Chapter 50: Dungeon Dive [6]
Contrary to what one may believe, Gareth was exactly the kind of captain that would make his subordinates move immediately after a life threatening battle.
Silas was still limping a little as they walked through the sea of roots and branches, Antonio at the lead cutting down the path for them as they made their way deeper into the woods. The foliage had consumed the entire world by now, making him feel unnecessarily on edge.
Not the combat kind of on edge though. The other kind, the quieter and in some ways more irritating kind, where there was nothing immediately wrong but the environment had decided to be atmospheric about it regardless.
The roots underfoot were uneven, slick with the moss that covered everything at this depth. And the light—what little of it existed down here—came from bioluminescent growths on the tree trunks that pulsed at irregular intervals, which was exactly the kind of thing a dungeon did when it wanted you to feel like something was about to happen without committing to anything specific.
He was onto the dungeon’s tricks and he still didn’t like them.
The limp he was struggling with was minor. A deep bruise on his left calf from the second tree, the muscles having decided that two high velocity impacts in one afternoon was sufficient and they would be lodging a formal complaint through the medium of stiffness. He was managing it, redistributing his weight with the unconscious efficiency of someone whose body had been problem-solving its own damage long enough to get good at it.
Though he was still limping.
Which obviously, Aris noticed.
"How bad is it?"
Aris was walking by his side, quietly blending into the background as they lost themselves in the tension of waiting for something to happen. It was something refreshingly new from him, Aris was the kind of person who became the center of attention no matter what kind of room he walked into, so seeing him blend into the atmosphere so seamlessly was interesting to say the least.
Though Silas wished Aris wasn’t so good at it, he was starting to get worried that a slip up might happen when he wasn’t looking.
"Nothing major, just a small tear."
Aris was quiet for a long time as he processed the information, only the sound of Antonio cutting through the shrubs keeping them company.
Then he quietly nodded. "Don’t do anything reckless, i can cover for you."
Silas smiled, a sly grin that he never properly managed to resist when mischief called.
"Is that concern i hear?"
"I’d rather you don’t die."
"Yes Milord’. This peasant rejoice in knowing that you care."
Aris turned to him, staring at him with a deadpan look in his eyes.
"Maybe i should feed you to one of those centipedes."
He let out a chuckle.
"What a horrible thing to say."
He took in a deep breath, letting the silence between them do its thing before he spoke again.
"You don’t need to worry, I’m pretty used to fighting with injuries." He turned to look ahead, letting his awareness permeate back into the world as he continued. "If anything, this feels more comfortable than fighting while being fully rested."
Aris turned his gaze forward too.
"Makes sense."
Silas glanced at him.
"Does it?"
Aris didn’t respond.
Another half an hour had passed by the time when Antonio suddenly raised a fist ahead of them—the stop signal—and the formation halted with the quiet efficiency of people who had learned to read it without discussion.
Silas moved his hand to his blade hilt on reflex, not that there was any blade in there for him to use.
Antonio turned, and for the first time in the descent his expression had shifted out of the professional neutrality of a man doing his job into something that was trying very hard not to be what it clearly was.
Which was impressed.
And slightly alarmed.
Maybe there was the barest hint of a terror too.
He pointed ahead, through the last curtain of undergrowth, and mouthed two words.
Boss room.
Gareth moved up beside him, looked through the gap in the foliage, and went completely still.
Silas moved up on the other side.
Looked through.
The boss room, well, lair, was a clearing—vast, the trees pulled back in a perfect circle, the canopy open above it for the first time since they’d entered the dungeon, grey sky visible in the gap.
The floor of the clearing was different from the rest of the dungeon, the undergrowth flattened and compressed into a pale layer, the root systems running through it like veins in something organic.
In the center of the clearing, perfectly still, hanging from a branch at the clearing’s edge with the patience of something that had been waiting for a very long time, was the dungeon boss.
Silas processed it in sections.
The size first—roughly the height of a two story building, the body slender in the way praying mantises were slender, which meant the apparent fragility was misleading because the structural density in their limbs was considerable from what he knew.
The colouration was the deep mottled green of something that had spent its entire existence in this particular dungeon and had absorbed its palette, the bioluminescent growths from the trees replicated in faint points of cold light along the edges of its carapace.
The forelegs. He got to the forelegs last because they demanded to be gotten to last, the way things demanded attention when they were the most important piece of information available. Each one was as long as the snake had been thick. Serrated along the inner edge in a pattern that was not the random serration of natural growth but the deliberate, even spacing of something that had been selecting for cutting efficiency over a very long time.
It was looking at them.
The compound eyes, catching the grey light from the open sky above, oriented on the gap in the undergrowth where the party had stopped with the particular quality of something that had known they were there before they’d known they were there.
It had been waiting.
"Right," Silas said quietly.
"Yes," Aris said, from directly beside him.
"That’s the boss."
"Yes."
"That’s a very large praying mantis."
"Yes."
"I’ve never fought a praying mantis before."
"I know," Aris said. Then, after a beat, "I have."
Silas looked at him.
Aris was studying the boss with the calm assessment of someone taking inventory, his eyes moving across it in the methodical pattern he used when he was identifying priority information. He looked, Silas thought, entirely too calm for the current view.
"When," Silas said.
"Different dungeon. Smaller specimen." A pause. "The forelegs are the primary threat. Its speed is higher than the size suggests. However fast you think it is, it will be faster than that. It will strike once to test response time before committing to a pattern."
"How do you know it will test first."
"It’s still waiting," Aris said. "It’s been aware of us for at least a while. If it was a direct aggressor it would have moved already." His eyes settled on the forelegs. "It’s patient. Patient things test before they commit."
Gareth leaned across from Antonio’s side. "Thoughts?"
Silas looked at the mantis.
The mantis looked back.
"It’s going to come fast and it’s going to come for whoever looks like the decision maker," Silas said. "It’s been watching the formation. It knows where the center is." He paused. "It’s going to go for you."
Gareth was quiet for a moment.
"Then I’ll give it something to go for," he said. "Formation. On my call."
The mantis shifted its weight on the branch, the movement fluid and almost imperceptible, the adjustment of something that had finished deciding.
Silas shifted, summoning another mana blade.
"It’s done waiting."
Gareth straightened, grip on his sword tightening, and looked at the clearing with the expression of a man who had looked at worse things and walked away from all of them.
"We walk out of this alive."