Daryl rushed around to the far side of the golem while Gabriel set up an Ice Wall behind it and Naomi rushed the golem to get its attention. It was clear they’d done this before, since they did it without any directions or confusion.
Serenity shrugged to himself and started to get to his job, killing the golem with Death magic.
It was a boring fight. Yes, it knocked Naomi back a few times, but each time Gabriel was ready with an ice Wall in plenty of time to let her recover while keeping it away from Serenity yet distracted from Daryl. Sure, it took longer than one of the individual golems, but that still meant it took only a dozen of Serenity’s overcharged Death Manabolts to finish off the golem. Serenity had about half his mana left when the golem collapsed. It just wasn’t much of a fight.
That seemed to be Daryl’s reaction, as well, when they joined him at the vent. He jumped and started to move away, as if they were the golem, before he realized who they were. “You’re already done? I know it was small, but already?”
“Yeah, already. I even had time to crack out its heart,” Gabriel said. “Ready for me to toss it in?”
Daryl shook his head. “Not quite. Hey, Serenity, do you still have that fireglass I gave you?”
“Yeah, it’s right here. Need it back?” Serenity offered the fist-sized chunk of what was probably obsidian to Daryl.
Daryl inclined his head towards the volcanic vent. “Toss it in there. There should be a …” he stopped while Serenity tossed the fireglass in. A puff of white smoke filled the vent for a moment then cleared, almost like steam. “That did it. You can toss the elemental heart in now, Gabe.”
“Gabriel.” Gabriel barely even seemed to notice he’d spoken as he tossed the odd reddish crystal he’d pulled out of the lava golem into the vent. It felt like a monster core to Serenity, so calling it a “heart” was probably as accurate as anything when it came from the monster’s “chest”.
Serenity spared a moment to wish that the Silver Blades would actually explain these things. He was pretty confident by now that they were telling him just enough to make it through the dungeon without revealing any secrets they could avoid and it was annoying.
Some of the things they missed were mistakes and some were obviously “because it was funny”, but this one was probably to keep him from leaving and running the special area on his own. The thing was that they’d already shown him enough that it wouldn’t be hard to work out what was needed, even if he couldn’t just ask the dungeon. That made their reticence annoying instead of reasonable.
The volcano shook around them. Serenity glanced at the Silver Blades and found that they’d already sat down; they’d clearly expected the shaking. He joined them on the ground just in time for a second, larger shake. Something that looked like molten rock rose up through the vent, but it clearly wasn’t. It wasn’t hot; Serenity was close enough he’d be able to feel it if it were.
It solidified into a perfect plug with a pedestal in the exact center, then the shaking stopped. A spot of light sparked into being above the pedestal; when it faded, there was a clear red crystal sitting on the pedestal. It was at least twice the size of the monster core Gabriel had tossed into the vent and didn’t feel like a monster core at all. It looked like red glass, but Serenity didn’t believe that. It had to be the fire-heart the three Silver Blades had claimed. Serenity looked forward to talking to Daryl’s sister about it.
A moment after Daryl claimed the fire-heart, the embers that had floated in the area since the Fire Wave started to dissipate and the invitation to the next level appeared. Serenity noted that none of the Silver Blades accepted; instead, they took off their protective clothing and tucked it in their packs. Each of them then pulled out a cloak that looked more like a metallized full-length raincoat than anything else.
Gabriel pulled out two. He tosses the second one at Serenity. “Here, you’ll need this. I know we didn’t tell you to get one, so I figured I should loan you my spare. Your shield should keep the lightning on the next level from hurting you, but if it’s doing that it can’t, y’know, act as a proper shield. So this diverts a bunch of it. If it gets torn, well, lightning will get in. So try not to let that happen.”
They had mentioned that the sixth level was a lightning storm, but no one had said anything about needing protective gear for it. This had to be yet another of the deliberate omissions; still, Serenity couldn’t really blame them for this one. They might have left it out, but Gabriel made sure Serenity had what he needed before he got there.
Serenity pulled the cloak around himself and was glad he wasn’t any bigger than he was; the rain gear was a bit small as it was. It wouldn’t have been able to cover him completely if he were any larger.
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Once they were equipped, the Silver Blades moved on to the next level. Serenity followed quickly.
The sixth level was an open field with grass that varied wildly in height from nearly nonexistent to waist-high. A few hundred feet away, a Serenity could see a wall of rain, even though none fell right where he was standing; the other direction seemed clear as well. There was lightning throughout the rain and an almost continuous string of thunderclaps made it a bit more difficult to understand the others.
The grass was different, but other than that it reminded Serenity of the final fight against the Sterath in the hills outside Denver. This time, he didn’t think he’d be handling it by dismantling the spell; among other things, there wasn’t a single spell to dismantle. The lightning was “natural”, or at least as natural as these things got in a dungeon.
“The clear opening,” Daryl said, “But it doesn’t look like one of the long ones. I’d say we have less than a minute before the storm gets here.”
“No encounter before the storm, then.” Gabriel grinned. “Good, I hate those.”
More things they hadn’t mentioned. Joy. At least these didn’t seem to be important; encounters before the storm were likely to be like the animals at the beginning of the previous level, simply there to wear down the delvers. They’d be a Tier higher but that was all.
Naomi led the way into the storm. The raincoats were good at keeping the rain off, at least. Serenity appreciated that; there were feelings worse than being drenched in a spring storm like this one, but it still wasn’t comfortable.
At first, the only real threat was the storm itself, but after about an hour they started to encounter individual lightning elementals, then some odd creatures that looked like frozen lightning bolts made of stone. Serenity suspected they were supposed to be fulgurites, even though they looked more like stone golems with a lightning shape.
The fulgurite golems were very sharp but fairly fragile; Naomi had to work hard to avoid having her protective raincoat cut by them. She wasn’t entirely successful, but she didn’t seem worried about the small cuts in the cloak.
Serenity tried attacking them in different ways; as it turned out, the lightning elementals were quite vulnerable to his Death Magebolt but it was better to hit the fulgurites physically. Strangely, that seemed to mean that Gabriel was primarily attacking the fulgurites with an Ice Spear wand while Daryl used a Skill that reminded Serenity of his old Elemental Bow to shoot some form of magic at the lightning elementals.
As they wandered across the lightning-scarred plain, the number of monsters grew. Small groups were fine, but Serenity noticed that they detoured around any group that seemed to be made of more than four monsters. When they finally attacked a group of seven since there was no better way through, Serenity got his answer on the reason why: the three lightning elementals rammed into each other and fused into a larger, more dangerous, and significantly more difficult to kill while the four fulgurite golems charged the group and forced them to give the elementals the time they needed.
It was like a minoboss fight; much like a miniboss fight in a game, it seemed to announce a change in the area. A handful of minutes after fighting off the enlarged lightning elemental, they were no longer walking over scorched grass; instead, they walked over a barren plain that had lightning skitter across the ground periodically. Lightning no longer fell from the sky in individual bolts; instead, it washed over the area in waves.
It did nothing to the four delvers inside their enchanted metal-coated rain gear. This was clearly the threat it was designed to handle, and it was well made.
The monster encounters on the lightning plain were the same as the ones before, small lightning elementals and fulgurite golems. There were no new monsters and the only increase in the danger was from the environment itself; there weren’t even any groups of more than four monsters. Serenity was a little disappointed; it seemed relatively boring.
On the other hand, there had to be a secret somewhere. There had been a secret on every level so far, at least every level where he’d checked. Serenity wasn’t sure what it was, but he was pretty sure they were skipping it. It was possible they knew what it was and didn’t find it valuable enough, but it was equally possible that they simply didn’t know about it.
At this point, Serenity didn’t really care; he was here to check out the dungeon and clear it, not to get all its secrets and rewards. If he wanted the secrets, he could ask the dungeon. It would probably be more willing to tell him than the Silver Blades were, as well. It was friendly and eager to help in a way that they simply weren’t. He was an outsider, so that was only to be expected.
At the center of the plain there was a pillar of lightning that ran from the clouds to the ground continuously; it was loud enough that there was no way for anyone to talk. It had to be the site of the final encounter for the level, so Serenity readied himself to fight and watched the Silver Blades. The only thing he knew about this boss was that there would be a series of things he was supposed to attack with magic, then “the large one” that he was specifically not supposed to use magic on, because magic would only empower it.
The fight started when a lightning elemental a bit larger than the ones they’d been fighting the whole time flung itself out of the nonsensically massive lightning strike. It was an easy kill, as were the fulgurites and elementals that followed. They grew larger with each subsequent kill but came one at a time.
About a dozen monsters in, something that looked like a miniature tornado emerged; Serenity tentatively classified it as either a wind elemental or a storm elemental. It proved just as vulnerable to magic as the fulgurites, but its presence confirmed to Serenity that he was correct. There was more to this level that they hadn’t seen.
The very next monster was a water elemental. It was amorphous and always shifting, seemingly nearly immune to magic, but Gabriel knew what to do. He cast an Ice Wall near it and the water elemental disappeared, leaving behind an Ice Wall that was significantly larger than Gabriel’s norm.