"Alright, everyone properly harnessed?" Jass asked, turning her head just enough to catch a nod and a thumbs-up from Esmerelda, whose back was pressed firmly against her own as the rope binding their torsos pulled tight between them, as she leaned a bit backwards and saw that they still remained back to back.
Esmerelda gave the knot at their hips a quick, cautious tug to double-check the hold for her sanity, then rested her hands on her own and Jass's thighs. She began rhythmically patting out the beat to their favourite song with the resigned air of someone who had long since abandoned the dream of having her freedom of free will — especially after her idea of riding on Jass's shoulders had been so thoroughly and mercilessly vetoed by the rest of the Party.
"Ugh," Bonehead groaned as Deacon braced a leg against the side of the mountain and gave the rope cinched around the midsections of both Bonehead, Sam, and himself another firm yank, ensuring the two of them were secured back-to-back against his upper back. Bonehead grabbed the rope with both skeletal hands and tugged experimentally, grimacing when it held with the strength of a vice. "Remind me again why we're on your back?"
"Because it's faster," Deacon said as he threaded the last loop through the harness ring at his hip and cinched the knot tight in one taut pull.
The rope now connected him and Jass along a long, secure line — ensuring that if either of them slipped, and Sam or Esmerelda were too busy fending off an attack to help, the other could keep climbing and bear the extra weight until they reached one of the smaller plateaus on the Jagged Spire range or at least found a decent foothold.
And of course, the rope they were using was one bought from a general store and not the vine rope he'd made back on Floor Three, as compared to the rope they were currently using, the vine rope was nowhere nearly as durable or credible enough in their own eyes.
"And because it's a hell of a lot safer if Jass and I handle the climbing while the three of you watch our backs—"
As if on cue, high above them, a trio of wyverns burst from their cliffside nests, now fully visible as the clouds from last night had floated away. Circling around the section of the spire where Deacon assumed their nest to be, waiting for the others of their flock to get into the air.
They didn't wait for long as four much larger wyverns launched into the air with varying decibel ranges of screeches that shook loose even more pebbles down the edges of the small plateau in front of their nest.
"—and unless you three want to be chewing dust and praying to whatever deity likes you best," Deacon said, his head tilted upward at the wheeling wyverns overhead and watched as the seven of them grouped up before flying off into the distance, "it'd be nice to get to the top before they come back."
"Just—" Bonehead said, craning his neck to try and get a look at Deacon. "Just make sure I don't fall, okay? I still haven't gotten myself a goth baddie yet – I can't die before then."
"And don't do any bullshit giga-athletic stuff," Sam added, squirming in place to find some semblance of comfort as the rope dug into his robes, as the three of their backs pressed against each other.
"But if you do intend to pull something like that, give us a warning, because I swear to every god out there. I will create a curse and cast it on you, have wet and soggy socks until the day you die and spoil every damn TV show and movie you watch – I know the ending of Totally Ordinary, and I will spoil it!"
"I'll do my best," Deacon replied with a smirk spreading across his face as he rolled his shoulders. "Just augment the lightness of my body and cover us in a wind barrier so the wind doesn't try to peel us off each other and the mountain."
At that cue, a soft rush of air coiled around Deacon, Bonehead, and Sam as Sam lifted his staff and murmured the spell under his breath. Not a few seconds later, wind began swirling around them and formed a translucent barrier that clung to their bodies like a second skin.
A matching barrier wrapped itself around Jass and Esmerelda, cast by Esmerelda with equal speed and power as Sam.
Jass adjusted her footing and gave a small hop, testing how the body-lightening spell was affecting her weight. The wind caught beneath her boots immediately, lifting her higher than she expected.
She let out a soft, surprised "oh" as the spell boosted her upward with more force than she'd expected it to before landing atop the ground with a muffled descent, now standing in front of the mountain base.
Deacon followed suit, bending his knees before pushing just a fraction against the ground. The resulting hop sent him several feet upward with little effort. "I'm going to miss this when it disappears."
"Same," Jass said, rolling her shoulders as she tested her grip on the rock face in front of her.
Deacon let out a deep exhale as he gripped the side of the mountain, glanced at Jass, and found her also looking at him and giving him a nod to show that she was ready.
With matching grins that would've terrified the rest of the Party, Deacon and Jass leapt upward. Their fingers dug into the coarse stone with ease — Deacon through raw Strength, and Jass through her Earth Affinity, which softened the rock just enough for her hands to sink in while still keeping its structure intact.
Despite the nearly fifty-point gap in their Strength stats, her ease with manipulating earth made her climb with the same effortless grip Deacon had through sheer muscle alone.
The moment their boots left the ground, both of them moved with incredible speed and moved with such agility that Sam and Bonehead, who could see how Deacon and Jass were climbing, suddenly saw the both of them as giant coked-up spiders for a brief moment.
Ignoring the bellows coming from Bonehead, Sam, and Esmerelda at the ridiculous speed he and Jass were showing off, Deacon drove his gloved fingers into a jutting stone handhold, tearing into it as easily as packed snow before launching himself upward again, Jass matching his pace perfectly.
Together, they spidered up the sheer cliff face at a speed that would've been impossible given their current stats without the Gust barrier around them, lightening their weight while practically removing the air resistance on them.
Behind Deacon's head, Bonehead's voice came out thin and rattling. "If you drop me, I swear to the goddess of the goth milfs – I will haunt you until you die, where I'll beat you the fuck up!"
"You're a skeleton—" Sam sputtered, his words ripped apart by the rushing wind as he was clutching the ropes so tightly his knuckles squeaked against the fibers. "—How the hell will you haunt anyone when you die when you're already an undead?"
Above and strapped in behind Jass, Esmerelda swallowed her internal screaming as their first group of creatures spotted them scaling the mountain. The wind barrier around them wavered as she lifted her wand to cast a barrage of Wind Arrows.
"Birds incoming on me," she warned, her voice barely audible over the roar of air rushing past her ears.
"On it!" Sam barked, twisting around on Deacon's back just enough to aim his staff at the flock of birds rushing at them without unbalancing Deacon.
A powerful blast of wind shot from the tip of Sam's staff, splitting mid-flight into razor-thin arcs that sliced through the necks and wings of the three-legged magpies rushing them. The attack hit right after Esmerelda's spell, which had already punctured through most of the flock. Together, their spells sent the majority of the birds plummeting to the forest floor below.
Jass clicked her tongue as one remaining magpie slipped through the barrage, diving at her with talons extended. She tilted her head an inch, its claws skimming past her hair before it latched onto the rock face beside her left hand, leaving deep gouges across the stone.
Before it could rear its head to strike at either her hand or face, a sharp spike of stone erupted from just above where its feet landed and hammered into its ribs, sending it spinning off-course and crashing into another section of the cliff while leaving a trail of blood in its wake— courtesy of Jass who quickly got rid of it before it could potentially do anything to the barrier around both her and Esmerelda.
With that hiccup out of the way and Esmerelda focusing on killing the other magpies attacking them, Jass began climbing again, irritated that she'd had to pause even for a moment to kill the magpie and now found herself twenty meters behind Deacon.
"Sorry," she heard Esmerelda say as a barrage of Wind Arrows pierced through the bodies of the remaining members of the magpie flock. "I forgot to account for the sudden shift in wind that the barrier wraps around us."
"It's fine," Jass said, without an ounce of hesitation and began to create some small talk between her and Esmerelda. "How far has your study on learning buffing spells gotten you?"
Having full faith in the capabilities of his friends, Deacon, still a good distance ahead of Jass, did not stop his ascent and reached for another handhold — and plunged his fingers directly into a small alcove lined with brittle scales, pale, molted skin, and what felt like a cold, coiled rope.
The moment his hand brushed its nest, the serpent exploded outward with a sharp hiss and loud rattling, its elongated fangs aiming straight for the exposed gap between his index finger and thumb to his bare neck.
[Diamondback Rattlesnake Lv 15]
A danger noodle! Deacon thought in surprise as he caught sight of the rattlesnake.
His hand snapped upward, fingers closing around the snake's head in a single crushing grip.
A second later, Bonehead let out a bellowing scream beside his ear — just as Deacon caught sight of a rattlesnake's head only inches from his own. He grabbed it on instinct and squeezed, rupturing the serpent's skull like an overripe fruit before letting it drop, gravity reclaiming it as it tumbled down the cliff face.
To his right, Jass also encountered a Diamondback Rattlesnake. Unlike Deacon, who killed his outright, she simply tilted her head, letting the serpent's snapping jaws whip past her cheek. It had launched itself with far too much momentum, missed completely, and sailed past her shoulder, plummeting thousands of feet down the cliff to its death.
"Danger noodle," Jass muttered as she became level with Deacon and stopped to catch her breath.
"I didn't know they could live this high," Deacon grunted, shaking the remains of the serpent off his wrist before slamming his palm into the next crack in the stone, shattering a chunk of the wall to make room for his grip. "We're like seven hundred or so meters off the ground."
"I heard they can live up onto mountains that are six thousand feet high," Jass stated as the two of them resumed their ascent, now only less than two hundred meters away from reaching the plateau where they saw the wyverns leap from.
You learn something new every day, Deacon mused as he filed away the little factoid Jass had dropped on him just as his head breached through a cloud.
After dealing with a few more lunging Diamondback Rattlesnakes on the climb, he and Jass finally hauled themselves onto the wyvern plateau.
Jass barely made it onto flat ground before her legs gave out. She pitched forward and face-planted into the grass-coated stone, too spent to even mutter a word.
Deacon wasn't doing much better; sweat plastered his hair to his skull and soaked his clothes, while his lungs felt like they were on fire, but he remained upright, staring a few dozen meters ahead into the den of the wyverns.