The flickering torch filled the tunnel with an orange and yellow light which was seemingly absorbed by the compacted dirt walls and rough stoned floor, however the light did not penetrate through the darkness which seemed to creep ahead and behind us as a great wall of shadow, always watching but never getting close. The tunnel itself was small so that we had to walk down it in single file and the ceiling hung not far above our heads creating a small enclosed space. I cautiously led the line through the tunnel with my sword drawn and raised in front of me while my eyes continually searched the darkness for any sign of life or adjacent passageway. Ruby walked behind me with the torch raised in her left hand and her red handled rapier, held to her side, in her right. Behind her was Celestia and Sky who also had their swords at the ready.
It was close to an hour since we had split up from the rest of the group and we had yet to meet up with them or find anything that lead to the Geocrawler. Not far into the cave where we had been sent out to find the Geocrawler within we had found a split in the path, each path looked as likely as the other to lead somewhere and we had no hints to which one we should follow, so we ended up splitting into fours and parted ways into the darkening and deep cave. The tunnel pathways had seemed to go on endlessly from there on, some were large open areas filled with monsters, some seemed to hint at an old city within the mountains which had long passed from memory, but most of them were like the one we were currently within, small, long, dark and worrying.
We walked almost silently down the flickeringly lit passageway with only our armour making small noises as we moved, however in the dead silence these insignificant sounds echoed around and seemed to be amplified greatly making us worry what manner of monster may have awoken or been alerted by these sounds. However no monsters had yet to show themselves, which surprisingly made us increasingly worried and nervous at what may be ahead of us, waiting for its prey to walk into its hunting grounds.
Suddenly the ground shook violently, chucking the four of us up against the walls for support, a rush of air cold blasted through the tunnel putting out our torch and plummeting us into an impenetrable darkness. Quickly after the torch went out I heard it fall to the ground with a clatter, I felt a hand grab onto my arm with an iron grip and I heard rapid scared whispering next to me. I put my free hand onto Ruby's hand and quickly opened up my inventory to give us some light, in the faint light I could see Ruby up against the wall with her eyes shut tightly and her mouth moving rapidly and she held her blade in front of her with a shaking hand. Next to her Celestia was had her back on the wall with her rapier held tightly at her side with her eyes locked in place looking down the pathway, while Sky stood in the centre of the tunnel with a strong stance facing down the tunnel with her sword held high with both hands.
"Why do I get the feeling that something bad is about to happen?" I ask with a worried tone as I looked down the tunnel where the gust of air had come from and where I had felt the quake resonate from. I feel Ruby's hand loosen as Celestia knelt down next to her and spoke calming words, I look at Sky quickly and she gives a quick nod as she opened up her menu panel.
I got up from the wall and began slowly walking down into the darkness, I held my sword in my right hand with my left hand pressed against the wall slightly in front to feel out the way. I quickly looked over my shoulder to see the glow of Sky's menu panel, hovering next to her head, fade away slightly as I kept walking forward as if something was wanting to swallow all of the lights.
As the light behind me nearly vanished I stopped walking and squinted down the long passage. The darkness was all that I could see, no new passage, no monsters, no players and no way to know what had caused the quake. Not wanting to be gone for to long I turned back and started walking back down to the girls when I heard a faint sound echoing from behind me. I nervously turned my head to see a flickering speck of advancing light from far down the tunnel, as every second passed the light grew in size and the ground began to shake.
I turned fully towards the approaching enemies with my black blade drawn back ready in my usual engaging stance and I waited. As the light grew bigger I could see silhouetted figures running full sprint away from something, their footsteps echoed loudly through the tunnel before quickly being drowned out by a guttural clicking sound. I recognised the sound to have come from the Geocrawler, which seemed to be chasing down the fast approaching figures with an earth shuddering recklessness.
When the light was about 20 meters away from me the I could see the faces of the silhouetted figures, I quickly realised that it was Aurora at the front with the torch closely followed by Andrew, Oliver and Andrew B. Aurora ran past me, not paying much attention to who I was, Andrew followed her but looked me in the eyes for a few seconds and seemed to recognise me but kept running. Andrew B gave me a quick nod of the head and a cocky smile while Oliver who was bringing up the rear grabbed my shoulder roughly and dragged me around with a quick shouted order, "RUN!"
Without much hesitation I followed this order and began to run away from the beast behind us, in the split moment where I was still stood there I saw the Geocrawler drilling viscously through the soft and loose dirt tunnel using both its teeth lined jaw and its powerful and heavily plated claws. The ground around me shook violently an large chunks of dirt were thrown forward making it nearly impossible to run without holding to the side of the wall, this stopped me from gaining any ground from the Geocrawler which took a swipe at me at every opportunity it could with some of its attacks slicing through the back of my jacket and cutting slightly into my flesh.
Even with the Geocrawler right behind us quaking the ground, we quickly passed the spot where we had first felt the Geocrawler's tremors, however the three of them were no longer stood there. I pulled my head up to see a second torch just in front of Aurora putting everything behind it into shadow, obviously the three of them had seen us running and heard Oliver's shout and had got a head start on us which allowed them to get to the front.
The long run was rough through the narrow and rocky tunnel ways and by the time we had reached on of the still dark main hall like rooms of the cave where we had initially split up. As I sped out of the tunnel way I saw that the others, who had got far in front of me, had formed up in a semi circle around the small opening all with their weapons at the ready. I deftly hit the ground and slid my way over to the surrounding formation as the Geocrawler smashed through the last piece of dirt wall into open space, sending heavy chunks of earth and stone across the room.
The Geocrawler reared up and made a loud clicking sound which bounced off of the rugged stone walls, this was the chance the 7 of them were waiting for. All of them attacked at once, the four rapier users jumped up at its head to attack its glowing green visor with a flurry of swipes and stabs, Sky and Andrew B ran in at its claws to combat them separately so that they had no way of hitting anyone else, while Oliver began to land powerful strikes to its weaker points in its scaled armour around the plated joints which allowed for a small space between one plate and the next.
The Geocrawler flailed out in attack trying to hit each of its assailants, however with seven attackers dodging and weaving its attacks while planting heavy hits of their own, it had a hard time pinpointing its attacks. The beast quickly began to become more and more enraged, which led to powerful strikes which cracked the ground below them and seemingly gouged out areas of the surrounding air. The Geocrawler's visor slowly changed to a dark red colour and its claw and tail were engulfed in a flaming yellow glow, it once again let out a resounding guttural clicking sound which shook the air and earth around us, dislodging huge rocks from the ceiling which came crashing down with huge thumps and clouds of smoke and dirt.
The seven of them saw what was happening and in seemingly in panic rushed away from the Boss, who had lost no health from its 4 green health bars that floated slightly to the side of its head. They ran quickly up to me and we all got our blades ready, rapiers held to their sides glowing, swords held in front of us waiting for the attack, however Oliver had placed his axe in its holder on his back and drew a small ball like object made of metal. I looked away from the Geocrawler completely to see that he was lighting a small fuse on the ball with a match, the fuse crackled slightly and sparked. With all his might he they it at the now fast approaching Geocrawler with a quick shout to the rest of us, "Lets get the hell out of here!"
We all quickly turned away from the Geocrawler and began running as fast as we could to the wide arched exit from the chamber, as we began to run an explosion sounded from behind us with a blinding flash of light which forced me to cover my eyes for a few seconds. With the quickness which they had followed Oliver's order allowed me to make the assumption that they had quickly planned up a way to keep the Geocrawler enraged without taking any casualties. Now all we needed to worry about was keeping the huge tunnelling monster as far behind us without loosing its attention. This task was simply a matter of running as fast as we could while avoiding the many obstacles that got in our way, from falling rocks, deep holes in the ground and the occasional minion type monster which seemingly went down in a few quick attacks.
This was going extremely well and we started to believe that it was going to stay as easy as this and that the rest of the run wouldn't be too hard. However when we reached the large sunlight entrance, it took a few seconds to get accustomed to the blindingly pure light, but when we could see properly again we had been surrounded by a number of dark brown coloured segmented worm like creatures which had round mouths lined with sharp teeth as their only distinct feature. Each of them bore a red crystal which spun slowly as it floated above its head and only boasted a small health bar, on its own, like the creatures we had encountered in the tunnels, it would be insignificant, however there was a huge number of them blocking our path to the exit of the cave.
Knowing that the Geocrawler was close behind us and that there was only one way out we quickly looked at each other and charged headlong at the creeps in a close line, with our weapons beginning to glow. Our blades quickly got to work on our enemies, Oliver's axe cut through large swathes of the creeps, our swords were taking out a few at a time while the rapiers attacked individual targets with such speed that they didn't fall behind or get over whelmed. However with each one we killed and moved passed at least two more replaced it after rupturing through the ground and chasing after us and completely surrounding us.
As we got more and more enclosed in the wave of enemies they began to jump at us and dig their teeth deep into our flesh after somehow easily piercing through our armour. Although even with this number of enemies we were making slow but sure progress over the the opening in the rock face, it now being only a few meters away. But as things seemed to be working in our favour the floor once again began to quake and the walls rumbled slightly, the Creeps seemed to move away from us a bit, stopping their attacks but keeping us closely surrounded as if scared of something.
Seeing that the Creeps had weakened their defence by stopping their attacks the eight of us quickly rushed towards the exit meeting much weaker resistance than we previously were. Suddenly as we were just about to cut through the last line of Creeps the ground behind us exploded as the Geocrawler launched into the air, intent on finishing off its prey which had killed its brethren. The initial quake knocked us off balance and seemingly changed something within the watching Creeps as all of a sudden they charged down at us with a greatened speed and power.
The Geocrawler plummeted to the ground, creating a shock that knocked us all to the ground and stunned the nearby Creeps, the Geocrawler seemed not to have been affected by the shock and without a second's hesitation it came barrelling down at us, throwing any Creeps that were in its way across the room without care. As we began to unsteadily pushed ourselves up to our feet the Geocrawler was already upon us and it swept the back of its claw with huge amounts of power at us. All but me and Ruby, who were closest to the claw, were able to dodge it but both me and Ruby were thrown heavily across the room and crashed into one of the hard stone walls.
It took a little while to regain my vision and hearing from the ferocity of the blow, but even with my hindered senses I knew that I was in a bad position. Once my vision had cleared a little bit I looked up at the health bar at the top left of my vision, deep in the yellow, a below it I saw that everyone elses health was in the green or had just gone into the yellow. However as I looked down to the last bar I saw that it had hit red, I looked at the name which rested just above the bar and saw that it belonged to Ruby.
I looked to my side to see Ruby, like me slumped up against the cold wall, however her eyes were closed and her hand was held loosely against her rapier. I stubbornly pushed myself off of the wall, but quickly fell back against the wall with heavy breathing as I tried to regain any sense of balance. I began to hear shouting and the sound of a large number of clicking bugs and soon after came back to my senses to see that the two of us were trapped against a small section of wall as nearly every one of the Creeps advanced on us.
I looked over at the others but could only see a fierce battle between them and the Geocrawler who had learned from its previous encounter and was therefore stopping a large number of hits from connecting and was able to block them from helping us in any way. I readied my sword in my hands, trying to stop it from shaking, and moved in front of the seemingly unconscious Ruby. I began to fight back the oncoming swarm of creeps trying to keep all of them from getting close to Ruby, after the first few lines of the Creeps however this became an increasingly harder fight as their overwhelming numbers begun to easily and quickly overcome my sword skills and kept pushing me back closer and closer to the wall.
I was quickly backed up against the wall with Ruby still slumped against it below me, I could see little way out of this fight whilst trying to protect Ruby, however I wasn't going to leave her just so that I could survive. Luckily I noticed that Sky had been slicing her way through the Creeps with a passion and had nearly got over to me, so I redoubled my efforts to stay alive for as long as I could to give time for Sky to get here.
Sky seeing that there was a seemingly infinite number of Creeps that kept pouring out of every opening in the walls and the ground she stopped trying to fight them and by using pure brute force and the strength of her thick steel armour she sprinted through the swarm shoulder first knocking the Creeps a few feet away from her. With this quick way to getting through the Creeps she soon met up with me but had taken a good bit of damage, however she was still holding up in the green.
"How we going to do this then?" I asked her hurriedly knowing that prolonging the time we spent backed up against the wall would lower our chances of a safe escape.
"You carry her and I'll clear as much of a path as I can." She answered quickly, not taking much attention off of the Creeps she was currently killing. I quickly nodded in agreement and turned to pick up Ruby, I quickly sheathed her rapier in her sheath and picked her up in a fireman's lift over my left shoulder, leaving my right arm free to fight with. But as we were about to get moving we both heard a scream come from the fight against the Geocrawler.
We both looked over and in shock saw that Celestia hung suspended in the air with one of the Geocrawler's claws protruding through her chest. She, not going down without a fight raised her rapier high with both of her hands and rammed it down into the Geocrawler's opened mouth, lodging itself deep into its flesh. The Geocrawler let out a short pained clicking sound before quickly retaliating. It brutally swung its free claw at Celestia's neck without mercy.