Alarion’s sandals scraped against stone as he rounded another corner, his lungs burning with each ragged breath. The rhythmic clanking of metal feet echoed through the corridor never far behind. It was a sound that had haunted him for the better part of the day.
He might have been better off with the puzzle. Judging by his small sample size, ‘combat challenges’ were just puzzle rooms where something tried to kill you.
His mace dragged along the ground as he slowed to a stop and surveyed the upcoming chamber. The corridors all looked the same - endless stretches of carved stone that twisted and turned without reason or pattern, but the spherical chambers were different, their walls inset with cryptic markings whose meanings he had yet to deduce.
They were the solution to the maze, he was sure of that, if little else. The problem was that the onslaught of machines barely gave him time to breathe, let alone to think.
The clatter of pursuing footsteps grew closer and Alarion forced himself into a jog, ignoring the protest of his aching muscles. His MP had recovered enough for another spell, but he wanted to avoid that if at all possible. If this kept up he’d need [Valentina’s Energetic Embrace] just to keep going. The last time he’d tried to make a stand, the horde of mechanical soldiers had nearly overwhelmed him through sheer exhaustion.
Their blank faces and jerky movements brought to mind memories of the soulless in the spire, but these were different. Simpler, more primitive. Where their cousins had posed a threat with their energy weapons, these soulless came at him with nothing more than their own sharpened limbs. They weren’t even Awakened, as far as he could tell, their metal bodies no stronger than that of a regular human. But they just kept coming, an unending wave of emotionless pursuers.
Sweat stung one of his eyes as he charged toward the chamber, hoping to get a few seconds grace to study its markings before making his escape. Then his mace caught on an uneven stone and sent him stumbling. He recovered his balance but lost precious seconds. The metallic chorus grew louder.
Alarion’s chest heaved as he reached the entrance. His eyes raked over the walls, taking in stone carvings that looked for all the world like a series of unfamiliar constellations, with starburst engravings connected to one another by thin lines. This set was inert under his [Introverted Mana Sense]. As the last had been. As they all had been. The ambient magic in the room was very high, and there was something enchanted within the stone. What he lacked was a trigger. An item, an incantation.
The sound of metal upon stone grew louder as he studied what he’d come to think of as ‘The Map’. It wouldn’t be long now before they caught him. Worse yet, similar sounds echoed from three of the room’s four exits. The machines weren’t smart enough to ambush or surround him, they had no sense of tactics at all, but there were so many of them that the latter was almost an inevitability on a long enough time scale.
Last time they’d boxed him in had been halfway down a corridor. It had been a nightmare. The passageways were tight, perfect for creatures that fought with nothing but their sharpened limbs, but terrible for someone like him who did battle with an over-sized weapon.
There was no sense in running. At best he’d make it to the next chamber before they swarmed him. No, he’d make his stand here, out in the ‘open’. The chamber was only twenty yards across, and the ceiling was still low enough that he had to watch his overheads, but at least here he could move.
The first Soulless emerged from the same door Alarion had entered through, its joints creaking as it lurched forward. Alarion’s mace crashed through its chest, scattering gears and bits of jagged metal across the floor. A second was hot on its heels and met a similar fate as Alarion’s elbow caved in its faceless visage.
Three more stumbled in from different passages. Individually the machines were slow and weak, their bodies in desperate need of repair. It was a simple matter for Alarion to slip between their sharp, flailing limbs, his movements focused more on economy than grace. Three times his mace found its mark, crushing metal limbs and torsos with overwhelming force.
But it was never enough
His breath came in sharp bursts as more and more rusted metal filtered into the chamber. Two. Then three. Then eight. The click of metal feet against stone grew to a constant rhythm as the Soulless poured in from multiple corridors at once.
He idly wondered if he’d manage to improve his [Soulless Bane] Feat of Strength before all this was over. Surely the System kept track of creatures he fought in a dungeon, and there were bound to be enough.
Alarion’s muscles burned as he picked up his pace. His mace became a blur of motion, smashing through clusters of machines with each swing. Metal bodies crashed into each other as they pressed forward. They were so focused on him, so cavalier with their own lives that their blank faces did not even turn towards the attacks that killed them.
But then, that was their strength. They could afford to trade bodies for the chance to chip away at his HP. To drain a little more of his stamina. They could die a thousand times. He could only die once.
A group of Soulless, nearly twenty in number, backed him toward one wall. The tight quarters forced him to swing his mace through a weak, wide arc, focused more on knocking them back than destroying them. He couldn’t afford attacks like that, ones that didn’t kill. His stamina was already deep in the red as he pushed himself harder.
Blood dripped from his chin, a new wound open on his lower jaw. He hadn’t even felt the attack that had struck him. He was slipping.
The chamber filled with the sound of grinding metal and snapping gears as dozens of machines pressed in on him from all sides, hurting one another under the sheep weight of their bodies. Alarion’s arms trembled as he killed one more, but it wouldn’t be enough.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
“Dammit.” He growled under his breath. Then he swung wide again, one of the Soulless carried along the flat of his mace, its body disintegrating as it smashed into a dozen of its colleagues.
“Solar Burst!” He chanted.
There was a pulse of light and heat and the onslaught faltered.
One of the topics that had come up during ZEKE’s endless lessons on magical theory had been the concept of natural affinity in the form of Banes and Boons. Some fiends and many Systemborn creatures were known to have natural affinities that resulted in corresponding weaknesses and strengths. The Thoughtborn elemental he’d fought had been slightly more vulnerable to solar magic, doubly so given that he’d been inside it, but would be resistant or possibly outright immune to water magic he might have thrown its way.
During the lesson, ZEKE had stressed the importance of that distinction between resistance and immunity. At the time Alarion had found it hard to visualize.
The Soulless provided an incredible demonstration.
The machines nearest him had been melted down to slag, their rusted carcasses folding in on themselves as the metal weakened and collapsed. Those to the rear of the pack had fared better. Most had still lost limbs to the heat or the shrapnel of their comrade’s bodies, but at least a few had endured the brunt of the attack without significant injury thanks to their innate resistance.
Those weren’t the ones that caught Alarion’s eye, however. He was interested in the one among the pack had survived without a scratch.
It was toward the rear, lingering near one of the entrances. That alone was an oddity. These machines didn’t linger, they advanced single mindedly. It was behavior that set off alarm bells now, but had gone completely unnoticed in the heat of combat. Why pay attention to a machine hiding at the back when a dozen were trying to stab him?
Was it a leader? It didn’t seem any different, apart from the fact that its rusted body hadn’t been so much as singed by the wave of heat and energy. Sure, [Solar Burst]’s damage dropped off with distance, but these Soulless were so weak that even a glancing hit had been enough to kill or disable most of them.
All except for this one. It was immune.
His mace swept out the legs of a half-melted machine that stumbled toward him. The handful of survivors pressed forward with their usual mindless determination, but their numbers had thinned enough that he could pick his targets and take them apart one piece at a time.
Alarion sidestepped a wild stab from one of the damaged Soulless, letting its momentum carry it past him into the wall. It struck with enough force that its arm snapped at the elbow, not that it seemed to notice. It continued its attack undeterred, but its remaining arm failed to breach his guard before he smashed in its head with a solid right hook.
Even with his [Ring of the Durable Fist] it wasn’t pleasant. Rusty or no, putting his fist through several inches of iron hurt.
Two more machines lurched forward and Alarion’s muscles protested as he brought his mace around in a horizontal arc that smashed one into the other and both into the nearby wall. Their bodies crumpled and split in half under the impact, the torso of one still crawling after him before his slammed the haft of his mace through its neck.
The untouched Soulless had been moving closer as Alarion fought and the crowd diminished, mingling in among them to the point he almost lost sight of it among a sea of similar machines. It knew he’d seen it, likely knew it couldn’t outrun him. So it wanted Alarion to destroy it instead.
Why?
Despite its best attempts to hide, up close he could see that its frame was different from the others - more precise, less crude in its construction. The rust that covered it seemed almost deliberate rather than a product of time and neglect. It wasn’t his imagination, this one was special.
Alarion’s swept through the last of the machines like a scythe through wheat as he set his sights on his prey. It was backpedaling now that it realized its ruse had failed, trying to put distance between them, to turn and make a futile attempt at an escape. Without pause, Alarion lunged forward and seized the unique creature by its throat.
Flight turned to fight and Its limbs lashed out with precise strikes, nothing like the wild flailing of its companions. Metal scraped against his bracer as Alarion deflected a blow aimed at his kidney. The machine’s other arm snapped forward, its knife hand raking across his shoulder before he could turn away. Blood welled up from shallow cut, but Alarion was too focused to care.
His grip tightened around its neck as he slammed it against the wall. The impact rang through the chamber, but the machine’s frame held firm. Its arms continued their assault until Alarion caught one wrist and twisted. The mechanics inside its arm groaned and metal snapped as its joints gave way.
The Soulless didn’t miss a beat, redoubling its efforts with its remaining arm. Alarion repeated the process, breaking each joint methodically in both arms and legs until the machine hung limp in his grasp.
With his safety assured for the moment, Alarion focused inward. [Introverted Mana Sense] revealed nothing special about its construction, but that was not unusual. As unawakened beings, these Soulless had little mana to speak of, and he could see no hidden enchantments or other bound fields that would have explained its immunity to his magic. Its body was as magically dull as the corpses strewn around.
“The metal, maybe?” Alarion wondered aloud as the thing’s left leg twitched in a feeble attempt to kick him. There had to be something different about this one.
Out of ideas, he dragged its limp body along the walls of the chamber, moving it up and down as he went, following the patterns engraved into the wall in the vain hope of triggering some solution to a puzzle that he did not understand.
Predictably, it failed. Worse yet, he caught his first hint of footsteps echoing down one of the corridors. They were on him again. It was time to leave.
Frustrated, Alarion squeezed. When one hand wasn’t enough to do the job he added a second, and a bit of body weight. This time the metal crumpled beneath his hands, spilling its contents across the floor. Cogs, pistons and gears popped free from the fractured skull, and for a brief instant Alarion thought of ZEKE. Was that what his insides looked like?
The idea made him nauseous. These things were empty, no more alive than the dragon he’d fought in Sierra’s [Void Arena]. ZEKE was a person, like all those he’d killed. Guilt and self-loathing welled up in his mind, but something stopped him cold.
Buried in the depths of the machine’s skull was a single silver gear, entirely at odds with any he’d seen before. It was pristine, its metal shimmering in the torchlight as Alarion plucked it from the machine’s ruined cranium.
Upon closer inspection it was of a different make than any of the mundane gears he’d seen. Less of a circle and more of a pointed star.
Exactly like the ones on the wall.
Alarion quickly rushed to the nearest wall and began searching from one star shape to the next. Each was unique, and it took him nearly two full passes along The Map before he finally found a match, rotated the gear to the right orientation and pressed it into its new home.
Immediately, the gear and the wall behind it sprung to life. The metal sunk into the stone and the whole area was flooded with magic, the lines radiating off the starburst glowing white blue with arcane energy. Alarion felt a similar flood of relief and excitement, right up until he realized the implications.
There were forty-two starburst symbols set into the walls.
It was going to be a long day.