Chapter 6
BROTHERHOOD
As the gentle glow of the morning light crystal light woke Igmail up he struggled to reconcile his current position with his usual routine. Usually he would sit up on his bed with a yawn, feeling well rested if not exactly super comfortable on the small cot. This morning he was on the floor, and when he tried to sit up he realized that his neck hurt quite a bit.
‘Oh,’ Igmail thought when he spotted the additional people in his bunker. ‘This sucks.’ Igmail had ended up offering his cot to the much more tired soldiers. Sophie had the highest rank among the three so it would’ve ended up going to her, but she instead insisted that her higher tier meant she could handle the floor better. Johan’s feet would've hung off the end of the cot, which he judged to be worse than sleeping on stone, so the cot had ended up going to Nolan.
Igmail was the first to wake up among those in the bunker, which rather hampered the execution of his normal morning exercise, so he instead started warming up breakfast. Dried meat was better warm. It was the warmth more than the smell that woke the others up; turning the stove on made the room even more uncomfortably warm than the jungle just outside already did.
The much reduced patrol group looked rough when they woke up. Exhaustion clouded all of their features, both from their physical expenditure yesterday but also from all the friends and comrades they had lost. Everybody in Flourish had lost someone to the monsters at one point or another, so they were tough. Grief was a luxury most could not afford out in the forest. “Time spent cryin’ is time spent dyin’,” or so said Igmail’s least favorite drill instructor. It was a sad reality. This utilitarian attitude the soldiers had therefore left them looking for something to do after breakfast.
“So, Igmail, what do you do around here when you aren’t in the dungeon?” Asked Sophie.
“Well, uh, I don’t actually go into the dungeon except to collect the bodies. I have an ability that makes self guided golems and they’re the ones actually doing the fighting,” Igmial responded with a hint of embarrassment. “Other than the rare occasion when I’m making one of those, I’m usually compressing the walls. More space, better defenses.”
“Where does that leave us then?” asked Johan.
“I don’t know. You could meditate? There’s enough room to do some exercise, and plenty of ambient mana too,” Igmail responded uncertainly. He’d never not had anything to do around the bunker. There was too much he could be doing with all the rock around. “Hmm. Actually, what can you all do?”
Sophie was first to respond; “Item boosting. I can spend my mana to temporarily enhance anything I’m in contact with. I coulda gotten into the crafting division if I knew a trade before my training year ended.”
Nolan was next; “Kinetic manipulation. It's broad, and therefore weak, but I can apply force in just about any manner I can think of.”
Johan came last; “Bog standard vitality boosting. My mana keeps me from getting hurt and helps me heal. Vastly more effective to use on myself than others, but I can do it in a pinch.”
“Johan,” Igmail said, “I got no idea for you, but you two can help me expand. I’ll make a pickaxe for you Sophie, and you, Nolan, already have what you need.”
“I’ll be making another golem,” Igmail continued, “so I you’ll be on your own once I get you started, but it’s something to do.”
“We’re ok with that,” replied Sophie.
Igmail was briefly worried about being incapacitated with guests over, but this time he wouldn’t be quite so disabled afterwards, so it was fine. There were two aspects of soul cultivation, size and tier. Igmail’s golem making ability always broke off a piece of the same size without impacting the tier of his soul, meaning that Igmail would still retain the portion of his strength that was a result of his soul’s higher tier. Functionally, this meant that his soul would be more robust when he made the gorilla this time, and thus he would be less impacted by it afterwards.
It was a weird detail of his ability, but boy was Igmail glad for it. When he had created Toto he had been laid up in bed for weeks. Now he could get back to top form with a good night's sleep and a day of light activity.
With these thoughts running through his head Igmail got up from where they had all been sitting to form Sophie a pickaxe while Nolan got started. Nolan seemed to form a drill from thin air, drilling small holes into the stone that allowed him to crack the stone farther back, making it easy for him to simply pull rough blocks out of the wall. He got tired after two or three of them, however, which is when Sophie would start making chips fly with her faintly glowing stone pickaxe. Johan focused on removing the bricks and debris from the quickly growing passageway.
Meanwhile, Igmail had already done his part by taking with him a gorilla sized block of stone that he started to work on. Due to the clatter and racket it took him an extra minute to fall into his trance, but it didn’t end up being a problem. By the end of the day another gorilla had been sent to the dungeon and a decent sized pile of stone had been created in the corner of the dungeon entrance room.
When Igmail woke up the next morning, once more on the floor, he began to realize the truth of Sanderson the adventurer’s words. It wasn’t fun sleeping on the floor, nor listening to others snore, nor waking up feeling so sore. It wasn’t quite as bad as last time but Igmail still wished his head didn’t feel like it was about to implode. Poetic thoughts aside, Igmail once more got to work. He started with breakfast, then moved into renovation. This time, while the others were working on hollowing out a new room, he very gently resumed his work on the front wall of the bunker.
Very little of note happened that day, but Sophie did take one of the panther corpses that had started to show up and grilled it. It was nice, eating fresh food, so everybody in the bunker ended up sitting on the oddly soft but still hard stone floor as it cooked that evening.
“Sophie, I have a question. Does your power work on all tools? For example, will a stove perform better when you're using it?” asked Igmail. He’d noticed an odd glimmer to the stove, much more subtle than on Sophie’s pickaxe, which prompted him to inquire.
“Indeed, Igmail. Halbert is-was,” she corrected, “better at cooking over all, but I can do pretty decent just ‘cause the stove loves me. My power can stretch pretty far in terms of utility, but the farther from intended use a use is the less I can boost it.”
“Huh. A lot like my own power,” Igmail said. “Takes more energy to make stone something it isn’t than to make it more of what it is.”
----------------------------------------
The gorilla didn’t quite know what to do with itself. It had only taken an hour to kill everything on the first floor, then another hour for the second. He hadn’t even encountered a single thing to kill on the third floor, and now here was something that he wasn’t supposed to kill! What was even going on!
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
What's worse was that he could hardly communicate with this other gorilla, charades could only get its primitive mind so far despite what the other golem seemed to think. In the absence of more information the gorilla defaulted to its orders and tried to go to the next floor, but the other gorilla had stopped him! Confusion echoed through the small minded monkey, so much so that he eventually just sat down and cultivated, which is what his master told him to do when he couldn’t do anything else.
----------------------------------------
Champion was fed up with this suicidal companion of his. Sure, the other gorilla had been given a stronger chunk of soul to start with, but he wasn’t half as powerful as Champion was, and even Champion would be fighting for his life should he descend to the fifth floor. Champion had tried, and though he thought he could clear the floor if he had to, he’d rather be certain of it. If even Champion would struggle on the next floor, this dude had no chance whatsoever.
Finally, after a full two hours of struggling to communicate with the younger golem, Champion managed to get it to sit down and cultivate. Spear practice was basically out of the picture for the younger golem, such an Ideas was too complicated to communicate, but Champion continued with his own regardless.
At the moment he was practicing his deflections. The monster further in could seriously damage him, so avoiding that damage was a priority, and Champion wasn’t exactly as nimble as his master. Thus, he would deflect instead of dodge. Champion would take a rock he had enhanced to be bouncy and throw it against the wall, then practice hitting it away from him with his spear. It wasn’t too hard but it wasn’t exactly to easy either, so Champion wasn’t complaining.
Eventually, the young golem got up, apparently bored with cultivating, and watched as Champion practiced. Interestingly, he watched the roundish rock but not the spear. After some time the golem grabbed a handful of stone out of the ground and shaped it into a ball approximately the size of a grapefruit. He tried to bounce it against the wall, but it simply flopped.
At this point, Champion turned back to his training and stopped paying attention to his foolish friend.
----------------------------------------
The gorilla had meditated as long as its mind could justify inaction against its larger mission of suppressing the dungeon. Then it began to observe the other gorilla, assessing for weaknesses it could exploit to escape its captivity. It was playing a peculiar game with a rock and a spear, bouncing the rock against the wall only to hit it with the spear.
Seeing the speed the other gorilla demonstrates during the game made the golem quickly come to the conclusion that it was completely outmatched, and so it started looking for alternate solutions. The problem was that this thing it couldn’t attack was keeping it away from the things it could, and escaping the other golem was impossible. Therefore, the solution was to extend the range it could attack at until he could attack even from behind this impassable obstacle. A solution immediately presented itself to the calculating mind of the gorilla in the form of a sharp crack as the captor’s rock bounced against the wall once more.
Immediately getting to work, the gorilla shaped a sphere of stone out of the floor next to him, maintaining compliance with the other gorilla’s orders to sit. The young golem attempted to bounce it off the wall like the unattackable one, but it didn’t work. ‘Not a native property of this stone. Must fix,’ it thought. So it did just that, working to increase the elasticity of the stone for several hours, not that the gorilla golem knew the word “elasticity.”
When he tested it this time the shot put like stone did more than bounce once, it bounced off the wall, cracking it, the floor, cracking it, and the roof, though it was too weak at that point to harm the stone. Seeing its results, the gorilla decided to risk standing up and continued to practice with his new weapon.
After another hour or two of this, the gorilla could consistently bounce the ball against two or more surfaces and catch it again. The other gorilla seemed to notice this, and started up its strange gesturing again. It took several minutes but the gorilla recognized that the mental blocker prohibiting it from attacking this other simian was gone, and took that as its que to get in some live target practice.
----------------------------------------
‘The dense fool finally got it!’ thought Champion as he deflected the strange orb his companion had created. It was much better practice, the other gorilla rapidly recovering the orb to throw it at him from a new angle. ‘A few more hours of this and I may be confident in taking on the fifth floor.’
----------------------------------------
Now, an observant monkey might’ve come to the conclusion that the magical murder gorilla golems were being more cautious than normal. There was a very good reason for that, a reason that Champion feared. After a few hours of practice had passed, both Champion and the other gorilla went to face that fear.
The stairs down to the fifth floor were more ornate than those of the other floors. Instead of rough, unleveled stone the stairs were smooth and polished, with iron filigree lining the edges. It was slightly unnerving to see such a confirmation of the intelligence of the dungeon, that it could both produce and direct monsters capable of metalworking simply for decoration. Champion’s embedded knowledge said that messing up the decorations was a good way to piss the dungeon off badly, more so than blocking its entrance would.
At the bottom of the spacious stairway there existed a door, wide as three gorillas and as tall as four. The door was etched with images of bugs. Bugs pouring out of skulls, bugs devouring people whole, bugs swarming over a vague field of grain. In the middle, posed to be split open by the door, was the image of a giant cockroach, bipedal and terrifying. Terrifying, that is, to human adventurers. Champion, despite his respect for the danger the room presented, was not intimidated. He kicked open the doors, with his faithful rock thrower by his side, and rushed in spear first.
The room was crowded with stalagmites and stalactites, obscuring a decent amount of the room from Champion’s perception. That cover meant he had very little time to react to the five foot seven bipedal cockroach blasting into his side. Unlike with a lot of his other enemies, this one’s attack threw Champion to the floor with four big gashes in his side.
However, he quickly recovered and managed to spot the next attack. Thanks to all his training he parried a couple of the monster’s blows, and scraped it with a kick as it blitzed by him. This gave the other golem the opportunity to throw its rock at the monster. The golem’s natural eagerness to destroy was at war with the caution Champion had taught it, resulting in its decision to stay back and support the stronger gorilla.
The rock hit with much force but only managed to clip the antenna of the monster, crushing it slightly before the rock hit a stalagmite and rebounded around the room some more. Paradoxically, open spaces weren’t the best for the rock thrower’s choice of ranged weapon.
The cockroach sprang away deeper into the room, inciting Champion and his companion into giving chase. In the middle of the room was a clearing of sorts, where a lot of the stone protrusions had been broken. It had better lines of sight, meaning the gorillas could see attacks coming, but the footing was much worse, making dodging harder. The unnamed golem’s caution led it to stay close to Champion, each of the golems keeping an eye on one direction. It picked up some of the rubble as a replacement to its spent projectile, and it was at about that point that the cockroach attacked again.
It came for the unnamed golem at a diagonal, fast as lighting, but the monster's straight line trajectory made it an easy target for the rock thrower. The big bug was forced to juke to the side, which, along with the sound of the stone impacting the floor, gave Champion sufficient warning to jump in front of the other golem.
He stabbed at the monster from maximum range, the sharp spear failing to dig into the chitin of the dungeon spawn very deep. Champion did succeed in over balancing it, giving the stone thrower another opportunity to throw a stone. This one managed to crush one of the bug’s upper arms before it darted away.
It was in this manner that the fight proceeded. The monster would dart in and attack, sometimes dodging the attacks of the gorillas to score a blow. Other times Champion managed to deflect its dangerous strikes. On occasion the monster would get interrupted by a stone spear or a stone sphere, the gorillas getting the opportunity to score more minor damage on it.
The balance of the battle began to tip about ten minutes in as the monster got tired. Even its mana-saturated body was still made of flesh, and its speed and durability came at a cost. On the other hand, the golems could literally last indefinitely as long as they had magic to fuel them. The cockroach got slower and slower, weaker and weaker, till a lucky bounce on a thrown rock managed to crunch into the cockroach’s torso equivalent.
The battle from then on was just clean up, and Champion was quite capable of ending the monster quickly. When he finished Champion sent the other gorilla up to deliver the corpse while he guarded the room. It had several entrances and exits, with only one being a staircase going down, so Champion figured a lot of monsters passed through.