Dungeons used to be living, ever-changing before the mana drought had turned them dead and silent.
But this cave-in was new.
As a clay golem, I could tell. I knew earthworks, this hadn't been a natural collapse and also, I had felt the vibrations when it happened. Even with the human's magic sealed, I could still perceive shockwaves from far away.
The young lady still scratched herself while following in the nearby gallery. New gallery too. But my mistress didn't seem to notice, busy coping with her new, self-described feeling of emptiness. The symbols on her skin were doing their work.
Still, someone was intent on leading us astray...
Right into a vast natural shaft plunging deep beneath. I stopped my mistress before she tripped.
All around us, on the shaft's circular surface, crystals started to faintly glow. Red, pink and purple hues growing in the darkness, breaking the obscurity and revealing the shapes of floating platforms.
"Ah!" The lady got excited. "Pretty!"
And she jumped over the abyss, onto one of the floating rocks. Solid underneath, smoothened above by erosion. I tried to join her, barely caught the side and she had to help me climb up to her.
"We should..." I got cut off. She made me sit.
"Just a minute." She softly demanded.
Not sure what had got to her, but she had sit herself, legs dangling over the edge. She seemed to enjoy the faint glow and hovering rocks.
"It's a nice world, isn't it?" She wondered aloud. "I get to fly in the air in a mystical hole while crystals shine all around. It feels like a dream."
"None of it is helping you."
"Enjoy life a little!" She complained, pushed me with two hands. Then her eyes faced my badger mask. "Ah. Sorry. I didn't mean to imply... I'm sorry."
What for? I was enjoying life, I was with her.
"If it makes you feel better," I proposed, "you have made me experience many new things. Before you arrived, all I did was collect mana in the ruined city."
She looked at me with a sorry air in her brown eyes.
"Won't you tell me about it?"
"There isn't much to say. Monsters had already absorbed the mana of all relics and utensils. Only monsters were left to absorb. And a clay golem could not exactly face much so all I did was look for rapts. The city's vermin, in a way."
I grasped the necklace at my neck, took it off and held it by its single amber bead.
"This tool absorbs and stores mana. A human marvel, if I may. When monsters absorb mana, a lot escapes them. But this bead? All of it. It catches all of it."
Not that it mattered. All of little was still little and, like everything else, the realm's drain would often empty it before I had finished my hunt for magic.
"Can I see it?" My mistress wondered. I offered it to her and she tried to take it, only to retract herself as if burnt. "It hurts!"
"Sorry!" I panicked. "I didn't think properly! It tried to absorb your mana."
"And you carry that on you like it's nothing?! How do you do that!?"
I had never given it much thought. Maybe it didn't absorb the owner, maybe I had too little mana to begin with.
"I could try" I stopped. "Watch out!"
Everything happened very fast. I had seen no option but to push my mistress with me over the edge and fall before the snake's head cracked the stone where we had been sitting. That snake!
So silent I had not seen it coming, only betrayed when it leapt for us from all the way across. It was now falling as well, its ten meters body hitting the wall and slithering on it while we caught another platform below.
"Him again!" The young lady fumed. "I'm going to..."
She looked at her hand. Her mace would not appear. Of course she could not summon her mace! We had sealed her magic!
The beast had already jumped on us again, too close to avoid. I threw myself in front my mistress and punched.
Rather than just ram through me like kindle, the snake recoiled at the touch, shrieked, thrashed and rushed off the platform, back onto the wall with its head fixed on me.
The bead. I had forgot I still had the bead in my hand.
And now it considered me the bigger threat?!
I put the necklace back on my neck, all the while crouching to touch the rock with my free arm and extract enough stone that reshaped into a warhammer.
"Use this!" I told my mistress.
She picked up the weapon with both hands, felt its weight: stone and metal. Yet as a fabulous human she could still swing it with ease.
The snake attacked again, this time plunging below and leaping from a platform underneath to hit our rock head first! It cracked on the impact, the whole mass of it broke in parts and started to fall.
We had already jumped to the next, saw the snake crash on it and fracture it as well, then catch us in mid-air!
My mistress swung hard to push it back, then let me caught her and bring her to the next flat surface. She immediately left me there to jump after our enemy.
Why? Because otherwise we would run out of space to hold on.
"You're dead, tote bag!" She yelled.
Tote bag? They both clashed on the wall, then again in mid-air. What kind of insult was tote bag? Who would even make such a useless craft?!
The hammer shattered. Of course. The whole point had been to use the least amount of mana possible. I had already forged a mace, threw it and the young lady caught it without even looking.
The beast had tried to take advantage of the moment, maw wide open, fell on her to nearly gobble her head but the human stopped it with both hands, held firm despite the massive body's thrust. A deadlock until the snake's tail started to draw on the ground.
A magic circle?!
It disengaged before I could fall on it, my spear cracking on solid rock instead. Why did it even bother avoid my attack? It would not even have hurt its scales.
But the snake had now retreated back onto the wall, my mistress in pursuit while I stood there, preparing another weapon. Head turned on the first lines that beast had drawn.
Tremor.
Why would it want to waste mana to cast a tremor? Break this platform? No, wait, outward. It wanted to cause the shaft's wall to shake!
My mistress got pushed back. On the wall the snake's body had formed a ward, casting a barrier on which the mace had broken. She had already caught my new spear, in time to fend off her opponent.
Again pushed it against the wall. Again a ward to hold back the attack.
"It's preparing something!" I warned.
"Yeah tell me what!" The young lady yelled back while catching the stone halberd.
The snake leapt first, met in mid-air by my mistress. It got the worst of the exchange, shrieked at the wound and fell back on the wall. Magma! It had leapt just in front of a pocket of magma!
And my mistress, clueless, was going for it.
So much for preserving mana. I cast the magic circle. The snake had dodged the attack, let the human crack the wall and made the magma burst. For all her talks of fire resistance, she would have been burned by the jet.
Instead, my weak barrier had taken the worst of it.
And the snake was on me!
All I could do was flee. Jump out of its way, waiting for the young lady who reappeared, her rugged face furious, to push back the assailant.
"Just how many tricks does he have?!" She clenched her teeth. The snake hissed in response. "Well screw you! I'm used to pulling way above my weight! I was punching thugs like you before breakfast!"
Her only answer was the reptile tail drawing a magic circle again. Tremor once more.
I was still a bit at a loss. Why fight us here? The platforms didn't particularly advantage that beast and actually made its attacks that much more exposed. It either knew something about that shaft, or it was improvising.
But I knew something myself, finished casting a new hammer that the human picked and jumped back, from platform to platform, away from their renewed fight to the wall itself.
I knew the snake was trying to exhaust us. Win by attrition. And that was not a fight my mistress could afford.
So if it wanted a tremor, I would give it one.
But for now the young lady had to endure it all by herself. And I would not be able to provide a new weapon for a while.
Maybe she had realized that, or maybe she had learned to respect her opponent. They were both dodging each other more than anything. Looking for their moment, denying one and leaping again on the platforms.
The snake got pummeled by a volley of massive rocks.
My mistress had punched! Hit the platform before her instead of jumping on it, broken and and set the pieces flying on the beast. Had she had ground to lunge from, that would have been the end, but instead the snake hit the wall, caught itself and recovered.
So when the hammer fell, it missed the head and crashed on the body.
Another screech! And before a counter-attack my mistress was swinging again, hitting so hard that the scales cracked and black blood flooded out.
The snake's maw sought the human's head, caught the maul's handle in a new deadlock.
Then, slowly, the snake lost ground. My mistress pushing back. Even though she was precariously hanging on her opponent's body, she was forcing the head back until the beast started to panic.
The tail hit! It could not pierce my mistress' back but punctured it, making her scream. In an instant the balance got reversed and the hammer broke in two under the monster's maw.
So I cast it!
The whole shaft started to shake! And what the snake had wanted happened: pockets of magma breaking from the walls all around, pouring in waterfalls of all sizes. A feeble source of mana for it, and a deadly weapon to use against us.
But more importantly the snake's grip on the wall had vanished. It went tumbling down while I plunged and caught my mistress, held her by the hand. I could handle the tremors.
All around us rocks solid and molten alike were raining down.
Come on! My magic circle hadn't been so potent! I had only carved it on the circumference of the whole shaft.
"We need to go!" I yelled.
That didn't mean the obvious; that meant I was about to let go willingly.
So she braced for it, we threw ourselves away and onto a falling platform below, then with my arm still holding hers, back on the wall, to one of the crevices that had opened.
A shriek from below met us before we disappeared into that hole. The snake emerged, only to be met by pouring magma that sealed the passage. Magma that flowed behind us.
So we hurried through, and the earthquake would not stop! The whole tunnel was breaking around us, magma oozing on the sides, boiling the air all around.
In the middle of the mayhem, I realized that this was the actual battlefield the snake had prepared. To drag us into those very tunnels and bury us alive. I kept pushing my mistress to run and realized that the beast had had the last laugh.
The ceiling collapsed between us. The whole passage did.
"Ji-Ah!" I screamed.
I was a clay golem. Earthworks was my specialty. Controlling the rocks and soil around, commanding to the magma if need be! I dug through it all and as it calmed, while still calling her name, I finally felt her hand.
In the small alcove my work had formed, she fell into my arms, crying.