by Erik Rounds
Golden Axe
“Tasha, wake up!”
Gradually, Tasha came awake and found that she was lying prone upon a rocky floor. Atmospheric instrumental music was playing, which thankfully meant that she was no longer in combat. She pushed herself to her feet and opened her eyes. She awoke to find herself face to face with Princess Kiwi and a small dragon.
She blinked her eyes in confusion. “What happened? I remember falling, and then…”
Memories of the fall came back to her. She had been dragged underwater by the currents and had lost consciousness. Somehow she was still alive.
“I remember you,” she said to the dragon. “You’re Kaze, right? What are you doing here?”
“Apparently he’s been following us,” Kiwi said. “He said he wants to join our quest.”
Tasha nodded. “I don’t see why not. He did help us out with the monkeys.”
Kiwi pursed her lips. “I told him I’d think about it. I’ve not decided yet. For one thing, traveling with a dragon would make us much more conspicuous. Also, if he is seen close to the dwarven kingdom, it might make trouble for his people.”
The dragon’s voice appeared in her thoughts. I’m aware of that. I would only stay with you until we reached the borders of Dwarselvania.
“What happened to the others?” Tasha asked. “Did everyone else escape?”
“I don’t know,” said Kiwi, “but I’m pretty sure the flying monkeys were trying to get me. I’m worried about Slimon and the others. We should hurry and find a way out.”
Tasha hoped her friends were okay. She took in her surroundings. They were in corridor lit by wall torches. The shackled skeletal remains of some poor adventurer adorned the wall. The floor and walls were a combination of natural and carved stone. A large red wooden door lay open at the far end. The sound of rushing water trickled through. “What is this place?”
We escaped the flying monkeys by entering a dungeon. They won’t follow us in.
“But it’s only a matter of time until Queen Murderjoy learns of our location,” Kiwi said. “We should proceed further in.”
She got to her feet and began to move inward. The corridor opened up into a large chamber filled with stalactites and stalagmites. There were several exits from the room, and the layout of the dungeon began to fill in Tasha’s mini map. Half a dozen level 16 vorpal rabbits hopped around the room in repeating patterns.
Vorpal Rabbit (Level 16)
He can leap about… he’s got huge, sharp… Just look at the bones!
ATK 20Mag ATK 16
DEF 12Mag DEF 16
Tasha turned to the dragon. “Kaze, can you pull those mobs over here one at a time?”
The dragon’s voice resonated in her mind. I think so.
“Okay. Kiwi, stay behind us. Since you’re only level 3, the mobs will most likely target you—particularly if you start casting. Kaze and I will try to take them out one by one. I want you to injure them right before we finish them off so you can get a more even share of the XP.”
Kiwi nodded and moved to the back of the chamber. Kaze stepped forward and shot a narrow jet of steam that expanded the farther out it went. Due to the distance involved, it only dealt one-quarter heart of damage to one of the isolated mobs. The horned rabbit turned and hopped angrily in Kaze’s direction. When it got close enough, it turned to attack Kiwi instead, its targeting algorithm having decided that her low level made her a preferred target.
Tasha intercepted the bunny as it hopped past and sliced at it with her gunblade over and over, each hit drawing blood and dealing between one and one and a half hearts of damage. It changed its target to her, but Kaze was already hitting it with a close-range steam attack. The battle lasted less than ten seconds and hadn’t caused Tasha to lose any health.
They repeated this process six more times and cleared the room of monsters. When the enemies were defeated and experience was finally awarded, Kiwi gained two levels, bringing her to level 5. Due to the high density of monsters in the dungeon, her level gain came at an accelerated rate.
They continued to explore the dungeon. The grotto was a complex natural labyrinth. The layout continued to draw itself out in Tasha’s map as they explored. Most of the mobs were high level yet manageable. The monsters all seemed to be rabbit themed. Horned rabbits were common, there were also red-eyed demon rabbits, anthropomorphic rabbits, stuffed rabbits, and large stone bunny golems. It seemed that whichever designer built this dungeon had a thing for rabbits.
After about three hours of exploration, Kiwi brought their party to a halt. Kiwi had reached level 9.
The princess looked around cautiously. “I think we’re about to reach the first boss battle.”
Tasha looked around. “How can you tell?”
“Listen.”
Tasha tried to listen but could only hear the in-game music. “I can’t hear anything.”
“It’s the background music. Notice how it’s quieter and full of suspense? That’s usually the prelude to a boss monster or event. Let me cast some buffs before we continue.”
The princess had put most of her stats into intelligence—Etheria’s stat system didn’t have a separate stat for wisdom. Unlike intelligence, wisdom was subjective and did not lend itself to numerical quantification.
Kiwi cast defense and strength buffs on Tasha and Kaze but decided to hold off before doing any additional casting. There was no way to know what kind of enemy they would fight and what kind of attacks they would make. The only thing she knew with relative certainty was that the boss monster would most likely be something rabbit themed.
That prediction turned out to be correct. After they moved into the next room, the door behind them slammed shut as high-intensity Asian music began to play. From the shadows, a white anthropomorphic rabbit garbed in a samurai outfit emerged.
Yojimbo (Level 20)
Dual-blade-wielding ronin rabbit.
ATK 30Mag ATK 0
DEF 28Mag DEF 22
The midboss drew its katana and leaped directly at Kaze, cutting into him for three hearts of damage. He jumped away and repeated his attack. The dragon managed to dodge but was unable to counterattack due to the samurai rabbit’s uncanny speed. It seemed as though the samurai rabbit left an after-image.
“I’ll cast a haste buff,” said Kiwi, whose eyes began to glow white as she chanted. Unfortunately, the mob cut her for five hearts of damage before she could finish the spell. Changing plans, she cast a recovery spell on herself.
This foe’s main advantage over the party was speed. It was a risk, but Tasha decided to invoke Stat Shuffle and divided her stats between agility and strength—that would allow her to counter the rabbit’s speed.
Using this ability reduced her overall stat point count by 15% and came with a twelve-hour cooldown. She just hoped that she wouldn’t need it again anytime soon. Her extra agility gave her the speed she needed to damage him. The samurai wasn’t especially difficult to defeat once she was able to hit him. It was just a matter of outlasting his attacks.
Five minutes later, the midboss had been defeated, and a treasure chest appeared in the center of the room. Tasha had finally leveled up as a result of the boss battle, reaching level 20. She took the heart container and allocated two stat points into strength and the other two into intelligence.
Tasha had grown to really like treasure chests. They always contained something good, whether it be GP, some new piece of armor, food, or some other knickknack that she didn’t even know had been missing from her life.
This one contained a glowing golden carrot. When she scanned it, the description read:
Golden Carrot
Dungeon key item 1/3
When she attempted to put the thing in her inventory, she found herself unable to do so. A message popped up, informing her that she couldn’t store key items in her inventory. Instead she stuffed it into her back pocket and they continued onward.
They spelunked through the dungeon for several hours before coming to anoth
er large chamber. The in-game music stopped, but it wasn’t in anticipation of a boss battle.
The large brick room was surrounded by glowing neon lights. Against one wall was a machine that Tasha instantly recognized as a video game cabinet. Along the lighted bezel were the words “Rabbit Punch.” A large red rabbit and a green rabbit stood on either side of the cabinet.
“I love this game! I used to play this as a kid. They had one at the pizza restaurant. My dad would play it with me every weekend.”
Kiwi approached the machine. “I’ve never seen anything like it. You said it’s a game?”
“Yes, it is. You control your character on the screen using these joysticks. Look at the wall: It’s numbered one through twelve. I’ll bet the way forward will appear when we clear all twelve levels.”
Tasha fished out two 5 GP coins and inserted them into the coin slot. “It’s a two-player game, so I’m going to need your help.”
Tasha taught Kiwi the fundamentals of how to play. It was an early side-scrolling bullet hell arcade game. Both players piloted their respective bunny robots while punching and shooting down enemies in an attempt to save the royal family of Bunnyland. There were carrot-themed powerups to collect and bosses to fight. When she was a kid, she’d never made it past level 7, but that was only because she kept running out of quarters. She had more than enough GP to clear the entire game.
Tasha chose the red rabbit so that Kiwi would be able to choose green, which she assumed to be her favorite color. It only took Kiwi a few tries to get the hang of the controls, and before long the two of them became a well-oiled Rabbit Punch-playing machine. Together, they’d overcome this challenge in no time.
♦ ♦ ♦
The bridge finally gave way under the intense stress of the tempest. Pan wrapped her hand around the railing and held on tight as the bridge collapsed and smashed into the side of the mountain. Aralogos was hanging on to the remains of the bridge above her.
“Behind you!” he cried.
She turned and saw half a dozen flying monkeys flying toward them. She swung her knife using her free hand, yelling, “G-get away!”
Multiple tracers impacted the flying monkeys from above. Hermes had opened fire and was shooting them down with much more accuracy than before. The monkeys that came too close were riddled with gunfire and fell out of the sky.
“Hurry up and climb!” he shouted.
Aralogos climbed to the top and helped Pan the rest of the way as Hermes continued to hold them off with his machine gun. The three of them stood together as the flying monkeys approached, then turned away, retreating into the ravine. It seemed that they had suddenly lost interest in the battle.
“Hermes, did you see what happened to Tasha and the Kiwi?” Ari asked.
“Aye, I did. They both fell into the water, and Kaze, that dragon who came out of nowhere, followed them. They might still be alive.”
“Follow the river downstream,” Pan said. “Tasha might be there.”
Hermes nodded. “Let’s get moving.”
The followed the path of the stream as it rode inside the ravine. After some time, Pan saw what they were looking for. She removed her glasses and peered through her binoculars into the ravine below.
“C-cave, there.”
“There are hundreds of monkeys just outside,” Ari said. “We can’t fight that many as we are.”
“Have you two forgotten that I’m a dwarf?” Hermes said. “Digging is kinda my thing. If they are trapped in the cave, I can create a second entrance. We’ll need to get close, though.”
It took them nearly an hour to reach the bottom of the ravine. There was a ledge that led downward, but it wasn’t exactly a safe way to climb down. Slimon was able to help them make the descent by lowering them down with his tentacles. Unfortunately, they were forced to leave Denver at the top of the ravine since there was no way for him to climb down the rock face. They would have to return for him later.
By the time they reached the base, the sun was already setting. There was only a small amount of dry land along the side of the cliff face, but it was enough for Hermes to do his thing.
The flying monkeys were still congregating by the cave entrance. Hermes got to work right away and starting tearing large cubelike blocks out of the cliff face. Pan was concerned that the monkeys might hear Hermes’s efforts, but they were making such a racket of their own that it wasn’t a problem.
Hermes would remove a large chunk of the cave and deposit it in his inventory. They kept digging inward for fifteen minutes and then turned in a right angle toward the cave. The light from the outside was no longer reaching them, so Aralogos cast a light spell.
Hermes continued digging for several more hours until finally they connected with the adjoining caverns. A prompt appeared:
Now entering dungeon: The Bunny Grotto
Recommended levels 23–27, party of 3 to 8.
They were in an opening that connected to a downward sloping corridor.
“Which way should we check first?” Aralogos wondered aloud.
Pan checked her map. She had set a waypoint at the spot where she thought the flying monkeys were at and compared that direction to where the corridor led.
“There.” She pointed to where she thought the entrance was.
Hermes just shrugged, not preferring one way over the other. They descended together. It wasn’t long at all before they were attacked by mobs. They were all rabbit themed but didn’t pose any real threat to the three seasoned adventurers.
They seemed to be getting closer but kept hitting dead ends and having to backtrack. The cave system was a twisting, convoluted labyrinth.
One room they came to seemed to be leading the right way, but as they entered they came upon a great fountain of water set in the middle of the otherwise empty chamber.
“What is it?” Pan asked.
Aralogos cautiously approached the fountain. “I think it’s an abnormal spawn. Maybe a puzzle.”
Hermes grunted. “These sorts of spawns are usually high risk, high reward. If this is a puzzle, it might be worth trying to solve it.”
Aralogos, as usual, wanted to play it safe. “We can’t afford to die right now. Maybe we should ignore it.”
“Screw that, I want the treasure!”
Hermes marched up to the pool, and as he approached, a figure rose out of the water. It was a stunningly beautiful fairy about two feet tall with glistening blue wings and bunny ears. She wore an elegant dress made out of flowing water.
“Greetings, kind woodsman,” said the fairy.
Hermes looked down at his heavy armor. “And just what part of my attire makes you think I’m a woodsman?”
The fairy continued as though Hermes hadn’t spoken. “Oh, did you drop something in my pool?”
“Um… maybe?”
From somewhere in her watery dress, the fairy pulled out two large axes that were each easily twice her height. She batted her eyelashes and said, “Well, then, did you drop a silver axe or a golden axe?”
Hermes squinted at them closely. “Which of them has the higher resale value?”
“Please choose which one is yours. The silver axe or the golden axe.”
Aralogos put a cautionary hand on Hermes’s shoulder. “This is obviously a test of honesty. We should tell her that we didn’t drop anything. Otherwise she might become angry and murder us all!”
“But if we tell her the truth, she might go away without giving us any axes.”
Ari put his hand on his forehead. “None of us are axe users. We don’t actually need any axes.”
Hermes groaned. “Fine, have it your way! Well, there goes my dreams of riches. Eh… Great fairy of the pool, we didn’t drop either axe in the water. So, now that we’ve been so honest, what kind of reward can you give us for our honesty?”
“Well,” the fairy said, “if you didn’t drop the silver axe and you didn’t drop a golden axe, then you must have dropped this!”
She held forth
a bottle of carrot juice. It seemed to be a key item. The description read:
Carrot Juice
Dungeon key item 3/3
“Oh ho ho ho ho!” laughed the fairy as she vanished back into her pool which then dissolved into purple mist.
Hermes took the dungeon key. “Carrot juice? Seriously? We shoulda taken the golden axe. Ah, well. Let’s not waste any more time goofing off around here.”
The four of them left the room, continuing their search. They spent the next six hours mapping out the dungeon, trying to find Tasha and Kiwi. Eventually they reached an area where there were no mobs. Since monsters didn’t respawn in dungeons like this one, it was an indication that Tasha had come this way.
Now they just needed to follow the trail of no monsters to catch up.
♦ ♦ ♦
Tasha hated this game. Rabbit Punch sucked. No, that wasn’t true. She just sucked at playing it, was all. Why did she ever think she was good at this? She’d been playing it for two hours and couldn’t get past level eleven. The game let you continue, but only from level nine. That meant every time they died, they had to continue from that point and replay levels nine, ten, and eleven. Whose idea was it to design a game where you had to fight difficult bosses without being able to continue?
They couldn’t stop—arcade cabinets had no pause button, and if they stopped, they would have to start over from the beginning. Besides, she was in the zone. They could do this.
Kaze had grown bored watching Tasha suck at video games, and he lacked the opposable thumbs to take over for one of them. Instead he curled up in the corner to take a nap.
Finally, after the third hour of the damn game, the two of them made it to level twelve and defeated the boss. The actual boss, not the fake immortal boss that the game teased her with. At the end of the day, she had spent over a hundred GP on this dumb game, but it was worth it for the sense of satisfaction gained by defeating it.
A compartment at the bottom of the arcade machine opened up, and Tasha retrieved a small object from within. It was a slice of cake.
Carrot Cake
Dungeon key item 2/3
A door on the far wall opened. There were three carrots icons inscribed in the doorframe.