Chapter 8: The Gauntlet

Once they had finished eating, they packed up their things, readied their nerves, and entered the shell, with Noah taking the lead and holding a torch. Because of the shell’s twist, they had to descend a spiral ramp. The walls, floor, and ceiling of the passage were perfectly smooth, without straight lines of any kind. It was like wandering through a narrow canyon carved by flash floods. Dirt and broken stone covered most of the floor, seeping in from the shell’s opening. Luckily, this meant that Mira would have something to work with to use her spells.

The crab had been venting its shell for more than a week, but still smelled stale and earthy, like a mineshaft, while tinged with the biological signature of the parasites. It seemed there really was an ecosystem in the shell. The air seemed fine to breathe, and the torch was burning brightly. Was all that oxygen from the outside? How long could the oxygen last if the crab went back below the surface? How long did the dungeon crab live underground before surfacing? Either the crab and its parasites could function in an oxygen-poor environment, or something within the crab could produce a human-friendly atmosphere. Noah curiosity continued to grow.

They descended fifty feet when the first fork appeared, another tunnel branching off the staircase.

“We’re going to keep going down, right?” Oath asked.

“Yeah, whatever passage leads us down, we’ll take it.”

One of the bipedal parasites burst from the branching tunnel, aiming for Noah. He stepped to the side to dodge, drew his short sword, and stabbed the beast through the spine when it landed.

The deeper they delved, the more branching tunnels they came across, but they continued their descent until reaching a large chamber at the bottom of the staircase, with five tunnels spread out. The staircase was wide enough for two people to walk shoulder-to-shoulder, but these tunnels were like subway lines. There were signs of adventurers coming through, marking the tunnels to try and keep track of which paths they had taken. There were also blood splatters, torn clothes, and a broken sword.

“What’s that, hanging from the ceiling?” Oath asked. Above their heads, gooey threads glowed like fireflies, making Beth and Mira squirm in disgust.

“Cave worms. Their bodies are bioluminescent, attracting prey, which get caught in their threads like spider webs. This is a good thing. We won’t need this.” Noah extinguished the torch and stored it in his ring. “Ok, let’s split up. We can cover more ground that way.”

“Wait, WHAT?!” everyone exclaimed.

It was the hardest Noah laughed since coming to this new world. “Relax, I’m just kidding. Can you imagine? In all seriousness, let’s take this path over here. It looks like it continues to slope.”

They took the right-most path, further descending into the dungeon crab, and soon stopped at the entrance to a branch chamber, hearing movement within. They stayed against the wall to avoid attracting whatever was inside. Noah signaled to the others with his hand, cast his invisibility, and stepped into the doorway.

The sight before him was grotesque; a pile of football-sized maggots feasting upon the remains of slain adventurers. Their fat bodies quivered as they peeled flesh from bone. The walls were honeycombed to house the creatures between meals, and three adults were standing guard. The guards were bugs of some kind, consisting of four legs surrounding a head and torso with wings between the legs. The legs were armor-plated and sharp, and their downward-pointing faces had teeth like an angler fish. They looked almost like winged bar stools.

Noah drew his sword and killed one of the beasts without his presence detected. Seeing their comrade sliced in half, the other two began to panic and searched for the invisible assailant. He killed them as quickly as he had killed the first.

“Clear,” Noah said as he released his spell.

He reappeared just as Oath and the others entered the room, immediately broadcasting their revulsion at the remains. Noah knocked the pile of bodies over and kicked away the maggots so that he could begin poking around with his sword.

“Don’t loot them!” Oath said in disgust.

“Why? Because we didn’t kill them? We’re adventurers; we thrive on the deaths of others, be they humans or monsters. Meh, nothing great.” He collected a few coins and arrows, but that was it.

“Hey, something’s coming!” Trevor shouted. They ran out into the hall, hearing wingbeats. Further down the tunnel, several more four-legged bugs were flying toward them, likely detecting their comrades’ deaths. “Phalanx Spears!” he then cast.

He blocked the passage with an array of mana blades, and Beth began launching arrows, but the armor plating on the monsters’ legs proved too resilient, and they smashed their way through. Oath took down one, but a second tackled him from the side, tearing into him with its teeth and claws. Noah killed it before it could inflict more damage, then fended off the others with well-placed stabs. Trevor was on his back, with Beth and Mira working together to save him.

Noah was still on his feet, so the monsters headed toward him. He put away his longsword and instead switched to his short sword. The first bug that tried to tackle him met his shield and piercing blade, with the others dying the same way.

The battle ended, and healing potions were used where needed. This certainly was an interesting environment for fighting. Most of the monsters seen so far had hard outer shells, which Noah and his group had little experience dealing with. Their group focused on attacking rather than endurance, as they usually fought beasts as vulnerable as themselves. Aside from Noah’s shield, the group didn’t have much in defense outside of light armor—and a strong offense, of course.

They continued deeper, passing by countless branching tunnels and eventually coming to another fork. Before they could decide which path to take, they heard movement down one of the tunnels, and soon saw the source. It was a flood of centipedes, just like the one that had tried to kill Oath that morning.

“Holy shit!” Mira shrieked, something very out of character for her.

“Come on, this way!”

Noah ran down one of the passages with the others following, but so did the centipedes. It seemed they were familiar with the scent of people and now hungered for Noah’s group. He slowed his pace, letting the others get past him, then untied a bag hanging from his belt and scattered its powdery contents across the floor.

It was lye, the best he could make within reason. It was much more caustic than what he had made in the forest with Tin, and when the centipedes ran through it, getting it on themselves and breathing it in, they immediately began to writhe and curl in pain. However, it barely slowed them down, and those in the back climbed over their ill kin.

The group kept running, though more monsters burst out of the tunnels ahead. Noah and Oath took them out to the best of their abilities, trying to incapacitate them with one slash each. Those not slain retreated immediately as the group passed by, not wanting to become the prey of the centipedes behind them.

“There’s a room ahead!” said Trevor.

“Mira, wait until we reach that room, and if I give a signal, use your Earth Surge spell,” said Noah.

They entered the chamber, though regret filled them immediately. A new, colossal danger awaited them. It was a worm, coiled like a hissing cobra, with a body more than ten feet thick and long as a football field. Its flesh was rough, like living stone, covered in countless tiny feet. Towering over them in this arena-like chamber, it stared without eyes and roared from a mouth that was simply a pit of teeth.

The monster’s appearance shocked everyone into stunned silence, like Oath when standing before that bear, but not even Noah could chastise them, for he, too, was momentarily stunned by fear. The fraction of a second between two beats of his heart seemed like it would last forever, but that next thump shook him from his stupor, letting him collect his thoughts and begin working on a plan.

“Mira, do it now! Beth, shoot some arrows into that thing’s mouth or anything else that looks soft! Oath, you and I will be the decoy. Trevor, you attack with all your magic. We need to just wound it long enough to get away!”

No one else moved, but Noah giving Oath a shove woke them up. Mira turned back to face the oncoming wave of monsters and countered with a wave of her own. She took control of the earthen ground and unleashed it on the centipedes like a rockslide. While that was going on, Beth was shooting arrows at the worm’s mouth, striking its exposed flesh but only angering it.

It turned its attention on Oath and Noah, running at it from its left and right side. It lunged at them, aiming to eat Noah and swat Oath with its tail. Noah made himself invisible and dodged the worm’s mouth, and Oath blocked the attack with a swing of his sword, breaking the monster’s skin.

As they had distracted it, Trevor could now unleash his charged magic. The spear blade and the axe head of his halberd were glowing with a radiant storm of mana, and runes spun around the shaft. He charged toward the worm’s coiled body, released a roar of fury, and brought down his blade like a divine smite.

“Voulge Slash!”

It was a combination of his stabbing and cleaving spells, and while the motions were the same as just a normal swing, it inflicted damage differently in the form of a slash. It had less penetrating power than the other two, but it damaged the tissue underneath much more severely. His mana, having solidified around the head of his halberd, carved deep into the worm’s flesh, and as Trevor swung his weapon down, he left a deep cut on different segments of its body. Blood poured from the wound, and the worm shrieked in agony.

“Let’s go!” Noah shouted.

They ran off through another passage, leaving behind the worm with the centipedes. They kept maneuvering through the dungeon, fighting the monsters leaping out while they searched for a safe spot. It seemed like something would burst out every time they slowed down or even paused, every beast attempting to take a chunk out of them.

Finally, when they were gasping for air with their throats feeling as dry as sand, the group found a chamber with a small opening and no monsters inside. They set their packs against the entrance, hopefully, to help keep the monsters from detecting them. They all slumped down on the floor. Even Noah was feeling sick from the adrenaline.

“Fuck! This place is a death trap!” Trevor exclaimed as he poured a healing potion on a deep puncture wound in his thigh, caused by something resembling a cycloptic tiger catching him with one of its claws.

“No wonder nobility is the prize for conquering one of these things. You deserve to be a damn king if you can survive this place,” Beth panted. Despite fighting from the back, she was covered in monster blood.

“Guys, I gotta tell you, I’m not sure we’re ready for this place. It’s too soon,” said Oath.

“Don’t say that. We’re alive, aren’t we?” said Mira. “We managed to get through it and find a place to rest. Not too long ago, we would have died before even reaching the dungeon. We can do this, right, Noah? Noah?” Mira turned to Noah, seeing him staring at his trembling hand, but with an expression that didn’t fit the situation. He was smiling.

After dying so many times, death was no longer something Noah feared. He avoided it with about the same amount of effort used to avoid dying in a video game. He still possessed the survival instinct in some fashion, but he could no longer appropriately appreciate the most significant risk of death in a given situation. He was no more afraid of guns than a coffee table’s sharp corners.

What he felt when he saw the worm was genuine fear, realizing that not only was the worm the most likely cause of his death in that room, it was a death he wanted to avoid more than any other. That sensation of fear, after so long, made him feel alive.

“Noah?” she asked once more, hearing him chuckle.

He shook himself back from his thoughts. “Sorry, I was just thinking about this place.”

“And?”

“A snail.”

“What?”

“The book at the baron’s home, it had a picture of a dungeon crab. It might have just been a guess at what it looked like, but it was of a giant hermit crab. However, hermit crabs don’t create their own shells. Snails do. Hermit crabs just take them over. So, either we’re actually inside a snail, or if this really is a hermit crab, then that means it probably got this shell from a snail, and if there are these gargantuan crabs and snails living within the planet, what else is down there?”

“And how does that help us?”

“It’ll take your mind of things. We’ll be fine, we can get through this. Like you said, had we tried this earlier, none of you would still be here, but you’ve all grown stronger.”

“So, what should we do?” Oath asked.

“Exactly what we’ve been doing. Just watch our step, take it one challenge at a time, and keep our rhythm steady. Besides, I’d say there is plenty of incentive to stick around.”

Everyone glanced around the chamber and gasped when they realized the ground was gleaming like a starry sky. It was hard to tell under the glow worms’ blue light, but bits of metal and gems were mixed into the dirt.

“Our first score!” Beth exclaimed.

They began collecting the glimmering pieces and cleaning away the unwanted dirt and rock. Most of it was raw and diluted, so excess sediments had to be scraped, hammered, and rubbed off. There was no telling how much gold and silver they had until they smelted it down. Despite the find, Noah couldn’t deny his disappointment. When he had heard about these dungeons and the treasure within them, his inner nerd had imagined something more like brick corridors and an actual treasure chest. That worm back there could be considered a mini-boss, after all.

With their spirits lifted, they left the safety of the chamber to continue their descent. Not long after they departed, they faced off against a pair of four-legged monsters like the one Mira killed outside.

“Oath, with me. Trevor, don’t let them stand over us.”

He and Oath stepped forward, keeping just out of range of Trevor’s halberd, with Oath delivering a mighty cleave. His sword cracked into the monster’s shell and struck its brain, though the wound was shallower than he expected. Nearby, Noah was fending off swings and stabs of the beast’s jagged forelimbs, but when an opening came, he hacked one of them off and thrust his sword into the monster’s face. It took a moment to pull his sword free, as it had been stopped by the inside of the crustacean’s shell.

“Hold on. These shells might be worth something.”

Knives in hand, they carved the top shells off, each one the size of a tower shield. They were hard enough to stop Oath’s cleave and relatively light, so there was a good chance they’d be worth something to an armor dealer.

They proceeded onwards, fighting through wave after wave of the shell’s inhabitants. They survived each encounter, but not without shedding blood. They kept their eyes peeled, not just for monsters, but for glimmers of treasure. They searched every room, finding gold, silver, and gems of all different colors. They also found signs of human activity, though rarely any bodies, same with the monsters, and the dead ends were a constant annoyance.