9:48 A.M.
March 2
Snowfall 4
Rockdigger dungeon, Thornfield, Veotera
Gary came up to the area where the Rockdigger dungeon was located, his armor on and crimson cloak thrown back over his shoulders. The metal shone in the mid-morning sunlight and he made sure both hsi Delver’s medallion was visible and that he had the permission missive already in hand as he approached the structures that ringed a very wide patch of dirt. His rift-detecting headache was throbbing with a dull ache dead ahead as he walked to the encirclement.
The locals had apparently chosen to go with movable stone barricades, reminding Gary of the concrete Jersey barriers used in road construction back on Earth but on wooden frames that could be rolled forward to create an encircling perimeter when something came out of the dungeon. They were a bit higher than the Jersey barriers he was used to as they ended at about sternum-height on him as opposed to waist-height like the concrete partitions he knew. Not knowing where the dungeon was located exactly made this a more reasonable approach since a few people could just use these as impromptu battering rams and enclose the beasts before they could get a head of steam to move or burrow underground.
He spotted the people standing vigil over the area, and noted they were far better equipped than the local town guard. As opposed to leather armor, these figures sported something more akin to proper metal plate armor. The design was actually leaning slightly towards his own fantasy-inspired half-plate but with noticeably more protectiveness to the design. Gary decided to cheekily call it three-quarters plate. It didn’t seem that anyone had noticed him yet. He could almost imagine his Class smirking in the back of his head at his realization he was getting sneakier without noticing it. A tiny sigh of frustration with the System huffed out of Gary before he loudly rapped his left forearm’s metal gauntlet against the girdle-like section of his torso armor, causing a trio of distinct metallic clangs that brought a surge of sudden activity.
Most of the people - mostly men but he saw a couple of female silhouettes among them - turned and leveled weapons at him. An assortment of blunt tools of war presented themselves in his direction from the startled soldiers; maces, warhammers, lucerns, and a couple of clubs that he couldn’t tell if they were iron-shod or full on kanabo. Gary raised his hands in mock surrender, the missive clearly in his right hand as he put on a warm smile to his lips.
“Morning, folks. Didn’t want to sneak up on you.” A number of them cursed unintelligibly at him when they saw the medallion around his neck and the folded parchment in his hand. Slowly they relaxed their stances as he held his position and was assessed by them, but they still held their weapons in a half-ready stance as though expecting him to cause trouble. “I was informed that I needed to give my entry missive to the watch commander?”
He saw a lot of eyes shift behind him. People were still expecting him to need a crew. He shrugged at their returning and now-dubious looks. This was going to be a thing and he’d long made peace with it. One of the soldiers decided to pull rank or decided to make him someone else’s problem.
“Follow the encirclement that way. You’ll want the large tent with the kingdom’s crest on the banner outside.”
“Thank you kindly,” Gary said as he bobbed his head in respect before walking towards the eastern side of the encirclement where he saw a collection of tents formed into a bivouac on a very tiny rise in the local terrain. He hesitated to call it a fort or permanent garrison due to the lack of hardened fortifications, though there was a simple wooden watchtower that overlooked the encirclement. As he came up to the bivouac, Gary made a point of waving up to the sentry in the tower. The sentry regarded him quietly as he continued his approach and ultimately waved him past the structure towards the camp itself.
Entering the camp proper, Gary was pleased to note that it was laid out in a very sensible and military fashion. Neat rows and columns of tents greeted his sight as he looked around, with unlit braziers here and there for light at night. The setting had a feeling of being worn-in judging from the lack of grass in places people would commonly walk making ‘natural’ roads that led him towards the much larger tent he could see in the center of the camp. As he made his way through the camp those who were present all watched him warily, some sliding weapons a touch closer as he passed without an apparent care in the world. Gary was acutely aware of the low hum that 「Danger Sense」 gave off; each little ping here and there playing a low background noise that vibrated his headache a little bit. There were a number of powerful people here and it would be a bad idea to get into a fight here.
He came up to the large tent in the middle, and paused at the edge of the cleared ring of ground around it to take it in. As opposed to the ‘commander’s tent’ that Seraphina de Lys had been at Limeroom with, this was more of a pole marquee type of tent with some clear variations built in to make it a more semi-permanent structure. It was clearly large enough for a couple of commander-types to divide the inner sections into quarters and still leave plenty of room for equipment storage and small office space. He hesitated to call it anachronistic, but it was definitely a more modern-looking design than he was expecting. The coloration was white draped with a tasteful blend of winter-theming blues which seemed to be the official colors of Ridiana’s royalty and thus anyone representing them bore the colors.
Taking in the sight as he approached across the bare ground to the two guards stationed at the tent’s entrance, Gary noticed the banner fluttering in the light breeze to Gary’s left as he approached. He was mildly surprised that only what he could assume was Ridiana’s coat of arms was displayed, and not anything from the commanders.
image [https://i.imgur.com/JQMQR7k.jpg]
The heraldic display of the banner was rendered in white and blue, arranged on a heater shield design as was typical for such displays. A white lion rampant dominated the majority of the coat, surrounded by the blue in a smaller heater shield with a clear white one outlining it. The top fifth of the crest switched back to a band of the deep blue and bore a golden crown rendered in shiny threading to glimmer in the sunlight, thus drawing the eye. Even as he approached, Gary could see the care that had been taken to ensure the banner remained unsullied and that the banner was very well-constructed without seeming to have so much as an errant thread. His eyes shifted finally away from the banner as the guards on duty stiffened enough to be noticeable in his approach. Gary chose to stop just outside their halberd’s range before speaking.
“Delver Gary Zavon with a missive for the watch commander to grant me entry into the dungeon.” He held up the folded parchment towards the two guards, having spoken clearly but not so loudly as to seem to be shouting at the tent’s occupants. The two guards shared a glance before one of them turned his head back towards the door of the marquee tent and made some sort of loud click with his tongue. A child dressed in what struck Gary as the livery one would put on a knight’s squire scurried out of the tent, looked to the guard who’d made the click, and approached Gary once said guard jerked his head at the Delver holding out the missive.
The squire quickly came up to Gary, and was promptly handed the parchment. The kid was somewhere in his late pre-teens; pageboy haircut with a head full of dirty blond hair dully glowing in the sunlight as his dull blue eyes looked up at the gray-eyed tennager. Gary gave him a winning smile and nodded a greeting to the youth. Having retrieved the parchment the squire scurried back into the tent and Gary contented himself to wait. He folded his hands in front of himself and was contented to wait as long as it took. He made sure his hands were visible to the guards and could tell they understood his intent in doing so in the barely perceptible nods they gave him.
It took about three minutes according to his internal clock before the squire came back out and handed him a different piece of parchment. This one bore an ink seal in the design of the kingdom’s crest and a signature of “Lord-Colonel Marzin de Trocquer.” With a nod to the squire, Gary affected a half-bow with his right hand over his heart before straightening up and turning to leave. His exit was more rapid, the anticipation getting to him a little as he switched to a power walk that got him back to the encirclement quickly enough. He presented the parchment with the seal on it and was allowed into the no-man’s-land inside the movable barricades.
Gary rapidly closed the distance to the source of his headache. Yet again the glowing Cherenkov Blue cloud greeted his sight just like the last dungeon. He paused at the threshold, looked around at the encirclement, and took out two of his throwing knives from the holsters he’d had made for them. Lifting his head every so often to gauge where the edges of the rift were, he very obviously bent over and began digging a highly visible line in the soil around the rift’s perimeter. It didn’t take him very long at all to make a highly visible mark on the ground and even at this distance he could see a lot of confused looks and gestures to fellow soldiers that asked ‘What the hell is he doing?’.
He rapidly returned to the encirclement enough that he could raise his voice without sounding like a madman. “That circle I just dug marks where the dungeon is. Stay out of that circle to not get drawn in.”
“That’s hogwash,” chimed in one of the soldiers as they gestured with a free hand to the empty air above his newly-dug dirt circle. “No one can tell where the damn things actually are.”
“Special skill,” Gary replied as he tapped his temple with the flat of one of his throwing knives. The dubious looks remained but the mention of skills seemed to mollify their apprehension. “You can tighten the encirclement a little more around that spot. I’ll be going in shortly for some light reconnaissance.”
“By yourself? You’re mad!”
“No, I’m Gary.” Gary flashed a grin at the cheeky response before offering a nod and striding quickly back over to the rift. He decided to keep the throwing knives in hand as he stepped into the rift’s cloud and once more felt that surge of great and terrible motion pulling him inside. Too soon and not soon enough, he came out the other end of the rift and caught himself on the ground inside the dungeon. His headache settled immediately to a dull hum in his mind, proving to himself a theory he’d had in the back of his thoughts since his first dungeon in Limeroom. Something about the things triggered a headache but his own didn’t. Perhaps it had to do with energy frequencies, maybe?
A problem for future Gary to sort out. The rift had spat him out on a solid outcropping of basalt overlooking a winding gorge about sixty feet deep of a striated mixture of rock types. Above was a clear and cloudless blue sky, but one without a solar body to source the noonday light from. Gary hesitated to move from his position and instead twisted his body in place to look behind himself. More gorge, more sourceless noon-light, more striated rock. He frowned as the rift regained its energy and silently crackled back into life finally blocking his view behind.
He figured that these Rockdiggers were set to lurk in burrows just under the rock surfaces and moving would draw their attention. The outcropping looked to be a few feet above the gorge floor, and Gary was pretty sure that it was this type of rock that the Rockdiggers couldn’t get through. His internal logic was that this appeared to be quartzite, given the way it sparkled in the light despite having the rough appearance of the slightly less durable sandstone. Gary crouched and hesitated for a moment before gently brushing his bare fingertips across the surface of the stone. It did have a smoother texture than he’d thought.
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Maybe these things couldn’t dig through things past a certain Mohs scale toughness? Would that apply to processed metals as well? Gary wasn’t confident that he could withstand sustained combat from a critter that dug through rock but he didn’t need to. He just wanted one or two for experimentation. Gary looked around the gorge and sighed heavily. Nothing for it but to get to it, then. He triggered 「Leap」 and announced his presence vibrationally by landing with both feet noisily on the stone floor of the gorge. Gray eyes swept to and fro as he felt himself sinking into a pattern of paying attention to 「Danger Sense」 and deciding not to use 「Stealth」 since these things hunted by vibrations as well.
Gary didn’t have to wait long as the detecting Skill pinged to his left about fifteen feet from where he turned in place and closing fast. The stone of the gorge floor exploded into a spray of sedimentary shrapnel as a hunched and hulking form erupted into the open air, leaping for center mass on him. 「Leap」 triggered again and he flipped a somersault over the lunging bulk, the two bodies coming to the ground at the same time. Without missing a beat Gary spun and hurled first one throwing knife then the other towards roughly where the head would be.
The sound of leathery flesh and sharpened metal met his ears as Gary finished his spin and confronted the beast full-on; retrieving a tomahawk as he did so into his right hand. His throwing knives had done barely anything as he observed the creature completing its own turn towards him and nearly immediately exploding into a charge back at him. Gary waited until the last moment and sidestepped the charge, swinging his tomahawk towards an exposed eye. The beast wasn’t cooperative enough to lose a sensory organ so easily as the head tilted just enough to leave a bloody scrape along the brow ridge as opposed to being minus an eye.
Gary whirled as the Rockdigger finished passing him and immediately chased after the beast. He saw it was squat and surprisingly leathery, reminding him of something between a rhinoceros and a mole of some variety favoring the rhino’s effective hairlessness. It had the same build as one after accounting for the parts needed for digging through stone. Gary caught up with the beast in a few speedy steps and tried again with his tomahawk aiming for the inside of the back right leg’s thigh area where it met the beast’s torso. A hamstring of some flavor would greatly swing this fight in his favor and though the Rockdigger was moving this was a far better angle than he’d had for his first swing.
The beast squealed in pain and rage in equal measure as the blow connected and the sharp ax blade sid across the less-armored skin and flesh at the inner part of the joint. Gary let it move past his reach and turn around as he ran a critical gray eye over the physicality before him. The Rockdigger was a somewhat squat creature, coming up to about the top of his hips with a wide clawed-footed stance. The previous impression of a rhinoceros with mole-like additions proved to be far more accurate from the front profile the beast presented as it wheeled at the end of the charge to regard him with beady near-black eyes; the beast only lacking a horn on the smoothly-armored head to be more like the animal it most closely represented.
A mouth opened beneath the leather-plated head to reveal a panting maw with stubby but sharp-looking fangs and a slimy dark ochre tongue. The beast squeal-screeched a challenge at the prey that dared to wound it, and Gary felt his face contort into a rictus of disgust back at it. He kept an ear and his Skills on high alert in case any friends decided to join this critter’s battle as he considered how to fight this thing. It had only really reacted to the slowly bleeding attack on the joints, causing Gary to frown as the Rockdiggger started to tense for another attack. It seemed that bludgeoning attacks were going to be the route to take here after this fight.
Gary steeled himself and waved his free left hand in a gesture to encourage the next charge. The Rockdigger seemed to take him up on the offer and coiled to spring at him again, powerful muscles shifting and visible even under the leathery plates of natural armor it bore. Gary decided to go low this time, ducking under the leap and trying to use both hands to hold the tomahawk steady against the beast’s hopefully more vulnerable underside. The ax nearly twisted out of his reinforced grip from the sheer mass of the creature as the weapon only managed another bleeding scrape against the armored underbelly of the thing.
This was clearly not going to work out the way he’d intended. The beast stumbled from the disruption to its pouncing trajectory and also the lack of proper contact with the target, fumbling the landing and going into a short tumble as it slid past where Gary had been standing. The teenager stood up and risked a glance at the tomahawk’s state. It looked serviceable but would clearly need sharpening once this was over with. Along the length of the gorge he could hear tiny amounts of rockfall here and there as presumably this fight was waking up others from some torpor they were in.
A frustrated click of his tongue made the Rockdigger’s head snap in his direction as it snapped that stubby-toothed maw at him in anger that reflected in the beady eyes it glared at him with. Definitely sensitive to sound, then. He had an idea of how to deal with the thing now but it would require a bit of good timing on his part. Gary narrowed his eyes and waited for the creature to open that maw again where he could get a good view. The spacing was good enough by eyeballing it, so with a deep breath he triggered both 「Rift Maker」 and 「Sneak Attack」 as he swung the ax in his hand as hard as he could.
The Cherenkov Blue hole in reality manifested in the path of his arcing swing and the blade vanished into the glowing recesses, only to manifest right inside the Rockdigger’s open mouth and bringing the enhanced attack’s strike down like a guillotine on the ochre tongue. The head jerked as he felt the blow connect with a jolt of impact up his right arm but Gary wasn’t done as he drew the weapon out of the cloud and got a reinforcing grip further up the haft before again plunging the ax head into the rift before it closed; rewarding himself with another vicious jolt as another impact landed.
Just now reacting to the assault as the rift in the maw snapped closed and threw Gary back a step from the force the tomahawk had been expelled from it with, the Rockdigger threw it’s head back and let out a teeth-grating scream of pain. The scream was accompanied by a fleshy ochre tongue flinging out and away with an arcing mist of rich wine-red blood as the results of his attacks manifested. Since Gary could control the angles that anything passing through his portals could emerge from he’d figured this attack would work. He couldn’t manifest a rift inside something yet but an open mouth with a squishy tongue and unprotected roof? Those were juicy targets as long as the target had their mouth open.
The Rockdigger continued to scream and thrash as it pawed at the ruined mouth; the human prey forgotten in the wake of the searing pain, gushing blood from it’s ruined mouth, and the rapid loss of blood from a thundering heart pouring it out onto the ground and down the throat to help drown it in it’s own vital fluids. Gary risked a glance to and fro and those earlier rockfall noises were getting a bit louder and pronounced in the wake of that pained scream. He frowned at the development and turned back to the Rockdigger before him that was coughing up blood and still thrashing in agony. He switched out the tomahawk with his simple dagger and ran up to the beast. Another trigger of 「Sneak Attack」 saw the dagger plunge into an opportunely-presented eyeball and finally the beast sagged as he’d hit something vital inside the brain.
He jiggled the dagger a little in the eye socket to ensure the monster was dead before withdrawing the blade and glancing up at the sides of the gorge. He thought he saw proper movement. “Time to go, then. Gonna need something blunt for this,” he muttered to himself as he conjured another manifestation of 「Rift Maker」 and managed to roll the heavy beast into the gap in reality enough to let it drop out of the air over the entrance rift to the dungeon. The carcass flopped out of nothingness and vanished to nothingness as the entrance portal winked out and took those precious seconds to remanifest as Gary climbed up the outcropping and stepped through as soon as the entrance opened again.
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Gary sat in the disassembly yard for the local Delvers branch, having gotten back with some assistance with his gathered carcass. He’d borrowed tools and sat about dissecting the Rockdigger corpse in what the workers were clearly frowning at as some sort of desecration of a body. His earlier mental comparisons to a rhinoceros with mole-like add-ons was proving to be more accurate than he’d like. The skin had been absurdly difficult to cut due to the collagen fiber buildup that gave a rhino and thus the Rockdigger their famously durable natural armor. The internal anatomy had yielded nothing special in terms of useful information except for the presence of an additional large sac connected to the brachial tubing right before the lungs.
“So this sac probably holds a reserve of air to breathe while it digs underground. They have to come up for air eventually. Poison gas, maybe? No, that’d affect people too. Diving underground would scrape off sticky fire or acid.. But acid and flammable substances are comparatively easy to get. Is blunt force really the best option here?”
Gary was muttering to himself out loud as he dug into the creature’s innards more, clearly seeking some vulnerability to exploit. His Skills were too mana-intensive to be viable for sustained combat against a whole gorge of these critters. His head lifted up at the sound of someone approaching and he saw the form of Tarrence Swey walking up. The gory display of various organs spread out on a used and already-stained tarp drew a look of mild disgust as Gary paused in his exploration of the creature’s innards.
“Hello,” Gary said with a slight bit of cheer and a nod. “I’d shake your hand, but I’m kinda in the middle of an autopsy.” Tarrence waved the statement away as he crossed his arms and Gary went back to making unseen notes into his Virtual Network on the critter before him. “Gotta get inside these things and figure out what makes them work. This one took way more of my Reserves than I’m comfortable with to bring down. I think the big problem’s the skin.”
“Aye. It makes pretty damn fine armor once the leatherworkers figured out how to tan it. Hard to work with and expensive as hell, but it’s hard as hell to cut or pierce. Popular stuff to make gorgets out of for Ripper Rabbit hunting.”
Gary grunted in assent at those points as he retracted his gloved and blood-soaked hands from the innards of the Rockdigger carcass. “I can totally see that. I’m thinking of going with some flavor of burning or acid to soften the stuff up, at the least. Gonna have to pay a visit to the local stores and see what I can round up. This hide reminds me of a creature from where I’m from, and they’re just as famous for being hard to penetrate. This really makes me want to get my hands on a relqa that I can use Alexandrite magic with. I’d be able to kill these things fast if I could manipulate air.”
Tarrence frowned in confusion and took a step closer as he spoke up. “How so? They dig into the ground. Wouldn’t Emerald magic work better against them?”
“For getting them out of the ground, yes. Combine some Ruby with it to melt the ground and get lava to burn them alive nice and proper, but that’s mana-intensive. Alexandrite would let me take the air they store in this sac here,” Gary said with a pause as he reached towards the extracted lungs and the air sac still hooked onto a section of brachial tube coming off the end, “and do some nasty things with it. Superheat it to flash-fry their lungs to asphyxiate them, superchill it to freeze them solid, make the air expand in such a way that it detonates inside the creature and fuck up the organs? Great methods for assassination as well, since magic is a thing.”
The grim talk set Tarrence to shuddering at the casual tone Gary used. He was clearly reevaluating the gray-eyed young man before him ‘playing’ around with monster innards. Gary caught the shudder and shrugged.
“Dark stuff, but you gotta be aware of such things in the back of your head. You’ll get caught out by the one thing you didn’t plan for. I’m only saying it out loud to you because you’re not the sort to do anything with that grim knowledge. I’m a pretty good judge of character.”
“I would indeed appreciate you keeping such talk out of certain ears, yes. I’m also worried about what you’ll be doing once you visit the local alchemists.”
Gary laughed aloud at that. “A valid concern, good sir! It really depends on what I can find. There’s some things I know how to make that would get the job done fast, but there’s no safety countermeasures that can be put into place with the reliability I’d be after. Fire, acid, and plenty of blunt force seems to be the trick against the Rockdiggers. Maybe tomorrow will offer something more productive.” He reached out with a handsaw and got to work cutting a few sections off the Rockdigger’s hide. Samples were going to be required for testing. “I’m about done here. Just gotta get some test samples so I can try things on them, and I’ll get the people here to just dispose of this carcass. It’s sat too long without being processed to be any good.”
Tarrence grunted and waved on the workers who’d been hovering out of earshot further on the premises. As they moved in, Gary wrapped his bloody samples in a section of old tarp that he’d gotten for the purpose and began to help them clean up his mess.