Chapter 16
CLEAN UP
Igmail’s fears had finally come to fruition, and in doing so they evolved into the cool professionalism that would let him survive them. About two hours ago the remainder of his expedition team had died, all but one, and then that one had started moving back towards the surface. Normally cause for celebration, this knowledge was tempered by the fact that every monster between here and there had all attacked the bunker at once. The slowly ascending Champion and the sudden attack painted a vivid picture of the dungeon finally growing tired of him due to this final intrusion and deciding that now was the time to unleash everything.
In this picture Champion was not the victor, but rather the prisoner, the homing beacon for if Igmail were to run. The sounds of combat, the crash and clash and smash of his gorilla golems, had emanated from the dungeon access room for over an hour and a half, and Igmail could come to no other conclusion than that this would be his final stand in the face of overwhelming power. This certainty of doom had calmed Igmail’s fears, as an immediate threat always did, and he started working.
Backup was a distant dream, whatever meager help available hours away, and Igmail had absolutely no confidence in facing the dungeon master head on, so he instead started preparing a battlefield. He first ordered his golems to clear the first five floors as quickly as possible. His conversation with Scholar had revealed that the fifth floor was just a large boss arena filled with rubble and pointy obstructions, which sounded perfect to him.
It took two hours and three deaths for the hodgepodge of unnamed golems to overcome the constant flow of monsters from the lower floors, but they eventually managed it. They must have killed two hundred monsters by the time they reached and cleared the fifth floor, Igmail even killing around seventy of them by himself. After that it became the golems’ job to stem the flow as Igmail worked.
The stone alteration specialist was surprised by just how easy it was to alter the dungeon stone, the will it previously possessed now entirely absent, but he simply attributed it to that will now being intently focused on his destruction. It did make his job easier though, allowing him to gather all the stalagmites and stalactites in less than a day. He piled them to the side, then got started on the meat of the work: a hidden quicksand trap.
He started with a trench in the middle of the room, ten feet deep and twelve feet across. The stress of his impending demise made the mana flow through him at an absurd pace, allowing him to affect large sections of stone at once, for each one increasing the malleability of the stone while decreasing the buoyancy potential. Sinking into stone is normally impossible, it is simply too dense even in liquid form, but Igmail changed that. Using the blood of the defeated monsters as a catalyst for his power, Igmail spent two whole days ensuring that anybody who crossed the middle of the room would find themselves sinking into and crushed by the hyper malleable stone.
After doing all he could, Igmail collapsed, just before telling one of his guards to wake him up as the danger approached.
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Champion’s first action after defeating the dwarf wyvern was to break the dungeon core. He strolled right up to the now inert orb of crystal and shattered it with a single punch. It broke into several massive chunks, each larger than himself. Champion’s second action after defeating the dwarf wyvern was turning those chunks of minerals into cackets for the fallen. He made eleven, once for everybody but himself, and filled three of them with what remains he could find in the room. In a bout of practicality he also created a large stone sled from the stone of the room itself and used it to carry the hastily removed scales and bones of the beast.
All throughout his work ghostly hands floated in his peripherals. Each action he took was supplemented by these ephemeral helpers. For each scale he removed thirty two others would find their way into the bin, for each bone the same. Each cut and slice was multiplied, and especially his work in shaping the crystal and stone was enhanced. Champion could feel, in the very back of his mind, thirty two wisps of consciousness left over from each fallen comrade. Over the course of his work they conglomerated, communed, communicated, until they eventually settled on a name.
The Shattered Legion, they pronounced non-verbally. The remains of all that was lost when a golem died.
Soon, all that Champion could collect from the room had been collected, and so he started to make his way upwards. Literally make his way, that is, because with the aid of the Shattered Legion he started to construct a spiraling ramp upwards through the stone. His new tier five strength and the aid of the Shattered Legion made it much quicker than it would have been before, quicker than navigating through the tunnels of the dungeon with his train of carts behind him. He started by pulling the stone from the ground, but soon he reached the roof of the massive cavern, where he instead let the rubble cascade down past him as he forced his way through the stone. It took him just a couple hours and a detour to reach the point of last stand, where he picked up the broken bodies of Interceptor and Pugilist.
After that, there was some clean up to do. When a dungeon fell, all of its monsters didn’t just die. Rather, they were simply freed from the dungeon’s control, and free monsters had two ambitions. They either wanted to go as deep as possible so as to grow the fastest, or reach the surface so as to eat as much as they wanted. The hobgoblins chose the former, and Champion made them regret it.
He and the Shattered Legion tore them apart in the narrow tunnels underneath the city. The only reason the tunnels weren’t blocked by the thousands of dead bodies was because Champion had liberated the transport hoop before anything else. It took most of a day to finish them all off, but it got done.
Champion continued on his way in this manner. He collected the dead, made the monsters dead, and continued to construct his upwards spiral. Once, he felt the addition of three new brothers to the number of the fallen, which sped up his progress a little. It took about a week in total to reach Igmail’s location, and when he did he did so by bursting through the floor with eleven crystal caskets and the scales of a pseudo-dragon in tow. Just in the right spot for what could only be described as stone mud to flow past him and down the ramp.
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Igmail was woken up by a large commotion on the other side of the room. He could hear rubble scattering itself and heavy thumping steps, an ominous screech and a rumble. It was terrifying, so much so that Igmail reacted by kipping to his feet and pulling his spear before he even registered the sound. There was a wild look in his eyes as he frantically surveyed the room, followed by a look of confusion when he spotted naught but stone gorillas. ‘Where are the monsters and doombringers? Where's my heroic final stand?’ he thought, though the fact that death wasn’t imminent shook him out of his combat hyperfocus. Taking another look around, this time without waving his spear around as well, Igmail noticed only one additional thing in the room: Champion.
‘Champion! What happened man? How are you here?’ Igmail sent with surprise.
‘Uhh… I won? I was the only survivor, but I killed the boss and destroyed the dungeon core,’ Champion told his creator. ‘Ooh, also, I brought gifts. My comrades, they… they wanted to be remembered. So please, when you remake them, remind them of who they used to be. I’ll help.’
Igmail was speechless. The surprise of Champion and crew actually winning was massive, combined with a display of sapience surpassing even that of Toto, it was simply too much for him to process in a conversationally appropriate time frame.
‘...’ Igmail stared, ‘Of course. It’s the least you guys deserve. What are these gifts you brought though? I want to remake everybody to be as strong as possible.’
With this prompting, Champion showed Igmail the harvested scales, bones, crystals, and stone, and using them the golemancer got to work. First, he located his “quick-stone” trap, which had flowed all the way down to the bottom of the dungeon. Next, he made everything usable. He had the guards work in pairs of two to grind it all down, leaving not even the bodies of their fallen brothers intact as most were too broken to be usable anyways. They then poured and mixed this assorted dust mix into Igmail’s former quicksand trap, the stone already possessing a desirable malleability. A pit was created for this concoction to rest in, and a long stone pole was fashioned and used by Champion to mix it all evenly while everybody else, including the Shattered Legion, worked the material into having a stronger bond with the stone.
After about a day of this work, all while Igmail was resting in anticipation, the clay was prepared for sculpting. At this point the process diverged from the norm a bit. The pool of stone had its surface tension increased, and then thirty five even sized blobs of stone were extracted. These blobs were quite a bit larger than the average gorilla golem, so they were then compressed until they had the approximate volume right. At this point, Champion entered the process. Sitting in the middle of these blobs, Champion poured his whole soul into the Shattered Legion. Across the room thirty five ethereal golems appeared, each one standing above a blob.
The mostly intangible gorillas then began their work, sculpting each blob into a likeness of themselves. Each knew intimately how they functioned, even in their reduced forms, and they endeavored to recreate that with a few alterations. A raised brow ridge here, an intentionally different colored streak there, each blob was made similar to yet distinct from their predecessor. About half way through the process was when Igmail got involved. Sitting back to back with his second oldest golem, he fell into meditation.
Igmail began to delve into his soul, and soon came to the space of the stone orb and the connections. The stone orb was looking especially knobby at the moment, the fourteen fallen golems yet to fully reintegrate with him. He delved past that and into the widest tube he could find, the one he shared with Champion. Soon, he arrived at Champion’s very own chunk of soul, smoother and richer than his own. He witnessed the chains wrapped around and hanging from it and the boulders attached to chains, thirty five of them.
His will began to stretch, a mental hand grabbing his own soul and extending from the wrist through his connection to Champion. This cord of mental power then split into thirty five strands, each touching a boulder. Igmail could immediately feel his conscious control slipping. His soul was directly feeding mana into the Shattered Legion and his will was harnessed to implant knowledge and skills into the new golems, but he had no control over how it happened.
The golemancer had essentially become a power bank for the Fallen Legion, allowing them to use his power in his stead. It was a weird aspect of his ability, one that was not often useful. The golems could only make more golems if Igmail was there specifically allowing them, so it was almost always just more efficient to do it himself. This was a very rare instance where it was more efficient, allowing the hours of shaping and shifting and altering to be done entirely by the golems, saving him time, physical exertion, and because the Shattered were footing part of the bill, will power and mana.
Eventually, however, it was time for the final imbuement. The bodies were completed and the minds were constructed, both of a quality rarely seen before. The wyvern remains had catalyzed the stone of their construction to a whole new grade of toughness and strength, not to mention the blood that had been mixed into the original stone putty. Additionally, the dungeon core dust, of which there remained quite a bit, had turned the golems’ bodies significantly more mana conductive, filling them with an efficiency and power that allowed them to put more mana into everything they did, whether that be movement, cultivation, or stone alteration.
The minds of the golems were custom built for the role their ancestor had held. They were privy to the specific knowledge of new disciplines that Igmail didn’t have proficiency in and the experience of being a gorilla made of stone that Igmail lacked. It was because of these improvements and more that Igmail felt safe splitting his soul chunks up further. All of the bits that had yet to fully reintegrate, all fourteen of them, were larger than strictly necessary to empower a golem, it was simply easier to keep them whole when he fished them back out.
That's not what Igmail did this time. This time he took a mentally shaped scraper to the outside of his soul, collecting all the malleable spirit stuff and then a little extra into a large glob. He passed this glob through his connection with Champion, the transfer naturally smoothing it into orb, and then used a mental hammer and chisel to break this orb apart into thirty five even chunks. These chunks were then passed back through the tube to Igmail’s soul space, the circular path rolling them into a ball. The mental hand that had been all this time grasping Igmail’s soul then switched targets and grabbed onto the lump of perfect orbs, each one traveling back through the connection for a third time and being disturbed to a boulder.
These boulders took the orbs into themselves, only for them to vanish, thirty five new connections spontaneously appearing in Igmail’s soul scape. Igmail released his meditation and opened his eyes, watching as each ghost rejoined Champion only to be replaced by a real version of themselves.