A Jaded Life

If there was one good thing about this dungeon’s weirdness, it was the ideas it gave me. Almost every swarm we faced was composed of a different foe, mostly different critters but if a type repeated itself, the powers they had were different. There were the ordinary giant rats, sure, but there also were smaller rats that were infused with Lightning in a way that made me want to try replicating it, or the spiders using Darkness Magic to hide. Those were exterminated with the greatest of prejudices, that was my trick, but still, ideas were ideas.

I couldn’t wait to get out of the dungeon, where the beasts weren’t just dungeon-created constructs that I couldn’t really interact with, I wanted to try for myself what the dungeon was creating.

As I channelled a combination of Air and Fire magic, creating a fairly intense cone of burning air to scorch a swarm of skittering ants made of wood and vines, pl-ants so to speak, I was wondering where the dungeon was getting the blueprints from. Or at least the ideas, I couldn’t believe that an inanimate object could design something like that but that might just be due to my ignorance regarding the actual nature of dungeons. I had no real idea how they functioned, the best information I had in that regard came from the Grandmother who had, somehow, managed to create one for herself. Sadly, she hadn’t explained the process to me, for the obvious reasons that, at the time, I didn’t have the foundations to understand it. Even now, I was only working at understanding those foundations, with a long way to go.

But while dungeons were far beyond my current understanding, the creatures the dungeon produced didn’t have to be. The pl-ants might be, simply because I had no access to Nature Magic, but the Lightning Rats, the Fire Bugs and even the Water Spiders, those were all things I might be able to replicate with Luna’s help.

And so, even as we destroyed the various monsters with utmost efficiency, looting a fairly wide variety of weird things that remained behind after the bodies faded back into the dungeon’s walls, I was studying the critters, trying my best to catalogue their features, abilities and ways they might possibly function within my mind. I doubted I’d be able to recreate them all, but I was willing to try. Well, not for the Darkness Spiders, that was my trick and I wasn’t about to let some spidery critter have that trick, I might try making some ravens with the ability, or crows, but spiders? No, I had no desire to make such a thing.

During the time we were massacring our way through the dungeon, with a few breaks to recuperate our spent stamina and regenerate the wounds we inevitably suffered during the near-constant battles, we even came across the family of earthen rabbits that triggered the whole thing.

Curiously, it turned out they were some sort of mini-boss, at least that was what I had started to think of the encounters with less than ten enemies, simply due to their rarity and the interesting loot they left behind, though maybe I should have expected that. Any enemy that had the ability to block direct, magical attacks like my Mind Magic should be considered at least somewhat capable and given that the blocking was part of what was likely an even greater defensive ability, it only made sense.

There were six of these rabbits, all moving with the same, bounding leaps and all encased in the same earthen armour. Their movements, and especially the sound they made upon landing, gave away that they had far more mass than any creature their size should have, making the way they launched themself at us all the more threatening. It was one thing to get tackled by a rabbit the size of a dog, it was an entirely different thing if that rabbit was the size of a dog but had the weight of a small car. What’s more, when I launched an explorative attack, just a simple frozen Javelin to get an idea of what they could do, the spear shattered against their armour, driving home the point that it was quite effective against physical threats.

At that point, the battle dissolved into pure chaos, the rabbits were bounding around like balls in a particularly demented bouncy. castle, trying to squash, crush or tackle us in any way possible and the combination of weight and speed meant that we couldn’t even try to block. Sure, Silva might have been able to withstand the impact of one, if she went into her two-legged form and braced herself, but that’d only help against one, while there were six of them. Similarly, I might have been able to stop them if I had access to the Earth around me, or if the fight had happened on a convenient glacier, but limited to the material I could conjure? Dodging was the only viable way to deal with this battle, at least until we could whittle down their number to something manageable.

When I tried to shatter the earthen armour of a rabbit with a blast of Mind Magic, just as I had earlier, I was severely disappointed. Instead of cracking the shell like an egg, my attack only managed to shatter the outer layer, leaving the bunny still hopping, though with less mass than before. It was a success but not the one I had hoped for, so I had to keep going. Sadly, the success meant that suddenly, I was the priority target for the rabbits and they tried to crush me with abandon, forcing me to focus on dodging, shadow-stepping out of the way and generally simply surviving.

Their single-minded focus allowed the others a better shot at hurting them and a combination of an alchemical grenade from Alex, followed up with Lia’s trusty meat-hook sent one of them flying, its shell cracked and apparently brittle. As it was in the air, I realised that Lia hadn’t just sent it flying, she had pulled it towards her while launching herself at the rabbit, her cleaver already swinging forward. The result was a stumbling, spinning Lia, who had pushed all her weight and momentum into the strike and a dead rabbit, the shell shattered as blood was pouring from a massive wound.

With that, only five of them remained and as I had to dodge, I noticed that the one I had initially struck had its shell back to the original size, causing me to frown until I briefly blinked on my magical sight and felt my eyes widen. During the chaotic fight, Luna had somehow managed to get a few of her seeds on the rabbit and now, those seeds were within the armour and germinating, digging into the earthen shell and doing something. Suddenly, without any additional warning, the seeds exploded into plants, before crumbling away just as fast, making me blink in disbelief as the rabbit crumbled, somehow broken within its protective shell. I would have to ask Luna how she managed that, but later. For now, dodging remained the way to go but, thankfully, with only four rabbits remaining, I had a lot more space to move.

The next rabbit to fall went down to repeated blasts of Mind Magic, interspersed with physical attacks from Silva, the combined force enough to shatter its shell and let Silva sink her teeth into its neck and break it with a brutal shake of her head. At that point, I was fairly bruised from near-misses and tumbles I had to take during the fight but things were starting to look up, especially when Alex managed to get one of their explosives into the mouth of a rabbit. How they had done that, I had no idea but I wasn’t about to look an exploded rabbit in the mouth, the thing was as dead as dead could be and we only had two more to worry about.

Two of them, against five of us meant that we didn’t have to fight as defensively any longer. Instead, Silva went on her hind-legs, her entire body shifting, and she leapt forward, meeting one of the rabbits mid-air and stopping its momentum. Their entire strength was in the combination of weight and speed, so with it stopped, Silva started to go to town, her claws savaging the shell and repeated blows cracking it, while the rest of us focused on the other rabbit, using a combination of physical strikes and magical attacks to keep it off-balance and unable to help its compatriot.

As we were about to kill the rabbit, Silva let out a howl of triumph and suddenly, the rabbit we had been attacking shattered its shell, its entire body shivering and shifting in an ominous manner. Uncertain what it might try, I twisted the simple Mind Magic blow into something different, adding a dollop of Death Magic and activating Overflow to make the attack supremely powerful, strong enough to make it a visible beam of ominous, grey energy. The attack struck the rabbit and even as it tried leaping forward, its body crumbled, turning the deadly leap into a graceless tumble and ending the battle.