This Used To Be About Dungeons полностью

The books stirred gently, then leapt from the shelves and their places on the room’s furniture. It wasn’t all of them, only a dozen, but they flapped through the air toward Alfric, and before he knew it, he was being battered by them, knocking his helm askew and then off. His sword stabbed through one, but they were fast and not the ideal enemy, especially when his quick slashes seemed to knock them aside rather than actually cutting into them.

“No magic!” Alfric called back to the party, though he really only meant Mizuki.

Thankfully, the books weren’t able to do much damage to him through the armor, and after not too much time had passed with them trying to knock him down, arrows started flying in through the open door. Alfric felt his magically enhanced strength fading, and hoped that was because it was going to Isra instead of because Verity’s song had failed. The books were taken out one by one, each with an arrow through them, the book creatures bleeding black ink, while Alfric took the beatings of book spines and more than a few paper cuts to his hands and face.

When there were only a handful left, Alfric moved deeper into the room, giving Isra more space to line up her shots. He dropped his shield to the ground and went after the books with his hand, grabbing onto them and slamming them to the floor so he could line up a sword thrust that would run them straight through. When the last of them was dropped by one of Isra’s arrows, Alfric took a moment to breathe. He was sweating, bloodied, and bruised, having taken quite a bit of a beating in the course of fighting the book-things.

On closer inspection, they were only booklike things, the ‘pages’ like gills with razor-sharp edges, and small eyes set into the spines. Their black blood was the consistency and color of ink though.

“Clear,” called Alfric, when there was no more rustling of pages. He replaced his helm on top of his sweat-damp hair and picked up his shield from the ground, then turned toward the closed door on the other side of the hallway as the party filed in. “Good work, Isra. Verity, you can drop the song if you’d like.”

“The maid played on, her singular song, its beat so true and sweet,” replied Verity, weaving her words into the melody without any seeming trouble. “She thought she’d continue, as sword cut through sinew, thumping a steady beat.”

“All right, up to you,” said Alfric. Thankfully, he didn’t have to call on Hannah for more healing. She did it on her own, touching first his right hand, then his left, and finally touching his face again. Her fingers were soft and warm. Alfric had always liked a healer’s touch, even from the old man who occasionally came over to supervise Alfric’s sparring matches.

“Gloves next time, I would think,” she said. She turned over his hand and pointed to a little cross-shaped wound, which was present on the other hand as well. “Intersecting wounds,” she said. “I can’t do much about ’em, ay? Unless you think now’s the time for more thorough healin’, but I don’t know what this dungeon’s got left.”

“It’ll be fine,” said Alfric. “It just stings.” The wounds were barely even bleeding. Hannah gave him a nod, then bent down to prod at one of the book-things.

“Why no magic?” asked Mizuki. She was breathing harder than she should have been, and her eyes were slightly wide, but she hadn’t bowed out, and she was asking sensible questions, which Alfric took to be a good sign. Before you did a dungeon, you didn’t know how people would be, and he’d been playing fast and loose with proper protocol, which involved reading off all kinds of horror stories. Mizuki seemed like the weak link, but at least there seemed to be only one weak link. He glanced at Verity, who was remaining stoic. She was from the city though, where the dungeons were almost certainly fatal, so her expectations would naturally be different.

“This is probably the most valuable room in this dungeon,” said Alfric. “Check it for magic. Verity, if you could enhance her sight, that would make this go faster.”

“There and there,” said Mizuki after a moment looking around the room.

Alfric moved over and picked up both of the books she’d pointed out. One of them was big and thick, nearly a foot and a half tall, containing what had to be more than a thousand pages. The other was much smaller and took some consulting with Mizuki before he finally plucked the right one from the shelf.

“These are valuable?” asked Mizuki when he’d set them on the table. She was keeping her composure, if only barely.