Chapter 49.1

The assaults on the second and third rooms were more of the same, and went about as smoothly. Each islet was no more than a cluster of small huts for living space, and Jason and the others used the combination of darkness and Ravs’ Obscuring Mist to great effect.

The second set of huts had had a pair of frogoids lounging about in front of one hut, almost like a pair of dogs. They’d also come across a species of rare marsh reed that Jason identified as possessing the Perceive trait, which meant that combined with what he could harvest from the frogs, Jason was able to put together a good-sized batch of [Potions of Extended Nightvision], which were immediately passed around.

Jason wasn’t totally clear on the status of Sylvia regarding her knowledge of his skills, so at first he hesitated to use [Brew Potion] so openly. What decided him was the fact that her exact job here was to evaluate their abilities and competence. She couldn’t very well do that if they were holding back, not to mention that holding back could be dangerous. If Aurion had meant for Jason to hide his key skills from Sylvia, Jason was fairly certain the man would have said something.

Once everyone could see clearly through the murk, they were able to pick up their pace. The third cluster of huts were cleared in no time at all, and they were moving on within minutes. It was only then that they began to run into difficulties: the dungeon began to react to their presence.

As they neared the estimated location of their fourth target, at a point where their current corridor took a sharp turn, Kera suddenly surfaced and called out to the rest of the group. “Hold up everyone. Lights up ahead, to our left.”

Jason couldn't see any, but nevertheless he shifted his grip on the pole and brought the punt to a halt. Sylvia did the same. With a lash of her powerful tail, Kera circled quickly back around to the side of Jason’s craft. At the same time, Echo’s dark form surged forwards beneath the water, heading off into the darkness.

After a moment of waiting, Kera lifted her head and propped it against the side of the boat so she could address Lumi. She kept her eyes closed as she spoke.

“Two—no, four light sources in the distance. Moving slowly, but coming our way,” she said. “Looks like…maybe a hunting group or patrol of some kind. And they’re riding… oh, gross! What is that? It looks like some sort of disgusting slime-fish. There's a bunch of murklings riding---”

She cut off, and tilted her head as if thinking.

“Wait... I’ve read about these. They were covered under…hang on, let me recall Echo.”

She paused again, then opened her eyes.

“We’ve got two bogri incoming,” Kera said to Lumi. “They’re like… frogoid tadpoles gone horribly wrong. Imagine an enormous, slimy fish-eel with just two webbed, clawed hands and lots of teeth. Murklings use them as a kind of workhorse because they’re big enough to strap baskets to. They can either hold on for the ride or use them to haul cargo, and they’re strong enough to easily swim against currents. The lights I spotted are basically waterproof algae-lamps.”

“How soon, and can we let them pass us by?” Lumi asked.

Kera shifted her snout from side to side. “Unavoidable. We've got two minutes, maybe less.”

Lumi swore loudly, and quickly looked up and down both sides of the waterway as the light in the distance began to grow brighter. She was clearly hoping to spot a place where they might have enough room to make a stand. Unfortunately the water passage was mostly bordered by a sheer ledge, blocked by both dense trees and heavy undergrowth, which dropped immediately into a few feet of water.

“Ravs, cloak us,” Lumi ordered. “Buffs out, get your rings on, and brace yourselves — this is going to get wet.”

Thick fog immediately began boiling off Ravs’ shoulders. Kera dived and Echo came racing back, joining Ceri and their mistress below the surface. Jason began angling his punt to one side, in order to be closer to what little shore there was, and also positioning for a broadside from he and Shard and Lumi. Meanwhile Aldin chanted a series of spells, and the mace he’d withdrawn lit up in a riot of different colors. He held one of the healing wands in his other hand. Ravs continued to exude dense fog, and drew both her daggers.

With some confusion, Jason briefly noted that Sylvia was no longer in the punt with Ravs and Aldin, having vanished somewhere, but then the two bogri were sweeping down upon them and he didn’t have further time to wonder.

Kera hadn’t been kidding about the bogri’s size. The creatures strongly resembled enormous mud puppies, except that they were the size of a bus and sported a mouthful of needle-like teeth. Jason could see that they had what amounted to a series of basket-like saddles strapped to either side. Each basket held a single murkling, and glow-lamps had been affixed to the outside of the center baskets to provide meager light.

The creatures came within sight of the rapidly growing fog bank, and one of the murklings barked out an order, and the bogri closed towards one another in the center of the waterway. They sank downwards, submerging most of their bodies and the saddle-baskets along with them into the water.

Jason had the sudden realization there was a rather large flaw in their strategy: while fog spells were great for concealing your location on the ground, they don’t function particularly well under water. He had only enough time for a sudden expletive before the water roiled violently and the bogri accelerated to top speed, headed straight for their tiny crafts.

Lumi stood and extended both hands to either side with a cry, and her [Shadow Curtain] rippled into existence ten feet away, extending down into the water and partially above it. For a brief moment, Jason expected to see the telltale ripples of something massive impacting the barrier.

Unfortunately for him, this was not the case. Much like their frogoid cousins, bogri were more than capable of leaping straight out of the water. Just before they impacted the shield, the serpentine creatures gave a powerful, sinuous lunge that flung them up out of the water, where for a moment they scrabbled wildly for purchase with their webbed claws.

They latched on, heaved themselves forward, and came sliding over, back down into the water with a massive splash that rocked both punts severely. Jason lost his footing, and toppled backwards over the side.

His armor weighing him down as it was, Jason sank like a stone. His back impacted the riverbed, and he struggled to find his feet. Jason’s heart began to race, and he willed himself not to panic. He firmly reminded himself that his helmet was mostly enclosed, and he had his ring already activated. In fact he didn’t need the helmet: he could breathe perfectly fine without it, and wasn’t in any danger of running out of air. Just to prove it to himself and to steady his thoughts, Jason took a deep, measured breath. The air smelt strange thanks to the purification properties of his ring, but it was air nonetheless. He forced himself to relax, found his footing, and took stock of the situation.

He could see clearly enough. A dozen feet in front of him, a battle raged in the water as Kera and her pets fought tooth and claw with one of the bogri. She’d morphed into her gorthek form, no doubt because it was far more massive than the crocodile, capable of actually standing in the deep water. He saw the water turn a shade of red as she gored the beast in the side.

Jason did have some difficulty seeing out of the water, but it was clear enough that Lumi had somehow managed to keep her balance; no doubt her mobility skill and high agility at work. A searing gout of wildly uncontrolled flame erupted from her extended arm, illuminating the area and presumably barbecuing one of the murklings. The others took to the water in a flash, abandoning their baskets.

Jason didn’t have much time after that to worry about his companions, as several of the fish-men spotted him just standing there at the bottom of the waterway. Spears were leveled, and with a kick of their finned legs, they launched themselves in his direction.

Jason knew he’d never out-swim them. Even if he had time to pull out a swim speed candy, the water was a murkling’s native habitat, and he was wearing armor. While he could still move, and even swim with a lot of effort, he’d be far too slow to escape. Instead, he’d have to meet them head-on. Jason bent his knees slightly, sinking closer to the floor. He swiftly swapped his two primary lightning shards out for a pair of the preciously limited Steel shards that he’d gotten while processing earthheart. It felt like a lifetime ago since he and Pelk had harvested the stuff.

The first of the murklings closed in, attempting to skewer him directly. At the last possible moment, Jason raised both hands and pushed off hard with both legs, launching towards his attackers. He twisted as he did so, rotating slightly as he activate his gauntlet enchantments in sequence. He batted the oncoming spear aside with a wide, serrated disc of steel, and used that momentum to change a slight turn into a full spin. Jason planted his fist against the surprised fishman’s side just as his melee module extruded from his forearm. A solid, foot-long spike of steel punched straight through scale and flesh alike. Blood clouded the water as his opponent screamed and went limp, but Jason could still see thanks to his ring. He kicked off away from the now-dying murkling and turned to meet the spears of the others.

Grinning to himself, Jason deactivated his current armaments, and extended his left arm outwards in the general direction of the swimmers. In his mind’s eye, he imagined in detail the process that occurred within his shard cannon as he gleefully opened fire underwater. First came the barrel-clearing blast of elemental air, which forced out the water and filled the barrel with oxygen. Then a gunpowder charge was swiftly ejected into the pan, one kept safe and dry within the confines of the gun’s spatial storage. A round was chambered, and the fire shard pin came down.

With little more than a deep, muffled thump, Jason’s arm cannon fired flawlessly despite him being six feet underwater. The two murklings in his cone of fire barely had time to register they were being attacked before Jason’s round ripped through the water, leaving behind a growing trail of ice crystals in its wake. The lead murkling was only a few feet from Jason; it was struck directly in the chest by what amounted to a density-enchanted icicle traveling at over five hundred feet per second. It died instantly, even as the shard’s magic encased it in a near-solid block of ice.

The small shock wave of expanding ice and high-velocity fragments took the second murkling by surprise. It lost one of its arms at the elbow as its right side was caught in the ice bloom. Thus encased together with the dead murkling in a miniature iceberg, it bobbed to the surface. Jason didn’t bother to follow up with a second shot. One of his allies would finish the hapless creature, it would bleed out from the loss of its arm, or it would die slowly of hypothermia before it managed to free itself. A gruesome way to go, but Jason now had other priorities: namely, the bogri.

Kera’s fight with one of the creatures was not going well. Lumi had her own boat shielded with a hemispherical barrier of light, but that had only served to allow the other bogri to shove her far out of position, while preventing her or Shard from returning fire. Jason watched with dismay as the bogri gave up hammering against the shield. It gripped down into the mud with its claws, bracing itself as it slammed its tail into the punt carrying Aldin and Ravs, who’d been fending off encroaching murklings. Their craft was smashed to flinders, and the pair plunged into the water.

Jason mind raced. He knew his current location wasn’t going to allow him to help his allies further. Despite the rather explosive results, his attacks couldn’t travel very far in the water, and he couldn’t swim at more than a crawl. But watching the bogri sink its claws into the mud gave him an idea. His skills were largely the result of the Voice’s intercession. Nothing said that Shard needed to actually hear his commands: the thing didn’t even have actual ears or eyes, so would the intervening water even matter?

He called out to his Contraption, mentally as well as vocally. It jerked upright and dived straight into the water like some kind of demented squid. It sank straight to bottom, and began dragging itself along by stabbing two legs forward into the mud, yanking itself forwards, and repeating the process. Within moments it was at Jason’s side.

Under Jason’s direction, Shard wrapped three of its legs tightly around Jason’s waist and shoulders. Jason was then dragged rapidly to the edge of the water, whereupon Shard hauled him out of the water. His Contraption’s sharp, pointed legs bit into the soft, half-rotten bark of nearby trees, and like a massive, mechanical spider Jason ascended upwards into the canopy. Shard flipped them both around, and suspended in the air, they drew aim upon the enemy below.

A disturbing sense of glee ran through Jason as he and Shard rained hell down upon the murklings and their bogri. His own ice shards froze the water around the great beasts, trapping them in place. Shard’s flame rounds punctured the bogri’s slimy skin and roasted them from the inside. When Jason’s magazine ran dry, he swapped it out for high-velocity air shards, which ripped through the murkling ranks like miniature tornadoes and waterspouts.

It was a slaughter. The murklings had brought no ranged capability of their own. Four of the bogri-riders wielded barbed whips for some reason, but they weren’t long enough to reach him. For that matter, although Jason couldn’t see it himself, the slowly dispersing fog probably meant that even if they’d had bows or the like, they would have had trouble seeing him. Jason almost felt bad for them, except that moments ago they’d been trying their damnedest to kill him and his friends.

As far as Jason was concerned, completely unfair no longer mattered in such cases.

“Arcane Reconstruction,” Jason commanded, holding out a hand towards the scatter remains of the second punt. He felt his mana drain significantly as the sundered craft pieced itself back together, but that was fine: he hadn’t actually ended up using any during the fight.

Of all of them, it was Lumi and Ravs who’d truly exerted their mana-pools. Ravs’ fog and shroud spells weren’t cheap, so she’d been low to begin with, and she’d made use of several short-range confusion spells to keep the murklings coming at her and Aldin only one at a time. Not that daggers were the best defense against waterborne spears. She’d also broken her arm when the bogri smashed the punt apart, but thankfully that was relatively minor for Aldin to fix. According to him, minor breaks and surface wounds were far easier to heal than major organ damage, like the impalement Lumi had once suffered.

Kera had ended up a right mess, covered in dozens of lacerations, but apparently her shapeshifting helped a fair deal when it came to healing. Two greater healing potions and a return to her crocodile form were enough to put her back together. Just to be careful, as they were poling about in a swamp, Jason used some of his precious new ingredients to whip up a pair of Cure Disease potions and made her drink one. Despite Ravs’ reassurances, he wasn’t going to simply trust that the region’s Rot and Disease aspects wouldn’t affect their likelihood of catching something. After all, it was clearly affecting the trees after only a few days. In fact, he was now determined that they’d harvest as much they could after everything was finished. He’d even pay people to go out and harvest for him, given the opportunity.

The punt finished its self-restoration, and Jason lowered his hand. It took some doing, but eventually they got everyone back into their proper positions. Sylvia reappeared from wherever she’d vanished, everyone topped back up, and after some brief deliberation about future plans, they were once again on their way.