They all picked a passageway at random and had walked along it for almost twenty minutes when, to Caen's dismay, they started hearing chittering up ahead.
“God bloody dammit,” Guinevere muttered. “Couldn't be easy, could it?”
Zeris fiddled with the lamp and turned it off. “We could go back. Try one of the other passages.”
“Or I could just scout ahead,” Caen whispered back.
“We’re already here together,” Guinevere said. “We might as well come along.”
"I-I vote for coming along too," Bwedel said, voice shaking.
Zeris shrugged.
They walked behind Caen in what was absolute darkness for them. Caen immediately began precasting a Body-enhancement spell. The spell patterns and visualizations were easier to form—his boosted training was paying off. The chittering sounds increased as the winding passageway widened. Caen looked around the bend and saw a low-ceilinged, cuboid-shaped chamber filled with ants. There were more of them than he could count. Several of the ants were biting into the roots above or the ones on the walls.
Caen backed away immediately, shooing the others back.
They rushed back to the chamber as silently as possible. Caen told them what he'd seen. They took another exit and were met with the same problem: they heard chittering up ahead. The path was forked, though, so they took the other passageway and hit a dead end.
Retracking back to the chamber and using the final exit brought them to another small chamber with rounded walls; it was identical to the one they'd teleported into. It also had a symmetrical outlay of roots on one portion of the wall. Zeris confirmed that it was inactive. Her spatial acuity wasn't even picking up any distortions.
They met their first ant along a passageway. Guinevere dispatched it quickly after Zeris turned on her lamp. They rushed on ahead and found yet another rounded chamber with an inactive root-portal. The first passageway led them to another dead end, but when they backtracked, there was a group of ants waiting in the rounded chamber.
One of them was leaner and shorter than the other ants, and it had two antennae that rippled and billowed about. Caen and Guinevere tore through these easily enough, but fighting inside a small chamber proved much harder than doing so in the open. There wasn't a lot of space to maneuver, and despite his best efforts, Caen got sprayed a little with that caustic glob once. His glaive was difficult to use down here.
The strange ant with twitchy antennae was shockingly fast. Not quite as fast as the broad ones, but far squishier. It let out a loud, chittering sound as Caen ran it through. A curious thread cluster grew prominent in its soul structure just before it died. It was the same one he'd seen in the broad ant and the trees.
“I think it’s just called more ants,” Caen said.
Zeris ran to the root-portal, checking to see if it was active again. “Nothing. I need to sit with one of these for a while. Not here, though.”
The roots overhead had already begun to writhe and squirm.
They spent the next few hours stalking the passageways, killing ants, and running away. It was an exhausting amount of nothing. Bwedel kept getting paler and weaker as they moved. Caen did what he could to patch up the ruptures.
* * *
Caen attended to all their wounds and burns—starting with Bwedel, as he was the most injured.
Guinevere insisted that she was fine. They sat backing each other in the middle of a rounded chamber to watch the three exits and the root-portal. Zeris's lamp sat by the root-portal and had been dimmed to its lowest.
Caen had considered setting up an alarm ward system within the chamber, but it would take far too much time and resources. Especially for a place they probably wouldn't be staying in for long. He had, however, carved numbers onto the floor of every chamber they'd been in so far, using tyyr ink so it lasted longer.
Caen focused on Mimicking the tree roots every time they weren't fighting. He drank some water from his flask; he'd been rationing the water in his keg for hours. Zeris had two flasks of her own, but had emptied the first one.
Guinevere didn't have any bags with her. She'd declined his water each time. Once again, after letting Bwedel drink his fair share, Caen bumped Guinevere's arm to take some water.
Guinevere sighed. “I have spatial storage,” she said as if admitting to a crime.
“We both do,” Zeris replied, speaking about her and Caen.
In answer to that, Guinevere gestured needlessly to the side, and a doorless closet of pocket space bloomed in midair. It looked to be a shelf and each layer was stacked full of knick-knacks, but more importantly, supplies: three jugs of water; blankets; folded fabric; a couple of bundled herbs; white boxes; a large, glass jar of… honey? A small basket of ridiculously sized fruits.
Caen had never seen a spatial storage device of this grade before. It had to be expensive. He squinted at one of the big fruits within.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Holy mother of Tet!” Zeris hissed. She was looking all over Guinevere's body instead of at the pocket space. “Where is the anchor? Is it the glove? Is it a necklace? Your armor?”
Guinevere took out a jug of water and a white box. “It’s a… bracer on my forearm.
Zeris made a weird sound behind her throat.
Guinevere flinched. “Why are you looking at me like that? It's making me nervous. Can you please stop?”
Bwedel's eyes were wide with shock as if he couldn't believe what he was seeing.
“We're supposed to be watching the entrances, you know?” Caen reminded all of them as he gratefully received a jug of water.
He and Zeris replenished their flasks. Bwedel didn't have one, so Zeris lent him an empty one.
Guinevere opened the white box. Within was an assortment of nuts, dried fruits, and biscuits, which she shared with them. They tasted really good.
"I also have these," she lifted an ornate glass vial with a red, oily liquid in it.
"I-is that a healing potion?" Bwedel asked, both hope and resentment warring in his voice.
Guinevere sighed. "No. Not really. It's tailored to me in particular. It boosts my natural healing. You'd need to have a high enough affinity rating in Body-enhancement and Blood-healing to get anything out of it. It's very potent, and because it wasn't brewed with others in mind, I'll have to seriously dilute it."
"Will it—" Bwedel began.
"No," Caen spoke up. "If it's tailored to her specifically, then it won't help you very much." He'd read about these in Vai's library. Even diluted, it could potentially cause sickness and fatigue in anyone else but the intended user. And tinctures like this often required sleep to truly run their course. "I'd strongly advise against using too much in your condition; it could make things worse for you, but I don't know when we'll get out of here. You need a skilled healer."
"I'll take that chance, please," Bwedel said, looking at the vial intently. "Please."
Caen mixed a few drops into Bwedel's flask. This way, the man could drink from it as much as possible without much risk to himself.
* * *
They'd needed to change their positions twice after being swarmed by a few ants. They returned to one of the chambers within which they'd killed ants earlier. Only traces of blood on the ground remained. All the corpses were gone.
Caen had healed his and Zeris’s injuries each time. Guinevere had her tincture. After looking over Bwedel's wounds—it was still too early to tell if he was improving—Caen cast the sleep abeyance spell on himself. “I'll keep watch; the three of you can try to get some sleep.”
“Cast it on me as well,” Zeris said. “I won't be able to sleep in this place anyway.”
“Wait, you know a spell that can delay sleep? I'd like some of that as well, please," Guinevere said.
"I'll be grabbing a quick nap," Bwedel said, sounding very tired. He hadn't needed to fight, but he'd been walking around with them for hours.
It would have been better if they could all get some rest, but it was impossible to predict when next ants would show up. Caen cast the spell on Zeris and Guinevere.
* * *
Without bothering the still-sleeping Bwedel, Caen cast a diagnostic spell on him. It would give him some basic information about the man's current condition. The spell took, but… nothing happened.
Caen quickly checked the man's pulse.
There wasn't any.
He turned the man over. Bwedel's eyes stared out into nothing, and his face was deathly pale.
"Holy shit! Is he—is he dead?" Guinevere asked.
"Ancestors."
Caen let out a weary sigh and gently closed the man's eyes.
* * *
The chittering of ants soon forced them to leave. Their group of three killed several ants as they moved through the tunnels.
Caen focused on refining Mimicry every time they got to stop. He would Mimic a tree's Blood-healing affinity, then switch over to Mimicking its Flora affinity.
Over the course of the day, he'd used diagnostic spells on the tree roots, and those had indeed proven to be crucial points. He'd taken to scanning the anatomy of all the trees whose roots were present in any chamber they settled in. He made notes and drew diagrams in his notebook. He still had a ways to go before he could reliably say he understood any of the trees’ internal structure.
Zeris was hidden beneath a blanket she'd taken from Guinevere's storage space. Just a hint of light could be seen from the bottom of the blanket, where she was reading through her tome and making calculations.
Guinevere was off to the side, running through combat forms in the dark.
* * *
One of those antenna ants had brought a swarm of ants to them. Zeris hurled concussive fireballs at the ants, but of course, her flames got no purchase on the slick carapace of the ants.
Guinevere did what she did best.
Because of the space and mobility concerns, Caen had switched to using the sword strapped to his side. Flickering Soul-sense and the occasional, slowly cast Body-enhancement spell allowed him to hack into carapace easily enough.
He couldn't kill the antenna ant before it let out its distress call. Flickering Soul-sense at it had had no effect whatsoever.
The roots above and on the walls started to twitch, and Caen could hear chittering from all three exits.
They picked a passageway and fought through the ants that came at them. It was almost impossible to avoid being sprayed by the green glob.
When they reached a rounded chamber, Zeris began interacting with the root-portal. Inactive. Caen was already Mimicking a tree's Blood-healing affinity. He'd drop it the instant the ants arrived. There was chittering in the distance, back the way they'd come, getting closer and closer. The two other exits out of the chamber lead to dead ends.
Guinevere was standing at the exit they'd just used, heaving and holding out her weapon.
They were all wounded and needed to rest. Too many instances of Blood-healing—even from healing potions—put too much of a strain on the body. Thankfully, the food requirement was less of a problem than the requirement for sleep, for now, at least. The ants were easy enough to kill, but not in such large numbers. They hadn't found an exit leading out of the underground tunnels in all this time.
Caen mentally ran over their options. They could make their way to a dead end and, with their backs to the wall, try to cut down as many ants as they could. He'd sort of seen a Delver team clear out a tunnel after all.
They'd all been heavily geared and kitted, though. And there were about forty of them. We're just three.
How could they get that root-portal to activate?
Caen placed his hand on the root portal whose Blood-healing affinity he was Mimicking.
Here goes nothing.