw them around as the wave passed, but most lost their grip and slammed down among their comrades who had already fallen during the beginning of their mad rush to kill the interloping adventurers.

Right behind the wave was Kay, who’d launched himself forward at the end of the three count, his legs pumping as he sprinted. Right before the wave of stone tiles took his footing out from under him, he leapt up and threw out two whips of blood from his forearms that pierced into the walls. Dragging himself forward, he dove and twisted beneath and through the bodies of falling monsters. Some of the creatures that hadn’t been too badly tossed around or had recovered faster opened their thing mouths wide, and balls of water pooled in the gaps. Gushing blasts like fire hoses sprayed at Kay while smaller globes traveling at high speeds flew everywhere, trying to bombard him. One particular blast from above hit him in the back as he flew under one of the monsters and slammed him down. His armor protected him from most of the force, and he bounced back up and rolled under another barrage of water magic.

Dashing to the obelisk, he rammed himself right into some kind of invisible barrier around it. “Dammit!” He called back to Darten, who was alternating between blocking water blasts with floating bits of tile he’d ripped from the ground and crushing monsters with his staff, “There’s another trick to it!”

“These things aren’t that strong, so just work on figuring it out!”

Dancing around the obelisk, Kay looked for clues that would give him any hint on how to get past the barrier, all while ripping monsters to pieces and returning fire with spears and arrows of blood, using Blood Shaping to make them into actual weapon shapes instead of just unfocused blasts and geysers. Glancing up, he noticed shapes pulling their way out of the ceiling, slowly taking on the same colors as the rest of the monsters as they came into being.

“More are spawning on the ceiling!”

“Got it!”

Stepping out of the way of another fusillade of bubble-shaped projectiles, Kay watched as several of them just ceased to exist when they hit the edge of the unseen barrier.

“Oh, that’s a tricky one.” Kay threw out a barrier of blood from his armor that blocked all of the attacks coming at him, then stepped out of his dripping-wet armor right through the barrier, arm outstretched to tap the obelisk.

The intense sprays of water and other flying attacks all splashed against the floor or vanished against the field around the obelisk, and no more came after them. Kay looked up to see the monsters frozen in place, one of them even hanging from one creepy hand, as the texture of their bodies shifted from bare skin and scaled flesh into stiff rock. In a matter of seconds, every remaining creature was a motionless statue, even one that had partially emerged from the wall as Kay touched the obelisk.

 Darten picked his way through the new pile of statuary between him and Kay. “Nice job!” He called out while hopping over one of the petrified monsters, “What was the trick?”

“There was a barrier around it that you couldn’t pass through while wet.”

“Ugh.” Darten grimaced, “That’s a shifty puzzle. All those monsters blasting you with water on the way here, and then you have to be dry to finish things up. I bet it’d be pretty easy to get overrun if you don’t have any way to dry off.” He frowned again as he glanced at the pile of monsters, “I take back what I said about the dungeon potentially underestimating us. This would have been a lot harder of a room for anyone who didn’t counter it and who ended up here. We can just cover ourselves in armor to keep the water off, then strip out of it at the last second to get to the goal, but anyone else…”

“Yeah, I don’t know if the briefings everyone got covered this much danger. I thought they said that the first few rooms weren’t as hard?”

Darten shrugged. “I don’t know either. Maybe the fact that we could have retreated made it easier? Or maybe you just finished it faster than expected, and there’s some other piece we missed because we didn’t need it?”

“That would make sense; we did blitz through this.” Kay looked around but didn’t see anything that stood out as another piece of the puzzle, “Let’s go to the door and get our loot. Since nothing dropped from those guys when we killed them, this definitely counted as a puzzle room.”

The exit had appeared on the wall behind the obelisk, slightly off-center so that it was just a few inches off, being directly across from the door they’d entered through. When they got within a few feet of it, two faintly glowing gray boxes floated down from the ceiling and hovered in front of them. Kay reached out to touch his, and a small lip appeared as the seamless exterior of the box suddenly turned into an open lid. The box tilted and dropped the loot into Kay’s waiting hands.

“Aw fuck!” Kay jerked back as the item touched his palms and threw it off to the side, where it clattered against the ground.

“What?” Darten jumped and reached for his staff as he looked for the sudden threat.

“Nothing, sorry.” Kay slowly walked over to his dropped loot with a moue of distaste. “I just got something creepy.” Using only two fingers to pick it up, he lifted the thick bracelet so Darten could see it. It resembled the hand-lizard-crocodile-thing’s limbs, with dark blue fingers coming off of a melded palm shape. Squeezing it slightly with his other hand, Kay closed the bracelet, which made it look like two malformed hands interlocking fingers. “Unless this thing has crazy good effects, I’m selling it. Or set it aside for the treasury or something. I thought this dungeon gave off really colorful loot, not creepy cursed-item-looking crap.”

“I’ve only seen regular stuff that’s just headache-inducing, like this,” Darten held up a pair of bright orange scaled gloves with green highlights around each knuckle. “I bet anyone with creepy loot worth keeping doesn’t have it in plain sight so that people don’t get all weird with them. Can’t you take magic items and make them into something else with blood or something? Do that to get rid of it and just move the effect onto something that isn’t so off-putting.”

Kay perked up and grinned at his big friend, “That’s a perfect idea!” He tossed the creepy item into the air in front of him, where it disappeared into his Inventory Skill’s subspace. “For now, it hangs out in the void. I can look at everyone’s loot once we get out and see what it all does.”

“Alright, see you in the next room or the last one, whichever happens first!” Darten said cheerily, touching the exit door and vanishing.

Kay took one last glance at the frozen statues of monsters and shivered. “I really hope the dungeon isn’t intelligent and giving me creepy loot because I insulted it’s aesthetic choices.” He paused before touching the door and smiled, “But if that is the case, I’ll just have more materials to level up Meld Blood!”