Chosen, Chapter 45: Those that Slay and Fall

AidanThe RealmsFirstday, 1st week of the 8th month, Godless Age 597Early MorningThe Fetid Lair, Mistvale Highlands

"Left is right, right is wrong," Aidan said decisively.

"What?" Brighid gave Aidan a confused look.

He laughed to himself. "Sorry, inside joke from back home. Let's go left first." He recast Burning Barrage, then followed Brighid into the left-hand tunnel. It twisted and turned even more than the entranceway. After a minute or so, they came to a split. One branch led left and down, while the other went right and up. Once again, Brighid took the left passage, reasoning that the queen would probably be in the deepest section. Before long, the tunnel opened out into another chamber.

This time, Brighid places herself across the tunnel exit, and Aidan launched his barrage from behind her. He sent the first set of motes arcing over her back, into the cavern, and then looping upward to explode against the wall and ceiling immediately around the entrance. No mites fell, but as Aidan waited for the cooldown to end, a buzzing sound started up somewhere in the darkness. "Adults!" Brighid cried out. "There will be juveniles too; you handle those, and I will take care of the big ones."

Almost as soon as she finished, an immense mite, at least three and a half feet long, emerged into her magical light and streaked towards her. Brighid knocked it out of the air with her glaive and immediately chopped and stabbed at it. Another pair buzzed in close on the first's heels, and soon it's all Brighid can do to keep them at bay. Shortly after the adults engage the Paladin, juveniles began to swarm into range, crawling across the cavern floor. Aidan crouched down behind Brighid and fired two jets of fire out of the tunnel entrance, sweeping them back and forth across the leading edge of the approaching swarm. The cooldown on Burning Barrage elapsed while he was roasting mites, and Aidan tried something new for him, recasting Burning Barrage while still in the middle of a Flame Jet cast. The effort was a severe strain on his Concentration and coordination. Even so, the seven fiery embers blinked into existence above his head after two seconds—just in time for his priorities to shift.

It turned out that the juveniles weren't just approaching from the floor. Dozens of them began to climb down from the walls of the cavern and enter the tunnel along its ceiling and walls. "Fire in the hole!" Aidan shouted to Brighid and unleashed his Barrage, sending one mote against each wall and one against the ceiling of the tunnel, with the remaining four spread out into the swarm of juveniles in the cavern. Heat washed over him, but his timing and aim were precise, and the flames stopped just short of him and Brighid. The mites weren't nearly as lucky, and scores of them were crushed and thrown through the air or reduced to piles of burning carapace by the near-simultaneous detonations.

Aidan's Flame Jets sputtered to an end even as Brighid finishes off the third adult with a back-handed chop that severed its head. The juveniles took advantage of the momentary absence of fiery death to surge forward. Despite how many he already killed, Brighid's light still reflected from a sea of scuttling mites. "Back up! We can't let them surround us!" Aidan called out to Brighid and began scrambling back towards the split in the tunnel. Brighid backed up as best she could, and a moment later, Aidan covered her retreat with renewed Flame Jets. The leading edge of the swarm gets close enough that they start to smoke from Brighid's Fiery Aura Ability, but they still press on, clawing their way over the smoldering corpses of their broodmates.

The creatures were fast, and soon Aidan and Brighid were in full retreat, him aiming blasts of fire over his shoulder and her doing her best to shield him. Fiery Aura took its toll on the pursuing mites, but it wasn't until Brighid scooped Aidan up and stretched out into a full run that Aidan was able to recast Burning Barrage and finally whittle the swarm down to under a dozen enemies. Brighid set him down, whirled, and finished off the rest with stamps of her hooves and broad strikes from her weapon. Both adventurers were panting with exertion. Aidan checked his prompts and swore. "What the fuck?!"

"There were almost three hundred of those goddamn things in there! I know you said there would be hundreds, but I wasn't expecting that to mean all at once!"

Brighid just grinned at him, sweat plastering her hair to her face and chest heaving, and panted out, "Yeah... but we both got over 7,000 experience for it, and we aren't even done yet!"

Aidan quickly allocated his points—one each in Logic, Intuition, Willpower, and Charisma, and two in Endurance—and Skill bonus—Swords—then joined Brighid in walking back down the tunnel. The swarm chamber entrance was choked with dead mites in various states of dismemberment and incineration, and Aidan opted to spend a Burning Barrage to blast the piles of dead mites into the chamber instead of pushing through them. After waiting for the spell's cooldown and ensuring that the explosions didn't trigger another swarm attack, the pair cautiously made their way into the room.

The chamber was long and narrow, and about halfway in, they started to come across piles of bones and hundreds of decaying corpses. Most of the remains are of animals, but there are centaurs and humanoids among the dead as well. The fleshiest bodies, near the back, bulged with clusters of wriggling, vaguely rice-grain-shaped objects roughly the size of bananas just under the skin. Brighid identified them as larval mites, and Aidan grimly set to incinerating. The scent made him vomit more than once, and it took nearly an hour to be sure that they were destroyed to the last, but eventually, the task was done.

"I really, really hope that was the only chamber like that in this dungeon. I am going to smell like rotten corpse and oily smoke for a month. Let's get out of here, it doesn't look like there are any more exits, so we can just take the other fork in the tunnel."

The pair retraced their path to the split in the tunnel and, this time, took the upward-sloping route. Or, rather, the initially upward-sloping route; it only rose for a short while before it turned much more steeply downwards, nearly forty or forty-five degrees. Brighid stopped at the top of the slope and warned, "It will be difficult for us to run back up this way quickly, so if this tunnel is too short, we may not be able to retreat like we did before. Are you prepared?"

Aidan thought about it, then suggested, "Let's try the other exit out of that first cavern instead. We can always come back here later, but there's no sense taking a risk now."

It took about twenty minutes of backtracking to reach the other tunnel. They followed it until it, too, split off in two directions. Following a hunch, Aidan opted to go to the right. After more twisting and turning and scraping against natural rock walls, they once again approached a larger cavern with a broader tunnel exit. This time, though, the place didn't look empty. Indeed, three gigantic mites, each very nearly Brighid's size, turned to face them and raised scythed forelimbs. Aidan immediately launched all seven of his Barrage motes against the one in front. They exploded all over its carapace and washed over the other two as they charged towards Brighid, but even the full volley, over 220 damage, wasn't enough to kill it.

Aidan cursed and began to cast his Flame Jets as Brighid raised her glaive over her head, pointing it downward like a scorpion's stinger. As soon as the lead mite scurried into range, she stabbed forward, the head of the glaive bursting into ghostly flames just before it pierced the monster's thorax. Brighid instantly pulled her polearm back a few inches, then twisted her shoulders, chopped down through the abdomen and cut off several of its legs in another burst of fire. The mite collapsed to the side but reached its wickedly-sharp claws towards her, clearly not finished yet. Aidan completed his cast of Flame Jet with each hand and began to pour damage into the leftmost enemy; Brighid brought her glaive around and buried it point-first into the first mite's head, but killing it cost her as the other two closed into range and lashed out at her. The screech of their hardened carapace across the Sunsteel plates of her armor was hideous, and she cried out in pain as one of them found a gap in her defenses. The mites slammed into her, but she braced herself and shoved back, sending one of them spinning backward and pushing the other far enough away to allow her to strike it after shortening her grip.

Even as Aidan concentrated his fire on the enemy Brighid pushed away, two more giant mites clatter into the tunnel. "More company!" he yelled to her, but she didn't have time to acknowledge as she desperately fought off the foe lunging and clawing at her. She was a blur of motion, turning to take strikes on her armored flanks and chest while chopping and thrusting at the enormous monster. All four mites smolder from Fiery Aura, but unlike the juveniles, these giants had enough Health that the damage over time didn't cook them within a few seconds. Brighid was nearly overwhelmed fighting all four of them and took dozens of minor hits as she whirled and spun her glaive. Aidan backed up and supported her attacks with Flame Jets. After a few seconds, she managed to catch one of the mites between herself and the tunnel wall, delivering a devastating double rear kick that shattered its carapace in a spray in pale green-white ichor. At the same time, Aidan's Burning Barrage came off cooldown, and he began to chant. "Sorry about this!" he called to her, then sent his full arsenal streaking towards the most injured-seeming bug.

All seven motes hit simultaneously, and Brighid and the other mites vanish in a rush of flames. Aidan's party interface assured him that he didn't hurt Brighid much, but it took a few seconds for his eyes to recover from the sudden flare of light to see her still standing and fighting. The bug he unleashed on was a blasted, dismembered wreck several yards away. The other two were scorched and singed from the explosions, but the incidental damage they took wasn't enough to drop either of them. Brighid feinted against one of them, then spun her polearm around to cleave its claws off, but she paid the price for it; the second mite rushed forward from her other side. One of its claws clattered harmlessly off Brighid's breastplate, but the other swiped up from below and caught her under the bottom of her chainmail skirt, slicing deeply into the flesh of her lower belly with a spray of bright red blood.

"Brighid!" Aidan screamed in panicked anguish, expecting to see intestines spilling out of the woman he loved. Brighid wheeled in place, slamming her hooves into the monster that just landed what would have been a mortal wound on a human, and decapitating the one she recently disarmed with a casual-seeming swipe of her glaive. Enraged and still panicking, Aidan poured flames into the remaining enormous mite until Flame Jets' duration expired, then immediately began the chant for Pulse of Life.

Brighid whirled back around and lifted her weapon over her head again, wincing at the strain it caused to the wound in her belly, then stabbed downward into the last mite repeatedly. It attempted to stand up under her onslaught several times, but eventually, it started to twitch and curl up onto itself. Aidan finished his cast and immediately felt drained as the air around him began to shimmer with wisps of glowing gold-silver-white energy. Brighid planted the butt of her glaive against the ground and slumped against it, collapsing to her knees, panting, blood oozing from her wounded belly.