“I don’t know,” replied Alfric. “They might be, they might not. We won’t
test them until we leave the dungeon. It can take some time to find out
what an entad does.” His blood was still pumping hard, loud enough that
he could hear it.
“You’re serious?” asked Mizuki, looking at the wall of books with wide eyes. “There have to be a thousand books here. That’s fifty thousand rings!” Her amazement at that seemed to wash away a bit of the fear.
“Libraries like this are rare,” said Alfric. He wondered whether there was a corresponding library in Pucklechurch that he’d missed or whether it was just variance. “It will take some time to sell off all the books, especially if we want that kind of price, and I don’t know how many we’ll actually be able to get out given we only have one exit apiece, but finds like this are one of the reasons that people go into dungeons in the first place. Sometimes you find trash, sometimes you find enough to fund you for a whole season or two.” It was more than he’d expected to find and potentially put a kink in his plans. If they made out too well on this first expedition, then there would be no pressure to go on a second. “We’ll leave this stuff here for now. There are at least two more rooms to clear.”
Through this whole time, Verity had been strumming her lute, playing the same melody, with an apparent focus on the senses rather than anything related to combat. Alfric heard a chittering sound, but wasn’t quite sure where it was coming from. He was just hoping that it wasn’t an insect swarm, as he’d heard plenty of stories of dungeon runs cut short by them. There was equipment that you could bring to help handle them, but they certainly didn’t have it, and it would mean a retreat. He had confidence in his ability to protect them from most things, but not a swarm.
Luckily, when Alfric opened the door across the hallway from the library room, it was only a furry creature with scaly legs, which hissed and launched itself at him, before being promptly and violently exploded out of the air by a fizz-crackling electric jolt from Mizuki. Alfric waited for more, but when none came, he moved into the room, eyes scanning everything that his light illuminated, turning every half step to make sure that nothing was creeping up on him. The room was half filled with metal pipes, almost all of them running vertically from the floor to the ceiling, with only a few junctions leading off into the walls or into other pipes.
“Clear, I think,” said Alfric, though it was hard to tell given the bad sight lines and many hiding places. “The pipes would be worth taking. They’re almost certainly water-aligned elemetal. I’m not sure how easy they’ll be to get out of here though.”
“We’re stealing pipes?” asked Mizuki.
“It’s not stealin’,” said Hannah. “Doesn’t belong to anyone, ay?”
“Elemetal is a good find,” said Alfric, looking over the pipes. “Water is evergreen. We’ll come back to this room though, I don’t see any obvious entads. Mizuki, can you take a quick look?”
“I’m starting to think that you only like me for my eyes,” she muttered, but after half a minute of looking around, she shook her head. “How’d you know the pipes were magic?”
“A good guess,” said Alfric. “We can talk about it more later, it’s not really something that you need to know if you can just look at things and see them.” He looked up at the floorboards. “Time to head upstairs.” He tried not to look at the others to see whether they were thinking of bowing out. He wouldn’t have blamed them, given what they’d come across so far.
Verity was still holding strong with the song, strumming her lute and sometimes singing under her breath. Some bards liked to take breaks; others liked to keep going through thick and thin. It seemed like Verity was the latter. Alfric was trying to be conscious of that and keep things moving, which was the best policy anyway. Verity was holding up well under pressure, as he thought she would. She had a pedigree.
The stairs were made of wood, thick beams that ran across into the wall of the library, and Alfric took them cautiously, worried that one of them might buckle under him. Dungeons were, as a rule, structurally sound, but that soundness mostly applied to the roofs and walls. This dungeon didn’t actually appear to have a roof, which was apparent when he looked up the stairs and saw an overcast sky with swirling green clouds. He made it to the top of the stairs safely though—and then stared into the eyes of a giant reptile.
