Aidan
The Realms
Firstday, 1st week of the 8th month, Godless Age 597
Pre-dawn
Starchaser Village, Mistvale Highlands

Movement from Brighid woke Aidan up. He glanced at the window and muttered, "Still dark out, lemme sleep."

"Nope!" The Paladin chirped. "Rise and shine! We have a dungeon to clear out today." She yanked the blanket off Aidan, exposing him to the cold morning air. "Come on, love; you knew this was coming."

"Five minutes," he mumbled, curling up into a ball to preserve body heat.

It took another twenty minutes for Brighid to coax him out of bed; the smell of breakfast cooking did the trick. It was another hour and a half before they reached a narrow valley outside the village. Once there, Brighid stopped and turned to face Aidan. Breathing in deeply, she said, "We face a problem. Even if we left today, Ceallach Macht is too far away for you to make it on foot in time for the battle. There are no horses in the village, nor any saddles for them. Even if you could afford a horse, Gerwyn could not find you one before it is time to leave. Your only option is to ride a centaur, and there is only one centaur who will let you ride her."

"Are you sure, my heart? Won't that cause problems for you when the others see?"

"Yes, likely so, but it is the only option. Besides," Brighid cast her eyes towards the ground, and her cheeks began to redden, "I... want you to. I want to feel you on my back." She looked up at him again and bit her lower lip. "Mounting me."

"Well, well. How can I deny such a fetchingly-presented proposal?" He grinned at her and stroked her flank. "How are we going to go about this? No offense, but the last time I rode you armored as you are was not exactly pleasant for me."

She nodded. "In my saddlebags, there is a thick blanket. Fold it up and place it on my back." She knelt on the ground in front of Aidan. He followed her instructions, then awkwardly climbed onto her back. She rose to her feet, and immediately Aidan had to wrap his arms around her waist to keep from falling off. He readjusted his seating, then Brighid began to walk around.

It took half an hour of slow walking before they were both comfortable with the pace. Once they had that down, Brighid moved into a trot, causing Aidan to grit his teeth and cling on tighter with his arms and legs; the jolting gait was exceptionally uncomfortable. Once they were both confident he wouldn't bounce off her back, Brighid lengthened her stride into a canter—a breath of fresh air after the trot—and then a full gallop.

Once he got the hang of it, it was a fantastic experience for Aidan to ride around on Brighid's back at high speed. Aidan could feel her powerful muscles flexing and stretching beneath him even through the barding. He leaned forward to press his chest against her back and rested his chin on her shoulder.

Once he regained the capacity for thought, Aidan carefully reattached Brighid's armor, then slipped around in front of her to kiss her. "How close are we to the lair, do you think?" He asked.

"Not far," Brighid panted. Her bangs, saturated with sweat, clung to her face. "Maybe half an hour walking?"

Aidan nodded. "Then let's proceed with me on foot. We'll both need to focus on the enemies inside."

During the short walk, Brighid explained what they would be facing. Mites, it turned out, were not bugs like Aidan first thought. They were a type of spirit; specifically, one attuned to rot and decay. They did take an insect-like form, however, which is where they got their name. Mites tended to nest underground, reproducing out of sight until they boiled out in a giant swarm to blight the land for miles around their initial nest.

They reached the entrance to the dungeon just as the sun breached the eastern horizon. Brighid put her helmet on, helped Aidan into his armor, and then asked him to go in with Burning Barrage already active. "We are not going to do this stealthily; I am never going to be able to approach unseen or unheard, and your current magic does not allow you to fight quietly, either. I think our best bet is for you to stick close to me and use your magic to fight at range while I kill anything that gets up close. Does that sound reasonable to you?"

Aidan readily agreed, and the pair headed into the cave entrance. As soon as he stepped foot inside, two prompts appeared in Aidan's mind.

Aidan accepted, and instantly the party interface appeared at the edges of his vision. Armed, armored, and as prepared as they could be, he and Brighid moved forward into the dark cavern.

The Fetid Lair lived up to its name; the air reeked with the scent of rotten flesh. Every breath left a foul taste in Aidan's mouth, but he did his best to ignore it. There was no natural light in the cavern, and the embers from Burning Barrage barely even shed as much light as a candle, but Brighid cast a quick spell, and a ball of yellow-white energy appeared in the air above her head. Aidan allowed Brighid to take the lead but stuck close to her side. The tunnel twisted and turned and sloped gradually downward. After about two minutes of careful, slow walking, the walls around them opened up into a wide enough space that Brighid's light spell didn't illuminate the far side.

Water dripped from the darkness above into pools of stagnant water with steady plip plop sounds. Brighid's pulsating light glittered from stalagmites rising like rotten teeth from the uneven stone floor. Aidan could only just make out the tips of stalactites descending from the ceiling. He couldn't see any enemies, but gaming instinct told him there would be some. He stopped Brighid and warned her, "My instincts tell me that we need to be careful here. This screams ambush." She nodded and cast an unfamiliar Fire Magic spell; Aidan felt waves of heat radiating off of her body, but strangely, it felt comforting to him rather than dangerous. Brighid cautiously entered the cavern with Aidan sticking close to her side.

Nothing happened for the first several yards, other than the continued noise of water dripping. Aidan looked around and strained his ears to hear any signs of potential attackers. Still, in the end, it was Brighid who suddenly shouted and sidestepped into Aidan, pushing him out of the way as something dropped out of the darkness above and landed on her back, right where Aidan's head had been a split-second before. Another fell just behind him, then another to the other side of his Companion. Within mere heartbeats, they were surrounded by at least a dozen of the small, multi-legged things. Brighid instantly springs into action, cutting down two of the creatures with a single sweeping strike from her glaive. Aidan began casting Flame Jet as soon as he recovered from Brighid's push, but the one-second cast time meant that he wasn't in time to prevent the mite on Brighid's back from scrambling to a joint in her armor and biting her, nor to stop several others from contracting in on themselves and then leaping towards him and Brighid.

One of them collided with Aidan and grabbed on with spiked legs, but before it could bite him, he finished his cast, and two streams of flame began to pour from his hands. He aimed one spell at one of the leaping enemies, blasting it out of the air, while his other hand was devoted to cooking the one on Brighid's back. The creature latched onto him took a bite out of his torso, cleaving through his ill-fitting borrowed leather armor and making him gasp with pain. Still, he was able to maintain concentration on all three of his spells. Brighid whirled and stamped with her hooves and spun her glaive from side to side in a deadly, beautiful dance. Aidan passed his flames over every enemy he could see, gritting his teeth at the searing, sickening pain in his side as the one on him continued to gnaw away. The instant his spells ended, Aidan grabbed hold of the mite with both hands and tore it from his body. With a grunt of pain, he threw it in front of Brighid, who drove her glaive through its bloated abdomen. A pool of blood—his blood, he realized—spread from its twitching corpse.

Aidan looked around for another enemy to burn, but the cavern was still once again. He pressed a hand to his side, feeling the sticky, wet heat there. Blood pounded in his ears as his heartbeat slowly returned to normal following the spike of adrenaline. The whole fight only took about ten seconds, and there were fourteen smoking, bisected, smashed, and/or transfixed corpses around them. He checked his and Brighid's Health; he took 35 damage and had a Minor Wound, while Brighid was hurt a little more but was un-Wounded. He started up his Patch Wounds spell, closing his Wound, then cast it several more times to refill both of their Health pools. While he healed them, he checked his notifications.

Well, well, that'll be useful, Aidan thought to himself. It was essentially an AOE Patch Wounds without the ability to affect Wounds. The Stamina cost meant he couldn't run it all the time, but it'd make recovering from fights simpler. The fact that it could be used offensively against undead also intrigued him, although the Stamina cost was prohibitive for now.

Once he was mostly repaired, Aidan took the time to kneel and examine one of the corpses. It looked something like an evil cross-breed between a spider and a roach. It had a long, roughly oval-shaped abdomen with a hard carapace, a much smaller thorax from which sprouted ten thin legs tipped in spikes, and a multi-eyed head with nasty-looking mandibles and a lamprey-like circular mouth lined with teeth. The whole creature was maybe a foot and a half long, not counting its legs. "So, these are mites?" Aidan asked.

"Yes," Brighid replied, mouth twisted in distaste. "Young ones. The adults will be about twice this size, and the queen a little smaller than me."

"And... how many of them are there going to be?" Aidan asked, not really wanting to know the answer.

"Hundreds, most likely. Fortunately, the young are fragile." Indeed, while the Boar Manikin had taken an entire five seconds of concentrated Flame Jet to kill, even with its high vulnerability to fire, these only took about a second's worth of damage to fry. Eyeing his combat log, Aidan guessed they had around 12 Health each. They sure packed a wallop for creatures that frail!

"They're only worth 50 experience each. Well, I guess a couple hundred of these with some bigger ones thrown in is still several thousand experience. Let's just hope that they keep coming at us in manageable groups and not all at once. Do you think that's all of the ones in this chamber?"

Brighid shrugged and replied, "No way to tell for sure, really."

Aidan grinned and said, "Actually, there just might be. Get ready, I might be able to make some bugs angry." He concentrated briefly, and the seven Burning Barrage motes around his head streaked off into the darkness. Less than a second later, a series of explosions lit up the rocky chamber. Six of them revealed nothing unexpected, but the seventh detonated directly in the center of another cluster of the creatures. They dropped from the ceiling and landed in the shadows. The damage from a single Burning Barrage hit wasn't enough to kill most of them, but the Flame Jet Aidan greeted them with when they scurried into Brighid's light quickly finished them off.

Aidan spent the next few minutes re-casting Burning Barrage and methodically clearing the ceiling and walls of lurking mites. Once he was confident that no enemies remained, they made a quick circuit of the chamber and located two tunnels leading further into the complex, one to the left of the entrance and one to the right.

Zurai

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