AN: Second chapter since opt-in, 16/1/23
The next morning saw the party eating a breakfast of trail rations as they packed the makeshift tent back up.
It wasn't what Diana had chosen, but the priestess had been quite keen on them getting moving quickly rather than taking the time for a proper meal.
It seemed sleeping in a hastily erected tent with a rogue hadn't exactly agreed with her, going by her glares at the group.
Diana would have asked the rogue what had her so annoyed, but she was avoiding everyone's eyes.
At least it should reduce the time they had to spend around the priestess, Diana reflected.
And with everyone working on the tents rather than their attention being split between setting up and cooking it was going much faster than it had the previous night.
Not that it had been night proper or was likely to be morning.
But it didn't need to be a night's sleep, just a long enough rest to fully recover.
Besides, it was impossible to tell the time of day from within a Dungeon.
In any case, they were nearly done, the last crumbs of the rations choked down (rather too literally in the case of the one armed rogue), and it was time to move on.
"Hurry up over there," the priestess snapped, and Diana glanced over to see her at the door and ready to go, having skipped over her fair share of packing.
"I don't think so," Artemis replied coolly.
"You mean you refuse to continue?"
"No," Artemis stated, pressing his glasses back into place over his eyes. "That is the wrong door."
Diana thought back to when they entered the room, with the second door on their left, and nodded.
"He's right. That's the way back."
"Of course you'd agree with your boytoy."
"Are you seriously still trying to piss us all off," the still healthy rogue snapped, slapping down the flap of her bag. "Just from the fact that you went to that day, it has to be the other. Stop trying to screw us over!"
Diana blinked.
Up to this point, she'd barely heard the rogue speak.
"I guess you should have been in my tent instead of hers."
The rogue shook her head.
"Too much of a risk. She couldn't get out without waking me. Getting to your tent after would be much easier."
"She was with me because you didn't trust me? That's why she got a tent to herself?"
"Yes," the knight stated flatly. "Now, unless you want to make your own way back, I suggest you get over here."
She glared at the six of them as they stood at the other door. "Fine, but when you discover this is the wrong way…"
{}
Somehow the priestess managed to become even angrier when she discovered the corridor led to a room with another of the poisonous crabs, plus a couple of a new variety of crabs.
They were similar in size to the ice crabs, but with an angry red glow beneath their shells, which were rather jagged, unlike their brethren.
It took Sir Jacob just a moment to determine the correct course of action.
"Cover," he called back, placing his shield before him moments before flames washed over it.
It was here he was reminded of the weaknesses of a metal shield.
While metal was resistant to physical damage and most other means nature had of causing harm, it was less effective against heat and magic.
In fact, improperly prepared metal tended to channel the effects of magic particularly well, and they had yet to find a treatment that would prevent heat spreading throughout the metal.
His order had been around for long enough that their armourers knew better than to leave them vulnerable to magecraft, but that didn't stop the heat from the flames passing across his shield and into his vambrace.
The flames stopped before it started to cause actual harm, but that didn't stop him from dropping his shield to let his armour start to cool off.
He took a moment to kick the shield to the side, making sure the others could follow him in, before charging the crabs, intending to take out at least one of these flaming crabs before they could go for a repeat performance.
He had covered about half the distance before his mistake became clear.
One of the crabs lit up, and Sir Jacob threw himself aside.
The stream of fire chased him, cutting off after what felt like a much shorter length of time.
As the fire cut off he charged the crab, the one that had attacked when he entered the room, and drove his sword through its shell.
As he'd expected the shell was weaker on these crabs too, compared to the direct combat crabs, such as the metal one he'd needed a mage to actually kill.
He withdrew his sword, turning his attention to the other crabs.
The second of the new crabs had a pair of arrows sticking out from under its shell.
And a bolt of light was moments away from striking the poisonous crab, which was close enough to poison all of them.
He moved without thinking, sweeping his sword around to toss the crab into the air, away from the party, in the last moments before it detonated into the same toxic cloud as its fellows from the previous day.
There was a moment's stillness.
"What the hell were you thinking?"
It was hard to believe just how badly the priestess had lost it.
"The crab needed killing, and nobody else was targeting it," she sniffed haughtily.
"Because it was too close! With the others dealt with we could have fallen back and killed it from a safe distance!"
From her comments about clearing other Dungeons, there should have been no way for the priestess to not be aware of such elementary tactics, which made it quite clear she was deliberately working at cross purposes.
He stalked over to his shield and strapped it to his arm again, before rounding on the priestess.
"What could we have possibly done to deserve this from you?"
She glared back at him.
"You already know. You let my apprentice die."
"I'd say it was your own failure as a mentor that got her killed," the mage, Artemis, declared, adjusting his glasses as he often did.
"You dare?"
"Is it really such a big deal that you lost your apprentice? I mean, by the sounds of it you have experience as an Adventurer, and she was going to be an Adventurer too, and we don't exactly have the best life expectancy."
The priestess turned and hissed at the rogue.
"You dare diminish what we had? Reduce us to mere teacher and student?"
"So it wasn't just me," the rogue muttered to herself.
Sir Jacob caught the implications.
"You… but your vows as a priestess?"
"Lumina cares not about such affairs. How else do you explain my powers remaining unharmed?"
"You would only consider a vow binding should you face consequences for breaking it?"
The mere concept should have been unthinkable.
"When a vow stands between us and saving souls, to keep the vow would be an act of damnation. This is merely the logical extension of that."
The next thing Sir Jacob knew, his sword was at her throat.
There was no way to trust anyone who could forget their vows for such little reason.
But to have come so far, cleared at least half of the Dungeon, and have to retreat? To let the Dungeon reset and render their struggles for naught?
He looked at the others.
"If we leave, everything was for nothing. If we keep going, we need eyes on her at all times, to kill her before her betrayal can see us killed. What say you?"
"You dare threaten me? A priestess of Lumina?"
He shifted his sword, and she caught his message.
"We have something to settle with the Dungeon Master," Artemis declared, turning back from discussing their options with the others.
"I'll watch her, until we get back to the entrance," the one armed rogue offered. "Gives me something to do before heading out to report. Can't trust the floor with the spider boss, crab floor as well as spider floor, all that."
Sir Jacob nodded sharply, satisfied.
"Then let's move."
{}
There had been a certain danger that the monsters they'd already faced would respawn, Artemis acknowledged, but their path back to the entrance proved clear.
It wasn't entirely known how Dungeons worked, what method they used to replace the monsters they contained and what conditions they required to do so.
What was known was the fact that leaving a Dungeon overnight would see the monsters within respawned at least, if not reinforced.
They couldn't even use their current experiences to say Dungeons couldn't restock while Adventurers were present in the Dungeon, as the guiding influence of the Dungeon Master could delay replacing the monsters for any number of reasons.
As such they reached the still rotating blades without further incident.
Part of this was the rogue taking his responsibility to watch the priestess seriously, and interrupting her each time she tried to speak.
The Boss Door was still sealed, but colour had started to spread across it, reaching about three quarters of the way around its face.
And opposite them the attempt at hiding the other corridor had completely burned away.
"And how do you intend to get past?"
"We slip into the other corridor when the timing is right, send our rogue friend to safety, then slip through the false door when the timing is right," Artemis explained. It was far safer to split the trip past the trap into two parts than to try to make it past in one go.
It would be tight enough getting the priestess past, with the speed at which the blades rotated.
Despite the danger they got through the crossroad without further injury, the knight taking custody of the priestess as the injured rogue left.
And now they entered the unknown reaches of the Dungeon.
{}
Shadow felt herself growing increasingly tense as they followed the corridor.
It had been hidden, if only barely, and by all reports the Dungeon Master was a tricky type.
So far the only trap they had faced was an obvious one.
She kept them moving slowly, checking ahead every step they took.
There were still no traps.
Even as the corridor terminated at a door, she remained cautious, checking even more carefully for traps.
"What's taking-"
There was a metallic sound behind her and the priestess stopped talking.
"Thank you," she muttered to the knight, continuing to make certain of the door's safety.
Without further distractions it didn't take much longer for Shadow to gently push the door open.
It only took a moment to realise her mistake, opening the door while the knight was still at the back of the party, rather than ready to protect them from whatever monsters were in the room, waiting.
As the door finished swinging open she saw them.
Two of the crabs were the same toxic variety while a third was something new, something that looked like a cross between fire and ice crabs, with the jagged shell of the former and colouration of the latter, from what she could see through the fog it formed around itself.
Neither variety of crab should need the knight to protect them.
If it wasn't for her training she would have released a breath of relief.
As it was, it was clearly up to her to take out the blizzard creating crab, as the only rogue aligned member of the party remaining.
She was already moving before she could even think to draw her daggers, snatching them out of her sheaths as she charged the blizzard.
In the first moments of enduring the storm, she regretted her actions.
She had selected her equipment for a standard Dungeon, rather than cold weather armour.
Shadow steeled her resolve, refusing to let the cold slow her down, and drove her blades into the hidden crab.
The daggers caught on its shell as she tried drawing them back out.
Rather than struggle to get them free and spend longer in the cold than she needed Shadow abandoned the daggers as she fled to relative safety.
By the time she was clear and had turned to see what was happening with the rest of the fight, one of the toxic crabs was dead, its cloud of poison meeting the fading blizzard and crystallizing, to shatter on the floor harmlessly.
Not the most effective combination of monsters capabilities Shadow had ever seen.
As she was watching an arrow found its way under the remaining crabs shell, causing it to detonate as well.
Shadow stepped back, putting more space between herself and the danger the poison posed.
It didn't take too long for the poison to disperse, and she stalked forward to collect her daggers from the pile of detritus the crab had left behind.
She paused, considering a crab shell gauntlet that had been dropped.
"I will never understand how that works."
Did the Dungeon fashion the remains of the monsters into useful equipment for Adventurers? Why?
It seemed rather self defeating, supplying their attackers.
She shook her head and collected her weapons, leaving the rest behind.
For all she knew the dropped items bore curses for Adventurers foolish enough to pick them up.
Instead of worrying herself about the leftovers of the battle she turned her attention back to the party.
The crabs hadn't got close enough to cause any damage, so they were still ready to keep going.
She turned to the exit, and started scouting for traps once again.
{}
Adventuring without a healer you could trust to do their job was wearing, even when the party avoided injury, Diana decided.
Although part of it could just be the need to keep an eye on the priestess.
It wasn't something Adventurers concerned themselves with too much, the idea of oaths or vows, but that didn't mean she couldn't understand the knight's response to someone treating their oath like that.
A vow was supposed to be sacrosanct, unbreakable.
For the priestess to make it clear she treated it as a matter of convenience, that if her goddess didn't punish her it didn't matter, that was something that should have been unthinkable.
And the way in which she broke the oath…
A relationship with her apprentice, meaning both had their oaths broken by the single act.
It was no wonder so many had problems with the church.
She checked her quiver, a nervous habit she had thought broken long ago, counting her remaining arrows.
She was down to a mere handful, a number having broken thanks to the hard shells of the crabs.
It would probably have been better to leave them to the mage, but there was an understable problem with using fire magic against fire aligned monsters, and she had remained somewhat twitchy since.
She came to a decision.
"I'll watch the priestess," she declared.
"Are you sure," the knight questioned her. "If you do, it is important she only die should she betray us."
"It isn't about revenge. I'm running low on arrows, this is the best way for me to help the party if I want to be able to help with the Boss."
He nodded. "I understand. Take over."
She drew her dagger, and a position at the back of the party, watching the priestess.
The knight took position next to the rogue, and the group advanced down the corridor.
{}
When they finally entered the next room, it justified Diana's choice to change places with the knight.
On one hand, all the crabs were of basic varieties, on the other there were five.
Two were the basic model, solid shells without anything too special about them unlike the others in the Dungeon, but the other three were all spellcasting crabs.
The ice variant at least, rather than the fire crabs they had recently run into.
Less fortunately they were already casting as they breached the door, giving Artemis only moments to react before the party would be hit.
And he was nowhere near his best.
Without the time to properly evaluate his options, he went with the first spell that came to mind.
A wind spell.
It disrupted the knight and rogues' advance towards the crabs, but also threw the ice crabs off at the critical moment, sending their spells flying above the party.
Moments after their spells a bolt of fire shot towards the trio, exploding in size as it hit the tail of the wind spell.
The fire consumed the central crab.
Artemis switched his attention to the rest of the fight, dismissing the ice crab as doomed.
The knight was engaging the melee crabs, keeping their attention focused on him, while the rogue was attempting to kill them.
The way their shells protected them from backstabbing posed a certain difficulty in this task.
Which left the magic crabs, the more dangerous of their foes, unengaged.
There were certain types of spell he was working on casting, but the midst of a Dungeon encounter was certainly not the preferred place for him to test them.
However, given the circumstances it wasn't as though he had much choice.
He started chanting, and thrust his hand towards the closer ice crab.
A binding of spectral webbing shot from his hand, wrapping around the crab mage and pinning its pincers against its body, hopefully preventing it from being able to cast further spells.
A blast of cold struck him in the side.
Artemis turned, to see bolts of fire and ice colliding into a short-lived mist, as the other mage engaged his own crab.
While the third, the crab that had been engulfed in fire, stood waving its claws at him.
Before he could act, or even consider what he should be doing, there was the sound of a heavy impact, and one of the crabs the knight had engaged crashed into the crab mage, an impact that seemed more than the mage could take.
Artemis shook his head and refocused on the fight.
{}
In the end they cleared the room without serious injury.
It was more through luck than skill, however, as far as Artemis was concerned.
The other mage had ended up simply negating the ice crab he was fighting, each rendering the others spells useless until he got backed up by the rogue.
Similarly the knight seemed more focused on keeping the other crab engaged than finishing it, only the mage changing focus when the rogue helped him seeing the monster actually dealt with.
"What are we doing," he finally asked as the priestess, with obvious reluctance, checked them all over for injury.
It was better than nothing, even if she was obviously not putting in too much effort.
"Trying to clear the floor-"
"Not what I meant. That fight, we should have won so easily. Instead…"
They seemed to have lost all semblance of tactics.
"There are… rumours of Dungeons affecting the minds of their explorers," the knight asserted. "Perhaps that could play a part."
"Ah think it's more how we haven't been able to trust the priestess, the harm that has done to party coherence," Diana suggested.
"Sounds right. Look," he shifted to face the priestess properly, "we are all here to see the Dungeon conquered. Can we at least trust you to do your part against the Boss?"
The priestess glared at him, even as she continued to work, soothing the effects of the ice magic.
"It is the greatest of Luminas teachings that Dungeon Masters and their works be destroyed whenever possible, whatever cost we must pay," she allowed.
"Is it too much of a cost to work with us?"
There was a silence before her reply.
AN: So I slightly missed the week deadline I was going for. Oh well, it's just one day late.
I had been considering whether or not to have the 'priestess in relationship with apprentice' thing actually go ahead, even before people commented on her being somewhat like Panacea, but went ahead anyway. It hopefully gives a better reason for her being so angry about the death. And (hopefully) before anyone complains about the portrayal of the character in a same-sex relationship as being villainous, the problem everyone has is that she broke her oath of chastity. Oh and Shadow got wound up by her propositioning her.
The priestess didn't have much chance for any other relationship.
In any case, next chapter, whenever it happens to come out, will see the Boss at last. And better yet, I get to use the line behind Dianas accent! Woo!