Godsforsaken

Chapter 19: Second Floor

“They are what?!" Annabella demanded as we stood in front of the throne room.

“I apologize, your highness," the steward said, “but both the king and queen are unavailable. They were called to negotiate an important treaty with the king of Albion.”

“Why is it happening so soon?" Annabella demanded.

“As I understand it, King Mordred of Albion insisted the treaty be signed imminently and has come from Albion himself to make sure," the steward said. “If the matter is time-critical I can take a message and pass it on for you, your highness.”

Annabella bit her lip in concentration. We had come here to inform the queen of the assassination attempt last night but with her out that complicated matters. I wanted badly to tell Annabella not to tell the steward anything since we couldn't be sure who he would talk to but I knew the princess was smart enough to figure it out on her own.

“It is not so urgent that we need to leave a message," Annabella told the steward to my relief, “but the issue is that we are going to be traversing the dungeon for the foreseeable future.”

“If you wish, once her majesty returns I can send a messenger to wait at the dungeon entrance to inform you of her return," the steward suggested.

Annabella shook her head. “The only messenger who could be trusted with a task like that would be a member of the royal guard and given that mother and father never leave the city without a guard detail the royal guard in the capital is going to be short-staffed. We cannot afford to reduce the peacekeeping forces even further. We will speak to my mother when we have returned from the dungeon.”

“As you wish, your highness," the steward said. “I wish you good fortune in the dungeon.”

**

“Well that was a bust," Selene commented as we left the throne room. “What now?”

“Now we're going into the city to sell our loot and to get some water-elemental weapons commissioned," I said, then looked over to Alisha.

The elf seemed to have her head in the clouds, the way she usually got the day after having amazing sex. Yume looked to be a combination of smug and satisfied and I was honestly dying to know what they'd done last night. But if I asked, they would doubtlessly ask how our night went. Not that there was much to keep secret, mind. Annabella was very touchy-feely compared to her previous behavior and it was honestly really cute to see her like this, sharing little touches here and there and smiling much more than before. Though at the same time I also noticed her looking over her shoulder a lot more. Understandable after one of her siblings had tried to murder her, but it still hurt to see.

So after our mission in the palace ended up a failure we got our preparations done, selling lots of stuff and commissioning gear made of the water-elemental metal of the dungeon. Even after commissioning expensive magical equipment and paying in advance, just our earnings from the first floor would see us through plenty of long winters and purely for that reason I was already excited to see just how lucrative the lower floors would get.

Once we were as prepared as we were going to get we headed back to the dungeon entrance, where we used the teleporter to get us straight back to the treasure room at the end of the first floor, just steps away from the stairs leading to the second floor.

We walked down the stairs and arrived in a forest clearing.

Deep and thick underbrush made it almost impossible to walk into the woods themselves, but the clearing stretched out into a path ahead of us. The path was covered in flowers and it took me a little while to realize that all of them looked just a bit off, all of them not quite matching the flowers of our world. They didn't look dangerous or poisonous or anything, they just looked like they belonged to another world, which they probably did if even half of our theories about the dungeons were true.

As with the previous floor there was a very high ceiling of light blue crystal that gave its best impression of a sky, but unlike the last floor this one had huge crystal growths dotted around the place, some of them pillars that stretched all the way to the ceiling, and I wondered whether that was an aesthetic choice or whether the pillars were actually necessary to support the structure. Honestly I doubted it was the latter one, because if the cultists just wanted to stir up trouble they would have just broken down those pillars if that were the case. If their goal was to cause damage, then I couldn't imagine anything worse than just sending the Crystal Crown crashing into the capital.

“It's gorgeous," Alisha whispered as she looked between the crystal growths and the flowers and I couldn't disagree. Especially the way some of the trees had crystal covering parts of their trunks looked amazing.

“I don't trust this place," Selene muttered. “Are those flowers safe?”

Annabella nodded. “The flowers are safe. There's lots here that wants to kill us, but the flowers are safe.”

“Anything like the monster fish?" I asked and pointed at the woods that were clearly not meant to be traversed.

“Yes," the princess said. “There are these huge monsters, sort of a cross between a gorilla and a deer, with stone masks for faces and bones made of granite, that stalk the woods off the path. There is one spot about halfway through where they can break through the underbrush and attack us even if we stay on the path, but they're much less dangerous here than they would be out there.”

“Got it," I said. “What about the other monsters?”

“The most common type is a moss-covered Golem," Annabella said. “The moss layer makes them resistant to clubs and hammers and they're so damp that fire has a hard time drying them out enough to burn the moss layer off.”

“Sounds tough," I said.

“Not really," she said. “What most people don't get is that they're mostly made of clay underneath, so you can cut them up quite easily.” I nodded in understanding. “Other than those, there's something that looks like a spriggan.”

I winced as Yume and Selene asked:

“A what?”

“They're evil Fae," Alisha explained. “They're humanoids made of thorny vines coiled together. Tough, mean and poisonous.”

“Right," Annabella said. “Except the ones in this dungeon are made of a really weird substance that looks like wood and flexes like wood but is as hard as rock. They're not poisonous, but their spikes are barbed and will tear you up if they hit you.”

“Great," I said and rummaged through my bag of holding to make sure my mace was close at hand. “Anything else?”

“No, that's it," Annabella said. “The enemies here are stronger and more aggressive than on the first floor, but they don't use defensive structures. This floor is also significantly shorter than the last and we should be through it within two days, three if we take every rest spot on the way.”

I nodded. “Alright then, let's get to it.”

**

As Annabella had said, the enemies here were tougher but less organized. They appeared first as single enemies and then as small groups, going up from one to two, then three, and the last encounter of our first day actually had six of the stone spriggans.

Of the two enemy types we encountered the spriggans were definitely more trouble. The Golems were big and scary but every one of us was able to damage them. Alisha's air lances skewered them with ease, Selene's ice miracles tore them up and her sword bit into them easily and Annabella and me had little trouble cutting them apart. Yume had more issues since her blade was so light but she made up for it with her speed and her Qi techniques.

The spriggans meanwhile were the real problem. They weren't quite as tough as rock, but they were still all but impervious to sword attacks. Yume quickly gave up and put her sword away and began punching them with Qi techniques and after a bit of practice Annabella was able to turn her crystal sword into a crystal club that she used to bash their heads in. Alisha could only hurt them with her tornado lances and those were so slow to cast that she only got to fire off one at the start of each engagement and Selene was all but helpless against them until I lent her a spare mace I'd picked up for just such an emergency.

But even despite all that we didn't really have trouble until we encountered the big team.

A string of easy victories had caused us to relax a little so when we saw two of the spriggans up ahead we already had a pretty clear idea of how to approach them. Alisha started charging up a tornado lance and was about to let loose when a shriek sounded from right behind us and we turned out to find two more spriggans about to pounce on us. Alisha panicked and let loose her tornado lance against one of the attackers, but between the shriek and the sound of her tornado lance shredding through a being made from something like stone the two we had been trying to sneak up on noticed us.

The one Alisha had hit was badly hurt but not quite dead, missing almost a third of its body and oozing the viscous black liquid they had instead of blood, and Selene jumped in to engage it just as Yume took on the other attacker, charging a Qi Burst into a punch. Under normal circumstances punching a being made of stone with a Qi Burst would have shattered all the bones in her arm but she also knew a technique called Qi Hardening that allowed her to momentarily toughen up her body to withstand blows like that. But I couldn't watch their fight since Annabella and I had to turn away and hold off the two we had been trying to ambush.

I channeled Qi into a strike and let loose just as a spriggan was about to reach me. The mace descended at blistering speed and I barely felt the resistance as I hit the spriggan's head, crushing it into gravel without slowing. The mace sank several inches into the ground and it took me a moment to pull it free, but that was fine since the spriggan was already dead, its entire head just a handful of stone shards my mace had pounded into the ground. The body twitched for another few seconds before it collapsed backwards.

I turned around to help Annabella with her opponent when the thorny appendage of another spriggan hit me in the back.

As Annabella had warned, getting hit by them hurt like crazy. It wasn't just a fist-sized rock smacking you in the back at speeds, the rock was also covered in long spikes covered in tiny barbs. My leather armor was just barely enough to keep the spikes from puncturing more than my skin but it still hurt. However, my first thought wasn't actually about how much it hurt, it was worry for Yume, Selene and Alisha. If the spriggans had gotten past them, what had happened to my girls?

I shook it off. There was no way the girls would go down without me noticing and so I gritted my teeth, ignored the pain and spun around to hit the spriggan that had struck me right in the head with a two-handed swing of the mace. As my weapon collided with the creature's head I finally saw what was going on. Yume and Selene were still fighting the two spriggans they had engaged and we had been ambushed by yet two more. One of them I had just struck but the other one Alisha was trying her best to hold off as it was standing against her magic, trying to strike Yume in the back while she was busy pummeling her opponent with fists wreathed in Qi.

I felt a growl bubble up in my throat and raised my mace high above my head before I brought it down on top of the still disoriented spriggan who had attacked me. Once that bastard was dead I charged a Qi Projection as I raised my mace again and then brought it down on thin air. The strike itself didn't hit anything but the Qi Projection transferred the same force of impact two feet forward to hit the spriggan Alisha was keeping in check with her magic, crashing down on top of its head and shattering it.

Alisha nodded her gratitude and then immediately began chanting her healing miracle. Clearly she'd seen the spriggan hurt me but had been too busy to do anything about it. Now freed up it only took her a moment to get back into her chanting and as I turned around to help Annabella with her fight I felt the miracle wash over me and heal my wounds.

Annabella was struggling. She was pretty good at braining these things when she could get the drop on them but when they actively attacked her her slight build was making it hard to build up enough force to put them down. I ran up to the spriggan she was fighting and swung my weapon low, smashing through its left leg so hard it exploded into a handful of gravel. Now hobbled, the monster crashed to the ground. It flailed around, trying to hit either one of us, but Annabella swung her own club and caved its ribcage in. It stopped struggling but was still alive so I left her to finish it off and hurried to Selene, who was having issues as well. I knew she was strong enough to get the job done, but she was also the only one standing between the spriggan and Alisha so she had precious little room to maneuver and spent most of the fight shoving the thing back to get more room to breathe. I dashed in and hobbled that one as well, then left the rest to Selene as I turned to Yume.

I had assumed Yume would have the least problems out of any one of us, given that she was easily the strongest of our group, but the spriggan had her on the defensive and it took me a second to realize why. I had almost managed to forget about the elite variants since it'd been a few days since I'd last seen one of them and thus I hadn't even checked for the crystal growths on our enemies. On the mermen the crystals had been incredibly obvious and impossible to miss, but this spriggan proved that that wasn't always going to be the case. The crystals were clustered on its back and only barely visible when looking at it from the front, but they still powered up its entire body. The thing was faster, stronger and tougher and even with her Qi techniques Yume was clearly struggling to hurt the monster even when it held still long enough for her to actually land a blow.

The beast fought well. It clearly watched Yume's movements and reacted accordingly and I knew that if I wanted to hit it I'd need more than just a well-placed strike, so I pulled out my lesser cloak of invisibility and donned it, then pulled up the hood to activate its enchantment and used the invisibility to sneak behind the monster, then charged up a Qi Burst that struck it right in the back of the head. On a normal one this would have shattered its head into a dozen little pieces, but the elite variant was made of sterner stuff. It actually survived, but it did crumple and fell to the ground. Yume was momentarily surprised but recovered quickly and charged an attack. Yume's Qi techniques rarely took longer than half a second to charge, so when I noticed her charge up a technique for two whole seconds, drawing oceans of Qi into her fist, I made sure to back off from her.

“Just die already," she growled and struck down.

Her strike was so powerful the air got trapped between her fist and the ground. Her knuckles didn't even make contact with the spriggan. It was just a bunch of compressed air she slammed downward into it and the effect was devastating. The spriggan's head and shoulders shattered and her strike went on to carve a crater a yard wide into the ground. The sound was deafening, shaking the trees all around us.

“I thought your mother said we'd be immune to dungeon malice with you along," I said to Annabella as we all caught our breath.

“That wasn't dungeon malice," she said, panting. “That was just these stone spriggans being what they are. They're not as stupid as most dungeon monsters.”

“Well, at least now we know that the floors actually get harder," Selene said.

“How long to the next rest spot?" Alisha asked.

“Not far," Annabella said.

“Good," I said. “I think we need to rethink our strategy.”

“Like?" the princess asked.

“Scouting ahead isn't going to be enough if these things are actively stalking the dungeon," I said. “We need someone to watch our backs at all times. Everything worked out alright this time, but imagine that same situation happening two floors later, with much stronger enemies.”

She actually shuddered at that. “Yeah, I agree. Who did you have in mind?”

I looked over to my little fox. “I've been undervaluing you as a lookout, haven't I?”

She flashed her long canines for a moment. “You're good at what you do, but you do not have the senses of a fox," she told me and I chuckled.

“Then you've earned rear duty while I scout ahead, since you're fast enough to join the fighting quickly when we need you on the front line. Annabella and Alisha stay in the center and you," I looked at Selene, “please make sure to stay close to both of them to protect them.” Annabella was about to protest but I cut her off. “Yes, you're formidable with your blade, but you can't use that bow of yours with enemies bearing down on you.”

“I can't use my bow at all here," she protested. “The spriggans are too tough and the golems are too soft.”

“On this floor?" I asked. “Absolutely. On the later floors? Not so much. I want to make sure we train the formation early so we're ready when we need it. And it's not as if I want to keep you from the fighting, I just want to make sure you have a clear shot when you need one.”

“Alright," she said dubiously.

Truthfully, the only one I wanted to keep away from the fighting was Alisha, because as a feeble cleric she had no business being on the front lines. Her magic was spectacular and her miracles were life savers, but while she could hold her own against humans and weaker monsters thanks to her rapier, dungeon monsters were beyond what she could handle.

“One more thing," I said. “What do you usually eat on this floor?”

I had noticed Annabella stopping us periodically to harvest plants and roots, but they had all looked medicinal rather than edible.

“There are small critters we can hunt," Annabella said, “but when the royal guards come down here they usually lure out one of the big beasts and kill that.”

“So more turtle stew," I said. The turtle meat wasn't actually that bad, but after the seafood dinner at the palace going back to the same stuff we'd been eating for half a week felt disappointing.

“Right," she said. “And tomorrow we'll probably have to kill one of the big beasts, which should keep us fed for the rest of the floor and the third one as well.”

“Nothing good on the third floor?" Selene asked.

Annabella shrugged. “I've never been down that far, so once we beat the next boss we'll need to rely on my ancestor's notes and according to him it was important to bring enough food and water to last through the third floor.”

“That was the fire floor, right?" Selene asked.

“Exactly," Annabella said.

“Has your ancestor been the only one to go past the second floor?" I asked.

“Not at all," Annabella said, “but he has left the most detailed notes we have. The royal guard regularly clear all the way to the end of the third floor. Rarely they even attempt the fourth floor, but after the losses my ancestor's forces suffered on the fifth floor nobody even dares to go past the fourth floor treasure room.”

Just then we arrived at the rest spot and the dark stone slab covered in light blue runes didn't look any less out of place in this forest biome than it had back on the archipelago, but the sight was no less welcome for that.

Alisha and Yume immediately began with dinner preparations while Selene and I busied ourselves setting up the tents. After what had happened last night it felt a little weird to prepare a separate tent for Annabella, but she hadn't actually mentioned our nightly activities to anyone. Alisha and Yume had clearly been able to tell but had likewise not said anything, so I wasn't quite sure where we all stood. By the looks and lingering touches she gave Selene and me I had a pretty good idea but I would wait for her to give some clearer hints before I did something presumptuous like place her bedroll into our tent.

**

Dinner was... alright.

I was getting a little sick of turtle stew and despite knowing that a tough battle awaited us I couldn't wait to fight one of those big monsters Annabella had mentioned so that we could have something new to eat.

When we were done with dinner Selene, Yume and Annabella sat next to the campfire, talking about Qi use, while I sat apart a bit, thinking. Soon enough Alisha joined me, sitting down next to me and leaning against me.

“Everything alright?" she asked and I wrapped an arm around her to pull her close.

“Just fine," I said. “It's nice to see how Annabella is fitting in.”

The elf got a mischievous look and said: “I bet.”

I didn't rise to her bait so she shoved against me. Finally I asked: “So, did you manage to puzzle out that mana channeling technique?”

She nodded. “Oh yes. We trained long and hard.” The innuendo dripped off her lips, but then the corners of her mouth turned up into a smile and she added: “And then she fucked me cross-eyed afterwards.”

I snorted. “Glad to hear you had fun.”

“You didn't?" she asked, a little bit concerned.

I felt my cheeks warm a little and carefully turned around to see that the three of them were still deep in their discussion before I replied: “We did.”

She bit her lip. “How was it?” She paused. “Or rather, how was she?”

“She's really starved for affection," I said quietly. “She had no problem driving Selene wild, but she's really not used to people desiring her in turn. It felt like we were taking advantage of her.”

“Do you feel bad about it?" Alisha asked. Her tone was clinical, the tone of a cleric trying to help someone sort through their feelings. It came naturally to her.

“Not at all," I said. “How can I, with the looks she's giving Selene and me? I just... I'm worried about her. She seemed so shocked about the assassination attempt and then she hopped into bed with us. I'm worried she might be repressing her feelings about it and it'll come spilling out later.”

“Then we'll just have to be there for her when it does," Alisha said.

“You're right, it's just that simple," I said and smiled as I leaned my head to the side, gently pressing my temple against hers. “Thank you.”

“Always.”