STR:
74.117
PER:
97.647
VIT:
74.117
END:
76.684
INT:
100
WIL:
134.736
AGL:
74.736
DEX:
74.736
Felix blinked.
This...this is incredible. My stats are skyrocketing past my expectations. He regarded his bare fists, which were already healed from his bare knuckle fist fight. It's like I'm not even human anymore.
Felix grimaced. Right. I'm not. I'm...Nym...an. Nymian? Nymean? Whatever. I seem human, and as far as I can tell the Nym weren't too different physically. Human-ish.
Felix stood up carefully, expecting further soreness from his fight. But the sudden stat gain had scoured his body, and he felt remarkably good, if uncomfortably sticky. The purple gore was everywhere, and it was all he could do not to get it in his mouth. When he tried before it burned right through him...but with his higher resistance maybe....No. Even if it worked, the last thing Felix wanted to do was pass out in a monster lair, even if he might gain a cool new Skill.
Felix hesitated again, but shook his head.
Too risky. Don't be dumb.
He stepped carefully over to the row of cages, some still swinging from the aftermath of the battle. Only a half dozen of them were filled, most Rockstrikes within burned to a crisp by an errant fire breath, while the rest rustled weakly. Thankfully, Pit's cage was uncharred, though the little tenku looked awful. His wings were bent at painful angles, and his forelimb was covered in blood. Felix felt a hot wave of rage flow over him, and he heard sudden creaking tear and felt a hot flash of pain in his hands. Alarmed, Felix looked down: his grip had split the skin on his knuckles again. Grimacing at the pain, he looked back at his Companion.
"Pit! You ok, buddy?" The cage was at about eye level so Felix reached his less injured hand through the bars, skritching his friend's neck. Pit cooed in relief, his eyes closing for a moment. "Don't worry, I'll get you out."
Felix cast around for some way to lower the cages, but soon realized that nothing was holding these cages up. The thick black iron chains at their tops were suspended nearly twenty feet up by...nothing. He had thought it a trick of the light, or the heat haze, but this was clearly magic.
Felix looked at his hands, slender but growing tougher with calluses on his palms, still bloody but healing as he watched. He could use a Corrosive Strike on the cage, but while it might break the bars, he had no way to prevent it from hitting Pit. That was a nonstarter.
I could just...try to bend the bars.
Heat Resistance is level 12!
Am I strong enough to bend iron bars? Felix felt his heartbeat speed up, and a giddy sense of anticipation built in his gut. He shook his hands to loosen them up but hesitated before putting his hands on the cage. Felix pulled up his stats and invested his 10 free points. Five into STR, five into VIT.
Feeling sudden strength and vibrant energy rush through him, he gripped the bars of the black iron cage and pulled. His skin, dry and already wounded, split open further and dribbled blood down his arms. But slowly and with a loud screech the bars bent until they broke open in his hands. He kept bending them until he had an opening big enough to let Pit escape.
Releasing the bars, Felix reached carefully through the opening and helped Pit pull his wings out of the too small cage. Pit trilled weakly, his wings twitching and his paw held close to his body as he clung to Felix's shoulder. He could feel the tenku's heart rapidly beating against his arm, and felt a faint trembling in his haunches. Felix clenched his eyes tight and softly stroked Pit's back.
"It's ok, little man. It's ok."
Felix looked around the area, for the first time noticing that there were a number of empty archways lining this level. Then he spotted a single door in the nearest archway and headed toward it. The door was made of the same black iron as the chains and cages, and as he approached Felix noticed that no other archway even had a door. It shook something loose in his brain that had been preoccupied with surviving up until now.
"How'd a bunch of wurms get you into a cage, Pit?" Wurms didn't have hands. Why'd they even have cages?
Pit trilled again, softly but insistently. A damaged wing shuddered and pointed toward the iron door they were approaching, almost as if to say, 'let's find out in there.'
Companion Pact is level 10!
The door had a simple latch, just a single lever that released a bar, but even that much invention made Felix worried. The wurms weren't the original inhabitants of this place, that was certain. No matter how faded, the artistry of the walls and flooring were amazing, nearly equal to the Waterfall Temple. The place was ancient, its creators probably long dead. But the wurms couldn't use floating chains and cages, and with that tunneling Skill the wurms definitely didn't need doors.The question was: who did?
Felix crouched low as he tested the door. It was metal and this place was crazy hot, but the black iron was cool to the touch. So was the cage, now that he thought about it. What did that mean? He shook off the stray thought and concentrated on easing open the latch as quietly as possible.
The latch groaned slightly, but pivoted on mostly greased pieces. With seemingly infinite slowness, Felix pushed the door inward and peered through the small opening. He could see no movement inside, and his Manasight only noted flows of earth, shadow, and...blood? Felix opened the door the rest of the way.
Exploration is level 13!
The room beyond looked like a small antechamber to somewhere more important, maybe twenty by thirty feet in size, windowless but with two large doors on the right and far walls. Felix stepped through the door, watching his step as he took in the details of the chamber, simultaneously noting that it was considerably cooler in here. The walls were less warped than elsewhere too, and the splendor of the original carvings were better preserved. Geometric lines and blocky design was belied by delicate fluting on faux columns and small figures etched into nearly all surfaces. The floor was a series of five sided tiles, only slightly disrupted and cracked along the edges. It was amazingly designed, and put him in mind of the Nym Temple again. It wasn't exactly the same, but similarities were definitely there.
By contrast, two oversized tables were set up in the center of the room, each made of rough cut wooden boards. They were crude and stuck out against the nicer surroundings, ruined though they were. The tables were tall, nearly five feet high and were covered in misshapen plates of iron while bits of bars and half-assembled iron cages were stacked to one side. Odd, jagged metal tools sat next to them, a set on either table; they looked like blunt scalpels, a cylinder of silver metal with a tapered tip. An equally rough pair of stools were next to the tables, one tipped over onto the ground.
Someone had been here, someone humanoid enough to use a stool, and they had left in a hurry.
Did they hear me fighting? He frowned. Of course they did. That was loud as hell.
"Is this where you were taken, before?" Pit bobbed his head in confirmation.
So someone captured us, put me in a stone hole and Pit in a cage. Why?
Felix scrutinized the tables and floor, noticing heavy scratches all over the soft wood and lightly covering the harder stone tiles. Suddenly, faint glowing boot-prints appeared, one set large the other significantly smaller. The tracks moved all over the room, appearing to pace in some instances, before they both disappeared through the door in the back. Despite the proliferation of the tracks, Felix could tell that only two figures had been in here.
Tracking is level 13!
Pit sniffed delicately at the air before huffing out a sneeze.
"I agree with you there," Felix said, his own nose wrinkling in disgust. "Something smells spoiled in here."Felix padded over to the table despite the persistent stink, and looked at the scraps of iron. Crude shapes were scratched into the metal, the steel styluses nearby likely used to mark the hard surface. Felix spun a piece around. There was something familiar about the shapes. Then it clicked: these were the same as the script in the Temple. Just...far cruder. He set Pit down on top of the table as he looked closer.