CHAPTER 241—A NEW FORM
His surroundings shifted between one thought and the next. Tom felt the return of gravity, the softness of the ground under his feet and the sun beating down on his head. Curiously, he looked around and noted the oppressive silence.
He was in what he imagined a coliseum in a small town somewhere near the Mediterranean would have looked and felt like. He was trapped in a modest space. When he glanced around, it was a rough oval which was thirty metres long but only twenty wide. The only flaw with that description was that no allowance was made for an audience. He was by himself trapped with the sun beating above him by dark grey almost black walls. They were constructed from large bricks that fit so snuggly the seam between them was barely visible. The constraining wall wasn’t even particularly tall only reaching four metres, it was to put it lightly a poor prison.
Tom figured that if he wanted to, he could probably run and spring up and grab the worn-looking stone’s edge at the top and pull himself up to escape. It was an idea to keep in the back of his head. However, it was not something he was tempted to try just out of some misplaced desire to test boundaries. Sometimes rules could be circumvented, but when GODs were involved, it was rarely prudent to attempt to do so. At best climbing the wall would prove pointless and he would be deposited right back where he stood, but it might equally trigger some sort of disqualification outcome or something more fatal.
It was best to keep his feet firmly planted in the sand that filled the arena’s floor. The sky above him was earth blue with a bright yellow sun he remembered all too well shining down upon him. The glare was noticeable, and the sand radiated heat, which in this scenario probably put him just past midday. He kicked the ground, and the sand sprayed outward, glittering momentarily in the sun.
Tom glanced around unimpressed.
There was a single point of entry into the arena. A large black hole in the wall with thick metal bars above it ready slam down. It was like a portcullis in a castle where more effort went into ensuring the exit could be closed quickly even if opening it would take a long time. Tom faced the entrance and waited.
There was the sound of growling, and then a monster burst through that looked like an ogre with a turtle shell protecting its back. It was the same creature that had been painted on the tile associated with the crystal he had used.
The portcullis slammed down with a massive crash, which caused the monster to spin around to defend against the cause of the noise. Briefly, Tom toyed with using a lunge to attack it from behind and then decided it wasn’t worth it.
The ogre snorted in annoyance when it saw the cause of the racket and then spun to face him. It’s eyes were wide, and its nostrils flared at a rapid pace. It was a large monster, thick muscles and around two and a half metres high with only its torso protected by rough chain mail. The spear in his hands felt small, but Tom smiled anyway. This was a chance to train, and the ogre was only level sixteen, so should be a simple opponent for him to defeat. Especially since based on its physical appearance it would almost certainly be focused on crushing strength rather than speed.
With a whoop of excitement, he charged towards it.
The ogre tried to fight, but it was as slow as he expected. He dodged the club easily and teleported under another one just because he could. Within those two engagements, Tom had its full measure.
More than a little disappointment filled him.
His spear flicked forward.
The monster judged the trajectory and shifted its leg back slightly to avoid the attack. Tom still smiling at the simple joy of combat used his Spear Extension skill to lengthen his reach. Rather than missing the longer spear struck and opened up a bloody line along the creature’s thigh.
The ogre growled in anger.
It had thought itself safe and didn’t understand how it had been hurt.
The confusion in its features amused Tom slightly, but his joy was gone. This was not an opponent it was a victim.
The best he was going to get out of this encounter was some training and if he pushed himself some familiarity with his new skills.
The ogre counter attacked and Tom mentally targeted a patch of air on the other side of the arena and lunged. The skill sped his feet and when his feet hit the sand, it was like the nature of the surface had changed. Rather than treacherous footing, it was like he was walking on a metal sculpture which had been spray painted with a sand layer to resemble an arena floor. There was no give whatsoever. Tom ran, and was a hundred percent confident in his footing. It was a weird but welcome sensation. If he deviated off the defined path, he knew from the knowledge in his head that the skill would fail and the ground would immediately return to become soft and treacherous sand.
His feet carried him over the five metres in what was a second or two to him, but to the rest the world might have been a twentieth of that time, a tenth of a second, maybe less. An instant as far as his opponent was concerned. The moment the tip of his weapon piercing the space he had been aiming for the skill released its grip on him. Just as it was designed, his momentum did not change. He was still hurtling forward moving far faster than he could achieve without the use of a skill.
Tom braked hard with sand flying everywhere as he slid another metre with his feet digging into the suddenly soft sand all the way to his ankles.
He glanced back and caught the confused expression on the ogre turtle’s face.
Tom ran back into battle and easily avoided its counter attack. Now fate was in play, there was no longer any challenge. He played with it for a couple minutes just to stress test his Spear Extension ability and then got bored. His mental calculations indicated that he had spent almost five minutes on this creature, and that was too long. It was time to finish it. That would let him eliminate the remaining enemies, however many there were, before the locked period of the trial expired.
Tom switched between one moment and the next from scoring casual strikes to trying to kill. It roared and lifted the club right up over its head, clearly intending to try to hit him with everything it had. The move left it ridiculously exposed and Tom thrust for the uncovered skin of its belly where its chain mail coat had ridden up so it was no longer protected.
Brutally, he struck, enhancing the blow with a mixture of both Power Strike and Spear Extension. The weapon enhanced by Power Strike went through the skin like it wasn’t there, and he shoved the spear up over two feet into the monster. Given the angle and how the spear had expanded to be as wide as his wrist, the weapon had to have hit something vital. Guts, lungs, heart, hell, if its anatomy gave it two hearts he could very well have pierced both of them. The wound was not small.
With a thought, the weapon returned to its normal size, which made it simple to extract.
When he pulled the weapon clear, he left a significant hole in the monster. It dropped the club, and both hands clutched at the wounded spot. That movement caused it to bend down and forward. The head that had stubbornly stayed out of range for the whole fight was suddenly low enough.
Tom Lunged at it.
The ground was immediately hard under his feet and gave him more than sufficient purchase to accelerate like he was launching from sprinter blocks. He took advantage and crossed the two metres separating them almost instantly. His spear glowed blue, and he drove it through the monster’s eye. He felt the weapon crash through the eyeball, then the bone socket, and then pierce the skull on the other side of the brain.
If the first wound had not been lethal, this one was.
He yanked the weapon back and with another lunge retreated to the far side of the arena in case it had some form of suicidal sacrificial skill.
Ding
The noise echoed in the arena, and he lowered his spear.
You have successfully completed the challenge.
The words flashed in front of him. Tom stared at them in surprise for a moment incapable of understanding this turn of events.
“Only one enemy?” he asked the arena in disbelief. He had been expecting to fight four, but hopefully eight. One enemy was too low.
The dead body disappeared, including the blood that had leaked out. The arena returned to its original state apart from the portcullis that remained stubbornly down.
Tom looked around and wondered what to do.
He attempted to access the auction house and failed. Which made sense. The GODs didn’t want participants communicating with outside sources. He had wanted to make progress on his next golem, but that path was blocked for him.
He activated Earth Sense and discovered that there was nothing available to help him train. Everything was dead and artificial. That even applied to the irregular rock that made up the walls of the arena. It was there only for aesthetics. It was literally a couple of millimetres of natural stone fused with the fake stone under it in order to give it an ordinary appearance and feel.
This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.
“What then?” he asked himself while glancing around. The sun was high above his head and the sand soft under his feet. With a shrug, he started to practice his spear katas. As he worked, he thought about what had happened.
The entire process annoyed him. The fight was too simple, and the forced waiting afterwards to annoying. Finally he was ejected, and Michael gathered them together for a debrief. “Hands up, who was successful.”
Harry was the only person not to raise their arm.
“Better than I expected. Let’s go over each other’s experiences. Harry?”
“It was a symbol puzzle. There were sixteen only possible combinations, so I tried to brute force it and it failed me on the ninth attempt.”
Everyone winced at that.
“So lesson one,” Michael said with a smile, “don’t try to brute force solutions. Tom, how did yours go?”
He faithfully recounted his own experiences with the ogre. Once more, the lack of difficulty annoyed him, but he suppressed that and kept to the facts. After him, each of the others went through the details of the problems they had faced and how they had solved their issues.
Results were in line with what Michael had expected and after a brief discussion on capabilities everyone was assigned to the challenges would best suit them.
“Nothing for me?” Tom asked once it was clear the assignments were finished.
The healer chuckled as he walked over to his challenge. “I’m pretty sure that Keikain has already given you your orders.”
“Who’s the boss here?”
“Clearly not you,” Michael shot over his shoulder as he went to touch the crystal that led to one of the logic challenges he had been assigned too complete. Then he stopped himself and put his hand to his side and turned to face Tom. He paused for a moment to let Harry and Toni activate their crystals.
They did so and disappeared, which left just him and Michael in an empty hollowed out mountain with perfect privacy.
“Seriously Tom, what Keikain said made a hell of a lot of sense to me. You’re critical to us surviving this. Not because of your tanking skills or the destructive potential of your spell. It’s your utility abilities that matter. The golem you’re going to create can be shaped to be a key to fit any lock. It can be designed to defeat the monsters the rest of us can’t touch. As for True Dreaming, well. We know how important that is. We need information.” Michael waved at the elaborate puzzle they stood upon. “We have a map. Let’s place our enemies and potential allies on it. Those details will take you days to gather and I have to be honest the sooner we get it the better. We need to turn potential allies to confirmed allies to let us plan better. Sleep as much as you can and when you’re not sleeping, plan out your golem build. Think of ways it can be used to cheese future encounters. Consult the auction house to see what is out there. Our budget is four hundred thousand, but we would obviously prefer some of that to go into evolution potions or be available to snap up any bargains that appear.”
“That much?”
The healer hesitated a moment. “That’s what Thor’s told me. That trait stone, the tier four one. We knew it was valuable, and we weren’t wrong. At least two parties really want it. I think its price has already gone over three hundred thousand by itself.”
“Four hundred thousand,” Tom repeated.
“Well, hopefully you won’t spend all of it, but yeah that’s our current budget. Anyway,” the healer waved at him with a huge smile. “Adios.” He pushed his hand down on the crystal and vanished.
Completely alone, Tom frowned at the numbers he had given. The price of the trait stone was no surprise. If anything, it only selling for less than three times its experience value was a disappointment.
He knew that when Michael had mentioned the four hundred thousand number he had probably thought he was offering a small fortune as the first golem had been set up for far less. However, their needs had grown, and they were fighting significantly stronger monsters than what they had faced in a rank fourteen area. Very little of the last Golly version had survived the wyvern’s attack, so he was basically rebuilding from scratch.
Tom consulted his storage space.
He had sufficient high tier stone to create a reasonably sized golem, the control orb to direct it, the broken prison to provide the home for an elemental piloting it and the artefact that contained the Earth Manipulation spell. That was all he had to work with, but it was a lot better than he had expected. The small stashes of tier three stone they had picked up on their journey helped.
He had to rebuild another version of Golly. His wandering feet took him over to the zones they were planning to target next. The flower picking one gave him nothing to base the new golem on. All the monsters he checked were different. It was a wild area with no monster consistency across it. The second zone they planned on targeting was the four-way war.
This he examined in more detail.
The creatures that made up the four sides were clear. A fire breathing mostly spherical creature that appeared to live in water, two swarms of small critters. One was almost a cliché possessing an air magic attack while the second seemed to have some sort of phasing in and out ability. The final monster was depicted as a sword devilish.
It was not much to go on, but the two swarm monsters made him remember an early conversation he had about the golem. Whatever extra capabilities he included in its build should be based on addressing their weaknesses, and his eyes studied the picture of those swarms.
How fast were they going to be? He asked himself. The answer was probably quicker than what he and his team could safely handle. One of their key limitations was a lack of spells capable of doing damage over a large area. He was sure Keikain, Michael and Everlyn had put their heads together to create a plan to address it, but they hadn’t made any progress as far as he was aware. The problem was that for most of them their specialities did not lend them to those sorts of spells. Maybe Thor, with his hammer had a natural synergy with that type of attack, but the others. Rahmat with his spear focus, Everlyn with her bows, Keikain with his earth and the healers certainly did not have builds that leant themselves to those types of attacks.
He did with his lightning speciality, but with all the other stuff he had to do, developing an area of affect magic was well down on his list of priorities. Toni was a possibility with her high air affinity and was probably the solution the others had earmarked. For now, the lack of coverage made the decision about how to create his golem clearer. He needed something to slow down fast moving swarms or … Tom tapped a painting of the fire breathing sphere… slow down or destroy fast moving swarms; he corrected himself mentally.
A fire cone spell was clearly an effective tactic if that species was involved in a war against both swarms and not losing. The sword devilish, presumably, was also effective against the small critters.
Tom chuckled internally at that. Theoretically, a golem based on speed and multiple blades was an option. However, he couldn’t see a crafter who only had access to a stone golem spell attempting that. They would have to be stupid to try… earth was not known for its speed.
Fire spells or slowing ones. Tom decided.
He ducked into the auction house and began his research.
Mana Engine - Tier 1 - Cost 45,000
Mana Engine - Tier 2 - Cost 320,000
Mana Engine - Tier 2 (Damaged*) - Cost 200,000
Mana Engine - Tier 2 (Non-Functional, Severely Damaged*) - Cost 145,000
The damage ratings were included by the system not by the human who had put them up. The description of the last mana engine implied the issue was barely more than a scratch and if you had some duct tape and some spit you could fix it up in a jiffy. He was glad that some guard rails was built into the auction house to prevent exploitation of the gullible. Even with his threshold he decided he would not buy the non-functional mana engine.
The question was whether he could get away with using the lesser and cheaper Tier 1 Mana Engines. Mentally, he prodded the stone golem spell and frowned. The mathematics, as was often the case, was immensely complicated. He included the weight of the rock and when he read the results he hit his thigh in anger.
The numbers did not work at all. If he used a tier one mana engine, it would only allow five minutes of basic action every hour, or around thirty seconds of fighting. A tier two engine, on the other hand did not allow continuous movement but was close enough that it would not cause incessant delays. Dropping down a tier was not a possibility.
Tom glanced up to check on the others, but only a few minutes had passed. They were all locked away.
There was more time, so he reviewed the other minimum components that were needed to create his construction. Unfortunately for this crafting project, he did not have a pool of craftspeople to draw from to convert jewellery into wire, so he placed spools of wire onto his shopping list. Twenty thousand credits for what he needed. Nothing more than a drop in the bucket.
Tom snorted.
His perception of things had changed. Twenty thousand credits a month ago would have been a vital piece of armour for him. He was spending too much, and they had limited budget, so he decided to only buy a single offensive option. The golem could still be useful while just relying on its physical abilities, especially when an earth elemental drove it. It would be at least equivalent to a rank seventeen monster with the Remote Earth Manipulation skill, and if got damaged that manipulation skill would allow it to rebuild itself.
The offensive choice, therefore, had to be a point of difference. Two items stood out to him as meeting his needs.
Dust Storm Generator - Tier 3
Converts infused mana into a rotating vortex brimming with razor edged pieces of stone that rotates around the caster. Rated to kill anything that enters with vitality below rank ten. At the basic cast level, the range of the dust storm is ten metres.
Note 1: No friendly fire protection.
Note 2: Weighs 90kg.
Note 3: Can be used with neutral mana or aspected Earth or wind mana. Aspected mana increases the deadliness of the generated effect.
Cost 52,000
The item was very similar to the ice missile that the first Golly had gotten installed. It was discounted in the auction house because its weight made it impractical for most purposes.
Unstable Flame Cloud - Tier 3
Creates an intense cloud of flame around the caster with a range of up to four metres. Is rated to cause severe burns on monsters up to rank 17, providing they don’t have fire resistance. This artifact lacks friendly fire protection and caster may receive minor burns when using.
Cost: 42,000
The choice between the two objects was not clear cut. The Unstable Flame Cloud was both cheaper than the Dust Storm Generator and was notably more deadly, with its capability of hurting rank seventeen instead of eleven monsters. However, Tom instinctively wanted the Dust Storm Generator, and it wasn’t just that inputting earth aspected mana might boost the damage significantly it was the additional range that it also granted. The swarm creatures were likely to be physically weak and having a death field of ten metres instead of four was significant.
He was willing to bet that the damage from the Dust Storm Generator was sufficient to defeat the swarms. With the build decided, he left the system room and started to shape the rock in his inventory into the form he planned to use. Unsurprisingly, the tier three stone resisted his manipulation, but he persisted. The activity was soothing and routine, but as he went through the motions Tom considered the nature of the form he was going to create.
All the previous versions of Golly had been mostly spherical designs with legs poking out. It had been the right choice for defending the battlements they had created, but it wouldn’t work for the zones he needed the golem to help him in. While the map did not have the level of detail required, Tom had no doubt that it would be rough. The broken landscape of the flower quest couldn’t be anything else, and the four-way war didn’t look any better.
He didn’t have a choice. He didn’t want to do it but slowly the disparate pieces of rock began to form the shape of a spider.