Chapter 89 - Fire and Water

  I picked up a piece of the ‘chest’ from the floor, examining it. Only the outside of the thing looked like a wood surface. The interior was a fleshy yellowish color, sort of like the inside of a shelf fungus, the things that grew on the sides of trees. This one had taken on a highly unusual shape on the outside, but the inside wasn’t that different from the natural versions.

  Well, aside from those acid strands it had, anyway. Those certainly weren’t part of any native Earth fungus I’d ever heard of.

  I dropped the thing and turned back to the rest of the group.

  “We’re going to need to stop and rest here until Marion is back on her feet,” I said. She wasn’t the only one who needed rest, too. I was wiped. I’d be too weak to fight off any major threats until my mana recovered. “Let’s get down into the tunnel for that rest, though. Down there, attacks can only come at us from two directions. I’ll feel a lot safer there than I do up here.”

  “What about Kelly?” Ruiz asked.

  “We’re going to have to leave him here,” Alex said. He reached down and touched a bit of bare skin on Kelly’s body. Instantly, his hand filled with crystals. “I wish we could bring him with us, but it’s just not safe.”

  I winced at that. Both at the idea of leaving someone behind, even dead, and also… If the people with us hadn’t known they could collect crystals from dead humans yet, they certainly did now. We’d discovered that during the fighting for Boston. I’d always known that information wouldn’t remain a secret forever. Lots of people probably already knew. But the fact that we could kill other people for their magical stones gave me a bad vibe deep in my gut. Once that knowledge was out there in the wild, there was no taking it back, and not everyone would be content hunting monsters anymore, at that point.

  “Alex, I think we can do one more thing for Kelly,” I said.

  He cocked an eyebrow at me. “What did you have in mind?”

  I turned to Dara. “How’s your mana level?”

  “Good. I’m not full, yet, but I’m okay.”

  “Awesome. Give me just a minute, okay?” I asked Alex, who nodded.

  I raced back down the path to where we’d fought the puffballs and grabbed three of them, carrying them back to the group. They were dried out husks, and I’d already seen them burn earlier. I laid all three on the ground, then rolled Kelly’s body atop them, careful not to touch the sticky, acidic threads which still wrapped his lower half.

  Once his body lay atop the puffballs, I stepped back and turned to Dara. “I figure a pyre is the least we can do for him. If you’d do the honors? It might take a couple of blasts. I don’t know how combustable those puffs are.”

  “I’ll give it a shot,” Dara replied.

  She fired off a wave of flames that washed over the body. It turned out the puffballs would burn, but slowly, more of a smoldering than a real flame. The acid tendrils, on the other hand? Those caught on fire right away. They burst into flames, the fire rising a couple of feet from the body. Some chemical in the strands must be an accelerant, because they burned extremely well. Soon, Kelly’s body was fully engulfed with flames.

  “Anyone want to say something?” Dara asked.

  No one spoke up. We all stood there, lost in our individual thoughts as we watched the flames burn away at Kelly’s body. After just a couple of minutes, we started turning away, getting back to the business of trying to stay alive. Up until now, we’d been doing great, rocking our way through the first challenges. Kelly’s death was a reminder of how deadly this dungeon was. None of us were guaranteed to escape with our lives.

  “What did the chest drop, anyway?” Ruiz asked, breaking the silence.

  “Tier six Heal crystal,” Alex replied. He pocketed the spare stones and then scooped up Marion’s still unconscious form. “Come on. Cameron was right about us needing a rest. Into the tunnel, everyone. Let’s get ourselves as secure as we can and try to get some rest.”

  Alex followed his own advice and set off into the tunnel. I followed at his heels. At this point, he was better situated to face anything we ran into than I was, but I’d do my best to have his back if there was trouble. The others followed us as we went down. We pushed about fifty feet into the passage. That was far enough that we’d have plenty of notice if anything came at us from behind.

  Once Alex called a halt, we all stopped and found a rock to sit on. The passage had been carved by the small stream running down the middle, so everything down there was damp. The best we could do was keep ourselves relatively dry. Still, it was a break some of us needed, myself included. Alex and I watched the front, while Ruiz and Dara set themselves up as rear guard.

  I turned toward Alex, who still held Marion’s sleeping body clutched to his chest. “How’s she doing?”

  Her recovery was probably even more important than mine. We had plenty of people who could hit hard, but precious few healers, and Marion was the only party member who could cast Cleanse. We needed her back on her feet before we could continue.

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  “She seems okay,” Alex said, his face twisting in worry. “I’m pretty sure she just overdid it. Burned up all her mana trying to keep Kelly alive, and now…”

  “Now she’s out until it comes back, yeah. I think you’re right. Those tier eight Heal spells have to suck down a ton of mana per cast. We need to find her more Will crystals to help boost her mana pool,” I replied. “Listen, we need to talk about the thing that killed Kelly.”

  “The mimic?” Alex replied, a wry smile on his face.

  “Exactly,” I said. “How are there mimics? Isn’t that a modern invention? I know you said that magic might be adjusting itself to better match our modern myths, but this is crazy. It was a fungus that grew to look exactly like a chest on the outside. How does something like that happen?”

  “Well, the term mimic is a modern invention, sure. But the idea of something that looks like a treasure but is actually a monster? That’s not new,” Alex said. “We’ve had stories about that sort of thing for as long as we’ve had stories, I think.”

  “You figure there were creatures like this, the last time magic was here?”

  Alex nodded. “Probably. And this creature wasn’t precisely like a modern gaming mimic, remember. No teeth, no gaping mouth, no big tongue... But those tendrils are sort of similar to a tongue, if you think about it. It’s quite possible the creature we just killed was the source of the mimic legend, thousands of years ago.”

  That sounded weird to me, but I couldn’t fault his logic. “What do you think we’ll run into next?”

  He shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. Probably more fungus monsters, but what kind, I don’t have a clue. This one was higher tier than the puffballs, though. I think we’re seeing the difficulty level increase as we move deeper into the place.”

  “Mmm…” Marion murmured. She blinked and looked around. “What happened?”

  “You’re safe,” Alex told her. “You ran your mana down to zero and passed out. We’re resting for a bit, then we’ll push on.”

  “Is Kelly okay?” Marion asked.

  I turned away as Alex filled her in on what she’d missed and she sobbed into his shoulder. She’d tried her best to save the man. So had I. We’d done everything any of us could think of, and it just hadn’t been enough. I understood her grief, though. It was tough losing someone you’d fought that hard to save.

  We waited another hour for Marion’s mana to fully restore before moving on. That was another smart call from Alex. We needed her in peak form if we were going to be able to survive whatever came at us next. The first monsters had been tier four. The treasure chest fungus was tier six. What would we run into next? My guess was it would be somewhere between tier five and seven.

  Having Marion’s mana back to full might spell the difference between life and death for someone.

  Once she was ready, Alex moved her back toward the middle of the group again, where she’d be relatively safe. We reset our marching order, with myself up front again, Alex and Dara right behind me for ranged support, then Clark and Johnson next. Marion was behind them, with the rest of the party pulling up the rear.

  As we pushed on, I quickly spotted a glimmer of light from up ahead. I warned the others, but we pressed ahead anyway. There really wasn’t much choice. We had to move forward, fight our way through, if we were going to find a way out of this place.

  The passage ended in a circular chamber about thirty feet in diameter with just one other opening, a passage on the opposite side. I peered inside, carefully looking for threats. Like the cavern we’d left behind, the walls here were rough, hewn from raw stone. Unlike that other room, this one lacked the rampant fungal growths. It also lacked the stalactites and stalagmites. Instead, the entire space was clear, floor and ceiling alike, except for an odd green growth which covered much of the floor.

  The translucent green stuff glowed, and looked faintly like a spiderweb. I’d seen pictures of stuff growing in Petri dishes that looked sort of like this, with branches radiating out from a center point, and connecting rings joining the branches together at intervals.

  Yeah, it looked a lot like a spider web. The fact that I couldn’t see a spider didn’t mean there wasn’t one.

  The stream didn’t stop at the doorway, either. It ran out into the room, wetting the rock and presumably feeding the fungus growing there. That meant I couldn’t just zap it with a Lightning Bolt, because the shock would travel back up the stream toward us. Alex and I could fly. The rest of the party would get zapped.

  “Dara, can you come forward? I think we need your flames over here,” I said.

  She and Alex both stepped up and stared into the room. Alex was the first to speak.

  “Well, that’s weird. I agree, Cameron. That looks suspicious as hell. Fry it, Dara.”

  “On it,” she replied, stepping up to the edge of the floor. She fanned her fingers and sent a jet of flames washing over the surface.

  But her flames hit the wet surface and just hissed, not really doing much damage. She tried twice more, with the same results, then shook her head. “It’s not burning. I’m guessing it’s all the water. Just too much of it.”

  “What about Drain Life?” Alex asked.

  “Worth a shot,” I replied.

  I cast the spell, firing a beam of black energy from my palm into the room. It splashed into the fungal web, shriveling the stuff as my magic sucked the life force from it. A wave of vitality hit me as the spell returned a portion of the stolen health to me.

  “That seemed to work. Try again,” Alex said.

  It took three more casts before the thing was shriveled and dead-looking from our doorway to the open one on the other side of the room. I reached down to touch the edge of the web with one finger, as a test.

  Nothing. It didn’t jump up and attack, didn’t fry my finger, and didn’t wrap me in tentacles. To my surprise, it didn’t drop any crystals, either.

  “It seems inert,” I said. “But it didn’t drop a stone. You think it’s dead?”

  “Try one more cast,” Alex replied.

  I hit it with another Drain. The cast worked, so it was still alive, but the health I recovered was the barest trickle. It must not have much left. “It’s alive, but hurt badly. I can’t do too many more casts if we want me to be ready for whatever comes next. You think we can maybe just fly everyone over?”

  “Worth a shot,” Alex replied.

  He picked up Johnson, while I lifted Clark. We left Dara at the doorway so she could shoot flames at anything that attacked us. I shot quickly across the room and set Clark down on the far side safely. Nothing attacked us. No sign of problems at all. Maybe we’d beaten this one?

  Alex flew over next, carrying Johnson clutched tight against his side. I watched as they progressed across, so I saw the movement beneath them the moment it started. Green tendrils reformed on the floor, sucking in water from the surrounding rocks and coming back to full health in seconds. They shot little vine-like growths upward, snaring the legs of both.

  “Cameron, could use some help here!” Alex called out.

  The tendrils wrapped around his legs tightened, then started slowly but surely reeling him in, dragging him back down toward the floor below.