<I held back,> said Mizuki. Despite the fact that she’d contributed just the single fireball, she was breathing heavily, and her eyes were wide. Verity shifted the song again, dampening a bit of the fear and anxiety, and she saw gratitude in Mizuki’s eyes. Fear was one of those funny emotions that could increase themselves if left to fester. <Should I have held back?> asked Mizuki. <You were just so close to it that I thought I might accidentally kill you.>
<No, you shouldn’t have killed me,> said Alfric, shaking his shield arm a bit. <He hit pretty hard. Hannah, can you look at my arm?>
Hannah came over to him, still dripping wet, and laid her hand on his biceps. <Minor fracture,> she said after a bit. <Not a full break. Easy to repair if it’s a hairline. I’ll fix it.> That took a moment of concentration on her part, and when she stepped back from him, Alfric rotated his arm around, testing the range of motion and feeling for any pain.
<Very good, thank you,> he said.
<Tell me if you break your arm in the middle of a fight,> said Hannah.
<I didn’t know it was broken, only that it was hurt,> Alfric replied. He looked at Verity, who was keeping up her song. <Come on, let’s get moving, left side first.> He moved around the pool, looking into it for a moment but continuing on. Verity was torn between finding his perseverance admirable and finding it foolish. <Good shooting, Isra,> he said, turning back to look at her.
<The arrows didn’t seem to do much,> she said.
<No, they won’t work against everything we face,> said Alfric. He had shifted his stance as he got to the entryway. <You did what you could with impeccable aim. Get ready.> This last bit was addressed to the group as his light began to illuminate the tunnel.
The next room of the cave was even taller, and it was less natural, a fat cone going up thirty feet, with vines creeping through the dark along one edge. At the top of the cone, the sky was exposed, letting down a shaft of light that illuminated a crumpled pile of skeletons on the ground, which Verity noticed just as she was thinking she was happy for the light.
Alfric charged forward and brought his sword down on the skeletons, shattering bones, but after the first strike, when nothing had moved, he held back, staring at them with suspicion for a long moment before relaxing.
<Sorry,> he said. <Monsters sometimes disguise themselves.>
<Vines,> said Mizuki, then right after that, <Fireburst.>
Verity had been strumming her lute and murmuring her song, the better to keep it going, but when she heard the word ‘burst’ she immediately released the instrument, letting it swing around her neck by its strap, and clamped her hands onto her ears.
It was no surprise that Mizuki was using fire: the grotto they found themselves in was a wet place, and that would naturally color the ambient aether, at least as Mizuki had explained it. She had gone on in brief about how her spells worked over dinner one night, and the basics of it were that it was largely a thing of coloring and castoffs and opposites.
She had also explained the difference between a fireball and a fireburst. The first was a gob of fiery hotness, while the second was a fiery explosion. She had demonstrated once, in the backyard, and then Verity had asked her to never demonstrate again and to give ample warning, because a deaf bard would have a much harder time doing her job.
Verity could feel the blast wave from the fireburst strike her in the chest, and it felt, for a moment, like her heart had stopped. It was incredibly loud, even with ten-fingered hands clamped down hard on her ears, and she was only thankful that she’d been given a warning, because if not, she’d have been doing the whole rest of the dungeon with ringing ears or, more likely, just gone home.
Bits of flaming vine as thick as Verity’s wrist fell to the ground around them, and she yelped when one of them hit her on the shoulder, which Isra pulled away almost the moment it had touched her. Through this all, Verity had been trying to keep the song going, but it was like a top spinning out of control, wobbling all over the place with the sharpness of the fireburst having practically shaken her head loose. At the last moment, she was able to save it, pulling it back into place, but it was a close thing.
<They were moving,> said Mizuki. <Now they are not.> She seemed quite pleased with herself.
<Good eyes,> said Alfric. <I didn’t quite get my hands up in time.> He held up his shield and sword, showing how hard it would have been. <Very loud. Chat is coming through fine though.>
<Earmuffs for next time,> said Hannah.
<Sorry,> said Mizuki.
<It’s fine,> said Alfric. <Let me know if you hear anything.>
<Take a break, ay?> asked Hannah.
Alfric looked at Verity, who was still holding the song. <Keep going,> he said.
There was another tunnel leading away from the room, and as they moved, Verity gave the skeletons a wide berth, just in case they had been saving a surprise for later. She was always at the back of the group, and with the party formed, she could have stayed at the entrance and given them nearly the same effect, but then they’d have had to rely on party chat for her to know who needed what at any given moment, and one of the benefits of a bard was being able to adapt to conditions, boosting whoever needed it when they needed it.
The song Verity had planned was quite the long one, but she’d been through all the prepared verses, so began freewheeling through new lyrics, all of them almost under her breath. The best bards could be completely silent, without need for audible music or vocals, but whenever Verity had tried, it had felt especially draining, too disconnected from the actual song for her to keep it up for very long.
The next trial the cave had for them was quite different and came at Alfric with a sound like whispers. It took some time for Verity to recognize them as a swarm of something resembling a moth, and she shifted her magic to Alfric’s constitution, hardening his skin as best she could and backing up so the swarm wouldn’t get to her. Alfric’s sword was particularly useless against a swarm of insects, so he simply covered his face and curled into a ball.
<Fry them, Zuki,> he called through the chat.
<Need some energy,> she said. <Not enough in the air.>
<Charging,> said Hannah as she placed her hand on her own chest, and at the same time, Verity did her best to shift the song for Mizuki’s needs, providing strength to Alfric in the hopes that the castoffs from the song would translate into something their sorcerer could use.
A moment later, lightning sprang forth from Mizuki’s hands, lighting up the room and the tunnels beyond it, which illuminated an overturned boat. The power Mizuki was using lacked direction or care, and Verity felt some of it hit her too, but it was a mild shock, nothing more. It was, however, quite fatal to the swarm of moths and arced between them, lighting them on fire as it did. Mizuki stopped as soon as most of them had dropped, and Alfric, bloodied about his face, stood up to swat at the last of them, using the electricity from his own sword to try to fry more. It took quite some time to get the rest of the stragglers, but once they had, Hannah rushed forward and laid hands on Alfric again, closing up the wounds on his face.
<Can’t get them all, I don’t think,> said Hannah. <You’ll have wounds on the cheeks.>
<It’s fine,> said Alfric, touching his bloodied face for a moment, then taking a handkerchief offered by Hannah. <I think that’s the best we could have done against bugs. They’re notoriously difficult.>