Book 2: Chapter 13: Team Play

  The Dark Den Dungeon didn’t welcome them nicely. It tried to swallow them.

  Just like it had been for Alex, the cold hit first. Not typical surface cold, but a creeping kind that slid under armor, crawled along the spine, and whispered death straight into the soul.

  Lance muttered, “Okay. That’s a little worse than I imagined it when we were outside.”

  “You never actually learn or understand anything unless it makes you bleed,” Allie snapped, already checking her potion belt.

  The portal to the dungeon’s preparation room sealed behind them. The darkness wasn’t pitch black, not all encompassing, it shimmered with that oily, bluish tint only system dungeons seemed to have. Like mold on glass, you could just make out what lay behind, but not without effort. Like recalling old memories that had long since turned sour.

  They lit a few soft rune-lamps Devon had rigged up. Pale white light spilled out, washing over cracked bones and jagged pieces of broken armor, weapons and more. The air stank of rot and ancient dust.

  Then the skeletons came.

  It was only a few at first. Clattering bone-knots with rusted blades, their hollow sockets glowing with dim, hateful magic.

  Cole’s shield crashed forward, knocking a set of ribcages into the dirt a few paces away. “Formation!” he bellowed.

  “Formation?” Garret asked, already backpedaling. “This isn’t basic training, this is hell’s trash dump!”

  “MOVE!” Eric shouted, drawing his sword. It crackled with lightning, his weapon augmentor spell already cast. “Lance, Garret, left. Kate, Zach, right! Henry, back row with Peter! You two guard our six.”

  They moved like muscle memory, the instincts of soldiers coming through. It was chaotic, ungraceful, but functional.

  Kate spun forward, her blade carving through three skeletons like they were paper. Sparks and splinters followed her wake. “Try to keep up,” she called, deadpan.

  Holly darted between gaps in their line, her sword flashing in tight arcs and thrusts. Every stab was surgical. She moved like a scalpel in motion, cutting joints, cutting magic, cutting any escape the skeletons might have had.

  Tom-Tom lobbed something over her shoulder. “Boom-time!” he shrieked. The vial exploded in midair and molten fire spread like oil, turning a cluster of skeletons into smoldering heaps. The kobold cackled, already prepping another.

  Devon barked a warning. “Incoming from the left, they have reinforcements!”

  Zach stepped in, his spear sweeping in a low, wide arc. The blade at its tip hummed with dark essence. Skeletons were cut, hit the ground, and didn’t rise again.

  Peter, trembling but focused, summoned a shimmer of light which rushed at Garret and infused his body with its power. Garret was able to quickly dash and move out of the way of two sword attack from the skeletons that had flanked him.

  “Thanks,” Garret breathed, planting his hammer and hurling a concussive blast of heat similar to Alex’s [Flare] spell. Bone fragments flew like shrapnel.

  It took nearly ten minutes to clear the way to the first grave-mound. And that was just the beginning. Alex wasn’t able to tell them any details about what awaited inside the dungeon itself, but he was able to tell them that endurance and efficiency was key to their survival.

  When the skeletal archers appeared, things began to heat up. Then came the warriors, the dread archers, the knights. They had the advantage of numbers that Alex just didn’t during his own run through the first floor, but that didn’t matter much when the floor spawned a never ending army of bone fodder to throw at them.

  The slog of near endless fighting began hitting the team hard after nearly twenty-four hours on non-stop action. Some chose to take naps during the grave-mound’s protective auras instead of gather energy. Those who still had their essence fragments to fall back on had it the best.

  By the time they reached the Grave-Tyrant and thus the portal to the second floor, they were bloodied, bruised, and mostly out of aether entirely.

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  The huge mound of bones pulsed with rotten magic. Skeletal Dread Archers and Knights still gave chase after the team as the hulking form of the first floor boss crested the mound into view.

  “Oh what the hell?” Lance groaned at the sight.

  “We have to fight that?!” Garret’s shield slumped to the side, banged up and dented on the top already.

  “Should have brought bigger boom-boom vials,” Tom-Tom adjusted his cooking pot helmet with his tail and juggled the vials he held in his clawed hands.

  Then the Grave Tyrant shrieked, and the ground began to move.

  Dozens of hands burst from the dirt, bone warriors clawing up, armor still fused to their limbs. An army, rising beneath their feet to meet them at the call of their undeadthly lord.

  “Alex fought this thing alone?” Devon asked.

  “Yes,” Eric said.

  “We’re going to die.”

  “Only if you slow down.”

  Then the Tyrant moved. Large feet thundered across the mound, shattering bones beneath it with each step. A shriek once again cut the air, like an elephant’s dying gasp amplified through a stadium speaker. The sound rattled their ears, and stirred the skeletons already unearthed into a frenzy.

  “Guess we’ll have to shut him up,” Allie muttered, her daggers flourishing in her hands.

  “Witty,” Kate said, “now kill something.”

  The fight began.

  Eric charged left, drawing most of the skeletons’ attention. Cole followed close, his shield glowing and smashing skeletons away as they moved. The shield bashes didn’t kill them, but it made room for them to position themselves.

  Kate activated a spell, flames erupted over her skin, licking at her clothes and hair while casting a eerie orange-red glow. Then she blinked forward a short-distance in a flash of heat and flames, her sword glowing red. She went straight for the Grave-Tyrant, only to be intercepted by a skeleton sentinel. The two collided mid air, Kate's sword thrown from her grasp on impact.

  “I need a new sword!” she yelled.

  “You need backup!” Garret shouted back, activating his enchanted ring and jumping the entire fifty foot distance to Kate’s side. He slammed into the sentinel shield first. It staggered back. Kate finished it off with bolt of fiery aether launched directly into its open mouth and a following string of curses she aimed at the Grave Tyrant, the sentinel, and Garret.

  Meanwhile, Peter and Henry were surrounded, each trying to keep the flank stable. Henry’s life aura flared green-gold, vines sprouting from his skin, binding the bones of enemies mid-strike as he swing his halberd with immense force. He was adding his weight and mass behind every blow.

  Tom-Tom darted in and tossed a purple vial into the center of a skeletal warrior formation, creating a purple tinged cloud, then immediately retreated. “That one ‘liquid acid cloud!’”

  It worked. Probably.

  In the back, Devon drew a long string of connected glyphs, his new hybrid spell that he had been working on. Once he finished, he tossed an aether crystal out over the heads of a few skeleton knights. It ignited midair and launched a precision aetheric bolt that ripped through a centurion-like armor and shattered bones.

  The Grave-Tyrant growled and the ground trembled under their feet. As the seconds crawled by, the air grew heavier and colder. Its eyes flared as it charged at Zach and Henry. The two of them managed to dive out of the way, the monster slamming it’s tusks into the floor instead, creating a crater.

  Bone shrapnel exploded everywhere, throwing out a dozen spears of calcium-compacted death in every direction.

  Allie screamed as she was pierced in the shoulder and knocked to the floor. Lance rushed in, and swung his sword wide knocking back an arrow shot from a dread archer and keeping the warrior she had been fighting from closing in to finish her off.

  “Fall back!” Eric yelled.

  “No!” Kate shouted, she still hadn’t recovered her sword, but her body was still wreathed in flames. “We have nowhere to fall back to. We push now!”

  So, with no other option, they pushed.

  Kate was the first to close on the Tyrant again. Without her sword this time, just pure anger and fire. Peter launched support spells behind her, light infusing her body like had done with Garret, boosting speed and durability. Lance dove into a guard position on her right. Henry moved in and flanked.

  Devon threw in another enchanted aether crystal, it impacted the Grave Tyrant, injecting a pulse of disruptive energy that made the glyphs along its bones and head flash erratically.

  Kate’s fist landed with a concussive boom! Bones cracked in Kate’s arms, and the Tyrant’s head both. She kicked off the boss monster, gaining distance as the flames around her skin began to fade. Her mage core now starting to run dry from her augmentor spell.

  Tom-Tom hurled one final vial, a bright white flash that blinded the entire front row of the skeletons.

  Then Garret leapt. His sword punched through the Grave-Tyrant’s face, sword glowing red, and releasing a wave of flames and energy directly into it’s skull. He rolled off and away, just as Lance and Henry danced backwards as well. Everyone held their breath starring at the Grave Tyrant, unsure if they had managed to land the final blow.

  Its eyes flared once. Then went dark. The unholy magic holding the abomination together shattered and its bones collapsed into a disgraceful heap in the dirt.

  And silence fell. They didn’t cheer. No one had the breath for that. Instead, they stood in the wreckage of the first floor’s dungeon boss, panting and bleeding, barely holding together. But alive.

  “I hate skeletons,” Allie muttered, clutching her shoulder even as the skin and muscles were starting to slowly stitch together under Cole’s spell who stood beside her.

  “I hate dungeons,” Peter said.

  “I hate how good we just were,” Kate added with just a shadow of a smirk on her lips.

  They laughed. If only but a little.

  Zach wiped blood from his lip and looked toward the sealed staircase ahead. “Ready for floor two?”

  “God no,” Garret said.

  “But we gotta do it anyway,” Eric replied.

  They all stepped forward, limping, grinning, burning with something new behind their eyes.

  Something Alex would see when they emerged again.