Forgotten Girl Quest

“The person we sacrifice, they won’t... die, will they?” Shuixing asked.

“No one knows what happens to them, as no one has ever acquired the Cursed Demon’s Eye before,” Pechorin said.

“Then how come someone wrote about it?” Sofiane said. “I mean, at least the abandoned dungeon we went to required using a dangerous trick of physics. This is like… this takes a minute to do. Tops!”

“Perhaps,” Pechorin said, his eyes sparkling with danger, “because the price was too steep.”

“Screw it, I’ll man the controls,” Natsuko said.

“Are you sure? We know not what will happen," Pechorin said.

“The stairs will move. Stop dramatizing a freaking puzzle and get moving!”

Shuixing, Pechorin, and Sofiane jogged up the stairs to the opposite ledge and turned around. Across the chasm Sofiane’s voice echoed, “oh yeah, look at that, there’s another entry way on the opposite side. It's not even illusory, it's just there.”

“Cuz who the hell turns around and deliberately goes the wrong way in a dungeon?” Natsuko said.

Instinctually turning dials based on what felt right, Natsuko soon had the stairs going up the opposite way to the secret room. Refusing to be left behind, Natsuko made a running leap at the wall, hopped up a couple rocky outcroppings, and leapt into open air over the pit. Just as her momentum slowed and gravity started to take over, a whirlwind of fire exploded beneath her feet and launched her upwards. Up. Up. And straight into the ceiling before she fell down to the stairs leading towards the secret room.

“Ow! Son of a bitch!” she said.

Shuixing ran to her side. “Oh no! Do you need healing, Natsu?”

Natsuko winced. “No, you don’t take damage from whacking the ceiling, just the floor. It just hurts like a motherf—”

Something twinged in Shuixing’s brain again. Why did things that hurt not cause you to take damage? Why did some things do a bunch of damage, but not hurt badly? The chunk out of Pechorin’s shoulder must have felt dreadful, but the HP loss was minimized to almost nothing by his stats. It felt like that shouldn’t make sense and yet…

“—er!” Natsuko finished, drawing Shuixing out of her musing.

Sofiane patted the crumpled pile of Natsuko. “Guess you can do things other than complain. I’m impressed.”

As they ventured further into the secret part of the dungeon, their surroundings remained thematically the same: Mildewy limestone walls and creepy crevices. It had the peculiar atmosphere of being somewhere they had all visited frequently for the sake of grinding experience, yet oddly novel. Eventually, the tomb hallways ended, leading out into a spacious indoor cavern. The cliff edge curved inwards, leaving a crescent-shaped gap between where Natsuko’s party stood and another ledge on the opposite side with a glowing orange orb on a pedestal.

“That looks eye-shaped,” Sofiane said.

“Holy crap, we might actually have something here,” Natsuko said, her sour mood washed away.

Her veins flooded with the excitement of Progress. Numbers were on the verge of going up, including, maybe, possibly, hopefully, the all-important Use-Number. But as they approached the ledge, zombie creatures crawled out of the ground in a shower of dirt. Clammy, rotting hands wrapped around the party’s ankles.

“Ugh, figures there’d be pop-up enemies here too,” Sofiane said. He swatted at the emerging head of one, only to have it take the hit with ease. Very large health bars were popping up above them. “Uh-oh.”

“Why are they so high level?” Natsuko said, letting loose a Fire Gale that scorched the hands grasping at their ankles. The fire discriminated between friend and foe and licked against her teammates without harming them.

“It is the Demon’s Curse. The same one whose legacy the Eye bears,” Pechorin said. He drew both guns and in a pirouette, fired off a volley in every direction, exploding in shrapnel of Metal Elemental. The zombies, still getting to their feet, shrugged it off.

“Erm, this isn’t good,” Shuixing said.

Waving her wand frantically, ribbons of fluorescent light seared their retinas and stunned the zombies, including one that was inches from mauling Sofiane.

“Lightning,” Pechorin said, holstering his verbosity. “Please.”

“Gotcha,” Sofiane said.

The ball of purple lightning zig-zagged through the mob of zombies, touching as many as it could, seemingly without effect until Sofiane popped out the other side. The Lightning element reacted with Metal and fried them in a Conduct reaction for what should've been a massive amount of damage, but ended up being lackluster.

“That should've killed them!” Sofiane said.

Natsuko sighed. “Pech doesn’t level up his Insight, so his elemental abilities don’t do any damage.”

“They’re a crutch,” Pechorin elaborated.

“What!? That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever—”

More zombies erupted from the ground beneath Sofiane and pulled him down as he frantically thrust at them with his rapier.

“Oh dear,” Shuixing said, clutching her rod.

With a twirl she spawned a wave of water at the already-damaged zombies which didn’t do much damage but Natsu recognized it as a setup for their own chain reaction, this time with reasonably-leveled abilities. Rearing back like a baseball pitcher, Natsuko chucked a ball of glowing ember into the crowd of zombies which blossomed into a flare that shook the entire cavern with a concussive boom. It was a spell she’d stolen from the Grenadier class. Triggering the Water element, the grenade of Fire scalded the zombies into sizzling puddles. Or at least the zombies between them and Sofiane, as even more were spawning from the ground behind him.

“Ye gods, their numbers are ceaseless. The demon’s thaumaturgy knows no bounds,” Pechorin said, firing his pepperboxes into the shambling wall of flesh.

Drawing on a wind spell, Natsuko telekinetically grabbed Sofiane and pulled him out of the grip of the crawling zombies and onto his ass.

Sofiane got up and dusted himself off. “They don’t do much damage, so if we stop screwing around, they’re just damage-sponges.”

As he said this, the zombies shifted focus and started crowding into one another rather than chase the intruders. The party stopped and watched the bizarre behavior for a moment before a yellow vapor flowed around them. A second later, the mob of zombies coalesced into a single, colossal zombie whose rotting scalp almost reached the cavern ceiling.

“I mean, it’s still a low-level dungeon, non?” Sofiane said with a shrug. “Can’t be that bad.”

He shot forward as a ball of lightning and moved to stab at the giant zombie’s ankles. As soon as Sofiane got the stab off, the thing groaned and pounded its anvil-sized fists into the ground and knocked Sofiane up. While still in the air, it grabbed him by the legs and hurled him into the cave wall.

This was a case where the pain and damage both lined up. Not only did it hurt like a bitch, the attack took half his HP in one go, leaving Sofiane in a crumpled daze.

“A-Apologies if this is obvious, but um, that will kill the rest of us in one shot,” Shuixing said.

“Pech,” Natsuko said, eyes fixed on the giant zombie. “If this eye thing sucks, I’m going to kill you. I’m not kidding.”

She charged straight at it, just like Sofiane had. This time, as its fist came down, Natsuko blew herself up. Activating her Desperation Art, flaming shockwaves flared around her at the expense of half her health. The result was that the giant zombie was stunned inside an ongoing blaze centered on Natsuko.

“Ow! Ow! Ow! Hit it please!” she yelled.

With Sofiane still stunned against the wall, Pechorin was the first to react. Leveling both barrels, he used his own Desperation Art, with all twelve barrels of both pepperboxes firing in a continuous volley on one target, each triggering their own Molten reactions between Metal and Fire.

“Volley of Vengeance: Lead Hell!” Pechorin said, giving both titles he had come up with for his Desperation Art since he wasn’t able to decide on which sounded cooler. Unfortunately, not leveling up his abilities or his Insight, this didn't do much.

Even Shuixing’s water abilities would've done more damage had she not been sprinting over to heal Sofiane. A few seconds later, the burn from Natsuko’s Desperation Art died and she was standing directly beneath the giant zombie. Before she could run, it landed a kick that sent her across the cavern floor, bringing her health to the brink as pulsing red filled her vision.

A healed Sofiane dashed forward and zipped around it, stabbing it from every angle he could, but the giant zombie’s dead eyes were fixed on Natsuko. It smelled blood in the air and let out a deep, rumbling moan as it lumbered towards where she lay helplessly. Its arms windmilled. One graze promising instant death.