Dom stood looking at the house, with its towering spires and dark wood siding. We’d taken out the trash mobs in the graveyard, but I wondered why he’d stopped. We knew that the house had almost a hundred rooms and at least a thousand mobs inside. I walked up next to him, staring at it to maybe notice what he was seeing. The house was three stories at the base, with four oddly spaced towers that gave it another two stories in height. There were also three levels of basement, including a dungeon and that final master’s chamber that had the most comfortable bed in the whole world. I had a smug moment of knowing that I had a copy of that bed in my inventory. There were bats in the belfries, zombie servants, rabid rats, a ballroom of ghosts, vampire masters, and one whole section of the dungeon filled with caged werewolves.
We knew all this because we’d gone through it twice, room by room, and mob by mob. Dom and I had each gotten one copy of the loot, which included the wardrobes of every single inhabitant of the house. Disguise might cover our looks, but a good costume department could not be underestimated. I knew that we’d keep doing the zone until we maxed it out, but it was taking longer than I would have liked.
“Hear me out,” Dom waved at the house. “I know you want the stuff in there, but wouldn’t it just be easier to burn the whole structure down and pick off anything that comes running out?”
My mind had been planning out the systematic clearing of each room, so it took me a minute to switch gears. Could that even work? Terra brushed against my leg, so I rubbed her head. I didn’t have to lean down anymore. Now that she’d gotten used to the new body, she was less grumpy. Transitions made her sleepy for a while too, but that also seemed to be wearing off.
“It’s not like the gold or gems would burn and we could repair anything you really want,” he shrugged. “If too much is destroyed, we can always go back to the other way.” He had a point. We were going to do that anyway. We would run this dungeon out the same way we had the gnoblin dungeon. It was taking a lot of experience to get to higher levels so we might be doing this dungeon quite a bit more.
“Might not work on the lower basement levels,” I reasoned, trying to imagine how it could go wrong. It could go wrong with too many mobs pouring out of the place. They could overwhelm us in numbers, but we could probably kite them outside. “The bats would just fly out.”
“Maybe hit the four towers first?” Terra suggested and I relayed the thought to Dom.
“Makes sense. We could barricade the exits for the zombies,” Dom nodded, laying a hand on Terra as his only warning before he summoned her so that he could hear her suggestions.
“They aren’t smart enough to come through the walls,” Terra agreed with him. Now that she wasn’t grumpy about the change, she was happy to be summoned. I got the feeling that she was looking forward to the next change but that maybe we should try to time them during downtime when she would have a chance to get used to her longer limbs without mobs threatening her.
“Even if they did, they’d be so damaged that we could likely pick them off without too much trouble.” Dom pet Terra.
Dom cast Silence because we knew from experience that the bats had a magical sonic attack. I cast my Poison Cloud over our heads. Both spells lasted over two minutes each, so we cast them before pulling the mob. The best part of the new Poison Cloud was that I didn’t have to concentrate on it to keep it going. It could just hang over our heads while I cast Fireball at the nearest spire.
With a nod from Dom, the nearest tower exploded in something out of an action movie, burning debris and bats flying everywhere. As soon as the bats came streaming out, Dom cast Create Water to put out the flame on the tower. I was glad we’d planned that because the house caught fire like a well-built campfire. We wanted the house to burn, but not yet. Dom had to cast Create Water a few times to get the fire out.
“Nice,” Dom said, drawing a huge sword out of his inventory. I understood that his Create Water spell had just upgraded because he cast Rain on the tower instead. That would last a good ten minutes so I was reassured that the house wouldn’t catch prematurely.
I focused on the swarm of burning bats zooming out at us. I managed to cast another Fireball at the mass before it got to us. While Fireball would burn us as easily as the enemy, the Poison Cloud discriminated between friend and foe, so I only cast Fireball at a distance.
Swarm of Bats – Level 17 (Health 549/748) (Mana 527/527) – Burning (-11/5 seconds)
As the bats took damage, the swarm shrunk, bats fluttering off the overall mob to flop dead on the battered roof of the house or porch. Where the burning bats landed on the roof, it began to burn. Dom took a swing into the center of the swarm. Terra crouched down low and then launched herself up into the flapping mess. Her teeth sunk almost completely through one bat and her claws swiped at another two of them. Only the one in her teeth sank to the ground with her. She spat out the dead body and eyed the swarm. The swarm hovered over us, diving with individual bats to attack all of us.
Health -112 (17,398/17,510)
Swarm of Bats – Level 17 (Health 324/748) (Mana 427/527) – Poisoned and Burning (-75/5 seconds)
Burning bats did flame damage to us, so even though we’d negated their sonic attack, we were being burned as well as bitten. Our Silence spell didn’t stop them from casting the attack even though it was useless. I tried some off the wall spells at them this round, but maybe they weren’t dirty enough for Bleach to do very much damage. The bats did brighten up from the dark black to a dull gray color. Terra leapt into the cloud again. Dom swung the broadsword through the main bulk of the swarm, but they were very dexterous.
Health -12 (17,386/17,510)
Swarm of Bats – Level 17 (Health 112/748) (Mana 327/527) – Poisoned and Burning (-75/5 seconds)
I cast Breeze at the swarm and got a better result than Bleach, but it also blew my Poison Cloud away and blew out the fire on their wings. Dom and Terra managed to pluck the last four bats out of the sky between them. The good result was that Breeze leveled up. It was now Dust Devil.
You have killed a Swarm of Bats – Exp +374 (35,644/350,315)
“Breeze leveled up!” I exclaimed as Dom kicked one of the bats, dissolving them all into treasure that automatically dumped into our inventories.
I tested the casting of Dust Devil and it wasn’t very big, but it was fun to watch. I let my eyes unfocus to see into the mana. I wondered if…
“Dom, what’s your Sparkler spell up to now?” I asked, watching the excitation and vibration of the molecules.
“I’m up to Blast, why?” he asked, watching my Dust Devil. I knew he didn’t see what I saw and while I didn’t understand why not, it wasn’t something we had enough variables to figure out yet.
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“Would you cast it into my Dust Devil?”
Terra backed up from my spell and I didn’t blame her. My machinations at the cellular level of spells could be unpredictable. Dom and I had played around with spells before. Dom’s Blast hit dead center of my Dust Devil and sputtered out, but before it did, I thought I saw something.
“Again,” I prodded, recasting my Dust Devil.
I saw it for just a split second, so I asked him to do it again. He gave a heavy sigh but complied. I tried not to feel rushed, but I could see the smoldering of the roof where the bats had fallen. I cast a Fireball just to see the difference between it and Blast at the cellular level. It was like the Blast ignited the Dust Devil, but only for a moment. If I could take a cellular snapshot of that moment, what would I have?
Spell Learned: Firestorm
There it was and it was a beauty. I cast it a few times to get the feel of it. If I cast it once, it created a whipping fireball that was suspended where I put it like my Poison Cloud. The beauty of it was that I could feed this spell. I cast a second Fireball into the storm and it intensified and grew in size. Just playing around with it, I cast my Poison Cloud into it and the fire changed color to a fun lavender. Dom let me play around with it while he played around with his own spells.
“Paper,” I fumbled into my inventory for an extra scrap of paper and tried very hard to infuse it into a scroll, but it failed. The spell was too high a level to make a scroll so I couldn’t teach it to Dom yet. The spell had split from Fireball like Darkvision had split from Manavision. Firestorm initiated at level eighty, the lowest level of Fireball, and would now level independently from Fireball. My Create Scroll spell was still in the forties so I couldn’t scribe a spell that was over that.
“Ugh,” I threw the paper away in frustration, dashing a glance back at the roof. “I can’t give you the spell.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Dom brushed off my frustration like it was nothing, and I realized he’d put out the fires on the roof by moving the rain cloud over them. “I’ve been practicing other spells.”
“But,” I started, but he gave me a look that made me stop.
“I don’t want to be Mage-ish anyway,” Dom told me, and again I had to step back from the idea that had been foremost in my brain. “Don’t get me wrong. I like the spells, but I’m not a Mage. I’m a Serial Killer.”
“Sorry?” I said, confused and feeling helpless.
“I’m practicing the spells that would make me a good killer,” he explained, moving his rain cloud to run out over a dead tree in the graveyard.
“Like poison?” I asked.
“Sort of,” he grimaced, “though poison isn’t my favorite method. It’s like the garrot. I thought I’d like it and it works okay in some situations, but it doesn’t feel like my signature weapon. My class has a signature section on my character sheet, but it annoys me.”
“I’ve been trying too hard to make you into a me, haven’t I?” I said, by way of apology.
“Not a bad thing, for sure,” he took my hand, healing me. “Just not my thing. Like this stupid zone. I want to be able to sneak in that back door and murder everyone in the whole place, but with it all being undead, my stuff just doesn’t work right.”
“What do you mean?” I squeezed his hand back.
“I tried the sword, but it wasn’t any more satisfying than the garrot,” he admitted. “Daggers are fine, but I’m still looking for that one thing that I can for sure apply to that signature.”
“So that signature is your special ability like mine is to be able to make spells, mix them and use them.”
“Like I’m realizing maybe you don’t have a satisfaction meter, do you?” he ran his fingers over my knuckles, the skin turning to stone and back again as he did it. It wasn’t like it hurt me. Because I was in his group, it was a buff spell that made me harder to damage with sharp weapons. If he were to cast the same spell on an enemy, it would petrify a small portion of their bodies, like it had with Beau for me.
“No,” I answered, watching as he cast Stone Skin on my hand.
“I have this almost itchiness,” he explained, letting go of my hand to stare at the house again. “When my satisfaction meter is low, my skin gets creepy-crawly, like spiders under the surface of me. My spells get sloppy.”
“Is it low now?”
“Not really. The gnoblins were satisfying even without a signature weapon, so I have some built up. The closer my satisfaction meter gets to full, the better I feel,” he continued as I thought about what he was saying. “But the undead are just too, I don’t know, not alive. I like the magic as a weapon, but I haven’t found the right spells for what would be the most satisfying.”
“It’s like you haven’t found your signature yet,” I mused, as if we were talking about how to paint the living room.
“And that bugs me too because signatures are for idiots,” Dom gave a heavy sigh.
“Agreed,” I cast my Firestorm spell at the tree his rain was watering, trying to get a feel for how much I could feed it before it got out of my control. “Serial killers only use a signature when they want to get caught.”
“Which is stupid, because not only don’t I want to get caught, but killing here is expected, so why the signature?” Dom cast his Stone Skin into the storm, and it threw in a bunch of flying shrapnel, giving me ideas. The tiny shards of stones flew out of the storm. It was like I’d thrown the Vampire Lord’s pebbles into the middle of a windstorm. Dust Devil wasn’t strong enough yet to damage us, but I imagined that it would be soon.
“I guess it could be used as a calling card for an assassin to gain fame,” I reasoned. “But that’s pushing you into the Assassin class again.”
“Which is why I still don’t like it,” Dom cast his own heal spell on himself.
“Interesting,” was all I said in return. I wasn’t appalled. I was fascinated. “Do you want to kill me?”
“Absolutely,” he breathed out, like we were talking about sex. “But I also don’t. I’ve always wanted to kill. Everyone probably has that predator in them somewhere, but it’s been closer to the surface for me than someone more like you.”
“Hmm,” and still I wasn’t upset at the idea. I knew he wouldn’t kill me in the same way that dog owners know their dogs won’t attack them while they’re sleeping. I was oddly glad that he felt he could trust me with the truth.
Dom and I had been more focused on the diversity of uses for the Dust Devil. Clean dispelled it, and I finally realized why the Dirty Skeletons had been damaged by our cleaning spells. Sometimes it took a while for me to get the puns. If I cast Firestorm and then cast Bleach into the middle of it, it turned into something that seemed more like acid rain thrown into a washing machine.
“Is the house supposed to be smoking?” Terra interrupted our philosophical conversation and spell machinations. Was it weird that we had this kind of conversation in the middle of a dungeon? Perhaps, but at least we weren’t talking about our feelings when the clock was ticking on a time bomb. Unless you counted my nemesis quest as a time bomb, which I didn’t because I was stalling on purpose.
“Jooooy,” Dom eyed the rising smoke that made our exploded towers look like a chimney. There was a special way that Dom said the word ‘joy.’ He could stretch it out in this odd drawl that made the word ten times more potent than its antonym.
With all our experimenting, we didn’t know what kind of damage it would do until we could try it, so I snapped a Fireball at the next spire. Rather than wait for each spire, I cast it at the next one right afterward. Now that we knew the house was already burning, we wanted to dispatch all the bats quicker than we’d planned.
That was okay since I wanted to experiment with Dust Devil and figure out its damage. I cast Dust Devil into the combined swarms over our heads. This was so much better than the Breeze spell, because it whipped the bats into a whirlwind. I cast my Fireball spell into that as Dom cast Poisoned Mana. The Dust Devil itself wasn’t all that strong, so the bats were only stunned for a round, but now they were also poisoned and on fire. Once I added my Poison Cloud to the mix, we had a screaming whirlwind of burning, poisoned bats that we just backed away from slowly.
You have killed a Swarm of Bats – Exp +374 (36,018/350,315)
You have killed a Swarm of Bats – Exp +374 (36,392/350,315)
You have killed a Swarm of Bats – Exp +374 (36,766/350,315)
“It makes them taste bad,” Terra complained some more, choosing to rest herself on the top of one of the mausoleums rather than help us fight the bats. Now that she’d gotten bigger, she was doing a lot more damage, but she also tended to find more reasons and ways to find a corner and take a nap. It wasn’t like we were in any kind of danger, so I let her find her own way. I knew she’d be at my side in a bound if I needed her.
“The body change is tiring,” she explained into my mind, reading my thoughts. “It’s just taking me a few days to get used to the new shape of me.”
“Like a teenager tripping over your growing feet,” I commiserated, sending her loving thoughts of sympathy.
“Terra?” Dom asked, and I realized I’d said it out loud.
“She’s having growing pains,” I nodded.
Dom winced in sympathy, and I passed that on to her.