6

Damon and Sierra marched deeper into the maze with their eyes fixed on the water. The growling continued to echo through the corridors. Soon, the twisting passageway drove them deeper into the maze, away from the outer brick wall, and they came upon a fork in the road.

“Left or right?” he asked.

“We started with the left side from the entrance,” the rookie mage responded. “So, we stay left until we reach a dead end. Only then do we backtrack.”

“Makes sense,” the orc said approvingly.

As they waded through the narrowing corridors, they studied the walls. The tibia bones and skulls that formed the walls were worn with age and yellowish in color. Occasionally, they came upon unique formations of skulls bunched together. Arrangements of squares, semicircles, and clear depictions of the crocodile creatures.

“So, Jordan said he saw these types of structures in France?” Sierra remarked as they took another left-hand turn.

“Yeah, I heard about them but never had the chance to see them,” Damon replied. “Apparently, they were built in the late eighteenth century from a series of mass cemetery exhumations. Disease was running rampant and they—”

The water splashed to their right. They abruptly stopped, clutching their weapons tighter. As the ripples petered out and they were sure it wasn’t another mouthy crocodile, Damon walked to where the disturbance had come from. Barely visible under the murky water, the pale image of a skull lay among the sediment at the bottom.

He gazed up at the wall, saw a hole, and turned to Sierra. “Looks like one of our Frenchmen took a dip.”

She smiled briefly.

They pushed on deeper into the maze, staying to the left, and eventually came to a dead end.

“Let’s head back to the last fork,” Sierra said to Damon’s questioning expression.

They spent the next half-hour backtracking and eliminating the various routes. Through it all, the growling persisted but they didn’t encounter any more mobs.

When they’d reversed all the way back to the second fork, Damon grumbled about wasting time, but Sierra knew they were following the right course of action. They walked into more dead ends before ending up in a passageway that showed promise. The path curled along the right side of the room, but not against the exterior brick wall.

As they drew closer to the back of the large maze, the growling suddenly stopped. Damon and Sierra paced more slowly through the narrow corridor, knowing that more encounters were likely. Armed with their hammer and fireball, they stared fixedly at the path ahead of them.

Sierra took quick glances behind her to make sure they weren’t being ambushed, but she was certain the danger lay ahead. They didn’t see the dark shapes moving through submerged holes in the skeletal wall, skulking into their passageway completely undetected.

7

To Sierra, it felt like a log had hit her. She lost her footing, dunking into the water. Her fireball careened off the bone wall before blasting cracks into the limestone ceiling. As she sat up out of the water, bones and skulls rained down on her. The water splashed again and the monster that had attacked her jumped onto her body. The cipactli opened wide and engulfed Sierra’s head. Its fangs scraped through her scalp as the stench of its breath flooded her.

She screamed as the reptile’s thick, red tongue circled her face. She switched from her druid staff to her Bonebase sword. The weapon felt heavy in her grip.

The cipactli unclamped and snapped onto her lower lip. Its teeth embedded into the soft tissue there, and then the monster pulled its jaws back. Sierra’s lip stretched, elongating to the point of unimaginable pain. The perforations in her lip became long ovals as the elasticity of her flesh was pushed to its limit. Warm blood dripped onto her neck. The cipactli stared at her with almost cognizant sadism. Its black slit irises gleamed from its pale green eyes. The rim of its long mouth tightened on her flesh.

Sierra screamed, but the sound was warbled, sounding like a long, loud sigh. The monster started shaking her side to side, and the mage felt her lower lip completely sever.

“Ahhmmmm,” she moaned as her blood flooded into her mouth. Her HP dropped from 288 to 254. Behind them, she could see Damon battling three of the crocodiles.

Sierra drove the sword upward, piercing through the rough hide of the monster’s belly. It didn’t even flinch as it chewed her meat, then swallowed it.

Sierra pulled the sword back and tried to decapitate the cipactli, but she didn’t have the strength her orc counterpart possessed, and the blade only chopped a quarter through the reptile’s long neck. However, the monster did react to this blow, swaying to her left, momentarily on the defensive. She swung the blade again and felt it hack through bone. Red blood squirted from the gaping wound, spraying the bone walls and tinting the pale water with a crimson hue.

With its head lolling at its side and still laying on top of her, the cipactli extended its knees and elbows forward and suddenly its mouths were chewing into her legs and her arms. Sierra screamed again, but the sound was muted as her head dipped under the water. The elbows withdrew and then the cipactli’s webbed claws clamped onto the sides of her head, keeping her submerged and drowning.

Sierra panicked, blowing the oxygen from her lungs and gulping back the soiled water. Her hit points were at 197 and dropping. In her peripheral vision, she saw a movement to her side. Another crocodile was coming through the tunnels they had never seen, heading for her teammate.

8

The monsters swarmed Damon, sensing he was the greater threat. While Sierra was being torpedoed by one cipactli, two went for the orc’s legs as the other two launched at his back. He was driven face-first into the cold water, pinned by the weight of four crocodiles. He heard the metallic clank of claws gripping his helmet before it was pulled from his head.

These are smart mothers, Damon thought as he twisted around under their weight. His hammer was long gone, driven forward somewhere up the passageway. He equipped his skelchion sword as teeth bore into the exposed skin at the side of his knees and forehead. I just need to get one, maybe two off of me, he told himself. Then I’ll have the strength advantage to stand back up.

He stabbed at the beige underbelly of one of the monsters clinging to his left shoulder. The blade seared through the less protected part of the cipactli’s anatomy. Its hit points dropped from 676 to 574. The monster roared and curled away from him. Its tail swiped against his face and its high triangular plates gouged into his skin, but skimming over his left eye.

Damon tried to get up, but the weight of the three cipactli was still too great and he didn’t have the leverage. Worried that the wounded crocodile would return, he stabbed frantically at the mass of scaled reptilian hides that squirmed over him. Another creature rattled loudly—a higher, more piercing sound—and slipped from his body.

The orc general squeezed his right leg under him and propelled awkwardly out of the water. While one crocodile continued to chew on his left leg, the other uninjured cipactli clung to his steel battle armor. Damon grabbed it by the throat and hacked at its neck with his sword. The creature gyrated desperately, but the orc general didn’t stop chopping until its body splashed into the pool of crimson water.

He dropped its head and grabbed the crocodile that was shredding his left leg, yanking it out of the water and decapitating it in the same fashion.

Behind him, the first stabbed cipactli shot at his legs, knocking him back into the water that was now populated with chomping severed heads. One sank its teeth into his forearm. Damon punched the mob away. The injured cipactli was on him now. He could see its dark blood flowing from the torso wound he had inflicted. Once again, the monster reared back its elbow, but the orc general wasn’t confused by the action this time. He met the limb on its downswing and chopped it off clean.

The cipactli’s arm fell into the water and splashed around with the dismembered heads. I’m going to have to take you guys apart piece by piece, aren’t I? he thought to himself. Yeah, and I still won’t be done. But at least then he would be halfway through. After that, it would be hammertime on the mouthy appendages.

Damon gripped the cipactli that was straddling him, rose from the water, and began chopping limbs away methodically. They dropped into the crimson pool, making wet plopping sounds—the kind you would hear when you dropped an ice cube into water.

While the injured and headless mobs thrashed aimlessly, Damon looked for Sierra. He couldn’t see her. He saw a cipactli mounted on something in the water. The edge of Sierra’s red cape floated to the surface nearby. Damon dropped the appendage-free cipactli body into the splashing water.

As a set of jaws closed around his ankle, he yanked his leg forward, breaking from the grip but tearing his skin in the process. His hit points were 489 out of 568. Far from anything to worry about. He stomped toward the attacking cipactli and heaved it up off of Sierra, who lunged upward, gasping for air. Blood trickled down the sides of her neck.

Damon held the cipactli and chopped off its head. Before he could check on Sierra, his feet were knocked out from under him. He fell forward into the rookie mage’s lap. Turning then sitting up in the water, he saw the largest cipactli make a quick U-turn with the flick of its long tail.

Sixty feet away, the gigantic beast raced toward him, sweeping aside the smaller crocodiles and severed appendages. The monster opened its mouth. It was then that Damon realized he had dropped his sword in the water. And the hammer was still at the other end of the corridor. Standing up, he clenched his steel-clad fist, hoping it would be enough.

The top of the monster’s jaw reached up to his waist. Its longest fangs were almost six inches. As pink water cascaded over its onrushing gaping maw, a fireball soared past him, blowing the top half away. The cipactli’s body slammed into Damon’s legs, but he stood his ground. The lower jaw swiveled up and down, trying to crush him still, but the edge of its leathery lip just brushed against his calves.

Damon located his sword in the blood-soaked water, grabbed it, and stood over the massive beast. He chopped at the cipactli’s neck several times before he finally decapitated it. He glanced back at Sierra, who was jumping in the water, trying to avoid the severed and chomping appendages.

“Will you get that hammer of yours?” she said anxiously.

9

Twenty minutes later and after countless hammer stompings and Boulder bashings, the cipactli’s appendages were finally smashed into oblivion. As Damon and Sierra tried to catch their breath, dark red blood and a strange yellow bodily fluid floated like oil on the surface of the crimson water.

They had piled the scaled reptilian flesh against the walls, while the broken teeth lay at the bottom of the canal with the sediment. The rattling growls were gone, and Damon and Sierra were certain they had defeated all the room’s mobs. They eventually started trudging forward, wandering through the maze. They took one wrong left turn and had to backtrack, but the course to the end of the room was straightforward after that.

“I guess that was their Alamo,” Damon said in reference to the cipactli’s attacking location.

Sierra gave him a strange look that went unnoticed.

They reached the end of the maze and found a wooden chest in the middle of a relatively large space. Sierra walked toward it, but Damon cautioned her, telling her how a chest mimic had nearly taken his arm off. Just to be careful, he got the mage to cast Song of Distraction, which had defeated the chest mimic the last time.

The spell didn’t seem to have any effect.

Damon approached the large wooden chest carefully and gave it a hack with his sword just for good measure, but this time, the wooden chest was just a wooden chest. He pulled the lid upward and grunted disappointedly. “That’s all we get?”

The two teammates peered into the deep chest. Planted in the middle of it and fixed into the stone floor was another rusted lever.