As I’d previously noted, being undead had a definite effect on my mind, similar to when I withdrew my consciousness into my soul gem. It wasn’t quite the same though. There were still some emotions, just muted and a little strange.
The first thing I noticed this time was that the river no longer disgusted me on the visceral level it had before. That was good. The next was that Dorian’s screams no longer tugged at my heartstrings. That would have been okay by itself, but now they also sounded a little too… appetizing.
Dorian was being reeled in by a series of meat tubes, some with faces and some without, each having bitten onto each other with their many mouths. Small, almost thornlike protrusions jutted from the swarming flesh, digging into both Dorian and each other. They operated like a single long limb, and as I watched, I saw other such limbs forming and beginning to rise, questing for more targets.
I watched Dorian’s health bar in the party interface carefully. It was getting dangerously low, but then one of the faces swung over and pressed its open mouth against his screaming one. The screaming stopped for a moment as I saw one of the black grubs crawl out of the thing’s mouth and into Dorian’s. His screaming resumed a moment later, even more panicked, but now his health seemed to be holding steady, or even regenerating slightly.
I didn’t think that was a good thing, so I tossed my spear as hard as I could, taking Dorian in the chest, killing him. A moment later, I felt his spirit settle into my soul-space. That wasn’t all I needed to do though, not by half, so I climbed the tower until I could reach Dorian’s still ascending and twitching body.
When it was in range I grabbed it, and then drove my clawed hand into his stomach, penetrating his skin and guts alike, searching. I felt the tubes of meat sliding over me, taking small bites, trying to figure out what I was. I quested inside Dorian until I felt something else writhing around in there as well. I grabbed it, then pulled it out to check.
Congratulations, you have received enough XP to become a Level 4 Shadow Thief!
In my hand I held a black grub that appeared to be in the middle of metamorphosing. It was elongating and changing color, becoming more like the meat tubes hanging all around me now. I held it for a moment while I drew Dorian’s body into my soul-space, into the same slot his spirit was occupying, then I smashed it between my claws.
Then all the faces around me screamed. A wave of screams raced up and down the river in both directions. Then they came for me.
I activated Unrestrained, and suddenly none of them could hold me. I fell, but not into the sky. Instead, I dropped lightly onto the underside of the walkway between the towers, the one we’d climbed under minutes ago. I used a shadow to close the door, then lock it. The spear reappeared in my hands, but I didn’t need it at the moment, so I started moving it back into my soul-space as I took off running.
I was really regretting not buying Spiderclimb as a skill right now. At the rate I was burning through mana I probably had at most a minute before I couldn’t keep Devour Essence running anymore, and that presumed I didn’t run out of Nightstalker spirit to munch on first.
Being undead was definitely helping me out in more than one way. Glancing at my log, I saw tons of immunity messages flying past for poisons, bleeds, and any number of other effects. When this effect expired I needed to be gone or I’d be dead.
I didn’t head inside the tower. I wanted the river to follow me. In fact… I turned and launched an array of burning blades of twilight. I didn’t aim for the questing tubes, but for the black and oily river itself above my head. The substance reminded me of what passed for blood in the ghouls, and I already knew that was flammable.
There was a hideous and deafening shriek as the burning blades hit home, and the river went berserk.
Immediately the river began to pull away from itself, like someone had decided to reenact the biblical scene of parting the red sea. The fire spread quickly, and I’d spread it out over a wide area to begin with, so the river’s efforts to quarantine the fire were mostly ineffective.
Tendrils were still questing after me as I ran along the side of the wall. They seemed to have difficulty seeing me, but I could see ghouls crawling out of the river in droves. They were making their way towards me and seemed to know I was to blame for all of this even if I wasn’t showing up on their Lifesense.
Devour Essence ticked its maintenance fee at that moment, leaving me with only about 20% of my total mana remaining. I was going to need that for at least one Shadow Step, so I couldn’t let it tick again.
As I started to turn away again, my attention was grabbed by something new. In its attempt to pull away from the flames, the river had overflowed its banks, and was now seeping through the streets of the city. With increasing concern, I saw it falling up into the sewer system, flooding the tunnels, and presumably our way back home.
> System Message
>
> Area Alert
>
> A new dungeon event has begun! This event will affect all instances of this dungeon as the echoes of important events ripple through all realities. This event will last until the dungeon resets, or until a group completes the dungeon. Participants in the event will be rewarded based on their contribution during the event.
Oh fuck. That wasn’t good. I immediately thought of Regga and her group of people just trying to survive. No, they were ready for this, they’d be fine. Zaeri though? She was a treasure hunter. Had I just gotten her killed in one of the worst ways imaginable? I didn’t have time to think about it right now. I ran, and the undead followed.
When I felt like I only had a few seconds left on Devour Essence, I used Shadow Step, teleporting myself into an empty room on the second floor of a stone building not too far from the wall. I immediately activated Hide, but then kept moving. I’d come in through a window, appearing in a shadowed space I could see within.
I now needed to put stone and distance between myself and the ghouls. I knew how their Lifesense skill worked, and in a few seconds I wasn’t going to be undead anymore. Unfortunately, the interior of the building was barren, so I ended up just shoving myself into a corner and rolling what remained of a wooden table in front of me. It was going to have to do.
Congratulations, you have received enough XP to become a Level 5 Shadow Thief!
Wait, hadn’t I just gotten a level in that? I didn’t have time to think about it at the moment.
Devour Essence ended a moment later, and I winced as a number of small bites and cuts I’d gotten suddenly started hurting. Worse, I could smell my own blood as it started leaking out. I managed to quickly improvise bandages on my wounds with shadows using Hands of Night. It wasn’t perfect but it would have to do. I pulled my shadows in close and focused on concealment.
I heard the ghouls prowling around not long after. It was clear they didn’t know where I was, but they had seen where I’d been when I vanished, and now they were hunting for me. Then I heard the rasp of claws against stone nearby. A ghoul had just climbed in the same window I’d teleported through.
Time to find out how stealth and shadows worked with Lifesense. I waited as the ghoul seemed to sniff around the room. It seemed to know I was here, or that I had been here, but it didn’t yet see me. I watched its dot on my minimap, as well as a half-dozen other red dots that were near enough to show up. It explored the building I was hiding in, and to my annoyance a second ghoul entered the building as well. Then another came in. I didn't like where this was going.
I had an exit plan already, but it wasn’t going to buy me much time. Shadow Step was about to come off cooldown, so I could jump away once more. Then I’d have a problem, as I was rapidly running out of tricks. I needed to go ahead and buy Spiderclimb while I had a chance, it was going to cost another Innovator rank but so be it.
I started to open my interface to make the purchase and right at that moment one of the dots on my minimap came a bit closer to my position, and suddenly stopped.
Then it howled.
Time to go. I kicked the table away from me and into the ghoul’s shins. Then I made a run for the window, and without hesitation I flung myself into the void.
In the moments I hung in the air I searched for shadows to leap to, finding very few good options. I started to fall as I hesitated, and so I reached for the furthest shadow I could find within range.
I just needed more time.
An instant later I appeared at the top of a covered well, seated amongst the remains of a broken pulley system and cracked bucket. I immediately activated hide, but I felt exposed from every direction.
I was at the center of a crossroads, and above me I could hear the flowing of something that wasn’t water. Obviously, this couldn’t possibly be connected to the sewer since you wouldn’t draw water from a sewer, but whatever was up there definitely wasn’t good. I had no mana, Shadow Step was on cooldown, and there were no other buildings within reach that I could get to with more mundane means.
Then things got even worse. With a loud crack, the wooden structure I was sitting in began to fall apart. Dammit! I needed more time!
Suddenly I had an idea. Surely, they would have thought of that though? Either way it was worth a shot, as my only other option was to try and climb into the well, and I really, really didn’t want to do that.
So, I popped a Scarab Token into my hand, and activated it.
***
Lucus watched in horror as Tavi followed Dorian out of the tower. He heard her last words, but for a long moment he couldn’t process them. Then Arven was shaking him. “Either activate that shield or do what she said. Choose now, we have no time!”
Lucus shook himself. Tavi was already dead, he needed to remember that. The stranger in her body didn’t seem like a bad person, but she wasn’t Tavi. He spun and headed for the ramp up to the next floor.
“Follow me!” he called out, activating his Stratagem ability once more. The regular skeletons weren’t too difficult to deal with and being able to fight normally instead of in silence actually sped things up considerably when paired with the Bastion. It simply didn’t matter that the skeletons all rushed them, Lucus pushed them back regardless, and now he could make full use of all his abilities for the first time since they’d entered the dungeon.
“Double Time! Give No Quarter! Chaaarge!” He yelled, activating skills with each command.
Lucus was a Tactician, a class made for battlefield commanders in charge of dozens or even hundreds of troops. That he’d even been able to find a way to use it for low level thieving showed how much he deserved it. That he’d been able to effectively level it for years would have shocked and appalled career military officials the world over.
Arven had thought it was funny.
The two of them were in opposite facing cells in their wing of the prison, and they’d spoken a bit before lights out was called the previous day. Arven had been a military man, that much was clear, and he knew what the class was for. When Lucus told him how he’d been using it Arven nearly laughed himself hoarse. It was one of only two times the older man had seemed happy, the other being when Tavi promised them all their freedom.
Now Lucus brought the full power of his class to bear in the way it had originally been intended. Each of his friends received a compliment of powerful boons, while his foes were demoralized under the weight of multiple banes.
It was a quirk of this class that many of the skills required you to say something aloud and be heard, but not necessarily understood, in order to apply their benefits. While Dorian had been allowing them to sneak up on fights and keep things clean and manageable, this sort of combat was what Lucus' class was made for.
The party smashed into the skeletal hordes moving at twice their normal speed. Skeletons were literally sent flying by the force of their charge, and their actions seemed hesitant and unsure.
Lucus focused his efforts on disrupting any organized defense while Arven and Savas disassembled the enemies with their blades in a series of brutally one-sided one-on-one combats. Even Dawn assumed a more active role, thwacking enemies with her staff and layering on her own set of boons. Speed mattered now more than anything else, and they had to get away from here or die trying.
Arven had fallen back to cover their rear as their mad push through the tower continued. They hadn’t taken the time to make sure every enemy was down for good, and several doors had been passed unopened. All their normal care had been thrown out the window with Dorian’s death.
Of course, the man wasn’t dead, not yet, but none of them wanted to think about that. The sound of his screams could still be heard over the sound of fighting, and they could see the sliver of health remaining to him on their party interface. Whatever had him was definitely keeping him alive.
Then suddenly the screams cut off, and they all saw with relief that the man had finally died. Tavi was somehow still fine, barely injured even. She’d said she would distract it and meet them at the next guard post, but was that even possible? How would she get there? Lucus didn’t have time to think about it.
They’d made it to the first floor of the tower, parallel with the river and the entrance to the wall tunnel. As usual there was a contingent of skeletons in both rooms leading out of the tower, but Lucus simply slammed the door shut on the one facing the river and caused a spur of stone to jut out from the wall, preventing it from reopening. That taken care of, he rushed the defenders of the wall exit.
“Into the Breach!” he shouted, slamming into the arrayed archers and pikemen. He leapt over the extended polearms that aimed to take his legs out from under him, and simply cannonballed into the defenders shield first, knocking many of them down.
He recovered quickly, using the shield for leverage he was able to pull himself to his feet before the skeletons around him could react. One who had avoided getting knocked over managed to fire off a shot, but it went wide and actually managed to pin another skeleton to the wall briefly as the arrow got stuck between armor and bone.
Lucus laid about himself with both shield and mace, clearing the room with a little help from Savas. When Dawn and Arven managed to fight their way backwards into the room Lucus slammed the door shut behind them, breaking skeletal bones in the process. Then he held the shield against it while reshaping the stone around the latch to keep it shut.
Most of the wood in this place looked like it had dried out centuries ago, but the doors were iron banded and heavily reinforced, intended to keep out a sieging army. They weren’t coming down easy.
Arven stopped Savas from opening the door out of the tower while Lucus was distracted. “Wait. We don’t know what’s through there, let Lucus take the lead.”
It turned out to be good advice. When Lucus opened the door he was immediately assaulted by a mass of shadow and claws. The Nightstalker was in a frenzy, and a moment later they all heard an unearthly keening scream from the direction of the river. Despite the ghoul trying to kill him Lucus glanced at Tavi’s party status and noted with relief that she was still alive and healthy, but had worryingly little mana.
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Suddenly Lucus was irrationally angry at this ghoul. As though Dorian’s death and all their troubles could be laid at its feet personally. He activated Strength of Stone, one of his species skills, and felt power flood through him.
This skill gave him a brief but intense bonus to strength and toughness, but normally required him to be standing on natural or at least uncut stone, so usually wasn’t of much use inside a building. The shield Tavi had given him had changed that, allowing him to use the skill freely as his skills and senses seemed to treat it like natural stone terrain.
With his skill active, he slammed the shield into the frenzied ghoul with sufficient force to turn its chest cavity into paste. He hadn’t even bothered to aim, simply swiping the shield through the entire area occupied by the ghoul’s shadows. Then he stepped into the inverted hallway running deeper into the wall and took off in a jog, his remaining party members following after.
Somehow, they had survived. Somehow, Tavi was still alive. Dorian was at least no longer suffering. Perhaps this disaster could be recovered from after all.
> System Message
>
> Area Alert
>
> A new dungeon event has begun! This event will affect all instances of this dungeon as the echoes of important events ripple through all realities. This event will last until the dungeon resets, or until a group completes the dungeon. Participants in the event will be rewarded based on their contribution during the event.
From the back of the line Arven swore but didn’t stop running. Lucus was numb to this information, what more could this possibly be? After a moment though, Dawn called them to a halt, motioning out one of the arrow slits.
They all looked on in fascinated horror as the river peeled itself away from the ground, seeming to reach towards the empty sky as though it had suddenly decided to obey gravity. It was on fire, like some sort of absurd mockery of a waterfall it writhed as it burned, spraying individual burning monstrosities in every direction. The burning worms fell back towards the city, occasionally setting the remnants of buildings on fire, while hapless ghouls and skeletons were flung into the sky like reverse meteors.
“What in Crucible's flames did she do?” Arven asked in a hushed voice.
“I suppose she made a distraction,” Dawn said.
“Remind me to NEVER ask her to make a distraction.” said Arven, voice laced with an almost religious conviction.
Lucus found himself laughing at that. “I learned that one years ago. Her definition of a distraction has always been to do something even more crazy and suicidal than what you were already planning.”
Then he sobered up as he remembered. This wasn’t the Tavi he’d practically grown up with. They were so similar sometimes it was hard to remember, but at the same time it was obvious to him now that he knew to look for it. Now that the person wearing Tavi’s body had stopped trying to fool him.
“Come on, let's keep moving,” he said. “She said she’d join us at the next guard post. We should clear it out before she gets there. We might need to fortify it.”
“What’s the point?” said Savas, though he turned and started walking with Lucus. “The event’s started. They’ll have sealed the door out within a few minutes.”
“We’ll just have to beat the dungeon then,” Lucus told him. “We can end the event early. I can unseal the door if necessary.”
Savas brightened at this, but Arven put a damper on his hopes. “Nobody’s ever beaten this dungeon. As far as I know this is the furthest anyone has ever gotten, though now I suspect others may have done so, only to trigger the event themselves.”
“Well, we have no reason not to at least try,” Dawn said. “If we’re doomed either way, we can at least go out fighting.”
Arven nodded. “Agreed. Also, frankly, I’m willing to believe anything is possible while our small friend is still alive. She’s clearly blessed or cursed, probably both, but the normal rules don’t seem to apply when she’s involved.”
They all murmured agreements at that. Lucus tried to keep his attention on the path in front of him, but he found it hard not to watch Tavi’s party display. Her mana was so low, she had to be running out of tricks.
Then he blinked and came to a complete stop. Savas ran into him before he could stop himself, then backed away quickly assuming there was danger ahead. When Lucus made no move to fight anything, Arven called forward. “Lucus? What is it?”
“Look at her mana,” Lucus told them.
In the blink of an eye, Tavi’s health, mana, and stamina had all maxed out. She’d almost instantly started using it again, but somehow, she’d fully restored herself.
Arven just shook his head. “I’m incapable of being surprised anymore. Let's get moving, at this rate she’ll not only beat us there but also clear the place out for us.”
Lucus took off at a jog once more. Arven was right. They were going to need to start pulling their weight around here. He didn’t realize it, but he’d begun grinning. Things might just work out after all.
***
I appeared in the Fair Deal, sitting on the floor as had become custom. I quickly swapped my titles around to assume my alter ego, then stood and pulled my shadows in close, forming them into a tight-fitting cloak.
Rhel was back to her standard position, bent over the counter reading something that definitely looked like a manga. She didn’t bother acknowledging me as I walked towards the bathrooms at the back.
This was like hitting the pause button in a video game, then rooting through your inventory for a dozen consumables while the poor NPCs just had to sit there and ponder the gross unfairness of the situation. Earlier I’d wished I could do something similar with my soul-space, but I’d had the ability all along with my scarab tokens. Hell, everyone who had a scarab token could do this. I was shocked that System allowed it. In fact, while I was here, I was going to file a bug report on it. Clearly this was an exploit.
While I was here, I was going to take full advantage of it. It was time to finally learn Spiderclimb. Not only did it feel like the ghoul spirit I’d been eating was wearing thin, but I was tired of burning through all my mana with that skill. Spiderclimb was obviously a good skill, but I’d been reluctant to burn a rank of Innovator on it when it seemed like this dungeon represented the pinnacle of its usefulness. That hesitation had nearly gotten me killed.
I corrected that now, buying another rank of Innovator, then I used that to buy Spiderclimb. I assigned it to the Shadow Thief class as that seemed most thematic. Then I spent all my points from that class leveling it up to rank 9, while also boosting my Hide skill to rank 10. Finally I bumped my stealth skill up a rank to 4 so that I could move further and faster while concealed.
The stage was set for my great escape now, but I had a while yet to wait for my various resource pools to refill, so I had some time to kill. I’d noticed something when ranking up my skills, but I wasn’t sure what it meant so I flipped over to the help screen and searched for “Signature Skill” - Stealth, Hide and Spiderclimb had options available to make them a signature skill, but I had no idea what that was.
When I finished reading the help article on signature skills, I indulged in a brief facepalm. This was a benefit I’d gained for being a class founder, and it was basically a super affinity. Not only would it provide the benefits of an affinity, but it would also provide the equivalent of a tier boost for any skill I attached it to and reduce its activation cost, if any.
Even better, I could reassign it every 10 class levels, so there was very little reason not to use it. I should have been using it this entire time, but I’d forgotten to look into it with everything else that had been going on. The only downsides I could see were that it could only be used on a class skill from the class I was a founder of, and there was no way to preview the effects.
I just had to decide which skill I wanted to use it on. Since it could be moved later, I didn’t need to agonize too much on it, but the choice was really between Embrace of Shadows and Hands of Night. I was using both skills extensively. Hands of Night was the more interesting of the two skills, but the issue was, Embrace was essentially fuel for Hands.
Without Embrace I was reliant on natural lighting conditions to even use Hands, while Embrace basically let me use it anywhere and anytime. Embrace also had a listed weakness against skills that created light, which was worrying. Hands was very good, but Embrace was a combination of necessary and flawed, so I decided to go with that for now and see if Signature Skill would patch up the weak points.
> Embrace of Shadows
>
> Active Skill (Tier 3, Signature Skill)
>
> Source: Shadow Thief (Level 1)
>
> Rank: 2 / 5
>
> PP: 0 / 6
>
> Activation Cost: Mana (Low, -50% from Signature Skill)
>
> Activation Type: Sustained
>
> Cooldown: N/A
>
> Nearby shadows animate and cling to you, creating a cloud of roiling darkness around you. Shadows obscure your form and movements, as well as your exact location, making you more difficult to hit with attacks. If you are in an area of darkness this can also provide concealment making you difficult to spot without the aid of special senses.
>
> While this skill is active you get a bonus to your Dodge skill equal to 3 times the number of ranks in this skill against attacks that rely on sight. Additionally, the shadows count as cover for the purpose of concealing yourself from sight. Shadows from this skill will be disrupted by light cast by a skill of equal or higher tier.
>
> Signature Skill: The dodge bonus is increased to 5x and this skill will now provide concealment from special and magical senses, in addition to sight. Additionally, this skill will no longer be disrupted by light skills unless the light’s tier is of greater rank than this skill’s tier plus its current rank.
That was a very juicy improvement. I was a little sad the inherent weakness was still there, but it was now going to be substantially harder to use against me, and I’d be able to make it even better by ranking up the skill. The best part though was the concealment from special and magical senses, I hadn’t been expecting anything like that, but that was a really useful change.
Now I’d be able to hide from Lifesense. This was effectively a buff to my Hide and Stealth skills, since those were what was used to determine if I was seen or not, while Embrace just provided cover that allowed me to use those skills. Overall, my kit had just become a lot more reliable.
I also realized that I was sitting on exactly enough Goblin progression points to allow me to pay off my Diminutive penalty. It was currently giving me a 10% penalty to general movement speed, though my Adventurer title was countering that and more.
I needed to be fast now, so paying this off was a no-brainer, but the question was did I want to spend an Affinity on this penalty? The last time I’d done so, I’d gotten a very nice subspecies evolution out of it. Diminutive was such a small penalty, no pun intended, that I hadn’t even been considering paying it off. Would it even be worth an affinity?
In the end, I decided to do it. I could afford to be wrong, but I figured that almost nobody else would be crazy enough to spend such a limited resource on such a small thing. That made me want to know what might be locked behind it.
I wished there were some other goblins around I could talk to about this stuff, but no such luck. I was willing to bet Ryke and Tavi had discussed it at some point, but if they had the memory was too faint for me to remember what they’d said.
When I dropped the last point in, I got a somewhat familiar prompt.
> System Message
>
> Species penalty removed
>
> Congratulations, you have paid off a species penalty and it has evolved into a new species skill. This penalty leads to a branching path of evolutionary options, so you must now choose which skill this penalty will evolve into.
>
> The following skills have been unlocked; however, you will only be able to choose one of them to learn. As this was not a major penalty, your sub-species will remain unchanged regardless of selection, though your choice may contribute to future evolutionary options.
>
> Choose One:
> - Skill: Scurry (Active, Tier 2)
> - Skill: Ankle-biter (Passive, Tier 3, Consumes Affinity)
> Scurry
>
> Active Skill (Tier 2)
>
> Prerequisites: Goblin (Any), Mastered (Diminutive), Branch (Diminutive)
>
> Rank: 0 / 5
>
> PP: 0 / 4
>
> Activation Cost: Stamina (Low)
>
> Activation Type: Maintained
>
> Cooldown: N/A
>
> Your low center of gravity lets you hug the ground and move faster when you need to. While this skill is active, your movement speed is increased by 25%, plus 5% per-rank in this skill. These bonuses are reduced by 50% if you do not have at least one hand free while moving. Maintaining this skill requires additional Stamina for every 15 seconds it remains active.
> Ankle-biter
>
> Passive Skill (Tier 3)
>
> Prerequisites: Goblin (Any), Mastered (Diminutive), Affinity (Diminutive), Branch (Diminutive)
>
> Rank: 0 / 5
>
> PP: 0 / 6
>
> You have learned to exploit your small stature to throw off the attacks and defenses of larger creatures. When fighting a creature larger than you, you get a 10% bonus to all defenses, and a 5% bonus to damage with attacks and skills for every rank in this skill.
I was surprisingly conflicted here. That was a pretty fantastic movement speed buff, and I needed to be quick right now. If I took that I didn’t think I’d have any difficulty outrunning the ghouls chasing me. On the other hand, I was already feeling pretty confident in my ability to slip away from them now that I had Spiderclimb and my improved version of Embrace of Shadows.
Meanwhile, pretty much every single enemy I’d faced had been larger than me, and a stacking percentage bonus to damage and defenses against them was fantastic. Being called an ankle-biter was a bit off-putting - really, I was more of a thigh-biter - but I could deal with that. I had also noticed that despite my long arms, basically everyone had reach on me. This would help counter that.
In the end I decided that while Scurry was nice right now, Ankle-biter was a better long-term investment. Sprinting was something I could already do, and Scurry seemed like just an improved sprint. I went ahead and dropped a rank into it using my universal points. My defenses were becoming pretty substantial now, particularly my dodge stat.
I also took a moment to check up on Dorian in my soul-space. As far as I could tell he was fine in there. His body and spirit were sharing the same spot in my soul-space, and I was hoping that’d help him in some way.
My plan was to have Dawn heal him, then I’d attempt to release his spirit back into his body. I had no idea if it would work, but it was the only thing I could think of in the seconds I’d had to try and rescue him. I knew he’d rather be dead than in the grip of those things, so there was no harm in trying.
There were two surprises waiting for me when I checked on him. The first was that I’d filled my last soul-space slot without even noticing it, but the second was a weird prompt I got when examining Dorian.
> System Message
>
> No Body Slots Available
>
> You may not assimilate this body as you lack an open slot for it. Acquire more body slots, or free up another body slot if you would like to assimilate this body.
>
> Body Slots: 1 / 1
I obviously didn’t want to take Dorian’s body, but it was good to know that storing the body in my soul-space seemed to have something to do with the process. I still suspected the massive penalty I had was related to this mechanic, but apparently my soul-space was too.
I’d need to investigate this more later. In the meantime, I turned my attention to the other newly filled soul-space slot, trying to figure out what I’d put in there.
Normally when I had a look in my soul-spaces it was obvious to me what they contained, but this time it took me a minute. Then I realized that the issue was that there were many, many different things stored in that slot. If I hadn’t previously swallowed a reality seed, this would have felt like a lot.
I looked at my combat logs, and after a minute figured out I had killed hundreds, maybe thousands of two different types of monsters called Unravellers and Unmakers. These were apparently the wormlike things that lived in the black river. I’d gotten credit for killing the ones that were dying to the fires I’d set.
I had no idea what I was going to do with these things. I had no desire to munch on them with Devour Essence… they were viscerally disturbing, and I hated knowing I had their spirits trapped inside me right now. I wanted nothing to do with any skills they might have, I wasn’t sure my sanity could survive making those things a part of me in any way. They were wrong in ways I could not describe.
I wasn’t sure what to do with them but I did decide to try releasing a single one of them. I figured I could kill it easily enough if I had to. I used a shadow tendril to release the spirit of an Unraveller a little way away from me after first arming myself with the Gray Watch Spear.
I felt something get released and my shadow rippled, then seemed to get tugged on as though someone else were trying to use Hands of Night on them, contesting me. I easily retained control however, and a moment later the feeling faded, as did the sense of presence in the room.
Interesting.
Richard had told me that souls attached to spirits rather than directly to bodies. I had no idea what had happened to Dorian’s soul, and that made me worry that my plan wouldn’t work. Hopefully it was still attached to his spirit.
Now I was also wondering if my spirit was responsible for manipulating the shadows through Hands of Night. Did the skill extend my spirit into the shadows? That was something else to experiment with later. For Dorian’s sake I hoped Dawn knew more about this than I did.
My resources had almost entirely recovered by now, so I went ahead and wrote up my bug report listing the exploit for using the scarab tokens to recover resources while in the middle of combat. I was pretty sure that one was going to raise some eyebrows, but it should be a pretty easy fix.
This was the first bug I’d found that I seriously considered not reporting. If not for what System and The Adversary had said was going to be done with the people using the loot box exploit, I may have kept it for myself. It was absurdly overpowered, but I wasn’t eager to push my luck there. Better to just report it and get rewarded.
I rearranged my titles back to how they were, then breathed a few times to steady myself, and returned to the dungeon.