Chapter 5
HARD TIMES A’COMING
On Igmail’s eighth day in the dungeon he finished condensing the wall attached to the dungeon room. So he started on the wall with the bunker door. Due to the shape of the room that wall had slightly less surface area than the first wall, so it shouldn’t take as long as the other one. He saturated a two square foot area of the wall with mana four inches deep, then rethought it and instead decided to saturate a single square foot area eight inches deep, which was enough to reach the other side of wall. In order to preserve the camouflage of the bunker, he then withdrew his mana an inch before he started to compress.
A week spent steeping in the mana from the dungeon, wafting into the room from its entrance, had done wonders for his soul’s strength. Igmail had been early tier three when he had entered the bunker, which was as high as most people ever reached, but he had already passed the halfway point to tier four by his approximation. His consistent exercise, body, mind, and spirit, combined with the environment to enhance his strength significantly.
It was a well known fact that there were several factors contributing to cultivation speed, those being mental stress, ambient mana, and taxing abilities. Sleeping above a pit of endless monsters and mana fulfilled the first two conditions, and Igmail had always had the third in spades, so it only made sense that he would grow under the pressure like coal turning to diamond. Which was something Igmail could actually do with his powers, it was just very difficult and not very profitable given that coal was more valuable than diamond in Flourish.
Additionally, it was hard not to notice how rapidly the mana saturation of the room had been increasing in the last day or so. Igmail chalked it up to the dungeon throwing mana at the problem the gorilla would be making of itself, and was very correct in that assumption.
About an hour into his work, Igmail was startled out of his focus by a desperate banging on the door. A rapid bass beat pounded through the thick stone, and he could faintly detect equally desperate yelling. It took Igmail a second to connect the dots in his head, but when he did he went straight to action. The door to open the bunker had a bar across it to keep it closed, which he promptly tossed aside. With his whole strength leveraged against it the door flew open, striking the cliff wall outside with a bang. But, by the time the door had impacted the cliff wall Igmail had already darted out the door with his spear in hand.
He used the scant moment he had to analyze the situation he had just jumped into. He identified three soldiers off to the side, not trainees, and dismissed them as the threat. Next, he spotted a troop of verdant apes, about twelve strong. Verdant apes were common monsters in the tier two to three range that looked like his golems if they were leaner and greener.
One of them in particular looked bigger and meaner than the others, and that was the one Igmail directed his charge towards. When dealing with something potentially stronger than you then preparation was the first priority, but speed and savagery was a close second. The less time you gave unknowns to act the safer you were.
Igmail’s charge led with his spear, no hesitation at all, but somewhere in the back of his head he was thinking ‘what is it with the dang SIMIANS!?’ Distractions aside, he put his full speed and power into one lunging strike. The green tinted ape was standing on the ground howling and growling at the terrified troops, so he was an easy target. But, even with this exposure the ape reacted with enough time to turn to the side a bit, turning Igmail’s fatal blow into a merely debilitating slash across the chest.
Igmail’s lunge brought him past the ape with his back to it, but Igmial dug his left foot into the moist forest soil to decelerate his left side faster than his right and thus spin him to face the ape. Due to this maneuver Igmail ended up landing in a defensive stance, with his spear placed out in front of him just in time to intercept the counter attack of the verdant ape. He parried the haymaker by putting the lower half of his spear firmly between the middle two knuckles of the ape’s closed fist, redirecting the dangerous blow to whiff past his chest harmlessly.
Utilizing the force of the ape’s own punch applied to the bottom half of his spear, Igmail let the spearhead spin around into a downward chop that bit into the shoulder and back of the monster. The sheer force the forty pound stone pole carried made the ape face plant, allowing to Igmail smoothly transfer the force of the chop into a stab through the spine of the monster, taking it out of the fight.
Igmail’s take down of the monster happened just in time for him to get walloped from behind. One of the lesser apes had taken offense to his offensive, and the resulting attack made Igmail stumble forward. He tripped over the body of the downed ape but turned it into a roll instead of a fall, probably saving his life. He came up from the roll by rotating at the hip to score a strike against the ape across the face, keeping it at a distance.
Igmail took the moment that this exchange had bought him to once more examine his situation. There were eleven verdant apes left, some in the trees, some surrounding him on the ground. Igmail knew for certain he would be overwhelmed the moment the apes recovered from their surprise, so he capitalized on it to dart around one of the apes standing on the ground and place his back in the still open door. He noticed in his dash that the soldiers had already entered the bunker and formed a defensive line just past the door.
Standing in the door in front of the bloodied troops, Igmail took a steady stance in preparation to defend his home. Now, the apes weren’t stupid, they knew that attacking a powerful and entrenched enemy was a bad idea, they were just too angry to care. So, starting with the one bleeding from the face, they all charged Igmail.
Igmail let the eager beaver impale himself, but in the time it took to get the ape off the spear another had already gotten in close. Lacking the space to stab the leafy looking ape, Igmail treated his spear like a staff and whacked it with the butt of the spear under the chin. With a spin, Igmail then brought the spear tip into its neck. That was three down so far, and nine left to go.
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The next apes to respond all came at once, three of them. One jumped from the trees, arms raised for a dangerous overhead smash while the other two came in low. The jumper came into range first, and Igmail used his seven foot spear to intercept the attack while it was still at a distance. He crudely smashed the head of the spear into its side. More important than the cut he inflicted was how the strike redirected the ape into the cliff wall, freeing him to deal with the other two.
They both arrived at just about the same time. The left one came in with a tackle at his feet, but that was easily avoided with a small jump that let the ape go sailing into the room behind him. The one on the right had decided to punch at Igmail’s center mass, which was hard to avoid mid air. Accordingly, Igmail instead dissuaded the ape by making a downward chop towards its head. Unwilling to make the trade, the ape aborted mid punch and backed up.
Behind him Igmail could faintly hear the sound of the soldiers massacring the monkey he had jumped. In front of him the seven remaining apes were looking a lot more wary. They puffed up and hooted in a threatening manner, but ultimately, they left without retrieving their dead. Igmail did it for them, throwing the verdant apes through the transport hoop. ‘Heh, I bet the logistics officer will be confused about that,’ Igmail thought.
Heading back inside and closing the door as he did, Igmail also collected the corpse of the ape the soldiers had killed. It was rather… messy. The soldiers were messy too. There were two men and a woman, all wearing the standard half plate, shield, and arming sword given to soldiers that didn’t have the ability to make their own gear or abilities that required special gear. All three of them were sprawled out on the ground, panting and out of breath. All of them had armor that had recently been splashed in red, so Igmail could easily tell that they were missing comrades from both the fact that almost all patrol groups were larger, and the fact that Verdant apes bled a goldish green blood that was often used in fertilizer.
Igmail looked the soldiers over for injuries, but didn’t detect any. He instead got them all a cup of water, the cups having been shaped from the stone of his impromptu gorilla sized expansion of the room.
“Y’all ok? Anything I can getcha?” Igmail asked in his best impersonation of his mother. The woman, whom he noted had the highest rank among the survivors as a private third class, waved him off breathlessly before proceeding to chug the proffered cool water.
“Thank *puff* you… Ambush. Sergeant killed, nowhere to run but here. Thank you,” She responded after catching her breath for an extra second.
“Just doin’ my job, same as you,” Igmail said humbly. He never viewed being good at killing as something to be very proud of, kind of like how he took no pride in creating his golems. In fact, he was prouder of the cups he had crafted than the apes he had killed.
“Do you have a way to get a message to command?” the woman asked with a focused expression.
“Kinda. Message stones don’t work out here, but I can send a letter through the transport hoop,” Igmail said. “Are you planning on asking for a pickup?”
“Yah,” the woman sighed, “We won’t make it back on our own. We barely made it here on our own.”
“Why were you out here anyways?” asked Igmail curiously. “I thought they were gonna stop patrols until the expansion was done.”
“Well, uhh… We were supposed to be your replacement,” the woman said with a wince. “According to Deborah, you were requested by high command for some tricky stone work, some kind of quality problem that they didn’t have an effective solution for. Obviously, that won’t be happening now.” As she was speaking she refused to meet Igmail’s eyes, quite a bit uncomfortable with the admission. “My name is Sophie Kindley, private third class. Nice to meet you Private Stone.”
Igmail needed a second to process this turn of events, but eventually offered his condolences. “Wow. That sucks… Welp, nothing to do about it now,” Igmail said, just a little stunned. By that point the other two men had mostly recovered, though it took them much longer than Sophie due to their lower tier. They were sitting against the dungeon wall looking despondent.
Igmail sighed again. “While I’m passing that note y’all might as well get bathed and changed. The bath room is in there, and I got a couple of changes of clothes left that you can have,” Igmail said while settling onto the ground next to the stove. He started it up and put a few oddly flat bottomed rocks on the grate, meant for heating up the bath. He had enhanced the stones’ specific heat capacity so that they were gaining and releasing heat at the optimal speed for warming bath water.
While the rocks warmed Igmail tore off the side of the crate his supplies had come in, a solid square of wood, and began to use a smaller stone knife to carve into it. Due to his enhanced blade, enhanced body, and enhanced coordination it was pretty easy to carve a legible message into the cheap wood.
The message read “Replacement squad suffered heavy casualties, unable to perform duties in dungeon. Extraction requested, Dungeon Bunker 4-12.” He went to toss it through the transport hoop, but instead decided to toss his gorilla’s kill through first. Hopefully that would help him get a swift response.
He wasn’t too hopeful though, everybody who could fight already had a job, so he prepared to spend the next while with these people. Over the next hour he introduced himself to the other two men, a blond man named Johan and a mousy brown haired mage named Nolan. Igmail also modified the floor of the whole central room so that it was a smidge softer to sleep on while he was talking with them.
Before the light crystals went completely dark they received a resupply, along with a note saying that it’d take a week for the next patrol to make their way out there. The crate also contained enough food to last them all for a week, most of it being dried meat. One thing Flourish never lacked was meat.
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Champion was making meat. Despite his practice with his spear shadow panthers still occasionally managed to get in close, but that was no problem for the stone golem. It just made the corpse retrieval messier. He was currently engaged with one such panther, though only in the sense that he had to remove his fist from the remains of its chest. The panther he was wearing was the last monster in the room, so Champion took the time to remove his fist while doing as little damage to the corpse as possible.
It had only been a day since Champion had earned his name and he was already on the third floor, having simply blasted through the second. This meant that among the various dead present in the room there were also several mushroom-like creatures with tentacles. Champion’s spear had the reach advantage though, so it wasn’t hard to kill them.
‘Mole, this is gonna be a pain to take back up the stairs,’ Champion thought to himself. He’d been getting good at that; thinking. He most often thought in full sentences after his revelation, and his tactics had been getting better too. As Champion looked at the carefully cultivated field of monster bodies he felt content with where his short life had taken him so far.