Chapter 31: Rolling in the...deep? (Patreon)

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1emLBI2x4ea3BSS1k9f6Wje30z2kxsFPifYGFGkxiCr0/edit?usp=sharing

For now, I'll keep including the google doc, and paste the chapter below as well with blue box text bolded. Enjoy!

--

“Soooo…” Cayden said, attempting to think of something to break the ice that wasn’t completely lame. “What do you all like to do?”

He winced. Shot and a miss.

They’d left Avernon thirty minutes earlier and were walking side-by-side along the road that passed closest to the Bolton dungeon. Due to the smooth road and their higher stats, they were able to maintain a much faster pace than he and Elise had managed on their trip to the ratling dungeon. But it was still going to be a ten-mile walk, which Cayden guessed would take them almost three hours to traverse.

Only thirty minutes into a three-hour walk, and already the silence was unbearable.

Normally Cayden didn’t mind silence. That was one of the things he loved about spending time with Elise: they could talk as much as was needed, but she never felt obligated to talk just for the sake of talking, and she was just as happy to spend hours in silence as they trained side-by-side.

The silence with the siblings, though, felt unbearable. Andy at least seemed composed, but the two brothers incessantly glanced at Cayden and Elise with curious looks in their eyes, as if they wanted to ask a question but were scared of how it might be interpreted. They were trying to be subtle about it, but were clearly, at least to Cayden’s [Awareness] boosted perception, failing.

It might have been bearable if he’d had Elise to suffer the awkwardness with him, but she was lost in her own world, nose stuck into her soul notebook as she reviewed her notes on enchanting. Every once in a while Cayden guided her by the shoulders to avoid a pothole or to stay aligned with the road as she continued on, oblivious to both the near misses and the awkward atmosphere.

“Um, not much,” Andy responded, thankfully accepting Cayden’s tactless effort to break the ice. “I’ve always enjoyed shooting my bow. It’s nice to get out of the shop and relax for a bit.” Then her mouth snapped shut as if she unintentionally revealed a deep secret.

It was strange that she considered shooting her bow to be a fun hobby, considering she was currently using it as a source of income. Cayden enjoyed his training but not for the sake of the training itself. Rather, he enjoyed training for the potential growth and experiences he knew it could bring him.

He shrugged. He could give props to Andy for finding joy in adventuring. ‘Do what you love, and you’ll never work,’ and all that.

“How about you two? How did you get into learning the rapier and sword?” Cayden asked the brothers.

Jerome and Xavier glanced at each other before Jerome responded. “We’ve got a neighbor who runs a weapon shop who was good friends with our dad. Always let us mess around with whatever weapons we wanted.” He pulled his rapier from his belt, hefting the blade in his hand. “After I changed, the rapier just felt like it fit, you know?”

Cayden nodded. “I can relate to that a bit. These are new,” he said as he raised up his sheathed claws. “I used to be an [Apprentice Blacksmith], so I used a hammer in our last dungeon run. But even though it’s only been a few weeks with the claws, I feel much more comfortable with them than I did with the hammer. They feel like they belong.”

Jerome nodded along, but it was Andy who responded.

“You were an [Apprentice Blacksmith]?”

“Yeah, up until a few days ago,” Cayden said, deciding there was no point in hiding what should have been obvious to anyone with [Inspect]. “It wasn’t exactly the best for fighting monsters, though, which is why I changed.”

Cayden pretended to not notice Andy staring at him with a conflicted look on her face as they continued walking. The silence stretched for almost a full minute, thankfully less awkward this time, before she blurted out, “We’re not really adventurers.”

Cayden looked at her askance. “What do you mean?”

“We actually work as clothiers,” Andy said, her two brothers remaining silent. “All three of us. We run a shop over in the merchant’s district.”

“Yeah, I kinda figured that from the classes,” Cayden replied, and Andy’s face flushed. “But what do you mean you aren’t adventurers? Can’t you be both?”

“Um…” Andy stuttered as she struggled to figure out how to respond, eventually turning to her brothers.

“We aren’t full-time adventurers, she means,” Xavier jumped in, his voice cracking on the last word. “The shop hasn’t been doing well since dad–”

Jerome elbowed his brother, reaching high to hit his brother’s human half’s kidney. “We each had some experience with weapons, so we decided to delve a few dungeons for the extra coin.”

“I’m the only one actually registered with the guild,” Andy added, having re-found her voice. “We aren’t planning on making this a long-term thing, or anything like that. Just here and there until the shop gets back on its feet.” She looked up at Cayden with a hesitant expression. “That won’t be a problem, will it?”

“Nah, that’s fine,” Cayden shook his head. In fact, it might’ve been for the best – once Elise was able to enchant a few items, they would be able to ditch this team guilt-free for some more experienced adventurers. He looked sharply at the siblings. “As long as you weren’t lying about your previous experience delving?”

Andy raised her hands defensively as she frantically shook her head. “No, no, that was true.”

“Good,” Cayden answered, and they once again lapsed into silence.

Thankfully, this time it was just slightly less awkward.

--

“Is that it?” Andy asked as she hopped off of her brother’s back.

The small pixie had kept up admirably with her longer-legged teammates for the first hour of walking, but had eventually decided the effort wasn’t worth it and climbed into Xavier’s saddle. The centaur had stammered an offer to Elise for a ride as well, but she had simply waved the boy away without looking up from her book, likely not even fully registering the offer.

“Yep! This is it,” Elise answered, her face out of her notebook for the first time in three hours.

“Let’s take a break for a bit. Eat, drink, and use the restroom if you have to. Make sure we’re all as prepared as we can be,” Cayden said, and the others nodded along.

A few feet away from their makeshift rest area was the Bolton dungeon. Unlike the ratling dungeon, it was an open-air dungeon. It had the same blue glowy forcefield-like-thing demarcating where the dungeon started, but where it had only been a wall blocking the cave entrance to the ratling dungeon, this one was a massive dome, so big that Cayden couldn’t see the curvature of the boundary as it disappeared into the surrounding trees.

According to Elise’s research, there was no real ‘end’ to this dungeon. No prizes or secret exits were waiting at the end of a long tunnel, just a large open space filled with monsters. A space that, if it went too long without being cleared, would puke out its horde to devastate the surroundings.

Cayden was determined to make sure that wouldn’t happen.

Getting rich and powerful along the way was a nice bonus.

“Everyone ready?” he asked a few minutes later, and he received decisive nods from each of his teammates.

Without there being a specific ‘entrance’ to the dungeon, they figured one place to enter would be just as good as any other. So, without further ado, Cayden stepped through the barrier.

The first surprise was the sky. Though he could still see the blue barrier behind him, it faded away into invisibility about ten feet above his head, leaving him with an open and unsullied view of the sun and clouds.

The second surprise was the trees. Or rather, the lack of trees. Outside of the dungeon had been just like any other part of the Lost Forest, crowded with trees and undergrowth, but inside there was none of that. It was an open field with grass growing up to his thighs over rolling hills. In the distance, he could barely see the blue of the barrier on the opposite side of the dungeon, so far away that it seemed impossible to fully clear.

And in the intervening space were the zepples.

They were smaller than he imagined, though that might have just been because there weren’t any close by. What surprised him were their tentacles: dozens of the thin, six-foot-long appendages hung underneath each of the monsters, trailing through the grasses as the zepples lazily bobbed up and down in the wind.

After doing a quick double-check around him to make sure there were no zepples hiding in the grass nearby, he waved for the rest of the team to follow.

Andy frowned as she entered, immediately turning to her brother and hopping on his back. The grass came up almost to her shoulders, so Cayden didn’t blame her, but that meant he and Jerome would hold the front line on their own. Andy needed a smooth and steady mount if she was going to make full use of her bow and arrows, which Xavier couldn’t be if he was dashing around and stabbing at Zepples with his spear.

“Wow. I know I said the dungeon would be different, but I didn’t realize by how much,” Elise muttered as she walked last through the barrier. Her backpack was larger than the one she carried on their previous run, packed to the brim with potions, food, and anything else she had deemed as potentially necessary.

Unlike the ratlings, zepples weren’t susceptible to most poisons, so she had left those out, but everything else she had included. Cayden honestly thought she had overpacked, but she was determined to never be caught without needed supplies again. Her job on this delve was primarily to keep an eye out for enchanting materials, and secondarily to distribute healing potions to anyone who was injured and for some reason or another couldn’t get to the ones stored on their own belt.

Dismissing his friend from his thoughts, he refocused on their surroundings.

“That one first,” he called, pointing to a zepple that was floating near the barrier about fifty yards to their right. It wasn’t as isolated as some of the other zepples he could see, but it was the most isolated one that was adjacent to the barrier. If they made a mistake, they could simply retreat out of the dungeon and re-enter somewhere else at their leisure.

They advanced slowly through the field, Cayden’s head on a swivel. Andy apparently had great perception, but not as good as was typically expected of a dedicated rogue adventurer. He didn’t know any of his teammates’ exact stats, but suspected that his [Awareness] boosted perception was higher than either of the brothers’. And even if it wasn’t, they were untested teammates – he wouldn’t leave the responsibility of avoiding an ambush solely in their hands.

Thankfully, according to every book Elise had read, zepples possessed no real intelligence. They would simply go wherever the wind and time took them until some outside stimuli caught their attention. No one knew exactly how they ‘saw,’ but they would typically attempt to float towards anyone that got within ten feet or so of them, though they wouldn’t self-destruct until their tentacles made contact.

Despite their supposed stupidity, Cayden wasn’t taking any chances, and they advanced slowly and carefully through the grass. But even at a slow pace, they made progress, and soon enough, they were within twenty yards of the targetted zepple. They slowed to a stop and Andy pulled an arrow from her quiver.

The zepple’s translucent outer membrane was about the size of a beach volleyball, filled with a swirling purple gas. In the middle of the membrane floated a black blotch: their core. It seemed a difficult shot, but Andy had assured him she was confident at this range. As she put her arrow to the bow, Cayden flexed his unsheathed claws against his spear, digging gouges into the wood in his anticipation.

For almost twenty seconds Andy waited after drawing her small bow, frozen still on her brother’s back and staring at her target. The zepple bobbed in the wind, floating on invisible currents and unaware of the nearby enemies. Then, just as the zepple paused at the peak of its latest bob, Andy released.

In a blink the arrow crossed the intervening space and pierced the zepple, flying out only slightly slower on the other side. Purple gas hissed out of the puncture wounds, and Cayden held his breath with the rest of his teammates as he waited for an explosion.

The zepple drifted slowly to the ground, inert, and they exhaled in unison.

They advanced to the corpse, and Elise stepped forward and sliced through the outer membrane with her knife to grab the experience crystal from its core. She pocketed the experience crystal with a smile at her teammates, and Cayden smiled in return before gazing across the massive dungeon.

One down, hundreds to go.