Dungeon Champions

“Jordan, I have a very bad feeling,” Skullie said. “There’s energy coming from that hole. It’s a type of magic that is forbidden by the Fates. We’re in way over our heads here.”

At his words, I thought I felt a very subtle tension in the air, right where my Tablet would normally manifest. I ignored the sensation. This was no time for Tablet messages, or strange phenomena.

I snapped, “Focus on victory, Skullie. We’ve won against impossible odds before.” It didn’t matter if we were in over our heads. We were in this and had to win, one way or another.

Looking around, I assessed our situation.

Mereielle was wounded but standing amidst an enormous pile of demolished bodies. She was leaning against a wall, panting as she watched the new threats emerge.

Above us, Zuri had inched until she was nearly above the boss monster, although what she intended to do, I had no idea.

Britney was staying safe, her back planted against the wall as she maintained the Thorns effect. As we’d learned previously, that holy damage of hers was pivotal to killing these things. Without it, I was relatively certain the psychic attack from the boss monster would have killed me.

Who knew retributive damage worked psychically? I mused, thoughts straying. I guess the description of the power didn’t say what source the damage had to come from.

The trio of minibosses had completely emerged, their amalgam bodies lashing with intact tentacles and claws. Brainard used two separate tentacles to touch each of the three, causing them to grow.

“An Enlarge spell. What a cheater,” Skullie muttered.

Jordan: Zuri, what are you doing?

Zuri: I have an idea! I’m worried the boss might be able to intercept our communications, so I’m holding to the last second.

True to her concern, I saw one of Brainard’s tiny eyes twitch, rolling around as if searching for her. Those eyes were too deep-set beneath scarred brain tissue to look up.

It’s not only adventurers who fail to look up.

Nearby, Nym had regained her focus enough to cast more spells. First, she tried casting Watery Death on the boss, but the effect didn’t even begin to manifest before it simply failed. Adjusting her focus, she repeated the process on one of the trio of minibosses.

Rattle. Rattle.

My Tablet flashed and my skin prickled as the sound of dice rolling, an echo of when I’d met Corey, whispered through the air.

The spell worked.

No, it didn’t just work. It worked incredibly well.

The miniboss, half blind, went utterly berserk.

Bubbles rippled from the surface of the water now surrounding the creature’s head as it writhed, striking out at random. Its stomach burst open and a tentacle lurched out, winding around one of the Boss’s limbs.

The effect was of two grotesque, barbed tongues working against one another.

“Gross!” Britney shouted, as the miniboss drew savage wounds against its fellow. One stray limb even slashed backward, catching the edge of Brainard’s brain mass, drawing a black furrow down the goo.

Brainard lurched back, slapping two tentacles down against its own servant. They did less damage than I would have expected, managing to barely shove the flailing, blinded creature away from the central mass.

It was a comedic, unlikely turn of events, and one I intended to take every advantage of. Dismissing my sword and axe, I re-summoned the bow, setting arrows into the air for the boss. Again, I aimed for the brain or eyes, hoping to further confuse the creature.

With several tentacles busy fending off its own assistant, a few of my arrows got through. One stuck deep between two folds of different brains. Another popped an eye. The problem was there was just so much mass, I wasn’t sure how much damage I was doing.

My guess was that the boss had suffered internal damage, its very mind wounded by the retribution of the psychic attacks. That left it making slower, or worse decisions than it might have. Coupled with the luck of Nym’s spell confounding the mini-boss, we’d bought time and space.

But how to use that?

I considered charging in and rejected the notion.

Then I looked up and saw Zuri unloading a giant pot from her storage space. It was boiling, steam pouring out of the top. She perched it on the metal support beam, and was looking in our direction.

Is she going to try boiling the brain? That’s not going to work.

Then I realized what I’d missed.

Oh, you brilliant, amazing woman.

“Don’t say it telepathically!” I roared, turning to Nym. Moving over, I lowered my voice, telling her what I’d guessed.

She gasped. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

“Why didn’t I think of it?” I retorted, “I’m the party leader.”

“You can’t think of everything.”

“How close will you have to be?” I asked her.

She considered the room, biting her bottom lip. “Halfway across.”

“Let’s go.”

Jordan: I need to get Nym closer. Merielle and Skullie, help run interference.

I turned in time to see the boss monster’s mini-bosses mob up on the confused one. Although they took more wounds trying to take their fellow down, it did not take them long to tear the drowning creature apart.

Once they’d ripped their ally limb from limb, the survivors turned to us.

Brainard squeaked his version of a scream, twin tentacles lifting to point in our direction as both bosses charged to intercept us.

Merielle came in beside me, the halo of Britney’s Thorns surrounding her.

We rushed ahead of Nym and Skullie.

Sword and axe reappearing in my hands, I dove to meet the ten-foot-tall monster. The wounds it had taken from its fellow, while impressive, were already healing. When it lashed out with its central-mass tongue, I darted in the way, accepting the damage.

Golden light burst down the appendage. Slicing with my weapons, I shouldered closer as the monster roared in surprise and pain, slicing not through the tongue, but toward the main body. I was trying to get in range of its limbs, to work myself inside its optimal reach and reduce the sheer quantity of damage it could deal.

It worked. Mostly.

Claws, tentacles, and other appendages snapped at me, with each causing the monster to suffer wounds it could not recover from. I, in turn, was losing hit points rapidly. As strong as I’d become, my primary role was as a leader, not as a fighter.

My hit points dropped precipitously, and with them came another round of foul sensation as the wounds the monster dealt applied the mysterious poisoning effect.

Beside me, I was vaguely aware of Merielle using an entirely different tactic. She was instead luring her monster away, batting at it with flickering, distracting strikes before somersaulting back. Thorns buffered her by seven hit points with each attack that bypassed her defenses, which was enough to keep her alive as she drew the creature’s ire.

She’d suffered far less damage than I had, although she was also dealing far less. The damage wasn’t important though; it was the distraction.

“I’m in range!” Nym called.

The mage’s cry drew the boss’s attention.

Until that moment, Brainard had seemed content to rotate, a pair of tentacles dipping down into the cavity beneath it. I got the sense that the boss was up to something we wouldn’t like, but he’d seemed content to let his minions work.

Hearing her shout, it turned, lashing out with a tentacle that suddenly expanded in length, mutating and growing as it reached for her.

Skullie threw himself in the way. Pincer limb rapidly opening and closing, he brought the full might of his minoant body against the attack. He was strong enough to stop the boss.

Even more impressively, the minoant’s body was sufficient to knock the boss astray. Between the body blow and the awkward way the boss’s extended arm changed his mass distribution, he lurched to one side.

In that instant, I saw what Brainard had been up to. Deep below us, in a secondary chamber, were several giant vats of brown-gray ichor. Body parts floated in the vats, each bubbling in and out of view. Between the vats, on some sort of central platform, was a round plate that looked a bit like a sci-fi teleportation ring.

Six static-filled gems—each about the size of my thumbnail—sat in the ring. Above them, hovering suspended in the air, was a new monster. It was only three-fourths built, but it had four arms and a pair of legs attached to an oversized torso.

Floating near its face was a piece of a Tablet.

The artifact was jagged, fractured down to just a small chunk, and it orbited the incomplete creature like a moon.

“Oh crap,” I said.

Splooosh!

Gallons of boiling water fell from the air onto Brainard’s exposed brain mass. It didn’t do any damage. Zuri hadn’t added any special chemicals or magic. Her plan had been to remain subtle, unnoticed and unimportant.

Thanks to the team’s efforts, it worked.

“Get cleanerized!” Nym cried, leaning forward to make sure she was in range as she cast her spell.

The boss would have resisted the magic. It was basically immune. Zuri’s plain, regular old water, on the other hand, did not.

Two gallons of Black Wash rolled over the Boss’s tainted, corrupted brain mess. It flowed into the cracks and crevices Britney’s Thorns effect created, and into the claw marks one of its own bosses had left.

Throbbing brain matter steamed, huge chunks sizzling as the Wash rolled down, pouring through the thing’s crevices. It twisted, tentacles flying. It struck everything in range, including its own minibosses and both myself and Merielle.

The boss wasn’t that strong, relatively speaking, but in its flailing it found unexpected reserves. I went flying, as did Merielle. Above Nym, a cloud of razor-like metal shards appeared, shooting down and impacting the little catgirl’s body. A haze of blood shot out from her delicate features as she screamed in anguish.

My vision seemed to blur as I slammed into a wall hard enough to rattle my teeth like dice. I didn’t see what happened next clearly, but I think Zuri upended a second pot of water onto the boss.

Nym, who’d collapsed to her knees, was holding herself up with one hand. Skullie stood above her, his borrowed body sliced to literal ribbons as he saved her life.

Our mage cast the water-changing spell again. Only this time, the boss wasn’t caught off guard. Brainard darted back, his sizzling brain mass no longer blocking the tunnel beneath. Instead of striking the boss, the Wash was wasted, falling out of view.

“Oh no,” I thought, as Skullie collapsed on top of Nym. She flattened beneath his massive form, whimpering and squealing as several more spell-conjured blades passed through the minoant’s flesh and into hers.

BA-BOOOOOOOM!

Everything went white. A blast of compressed air, so hot that it seared my skin, burst from the ground below as everything shifted upwards, then down again. Gravity simply stopped obeying any sense as I felt myself thrown around, once more hitting the wall with stupefying force.

Something hit my chest. Hard. I couldn’t see to check what it was.

CRACK! CRASH! BOOM!

My ears were ringing. Squeezing my eyes closed, I tried to mentally visualize my Tablet, to check on the team.

It didn’t work.

I thought I heard something. A man’s voice, maybe. There was a strange sense in the air, as if something huge had entered the room.

Then my eyes cleared and all I saw was utter devastation and carnage. Nym, beneath the remnants of Skullie’s inert body, lay several feet away. At first I thought she was dead, then I saw her tail twitch.

Sadie mewed as she climbed out of the tangle of bodies, the cat’s eyes wide with terror. She turned, licking Nym’s burned and bloodied fingertips.

The catgirl did not wake up.

Coughing out what felt like gallons of dirt, I rose to my feet. A barbed limb, vaguely resembling an organic axe, fell to the floor. It had struck my chest hard enough to dent my magical armor. The dent didn’t look too bad, although something felt…off about that observation.

Crossing to Nym, I looked around.

Merielle was on the far side of the room. She was slumped on top of a pile of debris, her body covered in dirt. Several large pieces of masonry and steel lay next to her, as if they’d fallen and broken on top of her body.

She was awake though, eyes wide. Looking around, she opened and closed her mouth. “What… What in all the Fates just happened?”

Britney, looking burned and frazzled but mostly intact, crossed to the wounded warrior and began casting healing spells.

I got to Nym and removed her from beneath my fallen familiar. His skull and spine rolled free, intact but unmoving. She continued to lay there, unconscious but breathing. Cradling her in my lap, I finally looked up, hoping against hope that Zuri was okay.

The half-gorgon was where I’d last seen her, perched atop a thick metal support beam, her legs and arms tucked in. She saw me looking and blinked a few times.

Zuri: The Black Wash. It interacted with those vats. Then…I don’t know what happened. Everything went white. Now, the laboratory beneath the boss is…

Jordan: Is what?

Before she replied, Britney rushed over. “Low on mana,” she rasped, accepting one of the few large mana gems I had.

Putting the gem against her forehead, she used her free hand to cast a healing spell on Nym. Golden energy suffused our unconscious mage and she shuddered, coughing up a writhing, dark mess.

Only then did I remember the putrid cuts.

“She must have gotten slashed at some point and I missed it,” I snarled, pulling out the Black Wash from my inventory.

“Let me turn her over,” Britney said, twisting the catgirl so she wouldn’t swallow her own vomit.

I applied the Wash to the catgirl. As anticipated, she shuddered and brought up everything in her stomach.

Mereielle crunched over and accepted a dose. I joined her in it. One benefit of the Wash was that it was like drinking multiple cups of coffee—despite being severely injured, I could have run a marathon and smiled the entire time.

Only after we’d stopped our bodies from falling apart due to lingering poison did I come to my feet and look to see what Zuri had discovered.

The laboratory, or whatever it had been, was vacant. None of the gems I’d seen were there, nor was the teleportation-like disk. The vats were gone, obliterated by a single, incredible, reaction.

Of the boss monster, little remained other than a few bits of brain material or tentacles. “It must have taken a lot of the explosion,” I reasoned, trying to wrap my head around what had happened. “How the crap did it blow up that much?”

Zuri slid down the rail until she was no longer over the pitted opening, then lowered herself to her fingertips. I walked over and caught her as she fell, lowering her to the ground.

“Black Wash purifies all corruption in, or on, a body,” she explained. “It’s not a spell that has any specific limits. If I’d used the Wash on a giant, or even a dragon, they would have been just as clean as you are from a dose.”

“That makes no sense,” I retorted.

“Magic does not always make sense.” She gave me a fond smile.

Only then did I notice just how blackened and burnt she was. All of her, from head to toe, looked seared. Even her serpent hair had taken on a dark hue. To my horror, when I checked the Tablet for the party’s status, her hit points were nearly as low as mine, Merielle’s, or Nym’s.

She read my face. “I was over the blast, love. It was quite unpleasant.”

“I need to get all of you proper armor,” I growled, tugging her into my arms, feeling an incredible wave of relief. “This was way, way too much for us to fight. We should have died.”

Merielle moved into view, limping close enough to put her hand against mine, which was still on Zuri. She spoke confidently, clearly, looking into my eyes. “Adventurers risk death all the time. Heroes figure out how to use what resources they are given to overcome the longest odds. We survived, Jordan. We survived thanks to you.”

I chuckled. “To all of us. Especially Zuri for figuring out that the boss might be able to read out telepathy.”

Pulling away, my half-gorgon lover gave me a troubled expression. “It had hijacked Tablet magic. I just made an assumption.”

Nym coughed, speaking weakly. “The idea about transforming water to Black Wash. That was incredible.”

“Even a cook has to do her part against boss monsters.” Zuri crossed to the weak catgirl, helping her up. “We need to get out of here. We’re all hurt, low on resources, and have done all we can.”

Sliding a phylactery from my inventory, I also retrieved Skullie’s head. Sliding the new phylactery in place, I muttered, “One second. He needs to be in on whatever happens next.”

My Tablet flashed.

Resurrect Familiar - Cost: 15 mana. If you confirm payment, the Tablet has been authorized to reinstate your familiar without the normal delay.

I confirmed the payment. It wasn’t like I needed mana for anything, anyway. The Tablet handled the rest.

A few seconds later, the skull twitched, eyes glowing subtle orange as he stretched his jaws from one side to another. “Did we win?”