For almost half an hour, we were venturing inside the petrified guts of the dungeon. The cavernscape sought to be tiresomely unchanging. Ambiguous, everlasting colon of rock, slate, and gravel graced with nothing else besides the purest and dimmest absence of light, over which game shaders couldn't reign, and seldom heaps and dumps of rotten timber poling.
Embattled, we were into a wretchedly disorganized phalanx, the shape of not the traditional rectangle or even a square but of an oval, and due to our not catching each other's marching tempo, the whole battle formation frantically crumbled, frenziedly melted, and infrequently collided back together for just a glimpse. Somewhat redeem our loose structure did the allocation of us by our's roles, the five finely armored shield-carrying tanks marched in the vanguard, after them the six of melee-type damage dealers enrolled to which was I, then, behind us, quartet of sorcerers and two of the bowmen followed and in the aft walked a miserable, despairing count of the most important manpower, a mere pair of clerics. One of those faithful ones, to banish the cavern's impenetrable darkness, lit and constantly stoked the radiant sphere of golden light over our formation, "Lumen's Grace" the miracle spell was denoted as.
Exactness sake, there weren't any traditional RPG classes in IO, at least in such format in which they were present in other games, in the process of character creation you could only choose a preset from a list, with it's unique beginner equipment and certain allocation of attributes, hereon nothing did constrain the playstyle, except for which twigs you did hang onto on the skill tree, the lone factor determining the exploitation faculty of armaments and incantations.
For the whole of what was living inside these dim hollows, for the fauna, it felt awkwardly unabundant. You sure would expect the stacks, bands, and hordes of mobs intensively growing over you at these depths, as it were in other dungeons, yet nothing besides foul cascades of wretched insectoids of tremendous size, commensurable to the wolfhounds, barred our way. Oh, how I do despise those wicked abominations of creatures, cockroaches especially. Tar-black slippy greasy alien fucks, with those vile antennas, with some nasty flimsy fur wilting over chitin, and here some perverted bugger decided to scale them up to the size of my whole fucking head (at least they couldn't permeate into your ears, these ones), un-fucking-beliavable, like I don't shit my pants seeing those freaks of nature in real life, for chrissake, why carry your skeleton on the outside? As these thoughts and images came strolling around inside my cranium, my right leg began lazily setting off, falling asleep. As I moved my attention to my limp, the sheer irony, mein Gott, the huge fucking cockroach swaged my armored flesh with its grimy, slimy hacksaws of the tarsi. At this sight, my whole entity petrified into a pillar of salt, no limb I couldn't move as this putrid thing pierced my entire being, with its brown, flaring, slimy pearls, alike the void gazing right back at you. It felt like all of my nerves were twisting and coiling and straining simultaneously, impenetrable stiffness, all the extremities of mine froze solid, my right hand, raised, stuck hovering mid space, holding onto the longsword. Chilling, acidic shock reigned across the back of my head and down through the spine. Suddenly, the unfathomable pressures began to build up at the bottoms of my sagged lungs, something tore its way upwards through my air tubes, scratching and scorching the entirety of my trachea, the glass shattering, voice cracked, high-pitched siren scream left my head's hollows:
— AH FUCK!!! GET THIS FUCKING THING OFF OF ME!!!
My body stormed out of stone paralysis and began disorderly shaking, like I was having a seizure or a stroke or an epileptic episode. I, with all the specks left of my courage, was trying to cast away the abomination, but those pathetic leg jerks proved themselves to be nothing more than exercises in futility. With my wits in panic and disarray, not a glimpse of a thought of cutting the thing with a blade did not occur to me. But, out of nowhere, the shrouds of hexapod turmoil were ripped by a swift swing of a blade, almost identical to those in samurai movies, sharp as a sudden flash of light cutting through the darkness. The oblong meat and shell amalgamation, which was the head of the wretched alien, fell to the ground with a nasty squelch, the monster's grip weakened, and the whole of its carcass followed to the rocks, accompanied by the same vile plop. The one who severed, literally, my sufferings was Hennessey; her long scarlet looms were whirled up in the air, and slowly settling back down on her shoulders. In her hand lustered a piece of fine silver, a sharp, angular shortsword, alike those viking swords, on the edge of it, a dull greenish gray sludge was smothered. On her face, a wild grin hung, her chestnut eyes glittered wide open, with her brows vibrating slightly.
— You scream like a little bitch, my God… — she said, covering her mouth with the back of a hand, trying to chain down her shaking lips, almost bursting with laughter.
— Ah fuck this shit! You put me on one v. one against a goddamn grizzly bear and I'll tear the fucker with my bare hands, but these pricks… — my hand nervously jerked to the dead thing, pointing at it.
— You still shit your pants from roaches, huh? — she muffled out, muting herself firmly with her hand, hardly succeeding at containing her approaching hysteria.
— Oh, get the fuck outta here! How can't you be afraid of these alien shitlings? For fuck sake, they can live withou—
Oh humanity! Like the trumpets of the eschaton, the fact neglected rang inside my head. Slowly did I turn my head to the despicable corpse. In the same exact moment, the fucker's torso went rouge, vigorously flailing with its thorny sticks. My heart, again, telegraphed from dead slow to the full-on surge. In a pitiful attempt of drawing distance with the thing, I slipped and flew off balance, rearwards. Fortunately, I fell not onto the gravel but into the embrace of some unknown fellows, two sturdy guys onto whose arms I hung with mine. The insect rapidly ran away, fueled with terror, probably, akin to that of mine. Now, in its place abode the scene equally gruesome, the redheaded hag was rolling on the ground, maniacally laughing and hectically twitching her legs like the cockroach did before her. At last, surrounded by the two of us, cockroaches, were with more than a dozen confused, perplexed looks, whose owners, a fraction of them, were sharing the laughs, when the others, held onto their sullen grimaces.
After the embarrassment of a scene, our deformed, somewhat loosened brigade treaded through the same unending chthonic hallway. There remained some damped giggling, from time to time, whispering in the back, but the rest of the squad remained seemingly unfazed with the incident; the man's face, Baldwin's face, the etalon it was for the word "grave".
A dozen minutes later, we reached a vast and empty expanse, with nothing there abiding but a few puddles of stalactite water and myriads of dimly glimmering crimson moss bulges. From it, our gangway split into the fork; and split did my brains and the entirety of the common sense by the words which echoed through the cave, not so long after we met the divarication.
— Let's split.
The suggestion, but in this case the order, came from the man himself. Baldwin, again, stood at the fore, his face, once more, embroiled upon our mass.
— Forage the moss, if anybody needs it, and I'll explain how it's gonna go. — he said, with his stout visage illumined by the sphere of light above.
To acquire frontier novelties, oh, I wouldn't miss it for the world. I knelt to the ground and swayed with my finger upon the floral ruby sponge. A tablet emerged above the moss, "Sanguine Certraria" headlined it was, and on the bottom of the pop-up, two buttons were, "Harvest" and "Close". I reaped the scarlet lump and now it was dwelling inside my inventory, but then, with a few quick taps through my game menu, the rouge lichen was lying inside my palm, materialized again.
— Hey, Hen! — I shouted to her.
— What!? — she shouted back.
— You didn't tell you were balding! — I revealed to her, from afar, the red moss in my hand.
Giggling began quietly, chirping from inside the crowd. To be honest, it was quite a pleasant feeling, hearing that some of those tiresome, dejected salary men tittered from a pun of mine, but nevertheless more important to me was the backdrop chords from whom the pun was referred to. She shielded her face with her hands, the scarlet manicure glittered under the light orb, through her fingers, through the opening in them, I got impaled with a familial evocative glare. The heavy sigh left her lungs, and then she uttered, eerily gently:
— I'll kill you some day… You know that.
We split, finally, into two almost equal halves, by the number and by the roles, and dove into respective passages, our's was to the left. I went alongside Baldwin, not that it was volitional, but he probably knew better to snatch me under his wing away from that vinous harpy. Now then, all distractions fled my sight and ear, only our strides were muffling up inside the veil of ever densifying silence. The passage began narrowing down, so as our band's composure, we were walking almost in a row, one after the other, under the lonely rock spires hanging down low enough you could hold onto them.
From out of the blue, a vile ratchet dimly rang before us, a medley of gnashing teeth and hectic shuffle. A man with a shield, one of our tanks, standing in the front, shouted, aiming with his sword into the dark:
— Look! Look! A giant fucking rat!
Attempting to grasp a sight in between the heads and across the shoulders, a bloated, enormous gnawer I could recognize. A pair of frenzied, blazing pearls floated aflame in the darkness. The light orb above illuminated a few inches of the creature, parts of its oblong, rotten, husky snout. From the rat's nostrils, some unknown, viscous, vicious oil dripped onto the ground. Its jaws were locked in a crushing, twitching trismus, the sound alone of which was unbearably nauseating.
— Kite it to us! — commanded Baldwin to the tank guy.
As we all stood still, the shield-man slowly and neatly, tread by tread, approached the giant rodent and sank into some kind of battle stance of his, approximately two meters away from the creature, raising up his iron run-of-the-mill shield and sword. For almost a minute, he stood there petrified, unmoving, his opponent stood alike, keeping up only the frantic, exasperating gritting.
— What's the problem?! — Baldwin questioned.
— It ain't aggroing! — the response flew back.
— Wha… throw something at it goddammit!
— Okay!
Prudently and gently, the tank guy lowered his whole stature, laid down his sword on the ground, and swiftly found himself a cobblestone to pick up. Rock in hand, he stood tall again and, with a mighty swing, he cannonballed the pebble into the betweens of the rat's fiery peepers. A violent, high-pitched screech left the creature's putrid jaws, and a long, curved red bar appeared above the rat, hollowed a speck. The thing shook and swayed its head to the sides rapidly and replenished its initial settings, a rapacious glare and a vexatious, insufferable gnash, all while remaining perfectly stone-still.
It screeched and clanked and creaked, a freezing whine began roaring and ringing inside my ears, it felt like that nasty rotten goo from the rat's nostrils was flooding my skull and dripping along my earlobes. Abhorrent non-action, it began driving me nuts. The fuck are you standing there? Kill the fucking thing! Kill it! Do something! The ringing grew painful, pulses of sharp ache scattered over my forehead and diffused inside my jaw joints and sinuses.
— Hit it, c'mon! What are you doing!? — I shouted.
— It ain't aggroing for fucks sake!
— Fucking kill it already! — someone harnessed themselves from behind.
The prick stood still, not even a twitch of a muscle, a damned waste of time he was. I rushed myself to the fore, squeezing my way through. I pushed the guy aside, bashing him against the wall, and cocked my longsword above that abomination, and from the back I heard the shout:
— No! Wait!
Suddenly, with a tumbling thunder, the ground beneath me ceased to exist, shattering into a thousand pieces of rock and soil, and there, for a few seconds, I levitated, with my legs now stumbling only against thin nothing.
— Ah… scheisse… — I uttered.
In a fraction of a second, I was violently tumbling down the sloped, twisted, rocky tunnel, with my head over my heels, bashing against everything of possible with everything of mine. All I could see in that pitch black nothingness was how impetuously fast my health bar was getting drained. A whole lot of oohs and ouches, my vocal cords rang out. At last, I smashed my back against the flat bedrock surface with a dusty echoing plop, which vigorously resonated against the cave's loins. Throughout this rolling bedlam, no pain I felt, it plainly ceased as soon as the rat ceased along, yet with the vertigo, I thought I would barf my guts out in that tunnel. Nevertheless, left I was with less than a quarter of my health points, in a pitch-black hole, hundreds of meters underground, all alone.
The echoes from the loud plop began slowly fading away, being replaced by a dampened rattle emanating from under my boots. For no apparent reason, my heart began racing again, trying to tear out of my chest for good. On autopilot, I swiftly took out the Arcane Lamp from my inventory, "arcane" for the reason of devouring a fraction of my mana points for every second it illuminated. I hovered the lamp down to the ground and got my retina scorched off my eyes by an eldritch, morbid sight of a moving floor comprised of haphazard hordes of striped, soot-brownish, slimy bugs frenziedly fussing over and across each other. Again, my blood turned frozen, my nerves strained, and to that, a shrilling clanking began scraping on the insides of my ear, ticking like a doomsday watch. I swayed the light to the source of the sound and oh… mein… warum zum Fick passiert mir das alles? A gigantic fucking queen bug, with her bulging gall-colored gravid uterus congesting the rest of this black womb-tight crevasse, was soullessly piercing my puny trembling flesh with her where-the-fuck-are-they eyes, clanging her sharpened horns, opening them wider and wider, unzipping her blood-misty, carneous gorge, finally preparing to begot more of her god-forgotten kind out of what unrecognizable gory mash-hash she is going to arrange out of me.
My eyelids slithered down, trembling, shutting away the atrocious hellhole from out of my sight. Compressed, stiff, lacerating wind crawled from up my lungs into my throat, alike the swarm of maddened worms and left my throbbing bodily hollows in a form of ripping, disharmonious scream, an alloy of "little bitch" outcry and harrowing barbaric roar.
— UAAAAAHAURG!!! — echoed against the cave's insides.
I opened my eyes and raised the sword above the giant insect. In a glance, my blade, infused with all of my frightened might, alike the guillotine, thundered down onto the skull of the foul creature, cracking it open, hacking it apart, demolishing the cursed, greasy carcass into dozens of pieces, and grinding down the sinewy flesh that throbbed under. I slashed and mashed and cut and smashed the vile thing again and again and again and a thousand times more till I completely and utterly lost the sense of how long I was desecrating this poor mother's corpse.
The creature's husk mouldered away into the void, and nothing remained beside the restless rattle of an infinite count of insects below and an acidic, metallic taste lingering on my tongue. Swiftly, I grabbed two red potions out of my inventory and greedily filled my jaws with that sweet scarlet liquid. In just a few moments, my health bar settled on almost half full. Scavenging across this cramped, petrified gutter, apart from the hole I tumbled down from, I found a narrow passage out. I squeezed through that twisting and tapering chute and hatched out of it into a hallway, thankfully much more wanderable. After a few minutes of unsteady stroll and brushing remaining disgusting little pricks off myself, the unnerving, stifling silence at last got thinned with the distant babble of running water.
Darkness set alight, a crystal clear brook vigorously ran beneath me. It streamed somewhere downwards to the right. I made my way down along the rivulet and stumbled upon the edge where water fell down onwards into the unfathomable pit, of which the bottom was practically indiscernible, concealed under the iron-gray haze infused into the dark. From down there raged the clamor of a much more violent, fierce stream compared to which I stood around. I lifted the lamp over the chasm, and all of a sudden the light died out, leaving only a sorrowful whoosh after. My mana bar was completely drained out, empty. As I was hiding my lamp back into my inventory and searching in it for some saccharine liquid treat, now the color of blue, I saw a pale glimmer slowly roaming through the abyss beneath. An octopoid shape coagulated out of white opalescent matter luminesced over something vaguely resembling an immensely tall, emaciated, gristly human carcass, covered in a dull and tarnished vermilion gown from under which gray, bony hands hung. The creature unhurriedly made its way along the waters and then abruptly stopped. It slewed its shimmering tentacle head upwards, focusing its sight on me. For a few seconds, it just stood there, glaring at me silently. Something twitched in the center of the creature's head, and a round, thorny gorge ripped open. The tentacles contracted and tensed, the creature arched back, and with a spring-like jerk forward, it shot out a coiled spurt of gray ooze from its gullet, aimed right at me. I tumbled back down on my rear in a rough and hurried attempt to evade and evade the foul slush I did. It smashed, dispersed, and smeared across the cavern's ceiling. A lone drip fell upon my cheek, an all too unpleasant and all too familiar burning sensation embedded itself into my skin, resemble it did the nostalgically insufferable scorch of paint thinner. In the top left corner of my view field, under three horizontal lines, red, green, and blue ones, appeared a vertical, thicker one, a status bar, with an icon under it symbolizing the status effect itself. A skull in a wall of rock was imprinted on the square icon, unacquainted I was with this particular status effect, yet for all I had to experience, surmised the nature of the status could only be as some kind of instantly killing curse. Due to the absence of continuous exposure of mine to the gray toxic goo, the status bar mercifully vanished.
Hastily, I left the premises of the chasm and continued my restless aventure now upwards, opposing the stream. I lavishly strolled for a good dozen minutes, engulfed in finally settled peace aroused by a gentle murmur of running water. At the closing end of the tunnel, I saw light, not white, fortunately, but pale blue, gleaming ahead. It was a spacious hollow divided in the middle by the same stream of water. From the walls, geometrically sharp columns of azure crystals were erected, each of a different size, shape, and chaotic direction of outgrowth. Here and there stood flimsy unions of rotten planks and poles, mining scaffolding ought to be. A persistent metallic clank rhythmically, in evenly spaced intervals, lonely resonated around the place. At the foot of the tallest timber work, a tiny and crookbacked lad, blending neatly with dark, cold shades of surrounding rock, passionately bashed his pick, matter-of-fact, larger than himself, against something he curtained with his rocky gray corpuscle. Treading gently, I sneaked behind the little one and lifted my sword over my head, nursing an accurate and mighty slash. The blade befell the puny rocky figure and, with metallic roar, bounced back, bashing me onto the ground. Little guy turned to me, scratching his unscathed head, with his deformed brute grimace, annoyed and surprised, lifted his pick onto his shoulder, and then hurriedly escaped my presence through a sphincter of a hole in a cavern's wall. Over him levitated his health bar, hollowed by a micron, attached to it was the name he carried: Petrified Dregs, of (yellow) thirty-third level.
No matter his size, this ugly little rock with legs was significantly mightier than me, surpassing my level count by a dozen, hence his numbers' color. Yet captivated I was not with a new challenge of hunting him down, but rather with what he was preoccupied with before my onslaught. Alike the surrounding crystals, a vein of tar-black ore protruded out of the wall in front. I sheathed my sword into the sheaves, and picked my pick out of my inventory. Appearance-wise, it was a simple, real-world iron pick, similar to that of petrified little ones, and with it I began smashing the dark mass of unrefined metal. A chunk of it successfully parted with the remaining lode. I lifted it up and tapped on it. Black Iron Ore, oh goodness! How unique! Puns aside, apart from the name, unique it really was, a completely new material, undiscovered until now. Besides the copper and tin (inherently bronze) and stout iron, there were no other metals previously in use. Oh, what a thrilling tingling feeling of being first to tread and see! After numerous strikes, I at last emptied the ore vein, a gracious nine pieces of ore in total I acquired, yet the clanking didn't stop, the sound endured now over my head. Standing on the scaffold, the same little prick was pecking on the stalactite just right over me. Hardly had I stepped back, the rock spike thundered down, piercing the ground, and with mischievous giggle, the damned gremlin vanished again.
I hurriedly squeezed through that hole, through which he previously escaped, losing a morsel slice of my health points in the process, probably for the reason of almost crushing my ribs in that butt nozzle. Found myself I did again in a cramped corridor, poorly but thankfully somewhat lit by solitary oil lamps dangling on cast-iron spikes hammered into the walls. Exercising my malleability in this endless, annoyingly abgefuckt cave maze, defecated I got out of it into an ample hollow, lit with the same mining lamps and with its floor gradually declining to the fore, leading to another passage. Sprinkling streamlets of amber magma were engraved about the whole interior, present alike the capillaries from inside an innard. Around the perimeter brooded a dozen tall black cages, closer look after, they served as domiciles for a slumbering horde of that petrified prick's kind. Gravel heaps of these dregs were just stuffed inside the cages, unclear, dead they were or plainly asleep on top of each other.
Gently treading across the stone floor, I almost made my way to the chamber's exit, as once again the quiet crumbled, ceased away by an all too familiar metal clang. He returned indeed, the prick with the pick was bashing on the cages with it. The horde now lingered wide awake, mercifully entrapped inside the cages, and a hundred of their frenzied, flaming red eyes stared at me with hunger. Suddenly, the cages began trembling, shaking, the rocks were rocking them from the inside, violently tumbling them down. Through the bars they shoved their arms and legs, and in this homogeneous form of a cage monster they marched at me, swiftening with each rocking tread.
I escaped through the passage, and standing, I was on another secluded ledge hovering above the ravine, which now housed a vast, unhurried stream of molten rock. Clanking grew louder and wilder, the cages smashed themselves against the narrow door, widening it and hammering their containers and contains lesser. A matter of a few seconds, it was of them reaching me and me reaching my lonely demise. All of a sudden, from my unnoticed right, a hopeful creak lashed out. A bridge of wood and rope hung above the magmatic abyss below and gently swung in the underworld wind. An ear-ripping bang, at last, the gruesome amalgamation of rock and metal squeezed through and had me at its mercy. My jaw clenched tighter than ever, and, losing breath, almost tumbling at each step, I rushed to the bridge with a death-starved berserker cage filled with maddened boulders chasing me down nearly successfully. We jumped onto the bridge, the rattling death exactly two meters behind me. An unnerving sound tickled my eardrums. Was it my nerves or the bridge rope so painfully stretching? Just a few quick steps… The screaming planks and roaring rope with high-pitched glass-shattering thunder growl snapped apart awry and crashing down, we went, spiraling in the air.