Optional Quest Received – Ophira has imparted a trade secret to you that she hasn’t even tried yet in using monster crystals to create dyes. Bring her one to see what happens. Reward: Unknown. No failure condition.
Do you accept Yes / No?
“I’ll do it if I can, I promise. I would give you the one we have, but it belongs to Albarth, and I’d like to find my own to give you.” I accepted the quest, and she smiled, nodding at my reasoning, though her eyes seemed tight. I could understand why; I was keeping something so precious from her out of pride and a sense of honor, but I couldn’t be budged, and I didn’t think she wanted to risk it.
We waited another couple minutes until the dye set, then strained the flower petals from the liquid with an incredibly thin strainer that we poured into a small vial. “Can the color be enhanced if there is more of the base material? Like, would the red of this dye deepen if I were to add more petals?”
“No, however, the color would be more likely to take with a larger portion of the base material,” before I could attempt to understand what she had said, she explained, “The more material you have at your disposal, the less time that it takes for the color to be withdrawn from it. The color stays the same, but the crafting time is lessened to an extent that is equal to the material.”
I nodded and lifted the small vial of red dye that we had just created.
Basic Red Dye – Single use
“That’s amazing!” I couldn’t help but let the excitement of succeeding bubble from my throat in a hearty laugh. “Oh, I love this!”
“I’m glad that you do.” She ushered me out from behind the counter to pick the colors I wanted, letting me have the red one I had made for being so studious.
With that, I bought all of my friend’s choices of colors, even Thea, who only wanted a single vial of red dye the same hue as I had made. I gave her the one that I had made, her face unreadable as she took it with a word of thanks.
“I should go, my training circle is a mess so I should clean it before you come over.” She smiled winningly at me and waved goodbye before scooting out of the door.
“Hot date later?” Sundar asked softly from my left side. Mona was off at the other side of the store with Ophira speaking about one of the colors that had caught her eye.
“We’ll be training with the sword and likely the glaive.” Suddenly, I felt more tired about this constant questioning than I had before.
“You’re a grown man, and Al told me what happened.” She thumped my shoulder softly with her knuckles. “I’m sorry, Ky. That had to be rough. You know I’m here If you need to talk about it.”
“Thanks.” I chose to just ignore the rest of the group and selected the colors I wanted. I chose a bright green for my chain shirt, an indigo for the pants, purple for the bracers, and I matched the pants and greaves.
The cost for the dyes had been discounted for me, running us a gold for all of it, which gave each of the others a couple dyes apiece and me all of mine. After everyone’s armor was sufficiently personalized, Mona’s brown leather customized to red with black accents on the straps. Albarth’s armor was dyed a stone-like gray since we would be going into a crypt, ever the practical mind. Finally, Sundar dyed her metal armor orange, which looked awesome against her green skin. She looked like an orc in a traffic cone, I loved it.
We made our way to Gage’s in amicable silence, and when he saw us, he rolled his eyes. “Wanderers.”
He brought us to the castle grounds, and we passed through the courtyard and training grounds until we came to a large mausoleum of cream-colored stone pillars and a large, thick metal door set into the floor of it. This wasn’t a normal grave building; it was like a shelter house with thick columns holding up the triangle-shaped roof.
“This is the entrance to the dungeon.” He nodded to the door. “It is easy to gain access to it, all you need to do is touch the door and speak the word ‘enter,’ and you will be teleported inside.”
“How does a place become a dungeon?” Mona asked quietly. She looked to be a little shaken, and I couldn’t blame her—she’d always hated zombie movies, and here we were about to go into a crypt full of dead folks. Hardly ideal.
“A strong enough presence of monsters needs to congregate for a long period of time in order to collect tainted Aether and pollute the area, or a cursed object can be placed somewhere to summon monsters and create as it will.” Gage motioned to the surrounding area. “This area is the least likely to have monsters in the city that would survive long enough to birth a dungeon, so we can only reason that a cursed object was placed here as the quest stated and made use of the interred inside as a source of protection.”
“Damn, that’s no good,” Sundar muttered to herself, so when she saw us staring at her, she added, “That just means that there was someone who wanted this place cursed.”
“That would be a correct assumption.” Gage’s horn chains jingled as he nodded his head. “We cannot guess at the perpetrator’s motives, but the prince almost fell in this dungeon little more than a week past, and this problem needs taken care of.”
“Why not take care of it yourself?” I asked, the Minotaur turning to regard me curiously. “I’m not saying I’m not happy to have the chance to continue being of service to the people of this city, but if it needs doing, then it should be done.”
“Dungeons sap the strength of this world’s people, making us weaker inside a dungeon.” He eyed the thick metal keeping the entry closed. “I was there in the initial incursion as a member of the army itself, and still, my prince almost paid the ultimate price in retreating. That is why I have been relegated to working for the city guard. This is part of my punishment.”
That made sense, as much as that sucked for poor Gage and the prince.
“Will we even be strong enough to do this?” Albarth eyed the metal door now as well, his hand falling to the rapier at his side.
“You wanderers gain strength swiftly in combat. This is a calculated risk on our part, but it stands to reason that you may gather experience and become powerful enough to stand against this foul curse as you go.”
“Does the nightfall rule work for dungeons as well?” I found myself reliving my first night in this game and shivered at having felt what I had.
“We are uncertain, but with you being able to return from death, if you are willing to take the risk, it would be appreciated.” He did seem to be generally concerned about it.
“Eh, if anything, we can just leave it, right?” I shrugged then glanced at the others who seemed to be thinking the same thing. “Let’s give it a shot.”
I touched the unreasonably cold metal with my hand, and I spoke the word, “Enter.”
I blinked, then felt a sort of whooshing sensation as my clothes and hair fluttered around me. The clinking of my armor against my body as I stopped doing whatever I had to have been doing meant that I had to be done, right? Teleporting. I had teleported into the dungeon. Oh my god.
A cool draft brought a musty stench to my nostrils as I took a steadying breath. My first dungeon in a new game like this was always filled with awe. Wow. It sure looked like a crypt to me, though I only had experience with them in games. Blood and Gore’s version had been more like a mass burial kind of thing. It had been highly unsettling.
Rather than the typically dirt-covered floor, dirt walls infested with spiders the size of puppies, I found the opposite. The royal crypts were near spotless except for a thin layer of dust over the perfectly built stone coffins, sarcophagi? their light-gray coloring almost blending into the stone making up the walls behind them.
“This isn’t what I expected at all, but kind of is?” Sundar muttered behind me. “Not nearly as creepy as some of the other places we’ve crawled through in other games, eh Kyvir?”
“That’s right.” I pulled my sword from the sheathe at my hip and held it at the ready.
“Movement will be rough in this entry, so let’s get off the pedestal here, maybe?” Sh
e suggested lightly with a hand on my back.
I turned and found that we stood on a small pedestal large enough to fit all of us, but she had been right that it would be a tight squeeze. As soon as we stepped off of it, the others appeared with similar thoughts on our current surroundings.
“Well, let’s get this show on the road.” I loosened the tight muscles in my shoulder, the thought of the potential fights to come causing tension to build there. I needed to be alert, but loose if this would work.
“Let’s try to be stealthy about this first portion, okay?” Sundar whispered, then smiled at me in my loudly colored armor. “Or at least as stealthy as can be done.”
A smirk graced my face as I turned back and crouched to move forward down the hall. The décor didn’t change, but the ambiance seemed to. I could almost feel the taint in the air. A sulfuric scent and rotting flesh filling my nose as light around us dimmed, growing steadily darker.
I looked back to my left and whispered to Al, “Can you use your Flame Dart and light something?”
“There are torch sconces, but no torches.” He whispered back just before I smacked into a shadow-covered wall, he lowered his voice further and leaned closer after my armor stopped clanking. “You okay?”
“No?” I whispered back. I was, but slapping into something solid down here in the dark was unsettling. Especially with the dead still safely held in the coffins and stone sarcophagus around us. “Maybe we leave and come back with torches?”
We made our way back to the hall that still held light and stepped onto the pedestal. “Exit.”
Nothing happened after I said the word, and panic settled into my chest. “Leave, vamoose, scram, bye, let us out!”
“Looks like we have to keep going,” Monami said.
“It’s a solid wall of darkness, Mona.” I motioned for her to go ahead. “I couldn’t pass through it, and it’s dark in there. What do you expect us to do?”
“Be more adventurous?” She raised an eyebrow in challenge. “How many dungeons have puzzle rooms, you moron? Are you sure losing the ability to make magic hasn’t made you soft?”
“Hey!” I touched my chest as if struck. “I can do things with ice, you know that.”
“Then cool your tits, and let’s get this going!” She snarled. “We’re gamers—streamers—and we don’t suck. We can do this little dungeon then move on. So, if we need to light the room up, we have to do… what?”
“Find light sources.” Albarth clapped a hand onto my clinking chain-linked armor. “Let’s go, meat shield.”
“That is so not my nickname,” I muttered evilly and made my way back toward the darkened room. “Where do we start?”
“Opening these coffins and the tombs. There are four sconces, so four torches that need to be placed within,” Albarth reasoned, his face turned up slightly. There was room enough for all four of us to move around easily if we moved away from each other. “Kyvir, you and Sundar will open one of the sarcophagi and see what is inside. Ice magic will likely not affect anything undead, so your magic may well be useless, but you can still take a hit, so make sure you’re front and center.”
“Yup, ready, Sunny?” The large woman nodded and took her place next to me in front of one of the stone tombs. “Let’s just open it enough to see if there’s a torch or something, okay?”
She nodded and motioned with a hand on the lip of the sarcophagus lid, three, two, one—push!
She and I strained as the stone fled from the smooth surface of the base, a strong whiff of death emanated from it, and I almost balked, but that stopped when I heard Sundar grunt a, “Yes!”
She reached in and snatched something out of the darkness and grinned. “Got one, let’s shut it, just to be safe.”
“Good idea.” She tossed it to Albarth, and we took the time to put the lid back as best as we possibly could.
We went through the same process two more times with no success and decided to try the coffins, but to our dismay, the wood was nailed shut.
“I still have my glaive,” I offered, taking out the first glaive I had from my inventory. “Maybe we can use this like a crowbar?”
“Clever, better than burning them open,” Albarth said, breathily, a sour look took over his face. “Though, I feel like this is going to be an issue when the lights come on.”
“How do you mean?” Mona moved to a coffin and used the dagger that she had been given at the beginning of the game to start prying the wood apart. “We only need to do the same thing that they did with the stone ones—move enough that you can see and get in there to get the torch. Then, leave it at that.”
“It could work, but as soon as light touches this area, I feel like the first of the undead mobs are going to come to life, and we’re going to be in for a fight.” Albarth eyed her as she worked and decided to help lift the coffin lid away while bracing it. It didn’t go far, though, and Sundar had to help a bit.
“Found it!” Mona grunted as she reached into the sarcophagus and grasped at something. “It’s stuck.”
“Yank it!” I encouraged from behind her, and she pulled with all her might. I reached out, grasped her forearm, and pulled with her. A snapping sound echoed around us, and she pulled out the torch, but also the arm and hand that had been holding onto it. “Gross!”
She peeled it off and tossed it as far from her as she could then gave the torch to Albarth, who took it with a heavy sigh and a roll of his eyes.
After she had taken a moment to calm down, we went back to work. The next torch we found easily enough in the coffin right next to the one we had found the first. The last one we checked had it. It’s always the last one.
Albarth used his Flame Dart to light the first one, then used that one to light the others. The sconces were just a little too high for us to reach, so Sundar walked from each sconce slowly with the lit torches and placed them inside. As she put the last one, a small click rang out, and the sconces themselves lowered, casting brighter light throughout the room together than they had separately.
The shadows that had blocked the door deepened, then dissipated altogether, but the warmth the torchlight gave off was hollow now. Scratching noises and light moans softly trickled from the corpses all around us in their now-cages.
“Well, I called that.” Albarth looked particularly smug, then the color drained from his face as he cried out, “Bloody hell!”
The hand that held the second torch had found its way around his ankle, and he hopped about trying to shake it off.
“Mona, get that thing off him, and help us out with this door.” I made my way uninhibited by the dead because our idea to leave them closed off had paid dividends. The only issue seemed to be that there was a door with a keyhole and no key.
“We may have to kill some of them,” I called back to the others. “Keyhole with no key.”
“Let’s start with the ones in the coffins then, the wood will burn, and Albarth can set them on fire,” Sundar suggested with her sword freed from its sheath. “Al?”
Albarth’s weapon blazed with his gift’s flaming energy as he plunged the weapon into the slit at the side of the coffin.
CRITICAL STRIKE
40 dmg to Fallen Knight
Burning Debuff Added
Lvl 6 Fallen Knight – Hostile
“Nice!” He smiled as I congratulated him, then I moved forward to start jabbing my weapon into the coffin.
7 dmg to Fallen Knight
6 dmg to Fallen Knight
CRITICAL STRIKE
16 dmg to Fallen Knight
That critical hit had gone a long way toward ending this guy, but the coffin smoldered and had caught fire already, so whether he was near half-health or not, he was coming and he’d be on fire.
I turned back and found Sundar doing the same thing as I was, and the others had moved on. Albarth dealing the ungodly damage he could while Monami watched all of our backs.
“Sundar, you want to see if you can use your healing magic to hurt the
m?” I called out as I stabbed the Fallen Knight in the quickly fading coffin for another eight damage. The added damage likely had to be from my increase in skill with the weapon, right? And the other stuff? Probably my Strength or Skill modifiers, whatever they were.
“Not if I don’t have to, we seem to be doing okay.” She grunted and lopped off the arm that pushed through the burning boards in front of her. Grasping fingers wriggled and clawed at the air as the appendage fell through the air. “That’s meant to heal us.”
Wood splintered and, as I had guessed, the Fallen Knight slunk through the top half of the lid that he had managed to claw his way through. His decayed and burnt flesh sloughing from the bones of his face where I had stabbed him, as well as his shoulders and chest. He was so close to being dead, well—dead again—that I decided to go for the coup de grâce by trying to cut off his head as he leaned forward.
The blade whooshed through the air and impacted the flaming coffin just before the undead being inside opened its mouth, clattering its bony jaws at me, the blade stuck into the wood.
“Come on!” My breath passed my clenched teeth in a snarl of frustration as I yanked on the weapon, wood creaking in protest.
Grasping hands reached out toward me, so with a couple bars of Aether, I covered my fists in ice spikes and beat on the wood and undead in a fervor. The wood splintered in a frosty clattering and cracking cacophony, and the sword loosened. The Fallen Knight just grew angrier at the one or two points of damage that the impromptu weapons did.
It grappled my left arm, fingers digging into my skin harshly, and dragged me forward. My flesh hovered ever closer to the suddenly sharper-looking teeth wobbling in its jaws.
1 dmg taken
“A little help here?” I hollered to no one in particular and made my right hand a blade, like in those old martial arts movies and lashed out, sending the pointed end into the creatures rattling jaws. No ice covered my fingers, but I did have rather sharp nails, and the ice protected the upper portion of my hand from being bitten.
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