by A. J. Markam
Hannah charged in and tried to tank, but the tube worms would gang up on her and kill her fairly easily, and then we’d have to wait 45 seconds for her to reappear.
Alexandra couldn’t get too close or the things would dart down, loop around her, and lift her up off the cave floor. Which looked pretty awesome in a Frank Frazetta ‘hot fantasy chick in danger’ way, but sucked in a ‘don’t let your teammates get killed’ kind of way.
Not to mention every time she resurrected, she shuddered so much I thought she might have a seizure.
It mostly fell to me and the Tiefling Hunter to try to take them down – and since I was 8 Levels lower than the rest, it was an arduous process.
But then we discovered the secret almost by accident.
Alexandra had just been snagged again by one of the tube worms. Trying to save her, Hannah targeted the worm and triggered one of her Paladin abilities – a super-fast sprint forward as she was encased in a golden light. It was meant to be a disorienting initial attack where a Paladin could slam into a group of enemies and knock them to the ground with little damage to herself.
Only problem was, the tube worm lifted Alexandra out of the way too quickly.
Hannah rushed right beneath the tentacle – and SLAMMED into the stone column.
Which immediately cracked like an egg shell.
Hannah staggered backwards, a little shaken but not hurt. The magical properties of her attack had shielded her from any real damage.
“Look!” I yelled as I pointed at the dozens of cracks radiating outwards from the stone column. “What was that you just did?!”
“Holy Battle Ram.”
“Do it again!” I urged her.
“I’ve got a 20-second cooldown.”
“Then do it again as soon as you can – and in the exact same place!”
Turns out Hannah could target the stone column just as easily as she could target the worm.
The second time she ran into the stone column, she blasted it into gravel.
Apparently, the big columns weren’t solid blocks of rock, but some kind of secreted material that just looked super-strong.
The tube worm’s home fell to the ground, and inside the broken pipe we saw the bottom end of the worm – a bunch of delicate, red, feather-like appendages.
Looked like a weak spot to me.
“Aim there!” I yelled at the Tiefling.
Between my Darkfire and her blunderbuss, we killed the tube worm in five seconds flat.
As soon as we did, its tubular body withered and collapsed to the ground, depositing Alexandra back on its feet.
And yielded up ‘Tube Worm Fronds’ worth 4 silver apiece.
“THAT’S IT!” I yelled happily. “Take out the base, then the worm!”
We did that column by column, worm by worm, carving a path through the center of the dungeon. Hannah would slam headfirst into a stone pillar a couple of times, knocking it down, and then the Tiefling and I would finish it off. Alexandra and Alaria would distract the tube worms on either side so that they didn’t snag Hannah after impact.
All in all, a very efficient system. It took only ten minutes to make our way from one side of the cave to the other, where it opened back up to the outside waters and the ledge continued down the side of the cliff.
“YES!” all of us cried out.
High fives were exchanged all around – even between me and Hannah the dwarf.
Unfortunately, we didn’t have any time to rest before we were attacked by Murwogs.
Murwogs are short, humanoid fish with arms and legs. Imagine goblins, but with fish heads instead of humanoid features.
Zali looked a little like a Murwog, except Zali dressed in flashy suits, and Murwogs ran around naked with shell necklaces.
And Zali pontificated about art, while Murwogs went “Bah wah bleh magwa blah!”
And Zali used elemental Warlock powers. Murwogs used pointy sticks.
And there was only one of Zali… but there were dozens of the damn Murwog fuckers.
They attacked us in a group, jabbing their spears at us and biting us with their fanged mouths.
As the tank, Hannah bore the brunt of the attack – and died at least twice.
I was beginning to suspect Tess wasn’t that great of a healer.
Anyway, we would all have to retreat and fight off the Murwogs until Hannah came running back to us a minute later.
“Man, doing shit on principle sucks,” she wheezed.
“Will you just JOIN THE GODDAMN GROUP so you can resurrect closer?!” Alexandra shouted at her.
“NO!”
“Asshole!” Alexandra snapped, and then we would continue on plowing through the Murwogs.
They weren’t the only new threats. Bush-sized, spiky sea urchins began showing up that could shoot their spines at us through the water. And then came the five-foot starfish that would pry the armor off Hannah and eat her like a clam.
Not eat her clam, just eat her like a clam.
I guess the starfish wasn’t a lesbian.
Or maybe it just preferred octo-pussy.
Alright, okay, I’ll stop with the sapphic mollusk jokes now.
The horrible thing about the starfish was that when Alexandra or Hannah attacked it with their blades, they ended up hacking off one of its arms – which would then regenerate into another full-sized starfish within 30 seconds. Which meant we went from fighting one of the fuckers to dealing with four of them, all within three minutes.
“Stop cutting them up and let US kill them!” I shouted in frustration as a fifth starfish regenerated. By ‘us,’ I meant the Tiefling Hunter and me.
“What do you expect us to do, just stand by and watch?!” Alexandra yelled.
“If it means not making any more of the little fuckers, then YES!”
Stig was the one who actually figured out what to do with them. When Hannah accidentally hacked off another starfish leg and it went flying onto Stig, he screeched and tossed it off him into the air – uh, water –
And over the side of the abyss.
Ohhh.
Problem solved.
From that point onwards, we were tossing starfish over the side with abandon.
The last one, though, was stuck to Hannah and prying off her gauntlets and greaves one by one.
“Get the bastard off me!” she yelled.
“We can’t!”
She gritted her teeth. “Then just throw us both over!”
Alexandra stared at her. “Are you sure?”
“Just DO IT!”
Over the side went both Hannah and the starfish.
The sharks showed up seconds later and had a dwarf-and-starfish ‘pig in a blanket.’
You know – pigs in a blanket – when you bake little hotdogs inside biscuit dough?
No?
Well, the sharks ate them anyway.
Two minutes later, Hannah showed up huffing and puffing.
“…alright… add me… to the fuckin’ group…” she wheezed.
“FINALLY,” Alexandra groused. “About fuckin’ time.”
“You keep talkin’ like that and I’m backing out,” Hannah snapped.
Alexandra shut up, I re-sent the invite, and Hannah accepted.
Things got significantly easier from there.
Well, for Hannah, anyway.
The ledge ended again and it was back into a cave. This time it was filled with softly glowing jellyfish moving serenely through the darkness.
“Oh my gosh, that’s so beautiful,” the elf whispered.
I agreed – until they started coming after us.
“OW!” I yelled as the first one stung me on my face, taking off 5% of my hit points in one go. Luckily my face was the only part of my body that was uncovered.
“AAAH!” the elf yelled, too, as she got stung on one of her bare arms.
But worst of all was poor Alexandra in her chainmail bikini.
“GOD FUCKING DAMMIT ALL TO HELL, YOU MOTHERFUCKING, SHIT-SLU
RPING AAAAAH!” she screamed as the jellyfish sent her for a respawn.
Hannah in her full-body armor was almost completely unaffected, though. She took out the jellyfish closest to the ground while the Tiefling and I zapped those along the ceiling.
Once Alexandra got back and we’d cleared the room, we proceeded to the final chamber, which had no exit – which meant it was probably the lair of a mini-boss.
The only distinguishing features of the grotto were several massive, inky-black holes in the ground and ceiling.
More blowholes? I wondered.
Not quite.
“What do you think is in OH MY GOD!” Hannah screamed as the nearest hole erupted with ten enormous flailing tentacles, each the size of a pine tree.
The first mini-boss was a giant squid, complete with a gnashing beak at the center of its arms.
Alexandra got picked up by a tentacle in another hot Frazetta pose.
Unfortunately, it ended up with her getting stuffed face-first into the squid’s beak.
Not quite as sexy.
“Ian, can you do another one of those respawn points?!” the elf screamed.
“Yeah!” I yelled.
When I tried to cast Gravesite again, I got the customary warning:
Establishing a new gravesite here will deactivate your previous gravesite. Do you wish to continue? Accept/Cancel
I hit ‘Accept,’ and black energy began to flow like water from my fingertips.
Seconds later, we had a new respawn point – and none too soon.
The squid had grabbed Hannah. She’d hacked a couple of its arms off, which weren’t regenerating, thank god. But rather than bring her closer to its beak (which I think Hannah was looking forward to, just so she could get the chance to slam her battleax into the fucker’s mouth), the squid jerked back into its hole like a giant had just flushed a monster-sized toilet.
That’s not an analogy, either, or a simile, or whatever my 10th-grade English teacher would have called it.
There was an actual flushing noise as it disappeared.
And when it went, it took Hannah with it.
Though when the squid reappeared – this time from one of the holes in the ceiling, in some sort of magical act of cephalopod teleportation – Hannah wasn’t anywhere to be seen.
Not grasped in its tentacles, anyway.
“Dammit,” she muttered as she reappeared right next to me at the tombstone.
“You alright?” I asked in shock.
“I will be once I kill that damn thing!” she yelled, and launched herself back into battle.
It took Alexandra a couple of minutes to retrace her way back to us – after all, she’d come from the previous Gravesite before I’d decommissioned it. During Alexandra’s absence, the squid magically flushed itself down the hole twice, killing both Hannah and Sylvie the Tiefling.
“What’d I miss?” Alexandra called out as she ran back into the room.
“A whole bunch of toilet bowl flushes,” Sylvie answered.
“What?”
“Never mind, just kill it!”
Though the squid had a magical commode ability, it was a fairly straightforward kill. I just kept Soul-Sucking it, Sylvie kept shooting it, and Alexandra and Hannah kept hacking off its arms. Finally it was nothing but a giant beak with a bunch of wiggling stubs.
Alexandra delivered the coup de grace by plunging her sword deep into its mouth.
“Suck on that, you son of a bitch,” she growled.
Unfortunately it did, pulling both her and her sword along with it, accompanied by a giant FLUSHING sound.
“GODDAMN IT!” Alexandra yelled as she disappeared into the void.
The monster squid didn’t reappear, though Alexandra did – by the gravesite.
However, loot rained down from the hole in the ceiling.
Again, not sure if it was the dungeon or the disparity in levels, but there was some bitchin’ loot for a mini-boss.
Fish-Scale Shoulder Pads
+15 Armor
+8 Intellect
I have no idea how big the fish was they used to make those shoulder pads, but it must have been huge, because those were some big honkin’ scales.
Eel-Skin Vest
+15 Armor
+6 Stamina
Whale-bone Bracers
+12 Armor
+3 Intellect
+5 Stamina
And two gold coins.
Not too fuckin’ shabby.
At first I was afraid the game wouldn’t let me wear the loot, since I was technically only supposed to wear cloth armor. But I tried out the Eel-Skin Vest and the Bracers and found I could slip them on with no problem.
Great! Apparently, since the stuff wasn’t cured like leather, and didn’t contain metal like chainmail or plate armor, the system allowed it.
The clothing was a decided improvement on my current garb in terms of stats, so I wasn’t going to resell it – but if I had resold it and added the amount to my haul of crab legs, lobster claws, and coinage, I was looking at 7 gold so far. And I doubted the dungeon was even a third over.
I used to make 42 gold grinding the Tomb of Tharos seven times a day. An average six gold coins per run.
The Great Abyss was a decided improvement, monetarily speaking.
Once we’d gotten our loot, a wall of the cave crumbled and revealed the outside ledge again.
Once more into the breach!
More eels, sea urchins, starfish, Murwogs, and a few new surprises, none of them particularly noteworthy.
The one thing that was noteworthy, though, was I hit Level 28.
Golden letters and numerals shimmered in front of me as trumpets blared, and a window appeared:
You have a new ability: Chain of Darkness.
ALL RIGHT!
Chain of Darkness
2.0 seconds cast time
Duration: 10 seconds
-1% from current hit points Damage Inflicted per second
Decreases damage dealt by target by 25% during duration of spell
250 Mana to cast
Range: 80 feet
Cooldown: 2 minutes
The description read, You can now summon a chain of demons to bind your enemies for 10 seconds, sapping the target’s current Health at 1% per second, and diminishing any damage they deal by 25%.
SWEET. No passive magical nose-picking here, buddy.
I checked out the icon on my Menu Bar. The picture looked like little dots forming a lasso.
Huh…
I cast the spell on the next Murwog that came at me. Kind of a waste, really, since Murwogs were such low-level opponents, but I wanted to see what my new spell could do.
Basically I thrust out my hand –
And a chain of tiny black demons came flying out of my sleeve.
“WHOA,” I said in amazement.
The chain flew through the air, encircled the Murwog, and wrapped around it tight.
“Blah wah rah mawga!” the Murwog screeched.
I ran over right next to the Murwog and peered intently at the chain.
The demons were each about an inch long, with grinning mouths full of fangs and bulbous red eyes with tiny little black dots for pupils. They hung onto each other, hands to feet and feet to hands, in a string of 80 demons or so. As they glowed purple, the Murwog’s hit points began dropping by 1% per second.
Like I said, no big deal on an opponent with only a thousand hit points – but this was one of the rare Class-based attacks I’d ever seen that scaled up and did more damage the more powerful your opponent was.
I mean, the ability to take 10% off of Zali’s hit points in ten seconds – that was fucking HUGE! Chain of Darkness might be the game-changer!
When the ten seconds were up, the little demons dissolved into smoke and disappeared. It would take another two minutes before I could summon them again.
YES!
Finally, a kickass power!
Although, yes, Gravesite was a kickass power,
too, and I’d just gotten it at Level 24, so I had no cause to complain – but whatever. I was a happy man.
Not only that, but Chain of Darkness came in real handy during the next mini-boss.
It was a Naga mage – the same type of snake-like creature that had been guarding Zali’s city. This one, though, had on an elaborate headdress instead of body armor, and held a staff with a glowing jewel at the top rather than a trident.
As we approached him, he summoned a swarm of eels from down in the abyss.
Turns out they were electric eels, and gave out nasty shocks whenever you got too close.
Which was especially bad for Hannah and Alexandra.
“AAAAH!” Hannah screamed as an eel discharged a couple thousand volts into her plate armor.
Poor Alexandra got zapped as an eel brushed up against her chainmail-covered ass.
“JESUS!” she screeched. “That was like electrolysis on my fuckin’ crotch!”
“What does Jesus have to do with your crotch?” Alaria asked.
“Absolutely nothin’!” the Warrior said as she skewered the offending eel.
I cast Chain of Darkness at the Naga mage and took off 10% of his hit points all on my own.
“WHOA,” Hannah said as she watched the Naga’s hit points drop. “Do it again!”
“Can’t, I’ve got a two-minute cool-down!”
Alexandra and Hannah set upon the mage as the Tiefling and I killed the eels.
Two minutes later, I cast Chain of Darkness again – and was surprised to see that his overall drop in Health was less than what I’d been expecting.
But the counter indicated that he’d still lost 10%!
When I realized what the issue was, I could have smacked myself in the head.
It was right there in the description: sapping the target’s CURRENT Health at 1% per second.
If your opponent had 100,000 hit points and you called Chain of Health when he was at full strength, you would knock 10,000 points off him over 10 seconds.
(Actually, it was more like 9500 hit points over 10 seconds. 1% of 100,000 is 1000, but 1% of 99,000 is 990, then 1% of 98,010 is 980, then -970, -961, -951, -942… you get the point. You weren’t going to get the full 1000 hit points x 10 seconds.)