Worthy Core

Elissa's face doesn't pale at the realization of her miscalculation, but that's mostly because she's a minotaur and the fur does a good job of hiding that sort of thing. "...Right. The tunnel is blocked, we'll...just need to find another way out."

Reardon frowns at the optimism. "This could be a maze floor, aye, so there may yet be a loop back somewhere. But generally speaking, most floors only got the one main way through. Which means the way out is through the damn floor boss." If he were a younger Challenger, the man might have shouted that last statement, but the man is nearly at a Master-rank himself and knows the value of being calm in an emergency. The way his hand clenches his staff however tells his party members about his true stress level.

"Or," Alesha raises a hand, "You and Elissa could dig us back out again? I mean, you closed the tunnel, you could open it again, yeah?"

The party leader frowns. "With no small amount of exhaustion, and with a boss-level foe waiting for us on the other side. I do not believe that was a floor guardian - perhaps the dungeon has a new wandering boss? I suppose it is perhaps large enough now for another. In any case, it is an option of last resort. A boss may be waiting for us on either side now, so the floor guardian may actually be the easier option."

"Suppose that's true." The Shadow Sapper looks around at the pocket of space the team finds themselves in, and gestures at three portal rings on the floor. "Could definitely be a maze floor, looks like another split here. Pick one at random and go?"

Elissa nods. "Palush? Lead us through the rightmost portal, if you would." The orc takes a breath and lifts his shield and sword, his mood certainly much lower now than before, but his courage not yet shaken. The man steps on through, followed by the rest of the party, and on the other side they're glad to find no monsters waiting for them. A rather disturbing challenge does await, however.

The floor here at least is dry, but once again the passageway narrows into a tunnel that would require Elissa to watch her horns. The more problematic concern however is that the tunnel appears to be completely clogged with strands of slime. Inspecting it from a distance, Alesha grimaces. "Reminds me of the slime webs way back on Floor Three, but way thicker. I do have a bit of slime solvent on me, but definitely not enough for all that. Would be hard to hack through...Elissa, do you think you could burn it?"

The Pyroclastic Geomancer shakes her head. "Not easily - slime is wet and not particularly flammable, after all. But...those amulets we recovered. The symbols on them could perhaps be drops of slime, don't you think? Perhaps this is the reason for them?" She says that, and then her eyes widen. "Did - did Waller still have all the amulets on him?"

That concern at least is partially addressed easily enough, as Reardon lifts one while gesturing to Palush. "He had one of the three, aye, but Palush and I were handed the others. At least they're not keys for a lock, perhaps one will be sufficient?" He shrugs, before lifting the chain over his head. "Suppose there's only one way to find out."

The way the half-orc goes completely still save for his widening eyes tells the party that Reardon may have found out, but not in a way they were hoping for. Just as Palush is about to ask if the man is okay, Reardon's arms suddenly flail, and he goes crashing to the ground with a yell. "Ahhh! Get it off! It's burning, get it off, off, off!"

"I - hold still, Cleric, I will! Just hold still, dammit!" Palush struggles to aid his teammate, as the man's eyes seem to stare at things that aren't there, but after a few moments he successfully manages to yank the amulet off of Reardon's neck. It doesn't immediately calm the man, but another half-minute or so seems to bring him back to reality. Surprisingly, his reaction is to start patting his arms and chest before laughing slightly maniacally.

"I'm fine! I'm fine! Ahahahaha!"

Alesha speaks up rather cautiously. "Uh...Reardon? Shit, was that a madness-cursed item or some shit?" She looks to her other teammates, but Reardon answers on his own behalf before they can.

"No - well, maybe. It, ah...I had this vision. I was fighting the slime girl back on Floor Two, and it was like her Challenge Mode was runnin', aye? I got...blasted with this heaping great wave of acid, and I could feel my body dissolve! It was..." He trails off for a bit, his eyes staring at nothing. "...Well. It's a relief to find it wasn't real, I'll tell y'that."

Palush eyes his own amulet he had received from Waller not long ago. "So...they're cursed items. Well, that whole room was a waste of time, then." He's about to throw it against the wall before Elissa halts him.

"Wait! That's why there were multiple copies of the thing! One of them must be real!"

"...What if the real one was the one Waller had?" There's no immediate response to Palush's question, and eventually he sighs. "Dammit. Guess if it's only mind trickery, I'll take the risk..."

After taking a deep breath Palush slips the amulet on, and like Reardon his eyes widen. Just as Alesha is about to yank it off of him, however, he grabs her arm to stop her. "Wait! It's - it's not a trap, I...I..." He goes silent for a moment, and then his eyes narrow. "...I know slime magic."

Alesha pauses. "...That's a thing?"

Reaching out an arm, Palush silently casts a spell, and the tunnel begins to unclog itself. The slime strands detach from the walls and ceiling, making a rather unholy mess on the floor as they do so, but it's certainly far less of an effort than trying to cut or burn it away, let alone push through it. He even begins to thin out a walking trail on the floor, but gives up with a grunt before making much progress. "It's weak magic. I could make it stop being sticky for a moment, but that's about all. Still...this should be enough, I imagine?"

Elissa smiles, her mood very slightly improved. "We shall manage. Come, let us hope the end of the floor is not far away." She gives the Vanguard a nod and the man leads the way, unable to clear a path for them to walk, but at least able to prevent the slime from sticking to their boots as they pass. Eventually the group reaches a small chamber at the end of the tunnel, this time with only a single portal ring waiting for them, but a noise from behind draws their attention before they can focus on it.

Graaah-cha-chk-chk-chk

Chckck-grachk-gra-chk

Eyes wide, Palush turns back to face the tunnel they'd just cleared. "There's a couple of them back there, we must've missed some entry points! ...You three go through first, I'll do what I can to slow them down with the slime!"

Elissa wants to argue, but the sight of three mutant Horrors coming their way makes her agree. Splitting in the middle of combat is a risk, but less risky than a four-on-three fight against monsters of this sort. "Very well, but don't delay! Alesha, Reardon, you go first!" She sends a few magma darts flying down the tunnel as the others activate the ring, one at a time, but the monsters move in unnatural ways. One crawls along the floor, as a beast should, only to be caught by the slime Palush gathers around it. Another mostly takes to the tunnel wall however, and the third actually begins to skitter along the ceiling. They dodge left and right as they move, and only one of her darts actually connects, a minor wound by the sight of it.

Then the ring is clear, and although Elissa wants to continue aiding her tank, who's already lifting his shield in preparation for an impact from the nearest monster, she knows the best way to help is to minimize the amount of time he needs to hold them off. So instead she passes on through - only to find a new sort of chaos waiting for her on the other side. She barely has time to collect her senses before a monster falls from the ceiling in front of her, nearly landing right on her horns, and as she leaps back in surprise she finds another of the arachnid-snake hybrids righting itself on the floor.

Indeed, the spherical room she finds herself in is covered in fungoid pods, some of them open, some of them in the process of beginning to split wide, and it seems as if Alesha and Reardon are already fighting their own struggles with the monsters that were hidden inside. One leaps at Alesha's face and the orc slices it open with a knife, before using her other hand to throw an incendiary bottle at one wall. Over a dozen pods go up in flames as it explodes, and some of them must have contained yet more monsters given by the shrieking sounds they emit as they burn. Reardon unfortunately was not so swift and appears to have been caught by one, scrabbling at the giant insect that's latched onto his face as it squeezes the life from him.

The Geomancer is about to move to his aid before being reminded of the one that nearly caught her as it leaps for her once again. The minotaur is a bit too tall for her face to be directly vulnerable to the relatively small beast, but it does manage to claim her right arm, and as its tail clenches her bicep tight she drops her staff against her will. She doesn't need the staff to cast magic though, and as she holds her right arm out she begins to prepare a spell with her left. "The things grab hold like a leech! But I've heard how you can take care of those..."

With that said her left hand clenches onto the monster's main body, even as she covers it in flames. It's an energy intensive spell, given that she needs to protect herself from her own flames even as she makes them as hot as possible, but it has its intended effect and after a few seconds the monster falls off with a cry. Her heavy boot-clad hooves finish it off with a solid stomp, and a moment later her staff is back in her hand. Looking around, Alesha seems to have managed the rest of the room with blade and bottle, and is already working to assist Reardon, who's currently collapsed onto the floor.

The Sapper gives the monster on the half-orc's face a few careful stabs, and with Elissa's help the two manage to carefully unwrap the tail from around his neck. The man's eyes are once again wide in fear...but fear strikes Elissa as well as she notices that this time they're still, frozen in place. Alesha carefully probes at the man's neck for a moment before wailing.

"Ahhh! It - it broke his damn neck! I only took my eye off of him for a few seconds!"

"...It's not your fault. It's impressive that you slew as many as you did. If anything, I'm to blame for splitting the party as I did. But as soon as Palush comes through, we'll..." The Mage trails off as she glances back at the portal ring, and does a quick mental calculation as to how long the fight lasted. The adrenaline makes it difficult to be sure, but...perhaps twenty seconds after she came through? Twice as much time, now - not long, but more than long enough for a Challenger to activate a portal ring. "...Palush is not coming through."

Alesha's attention snaps up to the ring as she does the same mental calculation. "What? Did - we should go back through for him!"

Elissa's heart breaks, but she grabs onto the orc's arm as the woman begins to make her way towards the ring of runes. "Then we'd be compounding my mistake! We'd be stepping through a portal into three of the damn things right on top of us! Do you think you could hold up in a fight like that?"

The Sapper's first instinct is to claim that she could - but the Master-tier Challenger is too experienced for that sort of bravado. "I...fuck! Just like that, now we've lost Reardon and Palush too? Fuck! This...fuckin', fuck-ass floor!" The vaguely coherent curses continue for a few moments more, but Elissa simply stands and waits for her to calm herself.

"We must go on. Now more than ever, going backwards is not an option."

Alesha growls, but eventually nods. "Let's hope the floor does loop back. I'm not looking forward to trying to...to duo a fuckin' floor guardian right now." Elissa agrees silently, and the two make their way onward to another spherical chamber. This one has two ways out, one on the right side a heavy metal door with a wheeled handle, as they found in the first room, and on the left there's another ring of portal runes on the ground. This time, Elissa steps forward, heading to the right.

"With a door, we don't need to split ourselves. I'll take the fore, if something comes through I can take a hit better than a puny orc like yourself."

Alesha snorts at the false insult, but steps aside as the Mage turns the wheel. "And minotaurs have the hardest heads, which is why we made you team leader. Maybe you should just get yourself a head start and charge us a way - " The Sapper's barb comes to a sudden halt as the door opens, and a hand suddenly reaches out to grab Elissa by her robes.

"Found you."

Despite her large size, the Mage is pulled through the open doorway before Alesha can even consider how to react, and as the sound of bladed limbs entering flesh reach her ears, she does the only thing she can think to do.

She runs for the portal ring. It's a matter of seconds for it to activate, a period of time filled with screams, some of them her own, but as it sends her onward the sound suddenly dies away. She doesn't stop running though, passing past pods, crashing through slime, avoiding suspicious-looking grates as her eyes seek out the next exit ahead. A portal, a door, a tunnel, she loses track of how many chambers she transits through. Any ambushes are too slow to catch her, any traps do little more than slow her down as she focuses solely on the next way out, her mastery of shadow magic concealing her just long enough to slip on by.

Until finally one portal takes her to a room with no exit. It's another spherical chamber but ten times the size of the last, ebon ribs crawling their way up the walls to support an arched ceiling. And in the center of the room, waiting for her...is Her. The woman stands up on eight tall legs, the mouth on her face grinning as the much-larger mouth below her humanoid torso stretches wide, showing a hundred sharp teeth.

"Ah! My brother saved one for me, did he? Ah, but only one...well, we shall make do..."

As the guardian's spider-like legs bring her closer, Alesha faints, and the last thing she sees is a flash of light.

As Xenia and Guy watch the disappointed Yulia return to her seat, Guy finds themself confused. "Apologies, ma'am, but is it not standard policy to reserve the daily 'save a Challenger' portal usage for the Initiates on the upper floors? Masters generally 'know what it is they're in for', do they not?"

Xenia chuckles briefly before answering. "Yeah, but they were running, even if this time they happened to be running in the wrong direction, so...eh. Besides, it's traditional."

"Traditional? What tradition is worth the risk of spreading the secrets of the floor to other parties?"

The reincarnator gives her guide a grin. "You need to watch more movies, Guy. Every good horror story needs a sole survivor."

DaScoot

Enjoy!

 

Name	Ethnicity	Gender	Age	Class
Elissa Wheatscythe	Minotaur	F	40	Pyroclastic Geomancer (Master)
Waller Mudcleft	Minotaur	M	42	Stonefist Brawler (Master)
Alesha of Niad'osh	Orc	F	38	Shadow Sapper (Master)
Palush of Niad'osh	Orc	M	33	Vanguard Charger (Expert)
Reardon Ironspike	Half-Orc/Dwarf	M	47	Cleric of Stone (Expert)