Chapter 14
OPERATION: EXTERMINATION
Igmail’s all staff meeting had ended several hours ago, though the results left him nervous. This emotional distress, as well as a deficit of other work for him to do, led him to work in his garden. As he adjusted the soil minutely and watered the plants precisely, wandering throughout the rows of his precious plant friends all the while, he pondered what he’d done.
First, there was SAP, the South dungeon Advance Party. Igmail had suggested that SAP an the North dungeon Advance Party rotate their guard duties so that they could each continue to progress in their own dungeons, but Scholar had pointed out that travel times made it inefficient, especially since one of them would be going with the Home Advance Party. Constantly switching guard duty would leave HAP without backup for hours at a time.
Igmail had agreed, trusting in the wisdom of the more experienced, which was why SAP had ended up camping in the dungeon entrance room. Even now he could hear the sounds of their training echoing through the door and into the rest of the bunker. The clamor and clank and crack of his troops improving themselves reverberated throughout his entire base, the sound much too pervasive for even stone to dampen it. It's not like Igmail could blame them for it either, his golems’ hearing was subpar at best and they might not even recognize the inconvenience of their incredible noise.
‘This… This is going to be annoying,’ sighed Igmail internally.
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Champion was also sighing internally. With Messenger, Scholar, and the entirety of team North now along for the ride there was less for him to kill than ever. Team West, the group that had only managed to reach the seventh floor, had been assigned guard duty on the fifth floor, so at least he didn’t have the responsibility of protecting the newbies.
It was fine for the first thirty floors, the prolonged absence of the boss floor guards as they formed new parties had allowed the floors to repopulate somewhat but there wasn’t much to kill on those floors. The thirtieth floor and its watery chasm was annoying as ever, but they’d already cleared that floor too. It was no big sacrifice to let the others take care of those floors. What was really annoying though, was just how little he got to kill on the thirty first floor.
It was a collection of packed dirt caverns, one and all rather large, occupied by a sort of speed burrowing massive worm. They were at least four inches wide at the head and several feet long, swimming through the earth to launch attacks at the gorillas. Now, Champion would’ve already found the floor annoying simply due to these ambush tactics, but this was on an entirely other level.
His problem stemmed from the fact that there were twelve gorillas down there, more than the number of monsters the average room held, and at this point the monsters were smart enough to go for the weakest link. This meant that every attack, every single one, was specifically perpetrated to avoid him, and thus he had no opportunity to catch hold of the tricky monsters. It was frustrating for the prideful magical murder gorilla golem, seeing those weaker than himself perform better just because the monsters were being scaredy cats.
Seeing one of the newbies specifically do better than him rankled especially, though he couldn’t exactly argue. Mapper had developed his ability to sense minerals to the point that he could use it as a crude third sense, given that the gorillas only had soul sight and hearing to begin with, meaning he was about as effective at killing the fragile monsters as Dash despite being a tier lower.
There was another source of frustration for Champion as well. Even with the golems discarding their previous perfect clear policy and instead prioritizing speed, it still took two grueling hours for the gaggle of golems to reach the next floor. Mentally grueling that is, at least for Champion. The next floor, the thirty second, was much more Champion’s style.
There were ice coated boars on that floor, though it was confusing that the corridors of the floor seemed to be rather more curved than optimal for the charging swine. On this floor Champion could rush ahead of his group and simply plow into the charging monsters, leaving them easy pickings for the rest of the group. No “tactical retreats,” no hiding, and no excuses were used by these monsters, and Champion loved them for it.
For him, the highlight of the whole floor was when the party entered a wide chamber to meet a whole line of boars charging right at them, ice accumulating on the floor for every hoof beat. He got to lead the counter charge, bowling right into a dense cluster and sending them all flying. Though, he did need to stop and heal a bit after that stunt.
The thirty third floor, however, quickly wiped away all of Champion’s previous joy. It was occupied by giant rats who could throw lighting bolts. They would rush around a corner and unleash a cord of lighting on the golems before promptly retreating. They were too big to escape through tunnels and such things as opponents had before, so it was easy to hunt them down afterwards, but the lighting was still annoying. Interceder ended up in front, his large stone shield protecting him from the irritating sensation of lighting washing harmlessly off stone.
In contrast to the safe floor before it, the thirty fifth floor claimed the first of the group's number. They were fighting these vine-like monsters, almost like snakes made of plant matter, and the boss was a giant flytrap with many of these vine snakes originating from it. Over reliant on his stone sense, Mapper missed a vine that came at him from above and behind. It tripped the mace wielding golem right into the mouth of the monster, only for its exaggerated wooden teeth to crush him to pieces.
Team North gathered the pieces from the corpse of the large monster and entombed them in a stone coffin, the process sped along by Crafter. They had Messenger bring the coffin back to Master to get repairs done, though the resulting newbie replaced one of the guard team members that was sent as replacement instead of rejoining the raid group.
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In the following week, that was how the dive progressed. One by one, the members of NAP got replaced by members of SAP, who were then replaced by former members of NAP who got repaired. So much was the work in recovering the destroyed gorillas that Igmail was too tired to make any new ones.
The members of HAP were mostly fine despite a few close calls, but Pugilist ended up losing an arm to the fortieth floor boss, a miniature tyrannosaurus rex. He went up with Messenger and the most recent casualty to get it reattached, but it did inspire him to work more kicks into his fighting style.
Such things happened often, inspiration, that is. The gorillas started with a default tier three strength when they were made, a tier weaker than their master, but their advancement was swift in such perilous and mana rich circumstances. This was aided incalculably by the ephemeral strength gained via revelation, such was the aforementioned growth of Pugilist.
Champion was the only tier four of the group when they started this expedition, but by the time they reached the forty fifth floor of the dungeon all of the Home dungeon Advance Party, Scholar, and a couple of the repairees had all reached the lofty height. Champion remained the strongest among them as an individual, but no longer did he believe he was powerful enough to beat any other three golems of his team working together.
This increase in power really came in handy on the forty fifth floor, another goblin floor. This time every enemy was a hobgoblin, as powerful as the floor boss they had faced on the first goblin floor. There was a notable difference between the two floors, however, in that while the first goblin floor was a warren of tunnels that facilitated ambush, this one was just one massive cavern with a whole town in it.
Large crystals shone light down on the walled town, their multicolor radiance highlighting the rather surprising architecture within the town. Similar to the city of Flourish the town was rather vertical, with many of the stone and mushroom buildings even connecting with the cavern ceiling. The town must have been most of a mile in diameter as well, containing a truly staggering number of the lanky green humanoid monsters.
Patrolling the forty foot walls, which were a third the height of the cavern, were many squads of armored hobgoblins. Champion and crew could only sit just inside the entrance to the cavern and gape at the sheer size of the obstacle in front of them. If they could have gone around they would have, but a thorough scan from Mapper’s successor Sense told them that the stairs were right in the middle of the town.
Nobody had any idea of how to go about solving this problem either. Tunneling would take too long, infiltration was right out for the hulking stone golems, and neither did bum rushing thousands of well prepared enemies seem wise to the squad of about a dozen. Champion must have stared at the town with his jaw limp for half an hour before coming to a decision.
‘Ok, this is gonna be bad whatever we chose to do, so we might as well do something,’ Champion sent with resolve in his soul and conviction in the magical knot of connections that was his mind. ‘Our goal is to get to the end of this dungeon and destroy whatever makes it tick, right?’ he asked, and a chorus of confirmations responded.
‘So, do we need all of us to do that?’ Champion asked once more, this time to a chorus of negatives. ‘Then I propose this: a sacrificial shell. The weakest among us will form the first layer, getting us as far into the city as possible before they die. Then, the next weakest takes over, and so on and so forth until we are all dead or at least one of us has reached the stairs.’
The task oriented golems thought it over for a moment before deciding that they couldn’t come up with anything better, assent to the plan trickling in over the course of a few minutes. And so they formed up into two rows of six. Interceder was in front blocking the arrows, but that would only last until they reached the gates to the town and it became the tier three’s turn to shine. After the four tier threes were Messenger and the tier four from among the replacements, and Champion’s team came after.
Their strategy set, they commenced a headlong rush towards the town. The pounding feet and multitude of pounds that each gorilla golem possessed alerted the guards to them as soon as they started to run, and arrows came soon after. They were constrained to the speed of their slowest member so it took a while to reach the walls, and in that time Interceder must have deflected two hundred arrows away from his allies, a measure of his growing skill and speed.
Eventually, the column made it to the gate, and the newbie tier four stepped forward here. He balled his fists up into one large hammer strike, leaping into the air and falling upon the gate with the fury of an avalanche. The wide doors boomed open, the stone cross bar on the other side of the doors exploding into shrapnel as the nameless golem rejoined the middle of the column.
Into the confusion the party charged, the golems in front shouldering aside those hobgoblins who chose to get in their way, the gate guards in hot pursuit. As they went hobgoblins in civilian clothes streamed out of the buildings all around them, each picking up a weapon and charging at them. The column made it three hundred feet before the first tier three got picked off, a particularly tenacious hobgoblin becoming a tripping hazard in death.
Isolated and prone, the golem was swiftly destroyed by the pursuing soldiers. It only took fifty more steps for the guards to catch up with their own column, though they had little luck damaging the stalwart Interceder and the overpowered Champion who were acting as rear guard. At around the same time, the next golem got picked off, this one the tier three that was second in the column.
At this point the town had finished rallying and hundreds of arrows started pouring down on them every minute, without Interceder to deflect them this time. The crowd of melee weapon wielding hobgoblins grew denser on the streets, the sheer momentum of two tons of stone that each gorilla possess being the only thing allowing the golems to continue their break neck run. One by one the remaining tier threes were pulled apart, decimated by the attacks hitting them as often as raindrops hit the ocean.
When only tier fours were left the advance sped up, the frontrunners bowling through the crowd of combatants with enough force to leave their wake clear of the dangerous monsters. But, over the half mile run, even they began to falter. The arrows sticking from their backs and shoulders, the nicks and cuts from the wild failings of hundreds of hobgoblins, they began to take their toll on Messenger and the nameless golem.
Messenger went down first, a lucky arrow through his eye knocking him out of formation, but the nameless golem didn’t last much longer. By the time the column had reached the final stretch they were all injured and half of them had died, but they had done it. In the distance they could see an open square with a large depression in it, no more than fifty feet from them.
Ramming through the last of the resistance the much reduced raid group dove down the stairs, running and falling all the way to the bottom. It wasn’t quite over yet, though. After all, there was nothing to stop the goblins from following them.