While the hexer and the giant lizard were arguing about who got who, they all started looking at each other out of the corner of their eye. Bethany noticed first, that Eli was standing there tapping his foot with his arms crossed. She pushed her will against the hex and it collapsed since the hexer was distracted and she walked over to him and copied his impatient posture. Beau was already out and had just been copying Eli’s act so he joined them. Cody and Lucy didn’t seem like their will would be strong enough so Eli decided to move things along by mentally commanding his avatar to steal the staff and run off with it. The avatar kicked the hexer in the stomach and pulled hard enough to get the staff out of his grip, then it ran towards the pond they had just come from.
The hexer was about to chase it when it glanced back at the group and noticed three people were out of the hex. It didn’t seem to be worried, only annoyed and angry. “If you kill them all, you can eat 4 and I'll only take one,” he said to the giant lizard. Then he ran off after his staff, chasing the avatar around the first layer. The giant komodo dragon lizard monster looked at them and licked its lips, but before it could even attack, and faster than anyone but Eli could see, there was suddenly a spear sticking out of one of its eyes. This only seemed to anger the monster, but everyone was once again in shock, only this time at the speed that Bethany was able to move at. Two more spears seemingly appeared in the monster, one in the other eye and the other in its mouth and stuck deep into the back of its neck.
Bethany had been practicing something she had seen Eli do a few times so she had asked him about it, focusing her will around one of her stats to improve it. At first, she had no idea how to do it since she didn’t have any magic sense and was unable to really feel the magic in her body. Several days of frustrating practice and training later, she figured it out, it wasn’t about feeling, it was about will, she just had to imagine an outcome and will it into being. Bethany knew that wasn’t entirely accurate but that's how she thought of it in her head. She had intended to save its use for a moment where she could use it to save Eli’s life, but those moments didn’t seem to happen often and even if they did, they were preceded by him saving her life.
The giant lizard-ish monster was flailing around, having trouble breathing and controlling its limbs while panicking because it couldn’t see. Cody gave Eli an anxious look, wanting him to put it out of its mystery, but Eli motioned for Cody to do it, giving a look back that said do it yourself if you want it done so badly. Cody huffed at first but quickly took on the responsibility and ran towards the giant monster chopping at its neck, all this did was piss it off even more causing more flailing and rolling on the ground. He spent another two minutes chopping away at the monster before it stopped moving.
Just as it stopped moving, the hexer was running past having chased the avatar all the way around the top level and back to where they were standing. The wooden avatar made mostly of flexible roots wasn’t particularly fast, but since its whole body was basically a wet noodle, it could bend and twist in ways that made it quite difficult to actually catch. It ran right up to Eli and gave him the staff, then seemed to run around the group of them doing something similar to disco dancing. Eli had been teaching it to dance every so often since the first time he had it dance as a distraction. He was happy with how well it was going and planned to teach it thriller next, or at least the parts he could remember from thriller.
The staff that Eli was holding was not what he was expecting, it was basically a node on a stick, or in this case two magic nodes on a stick to combine to make hex magic. Hex’s were apparently a mix of life and death magic since the wood staff was a stand in for a life node and the crystal on the end was a fake death node. These weren’t as strong as real nodes but it gave access to magic types that some might not have, he really wanted to keep it, but he could feel it belonged to the hexer. The staff had a piece of the hexer’s will inside it, probably how he was controlling the magic inside while also making it useless for anyone else to use, or at least until Eli came along.
He really wanted to give this staff to Stevens, he was sure he would find a way to use it to cast healing magic and debuffs and such giving him more versatile support options. So instead of killing the hexer and breaking its staff, like Eli had originally planned, he told Bethany to restrain him and got to work removing its will from the item. While he was working on it, he had a thought that the dungeon might not like this and make something harder, but he wasn’t going to use it so he hoped this would just be considered clever looting. He found the bit of will inside the item and slowly changed it to his own, he didn’t want to take the risk of the items breaking because it required will, so he made it his own and would allow Stevens to take it when he gave it to him.
Eli placed the staff in his inventory, and the hexer’s eyes went wide with a hint of terror in them. Apparently it wasn’t supposed to be possible to replace someone's will inside an item at all, at least not unless they are willing to let it go. He also guessed that it had felt the piece of will in the item get ground to nothing in a seemingly effortless motion. The monster was now just staring off into the distance apparently catatonic, which made killing him seem like the wrong thing to do. As an alternative, Eli blinked the hexer over to where the frog was and sat him on the ground with his back resting on the frog's leg. He gave the frog one quick look with a nod and blinked back to his group.
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There was one stone left but they all decided to take a few minutes, Cody looted the lizard he killed and ended up with an epic shield made from lizard hide and what looked like a piece of its skull. He said the effect on it was an increase in force when clashing with the shield, Cody looked pleased with himself and Eli guessed it was because from his perspective, doing the right thing had rewarded him. Beau and Cody did a couple tests with it real quick and it seemed like it added a percent based increase to his shield bashing, not a flat amount. This was good because it allowed Cody to maintain full control over how hard it hit and would be useful as he got stronger.
This time, when he put the stone in the pond and it vanished, the incoming monster was both obvious and straight-forward. It was a giant spider this time that just appeared on the other side of the top layer of the basin and started moving towards them at speed. However, the spider stopped just as quickly as it had started and seemed to be yelling at the frog up at the top of the waterfall with whatever noises giant monster spiders made. Eli couldn’t be sure but if he had to guess it was calling the frog a coward or some similar insult in an attempt to recruit its help. The frog's eyes remained closed, but he was pretty sure it had one eye cracked open and was looking right at him. He crossed his arms and gave him a stern look.
The spider looked frustrated, at least Bethany guessed it was frustrated, it was obvious to her that the frog had realized something about Eli and would rather face whatever punishment there was to face by not going along with the dungeon’s plan than face Eli. She thought it was probably something she still hadn’t realized about him since she was doing her best to keep her emotional feelings for him to herself and hide them with overzealous lust. There was a good chance that Tara had noticed that about her but there was little chance that she told him. All the women in Eli’s orbit had agreed to not tell him anything no matter how obvious, he would figure stuff out on his own when it came to them or he wouldn’t. Either way, everyone felt it was better for him to be oblivious of how the women saw him, good or bad.
She watched as the spider appeared to give up on recruitment and looked back over to them and started running towards them again, although not quite as fast as it had to begin with. As it was getting closer, she was able to get more details about it, it was black with brown spots and red rectangles in the spots. Its eight main legs were segmented in 4 places and it had 2 additional sets of legs, two near its back holding webbing and two near its front that looked like they aided in eating or maybe holding food for eating. Its face was more humanoid and hairy than she was expecting, but she didn't get more details as she shifted focus to its body and legs when it got close.
As it approached it raised its body high and began stabbing legs down, slinging sticky webs, grabbing with its apparently clawed front legs, and biting at people. The biting seemed more of an intimidation than an attack, but Bethany was not going to just play defense, she wasn’t built for it. She started swinging her spear in large arcs aiming at two or three legs at a time, at first she would get glancing hits that did nothing. That was until she aimed for where the legs were segmented and cleanly removed them two segments up. After getting a third the stabbing down slowed to a crawl and she was able to remove two entire legs since she no longer needed to dodge, cutting them clean from where they connected to the spider's body.
The spider hissed in pain spitting some kind of acidic looking green blood out of its mouth from all the shield hit’s Cody was landing on its body. Beau had been grabbing legs and holding them as long as he could, forcing the spider to stay put and because of how high it had raised itself, limiting its attack options. He had also cranked up the heat making the burning legs smell like cooked crab legs, which made Bethany equal parts hungry and nauseated. Before attacking more legs with her spear, she looked over to Eli to see if he was planning something. Bethany found herself doing this more and more, and not just in combat, she would model her reaction to a situation based on how his body language was at the time. During combat though, she would try to keep pace with him, doubling the amount of effort he seemed to be putting in.
Despite being ready to speed up or slow down depending on his pace, she was not ready for him to be standing perfectly still with his arms crossed and a sour look on his face. He looked a little different but she couldn’t place it since she was still dodging and countering legs. He did not move and every time a leg came down on his shoulder or head it just kind of slid off like it had smashed into an immovable object. He looked like he was testing some kind of defensive magic he had just made up and she looked closer and found that his feet were pretty deep in the ground. It was like he was very heavy and the ground couldn’t support him, but that didn’t seem to be the cause of his sour look, but just then, Bethany noticed it too, Lucy wasn’t fighting, or at least they couldn’t see where she was fighting.
Bethany started to panic a bit trying to figure out where she had gone, a small part of her was worried that she was off scared somewhere crying again, but she didn’t think that was the case. Bethany took a hit that cut her left shoulder open when she lost focus while trying to see where Lucy was. It wasn’t a deep cut but she was bleeding a lot and her left arm had lost a bit of its strength. Just then Cody got caught by some webs and was stuck to the ground and Beau was knocked away by a leg that he had been holding on to. She looked to Eli again to gauge if she should be panicking any more than she already was, but now he was gone too, and when she looked up, the giant spider was standing still and staring right at her.
