7. Chasm

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1364 DR, Undermountain

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Fighting with a chasm behind you is not easy.

Fighting with a chasm behind you against a foe who is your exact copy is even less easy.

Daren wasn't sure he would win this time. He usually assessed his opponents carefully, but in this case it would not help, because the enemy was himself, or rather, his reflection from a cursed mirror. The meanest of traps, which dangerousness was leveled on the skill of its victims.

He knew his own tactics very well, so he knew that if his clone chose a defensive strategy he wouldn't be able to easily take it down.

And vice versa, of course. It was going to be a very long fight.

His companion, a young half-vampire in training, wanted to help him but just didn't know how. She hadn't been reflected in the mirror (just because Daren broke it after the first enemy came out, it's not like she was so lucky not to be reflected in the mirrors, no, she wasn't vampirish enough for that), but now she found herself watching the fight as a spectator, helpless, unable to recognize which of the two drow fighters was her mentor and which was the copy. They were identical in everything, even in their movements.

Then she noticed: one of them, from time to time, gave her a brief glance.

It was impossible to tell if it was her friend, worried about her safety, or the impostor who planned to attack her to distract and upset the real Daren. Anyway, this gave her an idea.

The drow continued to fight parrying every attack, without attempting anything reckless because he also had the responsibility for Dee Dee's life. He couldn't afford to die and leave her alone in a deadly dungeon.

But she seemed not to have grasped the danger, because she was moving around the two contenders as if studying their moves, as if looking for an opening to throw herself into the fray. Daren gave her a worried look; how could she tell them apart?

Then she took a false step, literally: backing away to avoid a sword sweep of the false drow, she put one foot wrong and lost her balance, with only the chasm behind.

Daren acted on impulse: he raised one of the short swords to parry the reverse blow and with a twist freed himself from the fight. He jumped over the short distance that separated him from the edge of the precipice, instinctively bent to the ground looking for the body of his friend. But instead of a corpse he saw… Dee Dee, levitating in midair, looking up at him with a sly smile on her pale face. Dee Dee, with a small crossbow in hand. The dhampir aimed at his head and fired without hesitation.

The crossbow bolt passed just two inches above his head, hissing, and went into the eye of his double who was about to pierce him in the back with a stealthy blow from above. A moment later, Daren (the real one) turned around while remaining bent on the ground and raised one of his swords going to pierce a gap in the armor, where it was less resistant, right near the groin. The idea was to puncture the femoral artery, but he wasn't sure he had succeeded. His double took a step back, somehow slipping out of his sword thrust, and snatched the crossbow bolt from his eye - pulling his eye with it too. He didn't seem to care about dying, and maybe he really didn't: he wasn't a real person, he was just the puppet created by a magic mirror.

So wounded he didn't last long, and soon his corpse was thrown into the abyss from which Dee Dee had just emerged. The body magically disappeared into thin air long before it hit the ground.

When the fight was over, the drow allowed himself to breathe a sigh of relief.

"Dee Dee, what the heck was that?" He asked her after a while, as they were preparing to leave.

"That?"

"Throw yourself into the chasm in the foolish belief that I would move to help you."

"Why, what did you do?" she pointed out.

"You couldn't be sure!"

"I didn't do it careleffly, I had a magic ring of levitation. I waf not fure" she explained, falling back into her usual speech impediment: the elongated canines prevented her from pronouncing the s correctly.

The drow muttered something in protest, but nothing intelligible. From this Dee Dee understood that he had accepted her justification and that, perhaps for the first time since they had known each other, she had left him speechless.

"I'm impressed with the accuracy of your shot," he complimented after a good minute of stubborn silence. "You nearly killed my double."

"It wafn't your perfect double. You wouldn't let your guard down in the frenzy of killing an enemy. You would alfo have kept an eye on the furrounding, on the other dangerf, on me. "

"You're right," he conceded, because his reflection had proved short-sighted and careless. They weren't all that alike. "But next time, can't you find a less dangerous way to distinguish me from a copy? To say, I am missing half of my left ear, for sure he was missing half of his right ear. "

"If you ftop hiding it behind your hair, maybe."

Daren decided to change the subject, because he didn't feel the need to justify his aesthetic choices.

"Do you know what leaves me most perplexed about the whole story? Apart from your unexpected skill with the crossbow. "

"Do you have to be a baftard even when you compliment me?"

"Ah! You talk as if you don't know me. " He mocked her. "Nice to meet you, my name is Daren, I'm a bastard."

"Well? What if the thing that perplekfef you? " She resumed, who didn't want to give him the satisfaction of seeing her annoyed.

The drow pointed with his thumb at the chasm they were leaving behind.

"I'm sure it wasn't there a few weeks ago. There must have been a collapse ... or worse. "

"Worfe? What could be worfe than a collapfe in a dungeon? "

The drow might have shivered, had he still been able to feel fear.

"Worse than a collapse, could be the wizard who created this dungeon who decides to renovate. Sometimes… he likes to change things. And I just hope he's not around here now, because he's not a recommendable guy. "

Dee Dee opened her eyes wide without hiding her amazement, because she had never heard of the creator of the dungeon. He thought the Undermountain had ... always existed, or something like that.

"But ... but if he comef, you ... you could defeat him, right?"

"Don't be ridiculous," the warrior chilled her.

The dhampir glanced nervously over her shoulder at the disturbing chasm in the floor. If even his braggart friend was afraid of that wizard, he could only pray never to meet him.