Slowly all the weapons and pieces of armor that were collected by Arthur were collected within my personal dimensional bag and the spare bag I had on hand was handed over. His eyes ran up and down the side and were soon followed by his hands, he seemed to be recalling memories or something about the bag that reminded him of something. Regardless it wasn’t any of our business and we quickly took our leave taking our haul with us.
None of us within our group said anything until we were two whole floors away from Arthur. “All of you can go on ahead, I need to speak with Citro alone.” I waved my mercenaries on and they quickly followed though a little curious about what we were going to speak of. Once they were gone and far away from our sight we moved to a nearby room and closed the door. I quickly casted a very simple spell that would muffle most of the sound once outside of a radius of five meters.
“So, how high was his mana capacity?” Citro asked not bothering with the niceties or even a little small talk, though I didn’t really mind in the current setting.
“Just a little shy of 30 units, the spell isn't exactly the most accurate when it comes to measuring such relatively small amounts of mana.”
“But that confirms our suspicions, he definitely knows how to cast spells. That is why all those goblin bodies had so many magic related wounds on them, because he is a mage.” Citro said this with a bit of a grin on his face before his expression suddenly darkened. “But that raises the question of how taught him, do you think he is imperial?”
“Gods, no. He doesn’t even speak eevin, I doubt that anyone would be willing to work with him unless he was able to cast the comprehend language himself which he obviously can’t.” Quickly I dispelled Citro’s worries with our first observations of him, but he did raise a good point. We needed to know who taught him magic and how much he knew of each subject.
He certainly knew how to cast some offensive spells of the four evocations, but given his relatively low mana capacity and the armor he wore I doubted he was a full on mage. Most likely his preferred weapon and armor indicated that he was either a spell blade, a mage knight, or a battle mage. All of which could be very dangerous with their combination of magic and physical skill.
“As of this moment we have no idea how he got here or what he is capable of. But we may be able to solve the second mystery if we invite him to join our expedition and have him join our ranks for the time being.” I suggested to Citro who thought about the idea for a moment before nodding along.
“An interesting idea, though he would need to join us willingly and from what I can tell he is more of a lone wolf type. But we may be able to convince him to take part in a few delves with a few of our groups. From what I recall Aelia was supposed to have one additional member under her command, but we never did find anyone to fill that role.”
I immediately understood what Citro was saying and I smiled, it was looking like we would be having a conversation with Aelia regarding that open spot on her team.
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I ran my hands across the sides of the dimensional bag within my hands, it felt like an eternity since I last had this with me and I missed it dearly so. Opening it up I dropped my sword inside and like I expected it entered without issue and was hidden from the outside. Reaching back inside I thought of the sword and I felt it within my hands once again, quickly I pulled it back out and looked at my reflection on the blade.
‘Wonderful.’ I thought to myself. ‘Lyra really is a woman of her word. Now that I have this I won’t need to carry all the weapons and armor I take after my fights up several flights of stairs small amounts at a time. Now I just need to dump everything in here and I don’t even need to worry about the weight or size.’
With little else to do I filled my bag with my things that I didn't just trade with Lyra. That included my mushrooms and honey contained within the barrels, my old alchemy apparatuses, the keys I found laying around, and interesting trinkets I kept around, and my armor and longsword since I wasn’t using them at the moment.
With all my valuables in one place I slung the bag over my shoulder and took a seat within the office in the nice comfortable chair.
‘Everything within the city itself excluding the nineteenth floor has already been looted by either myself or Lyra’s mercenaries. That just leaves the actual cavern where the goblin’s came in from for exploration and looting. I do recall the layout of the cavern that I explored along with Aelia and her group, but aside from that I will be stumbling around in the dark in a very literal sense. I guess I should count myself lucky that I can conjure up fire to see this time around.’ With a quick movement of my fingers I conjured up a small ball of fire no larger than a coin, while at the moment I couldn’t see it the flame was quite bright and would serve me well when I did enter the cavern.
‘The only real downside to using magic for this is that I will likely be using all of my mana to keep a flame going, I might be able to cast a spell or two every so often but anything past that and I will not have enough mana to see what I am doing. Perhaps I should trade for a few torches with Lyra just in case something happens. But I did just give up everything for this bag, so that might need to go on hold for now.’
I did have a spell that generated a large amount of light for a similar amount of mana, but it was less versatile and required more concentration on the fact that it was an actual tier one spell and it had a wider range of light intensities. It might not have been bad if I was setting up camp someplace, but for exploration simple manipulation was good enough.
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Some time later I found myself standing at the opening to the cavern peering out into the darkness. Off in the distance I could see the semi glowing mushrooms the size of trees that were near to the demon warlock’s hole where we fought it. The memory of the fight, the feeling of terror that was drilled into my very being at that time rushed back for a moment. I took a deep breath and calmed myself down before conjuring up my little ball of flame and taking my first step into the cavern.
The pathway down was basically a thin and narrow walkway made up of stone that at most could accommodate three people at a time, whatever this was it felt very artificial but the smooth stone said otherwise. When I reached the actual ground I was met with the familiar stone and moss covered dirt that was there the last time.
The moss was of a light green color which I found to be quite odd given the minimal amount of natural light that reached this place, but I pushed my thoughts and questions out of my mind and started walking deeper into the cavern for any sign of goblin.
Roughly half an hour passed before I found any sign of life aside from the moss, and it walked on four legs. It was a large pale creature roughly the same size as a pig, it was standing around in a patch of moss it had been eating. At first I was worried and a bit fearful at the sight of the creature, but upon closer inspection I saw that it was not only blind and without eyes but it also had no physical characteristics that would make it dangerous.
Instead it had two large thin ears on the top of its head that allowed for it to hear exceptionally well. I knew this because when I got too close to the creature its ears moved and it spun around to face me. For a moment I did nothing, wondering what it was going to do, then all of the sudden it started to sniff with its funny shaped nose.
I remained even further confused by the creature's behavior when it started walking closer until it was just a few meters from me. After a few seconds of smelling at this distance the creature lost interest in me and turned away to continue eating its moss.
Soon I left the creature as I had other things such as killing goblins to do at the moment, however I made a mental note to return and take a proper look at this creature sometime in the future. Perhaps I would be able to do something with it, such as an underground farm. It did resemble a pig, perhaps it would also taste like one.
It took another half hour before I found any signs of goblins in the area, it came in the form of trampled moss walked over by several humanoids in a single file line. The light from my ball of fire stretched across the darkness and I leaned down to take a look. ‘Definitely goblins, the size of the tracks indicate something smaller than a human and the only thing down here that would do this is goblins. Unless of course there are some animal people down here that were never discovered.’
With my thoughts drifting over to animal people I paused for a moment and thought back to the very first time I was down here. ‘I don’t recall any animal people the last time I was here. I don’t exactly know how common they are, but I would assume a place like this would have some even if they weren't exactly the most friendly.’
Just as I was about to think further about the concerning lack of animal people within this cavern I suddenly heard a noise from behind. It was a garbled shout that sounded very much like goblin’s arguing amongst themselves. With a simple hand movement I dimmed the light and started carefully walking towards the source of this noise with my weapon in hand.
I could feel the tension in the air as I got closer and closer to the shouting which at this point became a full shouting match with at least three goblins taking part in. When I was only around ten meters from the shouting I suddenly found myself at the base of a small hill, over the top I could clearly hear the goblins.
I dimmed my light even further so it was only a small ember and I started climbing up the side of the hill with my body as close to the moss and dirt as possible. Reaching the edge I peeked over and the sounds of shouting were louder than I even could have imagined. Whatever was happening between the goblins was very intense and I doubted it would remain nonviolent for much longer.
With a deep breath I took control of the small ember and had it float towards the middle of the shouting match, when I was certain it was in the very middle I used my skill in pyromancy to make it much brighter at a rapid pace. The goblins who were very accustomed to the dark were both surprised and stunned by the sudden bright light source in the middle of them.
They all recoiled and covered their eyes from the terrible onslaught of light while I rushed forwards with my sword towards the closest goblin. With most of my strength I swung my sword toward the neck of the nearest goblin and left a large cut that started oozing blood. The goblin stumbled around for a few moments before falling to the ground while the others were in far too much pain to do or even hear anything for the time being.
Leaving the wounded goblin to its own death I rushed towards the next closest goblin raising my swords handle up to my shoulder in preparation for another powerful swing. This time however the goblin was somewhat aware of where I was and tried to dodge my attack, it only barely managed to avoid dying and instead was left with a deep cut on its right arm which caused it to shout out in pain. I followed this up by striking the goblin in the face with the pommel and then a slash across the face leaving it on the ground.
During this little interaction the other three surviving goblins tried running away to escape the bright light and whatever it was that was killing their allies, the first two somehow managed to stay together and run in the direction opposite of where I came from. The third instead ran in the direction I came in and fell down the hill face first.
Leaving the one on the bottom of the hill I quickly casted the tri earth bolts spell as quickly as I could and directed the bolts towards the two goblins within my view that were slowly being consumed by the darkness. Instead of aiming for the head or another vital organ like I normally would have I instead aimed for the back of the leg where there was a minimal amount of armor in hopes of stopping the two fleeing goblins in their tracks.
The goblin on the right received two bolts, one in each of its legs while the other only received one. The first goblin managed to take a few steps with its pierced legs before its legs gave out and it fell to the ground, the second made it a bit further before it slowed to a crawl dragging its bleeding leg behind itself.