The fight had begun ..running into the centre of the cavern I ducked just as I was about to hit my head on a low ceilinged part of the room , I was seriously begining to see a downside to being tall.

Leander had already rushed over to the massive bug and was swinging his axe low and horizontally at its legs , a move to get its attention, build his rage and hopefully reduce the creatures ability to manoeuvre.

Just before he'd started I had cast a shield over myself , and Seriously , figuring that I'd cast a quick one on Destroyr if the fight needed it . I then started on my larger heal , keeping Leander targeted .Amazingly though he dodged the creatures attacks , and seemed to be fighting a lot more cautiously now , so I cancelled the heal last second , and popped a shield over the sage. I had no damaging spells , so just kept an eye on the tank and waited before starting the process again .. The two damaging party members were gradually ramping up their attacks but compensating for Leander's lack of threat generation . We were actually starting to play as a team , rather than four individuals (or three individuals trying to keep up with one other.)

"To my left! , watch the eggs" shouted Leander , the massive 'Ant' , while attacking , had deliberately walked into a pile of the eggs behind it , causing some of them to start to hatch , and some larval type creatures had emerged , they may have been newborn , but usually in a fight like this they'd be an extra threat to worry about.

"On it" said the caster , and sent a fireball on top of them before they could start to move.

I allowed my burst heal to cast , and refilled our knight's health bar. His axe was still a blur , as it cut into the boss creature , and Seriously was now positioned behind it, stabbing and spinning , as his daggers did their work.

The ant spat out gouts of some sort of acid, which similar to the liquid snaking through the cracks in the cave seemed to smoke and sizzle, lukcily enough it was no where near anyone but Leander , and he dodged it easily.

The creatures health was at the 70% mark and slowly going down , I had mana, threat was being managed , and for the first time in the cave , no , the first time in this new game I actually felt we were in control.

So of course thats when things went wrong.

I was just about to commit a second heal to Leander , who was now taking damage , but at a reasonable rate , when I spotted a red warning in the corner of my screen .Destroyr , who was still carefully lobbing fireballs , from the back of the room , far from our opponent , had lost almost two thirds of his health , and it was continuing to plummet . He seemed oblivious . What the hell was causing it?? . I immediately switched my focus to him as the spell triggered , sending his health back to full . Again it was dropping .

"Damn Priest , heal me!!" shouted Leander , his health at about the 40 % mark . I popped a shield on Destroyr , and started a healing hands spell on the Tank.

"On it ..watch it Destroyr, you're getting hit!!

Why was the sage dying?, when he shouldn't be taking damage ??

Then I spotted it , he'd moved while casting , and was standing in the stream of greenish looking liquid .It was evidently some sort of acid , as it was sizzling at his robe and shoes..He'd committed the ultimate dungeon mistake:

"DESTROYER YOU'RE STANDING IN THE DAMN FIRE!"

"YOU IDIOT!! MOVE SAGE, NOW!"

" oh ..oh right , my bad , sorry"

My bad? standing in lava, or acid , or fire ..was the worst sin a DPS class could commit in a dungeon , and the one thing that was drilled into everyone from the start. The first rule of Dungeon Club: DON'T STAND IN THE FIRE"

How the hell hadn't he noticed it ?, even though pain was reduced to a threshold of 30% , people generally felt it when they were on fire.

"PRIEST! "

Damn , I'd lost concentration , and Leander was down to about 20% , in turn he'd moved away from the Guard Karsk but also from me , so my healing hands were out of range .

I ran at him and cast shield.

Crack! I'd hit my damn head off a low part of the cave's ceiling ..stunning me for a second .

Shaking it off I said "If you have have a potion drink it , heals are coming in a second"

For once he didnt complain , and drank a health potion , while I knocked back a mana potion

While all this was going on , and I was frantically trying to start a big heal , someone was trying to message me , I muted all communication so I could concentrate , I'd reenable it after the fight, I'm guessing it was my PA with my schedule for tommorrows checkup , and the meetng afterwards , I really didnt want to think about that now though.

The ant was using its acid spitting ability again , while it used its sharp mandibles to try and spear the knight.

I managed to get the heal out just in time , as Leander's health had dropped again .

While this was going on , the two other party members had slowed their attacks so as not to get the creatures focus while Leander was recovering . This gave the huge ant a chance to activate more eggs , luckily Seriously was able to hit them with throwing knives , however , they were spawning now faster than he could take them out , and several larva were speeding over to him and Destroyr.

Leander though ran back and intercepted their path , getting them to turn and attack him , holding his axe out , he spun around and around , like a crazy shot putter , moving in a short arc back to the boss , hitting all of the creatures with critical hit after critical hit.The larva where down , and the massive ant was down to maybe 15% health .

Screaming it increased the speed of its attacks .

"Everyone , on the boss , as much damage as you can!" he shouted .

Our rouge ran at the creature, and stabbed as best he could , evidently low on focus after the knife throwing .Similarly the sage mana bar was preciously close to empty , but he was timing his fireballs so that as soon as it replenished enough one was flying from his fingers.

I couldn't do much , but waited to cast heal again on the knight , as he flailed away with his axe.

With a scream , the ant was down .

[600XP Received]

Not bad , not the best haul of experience , but not the worst.

I was fairly close to levelling now , so hopefully if we continued to get a stream of small XP drops I'd level up before we went much further.

[Group loot received : Ant Acid wand]

[cast damage : 120 damage : +4 Int + 5 wis +2 Con]

As well as being a usable weapon , it had good stats attached ,even if it had a joke name.

we looted the larva , I got some coins and a "gas filled stomach" , which as well as being disgusting , seemed to be a sort of explosive.

"Nice , can I take that , it'll let me do some damage when I'm not healing" I asked Leander , as group leader he was the one who could assign boss dropped items .

[Leander receives Ant Acid Wand]

Damn it the guy really was a douchebag

"What the hell guy ? , you cant even use that" said a shocked Seriously.

"Consider it my fee" , said Leander ," I'm running you nubs through here like I said , and I need to cover any damages or potions I need to use ,because you guys cant keep up, so I sell the loot after we finish..it's simple business bud"

This is the part where having an older party member who could keep a cool head would be invaluable , keep the tank placated , maybe get him to give some gear out to us , and keep the rest himself , make it through the rest if the cave , get our quest finished then leave and never look back. Unfortunately , while I was an older party member , I've never managed that second part about keeping a cool head. Within seconds I was inches away from the knight , eyeballing him .

"Your fee? The way you've been handling this so far you should be paying US!..you're badly equipped , badly specced and have no idea what you're doing other than " Axe goes whack" .You're fucking crazy if you think that we're staying grouped with you .You fucking 'nub'"

[Leander has left the party]

[Tedius is now leader]

Leander started casting a recall spell.

"Fucking ...scrubs ..good luck getting through the rest of the dungeon with no tank"

"And you ..big man .."he said to me " Remember that you're just a healer , unless you're hiding behind someone like me you're useless"

As he faded out he gave us the finger.

Classy to the last.

OK ..well now we had no one to take damage ,and as I calmed down I realised that may slightly have been my fault. I said as much to the rest of the party , and apologised again.

"Its OK bro ,"said Destroyr , if I'd have stayed grouped with him much longer I would have ended up fireblasting him into a cinder anyway".

"So now what?" said Seriously "..we keep going or...?"

"we better backtrack I said , go back outside and see if we can maybe get a knight , or someone playing a guard might do , see if they can help us finish the dungeon" I said.

We started back , but the entrance to the chamber we were in had sealed over with a sort of hardened insect goo , evidently once we'd committed to the fight here we'd committed to the rest of the dungeon.

With no other choice , we started forward .

"Its possible there's a side tunnel to the surface " I said ,"the quest guy mentioned them ,so if we can sneak a bit forward maybe we can use one of those to get out "

At the end of the chamber , behind the ant corpse, was a rough hole , large enough for an adult to clamber through ..on all fours we slowly crept through , as it descended down and then twisted to the left and down again ..as we crawled it got colder , and the ground felt harder.the tunnel and beyond were lit by an eerie green light.Some sort of florescent moss , so Destroyr didn't have to recast his manalight spell after it expired.As we went on wisps of cobwebs hung from the tunnels ceiling , and as the passageway widened into a larger series of chambers , these webs grew thicker and more numerous.as we stood up , there were a series of massive webs criss crossing the ceiling , and scattered around the ceiling hung cocoons , ranging from maybe the size of a backpack , to clearly human sized .

In the far distance we could see shapes moving over the walls .

Spiders

"Nope ..nuh huh .. I'm out guys " said Destroyr "..I can handle nearly anything , but spiders ..nope."

"OK guy , its cool .. can you portal back " said Seriously.

"yeah don't worry , and thanks for the help" I said.

"yeah ..I uh .. I can portal myself out , If I had the high enough level spell I'd offer to portal you guys but ..I havent got it yet , sorry" he said

"Its no problem man , you do what you gotta do " replied Seriously

"look , if you guys need a hand again , let me know , I've found a load of cool things here , well a guy I know is telling me some places to check out , and how to get in , so I can help you out if you like , OK?"

"Thats great bro " said Seriously.

He waved and then cast the spell , fading out of sight.

"So Jason ..do you want to portal out too?" I asked ."I was planning on waiting till I got some good experience out of this area , but at this point it might be better to just quit”

"Yeah , thing is I used a scroll this morning , I cant portal back home for another 10 hours or so , so I'm stuck here ..if you want to go , its cool , I can stay camped here until tomorrow , then try and get home"

Portal spells had a lot of drawbacks , especially for non magical classes , and in his case he probably had a 12 hour cool down on his ability to read them . I didnt like the idea of leaving anyone surrounded by giant spiders for a night though.

"No I'm good, come on.. so we take it slow and stealthy , avoid fighting the bugs and get ourselves out"

Seriously topped up his camouflage dust , and tried some on me as well although I don't think it made much difference to my ability to hide .

We crept on through the cave as quietly as possible, the huge , dog size spiders seemed to ignore us , as they scuttled back and forrth between the cocoons . We'd made it through two chambers , and were most of the way through a third when I caught a flicker of movement behind me .

I turned and was face to face with a massive arachnid

[Massive cave spider]

It was about the size of a car, with eight thick legs covered in razor sharp barbs.

I'm not afraid of spiders but my legs turned to jelly as this thing reared up at me .

On instinct I popped a shield on Seriously as he threw knives at it to distract it from me .

"Run!!" he shouted , " ..I sprinted away from the huge creature

The spider chased after us chittering loudly ,

As I ran I started casting a shield on myself.

"We might be able to get through that open.....urrgh"

I felt a burning pain in my hand , and then my side.

I looked up .

The spider had tried to attack Seriously , but I'd been in the way , so the creature had driven one of his razor sharp legs through me .Worse still ,it continued on through Seriously , before impaling itself in the cavern wall.It was jammed in there good too , as the spider was trying to pull it free but having no luck. I was too far from the spider to push myself off , plus my hand was impaled behind me ,Seriously had both hands free but similarly stuck and was too near to use throwing knives ,but too far to stab.Our health was slowly going down , but my Aura of Light ability had kicked in , and was healing that damage almost immediately.

I was stuck.

Seriously was stuck.

The spider was stuck.All things considered it wasn't a good situation for any of us.

Its not really possible for a spider to look embarrassed , but I'm fairly certain this one did.

"You OK ?" I asked

"Well I'm on a spider shish kebab, but could be worse I guess"

“Really?”

“No …this is about the worst”

A few minutes passed.

"Can you portal yourself out?" Seriously asked, " I mean maybe if you pop off , I can damage the spider enough that he'll get loose, I can blind him and stealth out of here .

"Nope , I need both hands free to cast it , and ..well." I wiggled my impaled hand as best I could "I only have one free”

"Shit"

We both tried to think of a way out.

Its possible the spider was trying to think of something too , but he wasn't very forthcoming.

Eventually I said "OK , I have a plan , I cant portal , I'm not spending a day stuck up here , you can be practically invisible using stealth , but I cant ,so even if we get out of here , and somehow kill this guy , we're going to be chased by every other spider here that sees me ...so here's what I think we do ,you get a health potion ready , I throw the explosive I picked up earlier at the spider , it hopefully does enough damage to free his leg , and if we're lucky kills him , I die but hopefully don't lose too much experience , your shield spell is still up , and with your leather armour you should survive long enough to drink a potion and stealth your way out."

"Man there has to be another way around this" he said .

"Look , It'll be fine , at least some of us will get out of this with some experience, anyway ,shields running out , so no time to argue, drop me a mail later and let me know how you get on, anyway ..ready ..steady.."

I prepared to throw the explosive"

"Go! Go" Go!"

White .

Pain

[You have died]

I was back in the starting room again ,

[Experience deducted ]

[You are now Level 5]

[as you are under level 8 , you may choose a new class or race if you wish?]

Damn it .. I'd lost enough experience to actually drop a level

I was thinking of using this as an opportunity to get the spells and abilities I'd missed out on the first time around , when a frantic beeping alerted me that a high priority message was being put through.

It was Sophitia my personal assistant AI

"Boss! I've been trying to get you for hours!!"

"Is everything ok?" I said.

"I was going to ask you the same thing , your check up and that legal meeting was supposed to start half an hour ago , I've had to make excuses for you, and I'm not supposed to lie to humans!"

"Thats tomorrow though?"

"No its now , and you're supposed to to be asleep in here while they get you ready to go out ..over there, so its going to be rough "

"Okay ..damn ..alright I'm going to log out now, let them know I'll be ready to go out there in a few minutes"

With that I gestured for a logout door and got ready for a visit to the 'real' world.