Dungeon diving, pt 2

The Lair of Fetid Decay lives up to its name; you can smell the reeking air emanating from the cave entrance from at least twenty meters away. The stench grows incredibly strong by the time you actually step into the darkness. Even breathing leaves a foul taste in your mouth, but you do your best to ignore it all; there's nothing you can do about it. There is no natural light in the cavern, and the embers from your Burning Barrage don't even fully illuminate your head as they float around you, but Brighid casts a quick spell and a large ball of yellow-white energy appears in the air just over her head. It pulses and emits strong but variable illumination out to about ten meters, although you're currently moving through a tunnel less than two meters wide. You allow Brighid to take the lead but stick close to her, to the point that you actually keep a hand on the plated armor of her flank. The tunnel twists and turns and slopes gradually downward, until after about two minutes of careful, slow walking the walls around you open up into a space large enough that Brighid's light spell does not illuminate the far side.

Water drips from the darkness above into pools of stagnant water with steady, plip plop sounds, and the pulsating light glitters from stalagmites rising like rotten teeth from the uneven stone floor. The ceiling must be high indeed, as you can only barely make out the tips of stalactites at the light's furthest extent. You can't see anything threatening, but gaming instinct tells you that there will be enemies here. You stop Brighid and warn her, "I can't see anything, but my instincts tell me that we need to be careful. This screams ambush." She nods and casts an unfamiliar fire magic spell. You feel waves of heat radiating off of her body, but strangely it feels comforting to you rather than dangerous. Brighid cautiously enters the cavern with you sticking close to her side.

Nothing happens for the first several meters other than the continued noises of water dripping. You look all around you and strain your ears to hear any sound of potential attackers, but in the end it is Brighid who suddenly shouts and sidesteps into you, pushing you just out of the way as something drops out of the darkness above you and lands on her back, where your head was just a moment before. Another lands just behind you, and another to the other side of your Companion, and then you're surrounded by at least a dozen of the small, multi-legged things. Brighid immediately dispatches two of them which landed in front of her with a single spinning strike from her glaive, which gains a shroud of ghostly flames for a split second during the strike. You begin casting Flame Jet as soon as you recover from Brighid's push, but the 1 second cast time means that you aren't in time to prevent the one on Brighid's back from scrambling to a joint in her armor and biting her, nor to stop several others from contracting in on themselves and then jumping towards you and Brighid.

One of them collides with you and grabs on with spiked legs, but before it can bite you, you have finished your cast and two streams of flame begin to pour from your hands. You aim one spell at one of the leaping enemies and blast it out of the air, while your other hand is devoted to cooking the one on Brighid's back. The creature latched onto you takes a bite out of your torso and you gasp with pain, but you manage to maintain concentration on all three of your spells. Brighid whirls and stamps with her hooved feet and spins her glaive from side to side in a deadly, beautiful dance. A pulse of heat from her causes acrid smoke to rise from all of the creatures. You pass your flames over every creature you see, gritting your teeth at the searing, sickening pain in your side as the one on you continues to gnaw away. As soon as your spell ends, you grab hold of the mite with both hands and tear it free from your body to the tune of another grunt of pain, then toss it hard onto the floor in front of Brighid, who drives the tip of her glaive through its bloated abdomen. A pool of blood -- your blood, you realize -- spreads from its corpse.

You look around you for another enemy to burn, but the cavern is still once more. You press a hand to your side and it comes away wet with blood. Blood pounds in your ears as your heartbeat slowly returns to normal following the spike of adrenaline. The whole fight only took a few seconds and there are -- you stop to count -- fourteen smoking, bisected, smashed, and/or transfixed corpses all around you. You reach into a pouch at your hip and pull out a soothebalm leaf, then begin to cast your Patch Wounds ritual to heal the 35 damage and minor bleeding Wound you have. Brighid took a little damage as well, but is un-Wounded and has much more health to start with. That 35 damage is about a quarter of your total Health, while the bite Brighid took only set her back about 10 Health of her 416 total. 10 seconds later, a soothing coolness covers your side as the ritual takes effect, stopping the bleeding and beginning to repair the injury. You begin casting a second instantly, then a third when that one is done.

Congratulations! You have reached level 5 in Vivimancy. You are now a Novice in Vivimancy; your Health regeneration is increased by 10%.

You have received 50 experience for reaching Novice rank in Vivimancy.

Congratulations! You have learned the ritual Pulse of Life.

Pulse of Life: Vivimancy, level 5. Waves of life energy pulse outwards from you, healing every living creature within 2 meters of you for 5 Health each second and harming every undead creature for a like amount. This energy comes at a cost, however; your Stamina is consumed to fuel the ritual. The healing is caused by pure life energy and will not cause scarring. Cost: 100 Concentration; 10 Stamina per second. Duration: Concentration. Casting time: 10 seconds.

Well, well. You should have expected it, since you knew you would get the experience reward again, but your new Vivimancy ritual catches you by surprise. This new one is almost exactly what you hoped it would be, too; it doesn't require a material reagent that you need to expend, so you can use Pulse of Life to practice the Skill without worrying about the cost. It'll also be useful to heal yourself and Brighid from any further fights in the Dungeon, and maybe even offensively against the enemies in Bannagh Macht, although right now the Stamina cost makes it hard to use as a weapon.

Once you're mostly repaired, you take the time to kneel and examine one of the corpses. It looks something like an evil cross-breed between a spider and a roach; it has a long, roughly oval-shaped abdomen with a hard carapace, a much smaller thorax from which sprouts ten thin legs tipped in spikes, and a multi-eyed head with nasty-looking mandibles and a lamprey-like circular mouth lined with teeth. The whole creature is about half a meter long not counting its legs. "So these are mites?" you ask.

"Yes," Brighid replies, mouth twisted in distaste. "Young ones. The fully grown ones will be about twice this size, and the queen will be a little smaller than me."

"And... how many of them are there going to be?" You ask, not really wanting to know the answer.

"Hundreds, most likely. It is fortunate that they are fairly fragile creatures." Indeed, while the Boar Manikin had taken an entire five seconds of concentrated Flame Jet to kill, even with its high vulnerability to fire, these young mites only took a second's worth of Flame Jet damage to fry. You check your combat log and find that you are dealing 8.25 damage per tick to them due to your spell power and the +25% bonus damage from your Novice rank benefit, so you guess these had about 10 to 15 Health each. They sure packed a wallop for creatures that frail!

You also see several experience notifications:

Aidan Lostlorn's party has earned 700 experience for killing 14 Juvenile Rock Mites.

"And they're only worth about 50 experience each. Well, I guess a couple hundred of these with some bigger ones thrown in is still several thousand experience, let's just hope they keep coming at us in manageable groups and not all at once. Do you think that's all of the ones in this chamber?" You ask Brighid.

She shrugs and replies, "No way to tell for sure, really."

You grin and tell her, "Actually, there just might be. Get ready, I might be about to pull some more aggro. And watch the ceiling." You concentrate briefly and the seven Burning Barrage motes around your head streak off into the darkness above your head. Less than a second later, a series of explosions light up the rocky chamber. Six of the explosions reveal nothing unexpected, but the seventh lands directly in the center of another cluster of the creatures. They drop from the ceiling and land in the darkness ahead and to your right with a series of plops, then you hear their skittering legs swarming towards you. The explosion only did 6.25 damage, so one mote wasn't enough to kill them, but you greet the pack with twin Flame Jets as they pour into the lighted area around Brighid and none of them make it close enough to attack either of you.

Aidan Lostlorn's party has earned 600 experience for killing 12 Juvenile Rock Mites.

You spend the next couple minutes re-casting Burning Barrage and launching the motes in pairs up at random spots in the ceiling and walls until you're as sure as you can be that you have killed all of the mites in this room.

Aidan Lostlorn's party has earned 1750 experience for killing 35 Juvenile Rock Mites.

Congratulations! You have reached level 15 in Fire Magic.

A quick circuit of the chamber reveals two tunnels leading further into the complex, one to the left of the entrance and one to the right.