Beyond the narrow muddy passage there was a sharp drop. Their vision globes could see that the bottom of it was only twenty feet down, but the slick muddy walls meant that only Kaldalis and Ess with the Jump ability from their spear skill would have been able to return.

But with it being the only apparent way ahead, they all carefully lined up, preparing to jump.

Kaldalis went first, in case there were problems. But when he landed, there were no immediately visible foes. From down here, the drop was more like a chute, dropping them to the muddy floor of a larger chamber. When he landed, he sank down to his knees, cushioning the fall. But that was mostly from the soft mud. When he squelched his foot back out of the muck, the water itself was only ankle deep.

The globe of his vision didn’t reveal anything. Just a large muddy room. There were sparse shoots and reeds poking out of the water, but otherwise it was just a thin layer of water as far as his vision globe could reach. The ceiling was relatively high, about eighteen feet up, with thick roots poking down into the chamber. He signaled for the others to jump down and join him, once he knew there wasn’t any immediate danger.

“What are we looking at?” Courbois asked after everyone had splashed down. Behind her, Balrim and Reno were working together to pull Myrin out after her drop plunged her into the mud up to her mid-thigh.

“Big room,” Kaldalis said quietly, pointing out into the darkness. “My guess is that there’s gotta be a boss in here somewhere.”

“But it isn’t doing the thing,” Courbois pointed out, mirroring his gesture at the darkness. “It’s all still dark.”

“The first dungeon did this bit, too,” Kaldalis said, motioning for her to lower her voice. “The first time we ran it, I did the Chiraptor King path. The boss chamber was just a big dark room when I found it, but the boss was lurking in the darkness for a big dramatic reveal. They’re probably doing the same thing here.”

Courbois nodded with a grimace. “I don’t like it. It makes me anxious.”

Kaldalis shrugged. That was the thing about this sort of trap: they had no other option but to blunder into it. It was like being in a horror game, staring down a hallway with a big window halfway down it. You know with absolute certainty that as soon as you walk past that window a skinless dog (or a velociraptor, or a butcher with geometry for a face) was going to crash in at you.

But you have to go down the hall.

You always have to go down the hall.

And so, with no alternative, Kaldalis led the group blindly into darkness.

Kaldalis expected that if he strained his ears, he would hear the heavy breathing of a beast in the darkness, but all he heard was the splashing of their feet through the water. It sounded deafening in the otherwise-silent room, and the sense of being watched started to crawl up the back of his neck.

After a few minutes of walking beneath dangling roots and among scattered reeds, the far wall came into view. Kaldalis tried not to flinch, as he knew that meant that the jump scare was coming.

And it did.

When the group came to a stop, and the sounds of their splashing died down, Kaldalis caught a sound in the darkness. It was a soft creaking sound, which wasn’t what he expected.

Of course, what loomed out of the darkness towards them wasn’t what he expected, either.

It was dangling from the ceiling, swinging back and forth between the larger roots that hung down. The thing was a huge knot of pale white roots, twisting and wriggling as it did its hideous Tarzan impression. Its underside bristled with huge clumps of oversized cattails. Small for a boss, at only around five feet in diameter, but Kaldalis suspected that what was coming would make him regret underestimating it.

As it came into view, the wriggling roots vibrated rapidly, filling the air with a rough susurrus noise somewhere between a hiss and a growl. It wasn’t as threatening of a noise as it was of a visual display. The shimmering white mass of roots looked terrifyingly like a big ball of mud-spattered snakes.

Murky water splashed from its landing as it dropped down, flipping over once to land cattail-side up.

Kaldalis wasted no time, barking a wordless battle cry as he led the charge.

He expected roots to lash out at him like tentacles, but the monster’s first attack came from an unexpected angle. Instead of trying to grapple with him, a cluster of cattails whipped down in a vicious slap. The blow did two hundred and twenty-six physical damage, and an unexpected one hundred and three fire damage.

Kaldalis struck clumsily with his glaive, but still landed a solid hit with the blade of the weapon against the mass of white roots, dealing it back sixty-six physical damage and sixteen earth damage. Considering the numbers he’d seen elsewhere in the dungeon, he had to guess that the boss was weak to earth damage, which was just as unexpected as the fire.

They were underground, ankle-deep in water and surrounded on all sides by mud. Why was it doing fire damage and weak to earth?

Once he could properly set his feet, Kaldalis struck the beast as fiercely as he could, activating Sweeping Strikes just for the minor damage boost in order to maximize his aggro generation. Despite the monster’s small size, it was striking as hard as the first boss, so he had to put the same effort into ducking its strikes as well, or else Balrim’s healing output would be overwhelmed.

He was doing well enough, though.

As he turned the monster away from his allies, they attacked it from the flank, spreading out around it. Hammering damage into the monster, Kaldalis hoped that its small size meant it had less hit points than the other boss, but one thing the size was doing was making its attacks easier to evade. It didn’t have literally the full room of reach on him. It’s attacks were - he thought - limited to only about four feet from its root-covered surface. It was viciously aggressive, but Kaldalis was starting to get the hang of the movements of the reaching reeds.

Of course, as soon as he thought he had it under control was when the boss’s unique mechanic revealed itself.

An undulating flick of the monster’s body sent one clump of cattails launching off of its back. They arced sharply before hitting the ceiling, each one lancing down at Kaldalis and his friends. The attack was very obvious, though, and he didn’t even need to use the Jump cooldown to avoid it. A cattail launched at him speared into the water, leaving behind a vibrating length of reed sticking out of the water.

Then, of course, it exploded.

There was a searing burst of fire, followed by a concussive force that launched Kaldalis six feet to the left. The blast dealt three hundred and sixty-one fire damage to him, and left him badly off-balance. He flailed his way away from the boss to avoid its charge as it tried to lunge at him while he was recovering his footing.

“Gotta dodge those,” Myrin called across the battlefield. She appeared to have gotten out of the attack unscathed. “Or just stand next to them like a dumbass, it’s your HP bar!”

“You don’t pay my sub,” Kaldalis called back as he got his balance back and whacked the monster again, regaining control over the tempo of the fight.

“They’ve got these groupings of highly compressed seedlings,” Reno said, her voice sing-song even as Balrim tossed her a potion to restore the health she’d lost to the explosions. “That expand rapidly on impact, so they’re not that good for eating!”

“That’s not actually true,” Balrim corrected. “If you get them when they’re green and wrapped in the leaves, you just shuck ‘em, boil ‘em, and eat ‘em like corn.”

“Nerd,” Myrin teased, though she only had eyes for giving chase to the boss to redouble her attack against it.

The boss had only one other mechanic, where it would launch itself back up to the ceiling, swing between the dangling roots to get some distance, and then pelt them with the same fiery cattail bombs. But it was knocked back down by taking any damage at all, and with Balrim’s bow, it only ever got a single volley off before it crashed back to the chamber’s damp floor and charged back in at Kaldalis.

The beast, known as a Typhan Rizome, didn’t last long once all its mechanics were on the table. Kaldalis got slapped around a little bit, but the explosions were easy to manage once they took a few hits learning the radius.

The exp reward left Kaldalis only one more mob away from level fourteen.

With the boss down, the group took a collective breath and let Balrim catch up on the healing. The exit to the room was an opening covered in a wall of dense roots, and Myrin and Kaldalis went to work on it, since they were the first to be done needing Balrim’s healing - Myrin because she had evaded all the explosions, and Kaldalis because he’d been Balrim’s priority during the fight.

Using axes pulled from their gathering menu, they hacked open the next passage, revealing the boss’s loot chest, and a broken-open stone room, that would lead them into the next area, where Kaldalis knew they would find the final boss.

Along with the tablet that would give them a new ability.

They were making excellent time.