Rise of the Living Forge

Chapter 115: Chitter chatter

They crushed creatures. There wasn’t a better way to put it. The next eight rooms of the dungeon went down one after the other, none posing any significant amount of threat. It certainly helped that Arwin’s hammer mowed through just about everything they ran into like a scythe through hay.

Arwin did his best to make sure the others got a good portion of the credit for the fights, but they were all more concerned with getting through the initial ranks of the spiders to reach the more interesting opponents – and there were a lot of spiders to get through. None of them got any achievements or advanced their tiers on the initial set of rooms. It probably didn’t help that there were so many of them and the challenge the dungeon posed was likely being trivialized partially by their numbers.

The majority of the enemies in the first few rooms were rabble. Even the larger spiders didn’t seem to be considered much of a challenge by the Mesh, though it was possible that they had just grown strong enough where they weren’t a major threat.

Whatever the reason, they made good time. Lillia gave up on trying to store more spider parts. She’d already stuffed her bag full of them and it didn’t look like there would be much of a shortage.

Even the eleventh and twelfth rooms only held several large Broodguards. Those became large splatters on the walls and the group took a short break to recover the small amount of energy they’d already spent before pressing any deeper.

“Well,” Anna said from where she sat leaning against Rodrick, looking around in the light cast by torches on the walls of the cave, “it’s certainly a dungeon.”

“That’s one way to put it,” Arwin said with a dry laugh. “Damn spiders everywhere. Nothing of use. It’s kind of getting on my nerves. There could at least be one that’s multicolored. Then I’d have more fun fighting it. Tossing the same swarm at me over and over is so boring.”

“You know, I never thought I’d use boring to describe any aspect of a dungeon,” Olive said, running a hand idly across one of the scratches on her breastplate, “but I think I might be with you. If I was solo, this would have been brutal. I probably would have gotten stuck on the third room and had to pull back. Groups are completely unfair.”

I think it might be our group than groups in general, but that would be too egotistical of me to claim.

“Either way, we’re well past what that guard warned us about,” Rodrick said. “I imagine we should be getting to the interesting bits soon enough. Spiders breed like little shits, you know that?”

“What do little shits breed like?” Olive asked.

Rodrick blinked, then frowned. “Er… it was a turn of phrase.”

“Yeah, I got that. But it didn’t make sense.”

“I – nevermind,” Rodrick said with a shake of his head. “Sometimes words just come out of my mouth before I think them through, you know? You got the idea.”

A small smile flicked across Olive’s mouth. “Yeah, I did.”

Reya grinned, then snuffed it out when she realized that Arwin was watching. She made it a point to flatten her features as if she didn’t care about the conversation going on.

I wonder what it is she doesn’t like about Olive. Despite her complaints, she hasn’t actually acted on anything. That means she doesn’t actually think she’s a threat or a problem. Odd. I’ll have to pull her aside and ask at some point. If she knows something I don’t, then I need to find out.

“I think the Mesh might be corrupting all of us,” Anna said. “Nobody sane would complain about a dungeon being too easy. I’m sure we could sell these spiders for some good money.”

“Not really,” Olive put in. “There are so many of them that the local market is already flooded. The last time I went in I had a luckier run – if you could call it that. There were some gemstone insects crawling around. I managed to kill one of them and it sold for a good price. That was just about the only thing I made any real coin off. The spiders went for a pittance.”

Anna scrunched her nose and let out a huff. “Oh. Well, that’s disappointing. Back to being a battle junkie, then. I want to kill things.”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“What happened to you?” Rodrick asked with a shudder. “My beautiful healer has turned into a bloodthirsty killer. Arwin is a bad influence.”

“Don’t blame me.” Arwin chuckled and pushed himself to his feet. He held a hand out to Lillia, who was sniffing at the bag of spider parts. She took it with a grateful nod.

“Thanks.”

“Spiders starting to go bad?”

“Not really. I was just thinking that we’re probably going to find rarer monsters the deeper we go. This dungeon seems pretty deep… so I’m not sure if it’s worth carrying all this crap around.”

“If it’s crap, why’d you take it in the first place?” Rodrick asked.

“Because I need something to feed you,” Lillia replied.

Rodrick sent her an affronted look and the rest of them chuckled.

“Everyone ready to keep moving?” Arwin asked, nodding to the pathway waiting before them. “I want to get my hands on something that I can actually use, and I’d like to find a monster that the Mesh actually considers a worthwhile threat for us so we can get something for killing it.”

“Agreed,” Lillia said as she turned the contents of her bag upside down and dumped everything out. “But mostly because I assume it’ll be a rarer monster that should taste better. At least, I hope that’s how it’ll work.”

“You might get more than what you asked for if you poke at the Mesh like that,” Olive said. She rose to her feet and drew her sword, rolling her shoulders. “I’m ready to keep moving, though. I’ve never been this deep so I don’t know what to expect.”

“Probably more spiders,” Anna said.

They all got up to their feet and took a moment to make sure they didn’t leave anything behind. Arwin then summoned his armor back to himself and, after one look to check back on the others, he started into the passage.

For several minutes they walked in silence. The echo of their steps through the cave the squeak of metal were the only sounds around them. Eventually the passage wound around a corner and came to an end in an open room.

Torchlight flickered from the walls to illuminate – surprisingly – a tile floor. It was cracked and covered with wear from years of disuse and weather. If there had once been any murals on the tiles, they were now long gone.

Cobwebs hung in the corners and covered the walls, but there weren’t nearly as many in this room as there had been in the previous ones. A bulbous carapace rested in the corner of the room, legs curled up to the sky. It looked to be one of the Broodguard spiders. Arwin’s eyes narrowed.

“Dead spider,” Rodrick whispered over Arwin’s shoulder. “Mesh heard us bitching.”

“The Mesh doesn’t actually directly interfere with things. That’s just a superstition,” Anna muttered back. “But I think Rodrick is right. Looks like there might be a spider predator down here somewhere.”

“Only one way to find out,” Arwin said. “Same strategy as always. Be ready to follow up.”

He waited a moment to make sure that Rodrick and the others were prepared. Then he stepped out of the passage and into the room. Verdant Blaze took form in his hands as he looked up at the ceiling, expecting another monster to drop from above.

There was nothing but plain stone. His brow furrowed as he turned to check out the rest of the room. Aside from the cracked tiles on the ground and flaking off the walls, there truly wasn’t much of interest.

As far as he could tell, the room looked empty. It was possible that someone else had come through it recently. That didn’t make much sense to him, though. The previous rooms leading up to this one hadn’t been cleared and he didn’t see any passages other than an exit that traveled deeper into the dungeon.

I suppose it’s possible someone worked their way up from below and then went back down, but that would be pretty odd. I can’t see why they’d do that unless they were running from something. And, if they were running from something, I’d assume that something would still be in the area.

Arwin walked further into the room. He kept his guard up and prepared to dive out of the way at the first sign of something moving. There didn’t seem to be any overt signs of a battle anywhere in the room, but the cracks running over everything made it hard to tell anything for sure.

He adjusted his grip on Verdant Blaze. There generally weren’t rooms in dungeons that were just left open. Monsters liked their space. They didn’t leave areas unoccupied for no reason. No, it was far more likely that he was just overlooking their opponent and it was lying in wait somewhere to strike.

He came to a stop in the center of the room and turned in a circle. There was nothing on the ceilings. The walls didn’t have enough cobwebs to conceal anything. No holes on the floor that indicated an opponent that buried beneath the ground either.

The only thing that was out of place in the room…

Arwin looked down at the tiles beneath his feet. The cracks running throughout them were surprisingly uniform in depth. His heart sank as he realized where the monster was. It wasn’t concealed or invisible somewhere. It was right beneath his feet.

He took a step back toward the hall, hoping he could make it off the ground before the creature moved. A rumble shook the floor beneath him and he cursed, nearly tripping as the tile started to shift.

Evidently the monster had been hoping that more of them would walk out onto it before it acted. Tiles rose up all around Arwin – but they were no tiles. They were thin plates of beige armor that covered the body of a massive, oddly flat centipede that had layered itself over the entire floor. Stone legs chittered against the ground as Arwin fought to keep his balance on the shifting sea of the monster’s body.

The monster’s head rose up over Arwin and its mandibles parted as a hiss rattled the room.

[Chattering Mimipede – Journeyman 6]

“I found the monster,” Arwin said.