Chapter 44: Poison Floor

The walk down to the poison floor was much, much worse than Arthur thought it would be.

The rats that Karbo had found for him a long time were apparently the lowest of the bottom-barrel low when it came to monsters.

Of course, this was information that Karbo and Eito had told him, but their words severely understated how low the rat was on the monster hierarchy. Arthur’s first real monster encounter was with something that could best be described as a land-bound stingray that was the size of a corgi. It shot acid from its tail, something that Arthur found out the hard way when the poison hit him flat in the eye.

“Don’t worry!” Karbo had shouted, as he curbstomped a dozen bigger, meaner foes. “You won’t go blind! That’s just how it makes an opening to pinch you!”

Arthur managed to ignore the pain in his eye just enough and just in time to decode the unspoken part of the Karbo’s message, which was that the stingray was probably trying to pinch him. He managed to sidestep the attack, which came from hidden extendable mandibles the monster flicked out from underneath its body. After that, Arthur decided just to slug it out, falling on the thing, flattening it to the floor with his knee, and stabbing it again and again in the part that seemed the most like its forehead.

After a few minutes of rest to get vision back in his eye, they moved on again. Karbo explained that he was trying his hardest to actually avoid monsters, something he was pretty good at but didn’t exactly have a skill for. Arthur kept the infernal’s apologetic tone in mind as they almost immediately ran into another swarm of terrifying beasts, followed by another. And another. And another.

There was a bright side. Somewhere in all the fights, he leveled.

Level 17 Teamaster

Stats:

STR 5

VIT 8

DEX 10

PER 17

WIS 21

INT 5

Primary Skills: Teashop Brewmaster (Level 9) Food Scientist (Level 10) Medicinal Brewer (Level 5)

Achievements: Shop Owner, Mass Prep, Buffer Against the wave, Rise Together

“Oh, huh. Leveled.”

“Nice. That’s the other upside of all this. There’s a reason people go into the dungeons when it doesn’t do anything for their class. The experience you get from fighting is separate from what you get from your class.”

“Seems tilted in favor of combat classes.”

“It is, until you realize that fighting is the only way we get experience at all, and leveling means either an endless grind or constantly risking our lives. Or both.”

“Point taken.”

“What level, anyway?”

“Seventeen. Dumped the points in wisdom. I need the majicka.”

“Dammit, boy. Why not strength or dexterity? You’ll need it in here. Did you not hear the ‘you might die’ bit of my explanation?”

“Ah, yeah. Oops.”

“Oops, he says. Next time you level, toss points in strength. Or dexterity. I don’t care which.”

Chastened, Arthur followed at Karbo heels, immediately noting the wisdom of the infernal’s words a few minutes later, when he found himself barely keeping ahead of his one-member share of a wasp swarm. After taking one of Karbo’s pills to make the swelling from the stings go down enough to walk again, he followed on.

“Ah, there it is.”

“There what is?” Arthur asked as his vision suddenly flickered and he found himself in a whole other place. “Oh, gotcha. Magic warp zone.”

“Yup. Welcome to the poison floor.”

The poison floor, in addition to promising near-infinite potential pain, was also the ugliest biome Arthur had ever been in. It looked like an unhealthy dungeon growing out of either very fine-grained gravel or enormous grains of sand. The plants were vibrant colors, but apparently hadn’t consulted each other before deciding on which. The entire place clashed, like an experiment in backwards feng shui gone horribly right.

“So what’s going to happen now is that you are going to stay right here. And I’m going to go kill poisonous things for exactly ten minutes. If at any time you see anything dangerous at all, you yell. And for the sake of the gods, don’t try to fight anything on your own. Or go anywhere. Or do anything,” Karbo said.

“What happened to ‘everyone has to hunt?’ I thought it was a rule.”

“Well, yeah, but it’s not my rule, Arthur. You came. You hunted. I don’t want you to die and nobody comes to the poison floor on purpose. You just stay here, say you hunted some poisonous stuff later if anyone asks, and we’ll call it square. Unless Ellla asks. In which case you tell her I cheated like hell and did all the fighting.”

“Got it.”

“Good. Then I’ll be right back.”

It was an uneventful ten minutes. Arthur walked around and surveyed the plants, which all gave off a very “don’t screw with us and we won’t screw with you” vibe when filtered through Food Scientist.

Meanwhile, the place itself was quiet. Nothing came at him, but there was also a distinct lack of noise from wildlife. No birds. No wind, even. It was unsettling in a very calm sort of way. And then, suddenly, it was loud again. Arthur heard a sound like the trees themselves were cracking in half. Karbo was back, carrying an impossibly big load of semi-random, venomous-looking animals.

“Check these out with your skill. I’ll go get some more.”

He bounded back off into the weird jungle, apparently overjoyed to have a good reason to hunt. Eito had been right. There was no way that Arthur could ever love dungeon crawling nearly as much as Karbo did, or even in the same kind of way.

While Karbo filled the forest with the crashing sounds of joyful violence, Arthur picked through the corpses. He found out, to his great relief, that Food Scientist not only worked on the monster bodies as overall ingredients, but could apparently focus in on the parts he should be interested in. He managed to get a pretty definitive “no, definitely not” from a scorpion tail, and an “interesting, but probably not what you are looking for” from a viper fang in the first few seconds. The rest of the pile was similarly near-misses, things that had poison, but not poison that was even potentially medicine.

Karbo came back with another pile of dead monsters soon after.

“There’s only so many species in this forest. I’m going to go look for the last few, but the next trip will probably be the last. Just fair warning.”

“Got it. You can’t do any more than you can do, Karbo. Even this much was asking a lot.”

“From me? Arthur, I found you. Eito was going to walk right on by, and I said ‘What’s that funny shaved monkey?’ I owe you at least this much.”

The second group of fangs and stabby-bits didn’t appear too useful either. Arthur sat down on a log, determined not to worry so much as he patiently waited for Karbo. But just as he began to settle down, a sudden stabbing pain in his foot showed that the floor had other plans for him.

You have been poisoned! (Paralytic).

Some source of venom, poison, or toxin has entered your blood stream. You are currently afflicted by a spreading paralytic poison, and will lose a significant proportion of your mobility per second until completely paralyzed or cured.

Arthur tried to stand up, but his foot was already out of commission, and he instead flopped face first towards the ground. Catching himself on one arm and putting his dexterity to good use, he spun around to face the log, landing on his butt and drawing his dagger to prepare for whatever was about to crawl from under it. From under the log, he thought. Hopefully not from under my butt.

He had made a mistake, though, one he saw almost immediately after turning around. His enemy wasn’t going to come from under the log. It was the log, itself. It was some kind of mimic-like trickster beast, scuttling towards him with a slavering mouth and two long, needle-tipped arms.

“Oh, this isn’t good.”

The log-monster whipped one of its poison needles at him, and Arthur just managed to parry it as he tried to yell, only to find the paralytic had already robbed him of his voice.

Makes sense. Can’t be an ambush predator if your prey can call for help.

Another arm whipped out, and Arthur was ready for it this time. With a chop, he severed the needle, sending the whole log retreating in screams.

Arthur tried to seize back the initiative, only to find that everything below his waist was kaput. As the log recovered and stabbed out at his legs, there wasn’t much he could do. It plunged the stinger deep into his leg, but had made one serious mistake. He couldn’t feel that leg anymore.

He didn’t like seeing himself get stabbed, sure. But he also had the presence of mind to make the most of it. Pushing himself up, he grabbed the arm and staked it to the ground on the other side of him.

The log shrieked again, but kept advancing. He lost function in his right arm. He still had one working hand and arm, which put him ahead of the log, at least in that way. But the log had big jaws that looked perfectly capable of cutting him in half, which kept it ahead on other metrics.

Eventually, illogically, and in a completely unhelpful way, Arthur found himself completely paralyzed except for his left arm. At that point, he didn’t know if the log rolled over his legs or walked over them. But suddenly, it was over his waist, its big teeth extending towards his face. Even if he wanted to go anywhere, he couldn’t. He was backed up against a venomous pile of monstrosities, surrounded by stingers, pincers, and mandibles all dripping with danger.

Actually, I can probably use that. In a last ditch sort of effort, Arthur reached up and grabbed the tail of a scorpion-like insect and jammed it forward. He felt the contact happen rather than saw it, as his eyes winked out at about the same moment.

He was still conscious, and spent a full minute waiting for a bite that never came. Instead, he heard Karbo bashing through the trees again, landing with a crash only a few feet away.

“I didn’t get all of them. I can’t find the… Oh, hey there,” Karbo said. “Looks like you had a little adventure.”

—

Ten minutes later, Karbo’s anti-paralytic pill finally got Arthur back on his feet.

“Good choice of stingers, really. That’s one of the ones even I don’t tussle with directly. That woodbug didn’t stand a chance.”

“Such a cute name for a terrifying thing.”

“Aw, it’s not so bad. Probably the weakest thing here, as long as you know what you’re dealing with. You really didn’t notice that log was new? Logs don’t just appear, Arthur.”

“I really didn’t. But I got another level. Should I put it in strength, or dexterity? Your call.”

Karbo dismissed the idea with a shake of his head. “Not that useful now. Nothing will spawn on our return route. You can dump them wherever you want. But, Arthur, I do want to apologize. If that had gone a little different, you’d have been stung. And that would have been it.”

“Stung? I got both its stingers, Karbo.”

“No, you didn’t. You got two out of three.” Karbo flipped the log over. “The real nasties, the big dangerous ants and the like, they don’t sting you with a tail. They use the one in their abdomen. Or their feet.”