Dungeon’s Path

Jim and his team are a little irritated at the invisible maze from the last room but that quickly falls away when they see the next room. Jim slowly spins around to check if he missed something, but nothing has changed. The entire room was empty, the only thing out of place was a set of stairs that was hanging down from a hole on the other side of the room. Maybe if the stairs had been a rope ladder, the hanging adjective wouldn’t be so bad. Instead, it was just a short section of a staircase that stopped after only a couple meters.

Jim shakes his head, “In theory there should be a way to get up there.”

Susan squints at the stairs, “The system wouldn’t allow it not to have a way. Beyond that, though, this place had been quite strange. Maybe we have to figure out an invisible path that involves walking up the walls with any step out of place introducing us to a new down. Plus, we don’t really know how the system qualifies whether a room is traversable. Because, technically, if we could fly this wouldn’t even be a problem.”

Doctor shrugs, “I’m mostly certain that things will be to human standard, at least on this planet. If anything, the system should be judging it by the local people.”

Jim sighs, “Zach, I’m not going to ask you to walk into the unknown this time. I do however want you to use a few vines to get a ‘feel’ for the area around us. The space directly around the portal should be safe enough, but beyond that I feel there has to be something going on.”

Zach shrugs and summons up a bunch of vines and flings them outwards in a circle around the group. The vines going back and to the side land in a relatively normal fashion. Those thrown forward on the other hand, did everything besides what was expected.

As the vines tumble through the air, they start to warp and twist, seemingly growing shorter as they fall to the ground. Even once they have landed, they don’t stop moving, instead they begin to roll around on the seemingly flat ground.

Zach turns to the group, “Well, if any of you suffer from sea sickness, motion sickness, or VR sickness you likely won’t be too happy with this room. The good news is that the vines haven’t been damaged or altered so it should be safe enough. That also means this is likely the most aggressively spatial warping we’ve seen.

“Sure, the last room had a bunch of portals, but that is just 2D planes being connected or some such. Here? My bet is the entire area in front of us is warped. Like, instead of a 2D plane, it’s a cube or some such.”

Jay sighs, “And how are we supposed to navigate this mess?”

Susan shrugs and steps into the warped area. Behind her, the shocked group sees her body distort and stretch. Her appearance is a shocking match for the smear frames you might see in a claymation movie if you paused at the right time except it is all smear frames.

Jim roars at her, takes a step forward from the back of the group, and grabs her by the collar before dragging her back to the group. “WHAT DID I TELL YOU ABOUT RISKING YOUR LIFE LIKE THAT!?”

Susan takes a moment to realize what was going on before freezing as it catches up to her.

Doctor shakes his head, “Don’t be too hard on her. This isn’t exactly something recent. Now Susan, once we get out of here the both of us are going to have a talk involving me in a chair and you laid back on a couch. I would normally let people decide on their own whether they want to seek help, but we don’t really have that luxury anymore.

“In fact, Jim, when we get out of here I want you to talk with Jeremy and combine your two spy networks to rustle us up some trained psychologists. I’ll talk to Ace and make sure physical, mental, and even soul based check-ups are mandatory for all the core members. Hell, I’m going to make sure medical care can finally be free to all. At the very least, we should be able to sustain our own people and the town as a whole.”

Jim nods, “I always did hate how much of a bloodsucker the insurance companies were. Now, as much as I hate taking advantage of your situation, Susan, what did you see?”

Susan shakes herself and breathes out. “As you step into the distortion area, the warped terrain becomes visible. You can’t see too far, but what I did see makes me believe the area is basically mountainous terrain that has been warped so it looks flat.

“We are going to have a tough time climbing up to the stairs as I suspect the cliffs are actually taller than the apparent ceiling height would allow. That and there could be monsters hidden in there by the simple fact of being under an overhang or some such. What we see is very much like a satellite map of the room. Though even worse than that because the shadows don’t show up for some reason. They should, it isn’t like the light source is directly overhead, but here we are. Better to just assume the spatial nonsense also works on light in just the right way.”

The group talks about the room a little bit more, but soon enough are disappointing Doyle with their performance. Sure, Jay does get a bit motion sick while traversing the warped cliff and the goats almost managed to knock Sammy off when she blocked without quite a good enough of a footing. Still, Doyle had been expecting them to have a lot more trouble with the room as compared to other similar environments. Instead, the only real challenge the group faced was a simple act of climbing, something all of them had done a much tougher trial of back on the second floor’s cliff.

Then again, while the concept is quite interesting, it really boils down to hiding a cliff as flat ground. The cliff is still there and once a player is within the area, they can see it. So yeah, compared to a cliff that is literally taller than a person can physically climb, a cliff that acts like someone turned the render distance way down is nothing. All Doyle can hope is that future groups have more of a problem with it.

Though Doyle does consider removing the five goats from the room. While they could prove lethal, even with how powerful his goats are, they won’t be making a major difference to the room.

After the disappointment of the flat cliff room, the next three rooms are quite a bit more satisfying for Doyle.

At first, when Jim and his team arrive in the first of the three rooms, they aren’t too impressed. To be fair, it was a normal room without any spatial nonsense going on so comparatively it was easy to look down on it. Then they realized the only way forward was to climb up.

Though the three rooms were just as simple as the previous one so it didn’t take them too long. That is, it didn’t take too long if you discount the six assassin vine encounters and the elder guarding the exit. The only disappointment was that the room was so obvious that Jim and company knew exactly what to expect so even the first vine wasn’t a surprise.

That didn’t mean they weren’t effective. In fact, this was the most effective Doyle had ever seen the assassin vines be. Being ready for it, Jay was able to get his poleaxe between him and the vine that grappled him. That saved his life because the others found it quite hard to fight back while holding onto a vine so they wouldn’t fall to the floor.

In the end, Jim ended up descending to what little floor there was on the second floor and using his bow and arrow. While arrows might not seem like the best option for fighting a vine, the fact that assassin vines work mostly off of pneumatics means that a hole in a vine can go a long way towards disabling said vine.

Of course, with such an obvious weakness, the assassin vines aren’t completely defenseless against such things. With each pierced vine, sap soon flows out and hardens to plug the hole. Still, the damaged vines weren’t quite as flexible and prone to spring leaks.

Then they fought the elder assassin vine. By that point, they had already figured out their strategy so Jim had stayed on what little ground that wasn’t a hole. The problem was that he positioned himself directly under the exit, not quite realizing just how long the elder vines could reach.

With a couple vines of a length three times that of the normal vines, it was able to reach out and touch him. A touch that quickly turns into a grapple as Jim finds himself yanked into the air. Maybe if he had been on more solid ground, he could have resisted it. Instead, the elder vine was simply able to yank him to the side, which had Jim falling into a hole before being pulled up.

This led to the group’s first serious loss, not in life, but in equipment. Jim tried to use his bow to hold off the elder vine. This actually worked quite well. After all, it isn’t like he was using a weak bow. Rather, the opposite, in fact, with only dungeon loot currently outclassing it.

So the bow held up under the pressure of one of the long vines. Once the elder assassin vine noticed this, though, it had an answer. And so the second of its long vines came in and grasped the bow itself and flexed. The bow, already stressed from the first vine, snaps under the assault.

Jim, now deprived of his main defense, is suddenly in a lot more danger. Well, he would have been if the elder vine hadn’t been so focused on snapping the bow. The others in turn were able to approach the monster and while his bow had been decent at hindering the vines, Jay’s poleaxe and Sammy’s sword were quite capable of chopping through the normal vines, completely removing them from the equation.

So the elder assassin vine was defeated, but Jim was now down his main weapon. Sure, he had some melee options. That didn’t change the fact that while the others weren’t sure, it was safe to assume most of his skills weren’t helping with that. Still, they decide to continue exploring the floor. Though that mostly had to do with not being sure how much more of the floor there was left to explore.

That is, they had wanted to do that, but noped right out as soon as they found out the theme for the next room. A zero G environment was too dangerous without someone focused on ranged combat and so the group could only turn around with plans to come back once Jim got a new bow.

This wouldn’t be the next day or even the one after, as the bow would need to be made from scratch. Not that Jim had been using the same bow all this time. No, as one of the premier defenders of the city, the crafters had been hooking him up with any upgrades that came through.

That, however, didn’t mean there were any spares around. Most of the wood carvers had focused on spears to arm the small but growing group of people in the outer ring who were a mix of guards and militia. It wasn’t quite official yet, but Ace was planning on purchasing a town guard charter from the system. A useful bit of recognition from the system that would allow them to use certain peacekeeping features such as making their jail resistant to most skills as long as they are being used by someone less powerful than whichever guard is on watch.