The Death attunement in the Layered Dungeon’s ninth level felt slightly off. It was definitely Death, but there was a slight hint of something else. Undeath, maybe? It was familiar but at the same time slightly foreign. All that meant, really, was that it was based on a Concept of Death that didn’t quite match Serenity’s. That was common, since Concepts were rarely identical, but this difference seemed more obvious than most.
Serenity couldn’t tell if that was because it was farther from his own Concept or simply because he was closer to his Affinity than he had been before. He suspected it was mostly because of his Incarnate, if it wasn’t from the associated evolution; he remembered a similar increase in sensitivity when he first achieved an Aspect of Death.
“You really do have a Skill that lets you ease the burden of Death on others,” Daryl stated. He sounded shocked. “Even Master Zany couldn’t do that.”
Serenity shrugged. He didn’t want to make a big deal of it; protective Skills weren’t that uncommon and while his wasn’t technically a protective Skill, it worked just as well as most. “Guildmaster Zany was undead, wasn’t he? He probably didn’t need such a Skill himself and never developed one, that’s all.”
There was more to it than that, of course, but most people didn’t actually care about the fine details. Too much Death magic could be harmful to Death-based undead the same way too much Life magic could be harmful to the living. Whether it caused mora or cancer, too much of a Vital Affinity wasn’t automatically a good thing. On top of that, many undead were only incidentally dependent on Death; it was relatively common and Serenity had been, but he was pretty sure that Death wasn’t even the most common Vital Affinity for the undead.
Naomi turned to Gabriel. “Let’s get moving. Protected or not, I don’t like this place.”
Gabriel nodded and led the way out of the circular “room” and into a “corridor”. The passageway was significantly narrower than the area they’d started in, but it was still more than large enough to be comfortable. The narrowest spots were over fifteen feet from one wall of plants to the other.
“Don’t get too close to the walls,” Gabriel warned Serenity when he stepped close to look at one in more detail. “They sometimes attack if you get too close or pay too much attention to them.”
They didn’t seem that active to Serenity; they hadn’t moved at all. He was interested in exactly what the thorns would do, but even if the walls hadn’t reacted yet, it was probably better to listen to the voice of experience. Serenity stepped away from the wall.
They reached a large, ovoid open area. Serenity had just long enough to realize it had to be an arena before movement alerted him that they had an opponent. The first monster was a plant; clearly based on a tree of some sort, it was more than twice Serenity’s height and had branches that extended nearly as far to the side as it was tall. As Serenity had guessed, it was a Death-based plant instead of a Life-based plant. If you couldn’t read Vital Affinities, however, you might never know; the leaves were a dark, glossy green and looked very healthy. They resembled the leaves on a pear tree, with lighter green veins and a sharp point at the end. There were a large number of thorns.
“Naomi! Hold it in place, Daryl and I can kill it!” Gabriel shouted and pointed at the tree.
Naomi charged the tree. The tree-monster lashed out with thorny limbs, but Naomi was able to keep it from advancing on the others; despite its height and width, it was still a tree and its roots were poorly designed for a shoving match. It was a good thing she was encased in metal; even with her armor, Serenity didn’t like the idea of being near those thorns.
He liked the idea of being useless even less, but he wasn’t entirely certain what to do to the tree. His Skills from his Zonal Evocation Mage Path were clearly unsuitable; he didn’t want to hit Naomi. At the same time, his Death Magebolt would hurt the tree but it would be far less effective than most choices. He needed to fall back on his weapons, but the only one that truly seemed suitable was his Crystal Hilt.
Serenity ran towards the tree, a few steps behind Naomi. When he reached the tree, he dodged around to the side; Naomi would need more room than Serenity, but he needed some as well. Despite the past few days, they weren’t practiced at working together and he definitely wanted to avoid either of them accidentally striking or blocking the other.
Serenity tuned his Crystal Hilt to his Plasma Affinity; it was a reasonable one for fighting almost anything. Gabriel seemed to have the same idea, as Firebolts flew past Naomi and splashed in the upper portions of the tree. Each time he hit, leaves and thorns withered in the intense heat. Smaller limbs simply wouldn’t survive a direct hit.
Daryl wasn’t using fire; he was using lightning arrows. They left large burn marks wherever they hit, similar to Gabriel’s, but a bit more focused. They weren’t even close to as good at removing greenery, but that wasn’t what Daryl was trying to do. Instead, he aimed his shots to hit individual branches, damaging them or even completely breaking them off.
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Serenity had the feeling that this was something they’d done before, though with a different person in the front line. He also had the feeling that they’d picked this way of handling the fight because it was effective and safe, not because it was fast. He couldn’t argue with those priorities, but he also didn’t want to spend that long on a tree.
Serenity went after the trunk. It shouldn’t have been easy; when his blade started to burn its way past the tree’s bark and into its heartwood, it should have shifted all of its attention onto him and tried to keep him from hurting it.
That wasn’t what happened. Instead, the tree ignored Serenity as though he weren’t there. It did seem to become more agitated, but it never attacked Serenity at all, not even by accident. It smacked Naomi and whipped its branches at Daryl and Gabriel, releasing thorns like projectiles. None of it came even close to the person attacking the trunk.
When Serenity finally managed to cut through the trunk, the tree stopped pushing forward; it wasn’t fully dead yet, but without a connection to its roots it had no way to “walk” forward. It tried to pull itself along the ground using its branches, but that didn’t work at all well.
The “not dead yet” reaction was fairly common in plant monsters, regardless of Vital Affinity. Even so, once Serenity and Naomi shoved it to the side, against one of the maze walls, it was helpless and there was no point in fighting it more.
Serenity took a little time to check the three Silver Blades; they all had thorn injuries and all of the punctures carried a moderately invasive Death-affinity taint. Serenity cleaned it out with a concentrated focus from Eat Death; Gabriel didn’t comment but he seemed pleased with how easy the injuries were to heal.
The second encounter was a pair of small statues in the next wide spot; this time, instead of being long, the ovoid arena was widest to the left and right; one golem approached the group from each side. Serenity had expected large, lumbering golems but these were small and fast. In many ways, they were the opposite of the tree monster, though they were easily as durable.
To Serenity’s surprise, they seemed to be made from a glossy near-white stone; it was mottled with darker specks and seemed to have some small inclusions that looked more like tiny seashells than anything else. Each one was about two feet tall; one was shaped like a lump of stone with two legs, while the other looked like someone had mashed together all sorts of spindly, spiky limbs almost at random, more like a tumbleweed than anything living. Like the tree, they both radiated Death magic.
Despite their oddball appearance, they weren’t all that difficult to fight. Naomi blocked off the stone with legs while Daryl, Gabriel, and Serenity took care of the spiky one. Serenity tried to block it and eventually came up with a surprisingly effective method: he simply had to stay between it and the two backliners. For whatever reason, like the tree before it, it refused to attack Serenity even to get past him.
The two golems were sturdy, but with three people who could actually hurt the spined rock, they were able to disassemble it eventually. No one was hurt, since Serenity’s method of blocking meant it never got close enough to anyone to actually hit them.
The rock with legs took longer; Naomi was unable to damage it at all. While the others could hurt it, they weren’t able to do more than scratch the surface of the rock.They eventually ended up breaking the legs off to immobilize it. The dungeon seemed to count that as enough.
After that fight, it was only a few minutes’ walk before Gabriel told Naomi to turn left into a corner that seemed to lead back to where they’d entered the level. The new corridor was long, but there were few choices as it snaked back and forth. Each time there was a choice, Gabriel had them alternate between the route that went left and the route that went right.
There were no more monsters before the way opened up into another arena; this time, it seemed to be a dead end. Serenity scanned the area for another monster, but didn’t immediately see it.
“This is where the shortcut is,” Gabriel stated. “At least, I think it is. This looks right and I think I got the path right.” Serenity looked over his shoulder at Gabriel. The mage had walked a little to the side of the entrance and seemed to be focusing on part of the hedge. “I think it was over here somewhere?”
“A bit to your left,” Daryl offered. “You see where the wall looks a bit more yellow? I think that was the doorway.”
Neither of them got close to the hedge.
Serenity headed over to look at it, but as far as he could tell there wasn’t anything different about the spot other than its color and an odd lack of roots actually entering the ground right in the area they indicated. It certainly looked like a good spot for a shortcut, but he didn’t see any way to trigger it and it didn’t respond when he tried to touch it with unformed Death mana. That didn’t mean he was out of ideas, but it meant he should ask some more questions. “When Guildmaster Zany opened the shortcut, what did he do?”
“He closed his eyes and meditated for a bit, then the plants moved to the side,” Daryl stated. “I always thought that was mostly for the effect, but maybe there was something I couldn’t see.”
“There are Skills that are hard to use,” Gabriel stated snidely. “It was probably one of them. I never felt anything either, but I don’t have an Affinity with Death magic.”
Serenity tried not to shake his head at that. You didn’t have to have an Affinity to a particular type of magic to feel it; the fact that Gabriel thought you did was a failure of his teachers. It was harder to sense other magic types with an Arcane Affinity, but you could - and with practice, anyone who could use magic at all could get the Arcane Affinity. That’s what the Arcane Affinity meant, after all, the ability to do magic.
There was one person left to ask. Serenity took another look around the thirty-foot-wide circle, then sat down when he didn’t see any enemies. “I’ll give it a try, see if I can figure anything out.” Serenity closed his eyes to eliminate distractions, then reached out to the dungeon to ask how to open the shortcut.
The answer he got back was a surprise: there was no way to open the shortcut. The dungeon had to do it; it had set up the short cut and opened it whenever the Dungeon Binder told it to.