[Chapter 107. Sward]
Iris watched the group from her position in the rear, her massive blade still dragging through the packed earth with a low, grating sound that vibrated through the floor. She offered no intervention, no words of encouragent, and no tactical advice. She simply observed with the detached, clinical interest of a predator watching its young learn to hunt.
`Good. Those initial encounters were rely the dungeon's bottom feeders. Simple Carapace Crawlers shouldn't trouble a team at their current levels, even with their lack of coordination. Not yet, at least.`
The claustrophobic tunnel walls began to pull back gradually as they progressed deeper into the burrow, the ceiling lifting bit by bit until they could finally stand perfectly straight. Lana was the first to take advantage of the space, her lean, armored body uncoiling with a long, tremulous sigh that seed to carry the accumulated tension of the cramped passage. Vanessa, with her greater height had to endure the hunched posture for several monts longer before she too could finally straighten her spine. A grimace of intense relief crossed her face as several joints in her back cracked audibly in the silence of the cavern.
Iris shifted the weight of her massive Zweihänder onto her shoulder, the movent fluid and effortless. The oppressive, heavy silence that followed the absence of the scraping tal on stone felt sohow more ominous than the noise itself.
Lana paused and passed the unlit torch to Sarah, who fumbled in her belt pouch for a cheap, plastic lighter they had scavenged from the tower’s modern supplies. The grease-soaked cloth took several frustrating monts to catch, the fla flickering and sputtering weakly before finally taking a firm hold on the fuel. It flared into life instantly, producing a brilliant, flickering orange light that belched thick, acrid plus of black smoke into the stagnant air. The overwhelming stench of burning, rendered grease filled the tunnel, sharp and unpleasant to their unaccustod nostrils.
Their eyes stung and watered as they tried to adjust to the sudden, jarring brightness of the open fla. Despite the irritation, they moved on, deeper into the dark.
`More light, yet less actual visibility.` Iris noted silently. The thought was a flat, objective observation. The torch's aggressive glare effectively blinded the won to the subtler details of their environnt; the faint, bioluminescent purple glow of the deeper cave fungi was completely lost beneath the overwhelming, artificial radiance of the fire.
She said nothing to correct them. She simply followed.
They reached the first major chamber so ti later, their pace remaining a cautious, deliberate crawl through the oppressive darkness that lay just beyond the reach of the torchlight. The tunnel’s dim, flickering glow gave away their approach long before they actually entered the space. As they finally crossed the threshold into the chamber, the residentVenom Lasher was already coiled and waiting on the stone floor. Its long, barbed tail whipped through the air with a predatory hiss before Lana had even fully cleared the entrance.
The sheer force of the impact threw Lana backward. Her heavy boots carved deep furrows through the compacted dirt of the floor as she dug her heels in, bracing against the kinetic energy of the strike. She recovered with surprising speed, planting her feet firmly and pushing back into the chamber with her shield held high and her center of gravity low.
Vanessa remained stationed at the tunnel entrance, her hands already weaving intricate, glowing patterns in the air as a complex spell array began to form. Sarah hugged the jagged stone wall, her movents fluid and cat-like as she tried to circle around the beast's flank. However, the creature's imnse length made effective positioning difficult; its thick, segnted body blocked almost every viable angle of attack in the narrow chamber.
"Greater Venom Lasher!" Carn's voice cut through the rhythmic clash of steel on chitin. She had recognized the subspecies imdiately. "Watch the tail glands. Assu every strike carries a paralytic poison."
The battle initially flowed in their favor. Lana absorbed the heavy blows with practiced ease, her shield becoming the focal point of the beast's aggression. This allowed Vanessa's arcane bolts and Sarah's daggers to find their marks with increasing frequency. The creature’s chitin cracked and splintered under the relentless assault, staining the stone floor with gouts of black, viscous ichor.
Vanessa leaned into her role as an Astral Arcanist. Each spell she cast—each bolt of concentrated arcane force that slamd into the Venom Lasher—left behind a faint, glowing mote of energy that lingered in the air. As her casting rhythm intensified, these motes began to pulse with a life of their own, firing their own smaller, autonomous projectiles at the creature. The Lasher thrashed and hissed under the combined assault, its armored plates cracking under the barrage. These residual orbitals, a unique side effect of her specific class, added a constant, secondary layer of damage that the beast couldn't anticipate.
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Then ca a new sound—a series of wet, rhythmic popping noises, one after another, echoing from the ceiling above. A viscous, foul-slling fluid began to rain down on the group as dozens of smaller versions of the beast dropped from the hanging ceiling roots. Their soft, wet bodies hit the ground with sickening thuds.
`Now, let's see how you handle a true swarm.` Iris thought. She took a deliberate step back toward the shadows, her hand tightening slightly on the hilt of her Zweihänder, though she made no move to help.
Lana's eyes widened as the smaller creatures began to pour down like a living carpet of chitin. A cry escaped her lips—a sound laced with fear but tempered with steel—as she activated her Sepulchral Anchor. Her shield expanded with a ghostly light, and every head of the swarm turned toward her as the skill’s taunt took hold.
Sarah's daggers beca blurs of motion, slicing through carapace after carapace with surgical precision. But for every small Lasher that fell, two more seed to crawl out of the shadows to take its place. Vanessa fired two high-powered bolts into the writhing mass before quickly shifting her primary focus back to the Greater Lasher. She recognized the tactical inefficiency of wasting her limited mana on the smaller, endless threats while the primary damage dealer was still upright.
The swarm eventually reached Lana. She held her ground with gritted teeth, but there were simply too many of them. They began climbing her legs, crawling up her back, and swarming her shoulders. Their collective weight began to press her down as dozens of tiny claws and mandibles sought purchase in the gaps of her armor. Her shield was indeed an anchor, but the rising sea of bodies threatened to drown her beneath their weight.
Carn's hands glowed with a constant, warm healing light. Her spells washed over Lana in waves, even as the smaller Lashers bit and stung at the tank's exposed skin. Each pulse of magical energy sought to neutralize the poison, but the physical damage continued to accumulate at an alarming rate.
Finally, the Greater Lasher crashed to the ground with a final, rattling hiss. Vanessa's final bolt had punched a smoking hole directly through its primary head-plate.
Yet, even as the larger beast died, the smaller ones continued their frenzied assault. Sarah fought in a whirlwind of steel and fury, her daggers finding targets with relentless, desperate precision. Suddenly, a massive shockwave of kinetic energy erupted from Lana, throwing the entire swarm back and scattering the creatures across the chamber. The brief respite, however, lasted only a few seconds before the survivors regrouped and surged forward once more.
Vanessa and Carn could only watch in horror as Lana disappeared beneath the tide of chitinous bodies again. Sarah was the sole remaining barrier between Lana and the possibility of being buried alive by the vermin.
Sarah moved like a professional dancer in a slaughterhouse, her daggers weaving through the writhing mass. It took several precious, agonizing minutes—each one feeling like an eternity of Lana's choked cries and Carn's frantic, desperate healing—before the very last crawler finally fell, its legs twitching in the dirt.
A heavy silence descended upon the chamber, broken only by Lana's ragged, wheezing breathing. She stared down at the ring of dead, broken bodies surrounding her boots, their shattered shells glistening wetly in the flickering orange torchlight.
"That... that can't be real," Lana whispered, her voice sounding raw and hollow. "Carn... thank you."
"Don't even ntion it," Carn replied, her own voice strained and thin. "I need a break. Imdiately. I'm almost completely dry on mana."
"Maybe you should be the one to carry the torch for a while," Lana said, turning to face the group. She held the burning brand out, her hands trembling visibly from the aftereffects of the adrenaline. "I would feel significantly safer with my sword hand free. Just drop it if you need both hands to heal us again."
The floor of the chamber was now dangerously slick with black ichor. Each step they took was a calculated risk as they navigated toward the far side of the room, their boots slipping in the viscous, cooling fluid.
`They did better than I had expected.` Iris thought, her expression remaining entirely unchanged. `Which is to say, it still took them far too long to resolve a simple encounter.` She activated herBlade Step, vanishing from her position in the rear and reappearing at the chamber's exit in a silent, turquoise flash. `I had honestly expected at least one of them to have a full-blown panic attack by now.`
Carn drove the base of the torch into the soft dirt near the exit, testing its stability before leaning heavily against the dirt wall and sliding down to sit. "I saw the dungeon run Searanox did with us previously," she said softly, pulling her knees to her chest. "There were many beasts there as well. But seeing it from the entrance—and fighting for your life yourself—it's entirely different. How did you stay so calm, Lana?"
Lana sat down heavily beside her, placing her shield between her legs. "Panicking would have only made the situation worse," she said, reaching out to gently stroke Carn's back in a gesture of solidarity. "It was only physical pain I had to endure. I knew you had my back, and I knew that Sarah was dealing with the ones I couldn't reach." She paused, her voice dropping into a lower, more somber register. "I just had to stand there and take it."
Vanessa crouched before them, checking her own gear. "We just need a mont to rest and recover our mana pools. We haven't actually lost anything yet." She rose back to her full height, turning her gaze toward the shadows where Iris stood. "And since Iris hasn't intervened or criticized us yet, I'd say we're doing alright."
Carn looked up, her tired eyes finding Iris standing nearby with her usual mask of cold detachnt. "Is it alright if we take a thirty-minute break here?"
Iris simply gave a short, sharp nod, her face betraying nothing of her internal assessnt.
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