Kaboom

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While the Class Pack Boon was neat, it wasn’t really immediately important, so they returned to the larger room and proceeded down the actual main path. That led through a few more encounters, but they had a good process down for them so it was largely smooth sailing.

After a bit, they reached a larger room with multiple exits again. This time, the layout didn’t suggest a “correct path”, so they just started from the left. That got them two dead ends without distinguishing features to start with, but the third room was interesting.

Compared to the rough hewn, asymmetric rooms and shafts this one had been carved with greater care. Not enough to get any prizes for artistry or architecture, but it at least had a mostly even floor and a definite distinction between wall and ceiling. It was also mutant free, instead having a few wooden crates.

Most of them turned out to be empty, but one contained three more Pickaxes of Shattering and one contained a red box labeled “TNT” that looked like it was straight out of a Crash Bandicoot game. “Well, that’s certainly something.”

“Something dangerous, all right,” Qhila commented flatly. She had tried to open the box to look for individual sticks of dynamite, to no avail. “Explosives in mining need to be set up as shaped charges or pushed into crevices or drilled holes. If you find somewhere where you can break rock by just blowing a box of them next to it, you’re risking a cave-in. Meanwhile, if you just blow it somewhere random you’re going to create a shockwave that gets channeled through the tunnels, and it’s wildly unpredictable how far away a safe distance is going to be.”

“Honestly, I think causing a cave-in is the entire point of it…”

Qhila gave him a look halfway between incredulity and deep concern, like he had just made an earnest suggestion that they go lick the Elephant’s Foot in Chernobyl. “Cave-ins and structural collapses for fun and profit are a whole thing in video games. Sometimes, it’s how you kill, trap or escape an otherwise undefeatable boss, sometimes it’s how you shut off endless reinforcements, sometimes it’s a way to open one path by closing another, and sometimes it’s just something to outrun as you escape from somewhere or other. The last one is usually not player caused though, unless it doubles as the way to deal with a boss or endless enemies.”

She still looked tremendously skeptical, but didn’t protest as he put the TNT in his inventory. Or well, not exactly his inventory. He interacted with it in the same way, but the cartoony objects he picked up didn’t actually take up inventory space. Instead, they turned into Buffs that did nothing except track the Dungeon items. Qhila had icons tracking hers as well, despite having no gamified inventory management otherwise.

“That aside, does any bit of wall, or floor for that matter, look odd or off to you? Video game logic doesn’t really indicate anything specific enough to try for, but this is the kind of place where it makes sense to take an extra look.”

Qhila cast a second look around the room and sniffed the air. “No, nothing in particular. Definitely nothing that’s been treated with mining solution.”

“Onwards we go, then.”

And so they did. The next hallway led to a fork, so they doubled back for the last shaft leading from the last room first, expecting one of the split paths to be the ‘correct’ one. The last one led to a small mined out chamber with a tougher but still very manageable group of mutants, similar to the two ‘crossroads’ rooms.

Beyond that, there was nothing else to distinguish it in John’s eyes. Qhila, however, had clearly noticed something as she looked at a spot on the wall with narrowed eyes. “Something is off…”

She looked at the wall more closely, scratched it with her claw, sniffed it, knocked on it both with her knuckle and the butt of her dagger, then finally, to John’s moderate surprise, licked the stone before nodding to herself. “Got it. This is a different type of stone. The mine is otherwise chalk and limestone, which this type of rock resembles but doesn’t naturally occur near.”

“Which is exactly the kind of thing that would indicate a place where it’s worth digging.” He pulled out some mining solution. “Do you want to do the honors?”

She did, and a minute later they had uncovered a short stretch of tunnel with a perfectly square cross section, terminating in a steel door. Aside from a seam in the middle where it would presumably open, the door’s only feature was a circular indentation at chest height that was about as deep as a finger joint. The door had magic item glitters, and Observe revealed that the indentation was, indeed, a non-standard keyhole. “So I’m guessing the key is going to be somewhere else down here…”

On that note, they returned to the fork from before, once again going left to right. While Qhila was scouting ahead, an equal parts interesting and worrying thing happened with the second Bonus Objective.

Bonus Objective Updated
???? —-> Prevent the Second Horde from leaving the Whitestone Mine
Rewards: ???? —-> 50 Dungeon Points, 250 EXP, 2 Boon Vouchers

Obviously, he immediately looked up at her status in the party display, where he found both HP and MP full and no unexpected Debuffs. Making the Party Chat the next stop.

[John]: Are you okay?

The longest second of John’s life followed.

[Qhila]: Yes.
[Qhila]: Found something. Returning.

Well, at least she wasn’t in immediate danger. Probably. Though he’d have liked more details, Qhila had to actually type a response instead of just thinking at the UI, so he couldn’t really fault her for keeping it short. And based on what she had said, he was guessing she had found a safe vantage point letting her look at a future problem. One that was probably waiting down the last mineshaft.

A few minutes later, she returned. “There’s a large cave up ahead, and it’s bloody stuffed to the nines with sleeping mutants. There’s hundreds of them, and it’s mostly the big ones.”

“In other words, it’s the Second Horde that we should try to keep from leaving. Can we do it by putting every trap you have to work towards it?”

“No.” Qhila seemed very certain of this, presumably having considered it on the way back. “As long as the trap modules last, we might, depending on how much they cluster together. But there are enough mutants to run the batteries completely dry and then some. I’d guess it might handle half or so. Two thirds at most.”

“Okay. Then I think we check the last tunnel first and circle back. There may be more things to find that can help us, and failing that it gets us some time to mull over the problem.”

“What about if they wake up?”

“I don’t think they’re going to unless we disturb them. Usually, how sleeping mobs work is they wake up either when disturbed by something, on a timer, or on a transition between day and night. Since the UI didn’t throw a timer at us when you found them, and we can’t see where the sun is in the sky, odds are they only get woken up if we do something to disturb them or trigger an event that disturbs them. Beating the boss is the most likely suspect for such an event.”

“And if they don’t follow game logic, the same way the [aggro range] thing didn’t?”

“I think that’s just a risk we’re going to have to take.” John shrugged apologetically. “Unless you have an idea anyway, because even just a third of hundreds of the big mutants is way more than we can take on. But since it’s a Bonus Objective and not part of the Main Objective, them getting out isn’t a guaranteed game over either. So in the worst case scenario we hide in a side path while they pass and miss out on some goodies.”

“Fair enough.” Qhila shrugged as well, and they headed down the last tunnel.

Following another regular encounter, they came upon something else that was new. Or rather, Qhila did while scouting ahead and returned to report. “Plaster?”

“Yes. Colored and textured to look like a cave floor. I’ll bet it’s a thin layer hiding a pit trap, doing it that way is a classic. Work intensive to set up and reset after use, but easier than making a trapdoor that’s as well hidden. I only noticed because of a skittery noise coming from below.”

“Well, we pretty much need to get past it. Do we whack the plaster with a pickaxe and hope that we can just climb down and climb back up on the other side, or?”

“Well… in a kobold warren, there’d be some path to get past it. Either because a different tunnel goes there or because the pit doesn’t cover the entire floor and the residents know which part is safe to walk on. So getting rid of the plaster is a good start, but I don’t think we need to use a pickaxe.

“Plaster isn’t very strong. Odds are if we can break up most of the plaster anchoring it on one side, the rest will crumble under its own weight. Also, while not flammable, plaster is **** to damage from intense heat or rapid temperature shifts. If we douse the nearest part of it in alchemist’s fire for a bit, it’ll probably turn brittle enough to shatter with a solid hit.”

They proceeded with that plan, finding that there were indeed narrow ledges on either side that were safe to walk on. They also found mutants in the pit itself, ‘brown recluses’ made by mutating large hermit crabs to gain the air breathing capacity of the brown scorpion and replace their pincers with scorpion tails.

They were tied with the vipermoths for smallest and weakest mutant yet, but like their flying kin they came in great numbers. Falling into that would’ve been a very unpleasant time. But with the mutants unable to climb out of the pit, it instead was a simple matter of hosing them with alchemist’s fire until they died.

Beyond the pit trap, they found a prison cell, of a sort. What it actually was, was a selection of metal rods that had somehow been embedded into the floor, in such a fashion that the tops of them left a gap too narrow for a human to pass. If they managed to climb up there in the first place. The tips were also pointed, meaning that even for someone who could fit in the gap it was a perilous undertaking. A larger gap between the bars had a door, held in place by a padlocked chain.

On the floor of the dead end turned cell lay a man in torn, bloody clothes. Past the blood stains, the clothing was the kind of green and brown woodsman’s outfit that would have been at home on a grittier take on Robin Hood. His nameplate revealed him to be none other than Hubert the Hunter.

Hubert stirred as John and Qhila approached, but did not get up. Instead, he produced an incoherent stream of groans and other unarticulated vocalizations of pain and discomfort, interspersed with the occasional intelligible word. The accompanying speech bubble revealed that John had caught all of them, coming out to “manor”, “Chevo” and “glowing liquid”. None of those came with tooltips.

Just as John was beginning to mentally turn towards the process of getting the NPC out, he followed the failed attempt at communication up with reaching into his tunic and pulling out a cartoon-looking object: the broken off half of a disc-shaped medallion, still attached to a chain. After a heartbeat and a half, John realized that it was just about the right size for a certain circular indent they had found earlier. “Well shit.”

“I… don’t follow?”

“I’m pretty sure that’s half of the key to the metal door we found before. Which means the most likely scenarios are that either we would’ve gotten the whole thing if I went to Hubert’s cabin during the first Segment or the other piece is in the room with the second horde…”

“Ah.” Qhila grimaced. “Trying to sneak in to look would be beyond risky.”

“Yeah. Which means we’d basically have to stir them and see them leave to even go check, which would mean intentionally failing that Bonus Objective.”

“In other words, we’re only doing that if we can’t think of a way to keep them trapped.”

“Exactly. Also, on that, we’ll pretty much have to work with what we’ve got. But let’s get this guy out of his cell first. You, uh, wouldn’t happen to know how to pick locks?” He gestured at the lock to the cell door.

She shook her head. “I have a lock pick gun, but that looks like an older design than it’s intended to work on…”

“Well, then let’s just dig around it with some mining solution and one of the pickaxes.” John retrieved a flask of the stuff and stepped towards a wall, but Qhila stopped him with a gesture.

“Dig out the floor under the bars holding the door instead. Limestone is soft and prone to cavities, which means relatively high collapse risk. We’re probably fine regardless, but we might as well minimize risk.”

John nodded and they proceeded to do just that. Getting Hubert out did nothing further to get him on his feet, so John ended up having to carry the NPC. Despite the hunter being bigger and burlier than John and it taking some doing to get the guy into a fireman’s carry in the first place, that proved to be surprisingly less difficult than anticipated. Once the man was on John’s shoulders he could move with fairly little loss of speed or sure-footedness. A good thing that, because he had been worried about how to get the guy past the pit, but that was apparently not going to be much of an issue.

Once they were back at the intersection leading to the cell, the chamber with the second horde, and the way further out, they stopped. “Okay, time to figure out what to do about the Horde. Any ideas?”

Qhila shook her head. “Nothing that’d actually work, I think.”

“Okay. I’ve got one, but you’re not going to like it.” As he had expected, that brought out a frown that only deepened as he explained the idea. “Like you said, limestone is prone to collapses. So we’ll pour out all the mining solution on the walls and floor of the tunnel leading to the second horde. Then we set up the TNT between a pair of the wooden supports and set it up with an improvised fuse using string, a vial of alchemist’s fire and one of the candles we were going to turn into cleansing candles. That should let us get a good amount of distance before the tunnel collapses.”

“Triggering an uncontrolled cave-in still sounds like madness to me…”

“Yeah, I get it. Anywhere else and I wouldn’t do it either, but we wouldn’t have gotten a cave-in in a box if cave-ins didn’t run on game logic. And those are either predictably localized or else expand at a dramatically appropriate pace to make running away challenging but feasible.”

“And if you’re wrong?”

“If I’m wrong, the fuse puts us far enough to have at least a few moments of warning. If it sounds like it’s collapsing irregularly, in front of us, or on top of us, grab my hand and leave the barrier. Forfeiting the second Segment is better than ****. But the risk of it going like that is small, trust me.”

She looked hesitant for a long moment, then sighed with resignation. “I can’t believe I’m actually saying this, but okay, we’ll try the cave-in plan.”

John’s fuse idea was to set up the vial suspended from string above the TNT crate, with the string tied around the vial, going through a few rings from Qhila’s trapmaking kit and anchored to the candle. Once it burned down far enough, the wax would soften and release the string, causing the alchemist’s fire to drop, shatter and ignite the explosives.

It turned out that Qhila’s adhesion spell had a variable duration based on how much mana she put in and the weight of the object that was being stuck somewhere, so they just adhered the vial directly to the ceiling with mana to last about fifteen minutes.

That, in turn, bought them enough time to get most of the way out when the dull roar of a distant, rock-muffled explosion rang out. A heartbeat later, the Bonus Objective cleared. The muted rumble of stone striking stone continued for a few minutes, however, and the volume remained constant as they jogged the rest of the way out of the mine.

While Qhila’s fears with regard to the cave-in plan were soundly averted, John’s own expectations of trouble ahead proved accurate. As soon as they stepped outside, something emerged from the treeline that would have been comical if not for the very real danger that its nameplate and Observe indicated it to pose.