Watcher’s Fate: A LitRPG Saga (Life in Exile Book 3)

by Sean Oswald

  “It’s no big deal. I just want to see what’s down at the bottom of the stairs. Don’t you want to have fun?” Sara’s attempts at manipulation had all the finesse one would expect from an eight-year-old, but considering her audience, it might be enough.

  “Krinnk is Sara friend, but scary man who grows said say outside. Krinnk no want Sara get hurt.”

  “We won’t actually go inside, just down to the bottom of the stairs. Then we can go see if the cooks packed any of those tarts you like.”

  Wavering in indecision, Krinnk stood there shifting his weight back and forth from foot to foot and looking nervously around him. Sara saw this and pushed him over the edge by blatantly tossing the small crystal she had found down the marble stairs. “Now we have to go and get the crystal,” she said.

  “Krinnk just get pretty rock and then go from bad place?” the goblin scout asked.

  “Uh huh,” Sara said and started to descend the stairs, running her hand along the smooth stone. Krinnk followed her trying to get past her, but she kept playfully tugging on the tunic which Balayria had given him.

  As soon as they reached the bottom of the stairs, vines crossed over the top of the stairs quickly blotting out all light and causing Sara to squeal in fright. Krinnk grabbed her hand tightly. “Krinnk protect Sara.” Then both of them were startled as the floor they were standing on started to rotate.

  Altracia grinned within her dungeon core or would have if she could. Instead, the sentiment was reflected upon her former body which now served as an avatar for when she wanted to move around. Few things could be scarier than the eight-inch teeth of a massive drake bared in its best reptilian smile. None of the minions were currently in the core room, but if they had been, they would have been terrified.

  A single thought crossed the dungeon drake’s mind. I got her.

  Emily shook her head once again as she saw the aftermath from yet another fight won and a trap cleared. If fathers and daughters have a special connection, so, too, do mothers and sons. Watching Jackson fighting against these screeching monstrosities had initially been almost more than she could bear. Certainly, she wasn’t the first mother in history to send a son off to fight, and even on earth, her son would not have been the youngest to have ever been bled in battle. Yet, watching him fight was eye-opening. Her gentle son, so kind as a little boy, was capable of great violence when necessary.

  This last fight had begun when another of the vine traps went off. Dave had been moving intentionally slow between encounters, working his way down the dungeon hall and through its maze of twists and turns. She was thankful that he wasn’t moving as fast as he could and realized that a true gap had opened up between the two of them. She hadn’t understood his frustration with not gaining levels as quickly as she and Mira had. To her, back in the early days of Eloria, it had just been some hopeless fixation that he had with games. Now she understood differently.

  Realization is a progression, and this was clearly another step upon her path of understanding. Dave was like a superhero when viewed in a positive light and a monster in his own right if she allowed herself to dwell on the brutality too much. It almost justified the arrogance and impatience that she had seen building in him the past few days. Well no … not justified, but maybe explained.

  Dave had walked down another one of the forking paths in the dungeon–one they hoped was not a dead end. And as he broke, a plane of light vines snapped off the wall and began trying to encircle him. They sought to squeeze the life from him. She and Jackson were a good twenty feet behind him and weren’t caught in the trap. She watched as the vines failed to find any purchase on the seemingly slippery surface of his magical armor. He said the spell was called Ablative Armor, but whatever it was, it created an aura around him that was only vaguely visible to the naked eye as a disturbance in the air. Yet, it flared to life with a reddish tinged hue as the vines slammed into it and tried to wrap around Dave.

  Protected as he was, Dave then began to calmly cut his way through the vines. The black magical sword that he had taken from the death knight cut easily through tendrils as thick as his forearm. This time, the trap was made complete by a group of four shrubkins appearing to block any retreat out of this passageway. Such a tactic most likely meant that this was yet another dead end, but they would deal with that afterwards.

  “Dave, we have company back here,” Emily called out, wanting to alert him to their peril. But Jackson was already in motion. He had taken the instruction to protect her very seriously. He moved in an odd way now. Dave said it was a combination of a new magical ring and the wind core that he had taken from the first wing. Either way, her son was moving fast, as fast as she could even with her much higher Agility, but it wasn’t just the speed. It was the efficiency of his movement. Each step, each action seemed to perfectly set him up for where he was going next, and he somehow always took the most direct path.

  Jackson’s free hand shot out as he closed with the closest of the shrubkins. The cackling giggles filling the air. As per the other fights, it lashed out at him with a dozen thrusting branches each possessed of a tip as sharp as a needle and as hot as a burning ember. He had become good at trapping the branches as they shot out at him. He did this by moving his arm in an inward sweeping motion, keeping the branches to the outside of his arm and away from sensitive targets. The motion of his arm then continued outward and over the now tangled branches before completing the circular motion and hooking his targets appendages under his free arm while simultaneously hacking down with the new axe.

  Jackson had taken to first shearing away the branches before chopping down on them. It took a few seconds and numerous swings of his axe, but he was becoming efficient at it. So much so that Emily was barely paying attention to him or the creature he was directly engaged with. More of her attention was centered on other creatures. She distracted them, dancing amongst them until either Jackson or Dave could get to them. By the time Jackson had cut two of the creatures into pieces a retina-burning stroke of brilliant light flashed past him and forked into each of the remaining shrubkins, charring their chests and bursting out their backs, leaving a smoking hole in its wake.

  The first time Dave had cast a lightning bolt against creatures that were so close to Emily, it had caused her to erupt at him in a panic induced anger. What she couldn’t have known was just how nervous he had been casting it. Yet, she had seen him control the forking strokes of charged current with pinpoint accuracy time and again in the dungeon. It was just figuratively shocking to feel the hair on the back of her neck stand up in response to the electrical charge and to feel the heat and displaced air as the bolt seared its way into the target. By now, she trusted Dave’s aim implicitly and barely batted an eye as the last two creatures were blown apart.

  In the aftermath of another battle, a part of her was simply numb and another part just mechanically went through the same protocol as always. She checked both of them over from head to toe for injuries and healed anything she found. Dave did the same for any tears in the leather armor which he found using Minor Mend. Meanwhile, Jackson took to his task as loot gatherer. Whereas the knight thralls had dropped coins, these creatures had a couple of items that Dave thought was useful. Many of them had small thumbnail sized translucent red crystals called firedots, and he always insisted that Jackson collect as much of the sap from them as possible. Emily felt it was macabre, but Jackson didn’t seem to mind, and Dave assured her that these ingredients might have use in potion making, something she wanted to look into once things calmed down.

  “Well that appears to be all of the hallways except for the last one. That must lead to the boss of whatever is at the end of this wing,” Dave said.

  “Do we have to fight another one of those boss monsters? Can we even handle that?” Emily asked.

  “Just like the monsters here have been more on par with a team of three, so the boss should be scaled. I know that you have bad memories about the dungeon, but this dungeon is remade. It i
sn’t focused on killing me any longer. This dungeon seems to be fair and balanced. It is a hard challenge. It could have killed us if we screwed up, but if we are careful, it can be beaten.”

  “My nerves could still use a little rest. Would that be okay?” Emily said as she sat down cross-legged upon the floor. Jackson came over and sat next to her.

  “Okay, well it would probably be best if we ate and regenerated our mana to full if there is a boss in the last tunnel.”

  After eating and resting for a solid hour, Emily could see that both the guys were growing restless. Truthfully, the longer we sit here, the more I am talking myself out of doing this. Pushing her fear to the side, she said, “I guess there is nothing for it but to do this.”

  She saw the compassion in Dave’s eyes. There he was, the man that she loved, not the guy fixated on getting stronger. He hugged her and whispered, “I want you to trade out your mana regeneration ring for the epic health ring. You can drink a mana potion when we are fighting the boss, but I want to make sure you have a better chance at taking one hit if something gets by me. Oh, and I love you.”

  Once all their gear was checked and mended, they started down the final tunnel. At first it was just the same as the other tunnels with the vines growing from the stone. However, after they made it about two hundred feet down the tunnel, moving slowly and looking out for attacks, the vines started to disappear from the walls. Nothing attacked them, which was strange enough in a dungeon wing where they had rarely gone thirty feet without a shrubkin springing from the wall. By chance, Emily looked back over her shoulder and was shocked. “Dave, the tunnel is blocked behind us.”

  Both Dave and Jackson immediately turned and looked behind them when she cried out. They saw the same thing she had. The vines had slowly retracted off the wall, and now a mesh wall of vines was blocking their escape. They had only realized this about the time they got to the end of the current tunnel.

  “I should have seen this coming,” Dave said bitterly.

  “How could you have foreseen this? Nothing like it has happened yet.”

  “It’s called situational awareness. It was critical in the corps and critical in games. The thing is 99% of the time in games you knew what to expec. It was the unexpected fluke that you had to look out for. The variable that you couldn’t control. Eloria has a way of throwing things at us. I mean, in some ways it doesn’t matter, we wanted to finish this anyway, but now, if we had wanted to retreat, that is no longer an option.”

  Emily could feel his tension, but knew it was directed at himself. She so wanted to ease his burden, but long experience had taught her that in moments like this he wouldn’t take kindly to her trying to speak kind words. Right now, he was in black and white mode and was judging himself harshly. “So let’s say that is true, then what are you going to do about it?” She knew it sounded harsh from the way that Jackson’s eyes got wide when she challenged Dave, but she had learned it was the only way to get him to stop the self-flagellation. Dave, for all that he liked to say he was an unemotional guy, could get mired down with the best of them. He needed a task to focus on rather than emotional morasses to swim in.

  “I guess … No, you are right. This doesn’t change anything. We move forward,” Dave said, his tone becoming more confident as he spoke.

  Emily looked forward to the end of the tunnel. There was no huge room that opened up before them nor patrols of enemies to be waded through. Instead, there was just a crudely cut hole in the wall, burrowed into the stone as if by some human-sized mole. “Okay, where to then?”

  “Unfortunately, it looks like we have to climb into that hole. There isn’t a perfect way to do this, so I will go first, then your mother, and Jackson I want you in the rear. Okay?”

  “Of course, dad,” the thirteen-year-old said. Emily couldn’t help but once again be proud of the bravery he was displaying.

  “Just one thing first, let me cast my Minor Blessing on all of us,” Emily said, and both the guys nodded.

  She was glad that she didn’t have to go first, but no matter what, the tunnel was creepy. They were forced to crawl to make their way through it. Dave kept trying to sweep as much debris as possible to the side to make it easier for her. It was one of those little ways that he was always looking out for her. Whatever the debris was, she tried not to look too closely at it and, even still, knew that it was nasty just from the pungent odor. If it turned out that it was either droppings or offal, then Dave was really earning the brownie points today.

  After crawling for long enough to make her really start to get nervous, Dave suddenly stopped. Turning his head, he raised a finger to his lips, although she noticed that he didn’t actually let the finger touch his mouth. “Shhh, we are about to enter a room. This is probably it.”

  Then Dave moved forward a bit more, and she, too, could see the extra light coming into the tunnel and feel the increased air flow. It increased again as Dave wiggled up and out of the hole. She followed him into what was clearly an underground cavern of sorts. It was maybe thirty feet wide and one hundred feet long. The floor was punctuated by stalagmites that rose up in strange patterns. There were staggered rows of different numbers of stalagmites on each side with matching rows of stalactites coming down from the ceiling.

  At the far end of the room was another raised platform with what must have been the boss upon it. He was a shrubkin that was half as big as the others. This only made him the same height as her husband’s natural size.

  As she was looking at it, she heard Jackson ask, “So are we supposed to weave our way between the spiky things to get to the boss?”

  “I suspect there is more to it. Or at least we need to assume there is more to it. If all we have to fight is an overpowered shrubkin, then this will be easy, but the entire room has the feel of a trap,” Dave replied.

  Tearing her eyes away from examining the scene before her, Emily said, “I know this probably sounds silly, but when I look at the layout of the floor and ceiling, I keep getting the impression of an oven.”

  “Well your instincts are usually right, so we had better expect some form of fire traps,” Dave said.

  Emily grinned from ear to ear, even in this tense moment, she couldn’t pass up an opportunity like this. “You heard him Jackson, I’m usually right. You’re my witness.”

  Jackson just laughed quietly, “Sure mom.”

  Even Dave had a wry grin on his face. “What gets said in the dungeon stays in the dungeon.”

  “Oh no, it’s out there now,” Emily felt for just a moment as if it was just a fun family outing, but then that was lost as Dave got back to business.

  “The question is, why are there varying numbers of stalagmites?”

  “Maybe it has something to do with the intensity or timing of the trap?” Emily offered up. She felt silly saying it. This was more Dave’s area of expertise, but she just had a feeling.

  Dave silently clapped his hands but maintained his near whisper. “That’s it. You are brilliant.”

  Emily smiled and batted her eyes, faking a swoon as she replied, “Be careful. Too much of these compliments will go to a girl’s head.” She realized at an instinctual level that she was using playful banter to lessen the emotional stress and embarrassment she felt from being praised for something she didn’t expect to be good at, but the smile of genuine enjoyment upon Dave’s face made it worthwhile. Gah, how she loved this guy.

  Hand on her arm, Dave mouthed, “I love you.” before saying, “Time to get serious. I am gonna have to go out there and start working my way towards the boss. I want you to follow behind me but not too far as I don’t want to risk a trap separating us. Everyone keep their eyes open.”

  Then, he cast his ablative armor spell and started moving forward. By hand gesture, he showed that he was moving to the left. Then, as soon as he had walked forward to within about ten feet of the first stalactites, there was a sudden sound like the turning of the gears in a machine. Dave stopped and looked back at her. Ag
ain, he raised his hand, this time to pantomime listening. Emily assumed it was his way of asking if they could hear the clicking sound of metal gears turning against one another, the teeth popping into place as they turned. She nodded her head in response and that satisfied him, so that he turned around and started moving forward, sword drawn.

  Emily glanced up at the boss on the platform, and he still had not moved. Looking back at Dave, he had reached the first stalactite and was stepping past it when, as if appearing out of thin air, a shrubkin appeared behind him. She tried to call out a warning, but it was already thrusting at Dave. Instead of the many tiny branches jutting off of its body everywhere, it had four thicker branches that came off of it, two from the tops of its shoulders and two from its chest. These branches were much longer than its arms and shot out a full six feet in back stabbing attacks, each tipped in a blade that looked like a leaf.

  Her shout must have given Dave just enough warning because none of the blades landed a direct hit. He twisted his body, turning to react, and the blades went around him and were further deflected by his magical armor. Emily watched as his twisting dodge continued into a spinning horizontal slash of his long sword, which severed two of the thrusting branches and cut a deep furrow along the neck of the creature. She smiled, content that Dave could handle this threat, and then a slightly louder tick of the gears came. Instantly, the stalactite that her husband was standing next to burst out with flame, and everything within five feet of it was blasted by searing heat.

  Emily ran forward casting Lesser Regeneration on Dave, but as she got closer, she realized that it wasn’t as bad as she had expected. He looked like he had some sunburn, but there was no blackened flesh. Again, his defensive magic must have spared him the worst of it. An instant later, the stalactite on the right side burst into flame, distracting her. She saw that each second another one of the stalactites burst into flame in succession.