DD1 ASC - Chapter 26 - Run

Arilla’s boots skidded around another dusty corner of the dead halls moments before Typh’s magelight revealed what was yet another long-abandoned hallway for them to traverse. As soon as she could see the way ahead was clear, she began sprinting again, cursing the heavy weight of her mail shirt, zweihander and arming sword with every one of her belaboured strides. All in all, she was carrying close to 60 pounds of solid steel on her back, and right now, she hated every unwanted ounce of the stuff as it slowed her down and made each one of her loping strides more difficult than the last. She knew that her stamina pool acted as a buffer, which would enable her to keep moving when her body would otherwise demand to stop, but to her flagging muscles that resource seemed to be anything but a kindness as her heart pumped a potent cocktail of pure lactic acid, adrenaline, and terror as she fled the swarming mass of stone scarabs behind her.

“I thought you said everything was dead or left decades ago!” Arilla yelled, not sparing the energy to look over her shoulder at Typh as she raced ahead down the wide hall. Her breath was already huffing with fatigue and her heavy weapons clinking noisily against her armour as she desperately tried to maintain her frantic pace. The metallic sounds of her flight were nearly drowned out by the oppressively loud chorus of the approaching beetle swarm. A chorus that only grew in intensity as the stone scarabs poured around the corner like a wave and spilt into the hallway behind them.

A wall of chitinous clacking death was chasing after them, their long lead having long since been eaten up as the insectoid monsters used their far superior numbers to effectively herd them through the labyrinthian hallways of the dead dungeon. Every branching path and forking hallway providing another opportunity for the insects to exploit as the immeasurable horde of wood rank monsters were guided along by their much more deadly Brood Mother. With serrated mandibles larger than her own 6ft long sword and an armoured hide that appeared to be primarily composed of mana infused dungeon stone, their only saving grace was that the creature was so large that it had to carefully choose its route through the wider halls in the warren of underground tunnels. Or more accurately, it had to carefully use its spawn to corral them into fleeing down a suitable path.

"Okay, so maybe some things might have stuck around, but I didn’t think it would be anything dangerous given how weak the mana is here," Typh said as she ran, the small mage no doubt regretting her decision to prioritise reading her esoteric texts over performing any form of actual exercise during their extended training sessions.

“Why can’t you just admit that you were-”

As if summoned by Arilla’s darkest fears, the wall to their left exploded outwards as the Brood Mother burst through the thick stone, revealing a destroyed workshop and a fresh swarm of stone scarabs that poured through the new opening. Cocoons of hardened mana sprang up over them both, deflecting the stone chips and dust that were sent flying towards them. Typh’s defensive spell was then immediately tested as the mage was almost casually batted to the side by the Brood Mother’s powerful mandibles. Typh’s arcane barrier composed of overlapping shimmering scales whined audibly as cracks spread along the surface and she was sent crashing into the opposite wall.

While Typh picked herself up from the ground, Arilla was suddenly faced with the bulk of the swarm, and their pissed off mother. Her arming sword suddenly felt woefully inadequate and small as she looked at the much larger monstrous insect. Beetles streamed at her. Dog-sized monsters were crawling between the space between the Brood Mother and the hole in the wall where they used their smaller dagger-sized mandibles to make short work of the remnants of Typh’s arcane ward. All too soon for Arilla’s liking their serrated mouths were digging into the chainlinks of her mail. Only her newly ranked up skill [Sworn Strength] was protecting her from any further harm as the naked blade in her hand conferred some small amount of much needed protection while she hacked and swung her short arming sword like a frenzied butcher through the mass of insects.

Individually the scarabs were a laughable threat but taken together, they were easily the most terrifying foe she had ever faced. Time and again, she mechanically swung her sword through their flowing ranks, rocky carapaces crunching beneath her blade with every strike. Despite her numerous kills, she was forced to step backwards with every slash as they in turn pressed ever forwards. Each swing of her sword resulted in a kill or a maiming, while the System went mad with notifications as her blade discharged tiny trickles of mana into the air, which were then swiftly reclaimed as experience for her class. Given how little energy the monsters were releasing, she would have to kill them by the hundreds before she saw so much as a single level up, and already her sword was on its last legs. The 30-inch blade had long since lost its edge and was now little more than a narrow metal club for her to empower with her skill infused strikes.

As she cleaved her way through its children, the Brood Mother turned its monstrous attention back to her. The beast violently jerked its head to the side and sent its massive external jaws tearing through the air, crushing its own spawn unfortunate enough to get in the way of its attempt to take Arilla out of the fight. Despite her lack of formal training, she knew far better than to attempt parrying anything that large or high levelled so she instead ducked low to the floor. The jagged natural weapons missed her by inches as she wobbled forwards on her two unsteady feet, her class singing out in triumph from the feat.

She realised that in trying to stay upright and alive after her desperate dodge, that she had inadvertently stepped inside the monster's reach as she suddenly found herself face to maw with the Brood Mother. Its rancid breath filled the air around Arilla as she was treated to the sight of rows upon rows of overlapping fangs inside its lamprey-like mouth which was nestled between the monster’s overbearing maxilla.

She tightened her grip on her sword, and before she knew what she was doing, she found herself winding back to ram her weapon down its throat when suddenly Typh’s hand came out of nowhere, caught her sword arm, and roughly pulled her back and away from the bronze rank monster. The mage half-dragged her down the hall as she fired off a short volley of golden manabolts that impacted the ceiling above the Brood Mother, causing the roof of the hall to collapse around the oversized monster and they made their hasty retreat while the massive creature was momentarily pinned beneath tons of rock.

“Don’t try and fight the giant insect over 10 times your size and level,” Typh chastised as they once again resumed their desperate flight down the dungeon’s dusty halls.

“What else are we supposed to do? It won’t give up, and if you haven't noticed, it keeps catching up with us!” Arilla yelled, finding herself surprisingly angry at having been denied her chance to kill the Brood Mother, regardless of how suicidal the attempt may have been.

“I don’t know. I’m still thinking!” Typh yelled back, losing her cool for a brief moment.

“Will the cave-in at least hold it?” she asked, looking for any glimmer of hope in their perilous situation.

“No,” the small woman scoffed, then upon thinking better of it, “Maybe for a few minutes, they eat stone and well… there’s a lot of them.”

“So, what’s the plan then?”

“Same as before, we get to the tamed dungeon’s territory and hope that it loses interest.”

“That’s a terrible plan!”

“It’s not actually; the tamed core should be able to usurp the Brood Mother’s control over the swarm. If it’s smart enough to know that, it will pull back before crossing the boundary, and if it isn’t, then at least the dungeon will have to choose between sending the swarm after us or the mother.”

“And if the dungeon chooses to kill us?”

“Well, then we keep running and hope Arden or Sir Lothain feel like saving us.”

“Isn’t there anything else we can do?” she pleaded, well aware of how far away the tamed dungeon core’s territory was. They had roamed the supposedly dead halls for the better part of an hour when they had been ‘exploring’, something she deeply regretted now that they had to retrace their many, many steps with the added pressure of flesh-hungry monsters chasing after them. She looked over to Typh, the sweat on her brow reflecting her golden magelight as her face was scrunched up with obvious worry.

“I can cast a spell on you rather than just your mail. It’ll give you a little boost to your stats to keep you running,” she said, looking oddly uncomfortable as she made her offer, almost as if she was holding something back.

“What about the manaburn?” Arilla asked, having no desire to repeat her experiences with Typh’s favoured empowering spell.

“I feel like we have more pressing worries than that right now!” Typh retorted quickly.

“Fine, just don’t make me explode!” she relented, and then suddenly shivered with pleasure as moments later, a rush of energising power filled her. Typh’s mana soothing her ailing muscles, as a feverish energy empowered them to push harder and faster as they both accelerated down the tunnel, pulling even further away from the swarm of pursuing carnivorous insects.

They sprinted at pace through dust-covered halls for some time as they tried to make good their escape as they moved steadily closer to their distant destination. And yet, whenever they thought they had finally lost their pursuers, they would turn a corner to find the scarabs waiting for them, forcing them to backtrack and find another route forwards. It was becoming increasingly evident that the noose was tightening around them, as the time they could go between seeing the scarabs and the Brood Mother’s vicious jaws kept getting shorter.

The ambushes that had once been so momentous in their panicked retreat became frighteningly mundane, as Typh and Arilla would be forced time and again to fight their way clear of the beetles, while at the same time, the ravenous Brood Mother would charge at them from the other end of the hall or burst through another wall at a truly inopportune time. Arilla’s nerves were becoming a frayed mess, yet whenever she thought they were done for, Typh pulled out some new form of miraculous magic from her nonexistent sleeves in order to save them. Manabolts that collapsed ceilings, walls of arcane force that stopped the beetles in their tracks, cones of flames that pushed them back, each new miracle buying them just enough time for them to slip the noose and eke out precious seconds to escape. But things were dire, despite the power of Typh’s mysterious second class, she was only human, and there was only so much that one woman could do in the face of such a terrifying monster. Arilla didn’t know how much mana the small mage could have left, but she could tell from the agonised look of frustration on her face that she had to be approaching her limits.

Arilla skidded around another blind corner, and as soon as Typh’s golden magelight followed, she stopped suddenly, standing stock still as the next section of the tunnel was revealed to them. A literal wall of stone scarabs was surging towards them down the corridor, and while their levels were low, their numbers must have been in the hundreds if not thousands. There was no getting past them, so as they had done so many times before, she turned to go back the way they had just come only to see Typh standing firm and resolute. She extended her arm, and a golden barrier of hardened mana snapped into existence in front of the scarab horde. The weight of so many monsters pushing so hard against her spell failed to phase her in the slightest as their pointed legs and saw-toothed mandibles clawed fruitlessly against the wall of golden light.

"Please tell me the tamed dungeon isn't on the other side of that," Arilla said. Her pit of fear had long since gnawed its way past her stomach and she now felt it choking around her heart as she looked at the churning mass of bladed teeth in front of her on the other side of the translucent barrier.

"It is, but we’ll find another way around. Come on," Typh said through gritted teeth as she powered through the mental strain of holding back so many monsters. She took Arilla’s hand in hers and led them back the way they had just been, their hurried pace coming to a stop halfway down the long corridor when the now familiar sounds of the Brood Mother’s much louder chittering could be heard coming from just around the corner.

“Change of plans, we need to push them back,” Typh said, the mage’s hurried words causing Arilla’s barely constrained terror to spiral and leak out across her face. “Just a few dozen feet, there’s a fork in the tunnel we need to take just behind the front swarm,” she continued, looking over at her and offering an awkward placating smile as if she hadn’t just asked Arilla to help her do the impossible.

“The front swarm?” Arilla asked, looking over her shoulder at the first swarm that Typh had stopped. The sound of clacking mandibles and scurrying legs now originating from both ends of the long hallway. “How is this happening? I thought this was supposed to be a newbie friendly dungeon.”

“I’m sure it is, but we went exploring, and I guess this is our punishment for trying to have fun,” she said, wincing as the huge mass of insects started pushing harder against her barrier, the front of which was slowly getting coated in ichor and crushed bugs as those at the rear pushed hard into those at the front in their frenzied attempts to get to them.

“They're eating through the rock around the sides, Arilla get your sword!” Typh yelled, her voice sounding more tired than panicked as it echoed out loudly through the claustrophobic confines of the unlit hall.

Arilla was already moving, her sword drawn in a white-knuckled grip as she ran forwards to the edge of the barrier where the hard stone walls of the dungeon were crumbling like chalk as the insects ate their way through. Her blunted sword caught the golden light as she stabbed at the scarabs when they came in through the increasingly wide gaps around the sides of Typh’s spell. How they were supposed to possibly push the monsters back, she didn’t know, but right now, she had to focus her attention on staying alive as she did her best to plug the gaps around Typh’s golden barrier. Her sword arm started quickly going numb from the successive impacts of her steel sword against the creatures’ rocky shells. Her grip on the leather-wrapped hilt started to become slack and uncertain as the insect’s ichorous blood coated the handle beneath her sweating palms, as her whole world narrowed down to the next scarab to crawl in front of her blade.

When the Brood Mother finally emerged amidst a second swarm to their rear, Typh responded to its arrival by throwing up a second arcane barrier, stopping the monster and sandwiching them both between two walls of golden light, each one holding back an immense mass of aggressive scarabs. Typh had already done the impossible, the small mage staving off certain death time and time again as they had fled through the halls, but as Arilla grunted with exertion while hacking her way through the seemingly endless mass of scarabs with her ruined sword, she knew that it was already over. Arilla found herself smiling despite the pain and the fatigue, she was going to die, but no one would ever be able to say that she didn’t go down fighting. She was an adventurer at last, spared an ignoble death in some nameless gutter, or being dragged off to some goblin’s cookpot. She was going to die in a dungeon to some forgotten horror the whole world had assumed was long dead. It wasn’t the end she would have chosen, but it was far better than what an orphan like her could have expected; her only regret was that Typh would die here with her, the strange mage who had so thoroughly changed her life, disappearing into the depths never to be seen again.

“Typh, I want you to know that I—”

Typh took a step forwards and her twin walls of immovable light moved with her. The one to their rear giving the Brood Mother more space to fill and the one in front of them pushing violently into the swarm, pulping the carnivorous beetles by the hundreds as she calmly walked forwards. The endless flow of stone scarabs dried up immediately as Arilla leaned against the side of the tunnel, her sword arm hanging limp with exhaustion as she stared open mouthed at Typh while she single handedly pushed the swarm back. The mage’s level ticked up before her eyes as she quickly levelled to 6, then to 7 and finally 8. The humid air in the hallway filled with energising mana from the slain creatures as the intersection was cleared of living stone scarabs in seconds, leaving the walls and floor covered in a thick coating of yellow ichor and shattered chitin.

“Typh? What? How did you…” Arilla asked breathlessly, her head a swirling mixture of confusion, terror and awe, something which was only exacerbated when Typh pulled her into a deep kiss, her small tongue ignoring the foul taste of the scarab blood on Arilla’s lips as it entered her mouth.

“Please. Just let me pretend for a little while longer,” Typh said, after pulling back from the kiss and leaving Arilla speechless as she tried to make sense of what she had just seen.

Wordlessly Typh walked down to the now clear intersection, and Arilla, not knowing what else to do, followed closely behind her. The ruined wreck of her sword clutched firmly in her hands as they made their turn and entered the tamed dungeon proper, leaving behind the sound of chittering beetles thrashing against the increasingly distant barrier. They had emerged into the dungeon’s claimed territory further away from the dungeon's core chamber than Typh had originally planned when she took them on her detour. Their hasty retreat had forced them to flee into the tamed dungeon, with plenty of monster-filled tunnels left for them to traverse. Yet, this proved not to be an issue as none of the monsters survived for more than a heartbeat before Typh ended them with a flash of golden light, her manabolts tearing through the anthropomorphic spiders that made this part of the dungeon their home. The monsters were smart enough to wield stone-tipped spears but not quite cognizant enough to avoid suicidally charging the upset mage.

They made excellent time through the rest of the dungeon as they approached the core chamber, although, given Arilla’s mental state, most of it was a confusing blur of Typh eviscerating anything that moved with a quickly cast spell. She never relaxed her tight grip on her ruined sword as she watched Typh clear them a path through everything in silence. A perverse mixture of horror and wonder at the mage’s actions, not to mention intense relief and joy at still being alive, rendering her unable to do little more than put one tired foot in front of the other as together they completed her first dungeon dive.