Duelling Dungeons

The mimics continued to rampage room by room, devouring whatever they could get their mouths around. Their impressive constitution meant that they didn’t get poisoned that often. Still, occasionally one would stuff a boiling vial of acid or extremely virulent poison directly into their maws and require assistance.

“Why?” one of the little side tables moaned, spewing a mixture of saliva and vile liquids over the floor as it spoke.

“It wouldn’t hurt so much if you didn’t stuff everything you could get your tongue on directly into your mouth,” Calliope muttered as she purified the toxins. “Maybe you could try to eat less?”

The creature's top tilted to the side. “Not eat?”

“Yeah, only eat good things,” she said. “It’ll be easier on your stomach.”

It tilted the other way, like it was considering, before sticking out its tongue and grinning. “Eat! Fill stomach!” it shouted, before galloping away on its stubby little legs.

Calliope sighed and shook her head.

“You can’t reason with them in that way,” Luther chuckled. “Mimics quite literally think with their stomachs. If they’re told they can eat something, they will. Your choices are to let them finish their snack or give them something even more savory to distract them.”

“If I had known that, I would have brought snacks,” she grumbled.

“Don’t worry, they’re good entities, they won’t go overboard,” the poltergeist said, as he and his duplicates floated towards the door to the next room.

“They’re eating kegs of pure toxin, how is that not overboard?” Calliope asked, prodding Toto to follow.

“They could be eating the walls and floorboards,” Luther explained.

“Ahhh…” was all Calliope managed in response. “So what are we going to do once they run into something they can’t eat?”

“That’s where we, and the constructs, intervene,” Luther explained.

They’d been slowly advancing through the alchemy labs, driving their foes back through various storage and production rooms, but this next room was different. Instead of an open floor, the fighting area consisted of dozens of intertwined catwalks suspended over massive bubbling vats. The Alchemists had fallen back and taken cover behind a set of squat, heavily armored warriors.

The armor was so thick and ornate that they resembled golems, but each time they exhaled, a thick cloud of frost poured out of the bottom of their helmets.

These warriors had split up and blocked every approach, and behind them, on a higher platform, was a man. At one time, he probably had healthy blue-green skin and aquamarine scales of a typical merperson, but now his skin was covered in black and green veins, and his scales were a slick green.

“Welcome! I’ve been expecting you!” he declared.

“I’d be worried about your competence if you didn’t, Luka,” Luther replied. “We’ve been making quite a mess of your floor.”

“Yeah, well, that ends now,” Luka, the lord of poison, snorted. “You and your… pet, won’t take another step into the Sanctum.”

“Oh, that won’t be any problem for me,” Luther laughed. He performed an exaggerated bow, and when he came up, his mask had a devilish grin. Behind him, all his duplicate bodies slowly rose from the floor and drew their rapiers. “I already float.”

Calliope snorted, despite the seriousness of the situation.

“Always the joker. Let’s just see how funny you are when your forces are coated in my toxins!” their opponent sneered. He pointed down at the vats in the middle of the room, and slowly, theatrically, raised his hands. The bubbling in the vats intensified into a violent roil, then erupted into twisting pillars of pure poison.

These columns slowly sagged forward, shifting and changing. Soon, each eruption sported two long, malformed arms, a head with four hollow pits that resembled eyes, and a large, dripping maw.

“Greater poison elementals? Guess you’re not messing around,” Luther muttered as the massive shapes turned towards him. “Very well, I’ll give you my full attention.”

He rose off the ground, drawing his blade, then swooped across the room directly towards their opponent.

As the elementals turned, their full attention locked upon the poltergeist, Calliope stood up on Toto’s back. “Constructs forward! Push through the defensive line! Mimics…”

“Eat!” the biggest mimic, Otto, yelled.

“No! No, no, no. Now’s not the time for that, you’ve got to hang back and…” Calliope shouted, but she was too late. The other mimics drowned her out in their war cry.

“EAT!!!”

Calliope was nearly thrown off Toto as the tide of eldritch beings surged around them, shoving the oversized crab around. He dropped to the floor, raising a claw to support her, until the stampede stopped, but by that time it was too late.

The mimics nearly trampled the much slower bronze automatons as they rushed past and ran out onto the catwalks. The smaller, faster mimics slammed into the defender's mouth first, clamping down on whatever limb they could get their maws around.

The stout defenders didn’t even flinch, deflecting whatever mimics they could with their giant shields and smashing whichever mimics made it through their defenses with their oversized maces. Half a dozen mimics were sent flying, plunging into the vats below in a matter of seconds.

As much as she wanted to help them, or Luther, who was now throwing all his duplicates at the venomancer on the other side of the room, Calliope turned instead at the grand elementals towering over the battlefield. She raised her trident at the one on her left, concentrated all her mana, and intoned under her breath, ‘Purify’.

The magic surged through the elemental, causing a huge chunk in its middle to nearly instantaneously shift from toxin to pure water. As the water spilled out, the elemental tried to reform, but it was too late; too much damage had been done. The top half of the massive elemental toppled over, breaking the narrow connection to its lower half, and splashed into the vat below.

With such a catastrophic loss of integrity, the bottom half of the element sank back into the vat, the magic broken.

The second one didn’t turn as much as it did reform. Its features sank into the central mass, then re-emerged, looking directly at her. The elemental reformed with its right arm already raised, and before she had a chance to recover, it brought its human-sized fist right down on Calliope and Toto.

Just before it connected, Callope managed to raise her trident to intercept, and as the blob of animated poison struck her weapon, she let out the strongest burst of magic she could manage. “Purifying blast!”

The wave of magic erupted outward, engulfing the elemental’s arm and half its body. Filthy, mostly purified poison water poured over Calliope. Most of the toxins had been purified, but after all the effort she’d just used to repel the attack, she had nothing left to expel the poisons that splashed all over her.

As she lost feeling in her limbs, she slumped onto Toto and watched in detached interest as the second elemental fought to survive.

Although the blast hadn’t torn into it as deeply as the focused purify spell had the first one, the damage was much wider. Close to half the elemental’s body had been decontaminated, and it didn’t seem to have the power to regenerate what was destroyed.

It twirled about, trying to take in the area with only half a face, whipping its remaining arm around wildly. Just when it looked like the thing was going to sweep one of the catwalks, knocking everyone and everything away, Otto galloped into the way. The oversized couch propped itself up on its end and spread its cushions, revealing a massive mouth that went down the entire length of its body.

The elemental’s entire arm, up to the elbow, disappeared into Otto’s mouth and, with a loud slurp, it was lost forever.

As the elemental waivered, finally losing the last of its coherence and collapsing back into the vat from whence it was summoned, Otto flopped over again and burped. “Spicy!”

Even as her vision blurred and went dark, Calliope laughed. “I’m not even surprised anymore.”