Magic is Programming

Chapter 43: Swarms

Lorvan held his right hand palm out towards Carlos, urging him to wait. "My lord, while this particular dungeon is no threat to us, I would advise that we treat it as deadly dangerous to help you learn good habits for when you eventually delve greater dungeons with lesser escorts. Will you and Amber place yourselves under my command for the duration of this delve?"

"That sounds sensible to me. Amber?" Carlos looked at her and raised an eyebrow.

"Of course!" Amber nodded emphatically.

Carlos turned back to Lorvan. "I'll probably have questions while we do it, though."

"Ask as many questions as you want. Just don't let it interfere with following my directions, and keep in mind that in a dungeon powerful enough to give worthwhile rewards you will often not be able to spare the attention for idle conversation." Lorvan's spear reappeared in his hand as he turned to face the hillside hole that was the dungeon's entrance. It sloped downward for the limited distance Carlos could see. "Now then. As the strongest defender in our party, I will take point. Carlos, follow me and stay close. Amber, stay with Carlos. Ordens guard the rear, and deal with swarms." A soft glow around him became apparent as he stepped into the shaded darkness of the tunnel.

"Yes, sir!" Ordens stepped forward behind Amber, her shield ready but her right hand open and empty.

Carlos glanced at Ordens's empty hand as he started following Lorvan into the opening. "Why is your spear put away?"

The corner of her mouth quirked up slightly. "Spears don't do shit against a hundred rats swarming around you, sir. You'll see soon enough."

Carlos nodded and turned his attention to the front, watching his step and trying to spot any threats. He had to crouch to fit under the low ceiling, and his protective force bubble shrank as he did to match his reduced height. He tried to pay attention to his mana sense at the same time as he used his mundane senses to walk along the rough dirt tunnel. It was still strange and somewhat disorienting, but he thought it was slightly easier than before. His thrice-compressed mana sensor was no better than before his death and respawn yet, but maybe he was getting more used to it. In any case, he sensed a very obvious difference in the ambient mana just a few feet into the dark tunnel.

He suppressed his desire to pause for a more detailed assessment, making sure to stay close behind Lorvan. "The mana around us is a lot less chaotic here. That's because of the dungeon?"

"Yes. Dungeons are entities of pure mana, spawned from localized high concentrations of mana in the environment, and they have strong inherent influence over the mana in their territory. They streamline and organize its flow to improve efficiency for their actions." Peering carefully around a leftward bend in the tunnel, Lorvan suddenly lunged with his spear, drawing it back with a rapidly disintegrating rat impaled on the tip. Carlos sensed mana streaming from the tiny corpse as it faded. It wasn't much, and most of that mana joined the broad stream flowing inward down the tunnel, but a small fraction attached to Lorvan instead. "Well, the dungeon knows we're here now."

Amber spoke from right behind Carlos. "It didn't know already?"

Lorvan shrugged. "Depends whether it was paying attention to this entrance area. One of its monsters dying alerts the dungeon regardless."

"Ah." Carlos considered the unusually orderly ambient mana as he awkwardly crouch-walked around the bend after Lorvan. It wasn't as tame as his own mana, but it was much closer to it than what he'd absorbed in Dramos, and it was more than dense enough for him to absorb now. Something was stopping passive absorption from happening, though, and he should act properly cautious. "Could I absorb mana while we're here?"

Lorvan continued creeping forward. "Technically yes, and it would even be faster than normal once you overcome the dungeon's control of the mana, but the dungeon's monsters would respond by attacking more aggressively."

"The dungeon regards it as theft of its resources and gets angry?"

"Something like that. Dungeons have primitive instincts driving their behavior, not true minds with intellect, but I suppose possession and theft are simple enough concepts for even animals to understand."

Carlos restrained a chuckle as he shook his head. He was tempted to reveal Purple's intelligence just to see Lorvan's reaction, but exposing that secret to the Crown seemed unwise. In any case, if he wanted any chance of a friendly conversation with this dungeon's core he would have to refrain.

They crept another fifteen feet, all on a downward slope and lit only by the glow Lorvan and Ordens were emitting, then Lorvan paused and called back to Carlos. "Focus your mana sense on the walls just ahead. Do you notice anything there?"

"You mean where the ceiling dips so low we'll have to crawl?"

"Yes."

Carlos stepped up closer to Lorvan and stared intently, trying to integrate his normal and magical senses for a moment before giving up and focusing entirely on mana. There was plenty of mana all around them, streaming past in the air, and coating the entire tunnel's surfaces. There didn't seem to be anything different in the mana coating the wall where Lorvan had directed him to look... Except that a small side stream split off from the mana flow in the air, and split again into two.

"On the right side, there's a small stream of mana going into the wall. And another into the floor."

"Good, you spotted it." Lorvan reached forward with his spear, placed its head on the ground, and pressed down. A hidden blade suddenly emerged from the right hand wall and swept through the area, disappearing back into the wall in an instant. He plunged his spear into the wall where the blade had emerged, and the screech of breaking metal rang out for a moment. "Always be wary of traps in a dungeon. Your mana sense will allow you to notice them before they trigger, if you pay enough attention to it."

Carlos thought back to the traps he'd faced in Purple's original dungeon. He hadn't been able to sense mana back then, and apparently it was uncommon for some reason for people to make mana sensor soul structures. "How do people who can't sense mana deal with it? Look for trigger mechanisms?"

"That works for some traps, but many have magical triggers, especially in the more powerful dungeons. All too often, parties that lack mana sense have no recourse but to react after a trap has already triggered." Lorvan hesitated briefly. "Also be wary of dungeons using your mana sense against you. This dungeon is too weak, small, and inexperienced for it, but some stronger and more developed dungeons arrange their mana flows to give the appearance of traps to mana sense, hiding the real traps among a horde of false ones."

"Got it." As Carlos got on his hands and knees to crawl through the low gap, his thoughts turned to a certain other weak dungeon core. [Did you get that, Purple?]

[Yes. I've been talking with Amber. I actually knew it already. I figured it out from one of Tornay's comments when he found us.]

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

[Ah. Good. ...Wait, could this dungeon understand what Lorvan says to me?] That could be good, or very bad, depending on whether he could convince the core to be friendly.

[I don't think so. I never understood speech until your wish started translating it.]

Carlos let out a sigh of relief as he crawled after Lorvan. The ceiling went back up after about ten feet, but only to four feet above the ground. "Will we ever get to stand back up in here, or is the whole dungeon like this?" He grumbled as he got his feet back under him but still had to crouch.

"The whole dungeon is like this. It's part of why people rarely bother to delve it, along with the swarms." Lorvan moved a short distance ahead and waited for Amber and Ordens to finish crawling through.

"Understandable. Crouching so much is annoying." Carlos scowled, then shook his head and sighed. The main point of this was to learn things, and he should focus on that. "So, if this were a normal delve with you two not being incredibly overpowered for it, what should I be focusing on?"

Lorvan glanced back at him. "As you currently are, you would be useful for spotting traps and little else. Once you learn a proper repertoire of spells, you and Amber would be responsible for handling large groups and especially swarms of monsters, and for many possible utility spells. In this case, a spell to shrink us all would be useful. In other cases, flight, creating barriers, breaking or bypassing walls, or any number of other things. You could focus on killing strong individual monsters as well, and you could be good at it with the right spells, but that is something that many people excel at."

The dirt gave way to stone a few minutes later, and the path split. Both branches were the same width, but the stream of mana flowing down the tunnel only went into the one on the right. Lorvan took the right branch without hesitation. "You know why I chose this path, correct?"

Carlos nodded as he followed closely. "I think so. It's where the mana flows."

"Yes. And that means it's the path to the core." Lorvan paused as faint chittering became audible and rapidly grew louder from both ahead and behind. "Though there can still be plenty of monsters in the other section."

Carlos gulped as the source of the chittering came into sight. Rats blanketed the floor so completely he couldn't even glimpse the stone past the oncoming edge of the swarm, and a writhing carpet of large spiders covered the walls and ceiling just as completely, their bodies an inch or two long and their eight legs four or five inches each. He looked back, and saw the same horrible sight approaching Ordens from behind.

"And this, Lord Carlos, is how most who try to delve this dungeon die. Few ever try a second time." Lorvan calmly faced the hundreds and hundreds of tiny monsters, spear in hand and ready.

As if covering every last surface of the tunnel weren't enough, an angry high pitched buzz joined the chorus of claws clacking on stone, and a thick cloud of flying insects filled the air too, ranging from barely visible mosquitoes to three inch long hornets. Lorvan swung the head of his spear at incredible speeds, instantly killing everything it touched, but the swathes of death it cut in the swarm were filled back in so fast Carlos could barely tell he was even achieving any effect at all. And then the swarm's front raced past him, and suddenly all Carlos could see was rats, spiders, and flying insects bouncing off of his force barrier.

Carlos cringed, and hoped he wasn't going to have nightmares about this experience. Suddenly an almost blinding light and deafening roar erupted from behind him, and he turned to look. At first just the sound and some light filtered past the thick cloud of insects, but after a few seconds the light and sound grew rapidly brighter and louder. Suddenly, roaring flames washed over the outside of his force bubble, and the entire tunnel disappeared in orange fire. The air started to feel uncomfortably warm, though he was shielded from actually getting burned.

Something big whooshed past Carlos, disturbing the flames as they danced and flickered around his force bubble, and a loud clang sounded. The fire faded, revealing darkened stone everywhere and a thick disintegrating layer of charred bugs on the floor. Another clang of metal on metal rang out, and Carlos looked up. Ordens stood facing towards him and Amber, her gauntleted empty hand outstretched and wreathed in fading wisps of fire. Lorvan was standing on the other side of Ordens, his shield ringing from the impact of something heavy.

A single large monster faced Lorvan. Its body looked like a large snake, six inches thick and with too many coils for Carlos to estimate its length. Its neck ended in a heavy and sharp pointed spike, which lashed out again as Carlos watched, aiming low for Lorvan's legs below where his shield covered. Its whole body had a metallic sheen, gleaming faintly with reflected light, and it struck so fast Carlos almost couldn't track it. Lorvan moved faster, intercepting the strike with his shield again.

The snake-like monster's spike withdrew from the ringing impact, and it hissed angrily. Suddenly, its single spike split, breaking into eight narrower sections that spread out in a halo around its now visible head, each spike at the end of a thick tentacle. The eight spikes began raining blows at Lorvan, striking rapidly from several separate directions so he couldn't possibly block all of them at once with his shield.

Lorvan was incredibly fast, but even his speed could not allow his shield to be in two places at once. It didn't matter. His spear flickered, and three spikes fell, their tentacles severed. Three other spikes were blocked by his shield, and he dodged another. The eighth spike hit his armor and bounced. The monster hesitated a fraction of an instant, glancing at its three suddenly severed tentacles, and in that instant Lorvan's spear flickered again. A gaping hole appeared in its mouth, in line with a new rent outlined with bent shards of metal scales on the back of its head, and it collapsed.

Lorvan relaxed slightly, but remained alert as the metallic snake's corpse began slowly disintegrating. Or perhaps evaporating into mana might be a more accurate description. He turned back to Carlos and walked at a normal speed to retake his designated position at the front. "Most delvers who survive the swarms then die to something like that. Abilities suited to attacking areas are usually poor against individual strong targets, and enchanted items capable of filling either role for you well enough are expensive."

Carlos stared, his jaw hanging open for a few seconds, then shook his head ruefully. "I see. And the few successful delves happen when someone with a big area attack parties up with someone specializing in one on one fights?"

"That, or when someone excessively powerful decides to do it for some reason. Usually it's just so they can brag about it, but for people powerful enough to simply overwhelm this dungeon there should be better things to brag about." Lorvan beckoned forward with his spear. "Now, watch your head for stalactites, and see how many traps you can spot on the way. I won't point them out like I did the first one. You won't have that kind of helpful guidance in a dungeon delve that really matters, so you need to practice finding them on your own."

The dungeon was a bit of a maze, with several branching paths, but they never took a wrong turn. Lorvan warned Carlos and Amber to not depend on following mana streams in a dungeon too much, because some dungeons arrange their streams with dangerous and unnecessary detours, but this one apparently hadn't learned that trick. Carlos spotted three of the five traps they passed as they navigated the maze.

Ordens roasted two more swarms on their way to the dungeon's core, and both times a powerful monster tried to ambush her. The final swarm had another metallic spiked snake actually inside the swarm, hidden by all the rats running over it, and it attacked while she was still blasting fire in its direction. It didn't seem bothered by the heat in the slightest, its metallic skin just glowing faintly orange as it fought. Lorvan intercepted it, equally unbothered by the tail end of the fire blast Ordens was aborting, and then a second large monster emerged from the stone ground like it was swimming in water and tried to grab Ordens's feet.

She reacted quickly to dodge the stone arms that had suddenly appeared, and after that it was obvious it had no chance. The monster looked like a moving statue, made entirely of stone, and its movements were slow and loud, sounding like stone grinding against itself. Ordens just dodged it for a bit while Lorvan dispatched the metallic snake, and then they utterly demolished the stone golem together in moments. Completing her interrupted roasting of what little remained of the swarm was almost an afterthought.

Finally, Lorvan stopped before a corner, and turned to face Carlos. "The core is just past this corner. The two of you should enter first, to take the lead on choosing a wish."

Carlos straightened, as much as the low ceiling allowed. "What about any last ditch defenses at the core? And is that general advice, or just for this time in this dungeon?"

"Dungeons never put traps or monsters in close proximity to their core. There's too much risk that any violence that near might strike and damage the core by accident. And it is general advice. The core will assume that the person who approaches it first is the leader of the group, and will focus primarily on that individual."

"Alright." Carlos looked back at Amber and nodded. "Amber. Let's do this."