Still grumbling about the other guy making things hard for him, Will returned to the main cavern and continued in the same direction he’d been going earlier. The cavern stretched on for a few dozen meters before another smaller tunnel branched off, this time to the left.
Will headed down the tunnel for about twenty more meters before it opened into a chamber that looked very similar to the previous one.
In this room, however, the carpet of moss covered a far larger percentage of the ground, only having a few crisscrossing lines of barren ground. The reason for the less ravaged moss carpet was the presence of just one slime in the room, rather than two.
Will activated his upgraded Shock Bolt skill. Two miniature ball lightnings appeared in front of his face and shot at the slime. Will could tell that if he’d wanted to, he could have chosen different targets for each bolt.
When the bolts hit the slime, each one of them caused a visibly larger part of its jelly to blacken than the basic Mana Bolt did. Will could also see electrical sparks dancing over the slime’s body. The sparks remained for a second, during which the slime stopped moving, before vanishing and leaving the monster free to crawl its way to Will.
Will, however, was ready with another Shock Bolt, and launched it before the slime could even begin to close the distance between them. The second attack turned out to be enough to kill the monster, and Will settled down to recover his mana before continuing.
Let’s see. It took five Mana Bolts to kill the slimes earlier. At five health per bolt, that’s twenty-five health for a slime. Electrical boosts the damage by one category, so Shock Bolt deals slight damage, or ten health per bolt. That means that three bolts should have been enough. On the other hand, my wand deals minor damage. I don’t remember how much that is in health, but it shouldn’t have taken all three charges.
Something else to ask Fili next time I see him, I guess. For now, Shock Bolt should definitely be good enough to get me through this space.
It took a little more than half an hour for Will’s mana to refill, after which returned to the bigger cavern and continued on.
The next chamber he encountered had two occupants. One of them was obviously a crankscout. This version looked like a smooth brass dome, moving around on four little wheels. It was also painted green, presumably as part of its camouflage. But only on one side. The other side was the bright metallic yellow of brass.
The second monster looked like a relative of the slimes Will had been fighting earlier. This one, however, was as grey as the rocks around him, and looked a lot more solid than its possible brethren.
In addition to looking different, the new slime was also not behaving like any of the ones Will fought before. Instead of moving around and eating moss, this one was scraping around a stalagmite, slowly consuming the stone.
As soon as Will entered the chamber, the crankscout, which had been pretending (fairly badly) to be a regular slime, seemed to notice him and moved to attack. A small panel opened up on top of its dome, and out came a miniature fire hose. The hose aimed itself at Will, and a stream of liquid shot out of it, aimed at the wombat.
Will, of course, had no intention of getting hit by whatever the hell it was, and jumped away, launching his own Shock Bolt at the crankscout.
The bolts hit the mechanical monster, and Will could see the electrical sparks racing down the dome, to the metallic wheels, and down to the ground, not doing any visible damage.
Meanwhile, the weird, probably variant, slime started reacting to the battle, and shot a sharpened stone spear at Will, who was still recovering from dodging the crankscout.
The stone spear slammed into Will’s armored flank with a lout clanging sound. The armor stopped the spear, but the force of the hit was still enough to bruise.
The crankscout looked like it needed some time to reload its weapon, so Will tried another Shock Bolt, this time aimed at the rock slime. The bolts hit the monster, but didn’t seem to phase it at all. They did leave small scorch marks behind, leading Will to think that some damage had been caused, but nothing even close to what they did against the regular slimes.
Seriously? Will grumbled. I push everything into Shock Bolt and immediately things become immune to it?
Lacking any other option, Will charged at the crankscout. The mechanical monster had managed to reload its squirt cannon, and fired another stream of liquid at him, but Will was running fast enough that he managed to get under the arcing liquid, and only a few random drops fell on his armored back and butt.
The drops that hit his fur started to immediately burn, but they were few enough that they didn’t stop his charge, and he slammed into the crankscout hard enough to dent its metal. Unfortunately, the monster’s shape was stable enough that even with Unstoppable Force, Will wasn’t able to knock it over, and it quickly brought its acid squirter to bear on Will.
Will turned around and ran away from the metal monster, running behind a stalagmite to avoid the acid. Being focused on the crankscout, however, he lost track of the rock slime, and a second rock spear slammed into his armored back, making him stumble.
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The fact that wombats were heavy and low to the ground came to Will’s rescue, and he managed to catch his balance after a couple of steps. Running all the way around the stalagmite, Will charged back at the crankscout. He caught a few more drops of acid on the way, but crashed into the monster, denting it even more than his previous attack.
He was ready for his charge to be stopped this time, and wasted no time before running off again. There wasn’t any acid chasing him this time. The crankscout was having trouble moving, and Will could hear the sounds of its gears grinding against each other. Which also meant that Will could easily dodge the rock slime’s spear.
The third charge proved too much for the brass monster, and it broke apart under Will’s impact.
This left Will with just the rock slime to fight, and he turned to charge at the stony monster. A move which turned out to be a lot less successful than it was against the crankscout. In fact, charging at the rock slime was very much the same as charging at an actual rock.
Meaning, it left Will with a headache, and the slime completely unmoved.
With Will within melee range, the rock slime sprouted spikes all over its body, and tried to slam them into the dizzy wombat. Will had to back away quickly to avoid being turned into a holey wombat, and then had to jump sideways to avoid one of the spikes being shot at him.
Damn it. That thing is a serious pain in my wom-butt.
With physical attacks proving useless, Will went back to Shock Bolt. Each of the bolts seemed to do just a little bit of damage, and he had to constantly dodge the thrown rock spears, but once he got into the rhythm of things, the rock slime didn’t manage to hit him anymore.
It took ten Shock Bolts before the rock slime stopped moving and fell apart into a pile of stones. Which meant that the battle lasted for almost forty minutes, most of them involving Will running around and avoiding the slime’s attacks while waiting for his mana to refill enough for another Bolt.
So when the rock slime fell, so did the wombat. Will lay panting on the ground, trying to catch his breath after the drawn-out battle.
Crankscout slain!
Rock Slime slain!
Gained 30 XP
That was so not worth that little bit of extra XP! Will grumped.
It took half an hour before Will was ready to move again. He went to examine the broken crankscout, hoping for another aspect, but there didn’t seem to be anything useful in the wreckage. He did, however, catch a glint of something from the pile of stones that used to be a rock slime, and when he went to check it out, a piece of dark grey crystal caught his eye.
Aspect shard: Rock
Tier: Basic
Adds the rock aspect to a skill or piece of equipment. Effects vary according to the target.
Warning: aspect may have adverse effects on some targets.
I wanna rock (rock!)
The new aspect had very similar effects to the Electrical aspect. Linked to Dungeoneer, Mana Pool or Samina Pool, it would boost other rock-aspected skills.
With Unstoppable Force, it would make him resistant to damage while charging, which might work, but Will wasn’t sure it was better than slow.
With Lesser Cure Wounds it added the ability to reduce poison damage by one category on use. Will put that one firmly in the “useful” column.
Hunter-Gatherer was a dud. The aspect would increase the quality of harvested mineral resources. Which the skill had no way of harvesting.
Heavy Armor Proficiency was the best of the lot, with Rock promising to give Will a global mitigation of one damage category from all attacks on any part of his body covered by heavy armor.
Will still went on to check it with his gear, which gave decent options.
Bronze Claws would get armor piercing, reducing the damage mitigation on the target by one category.
His armor would get its damage mitigation boosted by one category, and gain least damage mitigation against magic damage. Which made it the same effect as that from Heavy Armor Proficiency, but limited to the area covered by the breastplate.
The wand would change from a stream of acid to a solid acid bullet, giving it the same armor piercing effect as the claws.
In the end, it came to a decision between Least Cure Wounds and Heavy Armor Proficiency.
I’d really like both, but the defense boost from the armor will probably be useful more often.
Decision made, Will rested up long enough to heal his wounds and refill his mana, and went back to exploring the caves.
Thankfully, there weren’t any other crankscouts or variant slimes around, and Will didn’t have any trouble finishing the rest of the quest. It still took several hours, since he had to wait for his mana to regenerate after every fight.
Will got the expected message that he finished the quest and ranked up the space, and the one hundred XP that came with it. With the XP from the slimes themselves, He now had a total of two hundred fifty XP, which Will planned to hang on to until he saw what the next space was like.
The skill shard reward felt like the quest was actively laughing at him.
Skill shard: Syphon
Tier: Basic
Type: Harvesting
Cost: 10 stamina
Duration: 10 minutes
Identify and extract the useable parts of one magical monster
Now you can literally suck!
Now I get this? There’s no way I’m going back to harvest all of those slimes I’ve killed! But hey, at least I’ll get something of the last two I killed, right? And it’s part of the same set as hunter-gatherer, so it shouldn’t take up a slot.
Will absorbed the shard without thinking twice, waiting for the message telling him that it would merge with his existing harvesting skill.
And waiting.
And waiting.
Ten minutes later, Will realized that the skills weren’t going to merge.
Damn it. I wish this thing came with a user’s manual. Or better yet, a Discord server.
Upset as he was about the lost skill slot, Will still went on to harvest the two dead slimes that had occupied the final chamber, gaining a pair of poor-quality slime cores for his effort.
Then he waited long enough for his mana to fill up, and rolled his dice.