I heard the crash while my mind was still acknowledging what I was looking at. I turned my head back to the rampaging bull… to see it roll up onto its back. I looked back at my summons to see the bull's head, with its glowing eyes, lying on its side in the rapidly growing puddle.
“Hey there, buddy,” Jacobs said, slipping his head under my arm to support me. I felt the reassuring coolness as he hit me with a healing spell. The pain receded, and the tunnel vision I hadn’t even realised was happening faded from my vision. “I’m not sure you are casting that spell right if it has this much impact on you when it gets broken…”
“I think you might be right,” I admitted.
“These are party killers…” Clark said in awe, staring down at the head of the metal monster.
“I can’t believe you can summon dinosaurs!” exclaimed Beatnik.
“I can’t believe it ripped the head off…” said Chango, alternating between staring down at the neck of the thing and the head several metres away in a rapidly drying pool of water.
“You OK?” asked Peachy. I nodded; the headache was fading.
“They seen a lot?” Darksider asked Clark as he squatted near the body to see what could be stripped.
“Rarely on six. More often on seven, but we usually try to avoid them or bait them into traps…” his eyes fixed on the horns. “I’ve lost friends to one on floor seven…”
The room had been some kind of chemical lab, work benches had Bunsen Burners and a variety of glassware, some of it even surviving. The place had been utterly ruined by the beast. Benches looked like they had been tossed around. There were blood smears and the pulpy remains of some unknown fleshy creatures. My eyes followed the carnage back, and I could see that the other door in the room had been forcibly opened from the other side.
“Roaming creature?” I asked.
Clark’s head snapped to me, and then in the direction I was looking. “No… they don’t smash doors down unless they already have…” his eyes seemed to track the carnage through the room. He suddenly moved over to where the worst damage had been done to the furniture, and it looked piled up. He started throwing it off, digging into the pile.
“JAX!” Clark cried out when he moved the last and was able to see what was buried at the bottom. I could see him now, the clearly shattered leg, a crushed arm. Clark looked like he was going to pull his friend out.
Jacobs looked up from his meditation. “Wait! He is still alive!”
G joined Clark in getting all the furniture out of the way. Jacobs slipped into gaps as they worked to assess his new patient. “Injuries are too extreme for my healing spells to fix here,” he said, fingers on the man’s throat. “BP is falling… internal bleeding that hasn’t clotted…err…” He looked around and then nodded at a table below a lightbox. “Get him on that table. I need better light. Peachy, CPR, his heart is about to stop.”
They pulled him out, his face pale as a ghost, his clothes soaked red with blood around a round puncture wound in his stomach. If Jacobs wasn’t fussing around the man, I would have sworn he was already dead. Peachy leant over and breathed into his mouth. She then turned to watch Jacobs start compressions.
“Clear!” called Peachy and then used her shocking grasp in a way I didn’t think was possible.
“Heart is beating again,” she said, her fingers on his neck, “it’s faint, but it’s there.”
“Good, OK, let’s find that bleed…” Jacobs slid a hand into the man’s chest. Targeting the bleed.
I felt movement beside me and turned to see G put a restraining hand on Clark, the man’s eyes wide in shock, mouth agape. “Trust them,” he quietly told the man.
“I think I’ve got him stable…” an exhausted Jacobs said, slumping against another table. It had been a frantic ten minutes of chaos as he slid his hand into the wound caused by the bull's horns and targeted healing directly on the injury itself. Peachy by his side, manually monitoring the guy's heartbeat and feeding her readings to Jacobs.
It was moments like this one that remind me that the pair of them met in an ER room, and it was only now that they were trying for a family that they both switched to general practice for more consistent hours.
“He’ll live?” Clark asked.
“We’ll need to get him topside, and somewhere he can rest… and we need to do so without jostling him… but… I’m as confident as I can be…” Jacobs said.
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“We need a stretcher?” asked Darksider.
“Already on it!” said Beatnik. He and Chango had repurposed one of the tables and some rope they must have pulled from inventory into a rough stretcher.
“Quickest route back up the way we came?” I asked.
“No. We should head for the stairs to floor six… My team found a teleporter core this morning. It should be installed by now. We were just about to start celebrating when Diane roped me into assessing your group… If he lives… I will owe you…”
“No, you won’t,” Jacobs said.
“We should get moving then,” I said.
“The loot?” Clark said.
“Fuck the loot,” four of us said together.
“Lives come first,” I added.
After Jacobs carefully secured the man, G and Clark lifted Jax and carefully moved towards the door. Jacobs walked alongside, fingers checking Jax’s pulse. I saw the glow in his hand as he added another heal. I followed along. I grabbed the things head on the way past and then heard a loud bang from the direction of the Bull's torso. I turned to see Chango using his sword to bash through the spine of the bull, near its hind quarters and then store the rest of it.
“I had some space,” he admitted in response to my raised eyebrow. I checked my inventory…yeah, so did I. I added the bit Chango had removed to my own and then hurried to catch up.
It hadn’t been that long since we last came across another group's trail markings, so we got back to them and then found we actually weren't that far from the level 5 transit chamber.
The chamber’s doors had guards on watch. They kept looking around us, alert for anything. The eyes of one of them went wide at the sight of Clark, and he turned and shouted something through the open door.
By the time we got to it, a tall woman in black armour was standing in it.
With a broken voice and her eyes red from crying.“Clark, I’m sorry…we lost Jax…”
He ignored her and carried on walking towards the door.
“I heard you have injured?” A man in an ornate white robe said from behind her.
“Blunt trauma and penetrating wound from a bull. Abdomen has a deep puncture wound, diaphragm compromised. Resuscitated and stabilised in the field. Used directed healing to counter the internal bleeding. Extensive trauma to right leg and left arm,” reported Jacobs to the man as Clark moved past the guards, who got their first good look at the man he was carrying.
“Jax?” he said in surprise. The woman and the man in white’s head snapped to the guard.
“What?” she asked in shock.
The man in white stepped around Clark and looked at Jax. “Extensive. He should be dead with these wounds… we need to get him back up top.”
“Is the Teleport up and running?” Clark asked.
“No, they are having some problems calibrating again,” the woman said.
“Come, let's get him to the healers’ area. Dalve, tell Verrin we will need the cart for a rapid ascent if they can’t get that teleporter online soon,” the man in white told the guard.
“Yes, Healer,” he responded deferentially.
The Healer led our group through the large chamber. Sections had been cordoned off, and it looked like it was set up as a staging post for going deeper. I was surprised by the number of people milling around. We were led to one of the more centralised sections, which had four beds in it and another person dressed in white.
“You kept him alive?” the second man asked Jacobs as he looked at the man we had brought in. I stepped away as the three healers started talking shop to check out the other bays in the place.
“I don’t recognise you, first time this deep?” a topless blond man asked me.
“First time in the delve,” I replied, looking around.
“Well, allow me to welcome you to the Floor five waystation. From here, you can repair your gear…” he points towards the obvious blacksmith. “Trade for equipment…” he pointed at the obvious shop area. “Store things for your next delve…” indicating the obvious locker area. “Head deeper into the Delve…” the stairs down. “Or if it was working, teleport to the surface…” he indicated the strange, round platform, which was tilted open. There were a couple of people looking down into the hole, and they seemed to be making suggestions. It seemed the most interesting, so I ignored the man flexing at me and headed over to see what they were up to.
“It’s not responding!” said a voice from inside the hole.
“Hit the button again,” said one of the two looking down.
“See! I have, it’s not responding!”
“Try…”
“I already have! It’s not responding.”
“Have you tried turning it off and on again?” I asked with a little tongue in cheek…
“I have…actually…I haven’t tried that yet…” the voice in the hole responded…”No, that didn’t work either.”
As I got around the platform, I could see it was hinged on one side to make accessing the components easier. There wasn’t a huge amount of space inside, which explained why the two on the sides were looking down and making suggestions. Inside, there was a small man in thick glasses, pulling out cables and resocketing them. Every other cable, he would lean over and pull a lever marked with a power symbol. Give it a second, and then when nothing happened, flick it back to off.
“Wait!” I called out the second time he pulled the power lever. “Are you sure it’s getting power?”
“Yeah, those are on,” he pointed at some of the lights which were flickering on a panel. The more I stared at the system below me, the more my glasses were giving me details on how it was set up, and I could see that they were on a different circuit.
“Are you sure those aren’t on a different circuit?” I asked.
“Errr…no…” he admitted.
One of the two men facepalmed. “Pass me a panel lifter.” The guy below pulled out a rod and chucked it up. Using the tool, the man levered up one of the nearby panels and then leant down into it. “Dagen, pass me a new fuse.”
“So which bit is the teleport core?” I asked the guy who had just replaced the fuse.
“Oh? It's the round metal ball in the middle of that central pillar. Sort of unassuming, considering…”
“Right! I think that’s working now!” the man in the pit said, standing up and away from the glowing electronics. He nodded and then climbed up the ladder and out. He and the other two then pulled the platform down and closed it.