Dungeon Masters by Mike Wild

Author:Mike Wild [Wild, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Severed Press
Published: 2017-07-13T04:00:00+00:00

XII

Turn-Based Combat

The lack of food began to bite the next morning. Which was more than they did. Their canteens still held plentiful water, but so far as solids went, they were all but out. Trix found a Twix in a pocket, Yuri, an apple, and Ralph a half-eaten crisp butty in the lining of his robe that he seemed to remember starting the last time he’d been down in the dungeon, a year before.

Foraging for breakfast became a priority. No easy task on the level they’d reached. A labyrinth of corridors and cells, it differed from those above in that swathes of it had been blitzed, reducing it to a half maze of exploded rubble and smoke-blackened walls, with occasional intact areas stretching as far as they could see. Trix, Yuri, and Ralph frowned. They knew a war zone when they saw one. The question was, whose war? And where were the warriors?

Dead. Or at least those they found were dead. Long since, too. Ratlings and kobolds, from what was left of them, they’d fallen battling each other, tight clusters suggestive of intense melee; par for the course for these territorial runts. Trix rummaged through their bones—the theory, one never knew what items one might find—but, as always with these guys, all they carried was crap: an arrow, a few coppers, and a lump of cheese or two. The cheese was green and so hard they could have bludgeoned each other with it.

Then they found other bodies. Bigger bodies. Orcs. Bloated, fly-picked forms flat on their backs, their chests—hell, their everything—pierced by so many arrows they looked like pin cushions. A few clutched a ratling or kobold to their chest, like a teddy bear, but there was nothing comforting about this—the heads of the smaller creatures were crushed in their dead hands, the insides of their brain pans forcibly ejected long ago. Others had clearly been batted aside by orc weapons or fists, little more than faded stains, now, on nearby walls. The orcs had clearly been the common enemy of the ratlings and kobolds, but somewhere down the line that allegiance seemed to have collapsed and they had turned on each other. This level, it seemed, was about a battle for survival.

The trio split up, each taking a separate route with the strict understanding they were to explore no farther than a couple of hundred yards and turn back at any sign of trouble. They had some success—Trix returning with a seaweed-like lichen stripped from the walls, Yuri with three small rodents balanced on the flattened blade of his axe, and Ralph two handfuls of mushrooms which, while off-putting in their rotten appearance, he pronounced edible. They lit a fire, and the whole lot went into a stir-fry which tasted like shit.

“What pisses me off,” Yuri said as he sucked noisily on a strip of the lichen, desperate to find some flavour or nutrition, “is that if this were a real dungeon, our inventories would be brimming with stuff.”

Trix grimaced as she nibbled on a rodent.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.