“Kill you all,” said Mizuki, pointing at them. “I mean it.” She knew, of course, that this would only make her look more ridiculous, but that was part of the fun.
“There there,” said Alfric, patting her on the helm. She grinned up at him.
“Well, let’s not play a game of who could kill whom,” said Hannah with a laugh. She turned to the dungeon. “We’ve got a dungeon to explore.”
Chapter 23 — This One Is Actually About Dungeons Too
The entrance to the dungeon was the same as it had been before, a tube of packed earth, but when it opened out into the first room, there was nothing like a house or building. Instead, it was a little grotto, with stalactites hanging from the ceiling and a trickle of water coming down. The only path forward was through the stalactites, where the light from the lanterns could barely reach.
<Party chat only,> said Alfric. <No sense alerting anything to our presence.>
<Let me know when I should play my song,> said Verity.
<Packs down first,> said Alfric as he slipped his off and onto the ground. He drew his sword and shield, getting comfortable with the grip of them and changing his stance. He was always rather serious, Verity thought, but here, it seemed to suit him more.
Verity slipped her own bag off and placed it on top of a rock, where she hoped it would stay relatively dry. There was practically nothing in her pack aside from her waterskin, some eggy bread Hannah had baked that morning, and some nuts Isra had brought. Her lute was already in her hands, with the finger flute tied tight against the calf of her left leg, giving her as many fingers as she pleased. The lute itself was tuned and ready to go, with a few tests of it before they went in.
Verity was wearing a helm, the same as Mizuki, and had practiced singing with it on. She didn’t look nearly so ridiculous though. In the mirror, she’d thought that she could pull off the look of a battle bard.
<Plan for a longer engagement this time,> said Alfric. He turned to the others and made sure that they were ready. <Song now, please.>
Verity had prepared a few songs and chose one of strength in the face of the foreboding, whose lyrics fit with the dark, cavernous dungeon better than the other songs she had on hand. It was a song of mythology, harking back to a very old story of the first person to ever delve a dungeon, Helgi of Amanth, though told in a somewhat more whimsical way than was orthodox. Helgi was almost certainly apocryphal, so Verity felt no shame in making changes.
They heard the first monster before they saw it, as Alfric was making his way beside the small trickle of water that went along the tunnel. It was a sound like a thousand crickets in the night, a buzzing that was so loud it was almost painful. The light affixed to Alfric’s chest illuminated only a larger cave with a pool of water and two more tunnels coming off it, and he crouched low, shield forward, until he was at the edge of the pool. Moving carefully, as though not to disturb the ground, he touched the tip of his sword into the pool and sent electricity arcing over the surface of it.
Almost at once, a creature rose up, breaching the water and roaring with the same buzzing sound, now even louder and higher-pitched. It looked almost like a man but covered in tiny black mussels, which vibrated to generate the sound, which changed in timbre as it surfaced. The room of the cave they were in was fifteen feet tall, and he stood nearly ten, even with his legs down in the water.
<Fireball,> said Mizuki, and Verity screwed her eyes shut. Even with them closed as tight as they would go, she saw the flash of it, and when she opened them back up, there was a faint afterimage. The monster had lost one of its arms, which continued to flop around in the water. With the other arm, it was going for Alfric, who was yelling at it and trying to hold its attention. It was all happening frighteningly fast, so fast that if Verity had stopped to think, her mind would have ground to a halt. She focused on the song and held its magic, boosting Alfric.
Three arrows zipped through the air, all one after the other, and Isra had moved across the room, right at the edge of the pool. She fired again, and the arrow struck the thing in its chest, cracking a few of the mussels there, but it seemed unperturbed by the damage, even as the arrows vanished back into Isra’s quiver.
<Tough armor,> said Alfric as he swiped at the monster’s other arm. <He’s strong.> As if to punctuate it, the monster brought its arm down, and while Alfric lifted his shield to meet it, the force of the blow brought him to his knees. He rolled out of the way of the follow-up attack, wincing, and got back to his feet.
<Hexin’,> said Hannah, barreling her way forward toward the pool.
<Too dangerous,> said Alfric, whose eyes went wide as he saw her moving in.
<Distract it?> asked Hannah, hesitating at the edge of the pool.
<Go, now,> said Alfric. He rushed forward, screaming at the top of his lungs and waving his sword wildly in the air. It arced with electricity, more threat than anything else.
Hannah moved forward, and Isra shot again, three more arrows in quick succession, this time with two of them flying wide. She’d been aiming for the head rather than the chest and, facing a smaller target, landed only one.
As soon as Hannah was in the water, Verity changed the magic, putting almost everything onto the cleric and doing her best to enhance the clerical power. It was a difficult thing to do, given that Verity had no clerical power of her own and only a vague sense of what the godly connection was like. It was so much easier to enhance those things she had some personal familiarity with, when the song could be drawn from her own life in some way. In their practice, it had gone poorly, but Verity did it all the same, as they’d planned.
The monster’s other arm fell off as though severed by a giant invisible blade, and Hannah splashed back away from the leg she was touching, soaked to the bone and moving as quickly as she could.
The monster, disarmed, roared with the vibrations of a thousand small mussels, loud enough that Verity almost lost the thread of the song. The creature staggered once, moving toward Alfric as though it meant to slam its head into him, but Alfric easily stepped to the side, and the monster fell to the ground.
<Strength,> he said, though Verity had already been shifting her magic in that direction. He brought his sword down with multiplied strength, severing straight through the monster’s neck, then without hesitation stepped up onto its back and plunged the blade into its center. The monster, or what was left of it given that it had neither head nor arms, shuddered once and then was still. The small mussels all slowly opened, like a hand releasing a blade in death.
Alfric was breathing hard, and Hannah was soaking wet, but everyone seemed to be okay. Alfric moved his head from side to side, then released his grip on his shield and flexed his hand a few times.
<Good fight,> he said.
<Not three raccoons,> Mizuki said.
<Higher elevation,> said Alfric. He turned to Hannah. <Good work.>
<Ay,> she said.
<You stopped when I told you to,> he said.
<Ay,> she said again, removing her helm and shaking her voluminous red hair to get it free of water. Verity hadn’t seen it, but Hannah must have been fully submerged in the pool at some point, perhaps when scrambling back. <You’re the one with the most trainin’, and I’m no fool.>
<Thank you,> said Alfric. There was relief in his voice. <I was worried you’d charge ahead.>
<I’m no fool,> Hannah repeated. <Just a brave girl who knew what needed doin’.>