Chapter 94: Swarms (Patreon)

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The delve was the most unique Cayden had ever experienced.

He’d been on probably close to a hundred delves, with all sorts of different teams in dungeons much more ‘unique’ than the Enorm Dungeon…yet none of them had he delved in such a different way as he was delving today.

There were plenty of teams of adventurers in Avernon that utilized stealth on their delves – rogues were not nearly as rare as mages – yet the majority of those teams only had a single member who used stealth, typically acting as a scout or assassin while the rest fought more honestly. And for those teams that did rely entirely on stealth for all their members, they were unlikely to enlist an enchanter as part of their group, much less a frontliner like Cayden who would destroy any previously-practiced plan or cohesion the team was used to.

Frontline fighters had reputations of being brutes, a stereotype Cayden fulfilled. It was something he accepted and even embraced. Yet after experiencing a stealth delve for the first time, he doubted he would have chosen the same ‘frontliner’ build if he had experienced the stealthy option beforehand.

It was so easy.

Of course, half of Cayden’s joy from delving came from the challenge, so he wasn’t entirely sold on the alternate method. But after they were able to kill the next two monstrous rats with no more than a scratch – Delphia incapacitating the beasts with a stab to their sides before they even knew she was there and then Cayden finishing them off with his claws – he grew more and more impressed. His battle with the first monstrous rat had taken more than twice as long as the two that followed, and that had been a relatively short fight.

“Why doesn’t everyone delve like this?” Cayden asked as he dug out the experience crystal from the third monstrous rat. “Why have frontliners at all when teams could just do this?”

“Some do,” Delphia responded. “I was given the option of being put on a team composed entirely of stealth-skill users, so there’s at least one at the academy. I figured that my healing skills wouldn’t be as useful for them, though. I don’t know why more teams don’t do it, however.”

In sync, she and Cayden turned to Elise, who had deactivated her item as soon as the monster had been incapacitated.

“Some do, but it’s usually not as successful as this,” Elise replied, more than used to explaining her knowledge after years of being friends with Cayden. “At lower levels, stealth skills aren’t typically as powerful as your shaeden skill, Delphia, able to hide your presence almost completely from monsters. And without the potions, even your skill wouldn’t be enough by itself.”

“What about at higher levels?”

“It’s feasible, but dangerous. A team of stealth experts could clear dozens of different dungeons extremely easily, but what happens when their skills fail them? No skills are infallible, and there will always eventually be a monster that can see through any specific stealth skill, regardless of how powerful. Or what if one of their members gets injured and is unable to stealth themself for the rest of the delve? Or runs out of mana? They’ll be forced to fight like any other team, but without the skills and experience that other teams have trained.” She shrugged. “Same reason people have teams in the first place. Specialization is powerful, but over-specialization falls apart the moment you encounter something that counters your strategy.”

Cayden supposed that made sense, and it brought up a potential issue he hadn’t been considering. “How are you for mana, Delphia? You’ve been using your skills a lot, and on two of us.”

“Not too bad,” Delphia responded. “I’ve invested heavily in mana regeneration, and that skill doesn’t use nearly as much as my other racial skill. I can’t keep it going indefinitely when it’s applied to you as well, but these breaks are enough for me to get back close to full.”

“Huh. I guess we can keep doing this then. It’s certainly been much faster than it would’ve been otherwise.”

Elise coughed. “Er, my enchanted item can’t go forever. It’s got maybe another fifteen minutes of use left before it’ll have to recharge for a few days.”

Cayden sighed. That certainly would have been a good thing to know before they started to indiscriminately use it early into the delve, but he supposed it wasn’t the worst. This dungeon was large, but it wasn’t nearly as large – nor as maze-like – as the Gauntlet. Even with her lower agility, fifteen minutes should be plenty of time for Elise to get to the exit from pretty much anywhere within the dungeon.

“Let’s go back to a normal style of delving then, or at least me and Elise. It’ll likely be a bit harder for you, Delphia, with the monsters trying to attack me, but you’re welcome to keep joining in the combat.”

Delphia nodded as shadows swallowed her, reducing her to no more than a blur against the wooden floor. It wasn’t nearly as effective at hiding her presence as the pseudo-intangibility she’d demonstrated to their team a few months earlier, but coupled with Elise’s potion it had been enough to evade the notice of the monstrous rats. Cayden suspected that, now that he and Elise were fully visible to grab the monsters’ attentions, it would be even more effective.

Not wanting to squander Delphia’s mana, they wasted no time resuming their delve. They were still in the second massive room of the dungeon, this one a bedroom compared to the first dining room. A massive bed took up the majority of the space, preventing them from seeing the entire room after passing through the doorway. It wouldn’t have been too difficult to climb the blanket hanging off the edges to the top of the bed thirty feet up, at least for Cayden, but they planned to fully clear the rest of the room before even considering that. Reports on the dungeon stated there were never any monsters on top of the bed, and rarely any enchanting materials, but it would be an easy place for someone targeting the princess to lie in wait. He’d have to check it out before they left.

The last monstrous rat had been snuffling around at the foot of the bed, behaving just like a normal rat might in a normal house. Only after they had been stabbed or caught sight of Cayden did their ‘monstrous’ personalities reveal themselves.

They rounded the corner of the bed carefully, Cayden leading the way, prepared for the next rat to jump at him the moment the rest of the room came into view. But instead of being greeted by another monstrous rat, he instead saw a very different type of monster.

They formed a line across the floor of the bedroom, a mass of them gathered around something small near the base of the bed and then leading to a crack in the wood of the wall on the other side of the room. They were small, each of them no bigger than Cayden’s fist, with six legs, antennae, and two sharp pincers at the front of their heads.

“Saw ants,” Elise called in a low voice. She paused. “Looks like levels two to three, for the most part.”

Despite their low levels, Cayden knew not to take these monsters for granted. They were one of the rarer potential monsters to encounter in the Enorm Dungeon, but also one of the more dangerous. They were small and weak defensively, weak enough that even Elise would be able to squish one with minimal effort. Yet they were monstrously strong for their size and level. Their pincers could cut through anything that fit between them like saws – the origin of their name. Even heavy plate armor could be torn to shreds in minutes by a swarm of them.

Yet Cayden didn’t hesitate to activate [Taunt].

It was time to truly put his durability to the test.

The antenna from the saw ants twitched as the monsters paused their scurrying and turned towards Cayden, the entirety of the swarm focusing on him. Swarms of weaker monsters were where Cayden’s skills had always shined, but despite this he dashed to the side to draw the train of monsters toward him in a line, rather than in a single massive wave. He was confident, but he wasn’t so foolhardy as to try to take on the entire swarm at once without first testing the monsters’ strength for himself.

He wasn’t worried about Elise or Delphia as he skipped away from them. These monsters didn’t have a high enough intelligence or strong enough will to resist his [Taunt], and even if they did he figured his companions would be fine. Delphia had her stealth skills, and Elise had both her teacher’s and her own enchantments. The barrier produced by her shield enchantment should be oblique enough to prevent the ants from being able to saw through it with their pincers.

Cayden didn’t bother with his claws as the first of the ants caught up to him, simply choosing to stomp down on those leading the charge, crushing them with a satisfying squishing noise. This enraged the ants following, antennae twirling as their speed noticeably increased. In an instant, the few that had been in the space before Cayden multiplied to dozens, with hundreds more only a few seconds behind.

He stomped with abandon. Each foot crushed one or two of the ants, but it was nothing compared to the swarm that followed. He slowly moved back as he stomped, shuffling away from the mass of the swarm to avoid getting surrounded, but there were still more than he could easily handle at once. He wished he had his spear – it wouldn’t do much to kill any of the saw ants, but he could have at least swung it around to limit the number that could approach him at at time. With only one arm, however, he had deemed the spear to be more of a hindrance than a help and had left it at the academy.

The first of the ants finally managed to grab ahold of the side of his boot and started to crawl up his leg. He swept it away with his claws, but this slowed him down just enough for two more ants to latch on. He swept those away as well, but the problem repeated. Until finally, the first ant latched onto his ankle with its pincers and bit down.

Cayden winced. It didn’t break through his skin, but the pressure wasn’t light enough for him to simply ignore. He shook his leg, but the ant held on by its pincers, the pressure increasing by the second, and Cayden was forced to crush the ant with his claws. Even then, its grip didn’t entirely release, and the mangled corpse of the saw ant hung onto his let like a macabre anklet.

The time it took to kill the saw ant gave a half-dozen other ants the chance they needed to start climbing his legs, and Cayden mentally upgraded the threat the swarm of small monsters represented. If he was alone, he quite likely would be forced to retreat from the dungeon entirely.

Luckily, he was not alone.

Delphia hovered around the edge of the swarm, stabbing down into ants with her dagger. Her rate of killing them was slower than Cayden’s stomps, and though the ants couldn’t seem to sense her presence, they could sense the deaths of their brothers. The ants around wherever she struck would wiggle their antennae in consternation as they searched for the threat, falling behind the rest of the swarm chasing Cayden. With agility as one of her race’s primary stats, Delphia was quick enough to avoid the ants agitated from her attacks, and would blur from place to place around the edge of the swarm, killing an ant or three before disapearing to somewhere new. It wasn’t doing much to whittle down their total numbers, but it was giving Cayden some much-needed breathing room.

And finally, there was Elise. While a noncombatant, Cayden had long since learned that did not mean the same thing as useless. She remained where Cayden had left her when they had first happened upon the swarm, digging through her bag, before she emerged with a small orange vial held triumphantly in her fist.

“Bombs away!” she called with no small amount of glee, uncapping the vial and then hurling it into the center of the swarm. Orange liquid trailed behind the projectile, evaporating into a similarly-colored mist before it could hit the ground. And wherever the the mist fell? The monsters reacted.

Apart from the shuffling of their legs against the wood and the squishing beneath his feet, the saw ants made no noise as they swarmed after Cayden. Yet as the ants scuttled in frantic circles and writhed in the effects of the gaseous poison, he imagined he could hear their screams.

The poison was a type of insecticide. It wouldn’t outright kill most of the saw ants, but neither would it harm him or Delphia from walking through it beyond causing a slight headache and making their eyes water. A worthwhile tradeoff, in Cayden’s opinion.

“Remember how this feels! We’ll compare it later to when you don’t have [Alchemical Assistance]!” Elise called from the sidelines as Cayden waded more directly into the cloud. Most of the ants were curled up into twitching balls and no longer a threat, but those furthest from the center retained most of their faculties and continued to chase Cayden with focused intensity. As he led the trailing monsters through the orange cloud, he made it a point to crush as many downed ants as possible with each step. Even incapacitated, the swarm was massive, and he didn’t want to test how quickly they might be able to recover from Elise’s insecticide.

He and Delphia got into the grisly work of dispatching the swarm.

Twenty minutes later, they finally finished. He and Delphia were covered up to their shins in saw ant guts, the healer having copied Cayden’s technique of stomping on the monsters after the first few minutes of stabbing. Cayden was sure there were still some living ants hidden among the mass of monster-goop, but he wasn’t worried. On their own, the saw ants represented little threat.

Elise was on the edge of the mass of remains, dutifully collecting tiny experience crystals from each ant, and Cayden sighed. Individually, the crystals wouldn’t be worth much, but as a whole the swarm represented a small windfall. So, withholding his disgust, Cayden dropped to his knees and began retrieving crystals on the opposite side of the swarm’s remains from where Elise was working.

Delphia joined in with them, and for the next few minutes they worked in silence, buried up to their elbows in ant guts. Until the healers called out hesitantly.

“Um…Elise? Is that what I think it is?”

Cayden looked up from the paste that was the remains of three squished-together saw ants to see Delphia looking back at his friend. Her trail of retrieved experience crystals had led her back to where they had first encountered the saw ants at the base of the massive bed, and she was looking down at a brown mass that the original line of saw ants had been retrieving.

Elise stood and walked over, before exclaiming in happiness. “Oh! Good find, yeah, I can enchant something with this.” She paused, and then her voice changed. “Actually…Cayden, you might want to come look at this.”

Something in her voice caught Cayden’s attention, and he hurried across the floor to join his friend, only to freeze in place as he caught sight of what she and Delphia were looking at.

Cayden didn’t have [Inspect], and he would be hard pressed to identify enchanting materials from anything else normal in a dungeon – yet upon getting a better look of the brown mass, he immediately recognized it. A burning pit in his heart, an intrinsic part of Cayden yet somehow also separate, opened in yearning upon catching sight of the material.

After so long, he’d found some more [Primordial Mud].

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