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  [colpse]Chapter Two Hundred and One - Grassroots Campaign

  The final floor was eerily quiet.

  The other floors of the Newbinnings dungeon werely loud, but there was always some noise. Wind rattling against shutters and whispering through patches of grass, water dripping and gurgling. No bird-song or people talking, but it felt as if there was still some life around.

  This pce wasn’t like that. Every shuffle and step echoed, even though from the moment we crossed the wall leading into this floor, we were beh the open sky, a sky that was looking a bit wrong. The colour was off and the clouds above were moving bad forth slowly.

  “What’s the final boss like?” Amaryllis asked.

  We were on a path, cobbled stones leading to the ft, squarish castle that sighe end of the floor. The huge building rose a good four storeys above, or maybe a little more. It wasn’t a house with windows all over or anything like that. Instead, it was an imposing wall of stoh thin slits here and there and spiky protrusions along the roof. The huge roots coiling around it like a grasping snake, all of them bristling with foot-long spikes, only made the silent castle more imposing.

  “The final boss, the Dreaded Dead King, is a big ol’ undead,” Carrot said. “He’s like this giant skeleton thing, with armour and a , that’s sitting on this throne. Glow-y eyes, so you know he’s tough.”

  I nodded as I listened. Glowy eyes were a sure-fire way of knowing that something was dangerous. I remembered that lesson well from watg cartoons.

  “What’s the trick with him?” Amaryllis asked.

  “There isn’t one, really,” Carrot said. “He has a sword and shield and will fight pretty hard. He’s strong, fast, and take a few good blows. I think he’s level fifteen?”

  “Yes,” Buster said. “Around there.”

  “Yeah. Just a pretty tough fight. No magic or any tricks. A couple of sword skills for sshing and such.”

  Momma hummed. “Perhaps the little ones here should sit back for this one. Pepper the king fre when they , but otherwise stay out of the fight.”

  Buster nodded. “I’ll guard them,” he said.

  We reached the castle gate and paused before it. The doorway was made of thick old wood, with an iron grating before it. It would have been hard to break through, had some roots not beaten us to it to slither out between the cracks, leaving splintered pnks on the ground a iron poking out every which way.

  “Man, these roots are mean,” Carrot said.

  Buster grabbed one of the doors and tugged, gritting his teeth as he gruhe door rumbled as it moved aside a bit, leaving an opening just wide enough for Carrot to poke her head in. “Looks clear,” she said.

  We moved in a moment or two ter, a single-file that formed up in the castle’s lobby. For all that the outside was undecorated and rough, the interior was quite a bit nicer, with pretty deliers and what had once been nice rugs across the floor. I could imagi being real nice, if the air wasn’t so stale and lifeless.

  “That corrupted mana is stronger here,” Momma said. “I almost taste it.”

  “I think I feel it,” Amaryllis said. “It’s... ah, I’m irely sure how to describe it. It’s not a ana, I’ve been to pces where there wasn’t much, this isn’t that.”

  I sniffed. “It smells like someone farted ten minutes ago, and you know they did, but you ’t smell it anymore.”

  Amaryllis stared at me. “What in the world does that even mean? You’re not just an idiot, you’re a disgusting one.”

  “Hey!” I protested while Awen held back a giggle and Carrot didn’t bother.

  “She’s right though,” Carrot said. “It does kinda smell like that... or doesn’t smell that way? Uh.”

  “Children,” Momma said. “Let’s keep moving, shall we?”

  “Gdly,” Peter muttered as he fed ahead.

  Carrot giggled and poio his back while pitg her voito a low whisper. “He’s the type to stealth fart like that,” she said.

  Peter’s ears twitched. “I heard that!”

  The lobby gave way te, cavernous room. Banners hung to the side, along with nterns which burned bright and strong, like they had in the mausoleum.

  Well, some of them were like the mausoleum, anyway. Others looked like they'd been tipped over by the many roots rising around the room.

  At the far end, sitting with one leg spyed out, was a skeleton as tall as two Broccolis encased in thick golden pte. His skull was uncovered, revealing a almost welded into the top of his head. o the skeletal king was a rack with a sword on it as long as I was tall.

  He looked strong, and he also looked very dead.

  I blinked. I meant double-dead. More dead thaons usually were.

  Roots, no bigger than fingers, had crawled all across the huge stohro upon, eae eventually reag the final boss and grasping around his armoured form. Roots dipped into holes of his skull and slithered around down into the cavity of his chest.

  His eyes didn’t glow, and in the faint light of the nterns along the room, I could make out a swirl of dust in the air slowly drifting down upon the king’s form.

  “He’s dead,” Carrot said.

  Peter nodded. “Usually he would stand on us entering. Nothihough. I isn’t giving me a level.”

  “Well, that’s a bummer,” Carrot said. “I like this fight. It gets the blood pumping.”

  I shuffled a bit. “What do we do now?” I asked. “Don’t you o fight ahe st boss to move on?”

  Momma frowned ahead at the dead undead, and the other buns looked around. It was Bastion that answered. “We follow the roots then,” he said. “Get to the source of them, and try to see what has caused all of this.”

  That pn sounded as good as any other. We grouped up and started to move deeper into the room. “The dungeon usually has a corridor that opens up behind the throne,” Carrot said. She pointed ahead. “That.”

  There was a corridor at the back. Ohat had a root the size of a double-decker bus jammed out of it. The walls around the passage were cracked and straining. There was no way we’d be passing by there.

  More ihe offshoots of the root here. “Are those seeds?” I asked.

  There were little sprouts poking out of the root, eae ending at a big bulb. It lump and swollen, like a watermelon that someone had ied full of air with a bicycle pump. Dark veins ran across the surfad I had the impression that they... stank?

  “Those are disgusting,” Momma decred. “The mana around them is putrid.”

  Bastion slid his hand over to his sword’s hilt and gred at the seed. “Are they twitg?” he asked.

  “Don’t touch them,” Momma said. “I hope I wouldn’t have to tell any of you, but I’ve raised enough little oo know better than to assume that on sense would be the first thing on anyone’s mind. Buster, Peter, do you think we cut into that root?” She poio the rge root blog the path. “We o make it to the dungeon’s core.”

  Buster grunted his agreement and moved over to the root. He touched it, ft of his palm against the greenish side, then he poked it a few times. “This is hard,” he said. “Wish I’d brought an axe for this.” Stepping back, the big bun raised his war hammer, then roared as he swung it around.

  The head glowed, and when it hit, it did so like a freight-train going off its rails.

  I flinched back as the root shuddered and twitched. A crater was smashed into its side, where his hammer had bee embedded in a ruin of fibrous ks that wept a pus-like fluid.

  “Not bad,” he said as he pulled his hammer back for another swing.

  I expected something terrible to happen, for the roots to respond, so I wasirely surprised with one of the seeds dropped off its stem and spttered on the floor.

  “Buster, keep w,” Momma said. “The rest of you, form a circle around him.”

  “Trouble?” Amaryllis asked.

  “Of course,” Momma said.

  The seed wiggled and burst apart, revealing... some weird pnt-mohing. It was all roots and leaves, some with big spikes on them, others sleeker. It stank, for real this time, like walking into a truck-stop bathroom an hour after lunchtime.

  The root monster wiggled a bit, then started pulling itself in our dire.

  “Its mana is wrong,” Momma said. “And...” She gestured to the side with a flick of her hand, and a ball of some sort of magic was flung out and curved around the far end of the room.

  The monster’s grasping roots wriggled that way, but the magic was too far for it to reach.

  “Magic-seeking?” Amaryllis asked.

  “I suspeomma said. “Which is a problem.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “It’s exuding disgusting mana, and it’s attracted to mana. We have mana in us. Imagine if we start to passively take in the mana from that thing.” Momma looked quite disgusted with it all. “Peter, kill it. Stamina-abilities only.”

  Peter nodded ohen flicked out a knife so fast it whistled through the air.

  When it hit the root mohe whole thing was flung back as though the knife were a tank shell, greenish sap flying everywhere. Peter tugged a thin wire out of the air and his knife snapped back to his hand. He ied the monster jui it with a sniff. “Not poisonous,” he said.

  “It doesn’t o be a poison to harm you,” Momma said. She touched the ft of the kh a swipe and rubbed the juice between forefinger and thumb. “It’s corrupting, but very weak. I think we should be fiering a melee.”

  “Wonderful,” Amaryllis deadpanned. “I love getting my talons dirty.”

  More seeds started to drop to the tone of Buster’s hammer crashing into the root. The tendril wasn’t taking kindly to Buster’s hits, and was falling apart where he hit it. It didn’t look like it would take him all that long to carve off a hefty k of it, but that time would be busy.

  An Evil Seedling, Level One, searg for a meal.

  “Those don’t look to,” I said.

  “Perhaps not,” Bastion said. “But take their enviro into at. They’re in a duhat’s presumably uheir trol, or the trol of the root that made them. I imagihem killing some of the local monsters and using that to level rapidly. By the time a swarm of them make it out of this dungeon, they might well be past their first evolution.”

  “And then they seek out the dungeon, the powerful souragic that isn’t tainted,” Momma tinued.

  “We saw Evil Roots all the way over near Mattergrove,” Amaryllis said. “A smaller iion than this. I don’t believe these things could have made it that far. The timing doesn’t make sense.”

  “We sider the possibilities ter,” Momma said. She stepped up to a root monster and pu hard across the room, where it spttered on the far wall.

  We kept our formation, smag and stabbing and ohumping with a spade, any mohat came close. Peter jumped to the far end of the room and killed any that tried to escape, then he and oved around, destroying the seeds.

  I expected... more of a defehan what we saw here, to be ho. More of a climactic fight against overwhelming roots. I wasn’t going to dismiss some good luck though.

  “I’m through!” Buster shouted.

  I looked over my shoulder to see a huge, gaping hole thumped into the side of the root, big gouges missing from it.

  “Well then,” Momma said. “Let’s go see this core, and the source of this root.”

  ***

  RavensDagger