The party had already fought rats with crystal symbiotes growing form their bodies, and now they faced a far more dangerous—though curiously rhyming—foe: bats with crystals growing from them. Though in this case it was not the eyes that were the focus, as had been the case with the rats, but instead the fangs, and, likely, the vocal cords as well, to judge by the unholy crystalline wailing that sprang to life as the flock of crystal-bats took wing.

‘We need to retreat, now,’ Drev said. ‘We can’t fight those things with wild magic as a threat backing them up! Too many things could go wrong. We need better ground to make a stand. Crystal-free ground, by the look of it.’

‘This whole place is riddled with the stuff,’ Jhess said, daggers in hand. ‘We’d have to run all the way back to the temple, at least.’

‘And we’re where the map told us to be,’ Robin said. ‘We’re on top of part of the secret. Vance uses magic to fuel his transformation, but the spells that do work seem to remain stable. You cast a few spells in the corridors that worked, fuck, they all worked. Vance falls back to the entrance where there are fewer crystals, we all load up on our defensive spells there and hope none go awry, then we can advance again, see how many of our cantrips go to plan. Even if it goes wild, it should be unlikely that the amount of magic in itself is dangerous.’ Robin paused, remembering how the magic of the hobgoblin army had fused into a gigantic chain-reaction of wild magic. ‘As long as we don’t use too many spells and blanket the area in too much magic, we should be all right. There aren’t that many bats.’

Saying there weren’t that many bats was akin to saying that there weren’t many pieces of hay in a small haystack. Sure, compared to the whole field it wasn’t much at all, but it was still a lot of individual stalks of hay.

Still, rhetorically it worked. Make the problem seem manageable, define the steps needed. It’s easier to see the way to defeat an enemy if you can break it down into smaller enemies.

And that’s what Robin and his party was facing: a swarm of small enemies. All together they were a threat, sure, and triply so in an area of wild magic where Robin, Drev, and Savra were a bit more limited in what they could contribute, but a horde of bat was still bats.

Even if they did have strange crystalline powers.

‘So we fall back, do what we can, try a sortie or two, and if it all goes pear-shaped, we retreat. If it works, we deal with the bats then investigate this place. Sorted.’ Jhess twirled her daggers. ‘So lets get to it!’

So the party did, falling back to the entryway. Robin shrouded them with the illusion of darkness. The spell worked, but Robin winced, noticing that several of the crystals seemed to soak up the quality of darkness as he did so.

He pointed the effect out to Drev. Vance would have been better, as a scholar, but the librarian was busily incanting his spells, calling upon the legends of warriors past to lend the mage their power and abilities.

‘What do you think that might mean?’

‘Maybe there’s a threshold,’ Drev mused. ‘The hobgoblins wild magic reinforced itself, so maybe there is some sort of level at which things change? A certain number of spells before there’s an outbreak of wild magic? If we could predict it—‘

‘Wild magic is never predictable,’ Robin cut in. ‘If it was it wouldn’t be proper wild magic. If there is a level, it changes or is constantly in flux. We might be able to ride a trend, but it will be like riding a shark or a tiger or a tsunami of lava—we’re never going to know when it is going to turn on us, and a mistake like that could be even more devastating because it’s so hard to predict.’

‘Ready,’ Vance called.

Drev sighed and went through the motions for his force armour spell. It flickered to life around him without an issue, though Robin noticed several nearby crystals spark to life with the colour of Drev’s magic.

‘I think we’re definitely headed towards that eruption we’ve been talking about,’ Robin pointed it out. ‘Let’s proceed with caution.’

‘The crystals further away do not seem to have reacted. Maybe proximity is also a factor,’ Savra noted, hands clenched around her coin.

‘I suppose we’ll find out,’ Robin said as Jhess lost patience and charged into battle.

The rogue dashed for the cover of a nearby pillar of stone and began lashing out with her daggers, flinging them at at swarm of bats. Each dagger found its mark and downed a bat, but there was no way she alone could take out the whole group of them.

She’d run out of daggers first.

Robin risked running to a different pillar, spacing himself out from the other magic-users in the party. If their theories were right, it was safer not to overload any one area with magic.

Cantrips flew into the air, bolts of pure force, balls of divine fire, and flaming playing cards, felling bats left and right. Vance was a bloody eye at the centre of a tornado of razor-edged fangs and flapping wings, his sword glowing a deeply-disturbing white that thirsted for blood like a bone in the desert.

At first, nothing happened and it seemed like their strategy was working. But as the spells flew, the crystals glowed more and more brightly, until at last there was a fzzt! and the stored magic discharged in a coruscating webwork like spun lightning and everything it touched was transformed to glass-clear crystal.

Fortunately Robin, Drev, and Savra were out of the area of effect. Jhess was nimble enough to escape entirely unscathed, in spite of being quite near the point of origin. Vance, however, was not quite so lucky.

The warrior mage attempted to dodge, and, for the most part, succeeded, dancing between a bolt just as it forked around him—maybe he was burning his magic to conjure the legendary luck of the Great Grey Hero, Maus—but the coruscating energies caught his sword just a handspan above the cross-guard and transformed both it and two-thirds of Vance’s flowing hair into crystal as clear as glass.

Vance swore but called out that he was fine. He took a dagger and cut the crystal free form his hair before the fine points could shatter and dig deeply into his flesh. The sword dissipated back into paper.

Well, the bits that had not transformed did. The crystal remained, tearing itself free to shatter in an explosion of razor-sharp shards on the ground.

And they were not the only ones. Several bats had been caught in the discharge as well, transforming to high-speed crystal bombs that exploded on impact. No member of the party—save Jhess—managed to evade the flying shards. Everyone was bleeding from thin, superficial cuts.

As he winced and levered himself back up, something caught Robin’s eye. There were lights pulsing in the crystals, moving from one to another in a spiralling pattern, like a galaxy glimmering within the stone of the cavern…

…and the core of that galaxy was a spot in the middle of the cavern, on the ground, a bit off of centre. The lights briefly outlined something that could be a trap door or other passageway before disappearing from sight.

‘Look!’ he called to his party members. ‘Something’s there!’

‘Make a note and we’ll deal with it later,’ Jhess called. ‘There are still a lot of bats we need to deal with first!’

‘Just watch the spells and the crystals! That crystal-lightning was no joke!’ Vance, for once, had a serious expression on his face.

Apparently the loss of his hair wasn’t something he could so easily laugh off.

The party—more cautiously now—went about exterminating the rest of the bats. Robin managed to confuse them a bit with strategic auditory illusions, but these bats seemed far less susceptible to that trick than he expected. Maybe they were using the nearby crystals to navigate? Not just sound?

In any case, eventually they managed to mop up the bats and pause for a breather. When they had recovered, the party moved cautiously to investigate the area where Robin had noticed the lights disappearing.

‘It was somewhere around here,’ he muttered, before conjuring the small illusion of a dancing globe of light.

Nothing happened, so he conjured three more. Then the crystals gulped down the magic and he was able to follow the traces to the exact spot.

‘Bit reckless,’ Drev said, but the mage was far more curious than he was afraid.

‘There’s some kind of hidden passageway here,’ Jhess said, running her hands across the stone. ‘I think I can…there!’

There was a click, followed by a circular section of the floor sliding out of the way. A set of stairs coiled around the passage revealed in its absence. Crystals, larger than those in this cavern, studded the walls and provided light.

‘There’s a room at the bottom,’ Robin said, squinting in the light.

The ability to see in the dark was still coming in incredibly handy!

‘Well, we’ve come this far. Might as well see what we’re working with.’ Jhess pointed down the hole. ‘In you go, Riri.’

Rerebos, who had resumed his perch on Robin’s shoulder, puffed up and hissed at her.

‘Can you block the mechanism?’ Drev crouched down next to Jhess. ‘I don’t fancy this thing sliding into place and trapping us down there.’

‘Eh, maybe. Give me some more light.’ Jhess reached for the edge.

Drev, perhaps automatically, complied, conjuring a bright globe of magelight.

That was a mistake.

The nearby crystals immediately sucked up the light and with it, Drev’s magic, and this time there was no delay before those selfsame energies were warped, twisted, and released back into the air around them.

There was a shuddering rush and a cylindrical wall of stone slid into place—or was conjured by the discharge of magical energies from the nearby crystals—cutting the party off from the cavern around them.

Cutting them off from the path back!

There was no way out except possibly by delving more deeply into the dungeon.

The dangerous, far too-high-tier dungeon.

Fuck.