<Ready,> said Hannah, as she put on her helm too.
It occurred to Isra that she was the only one without a helm. She simply hadn’t thought about it. A helm wasn’t something you wore out in the woods, even when tracking dangerous game, which she had done only twice before, both times to collect a bounty from the local beastmaster. In some sense, going into a dungeon was like those hunts had been, but with less uncertainty over when and where the danger might be.
They left the room with Alfric, as always, in the lead, and Hannah and Mizuki close behind him. Verity began her song, and Isra listened closely to the half-spoken lyrics, which seemed to be about a long sea voyage. Isra knew only vaguely of the sea: the closest she had ever been to it was the open water Tarchwood sat on the edge of, and that was, according to Alfric, a large lake rather than a sea. Still, the song was nice and sweet, with a bit of melancholy that Verity seemed drawn to. Isra liked it and reflected that she hadn’t heard Verity sing a bad song yet.
Isra had her magical bow drawn and an arrow nocked, so when the fighting started, she was ready to pull. The creature was shaped almost like a human, but as it unfolded from behind its rock, it became obvious that it was much taller, twice Alfric’s height at least. It had a single bloodshot eyeball that dominated its face, and teeth sticking out from the skin beneath it, without any seeming mouth to accompany them. The hands were four-fingered and disproportionately huge compared with the body. By the time it had picked up a rock to hurl at them or bash them with, Isra had loosed her first arrow.
She walked after the arrow as it continued on its leisurely flight through the cavern. She nocked another arrow and brought it to full draw, then released it, aiming squarely for the eye of the cyclops.
What Isra was used to was bow hunting, where the first shot was the most important, because it was the one made against a stationary, unaware target. That was where she was best. In a dungeon, there was so much less range, and the demand, especially with the entad, seemed to be to place as many arrows into the target as quickly as possible. Isra had been practicing every day since leaving the dungeon, getting used to the new bow, which seemed to have a much higher draw, and the new arrows, which had a different weight and flight. She’d been working her arm to build up the kind of endurance a dungeon seemed to require. Not enough time had passed for any of that training to take effect though.
She managed to loose three arrows as she walked, all aiming for that central eye, hoping to blind the creature or at least injure it seriously enough that Alfric wouldn’t risk getting crushed. The arrow she walked beside flew low, aimed at its belly or groin, because if she’d aimed high, she wouldn’t have been able to follow along with the bubble of warped time.
As the slowed arrow was about to strike, Isra turned herself around and quickly nocked another arrow, firing it away from the monster as soon as time started moving forward at its normal pace. This allowed a second bubble of slowed time, which she followed back away from the creature, resting her arm as she walked. She glanced back as she moved, trying to see whether and where she’d hit. All four arrows had struck it, but only one had hit the eye, and its head was snapping backward from the force of the impacts. She didn’t think that it would be seriously hurt, given the durability of the last big one, and she took her place beside Verity, turning back around to face the monster and preparing to let loose another volley, if it seemed to be doing anything helpful.
The monster crashed to the ground with three arrows in its head, and the flame Mizuki had been halfway to conjuring in her hands died away. They waited for a moment, but the monster didn’t move.
<Was that all Isra?> asked Mizuki.
<Yes,> said Alfric.
<I didn’t think that would kill it,> said Isra.
<You didn’t think that three arrows fired directly into its eye would kill it?> asked Mizuki.
Isra frowned at her. <Most of these things are tougher. I hit the other in the head, and it didn’t seem to notice.>
<Good work,> said Alfric. <Let’s move on and preserve Verity’s song.>
He continued without waiting for the others, and they fell in behind him, down yet another tunnel, one of two in the room. The tunnels seemed to branch, each room revealing two more, and Isra rubbed her arm again. She wasn’t sure how many arrows she could fire in a day, but she put no more than five in her quiver when hunting, and when she practiced, it was no more than perhaps twenty in a day, or forty if she was practicing in the morning and evening. With the magical arrows, which had yet to break, there was no worry about having to spend more money at the fletcher’s or more time fletching her own arrows, but it was still a concern. She was going to have to work up to the stamina the dungeons required or hope that Hannah could help.
The next room had a small pool, with tiny glowing fish that swam around in it, but no monsters to speak of. A wooden staff rested against one wall, so natural that it might have been possible to mistake for a branch. There were stalactites and stalagmites, and it gave the feeling of being deep in a cave, which in a sense, they were.
Alfric knelt down next to the pool and looked into the clear water at the fish there.
<Mizuki,> he said. <Can you see an entad down there?>
Isra felt the magic of the song shifting, likely to aid Mizuki, and once again, she looked over at Verity, who was strumming away. The bard looked calm, but she was holding magic in place, and Isra knew that took some effort for her and couldn’t be continued indefinitely.
<Some kind of long thing, maybe a sword, yes,> she said.
Alfric nodded, then slowly lowered his hand into the pool. The fish rushed to it at once, concentrating their glow, and Alfric pulled his hand back, shaking it with a grimace until two of the fish whose teeth had sunk into were dislodged.
<Hannah, be ready to heal,> he said.
<Ready,> said Hannah, moving to his side.
Alfric plunged his hand into the shallow pool, all the way to the bottom, and pulled something rusted up from the bottom. He used his spare hand to pull off the glowing fish and toss them back in the pool. The blood from his arm turned the water cloudy by the time he was finished. The wounds were healed almost at once as Hannah laid hands on him.
The sword itself seemed to be in terrible condition. It was covered in seaweed, rust, and barnacles, with the metal chipped and cracked.
<Save that for later, with the staff,> said Alfric, setting it next to the piece of wood. He looked into the pool. <No point in killing those.>
The room after that had black, long-legged things, like deer on stilts with horrible grimaces on their faces, and Isra let loose, taking more care to aim than to be quick about it. She got one of the five and injured two more, then barely got her hands up in time when Mizuki announced a fireburst to kill two of them outright. Alfric moved in quickly, sword flashing, and Isra aimed at the melee, trying to get a shot. Her efforts proved unnecessary as Alfric dispatched one then the other with only minor wounds. The whole thing was over in a blur, an encounter that almost immediately jumbled itself up, the details becoming indistinct under the relentless pace of their dungeon crawling.