I cleared the doorframe and stepped into the room as the motion sensors dinged beside me, my shotgun came up and leveled on the first goblin. As the group yelped in surprise at my sudden arrival I fired my first shot, replacing the mob’s face with a crater. While I racked in the next shell Charlie walked in behind me. His first shot synchronized with my second and two more goblins fell. His 300 Blackout barked once again and dropped the furthest mob while my Blade dug into the throat of the last.
While that final goblin was in its death throes I reloaded all but one shell, leaving the chamber clear and open, and Charlie moved around to cover the door to the orc-room.
“So what's the plan for this one? Gonna smoke him out with the totally-not-cosplay knife?”
“No, I was thinking I’d try something else, you might want to make sure your ear-pro is on tight.”
I approached the door while I loaded in a Shellshock, leaving three in my pocket, and aimed it through the door.
“What’s that?”
“Something I made earlier today. I used one on a goblin earlier, but I wanna see how it performs for area-of-effect.”
“Wait, what? You have an AOE shotgun shell?”
“Watch this.”
I pulled the trigger. Again I am thankful for my hearing protection. Earlier, when it had hit the goblin, the soundwave had been significantly dampened by the fact that the explosion was contained inside a soft body. This time, with it just hitting the stone wall, there was nothing to muffle it.
I was knocked backward, stumbled back several feet, and it felt like I had been punched in the chest. The best way I could describe it would be standing near one of your drunk relatives on the Fourth of July while he lights the gasoline he just put on a woodpile. My sinuses were cleared. It was hard to see into the room with all of the dust in the air, I could see that that blue abyssalite inside had shattered.
Perhaps I should have backed up, to see if the orc would come for me, but curiosity was far too persuasive and made me poke my head around to look.
His leg was the first thing I saw.
There it was, laying on the floor right inside the door. Splattered blood was running down the wall. At the far wall I spotted the orc. He was bent backwards over the chest in the corner. His remaining leg was at a ninety degree angle, the wrong way. From what I could tell, looking at the blood and the impact spot of the shell, he had been very close to point zero and was violently projected away.
Despite that, he was still alive, and his arms flailed somewhat uselessly in my direction. It took me a moment to realize why he wasn’t coming for me in a berserk state. His back was broken. Charlie walked in behind me.
“Jesus Christ, what the fuck was that? It sounded like a damn 40mm grenade went off in—”
His eyes took in the sight, then locked onto the orc. He walked toward it with his rifle ready, just in case it tried to lunge.
“Alright, new question, how much do I gotta pay you to get some of whatever it was that you just fired?”
“About one SE per shot.”
“Uh huh, and what is SE?”
“Oh, Soul Energy. That’s what the XP gems are really called. You need it to level up, but also I have to use it to enchant stuff.”
“Sounds like 3rd Edition.”
“Yeah, didn’t think of it like that till now, but sorta on the money.”
“So how much SE is this guy worth?”
He gestured to the crippled orc.
“Five SE.”
His rifle came up, aimed at the orc’s head, and fired twice.
“Alright, I’ll take five.”
“I’ll get right on it, later, gotta let my Mana regenerate enough first, and you gotta decide what form you want them. As a heads up, I haven’t tested it much yet, but it seems that if I use one on a goblin then they don’t drop any XP. I’m not sure if it's because the gem got destroyed or what.”
“Got it. So use it for the big boys.”
“Pretty much what I was thinking.”
The body dispersed, leaving behind the XP gem.
“Go ahead and use that one, let's find out how much you need to initiate the system.”
He picked it up, and it vanished from his hand. Suddenly his eyes widened.
“It worked…”
“What do you see?”
“That it exceeded the minimum amount of Soul Energy needed to initiate it?”
“Son of a bitch!”
That meant it took less than seven SE to initiate the System, that meant the ogre that had nearly killed me had been worth less than fifteen. Horseshit!
“Status?”
His hand waved out in front of his face.
Fuck, you weren’t kidding, this really is like a RPG!”
“I guess this means that we can’t see each other’s Status windows, that kinda sucks. Are you looking at it now?”
“Yeah, but why does everything besides Aura and Stamina have no numbers? The heck is with that?”
“Oh, it’s just like that. Don’t worry about it, you haven’t been reset to being a toddler made of glass or anything. Those stats, so far as I can tell, represent how much you’re buffed past your baseline level. Stamina acts like a tank of extra energy, and when it runs out you just go back to your normal energy. Until it hits zero, it sort of feels like you’re tireless.”
“That’s pretty cool. What does Aura do?”
“Think of it like a magical invisible shield.”
“Seriously? Like it can deflect bullets and shit?”
“No, unfortunately. I did some testing. It only protects you from things in the dungeon. So far as I’ve been able to confirm, the System refuses to recognize anything from our world.”
“Damn, that sucks. Still, it's nice that we have a shield against the mobs.”
“Everything on the Status window will give you a basic description if you focus on it. If you have any questions about what it all actually does, feel free to ask.”
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“I see what you meant by the System not recognizing our stuff… My Equipment window is all garbled.”
“Yep. Makes storage items a bit of a pain to use, cause ya gotta manually scroll through and select the item you want and remember what gibberish it was. It takes some practice.”
“And you’re keeping spare mags and ammo to reload like that?”
“Yeah, like I said, practice.”
It occurred to me that my high Dexterity might’ve been helping with my reaction times in that.
“Guess I need ten more to the next level.”
“Affirm, it seems to go up by five each time, it takes a hundred and ninety to level from nine to ten.”
“Jesus.”
“Yep. I did some math earlier, and unless the numbers change at higher levels, it’d take over five and a half thousand to get from level zero to level twenty”
“And these goblins are worth only one each… How often do they respawn? They do respawn right?”
“Yep. By my findings, the dungeon respawns everything every two months, or every twenty four hours for the real world.”
“I guess we should get to work then…”
He took a few more seconds to take in the new System, then gestured toward the chest.
“I take it this is a treasure chest, or a mimic?”
“Yep. I’ve taken to prodding them all with my crowbar to make sure. The first one that showed up was pretty nasty.”
“Alright, so how should we handle it?”
“I poke it, see if it reacts. If it does, we light it up. Once it's dead, it’ll drop an XP gem that’ll get you to level two. Combine that with the gems from the other orcs and the goblins, and the hobgoblins in the hall, you should come out to… Somewhere around thirty. How much SE do you have right now?”
He took a second to check.
“Two of ten?”
“Got it… By my math then, we’ll have you at thirty three total, assuming this thing tries to eat us. That’ll get you to level three and halfway to level four.”
“Then why are we standing around? Let pry this bitch open!”
I retrieved my crowbar and lined it up on the seam of the chest’s lid, then gave it a good solid poke.
It cracked open, and I saw the rows of teeth as they formed in the metal lining. As I was about to drop the crowbar and open fire with the shotgun, it began making a noise.
A horrible, awful noise, that felt like it was going to shatter my bones with the resonance.
I had heard it before, but never that loud, that soul penetratingly loud.
Before I could level the 12ga at it Charlie had opened fire, dumping half a magazine into its body before stopping to see the results. With horror I watched as the .30 caliber slugs flattened against the wooden body, and spider-like legs began to sprout out of the bottom. It reminded me a bit of the crab-head from The Thing. Though this one didn’t have a tongue lashing around. My shotgun disappeared into the pouch and my .308 came to hand.
The top half of the chest came chomping at me as it used those new legs to leap my way.
Ability: Minor Speed activated
I dove to the side as my finger hammered the trigger, five rounds went right toward its maw as it flew past me. Charlie dodged backward just out of reach and it clumsily fell to the floor in the room where the goblins had just been slain. Its legs flailed about as it laid on its side like an overturned turtle. Charlie wasted no time in unloading the other half of his mag into its mouth, yet it still lived.
Something was seriously wrong with this thing. The first one had taken a quarter of the firepower to go down, and what the hell was with the legs!
It occurred to me, as I walked around to take aim again, what it had to be.
This mimic was another elite.
Its legs suddenly snapped sideways, its lid bending around, and it pushed itself off the ground to return to standing.
“James! I think we need another one of those big boy slugs!”
“I know! But I really don’t want to waste another so soon!”
“You have any better ideas? This thing just doesn’t care how much we shoot it!”
I could see that while the interior of its mouth was riddled like swiss cheese, it just kept standing. It came scuttling toward us without a single care for all the damage.
Then something happened that I hadn’t expected. Charlie, standing beside me, suddenly let his rifle drop across his chest before reaching into his left pocket, then into a pouch on his plate carrier. From them, he retrieved a lighter and a spray can. Without a word he held down the valve and lit the flame.
A small geyser of flame shot across the room and hit the mimic full force. It was nothing compared to a real flamethrower, or even to the amount of fire that shot out from the use of Lesser Firebolt, but something came to mind as I watched the spider-legged chest caught fire.
It turns out that mimics are exceptionally flammable.
I wasn’t aware until that point that the mimics could make noise beyond the sound of squeaky hinges.
The damn thing screamed.
Its scream sounded much like that of the first chests I had encountered, the sound that drew in waves of goblins.
Ability: Minor Speed deactivated
Stamina: 35/50
In fact, it was so similar that I was only partially surprised when I heard the motion sensor ding all out in the hallway. Charlie’s head snapped toward the door when the sound met his ear. He dropped the can and lighter without delay and brought his rifle to bear on the door.
“Incoming! Reload while you can! I’ll hold them off!”
I think credit is due to Charlie’s training, that he dropped the mag from his rifle and pulled the next without questioning it. He calmly reloaded even as the first of the goblins showed up. My .308 went into the pouch and the MK47 came out to play. As I put two in its chest he drove the mag home, and a moment later when another three shoved at each other to get through the door first he opened fire as well.
My Blade shot into the growing crowd, and I realized that the sound in the hallway was only increasing in volume as more and more joined the party. Within ten seconds Charlie had run out of ammo, so with one hand on my rifle I retrieved my shotgun with the other and tossed it to him followed by the box of shells. As he reloaded I held them back, then my 12ga roared in his hands as he started cutting them down with 00 Buck.
“Dropping my pack!”
“Roger!”
For a second he held them back alone, while my pack came free from my shoulders. I kicked it around to rest in front of my feet, and zipped open the pocket that held my mags. As the horde persisted, my final loaded mag on my vest ran dry, and I had to reach down to grab the next from the bag.
The goblins slowed to a trickle, and for a second we had the opportunity to breathe and reload.
Then the sensor dinged again, and the floor rumbled.
“What the fuck was that?”
Charlie looked to me with concern across his face. A very unpleasant memory was already replaying in my head, but this time around I was much more prepared. The room shook again as the sensor right at the door dinged once more.
“No time! Catch!”
The Shellshock 12ga shell materialized in my hand and a microsecond later was tossed through the air toward him. He caught it and without asking why he cleared the chamber of my shotgun and loaded the shell in. My MK47 was quickly replaced by my .308 once more, and as I brought it up to aim the ogre began squeezing through the doorframe.
“Fuck it up!”