Chapter 12
HAHA. I’M IN DANGER
Igmail had been in the bunker for four and a half months when he finished hollowing out the hill. As a result of the space confinements of the hill some of the rooms had oddly sloped walls, wall which were never more than three feet thick if you measured from the inside of the bunker and the outside. The bathroom especially had expanded, now being suitable for up to three people at a time, though only one shower had an actual water crystal.
It made Igmail a little bit uncomfortable, actually, to have so much space now. Having lived in small apartments or barracks for all his life Igmail had no idea what to do with all the extra room. Extending from the main room, formerly the weight room, there were three other rooms of near equal size that he just left empty.
When he’d been given the assignment improving the bunker Deborah had told him to use his best judgment on floor plans, giving him full control over the layout of the base despite his lack of architectural or interior design skills. According to her, it would be simple to have a person with an ability actually meant for moving large sections of earth to clean up his design afterwards. This left him with a problem, as, lacking any specific commands, Igmail had no help in deciding what to do with all the space.
He ultimately resolved to leave it empty for now, but that left him with another problem. What was he to do with his time now? Igmail could only improve the properties of stone to a certain limit without adding additional catalysts. For example, when making his fridge cabinet, to alter the properties of the stone sufficiently Igmail had needed to refine some water into the stone. Water is made of hydrogen and oxygen, both gasses at room temperature, and these components ended up occupying microscopic air pockets in the stone, thus transferring some of its heat absorptive properties and acting as a metaphysical focus through which Igmail could scale those properties up even further.
Focusing on the problem at hand, Igmail didn’t have a sufficient catalyst to continue improving the quality of his bunker any further. He could draw carbon from the air, but that process was so slow that in all his loops around Flourish’s wall using this method he’d only managed to improve it half a percentage point. Of course, his bunker was a lot smaller than the wall, and he was a lot stronger than he used to be, but it still wasn’t a lot of improvement in comparison to the time investment made.
‘No,’ Igmail concluded, ‘I’ll just have to find a better catalyst, and what better place to do so than the basement?’ Having come to his decision Igmail started his expansion downwards. He walked down the stairs to the first room of the first floor and took a look around, then promptly left and came back with a light crystal. It was dark down there, darker than Igmail was comfortably with since his night vision wasn’t that great.
The room had many stalagmites and stalactites inside, and Igmail simply chose to harvest a couple and use them, as they were obviously tougher than the stone of his bunker. When Igmail attempted to use his usual method of making a thin layer of the stone brittle so as to more easily break it off, however, he encountered unexpected resistance.
His mana was impeded by will embedded within the stone, making it much more difficult to shape than the stone of Igmail’s bunker. As such he decided to simply spend the rest of the day mining the ‘mites and ‘tites so that he didn’t have to keep coming back down there for hours each day.
He settled himself on the floor with his spear beside him and got to work on his most tedious task yet.
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‘This is my chance! Finally!’ scream thought Samurthabec, practically salivating at the opportunity before her. ‘Go go go! Operation Phantom Assassin initiate!’ she once more screamed, startling a lanky goblin in dark robes into a sprint. She refused to waste all that mana she had stolen from that DOA meanie’s tunnel system. She would’ve disabled the spatial compression enchantments anyways, as it reduced the meanie’s ability to reach her and kept some of the cursed golems farther away from her, but she still refused to lose the chance to remove her infestation at the root.
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The Shaman had no name, as was normal for his kind. He did, however, have the capability of independent thought, which was not normal for his kind. Not that he had had much chance to learn these things about himself, he’d only been made a month ago. Nevertheless, the Shaman knew all he needed to know.
He knew how to suppress his soul signature and hide his mana to sneak past the visually impaired gorillas, he knew exactly where he needed to go, and he knew how to get there quickest. And so it was a simple matter to find himself in the first room of the first floor, clinging to the ceiling as he observed the Pest.
He lingered just outside of the light, watching, waiting. The Pest stood up from the ground and kicked the stalagmite he had been sitting near, the stone cleanly breaking along the bottom. He picked it up and started to move it to a pile of similarly conical boulders, distracted for a moment by his labor.
Shaman gathered up the full power of his soul into a single bolt that radiated a darkness darker than dark, as if the sun had inverted and decided to heed his call. He called it Devastation, a projectile of pure dark mana that could shatter any impacted soul his own tier. His power built over the course of seconds, growing, pulsing, festering, until he finally released it towards his enemy.
It flew slowly comparative to the speed Shaman knew the Pest could move, but the Pest was completely unaware. Closer and closer, until… contact! Right as the Pest stood up the bolt hit him square in the back, having no physical effect but rather directly attacking the Pest’s soul. His weakness, if Master Samurthabec was to be believed, and why wouldn’t the Shaman believe his creator? After all, how strong could a soul so fragmented be?
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Igmail felt something *ping* against his soul of stone as he was standing up. It startled him a bit, kinda like an unexpected horsefly bite, but he honestly wasn’t that bothered. How could a soul so used to damage be damaged by something so puny? ‘Hmm. I wonder where that came from? Maybe a gorilla got soul attacked, and I got a little backlash? Weird.’
Igmail was just about to go back to work, the disturbance brushed off, when he heard a soft thump from behind a few of the remaining stalagmites. Instantly on guard, Igmail grabbed his spear off the ground and sprinted towards it. Igmail had proved that the best way to kill something stronger than yourself was to do it quickly with an ambush, and there was no danger in rushing if it was something weaker than himself.
Therefore, when he found a skinny looking goblin about his height prone on the floor, he was very prepared to stab it. Sadly, the goblin rolled to the side in time to survive, though Igmail did give him a scratch on the shoulder with his downward thrust. Despite its thin body the hobgoblin kipped back to its feet with no further delay, drawing two steel daggers from its sleeves as it did so.
Igmail immediately stabbed at the strange monster once more, making it dance back with impeccable foot work. This had the added benefit of furthering Igmail’s reach advantage, something the goblin realized as it darted around the nearby stalagmites. Igmail pursued at a distance, going near horizontal as he sprinted around the obstruction, but he didn’t catch up with it before it faded into the shadows.
He fell into a defensive stance designed for quick rotation as he took small, fast steps back towards the stairs. His main priority at the moment was reducing the goblin’s angles of attack, which proved prudent when the goblin appeared behind him not ten seconds after disappearing.
Igmail failed to fully react in time and took a stab to the torso, though his quick rotation meant it didn’t reach anything vital. He retaliated with a backwards hook kick, sending the goblin stumbling to the side where Igmail lashed out with his spear. The goblin took a cut to the forehead, weeping blood into his left eye, but he did a back roll and soon vanished into the shadows again.
Igmail resumed his shuffle, but this time with more haste. The risk of falling paid off when he reached the wall without being attacked again, meaning that the goblin could now only attack him from the front. Or so Igmail thought. Igmail failed to look up.
Up is from where he was attacked next, the hobgoblin creeping along the ceiling just out of sight. Igmail spotted him only at the moment he jumped, the goblin plunging downward dagger first with great speed. With peternatural reflexes, Igmail threw himself forward, unable to bring his spear around to parry.
His counter attack was swift and fierce, all of Igmail’s tier four strength thrown in rotating back to the wall he justa left and burying the tip of his spear into the wall behind the goblin. He missed the goblin, the instability of his stance leaving it free to enter melee range. It started with a stab from the low right side of its body, aiming to gut Igmail. Obviously unsupportive of the impromptu surgery, Igmail jumped back without his spear and slapped at the goblin’s wrists, taking a small cut on his hand for the mistake of losing his weapon.
Again and again the goblin came at Igmail, the accumulation of small cuts inevitable for the less agile human, especially since Igmail only had his hands to rely on. Igmail needed to upset the status quo, and fast. Taking a risk, he bowled into the goblin after pushing one of its hands away, knocking the skinny monster over. The other dagger left a long shallow gash along his shoulder as he did, but that was a worthy trade for the stomp on its left ankle that Igmail was able to perform, breaking the fragile joint of the skinny monster.
With this impairment of movement leaving the hobgoblin at a close quarters disadvantage the goblin switched tactics and sent a dark bolt at Igmail’s face. Unaware of the harmlessness of the soul attack, Igmail jumped backwards and hid behind a stalagmite, breaking line of sight as he went to retrieve his spear. From then on the roles of the battle switched, with Igmail trying to get in close and the goblin keeping him at range with the scary looking dark bolts.
He dodged and weaved, trying to get closer, but couldn’t while still avoiding the dark bolts of the shaman. It took several exchanges for Igmail to finally fail to dodge, getting hit square in the chin only to realize that the dark bolts were no danger to his rock solid soul. Seeing the realization in the eyes of his opponent and fearing further hand to hand engagement, the shaman shrouded himself in darkness and attempted to flee. His crushed ankle meant Igmail was faster. It was all but over for the Shaman at that point; Igmail ruthlessly hunted him down in the darkness and finished him with a stab through the skull.
Afterwards, still fueled by adrenaline and fear, Igmail disposed of the body through the transport hoop, keeping the knives, and patched up his wounds with bandages the military had supplied him with. It was only an hour afterwards, sitting at his table with a bowl of stew in front of him, that Igmail really registered what had happened.
“Ok, what the heck?! The dungeon’s targeting me now? When did this happen? HOW did this happen?! It’s not supposed to have enough mana to send something that strong all the way up here!” Igmail yelled into his soup. “Ok, calm down Igmail Stone. Think this through like dad would. Ok. What: the dungeon sent a goblin shaman to assassinate me specifically, cause it didn’t kill any golems on the way up. When: an hour ago. Why: I don’t know! Maybe the golems have pissed it off somehow. There’s no way they are actually a real threat to it, I can make ‘em in a handful of hours.
“How: the most important I think. Because if it can replicate that, I’m screwed, I’m outta here, I’m dead. I can’t get into a fight like that every day, I’ll die before the week is out… I have no idea how the dungeon did that,” Igmail said in a tone of resigned dread.
“Ok then,” he continued. “How do I find out? The golems, I guess.” Having come to this conclusion, Igmail set his soup aside and started to meditate, going to the same place he went when he activated his ability; the marbled stone orb that was his soul. There were two small scratches on its exterior, little spots of discoloration from the shaman’s bolts, but that was it. He looked past the blemished orb to the things surrounding it, various ethereal tubes extending from nowhere into the space around his soul.
Down each tube, Igmail could see, was a space much like the one he was in, though smaller for most of them. Chunks of stone similar to his own boulder-soul floated in these spaces, primed to flee down the connection and rejoin his own soul at any time. Igmail gathered together his mental energy into a swarm of small hands, one for each of his golems.
He sent these hands to grasp the connections and set them to gently shaking, the vibration traveling the metaphorical distance between the parts of Igmail’s soul near instantaneously. One by one, each golem sent a signal back, confirming that they had received the message.
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Champion was on the thirty first floor perforating a monster when he got the signal, his whole soul vibrating to announce his Master’s summon. He and his crew finished the room they were in and started back up the stairs. ‘Man, I really need to have Scholar make a shortcut,’ thought Champion as he thought about the long climb ahead of him.