System Escape, page 6
“Not to speak ill of the dead, but I'm guessing I know why this Safe Zone got taken down,” Felicia said.
“It's possible. We didn't like it either, but the professors said that the teams could handle themselves and should have autonomy in their own Safe Zones.”
Marc shook his head.
“Stupid...” he muttered softly, then raised his voice.
“Alright, let's go in.”
Rob took a step in, then another step. With the third Marc heard Rob's foot as he pulled it off of the floor, a slurping sticky noise. Rob just groaned and took another step into the room before checking and making sure it really was clear of opponents.
“No-one in here,” Rob said, “but watch out for the floor if you don't want to lose your shoes.”
Marc thought he was exaggerating until he stepped in himself, right behind Chris, then he found himself wiggling each foot a couple of times before lifting it, the wiggling breaking the seal that might otherwise pull his shoes right off of his feet.
“Assuming there's nothing on the other side of that door to fight, we'll stop and I'll get this crap off of our shoes then,” he said. “Because if it sticks at all, I'd hate to be fighting and have my shoe not come off the floor.”
Rob grinned and nodded vigorously. Then he made his way straight to the door on the other side of the room. With Marc behind him and the rest of the group making their way across the room, Rob flung the door open to reveal a set of stairs leading down into darkness.
* * *
Once everyone had made it over to the door, Marc focused on his Cleanse spell, using it to clean the crap off the soles of all their shoes. The whole effort took a good forty mana or so, but he wasn't too worried. That much would regenerate quickly, especially if they didn't get into any combat right away.
“Let's head down, Rob,” Marc said.
Rob headed down with Chris right behind him. The stairway was technically wide enough for two people side by side, but it would make it difficult to fight if they ran into any opponents.
As they were headed down the stairs, Marc heard Jeff spit, then the sound of a plastic cup hitting the floor.
“Damn it, love in a canoe beer,” Jeff said.
“What are you talking about?” Todd asked.
“What do they teach you kids nowadays?” Jeff replied.
Marc barely resisted snickering. Jeff was only two or three years older than Todd, so the comment had just struck Marc as amusing.
Todd had said something or made a gesture, so Jeff continued.
“You know, love in a canoe? Fucking close to water?” he said.
Todd snorted once, then Marc felt the need to get them back on track.
“You know, guys, we are in a dungeon. Maybe stay focused here?” Marc said.
“Yeah, right,” Jeff said. “It's just goblins. They're nothing.”
A moment later a low growl came from somewhere further into the dungeon. It was so low pitched and so loud that it had to be coming from something much larger than a goblin.
“You had to say something, didn't you?” Derrick said once the echoes of the growl faded away. “Murphy is our shepherd, and he wants us to grow stronger. You tempt him like that and he'll almost always respond.”
“Murphy?” Todd asked.
I guess he really might be as sheltered as Jeff suggested, Marc thought.
“You know, Murphy, of Murphy's Law?” he said.
Marc's comment was greeted with a soft “Oh” from Todd, and then they were continuing down the steps.
Rob reached the bottom of the stairs and stopped, holding his index finger to his lips as he looked back at the group. After a few moments of silence, he nodded to Marc then pointed to the door.
“Spawns?” Marc asked softly.
Rob nodded.
“We'll go through in a rush,” Marc replied. “You and Chris take about ten steps into the hallway. If there's anyone that close, take them down first, then continue out so we have room for the rest of the group. Defend that point, and the Mages and Jeff's missiles can probably clear the rest.”
Rob nodded, then took a deep breath. He looked around the group and apparently decided that everyone was ready. His ax vanished into his inventory, and his shield was ready to slam into the door. His free hand went up and he raised three fingers, then lowered the first, the second, and as soon as the third one was down he slammed into the door with his shield, breaking it from its hinges and sending it flying into the corridor.
* * *
Rob charged through the doorway with Chris right behind him. The rest of the group started to file in, but had to pause for a moment as the sounds of combat came from just through the doorway. A few seconds later, the rest of the group managed to make it into the hall.
The door had apparently removed a couple of goblins on its own since parts of them were still clinging to it. There had been a hobgoblin and a few more goblins just inside the hallway but Rob and Chris had removed them quickly. Now Marc found himself staring down a long hallway at a group of about twenty goblins and five hobgoblins. There were several of them wearing the regalia suggesting that they were casters.
As Marc scanned their opponents, Chris' pilum went flying down the hallway to end one of the goblins. Marc had almost forgotten that Chris was a Legionary and was still using his original equipment, so seeing the pilum startled him for a moment.
“Target casters first,” Marc called, then began a Mana Dart spell.
He knew that four darts would be overkill for any one goblin, so he split his four darts into two groups of two, each targeted on one of the goblin caster types. As his darts flew down the hallway he heard Todd again.
“How do you know which is which?”
Ella was casting a spell of her own, so Jeff answered.
“The ones wearing the mystical froufrou, you know, feathers and shit like that.”
“Oh,” Todd said, then started casting his own spell.
Only one of the opposing casters got a spell off soon enough. A small Fireball raced out of one of the hobgoblin caster's hands to impact on Rob's shield. Rob just shrugged the damage off though. As far as Marc knew, Rob had even more health than he did, and Marc knew that he himself had what he considered a ludicrous amount of health.
Rob was stalking down the corridor, ax swinging from side to side in front of his shield, by the time Marc got another spell off. This time he let all four darts from his Mana Dart spell hit the hobgoblin that had cast the Fireball. It went down before Rob even hit the front line of goblins.
Jeff was feathering the back row of hobgoblins with arrows from his bow after he discovered that a few of them had spears to throw and Chris was right behind Rob, but to the far side of the corridor, out of the arc of Rob's ax swings.
Derrick actually beat Felicia to getting a heal on Rob after the Fireball, but it was close. Between the two healer types Rob was back to full health before he hit the goblins, and hit them he did.
He must've gotten some new skill, Marc thought, Because he's cleaving through multiple goblins with single swings. I didn't think that was possible.
Chris, off to the side, was having a bit more of a problem. There were four goblins attacking him, and they had him pinned to the wall. Marc dropped another Mana Dart spell that way, split between two of them, and Chris rapidly dropped a third. With just one goblin in front of him, his advance was no longer stalled and he quickly caught up to Rob.
The entire fight lasted less than five minutes and even the hobgoblin that had evidently been in charge of the rest went down fast. It was wearing crudely tanned hide armor, something the rest had been missing, but it did little to protect against the party's attacks.
Once the hallway was cleared Jeff practically skipped around, looting every corpse he could.
“Until today, it has been far too long since I've gotten to loot things,” Jeff said.
The rest of the party looted what they could as well and once they were done, the hallway was clear again except for the broken door and bloodstains.
“So, where to?” Rob asked.
There were five other doors in the hallway, very similar to the makeup of the dungeon they'd done once before. Marc assumed that the doorway at the end of the hall would lead down to the next level and was thinking that with the low threat level of what they'd seen so far that they might want to drive straight down to the bottom of the dungeon and destroy it. He brought the idea up with the party, but they couldn't come to an agreement.
“Alright then, I'm just going to open that door and make sure it does lead to a staircase like I suspect. If not, then it's all a moot point, right?” Marc said.
Jeff darted down first, getting to the door before Marc could and shooing him back.
“Did you forget that dungeons can have traps on their doors?” Jeff asked.
Marc shook his head, mainly in annoyance with himself because he'd actually done what Jeff had accused him of. He watched as Jeff fiddled with the door for a moment then checked the edges of the door.
“It's clear now,” Jeff said stepping back.
Marc opened the door and looked inside. Instead of the staircase he'd been expecting, the door opened into a massive room. The ceiling was easily thirty feet high and the diameter of the room had to exceed eighty feet. It was lit by something he couldn't see and there were plants and trees scattered amidst the boulders that rested on the floor. Marc was drawn from his examination of the room by movement. What he'd thought was a rock, wasn't. It was moving, and as it turned to face him he froze.
The creature's skin was the same gray as the rocks on the floor with maybe a hint of blue to it, but its shape was like that of the ogres they'd killed in the hills near The Mine. The biggest difference was the spiraling horn that rose from its forehead, the horn that had flickers of light racing up and down it, growing brighter with each pass.
* * *
Chapter Five
Marc reacted quickly, shutting the door, but not before Jeff muttered a faint.
“Oh, shit!”
Once he had the door shut, Marc turned to Jeff.
“Oh, shit?” he asked.
“Yeah, ogre mages. I got a quick Analyze off while you had the door open. I saw four of them, you?”
“I was mainly focused on the one that turned to look at me, but there were a few others. It could've been four total,” Marc replied.
The door behind them gave off a loud slam and when Marc turned, he saw that the center of the wooden door was cracking, after what was apparently a single blow from the ogre mage.
“Alright guys, problem. This is definitely not a staircase and we've got some company on the other side,” Marc said.
Jeff took up the thread when Marc paused.
“Ogre mages, level thirteen, and obviously they're magic using. There are a least four of them, maybe more. So, how do we handle this?” Jeff asked, looking back at Marc.
Todd's sotto voce reply was obviously not meant to be heard, but he'd managed to make it in one of those gaps where no-one else was speaking.
“We could always just run away and leave.”
Jeff snorted out loud.
“They aren't that bad, they're close to my level and the rest of our primary group.”
“I was curious about something,” Derrick said, the end of his sentence punctuated by another slam on the door that made him flinch.
“Yes?” Marc asked.
“Well, we haven't seen any of those things outside of the dungeon, why not?”
Marc thought for a moment.
“I'm not sure, but I can think of a few possibilities. Let's get set up for a fight and I'll talk while we arrange ourselves.”
Marc interspersed his theories with getting people set up and suggesting actions for the coming fight.
“It might be that the dungeon has a limit to the levels it can have inside of it or something. It forces out the lower levels to replace them with higher ones. That sounds reasonable to me, but I can't say for sure.”
About then the door was slammed off its hinges by the ogre mage. Rob had been waiting for that, though, and when the door flew into the hallway, he simply absorbed the impact on his shield then pushed the door into a corner from where it had ended up in the middle of the hall.
Marc laughed out loud as he stepped up and cast his anti-magic shield.
“Are you crazy?” Todd asked. “You're a Mage and you're going to tank? And you're laughing about it?”
“No, I'm not laughing about that. I just realized another reason they might be in here. They can't fit through the doorway.”
Marc made sure the rest of his protective spells were up before he started to enter the room, but the ogre mage who had destroyed the door was back a bit, having moved into the room after the door was gone. Now it tilted its head and a burst of bluish-white light raced from its horn to a point a few inches in front of it. From that point a cone of snowflakes and hoarfrost spread out, filling the air with white. When it struck Marc he felt as though he were flash frozen and unable to move. As the feeling passed, his body flooded with relief at the returning warmth, although his limbs felt as though they'd been bludgeoned with massive icicles.
“Well, shit. Looks like environment changing spells counts as environmental damage, not magical,” he managed to say as he brought out his shield from his inventory.
A moment later his body was flashing with different colored lights, golden from Felicia and a blue-green from Derrick. With two healers working on him his wounds healed at a rapid pace. While they did, he stepped back through the doorway and to one side, out of sight of any of the ogre mages.
* * *
A moment later they were headed back into the room, this time with Rob in the lead. As the tank passed through the door he had to shift his shield slightly to not clip the splintered door frame. Rob had his ax out as soon as he was in there and with a roar, charged the ogre mage that had frozen Marc.
Chris slipped through quickly, his shield significantly smaller than Rob's, and Marc was right behind him. Chris turned to face the side with a single ogre mage while Marc turned to face the remaining pair. Todd and Ella were leaning into the room, casting spells to support Rob on the one he was attacking. Marc, meanwhile, had determined that fighting fire with fire, or in this case frost with fire, might be the best idea and he'd moved his gladius to his shield hand and began to cast.
With his options being between an adapted Mana Dart of the flame flavor, a Fireball, or a Flamethrower spell, he'd chosen the Flamethrower. The two ogre mages he was facing weren't close enough together to get a Fireball to engulf both, but they were certainly in the area he could sweep a Flamethrower spell through.
And since it's channeled, if it's highly effective I can just leave it running on one of them, he thought.
He targeted the Flamethrower on one of them and, once the flames had struck the ogre mage and set it aflame, he swept it to the other one. As he did, the second ogre mage seemed to shimmer and was replaced with a cloud of greenish mist. Marc swept the flames over it anyway and was almost distracted by watching the roiling of the mists, the motion suggesting pain to him in some fashion.
Fortunately he wasn't entirely distracted, because a glimmer of white caught his eye. He turned to face the ogre mage he'd burnt first and found it with its head lowered, its horn pointing towards him and shimmering with the same light that the first of the ogre mages had shown before striking him with the burst of cold and frost.
“Watch out, another one of those frost attacks is coming,” Marc cried, once he realized that the area of effect might include Rob, Chris or even both.
Rob yelled a moment later, just as the frost was released from the horn of the ogre mage. Rob's yell was accompanied by a Shield Bash that took his opponent off of its feet and allowed him to advance towards the temporarily stunned ogre mage and get out of the way of the frost attack.
Marc pivoted his Flamethrower spell to intercept the cone of frost and managed to mostly counteract the section that had been going to strike him, Chris wasn't as lucky though.
With a cry of pain, the Legionary tank went down. Derrick was there as soon as the frost dissipated, dragging Chris out of the room. At the same time, Todd and Ella were bombarding Chris' opponent with spells. Marc saw that all out of the corner of his eye before deciding that he really needed to close with at least one of the ogre mages on him so they couldn't use that attack without potentially harming each other.
Marc dropped the Flamethrower spell that was eating his mana, then advanced towards the one that had just attacked him with the frost. While he did, he cast another spell targeting the ogre mage that was still in gaseous form. Having never expected to find a use for it in combat, Marc was grinning as he cast his Wind Stream spell, sending the gaseous cloud swirling up into the air and to the far end of the room.
That ought to give me some space, and a little time, to work on this guy, he thought.
He sheathed his gladius, unsure how well the smaller weapon would work here, and cast one more time, wrangling the Water Jet base spell into the fire blade version he'd created, pulling the sword hilt he used to anchor the spell from his inventory.
Then he attacked. The ogre mage was obviously surprised by the physical attack, which sort of made sense since Marc had led with attack spells. The first strike took the ogre mage in the leg, cutting deeply before Marc withdrew the weapon.
Worried about the ogre mage Chris had been fighting, since there was no longer a tank keeping it in place, Marc glanced back for a moment. He suffered for it as the ogre mage attacked with a weapon Marc hadn't noticed. It would've been a pole arm for a human, but the ogre mage was swinging it one-handed.
Marc managed to interpose his shield, but he was sent reeling back, almost losing his feet. He had managed to notice that the ogre mage Chris had been fighting was down, Jeff standing behind the corpse and gloating.
Good, now it's only three on us, but I lost track of the one that went gaseous, he thought.
