“That’s why I prepared you.”
“Are you calling me a tool?”
“Humphrey,” Jason said, placing an earnest hand on the big man’s shoulder. “You’re far more useful and versatile than some ordinary tool. You’re a complete tool.”
“I’m also holding a hammer,” Humphrey said.
Jason skittered back. “As you were, mate.”
Clive stood next to Jason as they watched Humphrey hammer away at the wall.
“That mouth of yours is going to get the cream kicked out of you someday,” Clive said.
“Been there, done that,” Jason said. “You can live your life avoiding consequences or accepting them. I tried the first way in my old world, and I’m trying the other here.”
“And how’s that working out?”
“It feels good,” Jason said. “Wouldn’t recommend it without healing magic, though. Cripes, he’s putting a dent in that wall.”
Humphrey’s hammer blows were crashing into the wall with the regularity of an aggressive metronome. The stone was covered with impact marks all clustered together, spiderweb cracks spreading out. In short order, the hammer breached a hole in the wall, which let out a wave of wet air, stinking with rot.
All three hurried away from the hole.
“That is foul,” Clive said.
“It’s not dissolving monster bad,” Jason said, “but it’s bad.”
Humphrey looked disconsolately at the hole in the wall.
“We have to go down there,” he said unhappily.
Jason nodded.
“I wouldn’t want that to be my final resting place,” he said. “We have an adventurer to bring home.”
“How did they get down there?” Humphrey pondered. “It looks like all the entrances are sealed up.”
“That smell means the water got in somewhere,” Clive said. “Best guess? Some monster burrowed all the way down here, found a hole in the lower level and made it their lair. They killed the adventurer up on the surface, then dragged them down into whatever entrance the monster made for itself.”
“Makes sense,” Jason said. “We were expecting some kind of worm monster.”
Humphrey took a deep, unhappy breath.
“Enough stalling,” he said. “I’m going to bring down that wall.”
Soon there was enough of a hole for a person to pass through and Humphrey leaned in for a look.
“Looks like the stairs were reshaped to make this wall,” Humphrey said. “Can we get some light in here?”
One of the floating motes of light drifted through the hole and Humphrey looked again.
“Yeah, we’ll have to drop down,” he said.
They took another of Jason’s metal stakes and Humphrey hammered it into the floor to anchor a rope. Jason was the first one through the hole, drifting down a stairwell now more like an elevator shaft. He stopped when he reached water flooding the level below. Taking out his ten-foot pole, he tested the depth.
“There’s water down here,” he called up. “Shallow enough to walk through.”
The others slid down the rope, ending up knee-deep in black, icy water.
“I don’t care for this,” Clive said.
“Look around,” Jason said, standing on the surface. “We might find our answers down here.”
Like the levels above, the stairwell opened onto a wide central corridor. This one was full of debris, piled up on the flooded floor. There were large clumps of mud with roots jutting out, bricks wholly dislodged from the wall, revealing holes into walls of packed earth. The battle damage was even more extensive than the floor above, and they didn’t have to look far to see corpses.
“This is barely navigable,” Humphrey said. “Where does the tracking stone point?”
“Ahead and to the right,” Clive said, stone in hand. “We’re on the right level.”
“Then stay ready,” Humphrey said. “Whatever dragged our adventurer down here is likely to be lurking about.”
They started searching the semi-submerged level, the water and debris slowing their progress. Clive had the most trouble pushing his feet through the water. Jason stepped lightly on the surface while Humphrey’s strength ploughed through it as if the water wasn’t even there. They stopped at the entrance to a large hall, one of the largest rooms they had seen.
“Do you feel that?” Humphrey asked.
“Iron rank auras,” Jason said.
“Not people, or monsters, though,” Clive said. “Some kind of enchanted objects. Do we take a look, or keep following the tracking stone?”
“I don’t like the idea of leaving an unknown potential threat behind us,” Humphrey said.
“Let’s check it out, then,” Jason said.
They moved into the hall, Jason’s light motes spreading out to illuminate the space. Flooding aside, it looked like the most intact room they had encountered so far. Everything was rotted, rusted or ripped, but the walls were lined with what looked like the hall’s original contents. Vertical banners, blackened with rot, hung from the walls. Stone statues were covered in black fungus and erosion, while weapon racks of metal and wood had largely collapsed as their integrity gave out.
At the back of the room were what looked like strange statues: mannequins of stone with segmented body parts connected by lengths of metal. They were the source of the auras, twenty-eight of them. They were standing in what was clearly meant to be four rows of ten, like soldiers at attention but a dozen spots were empty.
“Combat dummies,” Humphrey said. “If they’re giving off this strong an aura, they’re almost certainly active.”
“I’d like to take one,” Clive said. “You can learn a lot about a culture from their magical objects.”
“We’ll have to put them down first,” Humphrey said. “They’ll probably attack if we get close enough or unleash our auras.”
“Let me put some spells on you, then,” Clive said.
He cast two spells each on Jason and Humphrey. The first made them glow briefly with a red-gold light.
“Mantle of retribution,” Clive said. “Anyone that hits you will take damage.”
The second one caused a ring of runes to start floating around them like a slow-motion hula hoop.
“Rune mantle,” Clive said. “It consumes a random rune to trigger an effect each time you’re attacked.”
“Do you have anything that doesn’t require a monster to hit me?” Jason asked.
“If the monsters can’t hit you,” Clive said, “then what do you need extra magic for?”
“He’s got you there,” Humphrey said. Dragon-scale armour appeared around him, the giant wing sword appearing in his hands. It was too big to swing in most of the complex, but the hall they were in had plenty of room.
Clive pulled back a flap on the front of his robe to reveal a surprisingly ripped torso, covered in runes of blue and green. The runes floated off his body and through the air, where they came together as a ball of light that transformed into Onslow, Clive’s rune tortoise familiar. Jason didn’t bother pulling out Colin, who would have little impact on the combat dummies.
They formed up, Jason and Humphrey in front, Clive in the rear with his familiar.
“Ready?” Humphrey asked, looking at the other two.
“Ready,” Jason said, drawing his sword.
Clive pulled out a magic wand. “Ready.”
“Alright,” Humphrey said. “Auras out.”
You are in the area of an ally’s [Dragon Might] aura. Your [Power] and [Spirit] attributes are increased.
You are in the area of an ally’s [Lord of Magic] aura. You are continually gaining mana-per-second. Resistance to mana drain effects is increased.
The combat dummies reacted immediately, all twenty-eight moving towards them. Like Clive, they were hampered by the knee-deep water, but Clive was the first to act. His wand fired a bolt of red and silver light that blasted the arm off a combat dummy.
At his side, a bolt of lightning flashed from Onslow's shell. It arced out to one of the peripheral dummies, avoiding Jason and Humphrey. Clive touched a hand to the rune that dimmed on Onslow’s shell, feeding mana into it. The rune started to slowly light back up.