I stood behind a narrow bed with my short sword in my right hand and my dagger in the off. Across the dust-ladened room was an armored skeleton warrior with a halberd. With him were two other armored skeletons, each was missing an arm and perhaps a few ribs; that, however, was something I couldn’t confirm because of the breastplate.

While I froze trying to figure out what to do, the skeleton who lacked the brains to get lost in indecision attacked. He brought his halberd up and then, leading with the blade, tried to hit me with it like it was an axe.

This ultimately brought me out of my daze as I reacted on muscle memory and dodged by rolling forward and to my left his right. Fortunately, The blade missed me and impacted into the bed. It held for just a moment while he ripped it out. Which gave me enough time to close and cram his weapon.

I pinned his right arm to his chest with my right side and then activated the magic in my dagger. I slammed it into the skeleton’s head only to watch as the blade skipped off the skull. The skeleton kept moving, which meant that I just did nothing.

He took a step back and brought the heft of his polearm back across his body and slammed it into me. I staggered back and tripped on the bed, falling back onto it. My health looked like I lost about a fifth off-the-top from that one strike.

He kept his movement going and brought the halberd back down once again, using it as a slow giant axe. I rolled to my right twice and came to the end of the bed, where I scrambled back onto my feet.

The other two skeletons were closing in the room with me, making the whole place a jumbled pile of moving bones. The one missing his left arm was coming from my right.

I rushed him and shoved him back toward Mr. Pike, and added a kick to his hip. He staggered into the halberd as it was coming back around and arrested the movement quite nicely.

The other one-armed guy made his rush at me. I tried to hack his arm with my sword. However, he got to me too fast. I felt his bony fingers wrap around my left arm, and then he tried to bite me! Tried because the chainmail kept his teeth from closing and because the halberd guy chose that moment to try to hack me again. Completely missing and bashing biting skeleton to the ground.

The beautiful thing about rusty armor is when someone else is wearing it. In this case, it worked great as a vice for the head of the halberd. With Mr. Pike held in place, I brought my sword down and severed his lead arm. Then I brought my sword back around my shoulder and in for a second strike to the other arm.

I now was dealing with three armored and mostly disarmed skeletons. I dropped my dagger and my sword and rushed the old Mr. Pike. I tried my hardest to act like a football player and tackle his legs out.

What I should have accounted for was that while these guys were dangerous and fast, their bodies were overly weak. So I failed to tackle as I crushed out both legs and speared my head into one of the legs of the last standing skeleton.

I was now in the middle of a bone pile with the legless, armless one biting at my thigh and the one-legged, one-armed one trying to claw my face out. The other one, I guessed, was still dealing with the extra weight of the halberd in his back, so I wasn’t currently worried about his whereabouts. What I was concerned with, however, was the bony thumb trying to play marbles with my eyeball.

I squeezed my eyes shut tight and started to try to swing my head back and forth like a wet dog. As I did that, I pushed up and threw the torso skeleton off my back.

The old Mr. Pike, who I chose not to rename dentures even though his teeth came out when I threw him, appeared to be out of the battle now that his head rolled off. The one that Mr. Pike axed appeared to still be struggling to get up, and so did One-Leg.

Now, of the two, One-Leg appeared to be the one most likely to get up. So I took the step needed to line up, and I kicked the skeleton’s one good arm. Happily, this caused the separation to occur right at the shoulder.

I now wasn’t dealing with a time crunch, so I figured that I would finish this with a bit of style, or perhaps rage. So I flipped One-leg over and grabbed the back of his cuirass and lifted him over my head.

I turned back around to Mr. Halberd-in-the-back and preceded body slam One-leg into him repeatedly. I stopped slamming them together after I felt Blink show up. She was sending a feeling of peace across the bond.

“Hunt good!” She sent as I dropped the rusty armor from my hands.

I was at half health, but we had won. I looted all four corpses, err skeletons. The loot seemed relatively meager, but then again, this was just the first floor of the dungeon, and perhaps I would find better things in the chests.

All the armor was junk, as were most of the halberds. I found one that wasn’t listed as rusty, so I took it. Unfortunately, the rest of them weren’t worth the effort to take. So I headed down the hall with Blink.

I asked her as we were heading out of the room, “what took you so long to get down here?”

“Others.”

I chuckled a little, “There were only two how hard could they be?”

She didn’t say anything until we got to the stairs. There were the bodies of the two skeletons along with four spiders and three bashers. So while I had been playing with one and two halves, she finished 9 enemies.

She walked over to a basher and picked it up in her mouth as she headed towards what I assumed to be the safe room. “Others,” she sent back to me across the bond.

I wanted to rush over to the treasure chest to see what was in it and find my reward. Yet, I wanted to gather what we had first from the battle. So I looted the skeleton crossbowmen; I didn’t get much at all from the first three, just copper and bonemeal. It was the last one that caused me to pause for a few moments.

When I selected loot from the last crossbowmen, the skeleton fell away, and sitting where the body should have been was a wheel of red wax-covered cheese the size of my hand. I picked up the cheese and turned it over as I examined it through the HUD.

Dungeon cheese

This cheese is a one pound wheel of the eaters desired cheese.

Will vanish if taken from the dungeon

I sat there and thought for a few moments about what this meant. While cheese wouldn’t feed me well, it would give me something. It could be something that I used as a backup if I needed food. However, the drop rate wasn’t great, and I wasn’t wanting to live in here fighting like this every day. So while cheese was great, I needed to see what was in the chest.

I got up and moved over to the chest. It looked just like the one where the spider attacked me. The perfect pirate chest, and like all good chests, this one was lit from above so that the brass on it would sparkle.

I felt building up in me the desire to open the chest; it was pulling me to the latch. I wanted to open the box, and each step I took toward it made me want it even more. Ultimately, I was grinning like a maniac when I got up to the chest and threw it open.

I had forgotten the first rule about treasure chests. You always opened them from a distance if you didn’t have someone detecting traps for you. So yeah, I flipped the latch up and caught a crossbow bolt into my right shoulder, like the idiot that I was. I didn’t even see where it came from until it knocked me over from the sudden pain.

Chainmail is great against slashing attacks and depending on how big the rings were, it was okay against some thrusting attacks. Unfortunately, just about all chainmail sucks against bolts, and mine was made up of nickel-sized rings and not a fine mesh.

My health dropped to under a fourth with the one hit, and a poisoned icon popped up in my vision. I had no way to know what type of head was on the bolt to know if I could yank it out or not. My health was falling fast, so I cast with the bit of mana. I had my minor healing spell. I watched my health shoot up to just over half, and then it started to go down again.

This was going to be a mess, and I didn’t want to have to deal with taking off my mail out here and then trying to heal up. So I needed to get into the safe room so that I could be sure I wasn’t going to get jumped.

I moved back over to the chest and reached into the beautiful light, and drew my arms back with a large canvas backpack. It was heavy enough that I knew something was in it. I looked down into the now unlit chest and saw that it was empty except for a large coin. It was bronze in color and about the size of an Olympic medal.

When I fished the coin out with my good arm, the chest did the whole vanish thing the other did. It was amazingly more creepy than skeletons walking around or even the looting process. The slow melt got me feeling all weird inside in ways that I couldn’t quite explain.

I checked my health and saw that while I still had the poison debuff that looked like it was 2 every 10 seconds, my health was currently maxed out. So the only guess that I had for that was that the light from the chest fully healed me. Which was a great thing to know but didn’t help me much right now with an evil poison bolt making my life hard.

I took all the loot I wanted and headed over to the safe room door. I wasn’t sure what would be in the safe room, so when I popped open the door, I took a moment to peer in. What I saw messed with my brain more than even the melting chest.