Breaking the Rules Pt. 14

"Not the time. Here, lower this down. Ace needs some help."

Dayo vanished back down into the depths. Nuru stuck the staff over the edge, and gritted his teeth, hoping that he didn't lose his grip in the extreme moisture and sweat collected on his skin as the rope tugged down with some kind of effort.

"OK, up," Dayo said, Shadow Walking back up behind him and helping to grab the staff and pull the rope up.

One arms-length at a time, they together got Ace up to the top, wrist tied into the end of the rope.

"You're right, it's good we did this first," Nuru grunted.

"Time for a break," Dayo nodded.

"So what are our assets here?" Nuru said.

"I've still got my weapons, and lantern," Dayo said.

"I've got smoke portals, if only they worked," Ace said.

"So, Ace... you used a smoke portal anchor, right?" Nuru said.

"Saw it yourself," he said.

"Well, sure. What I mean is, how could you even do that?"

"They dropped me close to the glob, I guess so I'd get eaten first."

"But where did all that rope come from?"

"It was mine, they tied me up with it. I only got that much undone, and then it was impossible to get any more undone because it was under tension."

"Dayo, you knew he got tied up. How?"

"Lucky saving throw, and level bonuses. The wards hit me twice and stunned but didn't quite knock me out; I've been awake the whole time. Hurt like a bitch, though. I heard them talking about killing us before dumping us, but I guess they've done this before and they didn't want to get their weapons dirty. And they wanted to make sure Ace got eaten first; they don't like thieves that aren't on their team. They gave him a little cut to draw it to the small of blood, and our broken skulls were supposed to amplify its appetite even more."

"Too bad it wasn't me awake, so I could remember the exact layout of this place," Nuru said.

"You did miss your chance. They hit the wards power activation manually because you didn't fall over, I guess it was targeting based on faction the first time," Dayo said.

"Damn, no wonder he looked at me funny when they went off. Better we didn't crack our heads open though, so I guess it's for the best. What do you remember of the place?" Nuru said.

"We're pretty deep. That's the point of us coming here, really, these caves are known for spawning Gelatinous Globs relatively frequently," Dayo said. "Lots of side passages, too. There might be more than one way up, I didn't see any choke points but there's a number of people running around. Traps are still disabled though, so at least there's that."

"OK, one step at a time. Let's see what we need to get past first and try to find our equipment," Nuru said.

They crept carefully and quietly up the passages, every once in awhile stopping to let Nuru light another hellfire ball. Finally they reached a place where torches were lit. There were two men behind a locked gate, in some kind of wash room, scrubbing something into pails. Another man was standing by a doorway, bored out of his mind, muttering to himself, staring off in different directions.

"OK. First step, we open the gate," Ace said. "Don't try to be quiet. There's no alarms down here and we have the element of surprise on our side. They're ready for a Gelatinous Glob, not two seasoned adventurers and a maniac."

"Wait. One very important question about this plan of yours. Which one of us is the maniac?" Nuru grinned.

Dayo rolled their eyes, and Ace shook his head tiredly. "I'll take care of the gate. Dayo, you got the supervisor there?"

"Guess I'd better," the valkyrie replied. "Back me up though, in case he gets a lucky hit in. I'm still injured."

"That's on you, Nuru. I'm lucky if I don't just get in the way right now," Ace said. "You've got some unarmed combat proficiency, so you'll be at least a good distraction."

"OK, I guess we're as ready as we're ever going to be," Dayo said. "Say the word, Nuru."

"Now."

Ace vanished, and for a long minute nothing happened. Then the gate creaked a bit. The supervisor looked over, then came that way, peering side to side down the passageway, but turned back when he didn't see anything.

CLUNK

The gate separated just the barest inch. Dayo darted forward as the supervisor turned his head and slowly rotated, scowling in annoyance.

"We really need to get this damn thing oiled OH SHIT!"

Dayo came bursting through the gate and went for the throat. The supervisor went down, flailing and scrambling; the other men stood up quick and pressed against the far wall for a moment. Then they looked at each other.

"Weeeeell. Look what survived the feeding pit," one of them said.

They both relaxed and stepped forward, looking a bit confident of themselves.

"You want some of that ass? I'll take the noisy end," the other said.

Their grins vanished as Nuru stepped out and Dayo put the supervisor down for the count.

"You're right," he said, "we did survive. And unfortunately for your short-lived plans, the odds are not as in your favor as you thought."

"It is still rather one-sided though," Dayo said.

The necromancer staff materialized and spat an Arcane Blast, flattening the first one back into the wall; the other stepped forward and made to grapple with Dayo, but took a few hits from Nuru which was enough to deflect him and give the staff enough room to swing and take him out at the knee. He went down screaming, and Dayo kicked him into silence. Nuru and Dayo looked over at the second guy, slumped to the floor.

"Good hit," Nuru said to Dayo.

"Thanks," Ace said, appearing over top of the second man. "Had enough strength for one Co-op Sneak Attack, turns out."

"I thought he went down a bit easy," Dayo grinned. "Nice job."

They stripped the fallen of their clothing, as much as would fit at least, finding the key to the door the supervisor had been guarding. They took the rest of the stuff and dumped it just on the other side of the door, making sure it stayed locked. None of the fallen had a real weapon.

"That's a good thing, though," Ace said. "It means Dayo will be the only one with serious damage capability. As long as we don't get too outnumbered, we'll be in good shape."

They came up to the next chamber and Ace put his head in his hands.

"Why did you have to say it?" Nuru hissed.

Five guards, all armed, stood around a kitchen full of knives and heavy implements of all kinds. Three of them were acting as cooks, two of them guarding the pantry.

Dayo blew out a deep breath. "I have an idea. I'll be back."

"Wait, Dayo-" Nuru said quietly.

"You can't help me. Stay here; give me that key and I'll be back."

Nuru looked at Ace, who shrugged. "Let me see if I can nab something useful."

Nuru stood around fretting uselessly for several minutes as Dayo took both torches from the wall and put the flames out, then went back down the hall they'd just come from. He happened to glance back as the door opened once again. Dayo did something strange, then closed the door.

"Any luck?" he breathed in their ear.

"Oh yeah," they grinned. "Meet our newest party member, Blobby."

Nuru looked down, saw a vaguly humanoid shape on its hands and knees, that Dayo had been pulling through the doorway and which he hadn't been able to make sense of.

"What the heck! I thought we were waiting!" Nuru whispered.

"Where's Ace?"

"Collecting stuff, I dunno."

"I got us a couple bludgeons- oh hey, decided to get the floor cleaner after all," Ace said softly, holding up a heavy ladle and a long knife sharpening block.

"OK, we need to lure one of them over here," Dayo said.

"I've got just the thing," Ace said, dropping the ladle on the floor with a loud clang.

"What the-" one of the cooks said. "Who threw the ladle on the floor? Gods, I can't believe how juvenile you idiots are! We have to eat the food with this later!"

He came around the table towards the back passage, cursing about having to clean it again, where they all waited. He grunted as Ace whacked him across the back of the head from behind with the sharpener block, falling stunned to the floor. Blobby tumbled forward, seeping up the man's arm; he moaned but couldn't shake Ace loose from holding him with his fingers over his mouth. The creeping mass reached the man's face, and then the only sound was him flailing around for his life, hitting the table legs and the floor.

"Hey old timer, having some trouble lifting that ladle?" one of the other cooks cracked.

"I think I threw my back out!" Ace mimicked the fallen man's voice.

The two cooks laughed.

"Hey! It's not funny! Somebody help me back up!"

One of the two dropped his butcher knife and came around the table. He shook the fallen man, who now lay motionless.

"Hey man, are you-argh!"

Dayo clonked him hard with their staff from the other direction as pots boiled and hissed over enclosed flame, and then he too was overcome by the glob which suffocated him into oblivion as the final guard ran to tend an overflowing stew.

"Alright. We just need to make sure nobody gets out to sound the alarm," Ace said. "Dayo, you cover the far exit. Blobby here can sneak up on the last of these guys from behind. Time it right and we'll be home free, with some decent weapons they've got over there."

"Agreed?" Dayo looked at Nuru for confirmation.

He nodded. "Let's do it."

The man left was so wrapped up in chopping vegetables that he didn't notice a thing about the blob monster creeping up behind him from the floor and fell backwards screaming as it wrapped long fingers around his neck and squeezed. One of the guards by the pantry looked up, wide eyed, and tried to bolt, but Dayo had the initiative once again and leaped out with an Arcane Blast to send her reeling into the stone doorframe, clipping the woman's shoulder and knocking the breath out of her. Dayo's scythe whistled in and pierced her chain armor, but not enough that one blow took her out. Several blows finally laid the woman to rest in a large pool of her own blood.

"Brutal," Nuru shivered.

"Had to be done. She wasn't going to yield," Dayo frowned.

Ace had her purloined sword at the throat of the other guard, who had dropped his own as well. "What do we do with this one?"

"This one gets to be the scapegoat," Nuru said, taking the key from the fallen woman. "Grab a bunch of food from the pantry there for each of us. We're gonna shove him in there, and he gets to take the blame for all the missing food. Might as well make it worth your while in there, eh? Who knows how long until someone comes and gets you."

The man gulped, then let Ace rummage a bit before coming out with a king's feast worth of food. Between the five people, there were several bits of armor that Ace and Nuru could put on, and did.

"Gods, I feel like I haven't eaten in days," Nuru said, wolfing down his food.

"Hard to tell how long it's been down here," Dayo nodded. "Several hours. Probably missed lunch."

"Say, where's all our stuff, anyway?" Nuru said.

"I d-dunno. They haven't had our meeting yet. Probably still got it all upstairs," the captured guard said.

"You think that woman's trying your dress on?" Nuru asked Dayo.

"Hmph. Better not make it smell like Clubber sweat," the valkyrie groused. "I'll fucking kill her."

"W-who?" the guard asked.

"What was her name, Delu?" Ace said.

"Yeah," Nuru agreed.

"Ohhh shit, don't fuck with her, she'll cut your belly open and make you chase your own entrails pulled by a horse," the man said.

"Speaking from experience?" Ace said.

The man nodded anxiously.

"Ah well, thanks for the advice. Good eating," Dayo said, marching him into the pantry and locking it. "So. We need water."

"There's a barrel over there," Ace pointed.

Dayo looked at it and nodded. "This will do. Drink what you need before I do this."

They took turns quenching their thirst with a measuring cup left on one of the tables, then Dayo gestured to Blobby. It approached the barrel, and Dayo took a handful of goo and shoved it into the water; the rest followed along. The necromancer churned and shoved around hard in the water.

"What on earth are you doing?" Nuru said.

Dayo stood up and stepped back. "Observe."

Nuru looked closely. The surface of the water lifted, and he watched as it formed into an even taller humanoid figure, almost completely clear.

"It drank all the water?" Nuru said.

"Some of it. It cleaned out a bunch of the dirt and impurities that made it opaque," Dayo said. "And yeah, it inflated with the water a little bit. Its acid attack will be diluted, but we don't have time for it to digest anything right now anyway."

"How strong is this thing?" Nuru said.

"It's about... oh, level thirty, I guess, with all the souls I pumped into it," Dayo said. "Rough equivalency. Bear in mind that base stats aren't everything - it's skills, and proficiency, and equipment that make more of a difference. The actual stats are such that every additional soul of approximately the same level gives it about a ten percent boost. That's with no equipment at all, which is often the case with a chimera; it's hard to get armor to stay put, although if you give them a weapon a majority of the infused souls have proficiency with, that's not a problem. But the cumulative proficiency and the lack of taking much physical damage puts it at a much higher level as far as how hard it is to kill."

"So why aren't they used more often?"

"They're a bit rare, for one thing. Not like you can just farm them endlessly; they show up a few places, but not in the numbers you'd need for an army, and usually the smaller size, so the starting stats are lower. They're slow too; and if you put shoes on them, they get a lot faster but lose a lot of their strength and leverage. Also, they're size-limited - they can't get much bigger than Blobby here, unless you feed them an enormous amount of food, for which they have to still be properly alive, which is risky to keep around to try. And you can't stitch them together like you can with other creatures; each gelatinous mass is incompatible with another somehow, they destroy each other. Finally, like I said, the returns diminish of how much soul you can stuff in them without it being more effective to get a host creature that has bones you can enhance with crystals, if you've got decent resources. They're good for a novelty, a little twist to pull out of your pocket when some adventurer's gotten too deep into your dungeon, but they're a sideshow at best for high level adventurers. In our case, they're buffable for a lower-rank party like ours, and being slow isn't a problem for the size of the building we're going to attack. All he's got to do is take an impressive beating and convince the Legion that we're beyond their capabilities."

"Alright, let's see what's ahead," Nuru said.

"Six guards," Ace said, reappearing next to them. "On two different levels."

"Guh, I hate it when you do that," Nuru said.

They walked to the next doorway and peered through. Six guards, four of them guarding two doorways on a catwalk above, and two more guarding a stairway that presumably led around to one of those entrances on the catwalk.

"OK... this is going to take some finesse," Dayo said, pointing to the two guards across the way. "But I think we can pull it off. Leave those two to me. On my signal, Ace, you need to Smoke Portal me up onto that catwalk on the right side. There's too many torches in here for me to Shadow Walk."

They waited. It looked like nothing was happening, unless Nuru looked very close, and then he could see that Blobby had flattened itself out against the floor and was creeping in a long, thin rivulet, like an uphill-flowing puddle of water searching for a stream to rejoin. It reached the far side, slipped past the feet of the guards, then lifted itself up into a human shape behind them. Reaching forward, it pulled both of them into itself.

"Hey, what the-" one of the guards on the upper catwalk said, noticing a sudden commotion. All four went to the railing to look.

"Too soon, too soon," Dayo muttered, casting something.

The guards across the way turned towards each other and made a half-convincing show of making out, although the arm flailing made it seem more of an impromptu sexual assault than a spontaneous make-out session.

"Oh my god! You see that?" one of them said.

"Delu's gonna be sorry she missed the show," another said.

"I didn't even know they swung that way," a third said.

"Get a room, you two!" the fourth jeered.

"Good idea," Dayo muttered.

The two guards across the way pulled back towards the stairway, out of sight of the onlookers who were laughing and slapping each other with mirth. Nuru and Ace could see the two shudder and fall unconscious to the floor after a little while, and Blobby sank to the floor again, and thus, six enemies became four. It snaked its way under the catwalk and then up the wall on the left side, towards the two guards in that doorway. Ace tensed, ready for action. Dayo nodded, and everything happened at once. One guard on the left looked over just as Blobby encompassed her companion and spat her with enough force to knock the two over the rail, and fall to the floor below. Dayo appeared in a puff of smoke on the opposite end of the walk, and thrashed with a desperate strength against the other guards still above.

"!Fashewar Asiri!"

One of the two slammed into the rail and nearly toppled over; Ace stumbled over to the two who had fallen and finished them off while they were still stunned. Nuru ran over and jumped up to grab at the leg of the one who was hanging off the catwalk. She kicked at him, but he managed to pull her loose. He was suddenly fighting off the furious assault of a fully-armored warrior, he was quickly on the defensive and getting in only ineffective hits with her armor and his small butcher knife.

"I'm gonna rip your arm off and beat you with it!" she snarled, getting some good hits in, though his borrowed armor kept any of them from being critical.

Her mistake was in losing track of Ace, who reappeared as Nuru and the woman tussled, sliding his borrowed sword into her shoulder in a weak point in the armor. She screamed, but her partner up on the catwalk had been hiding behind her shield and was too occupied to assist. Nuru and Ace muscled his opponent's helmet loose, and Ace held onto her limbs while Nuru struck her in the back of the head.

"Surrender," Nuru said. "I hate to beat a woman to death."

"Fuck you," She growled, catching her second wind, and throwing Ace off.

Nuru got in a solid kick to her neck and something snapped.

"I can't... I can't feel my legs!" she cried.

"Sorry lady. It was you or me," Nuru said.

"Live by the sword, die by the sword," Ace sighed.

"Finish it then. Assholes! Don't leave me a cripple the rest of my life. I swear on my father's grave, I will hunt you down and-"

Her face smashed into the rock floor as Dayo wrenched her by the hair and shoved hard, unleashing an Arcane Blast at the bottom.

"Nuru, I appreciate the sentiment, but this is war," the valkyrie said, looking up at him. "Man, woman- it doesn't matter. They will kill you, and you need to be prepared to kill them first. She made her choice.!Rai Magudana!"

"Yeah... I know. I just had to give her a chance to surrender," Nuru said, looking away from the growing pool of blood.

"Fair," Ace said. "We should be giving most of them that chance, according to High Faction rules. But when we're outnumbered we have to maintain our initiative, so we can't stop to ask first."

Nuru took a moment to steady himself. "All clear?"

"Took a few hits up there, she had a pretty good defense with that shield. Blobby got there just in time. We're good to go," Dayo said, swiping blood away from some fresh injuries. "Can't keep this up much longer though."