Chapter Two Hundred and One - Grassroots Campaign

The final floor was eerily quiet.

The other floors of the Newbinnings dungeon weren’t exactly loud, but there was always some noise. Wind rattling against shutters and whispering through patches of grass, water dripping and gurgling. No bird-song or people talking, but it felt as if there was still some life around.

This place wasn’t like that. Every shuffle and step echoed, even though from the moment we crossed the wall leading into this floor, we were beneath the open sky, a sky that was looking a bit wrong. The colour was off and the clouds above were moving back and forth slowly.

“What’s the final boss like?” Amaryllis asked.

We were on a path, cobbled stones leading to the flat, squarish castle that signalled the end of the floor. The huge building rose a good four storeys above, or maybe a little more. It wasn’t a house with windows all over or anything like that. Instead, it was an imposing wall of stone with thin slits here and there and spiky protrusions along the roof. The huge roots coiling around it like a grasping snake, all of them bristling with foot-long spikes, only made the silent castle more imposing.

“The final boss, the Dreaded Dead King, is a big ol’ undead,” Carrot said. “He’s like this giant skeleton thing, with armour and a crown, that’s sitting on this throne. Glow-y eyes, so you know he’s tough.”

I nodded as I listened. Glowy eyes were a sure-fire way of knowing that something was dangerous. I remembered that lesson well from watching cartoons.

“What’s the trick with him?” Amaryllis asked.

“There isn’t one, really,” Carrot said. “He has a sword and shield and will fight pretty hard. He’s strong, fast, and can take a few good blows. I think he’s level fifteen?”

“Yes,” Buster said. “Around there.”

“Yeah. Just a pretty tough fight. No magic or any tricks. A couple of sword skills for slashing and such.”

Momma hummed. “Perhaps the little ones here should sit back for this one. Pepper the king from range when they can, but otherwise stay out of the fight.”

Buster nodded. “I’ll guard them,” he said.

We reached the castle gate and paused before it. The doorway was made of thick old wood, with an iron grating before it. It would have been hard to break through, had some roots not beaten us to it to slither out between the cracks, leaving splintered planks on the ground and rent iron poking out every which way.

“Man, these roots are mean,” Carrot said.

Buster grabbed one of the doors and tugged, gritting his teeth as he grunted. The door rumbled as it moved aside a bit, leaving an opening just wide enough for Carrot to poke her head in. “Looks clear,” she said.

We moved in a moment or two later, a single-file that formed up in the castle’s lobby. For all that the outside was undecorated and rough, the interior was quite a bit nicer, with pretty chandeliers and what had once been nice rugs across the floor. I could imagine it being real nice, if the air wasn’t so stale and lifeless.

“That corrupted mana is stronger here,” Momma said. “I can almost taste it.”

“I think I feel it,” Amaryllis said. “It’s... ah, I’m not entirely sure how to describe it. It’s not a lack of mana, I’ve been to places where there wasn’t much, this isn’t that.”

I sniffed. “It smells like someone farted ten minutes ago, and you know they did, but you can’t smell it anymore.”

Amaryllis stared at me. “What in the world does that even mean? You’re not just an idiot, you’re a disgusting one.”

“Hey!” I protested while Awen held back a giggle and Carrot didn’t bother.

“She’s right though,” Carrot said. “It does kinda smell like that... or doesn’t smell that way? Uh.”

“Children,” Momma said. “Let’s keep moving, shall we?”

“Gladly,” Peter muttered as he forged ahead.

Carrot giggled and pointed to his back while pitching her voice into a low whisper. “He’s the type to stealth fart like that,” she said.

Peter’s ears twitched. “I heard that!”

The lobby gave way to a large, cavernous room. Banners hung to the side, along with lanterns which burned bright and strong, like they had in the mausoleum.

Well, some of them were like the mausoleum, anyway. Others looked like they'd been tipped over by the many roots rising around the room.

At the far end, sitting with one leg splayed out, was a skeleton as tall as two Broccolis encased in thick golden plate. His skull was uncovered, revealing a crown almost welded into the top of his head. Next to the skeletal king was a rack with a sword on it as long as I was tall.

He looked strong, and he also looked very dead.

I blinked. I meant double-dead. More dead than skeletons usually were.

Roots, no bigger than fingers, had crawled all across the huge stone throne he sat upon, each one eventually reaching the final boss and grasping around his armoured form. Roots dipped into holes of his skull and slithered around down into the cavity of his chest.

His eyes didn’t glow, and in the faint light of the lanterns along the room, I could make out a swirl of dust in the air slowly drifting down upon the king’s form.

“He’s dead,” Carrot said.

Peter nodded. “Usually he would stand on us entering. Nothing here though. Inspect isn’t giving me a level.”

“Well, that’s a bummer,” Carrot said. “I like this fight. It gets the blood pumping.”

I shuffled a bit. “What do we do now?” I asked. “Don’t you need to fight and beat the last boss to move on?”

Momma frowned ahead at the dead undead, and the other buns looked around. It was Bastion that answered. “We follow the roots then,” he said. “Get to the source of them, and try to see what has caused all of this.”

That plan sounded as good as any other. We grouped up and started to move deeper into the room. “The dungeon usually has a corridor that opens up behind the throne,” Carrot said. She pointed ahead. “That.”

There was a corridor at the back. One that had a root the size of a double-decker bus jammed out of it. The walls around the passage were cracked and straining. There was no way we’d be passing by there.

More concerning were the offshoots of the root near there. “Are those seeds?” I asked.

There were little sprouts poking out of the root, each one ending at a big bulb. It was plump and swollen, like a watermelon that someone had injected full of air with a bicycle pump. Dark veins ran across the surface and I had the impression that they... stank?

“Those are disgusting,” Momma declared. “The mana around them is putrid.”

Bastion slid his hand over to his sword’s hilt and glared at the nearest seed. “Are they twitching?” he asked.

“Don’t touch them,” Momma said. “I hope I wouldn’t have to tell any of you, but I’ve raised enough little ones to know better than to assume that common sense would be the first thing on anyone’s mind. Buster, Peter, do you think we can cut into that root?” She pointed to the large root blocking the path. “We need to make it to the dungeon’s core.”

Buster grunted his agreement and moved over to the root. He touched it, flat of his palm against the greenish side, then he poked it a few times. “This is hard,” he said. “Wish I’d brought an axe for this.” Stepping back, the big bun raised his war hammer, then roared as he swung it around.

The head glowed, and when it hit, it did so like a freight-train going off its rails.

I flinched back as the root shuddered and twitched. A crater was smashed into its side, where his hammer had become embedded in a ruin of fibrous chunks that wept a pus-like fluid.

“Not bad,” he said as he pulled his hammer back for another swing.

I expected something terrible to happen, for the roots to respond, so I wasn’t entirely surprised with one of the seeds dropped off its stem and splattered on the floor.

“Buster, keep working,” Momma said. “The rest of you, form a circle around him.”

“Trouble?” Amaryllis asked.

“Of course,” Momma said.

The seed wiggled and burst apart, revealing... some weird plant-monster thing. It was all roots and leaves, some with big spikes on them, others sleeker. It stank, for real this time, like walking into a truck-stop bathroom an hour after lunchtime.

The root monster wiggled a bit, then started pulling itself in our direction.

“Its mana is wrong,” Momma said. “And...” She gestured to the side with a flick of her hand, and a ball of some sort of magic was flung out and curved around the far end of the room.

The monster’s grasping roots wriggled that way, but the magic was too far for it to reach.

“Magic-seeking?” Amaryllis asked.

“I suspect so,” Momma said. “Which is a problem.”

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“It’s exuding disgusting mana, and it’s attracted to mana. We have mana in us. Imagine if we start to passively take in the mana from that thing.” Momma looked quite disgusted with it all. “Peter, kill it. Stamina-abilities only.”

Peter nodded once, then flicked out a knife so fast it whistled through the air.

When it hit the root monster, the whole thing was flung back as though the knife were a tank shell, greenish sap flying everywhere. Peter tugged a thin wire out of the air and his knife snapped back to his hand. He inspected the monster juice on it with a sniff. “Not poisonous,” he said.

“It doesn’t need to be a poison to harm you,” Momma said. She touched the flat of the knife with a swipe and rubbed the juice between forefinger and thumb. “It’s corrupting, but very weak. I think we should be fine entering a melee.”

“Wonderful,” Amaryllis deadpanned. “I love getting my talons dirty.”

More seeds started to drop to the tone of Buster’s hammer crashing into the root. The tendril wasn’t taking kindly to Buster’s hits, and was falling apart where he hit it. It didn’t look like it would take him all that long to carve off a hefty chunk of it, but that time would be busy.

An Evil Seedling, Level One, searching for a meal.

“Those don’t look too strong,” I said.

“Perhaps not,” Bastion said. “But take their environment into account. They’re in a dungeon that’s presumably under their control, or the control of the root that made them. I can imagine them killing some of the local monsters and using that to level rapidly. By the time a swarm of them make it out of this dungeon, they might well be past their first evolution.”

“And then they seek out the next dungeon, the next powerful source of magic that isn’t tainted,” Momma continued.

“We saw Evil Roots all the way over near Mattergrove,” Amaryllis said. “A smaller infestation than this. I don’t believe these things could have made it that far. The timing doesn’t make sense.”

“We can consider the possibilities later,” Momma said. She stepped up to a root monster and punted it hard across the room, where it splattered on the far wall.

We kept our formation, smacking and stabbing and once thumping with a spade, any monster that came close. Peter jumped to the far end of the room and killed any that tried to escape, then he and Carrot moved around, destroying the seeds.

I expected... more of a defence than what we saw here, to be honest. More of a climactic fight against overwhelming roots. I wasn’t going to dismiss some good luck though.

“I’m through!” Buster shouted.

I looked over my shoulder to see a huge, gaping hole thumped into the side of the root, big gouges missing from it.

“Well then,” Momma said. “Let’s go see this core, and the source of this root.”

***