Shadowcroft Year 3 - Chapter Twenty-Five

Shellex Aldabra milled about in his human form, though he wasn’t human. Never had been. That would be too gross. He was a shifter, an onyxback tortoise shifter to be exact. He’d come from the dry desserts of Galapaygus, a whole world of various reptilian shifters, and a place with several Celestial Nodes, which flooded Galapaygus with life-giving energy.

Shellex loved his homeworld—which made his quest to destroy dungeons all the more important. If other worlds died, it would give his world more Apothos. That was why he’d dedicated his life to destroying dungeons. He’d assembled a party of like-minded adventurers, all powerful shifters in their own right, and called his dungeoneering party the Lupine Fury.

And why was the Lupine Fury on the strange world of Sucrosia?

Because their rogue, Dravena Molt, had heard of a treasure trove of Chrysalis Jewels, some unhatched, but some broken open to set free a kaleidoscope of Gemstone Butterflies. Dravena loved treasure, but the cocoon gems were more than simple loot. They were her ticket to a new level, and what was good for one member of Lupine Fury was good for the team and what was good for the team was, ultimately, what was good for Galapaygus.

Shellex, the tortoise shifter, stood in front of the gates of Wally Wanko Murder’s Factory with his team, spread out behind him in a loose circle. The gates probably weren’t iron, though they looked like it. On the other side was a gumdrop path that led up to the doors of the factory itself, carved into red rock candy cliffs.

Shellex shifted into his hybrid form. He was huge, six and a half feet tall and three hundred pounds, but he could get bigger. A lot bigger. His bardiche—a gargantuan ax that was part polearm and part cleaver—rested on his shell rising up above his shoulder.

Shellex was the tank, but he was also the leader, no matter what Hellmutt Oso had to say about it.

Hellmutt was the melee damage dealer of the group—an enormous bear with black fur—but he never shifted into his human form. On his head was a great golden helm, and it seemed to be the source of his magical golden claws and shining golden teeth. Those claws could cut through armor like it was paper. Those teeth could crunch through bones like they were dried sticks. Hellmutt was powerful, without a doubt, and but he was also a pain in Shellex’s scaly butt.

Hellmutt spoke with a pronounced accent—some said it sounded like one of the Germanic languages that had once proliferated on doomed Aldaleera. It was hard to say, but Hellmutt was very particular about how things worked within their party. “Herr Aldabra, I vill not take one more step until you tell me about this Wally Wanko. Vhat kind of dungeon are ve dealing vith, eh?”

Dravena hopped around the werebear in her semi-hybrid form, half-human and half-crow. Black feathers hung from her arms. She had a beak and human eyes. Dirty bird feet dropped down from her studded leather skirt. She had a whole collection of daggers, both for throwing and for stabbing. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, Hellie, I know, I know, you just want to lick the ground. Because you’re a bear, right? And bears like the sweet stuff. But I wouldn’t lick nothing, right? Right? A candy world might be sweet, but it can’t be safe. Can’t be. Can’t be. Can’t be. Treasure, Hellie, we want the treasure. It’s down there deep. Let’s just go. Let’s just get on with it.”

The excitable thief then transformed into her even more crow-hybrid form and went soaring up over the gate, and then landed on the gumdrop path that led to the building built into the rock candy cliffs. “Traps! I don’t see any traps! But I can tell you about Wally Wonka. He made candy until we went crazy! He was greedy and weird and loved jewels and pretty things as much as he loved cherries and chocolate!”

Shellex’s porcupine archer—Rothchild Sharps—pulled a quill from his back and nocked his bow. He too was in his hybrid form. His face was humanoid, but the rest of him was porcupine. He talked far slower than he shot, which made him rather annoying. “Well, now. Dravena is excited about this one. As for me. I got a bad feeling about it. None of the guilds know about it. Except for the Scarlet Paradox. But they’re keeping it quiet. Why’s that?”

“This is vhy I have asked us to pause, Liebling,” Hellmutt said with a sniff. “But there goes the avian, rushing in and threatening to expose us all.”

Dravena shifted into a form that had hands and hurried forward. She tried to open the gate, but she was far too weak. “Help me! Help me! Help me! Let’s go inside! Let’s go. Let’s not think. Let’s just go!”

Hellmutt took a huge paw and pushed open the squeaking gate easily.

Dravena hopped up to the huge werebear. “I heard that avian crack, mister. You mammals think you’re so smart. You think you’re better than us avian shifters, or even Shellex, but you’re not. Live young? Yuck! Mammary glands? Double yuck! Birds rule! Bears drool.”

Hellmutt stood up on his hind legs. “They do, Dravena, Liebling. Bears do drool. It’s very shocking. But I do not drool. Since you have found no traps, let us move forward. Shellex, is that all right with you, since you fancy yourself as our leader?”

Shellex scowled and transformed into his full fighting form—huge black shell, thick black scales, and a razor-sharp beak. A leather satchel dangled off his shoulder. He gripped his bardiche in black claws. “I am the leader, Hellie, and don’t you forget it. I’ll go up the path first. Petula, get behind me. Then it’s our normal marching order.”

Petula Cloudsweat shuffled through the gate. She was a skunk shifter, with black hair and the white strip down the center. Her robes were equally black and white. She mostly stayed in her hybrid form, so she had a little skunk ears, a little skunk nose, and tiny little teeth. Her eyes were small. She didn’t say much, but she had an expressive face and waddled with a certain confidence… when she wasn’t acting crazy.

Yes, the Cloud Caster might be insane, but she was also the most powerful member of their party. She did have a certain stench to her which could be rather off putting, but Shellex would die to protect her. She was their best bet of making it out of this strange candy dungeon alive.

Rothchild Sharps was right—this whole situation was strange. Normally, the guilds knew about the dungeons before anyone else. Not this time. They’d been in a tavern on Bharoosh, The Freckled Halfling, when someone started chattering about a candy dungeon filled with jeweled butterflies. The minute Dravena heard that, it was over.

They paid a local chapter of The Hermetic Order of Davos, a powerful dungeoneering guild, for use of their Hell-Oh Portal. Guilds always overcharged the indie raiders because the guilds wanted the raiders to join them, but not Shellex and his Lupine Fury. No, they were independent raiders, and whatever loot and Apothos they got, they’d keep. All those greedy guilds could go straight to the deepest, darkest, murkiest of hells.

Shellex sniffed the sweet air, and for a minute, the sickly, saccharine stench of sugar  made him gag. Then he caught a whiff of Petula’s peculiar odor, and he gagged a bit more. Her stink was part of her magic. A big part, actually.

Shellex turned and made sure his party was in their marching order. He was up front with his porcupine archer behind him. Then came the skunk sorceress. Dravena walked behind Petula, but the crow woman wouldn’t stay there long. She would fly ahead, hop around, and then turn to give Hellmutt Oso dirty looks.

The huge, helmeted bear took up the rear position, but he could storm forward at any minute to use his magical teeth and talons on any monsters they encountered.

In the case of the Murder Factory, they found monsters right away.

Shellex pushed open the doors and walked inside, ax in both hands, ready to start swinging.

The interior of the entry chamber was cloaked in deep shadow, until a new nasty odor assaulted Shellex’s senses. The air around Petula began to glow. That stench swept around the room, giving them light.

The tortoise shifter fought the impulse to put his claws over his nose.

Instead, Shellex took in the room. It looked like the lobby of a business, only the carpet was dirty and torn, the walls were marked with slashes and burns, and all the lights had been shattered. At one point, it might’ve been nice, but its best days were long gone. The dusty wallpaper showed happy scenes—cherry-cheeked children eating candy and following a fancy mushroom man into colorful caverns bursting with jeweled butterflies. They were in the right place, no doubt about that.

A fountain bubbled in the center of the cramped room, a water feature that was far too big for the space. There was also something terribly wrong with it. That wasn’t water in the basin, but a black goo was that was bubbling around jawbreaker boulders of various sizes. The statue above the muck was that of the same cute little mushroom man from the wallpaper. The toadstool fellow was only about three-feet tall and wore a jaunty purple suit, which included a cane and a top hat. The bottom of the statue was speckled with black goo.

On the other side of the fountain was a hulking, curve reception desk. An insectile figure dressed in what looked like candy armor—white with colored speckles—sat there unmoving. The centipede man wore a helmet like an Aldaleeran Spartan. It had dozens of legs, but it was hard to tell what was leg and what was arm. All of those ends looked sharp, though. The insect receptionist was utterly still. Was it the husk of a dead candy warrior? Or was it alive and motionless and luring them in?

Dravena flew up and dropped down on top of the fountain. “This statue isn’t alive! But that receptionist is, I bet. I bet. Rothie, Rothie, Rothie, shoot him up! Shoot him up quick! Can you smell the fountain? It smells like someone poured a milkshake on a sausage and mushroom pizza. Gross! Gross! Gross!”

Before Rothchild could fire his quill arrows, the wallpaper behind the archer tore open and a giant centipede, covered in candy armor, fell onto top of him. All of the walls were writhing with insects, ripping through, ambushing Shellex and his party from every side.

But that wasn’t all. From the ceiling came huge colorful flies with long spikes for bodies. They were the colors of a pastel rainbow—yellows and blues, pinks and greens. Those soft colors might’ve looked tasty, like Aldaleeran Sweet Tarts, if the flies weren’t trying to kill them.

The receptionist wasn’t dead, either. It reared up on a dozen legs. Six arms sprouted two-foot-long blades. The candy centipede Spartan clattered over the desk, coming at Shellex with a sinuous grace and unnerving speed.

The tortoise shifter swung his ax with all his strength, but the centipede Spartan ducked, and it was only in the last second that Shellex spun, taking all those blades on his shell. The blades sparked on his nearly impenetrable back, but that was only the first of the attacks. The spike flies struck Shellex in the face, and soon blood dripped down onto the leather jerkin covering his chest.

In seconds, the Lupine Fur was swamped by all the monsters—candy centipedes coming out of the walls and the Sweet Tart spike flies dive-bombing them from above.

Rothchild danced away from the encroaching centipede and riddled the creature with a host of quill arrows. The centipede squealed and pitched over onto its side, dead. More centipedes scuttled in to fill the void. He dropped another one, sinking several quills through the creature’s face, but those same missiles clattered off the centipede Spartan’s thick, jawbreaker armor.

Shellex swung at the Spartan again, but the thing was so fast, which was remarkable given how many limbs it had. The Spartan scurried past Shellex even as Rothchild managed to hit it with several arrows. The Spartan ignored the quills and the archer for that matter. It raced forward with single-minded focus, clearly targeting Petula Cloudsweat. Losing their sorcerer this early would cut this dungeon dive short.

Dravena flew away from the top of the fountain, which mercifully, hadn’t come alive. She led a bunch of spike flies away, but she wasn’t going to be able to help with the Spartan or any of the other candy centipedes.

Hellmutt was covered in the insects. Even as he ripped one apart, another would slash at his thick hide.

Shellex watched the bear tear the head off one centipede before barreling into another, his glowing talons rending chitin and sending black blood gushing across the floor.

It was chaos.

Then the awful fragrance of swamp gas and rotten eggs spread through the chamber. Though Shellex recognized the smell, it still made him almost throw up his lunch. The poisonous gas belched out of the skunk shifter, and it finally made the Spartan retreat, backpedaling all those legs right into Shellex.

The tortoise shifter hacked into the centipede with his giant bardiche. His blade went through several layers of candy before it found flesh. Black blood sprayed across the floor in an arc.

Spike flies dropped like mosquitoes in a bug zapper, the toxic gas exterminating them with extreme prejudice. Some of the spike flies even exploded from the atrocious smell.

The centipedes, likewise, recoiled from the stench of Petula Cloudsweat’s poisonous fog.

Petula grinned. “That was a stinky one. Can I light it on fire now, Mr. Aldabra?”

Shellex laughed. “Give me one second to protect our team.” The tortoise shifter dropped down to the floor and triggered one of his onyxback abilities. Apothos pulsed out from his core, creating a half-dome of powerful energy around them, drawing his party inward while blasting his enemies out of the protective circle.

With the members of Lupine Fury protected, Petula ignited her gaseous cloud around them. An enormous whoomp sent insects flying as orange and yellow filled the room. Everything not in the half-dome, and everything not dead from her poisonous gas, died in her inferno stinkbomb.

A second later, the fire guttered and died, leaving behind a small army of buggy corpses and smoldering candy wallpaper that smelled like burnt marshmallows.

It was total destruction.

Amazingly, the candy centipede Spartan stirred. The creature righted itself, retracted the blades protruding from its arms, and went running away on his many legs, leaving behind a trail of black blood. Most of his armor had been melted off in the explosion. Jawbreakers might be super hard, but they were also made of sugar, and sugar melted.

Petula could provide those oven-like temperatures, and she wasn’t even sweating.

The skunk shifter smiled shamelessly. “I’m glad I ate those raw onions for breakfast.”

Dravena flew to the exit, which was located just beyond the reception desk. The doors were all on fire. Since she had a Ring of Fire protection, she was able to just walk right through them, even as one of the doors fell off his hinges and clattered onto the ground.

“Come on! It’s hard to breathe! Must keep going! Keep on! Keep on!” Dravena squawked.

She wasn’t wrong.

Shellex cast another protection spell so he could push away the doors on fire, clearing a path forward for his team.

Rothchild and Petula hurried through the flames followed by the hulking figure of the werebear in the great golden helm. Hellmutt limped from his wounds. The candy centipedes had ripped into him but good. Rothchild had also been wounded in the battle as had Shellex, who had deep wounds on his face from the spike flies.

However, they’d defeated the Reception Room without losing anyone.

He knew his party was a little shaken by the encounter with the hideous receptionist and his monster pals, but not Shellex. He had years of experience and he’d had seen such tactics before—occasionally, dungeon cores would push the hard stuff up front to scare away raiders. Then things got easier the farther down you went because they’d frontloaded the dungeon. It was a bluff charge, meant to intimidate and run raiders off.

Even if that wasn’t the case, Shellex wasn’t going to turn around now. He didn’t much care about a few diamond cocoons and jeweled butterflies. They would help Dravena advance, but that was a secondary benefit. He and the Lupine Fury were there to suck the Celestial Node dry. To save their worlds. To improve their powers. To rid the world of another monstrous dungeon core. They would not be deterred and nor would they be defeated. This dungeon core had only hours left to live, whether it knew it or not.