by Adam Elliott
Chapter Fifteen
The underground complex had seemed pleasant enough at first. Wide, clean walkways next to clear swift running water. It reminded Cayden of when his family had vacationed up north and visited a set of rum runner tunnels purported to have been used by Al Capone. Damp, tight, but very touristy.
All that changed when the reached the instance gate.
If Shifty hadn't pointed it out, they almost certainly would have walked right passed it. The entrance was little more than a depression in the brick wall, one whose significance only became apparent once refuse and spiderwebs were wiped away to reveal a complex mechanical mechanism consisting of five rotatable gears.
Shifty had explained that the puzzle was a questline in and of itself, one that took players to each major city in search of a few scraps of information that would make sense of the complicated cipher carved into the spokes of each of the gears. Fortunately, it was a solution that never changed, allowing them to circumvent the entire thing in a matter of seconds with Shifty's help.
The passageway revealed by the open door sloped downwards further into the earth. A slight switchback in its path gave Cayden the feeling of walking down the gullet of an enormous snake. It was a sensation soon reinforced by the disgusting smell that emanated from up ahead of them. It was among the foulest stenches Cayden had ever experienced, and he could hear Celia struggling not to gag behind him even as Shifty appeared totally unaffected.
“Technically, I think this is a sewer.” Celia groaned as she fought a wave of nausea. “If we have to go walking through sewer water I am turning around and going to go make potions.”
“Oh, nothing that bad." Shifty promised. "The smell is part of the instance gate. If you weren't in our party, it would get so overwhelming that you'd be forced to turn back. It should level off in a few more minutes."
True to his word, the odor only persisted for the remaining length of the tunnel. The air was still fetid as they reached the landing, but compared to the corrupt scent they had been forced to endure it was positively tolerable.
Sadly, that was the only thing about their situation that had improved. Gone was the crystal clear water. In its place was a noxious brown sludge that oozed more than flowed down the center channel cut into the brickwork. A similar slimy substance seemed to coat the brickwork, leaving Cayden shuddering at the mere concept of touching the walls.
Celia's face mirrored Cayden's disgust as he looked her way, but to his surprise, she suddenly burst into laughter. A little giggle at first, then a full cover-your-face snicker that she was doing her best to conceal.
Shifty cast a glance to Cayden, who merely shrugged. “What is so funny?”
“Sorry... I just." She paused as another swell of humor overtook her. "I just... this is ridiculous. Six weeks ago I was in AP Math; now I'm dungeon crawling in a literal sewer. I'm probably going to end up fighting some sort of mutated samurai turtle before this is all over."
She dissolved back into laughter, and it wasn't long before Cayden found it contagious. It was ridiculous, that this was the world he lived in. Even before Babel, he had probably spent dozens of hours across as many different games in digital sewers. So much so in fact, that despite the revulsion of his body, the scene around him felt oddly... familiar.
“No Turtles.” Shifty said through a deadpan face that was struggling heroically against a grin of its own. “We are going to run up against a huge bipedal rat though.”
That was it. The floodgates opened, with Celia, Cayden and finally even Shifty all but collapsing into uproarious laughter. It wasn't long before Celia could barely stand, her slim body leaned against Cayden's unsteady frame rather than risk touching the greasy surfaces of the nearby stone wall. They laughed until they were red in the face, whatever tension they had felt coming down into such a dangerous place momentarily fled as they just relished in the ludicrousness of it all.
As they finally came down from their high and separated from one another, both Celia and Cayden found themselves thankful that their respective blushes were hidden by the harsh crimson that already tinged their faces. If there was something to be said about that short contact, neither had any interest in commenting on it further, and each was delighted when Shifty finally drew their attention to the business at hand.
“R-right.” Shifty said, running a hand along the bald area of his scalp in an attempt to focus his mind back to task. “So, before I go any further, we should probably discuss the bosses.”
“You mean splinter.”
Shifty clapped his hands twice mere inches from the young girl's face. “Focus girl. Focus.”
“I think his name is something like Rap Rat?" Cayden said. "Some early nineties reference I think. There honestly isn't much info available online about this dungeon."
“Too much of a pain in the ass, and not great rewards.” Shifty nodded. “I think we were the only people to reliably run it after the first couple of months, so anything you see online is probably going to be information from a farming group.”
Cayden nodded. “Even that is spotty. No real details on mechanics, just that there is a trio of bosses we have to go through. A rat, a slime and a crocodile?”
“An alligator.” Shifty corrected.
“Is there a difference?” Celia asked.
“Yeah. Crocodiles don't live in sewers.”
“Wait, alligators live in sewers?” This time it was Cayden, his voice dubious.
Shifty took a long moment to eye up each of his young party members. He was almost convinced that they were taking him for a ride, but after several seconds of confused glances between one another, he relented. “Look, just... don't think too hard about it okay. You're in the sewers of a magical, reality-defying tower in downtown New York City. I feel like the existence of alligators in the sewer should be the least of your problems.”
“Point taken.” The two said in near unison.
Shifty gave the two one more long look before he was apparently satisfied enough to continue. “Your info was mostly right. Three bosses, with an optional one that we're going to avoid. You've got Rap Rat a nine-foot tall bipedal rat with a sword the size of your body. Then you have the Ooze which... honestly is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. He will probably give us the most trouble since we don't have much in the way of magical damage. Last we have White, the aforementioned alligator in the sewers.”
“White?” Celia asked curiously.
“You'll understand when you see him.” Shifty grinned. “We'll go into more detail when we get to the boss rooms. Sound good?”
Celia nodded in affirmation, but Cayden remained silent for a moment before asking. "What's the optional boss?"
“Some golem thing. I think it was part of some questline?”
“You think, or you know?” Cayden inquired.
“I think." Shifty replied with a hint of annoyance. "It wasn't part of the regular grind for the dungeon, and there are no resource nodes anywhere near it, so we just ignored the thing. It is the highest level enemy in the dungeon, and considering we are already two men down I didn't think we'd be wanting to push our luck."
“We're down two player, but up three levels." Cayden retorted, his mind whirring even as Shifty turned away with a roll of his eyes. "But yeah, you're right. No reason to risk it if we don't have to."
“Talking some sense. I like it.” Shifty smiled. “Alright, saddle up boys and girls. Let's get this show on the road.”
Once they got going, it took the better part of an hour for the group to reach their first substantive obstacle.
There had been speedbumps along the way of course, but even down two members from the expected five-man group, the regular mobs weren't all that much of a threat. They were numerous, dog-sized rat creatures that came out of the walls in swarms and killer slimes that oozed from the endless river of questionable fluids, but they weren't dangerous.
In truth, their unfamiliarity with one another had proven far more threatening
. In one battle Shifty had dealt more damage than Cayden had been expecting, which forced the Carnivalist to turn tail and run, hoping small circles over the sludge to avoid the monsters until Cayden could reacquire aggro. In another Celia had spent half her manapool anticipating serious injuries to Cayden that never came. Even Cayden had screwed up at least once, mangling a personal skill use taunt so badly that the mobs had managed to get a few swings in on Celia before he'd reacquired them.
Whatever the particular failure, the overarching theme was far from encouraging.
“No real way around it, this part is going to suck.” Shifty admitted as they stood before the entrance to the first boss room. They had been discussing this particular hazard for the last thirty minutes, bouncing ideas back and forth in an attempt to come up with some clever way to circumvent or otherwise simplify the set piece, all to no avail.
Cayden had to agree with his assessment. This was going to suck.
It was a simple event. A player on each side of the sludge needed to pull down on a lever for one minute to open the boss room door, an action that prevented them from doing anything else. Doing so, however, would provoke a veritable flood of low-level slimes. According to Shifty, this was normally a non-event, a sixty-second hiccup in the run. But that was with a five man party. A five man party could afford to have two people out of commission, Cayden's group could not.
“I still think it makes more sense for me to do it.” Shifty complained as he crossed a small stone bridge to reach the far side of the sludge. “I can tumble over them try and make a break for it and kite them around for a bit until the door is open.”
“And if you miss a single one of them then it gets to beat on us unopposed for the better part of a minute. I might survive that, but Celia absolutely won't." Cayden countered. "If you had a taunt, I'd be all for it, but you don't."
It was the best plan they could come up with. Celia and Shifty would open the door, while Cayden taunted the swarm of slimes and tried to endure their damage until his companions were free to join the fray.
It was not a good plan. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
“Tank turtles and everyone prays. Fantastic plan.” Shifty scowled.
Tank falls, and you get a payday. Cayden frowned at the other man. He had made all of this sound a hell of a lot easier when they first discussed the idea at Imawasu's shop. It was hard to shake the idea that Shifty was protesting too much, that this was all just some elaborate setup for an easy kill.
“Ready when you are.” Shifty nodded to Celia.
“Right. Skill Use: Lesser Haste!” Celia replied. An instant later the system overtook her body, a dainty right hand rising to gesture in Cayden's direction as she intoned words of arcane power, ending in a stream of English words. “Layer upon layer, time compounds upon time. Lesser Haste!”
The spell overtook Cayden's body with the sensation of an electric shock. His whole frame buzzed, and a glance at his own hands showed them vibrating faster than he'd ever moved in his life. There was a blur of the movement, like hummingbird wings, his own motions feeling strange and unnatural to him.
“Skill Use: Slow Wall.” She continued another magical chant following the first. “Burden of time, barrier of entropy. Slow wall!”
Cayden tightened his grip on the hilt of his sword. He'd swapped back to his rune-inscribed blade in the lead up to this encounter. Better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it, even if he would have to spin a tale about buying it from the marketplace if either of his companions bothered to check the combat log.
“Skill Use: Image of the Past!”
Cayden took a deep breath as she began the last of the three spells. Lesser Haste was self-explanatory, a spell that increased his dexterity, reflexes and movement speed. Slow Wall hadn't taken him much time to puzzle out either, a barrier that would slow anything, himself included, as it passed through it. The goal was to fight at the edge of the glimmering obstacle, to try and keep as many slimes slowed inside of it.
Image of the Past was the only one he'd had to look up. It was a clever buff, similar to displacement or mirror image. It created a time delay duplicate of him, an afterimage that followed his every motion half a second behind. Rather useless in PvP since a talented player could see through it, but almost invaluable in a PvE environment like this.
“Form of time, recollection of motion! Image of the Past!” Celia cried before immediately reaching for her lever. The buffs wouldn't even last the entirety of the combat. Every second counted.
The click of switches falling into place was accompanied by the rumbling of gears as a crack opened beneath the door. Shortly thereafter a second sound joined it, a squishing, squelching sound as the river of sludge began to disgorge its cargo. One slime, two, five, ten. They came less in a column than in a wave, an onrushing mass of bouncing green and blue droplets and squares.
They'd fought a dozen such creatures on their way here. Individually they were pathetically weak. Their attacks were predictable by the sudden tension across their surface before they leaped. All they could do was throw themselves at you, bludgeon you with their body and coat you with the acid that lingered just beneath the gelatin exterior that kept them cohesive. If this group had come to him one or two at a time, he could fight them all day.
Sadly, he had no such luxury.
“Personal Skill Use: Taunt!” Cayden shouted, giving his best berzerker impression as the first of the creatures bounded into range, clattering off his shield for minimal damage. His first job was to corral the slimes; a task made harder by the fact that half of the slimes were spawning on the opposite side of the sludge.
“Personal Skill Use: Taunt!” He cried again. Slimes were completely unintelligent, which meant all he had to do was be the closest living thing in range. But they were fast. Even with his taunt, it was a struggle to shift from side to side with each encroaching batch of slimes. Doubly so as the critters began to pile up behind him. By the grace of God, or more likely the distracting image left by Celia, he managed to avoid any serious damage in the back and forth.
Phase one, complete. He had nearly a hundred of the multi-colored slimes on his tail now, the bouncing creatures throwing them in his direction with reckless abandon. One or two received a sword blade for their trouble, but without any vitals, it was impossible to land a critical hit against a slime. He'd need at least two hits to drop a single one of these things, which meant going fully on offense was a fool's errand.
“Skill Use: Grasp the Earth!” Cayden spun on the creatures as they surged towards him, catching nearly a dozen of the bouncing creatures on his shield. His glasses were alight with notification, five damage here, ten damage there, perfect block. They were a distraction. The only number he needed to focus on was his HP and the remaining time. If his HP started to drop at more than 2% a second, he was in trouble.
On the monsters came. Their attacks struck in waves, some missing entirely as they leaped at him from atop an unsteady position. Others struck blows against his shins that might have toppled him without the unwritten stability bonus granted by Grasp the Earth. Still more impacted his shield over and over, bouncing away as quickly as they'd dealt damage, or falling into the sludge with a splash.
Thirty seconds left, and he'd only dropped to 75%. At a glance, it looked like a safe number, but he knew it didn't account for the first five or ten seconds he'd spent gathering and dodging the slimes. He was going to be cutting it far closer than he had originally hoped.
Even so, he felt powerful in the fight. His shield whirred in his hands, moving faster than he thought possible. His eyes caught sight of a slime readying to leap, and before his mind knew to react, he had already interposed the wooden brace between himself and the threat. The quick slimes felt as though they were going in slow motion. Indeed, some of them were going in slow motion.
A pity it had to end.
The buffs didn't expire without warning. A small blinking icon next to his timer kept
him alert. Three blinks, two blinks, one blink. His haste cut out. Five seconds later the slowing spell dissolved into nothingness as well, along with his duplicate.
The attacks came faster now, and he was less prepared. Cayden lashed out as he stumbled under a barrage of blows, a slime splitting in half and bursting into ashes as the force of his attack threw it away from him. One out of a hundred might not win the fight for them, but it was a surprisingly satisfying moral victory.
Ten seconds. Twenty-five percent. I'm not going to make it like this.
“Skill disable: Grasp the Earth!” Cayden instructed, lunging backward as a trio of slimes passed through the air he'd occupied an instant before. More took their place as he retreated, and without the benefit of perfect blocks, the few that did clip him through his dodges dealt substantially more damage.
“Five Seconds Cayden!” Celia shouted. They couldn't even see him. The system took over their bodies when they used the twin levers, which left them facing the wall and praying that Cayden's rapidly lowering HP bar held out long enough.
“Anytime now.” Cayden impaled one of the creatures as it lunged at him, using its thick body to swat away one of its compatriots. His back was to Shifty now, less than two feet between the two men. Not exactly the best place to be if he was worried about getting stabbed in the back. “Skill Use: Grasp the Earth!”
“Skill Use: Fan of Knives!” Shifty yelled, the first wave of approaching slimes disappearing under the points of five sharpened daggers.
“Skill Use: Future Theft” Celia began to incant, soft glyphs of magical blue light appearing before her, their lines manipulated like the hands of a clock. “Twisted strands of time, the future is now! Future Theft!”
Cayden felt the waves of magic roll over him, causing goosebumps as they caressed his skin. Then, despite the withering attacks still battering his shield, his HP began to rise.
“Pain of the past, return to the present! Old wounds!” Celia's chant was accompanied by the sudden burst of a slime to Cayden's right. He hadn't even seen the creature, yet she'd had the good sense to recognize it was injured and to use a low tier spell she could cast without full incantation rather than just shouting out a warning. Maybe they'd make a good party after all.