It never ceases to amaze me how many view one advanced review can bring in. Thank you all for reading BKR – this will be a chapter more typical of what my small-group fighting scenes should be like, but there is also some interesting stuff about the dungeon itself.
2 cookies (and possibly a character named in their honor) for anyone who figures out the dungeon secret on their own ^.^
please enjoy.
Chapter 31: Diving Difficulties
Conbra’s whore that was fun, I chuckled quietly as I finished dissecting my 11th subject and happily absorbed the majority of it with mana roots. It was something like an armored pig when I first found it, but now it was just a lot of sliced pork and some odd organic shell.
I had no idea what the shell was made of, but it was somehow resistant to mana. Of course I could only analyze it with mana, which made trying to figure out how it worked very annoying indeed.
Normally I would blame it on my background by saying “if I had not been denied access to information in my previous life than I would know more,” but only certain individuals would be able to investigate the shell further. Those individuals would be rare too, as people like an apothecary, a non-magical-potion alchemist, or a mana scholar, one who studied mana itself, are pursuing a vocation that requires a fair bit of financial support for no obvious gains.
Still, this place was a great place to both study strange creatures and allow me to practice my more powerful magical techniques, I was having a lot of fun. Of course I still had to continue down the floors, but I was enjoying my time with each creature that jumped out.
I had currently practiced numerous death spells, fire based spells, a few lightning based ones, and even tried using various direct mana manipulation techniques. The creatures on these upper floors were all fairly slow, small, and slightly magical resistant, making them excellent test creatures for some of my more… exotic spells.
Though I honestly hated the idea of practicing some of those particular spells outside of my shroud, the fact that this dungeon seemed to have something close to it covering the entire inside of it, made me feel a lot safe.
In the meantime, I discovered a few things that were equal parts amazing, insane, and annoying
The first surprise, which was rather amazing to me, was my discovery that mana recovered… oddly while inside the dungeon. It likely had something to do with the shroud that covered this place, but my mana was recovering much more slowly than normal, even with the increased caloric intake from absorbing the variety of monsters I found here.
It had once taken mana scholars decades of debate to decide, but the general consensus that they came to was that humans passively absorbed the mana around them when recovering our personal stores of mana. Anton had declined to confirm or deny this, but I could not come up with any reason to disagree with the scholars.
The, somewhat insane, discovery was that the monsters I was fighting must be breeding somewhere in the dungeon. This was actually a well-known fact, but what I did not expect was that the dungeon was seemingly empty beyond the occasional maze, monster, or even a rare trap. This was no ecosystem, so what were the monsters eating? Since I had arrived, I had not run into a single spider’s web, piece of shrubbery, or even a bat.
Even if there was some location where monsters were breeding, there was no reason that some species would not spread out throughout the dungeon. There were no spiders, flies, rats, or plants of any type and as far as I could tell, there were no signs of their passing either. There was no guano, no skeletons of dead animals, nothing but the continuous rock.
I had even spent time on my current floor trying to look for any signs of a balanced ecosystem, but there were none. There was a fine difference between monsters and magical beasts which might explain it under difference circumstances. Simply put, monsters could, at most, block magic, while magical beasts could not only use it, but occasionally survive on it.
I had no idea how that worked, but I did know the biological signs of starvation versus simply being hungry and all of the creatures that I had dissected had eaten sometime within the last few days. Most of them still had some food left in their stomach to prove this, but where had they been eating?
To top this off, I actually came up with an explanation that seemed to might cover all of the oddities, except that it was the type of theory I would rather not say aloud. Namely: that the dungeon was an elfin training center of some sort from back during the Enslavement.
It was the only explanation I could come up with based on what I knew and even it had holes. If there were wards spread throughout the dungeon that would explain the constant drain on mana and the lack of explanation for both the ever thickening mana and the lack of a complex ecosystem. The wards could control the unseen parts of the dungeon that were still absorbing mana and pull various creatures for what effectively amounted to a giant training session.
[AN: only someone as sensitive as DeMorte is so aware of the thickening of mana this early in the dungeon, it is not something that most people would take serious notice of before floor 15 or so]
Where these wards might be, or why I could not see them, even with my magically sensitive body and powerful third eye, was unknown. How these theoretical wards had survived for millennium after millennium was also unknown, as I doubted that someone had come down and constantly replaced or repaired the old wards.
The annoying part primarily involved what Leo had told me so long ago: that the Nalks had blessed and cursed me before I was reincarnated. He even gave me a long list of what exactly each blessing or curse entailed, but I had not thought about it lately because of all of the changes that I had made to my own body.
Stones, I had negated the majority of those curses with my constant body modifications. By now my muscles were all denser and more efficient than others would be, while my bones were not only far denser, but could also be reshaped at my leisure: to the point where I could carve runes into them.
Between all my experiments into modifying and investigating my own body and genetic material, I had not even considered how the Nalks had carried out their original curse of restricting my talents in areas outside of the realm of healing. I figured out early on that it had something to do with my mana channels, but I had not realized the full extent of the issue.
I had… almost no idea how they did it, but any spell I cast was significantly harder if it was non-medically based. Specifically: stun and incapacitation spells, death spells, and healing spells were fairly easy and natural for me, but fire spells other than the fleshfire spell, my lightning spell, and most other spells were mana inefficient and had a higher likelihood of failure while I was casting with splash method. With non-spell mana manipulation techniques seeming easier than in my previous life as well.
The only possible explanation for the resistance of my mana to work on non-biological based spells that I could come up with was runic based. It was an old puzzle after all, why would a rune have to be flat in shape? If you made a rune out of gold it could be in the shape of a rune and still function. The remnants of village that I had found inside the fear runes had been arranged into the old ‘obey’ rune, but I had no idea if that had worked. I had a theory that the fear runes were made out of zugoran, but they were things that were instinctively hard to look at, so that was only a theory.
As best as I could tell, there was no reason that undiscovered runes could not still exist, hiding because they did not exist outside of some abstract physical shape that would be hard to discover outside of an accident. (Perhaps reminiscent of the discovery of the memory interfering runes) If I thought about it that way, the Nalks might be one of the few groups that would know 3 dimensional runes as they would be able to find a world where they were common knowledge and learn.
Regardless, the fact remained that most spells were harder for me to use, including fire spells, which have always been the main weapons of mages. Some of my exotic spells were effected and others were not, but with those spells I was trying to make nonthreatening, everyday things, into ward avoiding spells. As a result, there was too much experimentation needed to be able to tell for sure in that particular area.
I only tried to change the mana channels in my body a few times and it was not a pleasant experience. Pain, paralysis, and temporary loss of my ability to manipulate mana persuaded me to stop such experiments quickly.
In the end I was forced to simply accept that I was restricted using certain spells. I had known that for a while so it was not too much of a shock, though the extent of my restriction was still somewhat surprising. For example, I knew that being a combat mage would be difficult, but now I found myself wondering if that would even be a realistic goal in this body.
As a tangent thought, I found myself briefly wondering what type of mage I actually could call myself. If I had to qualify myself as a type of mage when introducing myself to others I could not say I was a Healer (they would likely hang me) nor a combat mage… In fact the only phrase that I could come up with to describe myself was something that had uncomfortable origins.
Anton had called Soul Mages ‘necromancers’ or death manipulators, but if I was going to put a name on my talents it would be a ‘biomancer’ or life manipulator.
Of course, I would not even be worrying about this if not for the tendency of people in power to ask you such basic questions while under truth spells, (which were of dubious effectiveness) with or without the threat of death if you lied. It was a popular trick with the nobility and a near certainty if I caused any trouble… rather like I was about to do.
I was currently on the 9th floor and if the barricade of SRM in my way was any indication, I was about to go down into floor number 10.
There were around 2 dozen of them this time around with 3 mages that I could sense. With small facilities that made it look like a military outpost. There was also a small barricade that surrounded the whole area, using the walls of the dungeon as anchors on either end to present a row of sharp of what looked like iron tipped wooden spikes, which were braced against the ground.
If I had to guess, this was both a resupply station and a fallback area, someplace where the SRMs could go if things became too difficult for them, or if they suffered casualties and would be unable to make it back out the dungeon without assistance. Stones, they might even be a reserve force to help those who ran into trouble in the dungeon.
The guards on duty waved at me and asked about the rest of my team as I got closer. His friends helped him remove part of the barricade so that I could come inside. Since I was not eager to alert the mages, if possible, I simply made sure that my vocal cords were still changed and politely deflected as much as possible until they asked for my identification.
“Sir, we need you to show us your-”
“I do not have it.” I said, striding forward and slipping around a guard who stepped up to stop me. I stepped around him by spinning some of my – as yet unused – iron spikes to keep the guard at a distance without hurting him. The guard tried to grab at the side of my spikes, but I spun out of his grasp.
He and a few others tried to run around my front at this point, but I simply took a Gía powered skip and was several meters away from them. Around this point though one of the mages came out from inside of one building and started yelling, asking what the problem was.
There was another mage that I could feel in a different building, but his mana was muted, like he was asleep. The last mage that I could sense was directly in front of me as he had been guarding the side of the base that lead further into the dungeon.
I ignored the commotion as best as I could and continued to walk at a reasonably fast pace, one that was meant to for speed, but did not show fear. I kept track of the guards as the mage from the building finally realized what was going on and started yelling at me to stop.
Since the base was not very large, I was already halfway through the base and was walking up to the very confused looking guards on the other side. These guards had spread out to surround me as I kept walking towards them, while their mage looked confused and stood his ground near a movable barrier directly in front of me.
I took maybe 3 more steps before the first spell was thrown. In that instant, I felt the third mage’s mana suddenly change and realized that that one was likely about to storm out and join the rapidly escalating fight. At which point, I decided to go ahead and take slightly more aggressive action.
I leaded forward and charged, not bothering with Gía just yet as I concentrated on getting past the few guards in front of me who already had their weapons out. A pair of guards on either side of me swung iron swords out into my path and tried to physically block me.
It would have been easy enough to duck under their weapons, but I still had my illusion spell working and it had to copy my movements, so I slid under them as best I could and rolled a little in an attempt to conserve some of my speed.
I saw several more spells come flying from behind me with my third eye – or mage sight or whatever they called it here – and I jumped a little off to the side. With the distances involved it was hard to tell if the spells changed direction, but I was willing to bet that they spells with tracking instructions.
Concentrating on the lot in front of me though, I tried to slip between two guards and I did so, after I managed to push one away with some of my iron spikes. I almost drew a sword to emphasize that they would not stop me, but I chose not to.
Having someone rush past and make you look the fool was much different than having someone fight their way past. These guards were more experienced than the ones a few floors above and I had to be prepared to kill them if I had to, but only if I had to and injuries would not help the situation.
To my left I suddenly found a guard barreling down on me as fast as he could, he was almost completely covered in iron armor and had apparently decided that he would be safe even if he tackled me… either that or he noticed that I was trying to avoid casualties and was trying to use that decision against me.
I preferred to believe the latter, but there a surprising number of idiots out there who manage to survive through much more luck than skill or brains.
He was certainly lucky that I was effectively a Gía master and could make small movements with my Gía. I turned my head and prepared to skip a small distance with my Gía. Unlike more inexperienced mages tended to just blast their- WOAH!
I rushed more Gía to my feet and did something that I normally never approved of, I flipped into the air, narrowly dodging the mage who had been previously standing guard. He had used a huge amount of Gía to try and rush me, only to overshoot because he could not react to my flip in time.
I was still rising up into the air when the fool missile came at me and I barely twisted my body out of the way before the mage crashed into the ground not far from where I had been standing. He, regretfully, somehow managed to not break every bone in his body on the landing, but he was still off balance enough to go stumbling over the ground.
I shot a stun spell at him in annoyance as I continued into the air, my jump taking me several meters up and forward. It looked like I would end up on the other side of the barricade, but it would be a near thing.
I mentally sighed in regret as I temporarily lost my ability to dodge. The 2 most dangerous types of people in the world, when it came to using Gía at least, were amateurs and masters. The difference was that an amateur would kill you on accident and plenty of murder-suicides had happened that way.
I then saw that a few of the spells that had been fired earlier were tracking spells, interlaced with some rather cruel looking torture spells, coming in behind me. I found myself creating mana armor to defend against them, despite the fact that I still had my iron armor on and could have let some of the get absorbed by it.
I did this because it seemed like the spells were made by a more experienced hand, which would explain the fool missile from earlier. The mage with the least experience had been assigned guard duty, while the other 2 were relaxing in the buildings. That also explained why the fool had turned himself into a missile instead of hurling a spell at me, he was likely too new to know anything other than lethal anti-monster spells and weak prank spells.
It was one of the blessings of the SRM Guild’s structure, the newer members actually believed the propaganda and thought that they would likely never fight against other people, just monsters.
To compensate, the other mages were likely much more experienced with battle and if that was indeed the case, I did not want to chance that those spells were specifically tracking my face or other parts of my body that were not encased in iron.
I used Gía to speed up my perception of time and I saw the mage who had been firing spells previously was now using his own Gía to propel him in my direction very quickly. Also, the mage who had been in a building up until now finally stepped out, not fully dressed, but looking fully awake and prepared to roast whatever was attacking them.
I concentrated on my landing, using some of my iron spikes by swinging them around below me and touching them to the sides of the barricade as I came down within a hair’s length of the iron tips.
At that point I immediately rerouted my Gía and used it to gain some distance from the barricade. A few moments later I paused about 30 meters away only to check what the mages were doing.
The two who I thought were more veteran had stopped short of jumping their own barricade, obviously figuring out that I was waiting for just such an opportunity to throw some spells back at them. The half-dressed one was looking over the fool while the other was staring at me with rage filled eyes. Apparently any monsters they faced here were the type to ignore arrows, because not one guard was preparing to fire at me.
I snorted and gave him a little nod of acknowledgement – more for his attempt than his skill – before I turned and started jogging deeper into the dungeon, purposefully conserving my Gía for the dungeon itself.
I heard a commotion start up behind me and tried to listen in for the brief period I was still in earshot and picked up on a rage filled voice’s orders. “-take Mark’s squad and go after him while I send for someone from the Guild-” I sped up at that point, turning my well-paced jog into a slightly Gía enhanced run, which focused on putting distance between me and my new would-be pursuers.
I reached the entrance to the tenth floor and descended the long slope further into the dungeon while calculating how long it might take for the Guild to send reinforcements.
It had likely been a day and a half since I had entered the dungeon, but that had been with my delays to dissect the various creatures. If they had no methods of instant communication – something that I was not prepared to discount – it would likely take a day to get up to the Guild and then another 2 days to coordinate and send down a team that they would think ‘appropriate’ or ‘sufficient’ to deal with me.
Of course it was possible that the time could be greatly shortened if the original guards had defied my expectations and spoke up about my actions. Though I would have expected an adventurer’s party to have caught up with me by now if that was the case. Though even if they were lazy enough to decide to try and wait for me to make my way back outside, the act of pushing past the second guard point would likely force them to come in after me.
If they realized I was here to infringe upon their monopoly, then I might even have a fun fight awaiting me on the surface in addition to whatever forces they sent down.
Bella raised an objection at my eagerness to fight, but I temporarily silenced her with a simple blast of resolution. If there was any type of magical device that the SRMs could use to track me, teleport near me, communicate instantaneously with others nearby, or even just make my nose itch, I would find it, study it, and make sure that it was a minimal threat to me in the future.
Given the rate that magical devices like my recorder or the instant portrait were being created, I had no faith that one of, if not the most, widespread organizations ever created did not have some sort of secret weapon or device to use against me. Many SRMs were naïve and self-righteous, but even I hesitated before labeling them as stupid…
Not to mention that the Nalks seem to dislike me almost as much as I dislike the SRMs and I would not be surprised if a few of their players were highly ranked within the Guild.
This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.
Unlike kingdoms or other large merchant groups, the “Adventurer’s Guild” worked across multiple kingdoms with minimal interference or public objection, so if I needed to fight them, I would and could not hold back if I wanted to survive the encounter… If that meant pounding a few iron spikes into those stone pillars outside and changing my appearance after the resulting magical explosion, then so be it.
Why are you always so bloodthirsty when it comes to adventurers!?
I am antagonistic at worst Bella, not bloodthirsty, and I am only like that because know their true faces. I have meet bandits, murderers, and thieves that I would trust more. Do you really think that they wanted to prevent us from coming down here for our own safety? Maybe a few people would think that about us specifically when they saw a small child, but those bases and rules were not put in place to keep others safe.
You mean the fact that it was not on the first floor?
Partly. Each of these floors is big enough that the sheer size alone would discourage children for the first few floor, but you do not need a half dozen guards to keep even a determined child out, you do that to keep the odd fool who thinks he is tuff from trying to earn money in your territory. If they force their way past the half dozen expendables, the Guild will have an excuse to hunt them down.
Even if that is true, you always go way too far with them! I can still see your mind DeMorte and the blood and the fire, the plagues and the panic, that you are willing to use for such inconveniences is horrible.
Inconveniences? Bella you know who I am and you hardly seem surprised, despite calling it horrible, besides I was not about to join the Adventurer’s Guild or fight a duel just prove to them that I can handle myself. Blood, iron, and panic is never my first resort Bella, nor has it ever been, I am just very good at it. If I thought I could have convinced the man from the Guild with any type of bribe other than a favor, I would have.
You only have bad points to make today DeMorte. I honestly do not know what is more frightening: that you have subdivided those plans into hundreds of different possibilities, just while you were walking around with nothing else to do, or that I am actually used to this type of thing by now.
In the end it does not matter. I chose this path when the reasonable path was blocked to me and I was unable to remove that blockage peacefully. It is nothing more than action and reaction, Bella and nothing should bother you about that.
I could feel her disagreement, but only for a brief moment. She was obviously not dealing with the fact that I was going this far ‘just to become a male again’ very well.
I reached the 10th floor proper and almost stopped in shock. The room in front of me was split into a dozen different offshoots that headed off in almost every direction, including one that seemed to lead back under the sloping path that I had come from. If those guards were really going to try and chase me over rock, then most of these rooms were likely dead ends, meaning that they would likely be setting up a base here and wait for me to come back out of the wrong path.
“Stone it all.” I said quietly, looking around to see if I could find something to help me chose a path.
Each path had a different statue carved out of the rock above it, there was a rat, a pig, a rabbit, and some others. I thought about it and decided that, if there was any meaning to this, it would lie in the creatures that I had found on the previous floors, or on what the personalities of each animal stood for.
That meant that I would either have to guess or logic it all out as fast as possible. If I had spent more time searching through each floor or if I had continuous access to the dungeon like the SRMs did than this would be much less of a challenge, but as it was… I had to either guess blindly or hope that each creature had meaning.
As it was, I felt far more comfortable with the idea the idea that the clue lay in the dungeon’s design. It seemed to be designed to either test someone or to allow continuous access to a limited number of monsters, like some sort of nature preservation area. If I thought of it like the former than these symbols could mean that I was supposed to choose the most challenging creature and take that path. If it was most like the latter, then I might be expected to…
‘One guard only tells the truth, one guard only tells lies, and one guard stabs people who ask tricky questions.’ I thought to myself, remembering an old joke.
It might all just be a trap too, with all paths leading to the same destination and the statues themselves meaning nothing.
I sighed and fell back on the old adage, ‘travel by your spirit,’ and chose to walk down the snake path.
Wait, what is that spell? The one you thought of when you thought of the snake?
Not mad at me anymore Bella? Well, it is an old, old, game where you use a simple spell that is meant to create an illusion of your spirit, a representation of who you are. Teenager mages who use the spell frequently do so in hope that they have some impressive spirit that they can show off. I learned to spell late in my life and ended up using it for base of my banner – a 3 headed serpent.
I am still mad at you, but there is no point in not talking to you when we live together. Anyway, I thought your banner had some winged snake on it.
I modified my banner based on those ancient stories of the flying super-snakes. The ones who were said to be so in tune with the world’s mana that they were immune to magic despite being able to use it themselves. Although my spirit is technically not a snake, it seemed appropriate.
Wait, so what is your spirit creature then and what is mine?
Mine is technically a king hydra, although no one likes to think about it like that as those things were legendary magical creatures that died out long ago… Yours is likely a giant, fluffy rabbit named Wade.
We would have kept talking, but the path behind us collapsed, sealing us into the snake path and putting me on high alert. I did not know if the SRMs behind us collapsed it, or it I somehow triggered a trap, but either way I would have to keep going forward for now and worry about it on my way back.
Although that raised the question: was there a different way out of the dungeon? I assumed that the previous base might serve as a source of extra man-power as well as a resupply, but I might have been wrong.
As I kept walking, looking around for any traps, but all I found was a long winding path that led me to a large open room… with a giant snake.
It was around 30 meters long, with a body a few meters thick, and earth colored scales with no easily discernable pattern. Its head was noticeable different to most snakes I knew, as it was wider. The monstrous creature was sleeping in front of a hole in the wall when I walked in, but it quickly woke up thanks to a tangible change in the mana.
This is a test after all, I thought, each symbol likely had something that looked like the statue on the other side. Stones, it seems like the dungeon even woke it up for me… how annoying.
I dropped my set of iron spikes and shed some of my equipment while firing a basic death spell at the giant snake. The thing did not even flinch as the spell broke over it and instead simply started slithering forward, smelling with its tongue.
After all the interesting things I dissected upstairs the dungeon only gave me a giant snake! I walked towards it while I pulled some of the bone that I had stored up in my bone armor into my hand.
The room was over 100 meters long and around 80 meters wide and the snake was in no hurry to reach me, so I had time to leisurely reshape the bone into a sword.
About that point though I realized that I might need all of my storage, so I poured my mana into the Not a normal sword of course, but an oversized, graveborn creating, sword that normally be impractical to the point of being laughed at. In fact it was so large that I had to stop and lower the sword point to the ground while I got used to its weight.
I also made it sharp and dense as I could, making the middle a little wider than the rest of the blade, before carving runes of durability, sharpness, and momentum into the side. The hilt was uncomfortable, but I was not going to need this ridiculous thing for long.
The snake was about 30 meters away at this point and it reared up before its head expanded, reminding me of a collapsible fan. It pulled its head back slightly and I tapped my Gía reserves.
To my slight entertainment the giant snake spat at me. I had no doubt that it was poisonous, otherwise it would be pointless attack, so I avoided it by rushing forward. There was no need to fear something like this, even the self-righteous mages were more dangerous.
The giant snake did not have time to spit again before I was too close, so it lunged at me. I used more of my Gía to watch the creature’s movements in slow motion, but it did not try to eat me, instead ramming its head into the ground as I stepped out of the way.
At least I will be able to harvest some of its poison, I thought grimly, before stabbing the sword into the monster through its fan-like neck. The blade stabbed fairly deep, but that was not enough vital damage to guarantee death, so as the monster reacted to my attack in slow motion, I channeled my mana through the bone sword and pumped 3 different death spells into it.
Bone channeled mana too well for me to use bone weapons all the time, but for something like this, it was one of the best weapons I could ask for.
How mediocre, I thought grimly, as the oversized corpse collapsed from its brainstem being destroyed, its heart giving out, and its internal organs deciding to stop functioning. Quickly checking the poison, I confirmed that it was nothing overly special and reformed my bone armor without collecting any as a sample.
I quickly gathered my things, absorbed some of the snake with mana roots and moved on, hoping that the SRMs had not gotten past me already. I had not taken long to deal with the annoyance, but if each of the statues really did represent something like the snake, then they might have chosen the easiest path or simply had a way to bypass the fight altogether, I simply did not know.
Moving to the exit at a reasonable pace, I only kept myself from running by the impulse to look around for traps. It would be rather anticlimactic if I activated a trap right after beating a giant snake and died… although it would be interesting to see Leo’s face if that happened… not worth it at all, but interesting nonetheless.
To my surprise, the exit was another long tunnel that led to another sloping decent to the next floor.
“That is it?” I asked aloud, it simply made no sense to me, one boring fight was all that I gained from the 10th floor?
*Ding*
I heard some sort of chime-like sound and felt the mana around me pulse gently, seeming to squeeze me briefly. Dropping to one knee, I looked around for traps or ambushes, but there was nothing.
After a few moments had past and nothing else occurred, I swallowed apprehensively and slowly moved around the room, testing for any conceivable traps while my mind raced to try and figure out what just happened… The closest thing I could think of was the giant heart in Leo’s personal area, but if that was some periodic method off telling time, then why did the SRMs never talk about it outside of the dungeon?
…It did not matter in the end, the world was full of mysteries, and it was time to move.
I descended into the 11th floor and moved through it easily enough, pausing only to dissect and absorb a large spider-like monster, one of a handful that I killed on the floor.
Eventually though, as I neared the end of the floor, I realized that I had my epinephrine rush for the day and had long since started to tier. Unfortunately, it was rather difficult to get a full night’s sleep in such a dangerous place and I still had no idea how far behind or ahead my pursuers were… although they would likely have ambushed me by now if they had gotten ahead.
Unfortunately, my normal solution of simply erecting wards and carving a few runes would not work as well in this place. If I tried to simply erect some wards like I would when camping, the dungeon’s odd mana would affect the wards fairly quickly, eroding them away until they were useless. Even if I put the wards into an anchor of some sort they would likely last a very brief time – less than a day. I knew this from both previous experiment (in both of my lives) and the lack of wards in either of the SRM bases.
I could carve some runes around me to try and ward off monsters, but Gorith’s shroud tended to interfere with the passive mana absorbing abilities of the runes, so it stood to reason that a similar effect would be at work here. Plus, fear runes, even if they worked, would draw others like a beacon.
Most SRMs recognized how hard going into the dungeon solo was and went in groups, especially because of the lack of protection granted by the wards. Still, I could hardly count on anyone else to simply show up and offer me a place by their fire, so what was I supposed to do?
Basically, I ended up finding a small section of the dungeon that had no monsters and I took out my iron spikes – which I still had not stoning used – and started to place them around where I planned to rest, which I marked by putting my remaining supplies down.
Of course, the iron spikes did not naturally balance on their ends and the rock of the dungeon floor would likely create a lot of echoing noise if I forced the spike, so I held them up one at a time, in a circle around the spot where I placed some of my supplies. While I did this I made part of my bone armor fluid-like and wrapped it around the iron spike in my hand. Then I added another bit of my armor to the bottom of the spike.
For the area by my hand, I simply attached it to the iron as securely as possible, but the bottom part was more directly functional. I added small extensions that radiated out and down from the spike to form stabilizers. These would keep the spike upright without making me try to dig it into the hard floor.
I did this with all of my spikes, creating a protective circle around me, before I started to create my wards.
Since the iron would naturally filter instructions from the wards, effectively destroying them, I anchored the wards into the upper bone disks that I had wrapped around each one instead. Doing so let my keep my wards anchored to something mana conductive and provided me with a circle of ready to use weapons in the event that someone or something attacked me.
After making sure that the wards would last at least a reasonable amount of time and were structured to immediately wake me up if they started failing I sat down and prepared to use my most powerful sleep compression spell on myself.
I would not get much rest, but I would get enough REM sleep to be able to continue into the dungeon in less than 1/5 the time I would sleep naturally.
Sleep was, like so many other things, was necessary for my mental health, but I was happy to have it in the smallest doses possible and if I had time in the future, I would reduce even that.
“Fun place, is it not Bella?” I asked aloud, knowing that by now she was likely trying to think up ways to dodge confrontation and would not answer me – although how she could still be so naïve was beyond me.
I sighed and closed my eyes to sleep.
* * *
“Rebel” city of Spina
Approximately 2 weeks ago
Istar was conflicted. One part of him could not believe what was happening and the other part of him had known that it was going to happen.
The king had called together the army and sent it into Spina as a show of force, but that had not calmed the locals down in the slightest. Instead it had gotten worse, with the guard being driven out of even some of the nicer areas. Now, things had escalated to the point where
Istar and Elysium had come here looking for some mercenary work, but they had not found it with the army like they originally thought they might. Instead, the nobles were nervous and were hiring guards left and right to protect themselves.
It was a very concerning move for Istar as almost every noble was a mage who could boil hundreds of regular people, or the lesser-souled as they seem to call us, with a wave of their hand. It would be even worse if a rebelling mob tried to force their way onto a noble’s personal grounds, where powerful wards would effortlessly destroy them.
In fact, there were times in the past where nobles had been able to run wild and decimate populations to the point where the kingdoms in question were destroyed. The nobles did not like the Histones talking about it, but all nobles were trained to control themselves and not kill the lesser-souled without purpose.
Not that it really matters, Istar thought grimly, unless a noble got really out of line or they were on the bad side of the king, only the church was strong enough to judge them… Which rather well summed up the current situation
After some churchman – apparently only popular with the public – was arrested, the poor of the city had objected strongly, to the point of attacking the city guard whenever they tried to enter the slums. After a public lynching by the guards, under the protection of a mage, the crowd started throwing stones, chamber pots, and whatever else they could get their hands on at the rapidly retreating guard.
No one knew who, but someone found some iron cooking pot and managed to hit the mage with it, knocking him out. The mob was said to have literally torn those poor unacknowledged guards to pieces. Naturally, the mage who was escorting the guards was from a lesser noble family.
Then came the complete and utter nonsense that landed Istar his current job:
While trying to find someone to blame for ‘exciting the lesser-souled’ someone had the bright idea to accuse the popular local sect of the Tophon church of being the source of the problem. They had tried to separate themselves from the incident, but that only served to heap more criticism on them and they were more or less forced into taking a side.
The local churchmen were, unlike the masses, quite powerful. They had money, mages, and churches with wards just as powerful as the noble house wards. This meant that, instead of having a few of the lesser-souled trying to poison them, the nobles were now worried about a much more serious threat, the holy forces of Tophon.
The main Tophon church had its own problems with this sect, who insisted that a time of change and judgment was approaching, and was said to be debating a formal excommunication of the whole sect unless they renounced their ways. However, that would hardly resolve itself soon and left them obligated to object to any movements made towards this sect.
Now the local population was being bloodily pushed back by the king’s men, after they executed the captured churchman (for some old crime that no one seemed to care about,) and left Istar standing on the city walls with his noble charge, watching the violence spread.
Someone in the mob had gotten them more or less organized and had blocked off the roads. As the soldiers came and forced their way through the impromptu barricades, more and more barriers were created, followed by a hail of stones whenever they tried to climb over them.
The original plan, to simply storm the slums and forcibly restore order, had clearly stagnated and now the combat mages had been called out. Thank the gods Elysium got sick, the unacknowledged fool would have wanted to help them.
Instead of forcing their way through, the combat mages came to the fore and directly blasted the barricades with fireballs. Indirectly, they also started to lob fireballs into the slums, no longer caring about collateral damage.
The king’s men had gotten serious and no one would like what was coming next.
The only blessing for Istar that night was that the noble Istar was guarding realized the amount of soot that was about to go into the air and decided to return to his manor – upwind of the growing fire.
The mages would eventually contain the fire, but the army would not care about what happened to the inhabitants. Istar felt slightly sick as he heard the noble talking about negotiating for property in the slums after it was ‘cleansed’ of its previous inhabitances.
Some of the other mercenaries looked grim as well, but they all knew the score well enough: it was always better to be on the winning side, getting paid in coin, regardless of who was paying that coin, than to be on the losing side, getting paid in remembrances by the Histones.