Sporemageddon

Phillipe nodded, then nodded his head back towards the door. "Small tunnel, then the boss room."

"What will we be fighting there?" I asked as I stepped past him and into the tunnel. I stopped right there at the entrance. I didn't have the expertise or the will to poke at all the traps likely ahead of me.

"We'll find out when we arrive," Phillipe said. "If it's the goblin shaman... then we might have to reconsider moving on."

"That bad?" Tyro asked.

"We're not equipped to take on a mage," Phillipe said.

"Are mages that dangerous?" I asked.

"Anyone that can rip your soul out of your body with a murmured word ought to be treated with more than a little respect," Phillipe said.

Tyro and I blanched. "They can do that?" he asked.

"Not this one. Goblin shamans are closer to elementalists. They'll spray fire and water around, send blasts of wind across the room and generally make a mess of things. You get to choose between being drowned, burned alive, or flayed to death." "How do you normally fight them?" I asked.

"With a team. Usually with two range-experts. You distract the shaman and put a bolt in their eye. They're as killable as anyone else once you get to them. The problem is reaching them. An alert shaman will pelt you with magic, summon walls of earth, and make it nearly impossible to fight them. There's no waiting for them to run out of magic either like you'd do on the surface."

"On the surface?" I asked.

"It's how armies fight mages," Tyro said. "Keep sending soldiers at them until they run out of magic, then butcher them. The one who takes their head usually gets a king's ransom for it. But we're in a dungeon, so even if the shaman's probably nothing compared to a proper human mage..."

"The dungeon supplies them with all the mana they could want," I finished. That would negate what looked like one of the biggest disadvantages a caster had: the fact that their magic was pulled from a finite resource.

Phillipe slowly led us through the tunnel, and I noticed that he wasn't finding any traps. Even so, he was checking every step we took to see if a trap would pop up. It would be a neat trick to have part of the tunnel be completely free of traps only for one to pop up halfway through. "If the room has a shaman, we'll have to make a tough choice."

"Would the shaman know not to breathe in any spores?" I asked. "Because if it dies as easily as any other goblin, then... yeah, I could definitely just fill the room with spores and let the shaman choke itself to death."

"I considered that, and it might even work, but I'm not sure if I want to gamble on it," Phillipe said.

"It doesn't cost much to try," I said. "A few mushrooms tossed in? Maybe a few minutes wasted? And if that doesn't work... I might have a solution against mages, but it would take me a few hours to grow it."

Phillipe hummed. It wasn't an affirmative, but it wasn't a 'no' either.

On reaching the end of the passage, we paused behind the door leading to the next, and final, room. Phillipe opened it up just a crack, and I positioned myself behind him to see what was going on in the room.

The space was relatively large, with a few workstations set up against the sides, some of which looked like they'd been ransacked for materials already.

In the centre of the room was a small hut made of discarded pieces of wood next to a small clear space with a firepit in the centre and a large cauldron sitting above that. Alchemical equipment was laid out on the floor and atop some flat stones, with bubbling concoctions spreading from one glass beaker to another via a maze of twisty glass tubes.

The shaman was there, a hunched-back goblin with skin covered in patches, wearing a poncho whose edge was covered in trailing bits of cloth into which beads were woven. The shaman's garb clicked gently as they fussed next to their cauldron with long bits of moss and pieces of what I suspected were tree bark.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Was it making some sort of potion? That... would make sense, I supposed. It would fit with what I expected a shaman to do.

"That looks like the boss you talked about," I muttered.

Phillipe closed the door very slowly. "It is," he whispered back. "I'm still uncertain whether or not we can take it on in a straight fight."

"I don't think I've ever volunteered to fight fairly before," I said. I pulled out a [Magical Dead Man's Cough] from my satchel and held it up between Phillipe and I. "We try this," I said. "And if it doesn't work, we return to the woods behind us and I'll cook something up that'll ruin a magic-user."

I had some fantastic ideas involving those [Magebane] mushrooms. Something told me that combining them with some of my other mushrooms would create something... rather niche in utility, but lethal all the same, at least for someone focused on magic.

"Fine," Phillipe said. He gingerly took the mushroom I was offering him. "How do we do this? The same trick with the rocks?"

"How about, instead, you just smack that one at the Shaman's face. It needs to speak some magical words to cast, right?"

"Most casters do," Phillipe replied.

Damn, I wanted to learn magic so bad. "Cool, then we'll make that complicated by not allowing it to speak at all without choking itself to death. Just hit it in the face, and if you can't manage that, strike close to it. The dust will climb a little. We can watch and if it doesn't die, then we figure out some other plan."

Phillipe nodded slowly. "Fine. I've taken bigger risks for less." He opened the door again, poised to throw.

The shaman was missing. Official source ıs 𝙣𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙡•𝓯𝓲𝓻𝓮•𝕟𝕖𝕥

We all froze up, looking for the threat, but the goblin who had been lingering by the cauldron was gone. Had it left to fetch more ingredients?

A shiver ran down my spine as I heard a gravelly, deep voice to the right saying something incomprehensible. I snapped my head around and found the shaman standing next to a table, a staff raised in one hand with the end pointing at us while it murmured something under its breath.

"Fuck," I swore.

Phillipe tossed the mushroom aside towards the shaman.

The shaman finished whatever spell it was weaving.

I was thrown back a moment later, the air kicked out of my lungs as the door exploded into the corridor.

I saw Phillipe fly back as a blur, then the door came crashing down atop me and I hit the ground hard only to get smacked in the face by one of the door's planks a moment later.

Groaning, I tried to push the wood off of me, but it was heavy, and I was tangled up in the straps of my backpack.

I glanced to the side and found Tyro helping his dad up to his feet. The bigger man had been thrown way back into the room. I was about to ask for help to stand up when something crunched nearby. Some primal instinct had me freezing up, the mouse who'd seen the cat's shadow.

The shaman was in the corridor, standing tall above me, gnarled hands wrapped around its staff. It grinned, toothy and crooked, and raised its staff towards the boys.

It was ignoring me, which was fantastic, but also I was pinned down with very little I could do.

Then Sir Nibbles, with a mighty yowl, jumped up and latched onto the shaman's face, little claws swinging and teeth chomping at the old goblin's eyes.

"Yes!" I shouted as I kicked myself free. Making noise didn't matter now, not with the goblin so distracted.

It reached up clawing to grab at Sir Nibbles. It never saw me coming. Not that I could do much. Once I freed myself from my pack I grabbed my knife and swung it as hard as I could across the back of the shaman's legs.

It screamed, arms flailing, then I bowled it over with a tackle that wouldn't have worked if the shaman had the mass of a human adult and not a child.

We fell into a heap. I flinched back as something cut across my face and ripped my mask away. My knife went flying at some point, but it didn't matter. Soon after the fight started, Phillipe put an end to it.

I gasped backwards, which wasn't the best because it meant I got a facefull of shaman as Phillipe's hammer came crashing down.

"And that's why I wanted to be careful about this one," Phillipe said.

***