It was an hours-long descent into Farander’s dungeon, but not because the pit to get there was deep.

The pit was a wide-open maw not far from the village. It was feared for the slimes that crawled out of it year by year, in time with toxic fumes rising from the bowels of Gaia. Yet it was also renowned for supposedly being the source of Farander’s fortune and fertility. Like a volcano, it enriched and destroyed, even at the same time.

First the divers all suited up, suction-locked their goggles, and double- and quadruple-checked their gear with Arnaul. Ragnorre was beyond confident. Most, like Dulcen, went ahead with a workman’s air: not quite casual, but close enough to make an onlooker worry.

Linzy and Catamaug looked up at the afternoon sky, then away at the gas-masked guards poking spears around the edge of the chasm. They, more than the rest, feared they might never see this surface again. Though everyone was wrapped in encumbering layers of cloth and leather on top of their armor, these two were tense beyond tense.

Ethel felt distant. She was physically distant, too, staring into the pit from the far end of the diving group, letting the fumes from its depts fog her goggles. She and Nyx were doing the dance of continual awkward mistimed encounters and un-encounters. Unluckily for them, they would be seeing a lot of each other for the next several days.

Ragnorre felt okay, though. Ragnorre couldn’t shut up.

Then the sun had reached its mid-morning point. They all secured their grappling hooks to the top of the pit, checked their gloves for tears, and hurtled down the hundred-foot chasm at the dazzling speed of less than one mile per hour.

It was slow going. Rocks on the walls were not always sturdy, crumbling at the wrong touch and spidering out in long cracks that shattered the rock around them. And the steam that rose from the bottom of the pit didn’t just come up, it whooshed up in an unending technicolor gasp that seemed to erode their shoe soles. Cruising down closer to the center of the pit would have seared their flesh even through their armor. (Not Nyx’s flesh, probably, but you get the point.)

Also, slimes were crawling up, eager to stop them.

Nyx hammered both heels into a slime head. Well, maybe they didn’t have ‘heads,’ just cores and gooey bodies, but it wasn’t like Nyx knew their biology well or anything. They’d never before had such close contact with a slime—that is, without a sword or dagger to mediate. So they were surprised to discover that the gelatinous thing actually got harder at the split-second moment of impact, then splattered apart.

Crying out, the slime fell in jelly pieces from the wall and into the whooshing hole. It dissolved in mid-air, into nothing, never hitting the ground. Pretty satisfying, actually.

But that was only one slime of, like, a thousand. Sure, there were eight divers, but they needed their hands to safety-test the rock they were climbing down and they only had sixteen feet.

On top of that, they had a fourth obstacle: a wrecking ball of burning-white electricity that cut through the fumes and chewed through rock wherever it bashed the wall...and the obstacle was Ragnorre, of course.

Nyx couldn’t see for shit but they felt her coming through vibrations in the air and wall. She was rolling through on the right—Nyx leapt a meter up their rope. Ragnorre, her whole body charged with electricity, razed the wall just below, taking fragile rock and a crowd of wailing slimes out with her.

Nyx cringed, wishing they could wipe both the heat-sweat and the startle-sweat from their forehead. The helpfulness of Ragnorre’s boardwipe-esque tactics balanced out the less helpful aspects to make her not an advantage at all. This would still take hours...

***

Solid ground at last—ground that was, for the moment, not overrun by slimes. Nyx touched down and, with the back of their otherwise-dirty gloves, wiped their goggles clean of fumes. Then, with a sigh, they reclined against the rock wall. The rock wall heaved. They cringed and un-reclined.

Mere footsteps away was the center of the fume-belching pit, too high-temperature deadly to enter. But somewhere along the edge was a usable entrance, one whose precise location was never the same twice. It was, like all passageways in all dungeons, unmappable.

Nyx heard a squelch. It was already time to fight again.

Eight slimes—a little swarm—jellily yelped as they made their way over the edge. Nyx reached for their dagger, remembered they didn’t have it on them because they were trying to use a more Athalie-like combat style, and reached instead for their long slender sword.

By skewering each one in turn, they made swift, short work of the slimes. Dulcen’s advice was proving useful.

On top of being fragile, slimes also had visible soul gems that wobbled within their translucent bodies. You had to squint and search a little to see them, but they were there, and once they were shattered, the slimes couldn’t regenerate.

The mission of the divers, therefore, was to shatter as many slime soul gems as they could, especially the stronger ones in the deeper depths.

Nyx messed up their aim on the last one. Their saber ploinked into the slime, but was an inch off target. The monster abruptly hardened on impact, changing from slime-strength to a pillowy softness. That wasn’t nearly enough to save it. It tumbled backward off the edge...or...forward...or sideways?

Wait, when did Ragnorre get down here? A tingly-electric wave went down Nyx’s spine just as the boxer shouted in their ear, “Made iiit!”

Nyx swizzled a pinky around in their ear. Yes, the earplug was still in there, apparently. They didn't get paid enough for this..

Ragnorre was tottering, clearly dizzy from flinging herself around, so Nyx put their hands on her arms to steady her. Not even one floor down and she was already flagrantly disobeying advice, weakening herself in the process. Too bad Nyx couldn’t punt her in the hot pit right now without attracting suspicion, they thought...but maybe the whole party could do it on majority vote?

Sounds of battle echoed across the hole. No time to stand around dizzy! “Come on,” Nyx told Ragnorre with a shoulder shake. “Get it together, now.”

“Yeah!” she said with a wiggling thumbs-up.

“Yeah...”