I was beginning to recognize a very annoying pattern, as I laid there in bed staring at the time on my phone. For a moment I considered just how I was going to manage living my life if I was going to consistently wake up at 4am every fucking morning.
I went to bed around 1am.
That meant I had gotten only three hours of sleep, and no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t force myself to fall back asleep. That alone was aggravating enough to make me decide that I needed to vent some frustration in the dungeon before starting my day.
By instinct I grabbed my shotgun, but stopped short of walking into the fridge without any other gear. I hadn’t even considered making sure the damn thing was loaded. I stepped back, took a deep breath, and put together a proper kit.
In my pouch I stored a week’s worth of MRE’s in an ammo can, which took up one slot. Then two one gallon jugs of water, taking another two slots. A can of ammo for my rifle, my rifle itself, all of my 00 Buck. I even packed my .308 and the hundred rounds I had for it, alongside two spare mags.
I realized that in the near future I’d need to get some more AR-10 mags, and plenty of .308.
As I was packing up my backpack with other essentials, my hand came to rest on a flashbang grenade. It got me thinking.
I had an entire enchantment that I had not yet tried out.
Well, since I was going into the dungeon anyways, I figured that I might as well do some testing.
I sat down at my workbench and got to work. First, I held my hand to the chunk of Abyssal Iron and focused.
Ability: Quick Craft activated
Mana: 5/6
Two small pieces came free, one perfectly round, the other the size and shape of an arrowhead. Both weighed about one ounce.
Two pieces of Abyssal Iron detected. Tier 2 material, small size. Required Soul Energy for enchantment equals 2. Requires 1 Mana.
Enchant pieces of Abyssal Iron with Thunderous Impact?
Soul Energy: 42/235
Mana: 4/6
Pieces of Abyssal Iron have been enchanted! Would you like to name them?
Name: Shellshock Test v1
Confirm?
I could care less about the name, since I didn’t expect these pieces to be around for more than a few minutes.
A light tap on the desk didn’t set off the round piece, so I figured it had to have some level of force behind it. If this turned out to be nothing more than glorified firecrackers then maybe I could disorient a boss by pelting it in the head with one.
For testing purposes, I donned my safety goggles and hearing protection, then strapped on my vest. There was some PVC pipe in my garage, and on the end of a ten foot long section I taped the round test piece. In the garage, lying unused in a box for who knows how long, was a kid’s compound bow which I retrieved. From there, I walked into the dungeon to begin the test.
The first test consisted of gently tapping the floor with the piece on the end of the rod. Nothing happened. That was about what I had expected, as it didn’t make much sense for it to just explode if it got lightly jostled in a pack, or dropped from a short height. Next, I gave the pipe a light swing, hitting the floor a bit harder. I knew from reading a random wiki page that the average swing speed of a major league baseball player could exceed seventy miles per hour. I aimed to do about a quarter of that, which was easy enough between my Strength and Dexterity.
Yet again, it didn’t explode.
This told me that I could quite safely carry it around without fear of it going off by accident. I didn’t go absolute full tilt on the last swing, but did give a strike that might’ve launched a ball into the stands. My uncle would’ve been proud.
If I’d been so inclined, I probably could have joined a team and made it big in the leagues, but I wasn’t.
Once again, the piece refused to go off. I was beginning to think that perhaps the Abyssal Iron was a bad medium for the enchantment, given its durability. Was it perhaps based on how fragile the item was?
For my final attempt I taped the arrowhead piece to a piece of PVC which I shorted to three feet long. I fired it down the hallway with my cheap children’s bow.
It hit the wall and went off with a decent bang. While it wasn’t exactly earth shattering, I still felt the shockwave, and knew that without hearing protection it might’ve sucked to hear. Upon walking up to inspect the impact spot, I found there was a small divot in the wall, about a quarter as deep and wide as if I had hit it with a normal round of 7.62x39. That didn’t seem like it was going to be that much of a game-changer, but I supposed it would make for a good distraction device, or a poor-man’s flashbang.
Time for another idea.
On a shelf in my workshop sat two nearly full cans of cheap 12ga rifled slugs that I had gotten a good deal on a few years ago. I rarely shot them, and had actually been intending to sell them off, but figured now they’d make good fodder for my experiment. Since I had the means to reload 12ga shells, I ripped five slugs off of the plastic hulls and placed them, one by one, into my vice so that I could use my drill press to put a quarter inch hole in the center of them.
Then I placed all five of the newly hollowed out slugs on the chunk of Abyssal Iron and touched it, focusing.
Ability: Quick Craft activated
Mana: 3/6
The iron filled in the gaps bit by bit, giving them a solid iron core with a tipped point. Even if my experiment yielded poor results, at least I had a way to now make armor piercing shotgun slugs. Next, I held my hand over them and tried part two of my idea.
Five pieces of Abyssal Iron detected. Tier 2 material, small size. Required Soul Energy for enchantment equals 5. Requires 1 Mana.
Enchant pieces of Abyssal Iron with Thunderous Impact?
Soul Energy: 37/235
Mana: 2/6
Pieces of Abyssal Iron have been enchanted! Would you like to name them?
Name: 12ga Shellshock
Confirm?
Again, I know it wasn’t the most imaginative name I could’ve given them, but this was just another trial run to see just how many rounds I could enchant at once. So far, the lower limit was five at a time, I’d try more later when I had spare SE. Given the previous result with the arrow, I wasn’t foreseeing extensive use, especially with the cost.
Regardless, I had five of them to test out, plenty of room there to change my mind.
One by one I loaded the enchanted slugs back into their hulls, crimped them, and loaded them all into my shotgun.
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After donning my full kit I stepped back into the dungeon with gun in hand, eager to try out my new ammo. The first and most obvious place to try it out was the two rooms at the end of the first hallway. Inside the south room of course sat five unaware goblins. I lined up my sight on them, clicked off the safety, and chambered the first slug.
They turned around to look at me when they heard the noise.
There wasn’t enough time for them to react much before my finger squeezed the trigger.
Let me say that I am thankful that I was wearing my safety goggles. The sound of the gun going off was normal enough, the recoil was a bit heightened from the heavier projectile coming out.
The impact though? Well, what would be the best way for me to describe what the slug did to the goblin.
Have you ever seen what happens when a coyote gets hit by a .50 BMG? I have. A few years ago a friend of Charlie’s had some chickens, of which a coyote got ahold of a couple. He wanted that coyote dead in a way that quote “left a message to all those other furry fucks that might be on my land”. Well, Charlie of course had just bought a Barrett M107A1, which is one of my favorite firearms in existence.
He was very excited for a chance to testfire it.
Charlie clapped that coyote from just over two hundred yards away, using a 750gr A-MAX projectile. I got to watch from beside him through a thermal scope. That coyote ceased to exist in this world as a singular entity. What remained was a mess of scattered pieces. There is a saying, “Artillery is the martial art of rendering your enemy past-tense”. I say that is appropriate here.
Yes, I am aware that this was wildly excessive to do to a mere coyote, but in our defense I’ll just say that the guy never lost another chicken to any coyotes.
Keeping that in mind, you can now imagine the carnage inside that small room. The remaining four goblins stood there and simply stared at the spot where their comrade had been standing just moments before being smited. Bits of their friend were dripping from the ceiling, and off of their bodies.
I wiped the blood from my goggles.
“Holy fuck.”
None of us did anything for a few seconds. To them, their friend had just been violently turned inside out. For me, I was currently holding the new and improved “Fuck You In Particular 9000”.
It took a few moments for coherent thoughts to push through the internal caveman noises in my head. The first thing that came to mind was “I wonder what this would do to a boss monster”.
I stowed my shotgun and retrieved my MK47, wanting to save the other four shells for later. The remaining four goblins were still paralyzed with shock, too stunned to actually fight back or dodge. The gory scene cleared away a few seconds after their bodies hit the floor.
I found only four XP gems on the ground. Remembering where all five had originally stood, I did the mental math.
The goblin that got smited did not drop a gem.
Had I done so much damage that the gem was destroyed? Or did gems only drop from whole (or mostly whole) bodies? That was yet another thing that I needed to figure out now.
I repacked the four rounds that I’d used, then collected my XP.
Gained 4 Soul Energy, 41/235
There was no gold to be found.
I had to be sure of what was going on before I could proceed. There was a possibility that the XP gem was going the way of the gold nugget, with drop rates starting to go down. If that was true, then that was going to make my life more complicated. I’d need to separate the goblins, kill some with normal means, watch them drop their gems, then take out the last one with the Shellshock.
Setting up another tripwire trap would be difficult in the hallway. I could take out a goblin’s leg, but then it might bleed out and die before I could try anything.
Maybe I could use my Blade to hold it down? No, same issue, if I pinned it to the wall with it, the goblin might bleed out or rip free. And I’d seen already that a goblin could strongarm the thing. A one pound object that could move up to 34mph could exert, at most, thirty nine foot pounds of energy. While that was more than sufficient for a sharp blade to pierce skin, it was not nearly enough to hold something down.
I sort of wished that I had the original form of the Hovering Disk, maybe I could’ve knocked a goblin over and weighed it down, so it couldn’t move.
Wait.
I had the actual enchantment.
I had the materials.
I had some SE to spare.
A few seconds later I was standing in my workshop again, holding my hand over the chunk of Abyssal Iron.
Ability: Quick Craft activated
Mana: 1/6
A thin disk of the red metal formed and separated. I made it six inches wide, and three sixteenths of an inch thick. Even as it was forming, I could tell that such a small surface area wasn’t going to hold much stuff, and I didn’t have solid lead on hand, so I added four small holes through which bolts could be ran. I was already planning to mount a steel plate to the top of it to make more room.
I weighed the piece, it came out to a pound nearly perfectly.
In my garage were a few pieces of leftover steel sheets from when I had renovated my workshop. Much like my father, and his father, and all the men of my family before me, I hoarded any leftover construction material because “you never know when you’ll need it”. There was also a pile of random lengths of lumber, which I’d eventually find a use for.
Most of the steel was over half an inch thick, which was more than I was wanting to use, but I had a few sheets that were only an eighth of an inch thick. That would work perfect.
It was easy enough to use my steel saw to cut out a one foot by one foot section, and then I sat the iron disk in the middle to mark where I needed to drill the holes. A short trip to the drill press later, and it was ready to mount. I sourced a few bolts from my workbench, and mounted the two plates together.
Perfect fit.
Weighing it, the whole thing came out to just over 6 pounds.
I detached the pieces, set the steel aside, and held the Abyssal Iron in my hands and focused.
Piece of Abyssal Iron detected. Tier 2 material, small size. Required Soul Energy for enchantment equals 10. Requires 1 Mana.
Enchant pieces of Abyssal Iron with Limited Animation (Flight)?
Soul Energy: 31/235
Mana: 0/6
Piece of Abyssal Iron has been enchanted! Would you like to name it?
Name: Hold My Stuff Mk 1
Confirm?
Once the enchantment was done, I mounted the pieces back together, and let the holder of stuff float there.
So far, I could see that the enchantment would hold up six pounds of stuff no problem, but I wasn't sure if that included the weight of the enchanted item itself. I went and gathered some of the exercise weights from the garage. One at a time, I placed the five pound disk weights on the floating plate. Eleven pounds total weight, one plus ten, no problem. Sixteen pounds total, one plus fifteen, still holding up. Twenty one pound, one plus twenty, it was holding firm. I was already thinking that this would make for a good way to carry extra gear, but decided I’d need to add sideskirts to make sure nothing toppled off.
I took back off the five pound weights, replaced them with two ten’s, and added another five pound. Twenty six pounds, thirty one, thirty six.
Finally, at forty one pounds, the Mk 1 stuff holder dipped a bit, lowering by at least six inches toward the floor. When I tried to make it raise back up, it shook slightly, but didn’t elevate.
I added another five pounds, and it gently lowered the rest of the way to the floor, landing softly. I tried to get it to move around, it didn’t budge. After taking back off the last weight, it raised back up. I spent a few seconds having the thing move around the room, and it trudged along like an overencumbered Elder Scrolls MC. It could certainly keep up with a slow walking speed, about three miles per hour. I didn’t want to try and make it move faster, for fear that I’d launch the weights across the room.
I removed another weight, and it lifted back up. Holding my hands around the stack of weights, I had it rotate around me, and it seemed to have no problem moving at about five miles per. I stepped into the fridge with it, and had it go down the hall. I’d guess it got to ten miles per hour, and when I had it stop the weights kept going and slammed into the wall.
So, it obviously slowed down the more weight I added, with about forty pounds being the most it could actually move (not including the weight of the iron itself). With a five pound steel plate as the load-bearing surface, that meant I could haul around about thirty five pounds of stuff per plate, though that would go down once I added straps or rails. Overall, it could carry just a bit less than what I could, before I leveled my Strength. That meant more room in my pouch, since I could use this to transport the food and water, and even more ammo.
I had enough SE left over, and enough steel, to make three more of these. If I mounted them together, it would still fit through my fridge with a few inches to spare on the sides, and by my math carry up to one hundred and forty pounds.
Fuck. Yes.
I spent the next hour working on how I’d set it up, and decided to stick with cargo straps for the moment. It was easy enough to drill the steel for tie-down rings, and I had plenty of straps from the last time I helped a friend move.
Of course I’d need to let my Mana restore before I could make the actual plates, at two Mana each.
I suppose I could clear the rest of the first floor while I was waiting.