“We will.”

I hadn’t even realized I was holding my breath until air whooshed out of me in a sigh of relief. She understands. Faultline gave me a quick nod, seemingly acknowledging my reaction, then promptly began rappelling down the tree to the swamp below.

I looked to Dungeonmaster and told her, “I’m going to bring us down. I’ve got you, okay?” No response, but that was expected. There weren’t many good ways to carry her that wouldn’t treat her like a sack of potatoes, so I defaulted to carefully sweeping her up into a bridal carry. Her arms automatically moved to wrap around my neck, and I flushed a bit at the intimacy of how I was holding her but did my best to focus on the matter at hand. I leapt from our branch to a nearby lower one then another. By the fourth branch, there weren’t any more at a lower level to jump to, but we were finally close enough to the ground. I took one last leap and landed in a kneeling position that doubtlessly would have led to broken bones if I hadn’t been using my power to make carrying Dungeonmaster and all the jumps easy. As it was, I could imagine Jess or Monk giving me a hard time.

Thinking of Monk and the predicament we had left them in brought a grimace to my face as I gently set down Dungeonmaster. I could just barely hear the faint sounds of fighting from the direction where the front of the library would have been, but now that the encounter had begun, I knew Monk was in danger. Octavia had made it clear to Dungeonmaster that the monsters shouldn’t hurt the patrons but could do so to us—“To make it more realistic!”—so that meant getting to Monk and protecting them was my first priority if I didn’t want them to end up dead. Killing monsters in the process meant I was accomplishing what Octavia wanted me to, which made it a win-win scenario.

Faultline had touched down nearby between two roots that had risen up through the soft soil and was busy remotely disengaging the hook lock on her rappelling gear. I called over to her, “The witch’s spawn might attack Monk. Will you help us find and rescue them?”

The hook came loose, and she tugged it free from the branch she had attached it to. As she quickly coiled it to store it in her costume once more, she replied, “I am only concerned with the two of you.”

“Well, the two of us are going to go help Monk, just so y’know,” I quipped back as I took Dungeonmaster’s hand in mine and began leading her forward. I knew the room we had been in with Monk wouldn’t be far from where we were, since the actual dimensions of the swamp matched those of the library. Presumably they would still be strung up in a tree somewhere near there, but with Dungeonmaster’s power, it was impossible to say for sure until we got there. Behind me I heard Faultline begin relaying orders over her comms system to kill any abnormal creatures, and I heard the soft squish of her boots as we moved through a particularly soggy patch. I smiled. She’s coming with.

I saw a flash of movement in my left periphery, and I hastily tugged Dungeonmaster behind me while drawing one of my swords. A large humanoid creature with green flesh was upon us an instant later, and I just barely managed to parry a blow from one of its large, clawed hands. Unfortunately, a second attack from the other hand came straight after, and I grunted as the force of the blow pushed me back and to the side, exposing Dungeonmaster. I had no idea whether Octavia had instructed her to leave herself vulnerable to the witch’s minions, and I didn’t intend to find out. I hastily swung with my drawn blade down towards the space between the creature and her, and sure enough, it began to lunge towards her with a cry that immediately set my nerves on edge. Thankfully I had acted quickly enough, and my blade sliced through the creature’s flesh, parting its hands from its arms. It screamed, a sound that was somehow more horrific than the one it had made just a moment ago, and twisted to try and take a bite out of me. With a quick quarter twist of my sword and a push from my power, I slammed the flat of my blade into its side just before its teeth could reach me and sent it flying back a dozen feet or so.

Now that I wasn’t so close to it, I could properly examine the creature while I drew my second sword, and what I found wasn’t pleasing to the eyes, to say the least. The green flesh hadn’t been a trick of the eye, and it was rotting or outright missing flesh in several places, revealing its musculature underneath. Those areas that were whole had random collections of growths, and a dark blue fluid that was presumably its blood was oozing out of the stumps where its hands had been. All of that coupled with the creature’s long, lanky black hair and the sharp yellow fangs it was baring at me made for a disgusting visage.

Faultline, who stood some feet away, drew one of the water guns at her hip and sent a shot of water laden with Newter’s spit at it. I wasn’t sure whether the liquid would have had any effect on Dungeonmaster’s projections, but it was a moot point, since the creature surged forward towards me, putting itself out of the line of fire. Its bulk belied its speed, but this time there had been more distance, and I was prepared. I took a step forward and braced myself with my rear foot, and as the creature reached me, I used the superior reach of my swords to stab towards its face. It must have had some degree of intelligence, as I saw its eyes widen in alarm, but by then it was too late to properly dodge with the unsure footing of the bog and all its weight pressed forward into an attack. My sword pierced straight into its nose and out through the back, and despite my braced footing, it was only thanks to my power that I actually managed to stay upright when its momentum continued forward and its full weight hit my arm. A gurgling death knell rasped out of the beast’s throat, and it fell limp on my blade.

Unfortunately, by that point I had bigger fish to fry. I shifted my attention to the similar creatures that had begun racing towards us with a screeching war cry from their fang filled mouths. Faultline immediately turned to a nearby tree while holstering her water gun then planted her hands on it. Blue and red light flared across it horizontally between where her hands laid, and she quickly moved aside as the tree fell towards where she had been standing. As it crashed to the ground between us and the creatures, she drew a different gun. This one I could feel, and I readily identified it as her semi-automatic pistol—a beast of a weapon compared to the fare I usually felt concealed on people’s persons when I walked down the street. She aimed over the tree, and when the first two of the creatures began to scramble through the branches jutting up from it, she put a bullet in the head of each.

The ones behind them proved these creatures were, in fact, intelligent after all by fanning out to make it more difficult for Faultline to quickly take them out.

“I’m on left!” Faultline yelled to me while taking aim at one trying to flank her. “Cover right!”

“On it!” I shouted back as I swapped my swords for my bow and swiftly loosed two arrows, the most I could manage the flight of at once. I curved the first arrow up into where I hoped the heart of the creatures were, and the second I tried to strike in the head but ended up missing because it made a split second dodge. I immediately killed the momentum of the aluminum arrow shaft to make it easier to retrieve the unspent ammo later and began firing at the remaining enemies. Thankfully there weren’t dozens of them, so their assault dwindled relatively quickly, but the two of us fought them off for maybe a solid minute before the last of them finally fell. I started collecting as many of my arrows as I could from the corpses while Faultline ejected her clip and fished out another, then to my dismay, once I was some distance from Dungeonmaster, one of the ‘dead’ surged to its feet and towards her.

“No!” I cried as I tried to knock an arrow in time, but it was already almost upon her.

A gunshot rang out, and red mist exploded out the side of a fresh hole in the side of its head. A distressed noise that was half relief half disgust found its way out of the back of my throat when I saw Dungeonmaster was fine, albeit bathed in a fresh coat of blood. I dropped my bow in favor of rushing straight over and immediately swept her up in a hug, blood be damned. “Elle,” I breathed out as I spun us around an inch off the ground. “Fucking hell, you scared the shit out of me.”

The wet squelch of Faultline’s boots slogging through the blood soaked bog reached my ears, and I heard her say behind me, “Are you two unharmed?”

I carefully set my friend down and asked, “Nod your head yes if you’re hurt. Shake it if you’re not.” When she shook her head no, the lingering tension in me bled out. I turned to Melanie, and I shook my head as well. “I’m fine too. Thank you.”

“Good. We need to press on then,” she replied not unkindly. “The sooner this is over, the sooner we can get you two out of here. Now, are you sure I can’t convince you to regroup with the rest of the crew?”

“Monk’s likely gonna get hurt because of us if we don’t do something,” I answered as I reached out my hand and summoned my bow and the half nocked arrow on its string. “Sorry, boss.”

“Very well,” she allowed, though from her tone, it was obvious she was saying so begrudgingly. “Let’s hurry.”

The three of us made quick progress after that, only encountering a couple of monstrous crocodiles and one more of the creatures from earlier on our way. It helped that, though a swamp was certainly tougher terrain to navigate than a carpeted library, we really weren’t very far from where the room had been. After we passed another tremendous weeping willow, I saw them. The limb of a massive tree stretched out over a shallow pool, and Monk hung limply underneath it a couple dozen feet above the water, still securely wrapped in chains that were now wrapped around the branch. Unfortunately they weren’t alone: Right underneath them was what looked like the bastard child of a frog, an octopus, and a shark but super-sized to the point it was roughly fifteen feet tall. Its wet green skin had a slippery-looking sheen to it, four writhing tentacles jutted out from its torso, and its eyes—all three of them!—sat on stalks perched atop its head. Its eyes were focused on Monk as it sloshed through the water, its frontmost pair of tentacles already reaching up towards the unconscious cape while a long forked tongue with suckers lining its forked tips lolled out of its fang-filled mouth.

Its intent was clear. There was no time to plan our attack, not if we wanted to avoid Monk becoming frog food. I drew my bow almost without thinking, while an arrow slipped out of my quiver to my hand via my power. “Hey ugly!” I yelled at it as I drew back the string. One of the eyes twisted around and locked onto us, and I let my shot fly. Fortunately for us, the monster apparently wasn’t anywhere near as nimble as the smaller creatures we had fought earlier, and the arrow crashed into the eye staring at us at a blistering speed. Since it had been moving as fast as I could make it, it pierced cleanly through before sinking into the upper branches of the tree Monk hung from. That got its attention, and with a deep screech of pain, its remaining two eyes snapped around as it abandoned the easier prey of Monk. In a flash, its tongue flew towards us, and I only just barely managed to dodge out of the way in time, falling halfway into the water for my troubles.

Faultline didn’t bother reaching for her water gun this time, likely presuming the monster would be just as unaffected by Newter’s spit as the creatures earlier had been, but she did reach for her pistol. She took several shots at the region where its eye stalk met its voluminous body, likely hoping to get a lucky shot at its brain, and I hurried to push myself up out of the water. The monster didn’t seem to mind the bullets, however, as it simply tanked them as its tongue launched towards Faultline this time. She dodged out of the way far more neatly than I had, and she dropped her shooting stance in favor of slapping her free hand on the tongue. That portion of the tongue flared with light, but apparently Dungeonmaster’s power was capable of mimicking life enough to trigger the Manton limitation on Faultline’s power because the area she touched didn’t split in two. Worse yet, the monster’s tongue was apparently prehensile, as the tips bent back and slapped its suckers on her arm. She grunted in surprise as the appendage began to retract while bringing her with it.

“Faultline!” I yelled in alarm as I finally pulled myself out of the morass. I tossed my bow aside and hastily drew my swords. I couldn’t really take a running leap as bogged down as I was, but my friend was in danger, so even before I had properly thought it through, I was flying through the air by virtue of my power yanking my armor up and forward. I hurled one of my swords at one of the creature’s tentacles to distract it, and I brought the other down in a cleaving blow that cut straight through the tongue, removing its forked tips and the first portion of its main body in a gout of rank smelling green blood. I nearly lost my lunch when some of it spurted across my face and slapped my left gauntlet over my mouth and nose in the vain hope of warding off the smell. Distracted as I was, I completely missed the incoming tentacle until it was too late. I yelped as it slammed into my side, losing my grip on my sword and sending me flying away with enough force that I sent water spraying everywhere when I crashed down into the murky waters once again. My eyes immediately stung from the filth, and I hurried to clench them shut as I attempted to regain my footing.

After a second of disorientation from my abrupt reintroduction to the swamp water and my inability to see, I unconsciously used my power to tug myself up and onto my feet. The skirt of my armor was undoubtedly soggy and wet from the water, so I tugged off my right gauntlet and pawed ineffectually at my eyes while shouting, “Dungeonmaster! Help me find you!”

I could feel where Faultline was from all the metal in her equipment, and I could feel the sword I had flung earlier moving erratically in the air about a dozen feet away—it must have landed in the monster’s hide and gotten lodged there. Dungeonmaster didn’t have any metal on her, but over the noise of the resumed fight between the monster and Faultline, I began to hear birdsong. There, I thought as I blindly jumped over to her vicinity. I slowed my landing to avoid splashing the water on her, and once I had touched down, I pushed up my helmet’s visor and blindly reached towards where I heard the bird warbling. “Please give me some of your cloak.”

Cloth was pressed into my hand, and I hastily wiped my eyes clean before blinking them open. “Thanks,” I said with a sigh of relief before turning my attention back to the fight. I saw Faultline narrowly dodge first one tentacle swipe then another, and as the third lashed out, I realized the only place she could properly dodge would put her in reach of the last tentacle and she wouldn’t have time to dodge with the swamp water slowing her movement. I didn’t know if I could do anything in time, but I had to try. I used my power to reach out to the sword I had dropped when I was hit, which had sunk to the bottom of the swamp somewhat near where she was dodging. Luckily, Faultline had a trick up her sleeve. As she dodged the incoming blow and fell into the path of the next, she sunk her hand into the water at her side. The murk was illuminated red and blue, and she deftly sidestepped the fourth strike at a speed just shy of walking on firm land. The maneuver did not put her outside of that tentacle’s reach were it to sweep sideways from where it had impacted the surface of the water, but just as it had bought her time to dodge, it gave me enough time to pull my sword up from the depths and bisect the tentacle on its way back towards me. I yanked myself forward once more and caught my sword in midair before immediately throwing it at another tentacle. The blade only clipped the monster’s appendage, but that was apparently enough to prompt it to pull back.

In fact, it pulled back all of its tentacles and seemed to regard us for a moment, apparently wary of further damage to its limbs. I landed with a mild splash a couple yards from Faultline, and as I tugged my closest sword back to me, I asked, “You alright?”

“I’ll live,” she answered, short and to the point. “You two?”

“Probably have some wicked bruises on my right ribs, but other than that, I just got some of this shitty water in my eyes,” I replied. I nodded at the monster and asked, “Think it’ll fuck off?”

“No. Froghemoths are known for being fixated on food.” I blinked and looked at her askance, and I could practically hear the smirk in her voice when she said, “You’re playing with real world Dungeons and Dragons but don’t know the creatures? For shame, Fighter.”

“C’mon, cut a girl some slack, you nerd,” I joked as I returned my gaze to the monster—the Froghemoth, apparently—to watch for any sudden moves. “I’m new to the game. Any particular weaknesses creepy frog things have that I should be aware of?”

“Electricity,” she immediately confirmed to my surprise. “I’ve had no good openings to use my taser.” She tugged the gun-like tool from within the skirt of her costume and tossed it to me. As I caught it in my left hand, she added, “Artificers can make guns. I trust you can accept equipment from another class for temporary use?”

The Froghemoth abruptly lashed out at us with the three tentacles that hadn’t been cut in half, and I jumped out of the way while she used her power on the water once more to make it quicker to dodge. “I’m pretty sure our Artificer’s shtick is pulling off bullshit nonsense while fighting, not making things,” I pointed out.

“Irrelevant,” she dismissed, some tension slipping into her voice as she danced around to avoid a probing tentacle while I narrowly ducked under another one and immediately jumped to avoid being struck by the last one. “Get close, stab your sword into its head, then hit the sword with the taser. Go!”

Oh shit, that is a good plan, I thought as I spun around the tip of a tentacle that nearly smashed my helmet and jumped towards the Froghemoth’s main body. I thought I was in the clear but was promptly reminded that, though heavily damaged, the monster did still have another tentacle and a tongue. The tentacle clipped my sword and sent it falling into the swamp while also throwing me into a spin that threw off my orientation enough I couldn’t adequately respond. Its tongue took advantage of that to wrap around me and yank me closer, which had the side benefit of killing the spin and therefore orienting me again. No longer confused and now moving towards where I wanted to go in the first place, I decided to not look a gift horse in the mouth and summoned the sword that had been embedded in its hide all this time to my hand. The moment it hit my gauntlet, I slashed at the tongue, and its grip on me slackened enough for me to slip free. Wasting no time, I threw the sword right back at it, this time aiming for the head. Despite being slower than the enemies we fought earlier, it still reacted quickly enough that it didn’t quite hit its head dead on as I had intended, but jammed as it was into the creatures cheek area, I decided it would just have to be close enough and took aim with the taser.

I pulled the trigger, and the leads shot towards where the leather grip of the blade met the metal hilt. They connected and crackled, and the Froghemoth began to seize violently.

“Go for the head!” Faultline yelled as she drew her pistol and started pumping shots into the area below its eye stalks once more. “Now!”

I tossed the taser into the air to give myself time to clear the water and leaped towards the Froghemoth. The sword in the swamp flew to me midair as I shouted “Clear!” so she wouldn’t shoot me. Not that it would matter, since I would stop any bullet before it did real harm to me, but it was the principle of the matter. I felt and heard the taser splash into the water behind me just before I could land, and the flow electricity abruptly ceased. Thankfully the monster’s debilitated stupor didn’t end straight away, and I was able to safely land on the head. I took a swing at the eye stalks first to give us an advantage if my next attack didn’t fell it, then I plunged my blade to the hilt straight down into its head.

The Froghemoth moaned long and low, and for a few long moments I thought it was still going to keep fighting, but eventually it collapsed into the swamp, sending waves violently sweeping through the murky waters. I let out a sigh of relief, grateful it was over, before turning my attention up to Monk. Up until that moment, I hadn’t really thought through how to handle things once we got here, but now that it was done…

Faultline sloshed her way over with Dungeonmaster’s hand clasped in hers. “Trouble, Fighter?”

“I was so worried about getting here that I didn’t really think about how we’d keep Monk safe once we rescued them,” I admitted as I used my power to retrieve my bow. Somewhere between a third and half of my arrows had fallen out of my quiver during my brief dunks in the water earlier, but it was still better to have the bow and not need it than the alternative. “This asshat didn’t pay Dungeonmaster any mind, but those rotting fucks from earlier tried to attack her. I dunno how to keep them safe while I’m focused on protecting Dungeonmaster.”

I then tilted my head when I felt somebody covered in a layer of metal peel away from the PRT officers I had been tracking since earlier and begin making their way to us. “We’re about to have company,” I added. “They were with the PRT peeps we nearly ran into earlier. Wearing a suit of armor.”

Faultline hummed. “Well that makes things both easier and more difficult.”

“Huh? Why’s that?”

“We can remit this ‘Monk’ to their care, but we’ll have to escape Chevalier first.”