The Merchant of Tiqpa: The Bathrobe Knight's Sequel Page 18

  How did I not see it before? But if they’re both casters, then . . .? Locke managed to piece the puzzle together, but no sooner had he finished figuring it out than a root popped out of the ground and lanced toward him. Like Tubal, he was forced to take off running and dodge around as he tried to not get hit. Unlike Tubal, however, he wasn’t spec’d quite as heavily into speed. He managed to dodge the first attack, but the second root whipped around and slammed into his ribs, knocking off 27% of his health bar and sending him bouncing across the ground like a struck tennis ball.

  Crap, why me? Locke gulped as he watched the root return for another attack, now joined by yet another. I’m not even hitting any of you! He silently screamed his frustration as he did his best to try and avoid his seemingly inevitable fate.

  “I got it!” Katherine dove down, still avoiding arrows, and landed knives-first right into one of the two remaining archers. They both crashed to the ground in a heap, but Katherine didn’t seem to be any worse for it. She sprang to her knees and let out a few quick attacks intended to finish off her prey. The archer finally succumbed from the rapid succession of blows, and Katherine pushed herself back to her feet.

  The Human mage next to her panicked and swung his sword in a feeble attack, immediately pulling his shield up in front of him like he was trying to block an attack and be as small as possible at the same time. Katherine put away her knives and pulled out her whip, snapping a series of hits at the caster. He managed to ward off the first two with his shield, but the third one whipped around the top of the shield caught him around the neck. With a mighty leap, the Black-Wing launched herself back into the air with the caster in tow.

  The vines were stopped, but not in time to spare Locke from taking another two strikes in the gut and one in the shoulder. They stripped him down to 28 and 14% of his health respectively, leaving him on his back to watch the remainder of Katherine's fight with the Human mage.

  The White-Wing caster caught sight of her as she climbed into the sky and shot a fireball at her. Katherine twisted to the side, dodging the attack, but her passenger didn’t.

  “That’s so cruel!” Katherine called out gleefully, laughing at the singed Human as he cried out under the assault. She didn’t seem to be phased at all by any of the potential spell assaults as she continued to climb straight toward the White-Wing. Finally, at least thirty or forty feet in the air, huffing under the load of the Human she carried dangling from the end of her whip, she reached the enemy caster.

  “You want to save your friend? Here, you can have him!” She reached out and shoved the handle of her whip into the White-Wing’s free hand. He instinctively grabbed ahold of the pommel and tried to fly higher and away from Katherine as soon as it was in his hand, leaving Katherine with the perfect opportunity to sink both of her knives into the wings on his back. She quickly extracted her weapons and slid out of the way, leaving them both to plummet to their deaths. “Darling,” she called out, taunting the soon-to-be-corpse, “you’ll have to do better than that if you ever want a woman to view you as a man.”

  While Locke had been caught up watching Katherine finish off the Human and the White-Wing, Sampson, Sparky and Tubal had somehow managed to whittle away the remaining archer, the other mage, and one of the of Dryads. By the time Locke looked back to what was going on with the rest of the skirmish, Sampson had already locked axes with the other Minotaur and was engaged in what appeared to be the last part of an epic showdown. Tubal was busy pumping the still-standing steak full of wood and iron, and together, they made quick work of finishing off the brute. The enemy bovine roughly resembled a pincushion by the time they were done, and without any finale, collapsed to his knees without ever uttering a sound.

  Sparky had just finished off the remaining Dryad, and she was standing over the man’s prone body like a triumphant victor. The wood-beast beneath her was struggling to get off the ground, pinned down by Sparky’s sword which was stuck straight through his chest. She hefted her shield up in front of her with both hands and brought the edge of it crashing down onto the Dryad’s head. The body gave one final twitch, as if it were somehow going to avoid death, and then remained still.

  Locke stood up with only a sliver of his health bar remaining, dusted himself off and took in the scene around him. He stared in disbelief at the giant, collapsed roots, the dead bodies and the blackened patches of grass, scorched from where fireballs had struck. Did this really just happen?

  “I can’t believe nobody died,” Bianca said as she landed. She was the only one, other than Locke, who hadn’t really contributed to the battle.

  “They didn’t know how to use their tools properly at all. Did no one ever teach them that defense is the best offense?” Sparky banged her shield with her sword.

  “I think you’ve got that backwards,” Reginald replied.

  “I think they had it backwards, and I think the result proves it,” Sparky insisted, throwing her head up in the air as if the conversation was over, and she was too good to carry it on any further. “Let’s make daylight, troops.” She pointed her blade in the direction of the quest and began her march, leaving the rest to just catch up in her wake.

  Locke did his best to keep up with them, but he was already falling behind on his herb gathering, and he quickly found himself staggering along far behind the rest of the group as he habitually picked every flower they passed along the way. All this fighting is leaving me broke, he grumbled. And it doesn’t help that I have to keep chugging these health pots like a single lady on bingo night. As if on cue, he popped the top on another bottle and swigged it down, watching the percentages on his health bar slowly climb back up.

  There weren’t any flowers he could pick in town, and while he could use the group and his new plan with Eliza to provide excuses as to why he hadn’t left right away, there was nothing left for him now but the work ahead. He had made such a good haul on the first trip out that he wouldn’t dare risk passing up the opportunity to do so again. The only thing left is to figure out how to turn in-game gold into real-world cash, he mused. If nothing else, the excursion into town had given him an idea as to how he could continue selling his wares and still keep his name far enough away from transactions to avoid a ban hammer. There had to be a way that he could set up a more permanent scheme similar to the one he had briefly cooked up with Sampson and start getting gold. But I’ll need a patsy, and who the heck would risk being banned? Locke frowned. There had to be a way to do this and make it work.

  Somewhere in the middle of his frantic flower picking, while he was trailing a good fifty or sixty feet behind the group, Locke could have sworn he saw a red glimmer off in the distance, like stars hidden in the woods. What the heck was that? He tried to spot it again, but it had disappeared completely.

  ----

  The group rounded around the city and followed the coast east until they reached a spot on the beach that resembled the description Sampson had read about on the forums. There weren’t any particular landmarks that stood out to identify the location, and it took a bit of guesswork to determine that they were actually in the right spot. The key was finding a hidden land bridge that sat just underneath the surface of the water and led out into the ocean. The group fanned out on the beach, searching in both directions, before Bianca eventually caught sight of the sandy formation just below the waves. A few shouts of, “Hey, over here!” promoted everyone else to gather around the spot on the beach.

  Sampson was the last to arrive, having moved further down the beach faster than anyone else in her search, and she was clearly a little skeptical. “How did you ever find this?” she asked. “I read the post on the forums, and even I couldn’t spot this thing.” She stared at the barely-visible sand that crept out into the ocean just below the waves.

  “Women’s intuition?” Locke guessed with a shrug, prompting a few heads to turn and stare at him instead. There were a few knowing chuckles, but no one actually responded to correct him.

  Sampson wad
ed out into the water and timidly tested the bridge with a hoof by poking it into the wet sand. When she found that it wasn’t going to give way under her weight, she began following it out into the sea in large, confident strides, and everyone else followed behind. Their feet never sank more than a few inches into the water, and the waves continued to pass over the top of the ledge as if it wasn’t even there as they made their way further out.

  Locke wasn’t exactly sure how far out they followed the bridge, but as if by magic, they suddenly noticed that a small island had appeared in front of them. He glanced behind them, and he could still make out the shoreline in the distance, but the island definitely hadn’t been visible before.

  It wasn’t another minute before Sampson stopped and said, “The path ends here.”

  “So, it’s in here?” Tubal asked, wading around beside her in the shin-deep water.

  “That’s what the post said. We need to go over the edge of this little cliff thing, and then we have to go swimming,” Sampson replied.

  “How far is it from the end of the ledge?” he asked, studying the dark blue water in front of them.

  “You see that tiny island over there that just appeared? Straight ahead from the drop-off?” Sampson pointed to a fat island that was now no more than two stone throws away from where the edge ended. “It’s there.”

  “Really? Are you sure the forum post was legit?” Reginald tilted his head as he stared at the island. “I don’t see anything other than sand. That can’t be the extent of the dungeon?”

  “I told you: We have to go swimming. Here, just follow me.” Sampson put two fingers into her snout to clog it up and did a pencil dive into the water, hooves first.

  “Suits me,” Tubal said, following behind with Sparky and Reginald right behind him.

  “Ugh, I don’t want to get my outfit wet,” Bianca groaned. “It’ll get too tight and . . . Reginald is such a creepy lecher.” She noticed Locke watching her as she stood hesitantly on the edge and looked at him pleadingly--as if there were some way he could prevent her from getting wet when she jumped into the ocean.

  So, is Bianca the girl and Katherine the guy? Locke wondered, still unsure which one was which. And why do they keep Reginald around if everyone likes to poke fun at him so much and complain about him so often? He may have questioned it, but he kind of knew the answer already: Someone was always going to occupy the bottom run of the latter and be on the receiving end of the teasing. As soon as the butt of the joke got up to leave, someone else filled the role. If ‘little Reggie-Reg’ wasn’t around, someone would, without a doubt, fill that space--and no one wanted to be that person. It was just convenient to have a troll in the group that people could always rag on when the situation arose.

  “Well, the other option we have is to stand here while they get all the experience and loot,” Locke said, pinching his nose and jumping in after the bull. He opened his eyes as soon as he was underwater to see the others swimming toward an evident, cavernous hole in the side of the island. The mouth of the underwater cave was over twenty feet under the surface, so Locke was rather glad he had mimicked the pencil dive as he wasn’t that great at swimming. It usually took him a couple of tries to even get beneath the surface since something about his body kept making him float upward. If gravity hadn’t done most of the initial work for him, he probably would have ended up lagging even further behind them. Without that problem, however, he was free to swim as hard as he could toward the cavern.

  The first thing he noticed when he finally made it into the cavern was that there were glow-in-the-dark algae covering the walls of the passage he was swimming through. The tunnel descended for another thirty feet, after which it turned upward and opened up into an underwater cave, and everyone else was already standing around waiting and drying off inside by the time Locke arrived.

  Having seen most of the game before, and many of the dungeons, he was rather surprised by how bright the whole place was. Given that the only source of light seemed to be from phosphorescent moss, an iridescent blue-green glow that radiated from the dark plant, the caverns were still better lit than any other he had experienced so far. It wasn’t exactly lit up like a beach at noon on a sunny day, but it was bright enough to almost be an eyesore. The two colors from the moss mixed together with the purple-hued stone and sand on the floor of the cavern and created a somewhat surreal effect.

  “So what type of mobs are we going to be facing off against?” Sparky asked, turning to Sampson. Everyone else was padding their clothes and doing their best to dry off after the swim, but Sparky didn’t seem to mind her water-logged state. She seemed more concerned with action rather than comfort.

  “I don’t know. It wasn’t really specific, but from what I understand, the boss is actually pretty easy and doesn’t have a super-long spawn timer like most dungeons. I think this place was designed to be more of a secret bonus level than an actual, serious dungeon,” Sampson said. “I don’t know what the point of that is, though, given that anyone with access to the forum can find it.”

  “Yeah, that makes it much less a secret bonus level and much more a farmable area ripe for exploitation,” Locke added, scratching his head. This isn’t right. If it’s that easy to get to, and anyone can find out about it on the forums, then why is it so empty at the entrance? I would have expected to see tons of people coming and going. Even if they didn’t want to use it for themselves, this place could be a potential goldmine.

  “Where are all the monsters?” Sparky asked, looking around. “Glorious battle awaits, and yet my eyes cannot see the road to it.”

  “It’s a pretty straight tunnel by the looks of it, but if I had to pick one of the paths, I’d say we should stick with the right side,” Tubal suggested. The cave wasn’t exactly broken down into two directions. Instead, it had a single main beaten path that slowly descended in front of them, no steeper than a few degrees of decline, and there was a very visible corridor shooting off from it on the right wall. It wasn’t blocked by a door or anything, but from the angle it separated off, it would be impossible to make out what was down it at all.

  “We could just stick with the big open path for once, you know?” Reginald lamented, shaking his head.

  But what would be the fun in that? Locke found himself wanting to take the mystery path too. He wouldn’t be the one fighting, of course, but he still wanted to see what was down it. Who knows what kind of bonus loot could be hiding down there?

  “Hey, Shy, what do you think?” Bianca asked, coming up on his right and resting her arm across his shoulder while she pointed down the hall. “On one side, treasure and safety. On the other side, poverty and devastation. Which path do you choose?”

  “You don’t know that it’s poverty and devastation. It could end up being the safe road with a treasure at the end,” Locke rebutted. Of course, I can’t see more than thirty feet down the path, so I have no idea what’s back there.

  “So we should take the main road, then?” Sparky failed to catch Locke’s meaning.

  “He’s saying that glorious battle awaits us down the right path,” Tubal confidently stated and then backtracked. “Probably.”

  “Then right it is,” Sparky proclaimed, silencing the discussion by pressing forward immediately.

  Given that Locke hadn’t spotted any floral things to pick inside the cave, he was free to actually think for a moment as they walked toward the narrow corridor--not that there was any new ground to cover that he hadn’t already been over while he was frantically ripping up roots and petals like a psychotic floral murderer.

  “You know, you could have probably just thrown me to the wolves back there,” Locke observed aloud as one of his thoughts escaped him. “No one would have tried to stop you guys from leaving the city, I think, if you had just given me up. After all, I was the one who was spotted with Demon, not you guys.”

  “Mmmmm . . . is that so?” Tubal pondered aloud, stroking an imaginary beard as he nodded his head. “You think the
y would have let us pass if we had sacrificed the whelp, Sparky?”

  Sparky stopped in her footsteps, which caused the whole group to come to a halt behind her since she was at the front, and the narrow corridor wasn’t really wide enough to let people pass around each other. She paused for a moment and mimicked Tubal, straight down to the stroking of an imaginary beard. “I think so,” she finally answered. “We could have culled the weak boy from our ranks and solidified an alliance at the same time. This much is definitely certain.”

  “Ah, then it’s settled. You’re right, Shy. We could have.” Tubal continued to slowly nod and stroke his own non-existent beard. “It’s good to know we had that option.”

  “Indeed. In the future, we will benefit greatly from this revelation,” Sparky said, continuing to give a slow nod of her head.

  “Wait . . . Why is it good to know that option? How are you benefiting? You’re not tossing our daisy-boy to the wolves anytime soon, are you?” Reginald protested.