They rebuffed, everyone eyeing the dropped ceilings warily as they gathered their things. And then they headed out once more.
Chapter Twelve — Backtrack
Mitch led them forward. Drew was next pulling the cart, while Sarah and Katie walked together with spears in hand and the Knight behind them. It didn’t take long for them to reach the stairwell. Six massive rats had been wandering the hallways. Each appeared alone and Drew merely double cast fireball and frostfire ball as soon as their beady little eyes began to reflect the light in the distance.
They quickly checked that the stairwell was clear and then descended. The cart’s weight made it a little tricky, but gravity did most of the work for them. Drew kept it steady as they slowly lowered it down the stairs. Unfortunately, their luck ended there: the stairwell only went down to the fourth floor.
“Well, crap, anyone ever been down this way before?” Drew asked from within the safety of the stairwell.
“I had a meeting down here once. I think I remember there being another stairwell a couple hallways down on the back side of the cafeteria,” Sarah offered. She had recovered some of her spirits after killing the rat.
“Well, that’s better than nothing,” Mitch said with a shrug that seemed to be the consensus.
Stepping into the hallway, they saw a few placards giving directions to the cafeteria and some of the offices that had been on this floor. Sarah thought the stairwell was to the left, so they followed the Ensign’s half-remembered directions.
The first cockroach landed with a thud in front of Mitch. Two hooks that had grown from his foremost appendages scored red lines along his arm, his shield preventing a significant amount of the damage, and one leg even bounced off to the side, deflected away by the magic protecting him.
Before anyone else could react, Mitch’s axe had already taken on an electric buzz as he used his skill on the axe head and then used it to push the cockroach away from him, opening a distance between them. Drew launched an acid dart at the beast, though Mitch’s push caused the projectile to go wide and the acid sizzled as it impacted the wall. Katie and Sarah advanced around Drew, the weaponless man unable to help due to the close quarters of the combat.
Each of the two women stabbed at the cockroach, but the sharp spider leg tips simply bounced harmlessly off its armor. The cockroach swiped at Mitch again, the sharp claws attempting to rip at his legs. Mitch refused to allow that though, stepping back before shifting his grip on the axe, bringing the blunt side of it down with an audible crack on the cockroach’s carapace. Another of his skills came into play as a gust of wind caused his blow to impact both harder and in a longer range than he could physically achieve.
The two women continued to thrust their spears at the cockroach, but their attacks didn’t seem to be doing any damage. They did, however, keep it occupied so that Mitch could get in close enough to swing his axe. Drew ducked in close enough to cast spark on the beast, but it didn’t seem to affect the bug at all. He dodged back, not wanting to get in his group’s way. His fingers moved in the motions that would allow him to cast another acid dart, but the spell was still on cooldown. He looked down the hallway, “Katie, walls! There are more of them.” He could see another half a dozen cockroaches making their way down the hallway, the noise of combat having alerted them to a potential meal.
Katie backed away from the cockroach, shifting over to the other side of the hallway and casting a wall to block off the reinforcements.
Mitch took a step back, then shifting his grip on his axe again, he brought it in underneath the cockroach, flipping the bug up onto its back. It immediately began trying to right itself, but Mitch’s follow up blows-hard overhand swings with the blunt end of the axe on its underbelly-kept the creature from doing anything. Katie and Sarah shifted their attention away from trying to do damage and instead started sweeping their spears at any legs that appeared to be getting traction, helping to keep the creature defenseless.
Drew watched the wall, and when he saw the first cockroaches begin to crawl over, he cast a cone of frost, which encased some of the bugs in ice along with the top of the wall but didn’t seem to do any damage. Another cone of frostfire added a little damage and more slick ice. Drew angled a fireball to explode on the other side of the wall, hoping the kinetic energy of the explosion would keep them from making their way over the top of the wall. His spells damage didn’t appear to be affecting the cockroaches, but their secondary effects had made scaling the wall difficult. With the seconds that bought him, he began casting ice storm, centered as far as he could see down the hallway.
Mitch had cracked most of the underbelly of the bug and blue ichor was leaking out of it slowly, but it had taken a dozen heavy swings. He switched to the sharp side of the axe now that the shell had been cracked and began cutting deep impacts into its flesh. The bug was mostly dead, which gave Sarah a chance to back up and cast a heal. Katie glanced behind her, and seeing Drew in the process of casting storm, prepared to cast another wall on top of the current one as soon as she felt the wind.
The storm exploded around them, the small confines of the hallway channeling it beyond its normal radius, and Sarah ducked an ice chuck that bounced off the wall above her and sent razor-sharp shards of concrete and ice raining down around her. Katie threw the prepared wall spell out and the impact of the storm lessened, although they could still feel and hear its fury through the small gap at the top of the ceiling.
Mitch finally killed the one cockroach he had been hitting for the last minute straight and grunted, his breath short. “Back to the stairwell, we can’t fight these things,” Drew said as he pushed the cart back the thirty feet they had managed to come down the hallway. Everyone else following behind him, casting glances behind them to ensure that none of the cockroaches managed to climb the wall and make it through the two-foot gap left at the top. Once back in the stairwell, Katie created a wall behind the door to prevent it from opening. Mitch and Sarah collapsed on the floor, the adrenaline wiping their energy reserves out.
The short fight and retreat from the cockroaches had taken a lot out of them mentally. Drew cast refresh on himself and kept watch while the other three slumped against walls.
“So, what do we do now?” Sarah asked, looking towards Drew while carefully picking ice and concrete out of her hair.
“We have a couple of options,” Drew said after a few seconds of thought. Ticking his fingers down, he listed them for the group. “First, we can head back to the ambush spot and use the main staircase. We’ve already cleared the path, and with the walls in place, it should be relatively safe until we get there…” He trailed off, everyone filling in that they had been ambushed by the orcs there once already and would have to deal with whatever else they had prepared for them. “Two, we could go up to the second floor and head over to the western stairs and head down those.”
“We’d have to break through the clinic, and even then, I’m not sure there’s an exit to the far side of the stairwell. I tried coming up that way to get to the clinic once and got stuck behind it,” Mitch offered. And everyone groaned, the joke before the building had turned into a dungeon was that whoever had designed it was trying to make a maze. It was clear that it was working against them now. The building was massive, meant to be the headquarters of the entire Department of Homeland Security. Movement through the building was far more complicated than it needed to be.
“Might not be a bad idea, might be able to grab some medical supplies while we’re up there.” Katie offered.
“But probably not worth getting stuck if there isn’t a back door, especially since we have healing magic.” Drew said with a shrug, “Anyway, our last option is going up to one and trying to make our way down the hill. Either way with options two and three we run the chance of running into more cockroaches or something worse.”