Beth desperately twisted to the side as she threw her arms up in front of her, shielding her head from the incipient blast. She had, by chance, wedged the blade of her sword into the ground in front of her torso, and the burnished metal absorbed some of the electricity trying to sear out her eyeballs and fry her brain. It was still quite a load of electricity for her to absorb, and her tall, lithe body spasmed and convulsed as the current flowed through it. The salamander took this opportunity to attempt to grab her head in its powerful jaws, which Beth stopped by flailing her left arm into its mouth.
The salamander bit down with quite an immense amount of force on her forearm, its small teeth sinking into the leather of her glove while the pressure started crushing her flesh. This attack of the salamander's proved, very quickly, to be a rather poor idea. Beth had enough STR when fighting a creature like this to easily lift it off the ground, which she proceeded to do as her body stopped spasming. She lifted with her left arm while twisting her torso and digging her feet into the ground, swinging the giant salamander over her head fast enough that it made a slight swishing sound on its all too brief journey through the air.
Even the beast's rubbery skin wasn't enough to save it, as Beth hadn't just swung the creature. She had also charged her left arm with a massive amount of energy using a full-strength Crush and, her arm now being wedged inside the beast's head, delivered all that pulverizing power directly to the inside of its skull, bypassing the problem of the rubbery hide altogether. Such a blow would not have been nearly enough to take out the creature normally, but having its entire head pounded into meat paste from the inside out certainly put it to rest.
Blood had finished off the beast she had been fighting and moved to harry the two salamanders that had forced Beth into the awkward position in the first place, buying her the time to finish the one that blasted her and get back on her feet.
This became the most frenetic fighting they had been part of so far. The vines had been very difficult, but the salamanders all firing off electric breaths made things touch-and-go for the last twenty or so beasts they fought. Beth and Blood couldn't avoid all the lightning during this frantic fighting, but they managed to avoid the most serious outcomes when they were struck.
Beth found herself repeating her earlier strategy on the very last salamander, finding herself in an awkward position after a swing and staring into the heart of a fresh electric blast. She took her left hand off the hilt of her sword and jammed it into the creature's mouth, causing it to instinctively bite down on her arm. She was blasted through her glove by the stored lightning, but ignored the pain and spasming of her muscles, lifting the beast by its skull and smashing it down with an infused punch. It turned out that crushing an enemy's skull from the inside out was still a very effective strategy, killing the hundredth monster instantly.
While Beth was quite tired, it wasn't nearly as bad as after the vine fight. What was much worse was the state of her and Blood's injuries, as they both had fairly severe burns on much of their bodies from the breath attacks of the salamanders. They immediately sat in the central area of where they had been fighting and dropped into meditation, activating their regenerative skills as well to heal themselves. It took some time for them to be fully back up to one hundred percent, but it was much less of a strain now. Their meditation and regeneration skills had increased quite a bit, particularly from the time spent fighting the spores of the strange plant, and they were able to heal faster and more mana efficiently as well as generate more resources from meditating.
Once they were fully healed up, Beth took the time to quickly check their stats and distribute any points they had available. They had gained a level, and she tossed the points in before checking their skills, where she was slightly and pleasantly surprised to see a new skill for both of them. They had acquired Lightning Resistance from all the lightning zapping them, which Beth thought would be pretty good. Both more surprising and more pleasant was Blood's acquisition of Identify, which Beth made an initial assumption was because she had pushed both Blood's INT and WIS to twenty.
After all the points were distributed, Beth hopped up and went to investigate the salamanders. There were a few that were fairly intact, namely those that she had killed from inside their own skulls, and a few that were totally mangled. She cut apart one of the ones that was badly mangled, grimacing as she did so. She found nothing inside, except for guts, and stopped at the point she started retching, staggering away from the mangled corpse and spitting out a little bile before wiping her mouth and straightening up. They needed money, but she still wasn't used to the gore and mess, only being able to push herself so far.
Circling back up with Blood, the two picked a direction and wandered off, looking to see if there was anything of value here before moving on to the final challenge. They moved over the rough terrain, sometimes having to hop up short escarpments or small cliffs, sometimes having to climb down into gullies before jumping up the other side. The fractured terrain made progress a little slow, but what would have been a terrible journey before the world changed was only slightly inconvenient now. Dozens of points in primary stats let the two leap up to dozens of feet safely, with high END letting a fall that would have led to broken bones now leaving bruises instead.
Nearly twenty-five minutes of leaping and climbing later, they stumbled upon a deep gully with the entrance to a damp and dark chasm near the bottom. The gully was a depression in the land as if a giant had pushed their finger quickly and slightly shallowly into the hard earth, and there was a sheer cliff face about fifteen feet high at the back of the area. It was at the base of this sheer section of the rock that a rough opening about five feet across yawned, leading deeper into the rock.
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"Add flashlights or magic lanterns to the shopping list." Beth muttered to Blood, who grumbled a short agreement.
The two ventured into the cave, not having quite as much trouble as they had feared. The massive increase to their stats had slightly sharpened their senses; not as great a change as the changes to their strength or physiques, but enough to allow even Beth to still have some visibility in the outer part of the cave. Fortunately for her they didn't have very far to travel, as the entrance was a fairly short tunnel of about twenty feet that opened into a slightly low but wide cave.
At first Beth was a little disappointed, moving towards the back of the cave while looking around as best she could, not finding anything of much interest. She knew that Blood could continue for a while with how sharp her eyesight had become in combination with her incredibly powerful nose, but if there wasn't anything in this room, she would become a hindrance as they tried to go deeper.
Beth was pulled out of her bitter musings by a couple of short and happy barks from Blood. She turned back and to the left, making her way to her companion's side in the damp and gloomy room. When she stepped up beside Blood, she saw the wolf was sniffing at something sitting on the ground at the corner between the cave wall and floor. She bent down to examine the item herself, soon finding herself face-to-face with a cluster of moderate sized mushrooms. She took a careful sniff near them, finding a musky, earthy, but also somehow refreshing scent entering her nose. She carefully reached down and plucked the cluster, pulling up four mushrooms with heads slightly smaller than her palm and stalks about the size of her thumb but slightly thicker.
Having found the first set of herbs, the two girls quickly got to work on one of their favorite parts of adventuring so far, the looting. They scoured the room quickly but carefully from top to bottom, Beth even climbing part of the somewhat high rear wall to investigate near the ceiling and finding two additional clusters high up. By the time they had stripped the room bare, Beth had made a pile of a little over thirty mushrooms, though a couple of them were damaged and likely not worth much. She scooped the pile up in her arms and made her way out of the cave, followed by a still curiously sniffing Blood, before they set off for the entrance to the final level.
Forty-five minutes later they had made it back and Beth sighed as she put the mushrooms away, noting how her improvised sack was bursting at the crude seams. She was worried about crushing the herbs but wouldn't think about leaving loot behind. She struggled to carefully close the makeshift bag and hoist it before moving to the door to the next floor. Blood followed behind, nose bumping her shoulder, ready to tackle the final floor. Beth pushed the door firmly with one hand and walked in, Blood following right after.
Beth was at very first a little confused when they emerged from the double doors, looking around to try to orientate herself in the vast expanse they now found themselves in. She first noted that they were in a building or enclosed space of some kind, though enclosed was stretching it a little. The room they were in was truly massive, likely stretching into a distance of miles in each direction, while the ceiling was multiple hundreds of feet overhead. A real shame; considering the size and intricate design of the large light fixtures hanging evenly spaced above her, they were likely worth quite a few gold pieces.
Beth then looked around the area, the lighting from the fixtures cool but not dim, and easily spotted their final opponents. She was actually excited for the first time in a number of floors, as lumbering around this strange warehouse-like space were one hundred golems. They were a little taller than she herself, putting them at a bit over six feet, made of some kind of glossy black stone with veins of red and white mottled throughout. They were a general humanoid shape, with two thick legs, thick and smooth torsos, long arms of a moderate size, and roundish heads that sat squarely betwixt their shoulders, no necks present on the beasts.
They each had a line that could be a mouth, though it didn't seem to open, and large, even noses centered on their blocky faces, though they lacked nostrils. The final touch was a set of oval eyes that reflected the cool light, looking more like a whitish tinted glass than any kind of gem, which were usually used for golem eyes in video games.
Beth wasn't sure what the stats of the creatures would be, but she was pretty confident her max copper rank Crush was going to do some real work here. She could sense she was still quite far from being able to push the ability to silver rank yet for a number of reasons, one of the chief ones being her lack of mana. It wasn't just a matter of her INT or WIS being too low, though she had been assigning her free points there for several levels. She could also sense the mana reservoir in her body was larger and a little more solid, and very, very little of that had come from her increased INT.
She had pieced together from talking to Baelvyr and the one book she had read on how the wider universe worked, plus her own experiences, that as one leveled up, they would have some natural increases outside of their stats. Likely the most important of these, at least before the construction of a Mana Physique, was the increases in the size of a person's magic reservoir. Until she and Blood hit a much higher level, or maybe even underwent their first rebirth, they wouldn't have the mana reservoir and mana density needed to upgrade their skills to silver.
Still, a max copper ranked skill was certainly nothing to sneeze at, especially as Beth's Unarmed had continued to slowly increase in level. The higher the level of weapon skill, the greater the extent to which one could utilize related skills such as Crush or Monstrous Blow. Beth would be able to deal a lot of damage very rapidly to the golems with her skills, but she wanted to test her limits first. Taking the easy path through the ranks certainly wouldn't do her and Blood any favors.
She set the smelly sack down and unsheathed her sword, wanting to test herself against the golems with her blade before falling back on her fists. She was making several assumptions about the creatures still, but golems were usually slow and strong with tough bodies, meaning her sword would likely do far less.
Even so, she moved towards the first of the golems near her, preparing for a fight as she watched it wander around. There was a fairly large clear space around where they had appeared, and by fairly large she meant not just their arrival zone but even most of the hundred golems were within that space. Beyond the immediate area were stacks of crates, pallets, and containers full of who-knew-what. She couldn't wait to crush these latest opponents and start tearing open the surroundings, trying to take anything that wasn't nailed down. Once she was close to the first golem she snapped out of her musings and used Identify on the creature.
Level 19 Worker Golem
They had an additional name besides just 'golem,' but Beth wasn't really worried, as 'worker' wasn't something that would indicate them being any tougher. With Blood trailing a few steps behind to let her engage alone first, she walked forward into the aggro range of the beast. It turned immediately, faster than what a level zero human would have done, but still slow to Beth's enhanced senses and mind.
Beth took out the first golem quite easily, letting Blood switch in basically right away to see if the wolf was capable of dealing damage to the beasts. The short answer was no, the wolf's claws and fangs were just now sharp or powerful enough to get through the stone of the golems' bodies. Beth told her companion to relax and then went to work, smashing through the golems like a jackhammer operator on steroids.