Rise of the Archmage Alister

Blas stretched his arms up over his head, locking together his fingers with a long yawn. Ahead was the cave in the distance, with a clearance forcibly made with scorched trees. He looked to his small team, then back to where the knights were. They were here just in case. He didn’t want to put them in danger unnecessarily, but just as well their movement would be too loud for scouting this out.

He could have a scout go out ahead, but if this was what he was hoping, he selfishly didn’t want anyone else to be the first to see them. Blas studied the walls of the cave as he entered, immediately hit by the scent of stone being dissolved by acid.

This made his pulse race. It was still possibly a cockatrice, or a number of others… but he was so ready. So excited. The odds got better as things went on. Not that it was entirely responsible to hope for such a powerful creature to be here… but he couldn’t help himself.

As they traversed deeper into the cave, a Night Eye spell was cast over them by one of the rangers; Blas wasn’t sure which, given how dark it was rapidly becoming. The scent of burnt stone only became stronger as they entered, and the shape of the walls changed. What was once random and suddenly changing directions and size quickly because more uniform and intentional.

Once they were walking for about a half hour, a notification popped up in the corner of his vision: [You have entered Fledgling Dungeon: Juvenile Wyvern’s Lair]. Blas’ heart about beat out of his chest, and he only barely kept himself from cheering and giving away their position.

Trying to calm himself, he analyzed the situation. The kind of timeframe it took to develop a dungeon around the will of a powerful monster fit with the reports, and it meant a couple of things. One is that the wyvern would be well familiar with the natural off-shoots, and the second was that there would be natural spawns inside of the cave. The creatures that would be appearing would be based around the will of the creature that made the dungeon, and in this case it would mean things that didn’t make the wyvern feel threatened, or seem to be some sort of foodstuffs. The specifics depended heavily upon the actual nature and personality of the wyvern in question.

Several twists and turns later, one of the rangers sent out a mental ping. Monster spotted, four o clock. Turning to look, he saw it. A Great Centipede. It was a medley of grays and jagged chitin, natural camouflage to the point that Blas himself never would have noticed it unless it was pointed out. He’d have to note to give the ranger team a greater cut of the loot, their skills were even more useful than he expected.

A second quiet ping went out, this one a simple question directed at Blas. What to do about it. He really considered for a moment, before coming to the conclusion that it could live. Not only would that possibly make noise, but it didn’t seemed to have noticed them first, which was no small part of why they opted for Night Eye rather than a Magelight.

After a few more tense minutes of sneaking, Blas mostly just focusing on not making noise and letting the specialists keep their eyes out. As they went, the area only became more and more rife with bugs. While it was entirely possible that the first Great Centipede they saw was a normal denizen of the cave, it was impossible for this density of them to be natural. There simply wasn’t enough food to keep them all alive… so they must have been spawned.

That did make Blas feel a bit better about the couple of Widow Queen spiders they had to shoot with their Hushed bows, silencing the whump of the bowstring. It felt strange to Blas, who had heard it countless times in his regular practice with tranquilized arrows, but that was the nature of magic. Such things always felt strange to him. Despite his proficiency with it, it was not his real field of expertise. Alas, he had no idea how to tame insectoids, so death was the only way about it.

More problematic, however, was the increasingly frequent acid pools. They were obvious and noticable at first, even Blas had no troubles despite his eyes being untrained for caves, but this began to change over time. It had to be a clever beast, because more than once their feet collapsed into barely covered pits. Such things could only be called traps. Could a wyvern truly be so intelligent? It was always told to Blas by other beastmasters that wyverns were incredibly smart… but it was something else to see it in action. From time to time, they even came across pit and wire traps. Such were things that wyverns couldn’t possibly engineer, what with lacking thumbs, but they must have comprehended such a thing for the dungeon to manifest it.

As cautious as they were, though, it was soon clear that they weren’t cautious enough.

Awe filled them as they turned a corner, revealing before their eyes a great lake of acid. This pool was, unlike the others, slightly luminous. It wasn’t much, but enough to make them squint a bit after no less than an hour and a half of pitch darkness. There was no way to progress… not without climbing the walls, which they were unprepared for. There was only one course of action, and that was to turn back.

Upon doing so, however, they saw something that raised the hairs on his neck.

Hordes of bugs. At least forty that he could see and count for himself, of all variety. Centipedes, spiders, ants, beetles, scorpions… shit, they hadn’t even seen the last two in their traversal. Yet all were at least waist high.

“Son of a bitch… they stalked us right back…” he muttered, unable to believe it. They followed them all the way to the edge of the acid lake, clearly using the topography of the cave to intentionally hide from sight.

How damned bright was this wyvern that even the monster spawns themselves understood basic strategies like time and place of attack? Didn’t that mean that the wyvern had to understand that the world was changing to its whims? Didn’t that mean it had to want its minions to know such things?

They were suddenly very glad that the wyvern didn’t seem to be home.