Black Mould - Twenty-Eight - Stalking an Immobile Adversary

I knew where the dungeon was.

I’d never visited it, but it was hard not to know where it was after so many years spent in the city. I had to go up a few levels until I was on the top level of catwalks. Every step I took clanged and banged as I moved, but that was normal. It was the song of the slums, along with the occasional cry and some booming laughter that carried through the streets as though the maze was some great canyon instead of a labyrinth of tin and rot.

The slums gave out onto a more normal street, with plenty of staircases leading down and back to the ground level.

It was a split in the city. Across that street were more homes. Still in bad repair, but not quite as poor. The distinction was small. More ads plastered over any empty wall space, actual shops on the ground floor with barred windows overlooking the street.

I found a crossing and waited there until the traffic conductor—in this case an elderly man stuck in a booth barely big enough to sit smack in the middle of an intersection—lowered a green flag from a pole and raised a yellow one. The ring holding the flag struck a bell at the top and traffic slowed down.

Horses and mules clopped to a stop, and then the foot traffic on either side of the road raced across. I had to put my [Running] skill to use to keep up with the longer strides of the workers leaving one slum to move into another.

There were more factories here, big, stubby buildings with black or brown or even red tin walls, most with tall smokestacks poking out above them where they spewed brackish smoke into the air.

My head was on a swivel as I took everything in. This was further from home than I usually went. Even my trips to the cemetery crossed through another part of the city.

Someone was clanging a bell ahead, a person in robes and with a big gas mask over their face. “Smog! Beware the smog!” they were calling. They had a sandwich board with “Danger: High Smog In Region!” written on it in a careful cursive font.

I noticed a few folk around me putting masks on, then the clouds above. They were pretty low, but mostly they were still above the smokestacks, and there was a wind coming in from behind me and heading towards the dungeon. I’d be fine with my home-knit mask.

At the next intersection, most folk veered off to the right, heading towards one of the factory districts up against the old wall. I glanced around and found a shoeshine boy cleaning his bristles on a corner. “Hey!” I said.

He glanced up with a start and started to quickly prepare things. Then he noticed me properly and finally he looked down at my bare, shoeless feet. “What you want?” he asked.

“Where’s the dungeon at?” I asked.

“Big D?” He pointed over my shoulder. “That way. Left at McCarthy’s.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Thanks is what my gramps told his chickens. They all starved,” he shot back.

I laughed and ran off across the intersection before a team of horses came rumbling by. A Bully standing some ways off shouted at me to watch it, but he didn’t seem inclined to run after me. I found the place the shoeshine boy was talking about, then took a left and continued on for a bit.

There were fewer homes here. Fewer factories, too. I saw some empty lots where it was clear that some large buildings had once stood, but they’d been rooted out a while back.

There were more warehouses than anything else. The air tasted strange, too, but not the usual stink of factories or anything like that. I pushed out with my [Druid Sight], trying to trigger an attunement sense, and it came back with this overwhelming sense of… hunger.

It was the same hunger that I felt sometimes, tugging at the pit of me, but this was greater—bigger and more potent.

I paused on the side of the road as a convoy rode by. Eight big horses, with masks over their faces and big coats on, pulling a long, open cart covered in boxes. Behind them was another carriage, this one filled with entire tree trunks.

Once they were past, I darted across the street and continued on for a bit.

That’s where I found the Ditz Dungeon.

The area around the dungeon was the biggest open space I’d seen since… well, since I came to this world. A ring of buildings surrounded a huge courtyard with a few small temporary buildings and tents dotting the flattened ground.

People were milling around industriously. Some were dragging entire trunks over to a crane which loaded them up onto another cart. Others were tending to horses and mules. Even more folk were tossing buckets onto a long conveyor line which went off into one of the buildings around the open space.

All the activity was centred around what could only be the dungeon.

It looked like a heap of stones. A small mountain, really, but one entirely surrounded by flat land, like a blister on the earth. The front of it was shaved off, leaving a large hollow opening into the side of the stones that lead into an entrance wide and tall enough for two semi-trailers to drive in side-by-side.

A huge letter D was carved into the rock right above the entrance, and a plaque was bolted into the stone next to it, though I couldn’t read it from way out where I was.

I tasted the air again, and yet again, there was that impression that the air was hungry.

Mana 22/26

That was a bit lower than it should have been. I kept an eye on my mana until I finally saw it tick down by a single digit.

Mana 21/26

Not ideal, that, but slow enough that I could linger around for a few more minutes. The moment I hit ten I’d start leaving. I wanted to gain a skill or ability to counter the mana loss, but at the same time… well, being low on mana was dangerous, and I hadn’t packed any mana-rich mushrooms with me.

Next time. Today’s goal was mostly to check things out. So many paths seemed to lead to this dungeon, and looking at it now… I could understand why.

Hundreds of men and women were moving in and out of the dungeon in long files. They carried buckets, some even had yokes over their shoulders so that they could carry two at a time.

Next to those were groups pulling along entire trees. Even as they moved—and there had to be thirty or forty men tugging the trees along—kids were bouncing from branch to branch with long knives and chopping them off while another group followed behind and picked up the small bits of wood.

How much stuff were they extracting from this one dungeon?

There were pens to the side with strange green-skinned creatures—goblins? Even as I watched, a group of them were marched out of the dungeon, trailed by people in mismatched armour, most carrying short spears by their sides.

The dungeon wasn’t unguarded. I saw patrols of Bullies marching around the perimeter, keeping an eye on things.

Every so often, a cart would come by and people would stumble onto it then be carried off. They looked sickly, but those same carts came back with fresher people all the time.

People hit by the lack of mana? They had to have a way to negate it.

Mana 17/26

“Hey!”

I jumped and spun around. A big guy with a pot-belly was stumping his way over. He had a rod stuck in his belt which he was reaching towards already. “Yes?” I asked.

“Why aren’t you in line?” he asked.

“What line? What are you talking about?” I glanced past him, then blinked. There was a row of children walking out of one of the side streets nearby. They were grubby and dirty, and every last one was wearing overalls just like mine.

“Get!” he shouted.

“You’re mistaking me for someone else,” I said.

“I won’t have another snot-nosed shit run off and get caught in a conveyor somewhere just because you’re a Vista-damned lout!” he barked. His face was getting to be an impressive shade of red.

I pointed a finger right at his face. I could shout too. “Look here, fatso, I don’t know who crawled up your ass and into your brain to tell you that you could talk to me like that, but if I were you I’d start bending over backwards to extract the stupid before it chews through what few braincells you have left.”

“You! You little shit!” he shouted.

I ducked as his stick flew through the air.

Was he insane? Someone as bulky as him, swinging that hard. If that hit me it would brain me. “Are you nuts?” I asked.

“I’m going to make a lesson out of you!” he screeched.

I looked to the people around for help, but the kids were just watching, some refusing to stare head-on, and the nearest Bullies were… were they trading bills? The assholes!

“Get back here!” he reached down, faster than I expected, and grabbed a fistful of my shirt. “I’m going to flog you black and blue, then toss you to the green-skins for lunch!” he snarled.

So I reached into my satchel, rooted around in a hurry, then found the mushroom I’d plucked just that morning.

“Get bent,” I said.

The Dead Man’s Cough burst apart in the jerk’s face, sending a plume of purplish dust flying everywhere.

He let go, which was great because I didn’t want to stick around in that cloud if I could avoid it. I stumbled back, spun, then ran as best I could, eyes closed the entire time.

He tried to follow, but I could hear him wheezing and coughing with every step, and he wasn’t in the best shape to begin with.

Maybe I’d put off my next visit to the place for a little while.

***