056 Sea Locust Chickens

We spent the next two days in a nearly endless cycle of eating, grinding, and sleeping.

Two new breeds of chimera appeared as we delved further into the Labyrinth: A Scorpion Goat hybrid with the head of a goat fixed squarely on the body of the arachnid; and a Sea Locust Chicken Chimera, which ran on six legs, clucked, and sported a segmented body equipped with powerful forearms.

Naturally, the sea locust chicken was the more dangerous of the two.

We’d run into a brood of them, about five in number, and within two minutes, they’d forced us back, with painful wounds to show for it.

“The hell?” Paz said, prying himself out of a wall that he had been blown into, courtesy of a chimera’s rocket punch.

I dodged around a similar strike, struggling to see past the blood that obscured my vision. True to their name, the Sea Locust Chickens were relentless in attack. A blow to the head had earlier emptied the last of my HP and left a deep cut over my eyelid.

Even as I dodged the supersonic punches, one chimera rushed at me with its large beak and tried to tear off my head. I slapped its beak aside at the last minute and earned three gashes across the chest. The sea locust chickens could attack with other appendages riddled with spines. Their forearms and beaks weren’t the only weapons we needed to fear.

Oh, fuck this.

“Paz! Cover me,” I said and slipped into the darkness. [Fear Aura] flooded the corridor on my command.

I’d picked up a new trick after hours of fighting chimeras. [Fear Aura] and [Dark Stalker] were the only abilities I could use at will, yet I’d never used both together for fear of giving away my position. [Dark Stalker] ended the instant I attacked an enemy, but the [System] seemed to waive that requirement for techniques that didn’t do damage directly.

It meant that I no longer had to be visible to use [Fear Aura]. And, somehow, using the ability from the shadows seemed to improve its potency. Not by much, but enough that I could Dismay enemies who had previously resisted.

The Sea Locust Chickens froze in terror the instant they felt my aura, leaving my teammates a small window to tear them apart.

“Game, set, and match,” Paz said, cracking the skull of a twitching chimera with one end of his jägerstock.

“Where did you learn that phrase?” I asked, picking my way around the corpses.

The chimeras were about the same levels as Paz, proof we were getting to the more dangerous parts of the Labyrinth. Killing monsters below my level didn’t offer as much XP as I would have liked, but I couldn’t deny the value of battle experience.

“Dunno,” Paz admitted. “Probably in a tome or something. I can’t remember.”

A tome? That made a lot of sense. If I wasn’t the first [Migrant Soul] Vizhima had seen, then one of my predecessors might have collected their thoughts about the world.

Paz didn’t seem interested in elaborating, regardless, so I poked at the wounds on my chest, noting how my jerkin had gotten ripped up in the process. Thankfully, I owned a spare.

“These monsters are more rewarding,” Nicola said with a hum to herself. “I feel a lot closer to level twenty.”

“Same,” I said. “Any idea what kind of technique you’d like to unlock?”

Nicola placed a finger beneath her chin. “[Mage Armor] or [Magic Hand]. Both are skills and would allow me another way to defend myself whenever I run out of MP.”

Paz snorted. “Skills like melee attacks rely on the value of your physical damage modifiers, and most Mages ignore physicals early on in favor of Magic Intellect and Magicka. You’re honestly better off focusing on abilities.”

“That’s not correct,” Nicola said with a smile, seemingly pleased to know something that Paz didn’t for the first time in a while.

“Explain,” he said.

“Ditto,” I added.

Nicola’s smile deepened. “For most classes, you would be correct. However, casters as a rule have fighting styles that force their damage-dealing skills to rely on Magic Intellect rather than Strength. We still depend on Strength for melee attacks, but any skills I unlock would be unbound by that rule.”

I mulled over her words. “So, in my case where my dagger attacks are modified by both my Strength and Dexterity values . . .”

“Your damage-dealing skills would do the same,” Nicola said. “It’s the reason why rogues and Skirmishers are lauded for their DPS. No other class can leverage the damage from two attributes in both skills and melee.”

“A Beast Rider could,” Paz said, “if they select the mounted archer template.”

“Agreed. But, Beast Riders famously have a lot to juggle in terms of stat allocation.” Nicola spun her staff. “I won’t always be in a party with you two. If I wish to survive as a ranker, I must be able to defend myself against a variety of builds. Collecting more skills would do me a world of good.”

We looted the chimeras and continued down the corridor.

“Safe room up ahead,” I said with a sigh.

The safe room appeared on [Map] as a chamber with a cleft in the wall, a typical sign for rooms in the Labyrinth. I could wait long enough to reach it and heal my wounds via [Meditation], but there were a hundred other things that could kill me in that short distance.

Paz’s bored drawl cut through my musing. “Hopefully, you’re wrong, and that safe room turns out to be a boss’ room in disguise. We could use a few more boss battles.”

“And, you could use,” I said through gritted teeth, “a zipper over your mouth. Try not to jinx us.”

I chugged a health potion and sighed in bliss as the wounds on my forehead and chest knitted back up. They left the faintest hint of scar tissue, though this was normal, according to Nicola, and I actually healed better than most humans.

We kept moving in silence until we spied a T-junction at the end of a long hallway. A sturdy wooden door stood across the gap from us, marking the entrance of the safe room. It bore a large insignia on its wooden surface that glowed brightly in the lurid hue of the Labyrinth.

Paz inspected this insignia which my elven sight made out to be some kind of chest.

“That’s not a safe room,” Paz said. “That’s an item room. We’ve hit the jackpot!”

“Are you sure—?” I started.

But, Paz had already started racing toward it. No sooner had he started than he screeched to a halt and raised a hand in warning. “Trap.”

The corridor seemed harmless to me. “How can you tell?”

“Magic residue. I’m sensitive to that kind of thing.”

Because of [Dragon Touched], huh?

“Not just you,” Nicola said, stopping beside him. “It’s the same for all casters. There’s a power in the air, the kind you’d expect from active magic.”

“Enchantments,” Paz growled.

“No,” Nicola corrected. “Runes. The magic here is static, not cyclical. That’s typically proof of a Runecaster’s work.”

I looked at the corridor again. It honestly felt no different from the other corridors we had passed. On a whim, I plucked a copper coin from out of my inventory and lobbed it into our path.

The coin bounced once . . . twice . . . and then, it vanished—just like that, leaving a gleaming inscription of blue on the tile where it had landed.

“Disintegration?” I choked.

Paz narrowed his eyes. “No. Something different . . .”

“Teleportation,” Nicola said with a finality. “That’s among the rarest of runes. For these to be invisible to the naked eye, it would mean they were etched underneath the stone.”

“Careful,” I said. “We have no way of knowing of certain. The coin bounced a few times after I’d thrown it. Possible delay of the onset of magic?”

“Not delayed”—Paz tossed another coin down the corridor. It vanished the instant it landed. “Notice how the tile responsible for the deed lights up after the fact. I’d wager that there’s an equal number of marked and unmarked tiles. But, without a divination technique, there’s no way to tell until one of us has been teleported.”

Crap. “What are you waiting for then, Nicola? Use your eye-thingy.”

“Excuse you?” She squawked. “My eye-thingy may be advanced enough to spot residual Eros and see in the dark. But, it can’t uncover magic traps. Not at its current tier, at least.”

Paz shook his head. “Useless.”

I intervened before they could devolve into another one of their fights. “We should probably abandon the room, then. We are not getting through fifty meters of that unscathed.”

“No way!” Paz said. “We’re not giving this up. The Way-keeping loot might as well be gutter trash when compared with the hoard in item rooms. We can’t afford to lose this chance.”

I mulled over his words. If we failed to find the dungeon egg, stealing as much loot as we could from the Labyrinth could prove a decisive choice.

“Okay,” I conceded. “We would try to approach the item room via another route. If we fail to reach it, however, then that’s the end of that. I doubt there’s anything good waiting at the end of those runes. And, I’m pretty sure you don’t want to find out.”

“Fine by me,” Paz said. “As long as we put some effort into finding some other way around, I’m fine with following your lead.”

We did as he requested.

I set a waypoint on [Map] to keep us on track, yet we failed to find our way back to the item room until three hours had passed.

We returned to the T-junction via one of the other corridors after navigating a dizzying series of turns.

Paz checked the hallway for traps before proceeding to kick the door open. He spread his arms and beckoned us to follow. “Feast your eyes, you bloody wankers, on the kind of rare loot that can only be found here in the Labyrinth. Stuff your inventories until they are full to bursting!”

An utterly wrecked room rose to greet us.

Paz sputtered to a stop. “Huh?”

Huh was right. What once had been a room stacked to overflowing now stood bare and disheveled like the aftermath of a tornado. Mannequins lay dashed against the wall, some with limbs divorced from the rest of their body. Wooden splinters peppered the ground: the remains of item chests that had been battered open.

A weapons rack keeled dangerously beside the door, but even with the blatant signs of violence, my mind fixated on only one thing:

“The items are gone?”

“Bastards,” Paz spat under his breath. “Someone got here before us.”

“Some people,” Nicola said, “And, judging by the look of things, the meeting didn’t end well for one of the groups.” She gestured at bloodstains in a corner of the room—a detail I had earlier missed.

“Goddammit,” Paz growled. “If I find who did this, I’d be sure to kill them.”

“Yeah, right,” I said with an eye roll. “Whoever looted this place won’t make for an easy kill.”

Nicola studied the carnage. “It’s a good thing we arrived when we did. Any earlier, and we could have been the bloodstains on the floor.”

“This bounty should have been ours,” Paz moaned, collapsing to his knees.

“There, there, big guy,” I said, helping him up. “We’ll find some other item room. I’m sure there are more waiting to be discovered.”

“We spent hours making our way here, Damien. Hours.”

Nicola sighed and walked out of the door. She ran back in with an ashen face. “Um, guys. You might want to see this . . .”

“What?”

“Chimeras! A whole bunch of them. Headed this way!”

No sooner had she spoken than a Sea Locust Chicken Chimera barged into the room. Her [Summon Tentacle] spell tripped it up, and I decapitated the segmented mass of murder without a second thought.

“No way,” I said. “They can enter dungeon rooms now?”

“This one has been emptied,” Paz replied, still sitting listlessly on the ground. “It has lost its protection.”

“More incoming,” Nicola cried.

“Spread out!”

Two more Sea Locust Chickens scuttled through the open door, keeping low to the ground. The fight didn’t proceed as easily the second time around. A hammer punch from one chimera launched me into a wall, despite being blocked. The second dodged Nicola’s spell and flew straight for Paz.

[Fear Aura].

The chickens stopped short in their tracks, enabling their dismemberment after a short but vicious exchange.

Paz peeked out of the door jamb. “Um, how many chimeras did you see when you looked, Nicola?”

“About ten. Why?”

“Ten?” Paz chuckled. “You might want to drink some potions. This is about to get ugly.”

I ducked beneath his arm and peeked into the corridor.

The mad clucking gave it away.

An entire army of Sea Locust Chickens barreled down the path, scuttling toward us like a squawking, writhing, boiling mass of death. I counted over twenty chimeras before I fell back into the room, struggling to tug mana and stamina potions out of my inventory.

“Shit!” Paz said, retreating from the doorjamb. “It’s a horde. Spawned right on top of us too. I think they are being led by an Alpha.”

“An Alpha?” I stammered. “I’m guessing that is worse?”

Paz’s answer was drowned out by a roar—louder even than the cacophony of clucks.

“Well, Damien,” he yelled. “You’re in luck. What was that phrase you used again? The one about fucking around?”

“Not the right time, Paz!”

“Well, we’ve upped and done it. Find out came calling a little too early. Brace yourselves!”