Into Darkness

“I still say we just kill someone and take theirs.”

The pixie grumbled as she hovered along beside him. They had to backtrack for an hour before they reached the last fork in the road, then turned west following a smaller path that wound its way through a deep crevasse. She had been in a bad mood since they left the gateway, frustrating the fox with her increasingly ridiculous demands.

“We’ve been over this. I’m not a murderer or a thief.”

“That’s how all this works though! You’re an adventurer now, that means you kill people and take their stuff.”

“That’s not…” he was about to say that’s not what adventurers do, but then he thought about it from her perspective and realized that, in a way, she was correct. She was from the dungeon after all. To her, the monsters here were just other people she knew, even if she did seem eager for them to be horribly murdered.

“In any case,” he continued, “I wouldn’t stand a chance against an entire prepared party of highly skilled murder thieves.”

“You don’t need to kill them all, just the leader. Soon as you do that all his slaves will be yours, and then you can do anything you want to them.”

Transferring ownership was a little more complicated than that, but he didn’t want to press the point. “You just want more sex slaves.”

“Well you’re doing a shit job of it.”

“Look, if we don’t find something in the catacombs we can try it your way, but they all had to get theirs from some place first right? I’m guessing it had to be there. The catacombs are pretty close to Rakenhold, which means that when people died in the mountain city they were probably taken out there to be buried, and they were probably buried with what little clothing they normally wore right?”

“Oh, so robbery is beneath you but grave robbing is totally fine?”

“Well, it’s not grave robbing if the corpses are up and walking around.”

The pixie gave him a momentary look of panic, closing her eyes and shaking her head. Seeing her odd reaction, something occurred to the fox, “Oh I get it… You just don’t like the undead. That’s why you’re so upset.”

“I hate them! Stupid brainless idiots. Illusions don’t work on them, and you can’t even fuck them once you’ve beaten them down.”

“Technically…”

“No! Slave, you are forbidden from fucking any zombies… or old people. Got it!”

“I wasn’t planni-”

“They’re just so gross, weird, saggy, wrinkly…”

The fox sighed and shook his head, briefly wondering how the undead and the elderly ended up in the same mental category for her.

As he walked, he mentally went over what he knew of the dungeon once again. There were only two vaults that the adventurers had been able to reach from Wolgur. Vaults were distinct areas of the dungeons. They were cut off from the rest of the dungeon, had their own monsters, treasure, and usually had some sort of ‘boss’ monster or challenge at the end.

The guild was currently focused on finding a way through Rakenhold, though they didn’t know it was called that. Given that the kobold filled tunnels were isolated from the clefts south of the town, it was clearly another vault. They just hadn’t found its bottom floor yet.

The other vault though had been conquered fairly early in their expedition. From everything Azalon had heard the catacombs were a fairly low level undead vault. The treasure there was barely worth the trip, but from the number of times someone had tried to sell him some trash from there he suspected it was a place every adventurer had been to at least once.

The fact that a ‘key’ was necessary wasn’t a huge surprise to Azalon. It was common knowledge that dungeons sometimes organized themselves in such a way, forcing the people who explored them to go in a certain order. The adventurer’s guild though often kept such things a secret. After all, why would anyone need to join the guild if the way through a dungeon and all of its various hazards were public knowledge?

As they came around a bend they saw that the cleft narrowed sharply, coming to an abrupt end. A stone lined tunnel entrance, with the snarling head of a wolf at its keystone, was set into the sheer cliff face. The road that led them here wasn’t used often, but looking at the tunnel’s stone floor Azalon saw a few sets of footprints. It didn’t look like anyone was in there now, but then it was too dark to see very far in.

Willowing hovered in front of the entrance, peering into the darkness within, “Is this it?”

Azalon shook his head, “No, we need to go through the Howling Glade first. Given the carving above the archway, this looks like it should get us there. I think the catacombs should be somewhere beyond that.”

“You think?”

“Well I’ve never been there, obviously. I’m really just going off of scraps of overheard conversation you know.”

The fox pulled his lantern out of his inventory, but shining its light down the corridor did little to dispel the gloom. Without waiting for the pixie he stepped into the passage. She hesitated for a moment, watching the bobbing glow of the lantern grow dimmer as Azalon headed down into the darkness. Finally with a huff she flew quickly to catch up with him, “Okay fine. But only because you’re so weak. If you want to be my slave you need to get much better at killing things.”

“How are you under the impression that I would remotely desire being your slave?”

Ignoring him, the pixie flared her wings, adding a soft blue glow to the light of Azalon’s lantern. “So that means, you need to go kill some monsters and shit.”

Azalon sighed, the pixie did have a point though. He had already burned through all of the bars he had brought with him. If he wanted to further improve his still somewhat meager abilities, he needed mana, and the best way to get mana was to kill monsters for it.

“All right, I think we can do a bit of hunting on the way there.”

The narrow tunnel exited into a small natural looking cavern. The cavern was only slightly wider than the tunnel they had been walking though, but noticeably taller. Stalactites hung in the air above them, but the ground below had been leveled, presumably by whoever had built this pathway.

They had gone far enough into the mountain that it seemed absolutely silent as they paused at the tunnel’s exit. Every few seconds the silence was broken by the sound of a water droplet hitting a rock, but otherwise everything was perfectly still. Which of course made the fox rather nervous. The cavern walls were uneven, and their lights created deep pockets of shadow where anything could be hiding.

Willowing sounded unusually loud when she spoke, “What? We stopping here? Need to take a piss?”

Azalon shook his head as he looked around the cavern, “Just… seems like a good place for an ambush.”

“Oh? And you’re the expert delver now?” The pixie flew ahead, the light from her wings morphing the shadows strangely as she flitted about, “See. Empty.”

He nodded and followed, still keeping his eyes on the walls as they passed. He began to relax a little though as they followed the path that wound its way through the cave. They were heading steadily downwards, and the further they went the more the cavern opened up around them. The path was still clearly marked, mostly by dusty footprints, but occasionally they would pass through areas where the stones had been cleared to allow for easier passage.

The sound of dripping water was growing louder and more frequent, and they soon found themselves walking alongside a small underground lake. Azalon suspected they were near the bottom of the cavern system now. The path had leveled out, a stone ledge barely an inch higher than the surface of the water next to it. Tilting the lantern downward he looked into the lake. Tiny pale fish swam about, their faces eyeless and strange. The water was so clear though that it hardly looked like there was any water at all.

“Are you sure this is the right way? I mean we’ve been going down for a while.”

Azalon shrugged as he walked along the sandy path, “It’s not like there were any forks in the path. We’ll probably start climbing now that we-”

The fox froze as he felt an icy grip envelop his chest. He wasn’t familiar enough with the sensations his Danger Sense provided though to react in time to avoid the thick tentacle that suddenly wrapped around his ankle.

He yelped as he was suddenly hoisted into the air, held upside down as more of the phallic looking assailants began to rise up out of the water around him. Each tentacle was tipped with a fat mushroom head shaped cock head, making their purpose abundantly clear. The head though was where any similarity ended as the main bodies of the tentacles were leathery and misshapen, covered in strange bulbous growths and wrapped in sinewy muscle.

He flailed in the air, trying to keep them off of him, and though he managed to keep his arms free he felt one of them wrap tightly around his knee as his legs were pulled apart. He reached down to his waist, trying to grab hold of the dagger he had at his side, but another tentacle had encircled him, trapping the dagger against his hip and keeping him from drawing it. Gritting his teeth he forced himself to concentrate, panicking wasn’t going to help anything, he needed to fight his way out of this. Blind and Daze weren’t likely to do anything, but Suffering might. He was fighting some kind of dick monster after all, so maybe a little oversensitivity would be effective.

Bright red geometric shapes enveloped his arms as he cast the spell, directing it at the writhing cocks still trying to capture him. He felt the spell nearly drain his mana pool but the same red light soon glowed like an aura around the tentacles. Other than the glow though there wasn’t an immediate effect. For that he’d need to hurt it.

The creature wasn’t going to make it easy for him to do that though. Azalon was well aware of how completely exposed his ass was, held upside down with his legs spread apart as they were. He was still wearing his leather pants at least, but they couldn’t keep him completely safe, as he soon found out when one of the thick tentacles slapped hard against his ass.

Azalon grunted, feeling the heavy impact. This wasn’t the gentle spanking of a lover teasing him, this thing wanted to hurt him. The single blow was enough that he could already tell that it was going to leave a deep bruise. Soon after that initial slap though he felt the tentacles quivering strangely and he bared his teeth in a fierce grin. While it had been painful for the fox, the monster unexpectedly felt the sting of the slap as well. The creature was probably used to just beating it’s prey into submission with its dicks. It still could, he thought grimly, but it wasn’t going to enjoy it.

He needed more than that though. Seeing that the unexpected pain seemed to stun the creature he pulled his small utility knife out of his vest. Reaching out he grabbed the nearest tentacle, holding it tightly in one hand while slicing into it with the other. The creature didn’t have a mouth so it didn’t scream, but it did make a strange squelching noise as Azalon cut into it. It was strong enough that it was able to pull the tentacle cock from his grip, but he made sure to run the blade down its length as it did, slicing into its thick leathery flesh.

With that, the beast had apparently had enough. The tentacles went slack, dropping the fox unceremoniously into the ice cold water, which fortunately, was much deeper than it had looked. He surfaced, coughing and sputtering, but quickly swam to the edge and dragged himself out. Whatever it was that had attacked him had disappeared completely, leaving the cavern eerily quiet once again.

Azalon glared at the pixie who had apparently spent the entire fight just watching. “Thanks for the help there,” he said icily as he bent down to pick up the lantern.

“What? It’s not like I could have done anything to it. Besides, you weren’t in any danger really. It was just going to rape you a bit, maybe lay some eggs inside of you. Might have done you some good even. Loosen you up a bit you know?”

Azalon shook his head, knowing that arguing with her would be pointless. He was already shivering from the icy water and would need to stop soon to dry his clothes. He wanted to be away from the lake as quickly as possible though so without another word he turned and continued onward.

As the pixie hovered alongside him though he began to think that having her along was going to do more harm than good.