Rune Seeker

Nivian stepped out into the stream of firebolts, his shield absorbing hit after hit, then methodically stalked forward. Where he would’ve normally engaged his movement ability to get to the Mid-Boss immediately, the totems kept him contained for the moment, but they also gave Hiral cover to return fire.

Leaning out to the side, Hiral took a quick aim with his RHC and pulled the trigger. The bolt finally smacked into the center of the Scholar’s chest. The monster snarled as it fell back a step, its hand coming away from the line of fireballs hanging in the air, and Hiral pulled the trigger again.

“I can hit it,” Hiral told the others, who couldn’t see from behind Nivian.

“And we’ve got incoming from behind,” Seena said, pulsing with energy and activating an ability Hiral couldn’t see without taking his eyes off the Scholar.

Another shot kept the Scholar back from his hanging fireballs, but those totems on the other side of it made it so Nivian couldn’t…

The totems. Can I…?

Hiral shifted his RHC from the Scholar to the totem on the right, then took aim at the fire-spitting skull and fired. The totem exploded in a shower of bone fragments, while the Scholar leaned forward and screamed a wordless roar at the party.

“Get ready to charge,” Hiral said, sliding around to the other side of Nivian and quickly picking off the other totem. “Go get him!”

“Why didn’t you do that sooner?” Yanily asked from behind Hiral at the same time Nivian activated his movement ability and blurred forward.

“Lizardmen in the way,” Hiral said as Nivian slammed shield-first into the Mid-Boss.

The force of the impact hurled the Scholar backwards to crash to the ground, its fireballs fizzling out, and its tome hanging in the air, motionless. Without the terrain advantage, it didn’t seem like the Scholar would pose much of a threat—until the doorways of every building burst open in a flood of angry Lizardmen.

Hiral canceled and reactivated Foundational Split in quick succession, giving Left and Right each a full third of his solar energy, and the two doubles spread out to intercept some of the charging monsters.

“Yanily and Nivian, Scholar is yours,” Seena said. “Make it dead. Rest of us, hold back the tide!” Her Spearing Roots erupted out of the ground to impale more than a dozen of the charging monsters.

After that, Hiral had no choice but to turn all his attention on the warriors rushing his way. There had to be a hundred of them, and more coming, so he lifted his RHCs and began pulling the triggers. His first shots went low, breaking ankles or kneecapping those in the front, tripping them up to slow the ones behind. As soon as they hit the ground, he raised the barrels of his weapons higher, shooting bolts of Impact into faces or chests.

Even with nonstop firing, though, the rush was going to reach him, so he dashed forward while he had the advantage of the Lizardmen being slightly spread out. Hiral leaped up and over the leading line of prone Lizardmen, pulling the triggers every time his RHCs were off cooldown, then landed and ducked under the first sweeping spear.

With his left RHC under his right arm, he pulled the trigger, then stood and dodged to the side to avoid a descending spear. Down and around, his leg sweep knocked the warrior from its feet, and his arms went out to each side as he rose. Spinning one hundred and eighty degrees, he fired in quick succession, then dashed into an opening between two Lizardmen, using their bulk against them to hide his movements.

After two shots into the backs of the legs on either side of him, he stopped short, a spear stabbing straight through where he would’ve gone, then ducked underneath and fired wildly at the source. A grunt of pain meant he hit, but he was already past and cutting hard to the left.

A spear lunged toward his face, but he avoided the worst of it with a tilt of his head, though the stinging pain on his left ear meant it didn’t completely miss him. Then he leapt into the air. Using one of the moves he’d seen Vix perform, Hiral’s knee collided with the warrior’s face, dropping it to the ground as he flew past and landed in a roll. His fingers squeezed the triggers as he rose, bolts taking the legs out from a Lizardman in front of him, and he spun, sending two more shots directly into the faces of a pair of rushing warriors.

While the bodies fell, Hiral swept his weapons around for his next target, but nothing else was charging at him. In fact, the few Lizardmen still standing were running away. A look at the Scholar showed the black-robed Lizardman on its back, Yanily’s spear straight through its chest and pinning it to the ground.

Dynamic Quest Complete

That is all for today’s lesson.

Congratulations. Achievement unlocked – Trial by Fire

You’ve run the gauntlet and come out the other side.

Please access a Dungeon Interface to unlock class-specific reward.

“Lizardmen are in full retreat,” Wule said. “Please don’t chase them. Yeah, I’m talking to you, Yanily.”

“They’re experience!” Yanily complained.

“So are the ones on the ground that’re still moving,” Seena said, her left arm hanging limply at her side and blood running down it from a nasty-looking shoulder wound. “Finish them off, then make sure our perimeter is secure.”

“Left, Banner of Courage, please, and hold on to it. The small heal and solar energy absorption will help,” Hiral said. “Right, you, me, and Yanily get the dirty work of putting these Lizardmen out of their misery.”

“Just us? What about Vix?” Yanily asked, only to look over and find the pugilist sitting on the ground with a Lizardman spear still stuck in his gut. “Vix!? You let them hit you?”

“I didn’t let them do anything,” Vix said, grimacing while Wule inspected the injury.

“How bad?” Seena asked, joining the healer.

“I can fix it. Just need time,” Wule said. “And you, Seena, sit down and put pressure on that wound to slow the bleeding.”

“Come on, Yanily,” Hiral said. “Let’s get this over with.”

Between Hiral, Right, and Yanily, the three picked their way through the bodies on the ground, finishing off any Lizardmen they found still alive. The work was gruesome, and without the adrenaline of the battle, Hiral had to fight to keep his stomach down.

He knew the enemies he was killing weren’t actually real—just solar energy constructs of the dungeon—but that didn’t change the look in their eyes when he met their gaze. When he pulled the trigger and had to watch their light fade.

“There’s another totem over here,” Nivian said several minutes later, the last of the Lizardmen finally dead. “The creepy, black kind. Not the fire-spitting kind. I think I see where it goes underground back to the briar too.”

“The Mid-Boss was called some kind of sealer,” Hiral said, but he went over to Seena instead of approaching the totem. He needed a break. Looking at the others, he wasn’t the only one. “How’s your arm?”

“The pain is fading,” Seena said. “Wule’s healing and the banner are helping a lot. A few more minutes and it’ll be like it never happened.”

“I didn’t expect all those Lizardmen coming from behind,” Hiral said. “I guess I should’ve.”

“At least the stupid fireball Lizardman wasn’t very strong once we got to it. If it was like the Duke, or even the Butcher, we could’ve been in trouble. His floating book thing was kind of neat, though. I wish I had something like that.”

“Er… yeah, I guess? Anyway, the dungeons aren’t designed to kill us. They’re designed to make us stronger. To teach us to deal with different situations and adapt, right? This Scholar… encounter—if you want to call it that—was all about getting to it.”

“Then why all the Lizardmen at the end?” Yanily asked.

“Because Dr. Benza was obviously a sadist,” Hiral grumbled.

Seena smiled and gave Hiral a pat on the knee. “Help me up, would you?”

“Sure,” Hiral said, getting to his feet and then helping pull Seena to hers.

“Wule, how’s Vix?” Seena asked.

“I’ve done what I can with my healing, but I’d like him to get some actual rest when we get out of here. The wound was pretty deep, and I don’t know if it’s affected his PIM.”

“I’m fine,” Vix said, tentatively twisting and stretching. “Little stiff, but this won’t be an issue. We can finish the dungeon.”

“And everybody else?” Seena asked.

“The banner’s aura fixed me up,” Hiral said, reaching up to find a small chunk still missing from his ear. Well, guess that isn’t growing back. “Nivian, how’s your shield?”

The tank lifted his absolutely scorched shield to show the rest of the party, the entire thing barely more than thorny charcoal. “It’s seen better days, but don’t worry.” He dropped the shield to the ground, where it crumbled into ash, then grew another one out of the palm of his left hand. “There. Good as new. Now, if I could just carry two of these, it would’ve made that whole encounter a lot easier.”

“You can grow shields anytime you want? That’s handy,” Hiral said.

“Says the guy who literally grows two new entire versions of himself,” Yanily said.

“I don’t grow them,” Hiral countered. “Anyway, are we ready to finish this dungeon?”

“Yes,” Seena said. “Time to find out what kind of Boss they were protecting. Hiral, could you do the honors?”

“You bet,” he said, following Nivian’s gesture to the totem and pulling the trigger. Fragments of bone exploded in every direction, and the faint black line leaking up from the ground vanished. “Now what?”

ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAR. The titanic bellow shook the entire dungeon from the center of the briar as the inky blackness within the plants faded and then disappeared entirely.

Dynamic Quest

The bound Prince of the Swamp awakens.

Time until it shakes off its lethargy: 10 minutes.

Defeat the Prince before it regains the terrible strength that forced its parents to seal it away.

“Well… huh…” Yanily said as all heads turned toward the center of the dungeon.

A second roar, and the already-corrupted plants along the near side of the briar began to crumble and fall. Starting at the top, rigid branches snapped and gave way, tumbling down to take more with them, an avalanche in a thin line about ten feet wide all the way to the ground.

But, on either side of that gap, more and more branches looked to be weakening, and it wouldn’t be long before the whole side came crashing down.

“That’s our way in,” Seena said. “Nivian, let’s go. If it’s anything like the summoning ritual from Splitfang Keep, we want to finish this before the timer reaches zero. Wule, re-buff while we move.”

“On it,” the healer said, reapplying Nature’s Blade to the party while Seena did Lashing Vines.

“Watch those alleys,” Seena instructed as the party jogged back down the street the way they’d come, Lizardman bodies—and parts of bodies—still littering the roadway.

Two hundred feet they jogged, Hiral looking left and right for an ambush from either side, but nothing came. In fact, other than the first two roars, the entire dungeon had gone deathly quiet. They reached the wall without trouble, checked both directions on the road, then crossed it to get to the swamp.

“Don’t see a path,” Nivian said. “Straight?”

“Nine minutes, so yeah, straight. Hiral, you see any snakes?” Seena asked while Nivian picked his way into the bog off the side of the road. He went up to his knees in the murky water, but that seemed to be as deep as it went.

“No snakes. No Lizardmen. No lizards. Nothing,” Hiral said, the eerie quiet sending a shiver up his spine. “This must be the Boss of the dungeon, but it sounds like the Scholar sealed this thing away because it was too powerful.”

“Let’s hope too powerful is still E-Rank,” Seena said, the whole party in the bog now.

“I’m going to be D-Rank as soon as we clear this dungeon,” Yanily said. “It can’t be too scary,” he added as they reached the gap in the briar’s outer layer, then worked their way inside.

Even with the inky shadows dispelled from the plants, the inside of the briar patch still lingered in darkness, like the sun directly above wasn’t welcome, and broken stone ruins littered the ground. What had once been a temple of some kind now rested in shattered chunks, pillars knocked down or torn apart. Several Lizardman statues stood proud in a line, though the great claw marks rending across their bodies showed just what the supposed Prince thought of them.

And there, in the center of the destruction, stirred something that made even the King of the Swamp look small. Jet black and with long spines extending from its back, its body and tail were much like its father’s. However, from its mother’s side, it had three long, serpentine necks and heads, which weaved into the air in unison to look at the party.

Boss – Prince of the Swamp – Unknown Rank