Emily becomes a whirlwind of violence, her arms flashing out, finding the weak points between the hobgoblins’ armour before digging Claws into their soft flesh. They try to fight back, lashing out with blades that she deflects gracefully before closing the distance between them at a speed they can barely react to.
She disassembles the squad quickly, covering the floor with their dirty blood before locating her next target and dashing forward, leaving fifteen dying hobgoblins to slowly melt back into the floor. Lightning wraps her legs, letting her cover the gap between her and the next group in an instant. The five shield-bearers in the squad line up to block her, locking their shields together while the polearms behind them jut forwards to pierce her as she approaches.
Emily simply crouches a little before springing up, clearing the shields and spinning in the air, releasing the Claws’ blades and letting them whip out, slicing through the hobgoblins below her. The shield-bearers fall with their heads split open as Emily lands, deftly weaving the wires of the blades around the spearmen beside her and filling them with machina, increasing their sharpness before retracting them.
The wires lacerate the hobgoblins, ripping apart their armour and flesh. She pushes forward as the blades click back into place before burying them into the throats of the remaining squad members.
She falls into a consistent rhythm, systematically taking apart every squad one by one and obliterating the remaining goblins with her arcs. The last hobgoblin falls from Emily’s blades as she lowers her arms, letting them slide out of its stomach. She looks around, taking in the empty chamber.
“Am I done?” she mutters, glancing at her mana and stamina reserves. “My body’s improved so much that, even after I’ve burned through half my mana, I’m barely short of breath. Hell, I only lost twenty stamina.”
The chamber shakes as the gates slide shut and the torches change to a natural orange glow, bringing an end to the horde. Emily looks around for the door to move on to the next chamber, but she doesn’t see anything.
Weird, is the trial not done?
She notices an unnatural glow spreading from the centre of the chamber with the same blood-red hue as the torches before. It grows to fill half the chamber with its light, and Emily recognises the pattern as a large-scale array. She keeps her back to the nearby wall, watching in fascination as a red haze slowly drifts up from the massive magic circle. The mana around her grows unstable, and a strange feeling of pressure envelopes her, as if crushing the air from her lungs.
Frowning, Emily tries to cast a spell, but the moment her mana leaves her body it distorts, bending and twisting in strange ways, forcing her to divert more of her focus to correct it. The spell still forms, a crackling bolt arcing out and slamming into the floor a few metres ahead of her, but it takes over twice as long as it usually would.
“It’s a widespread magic inhibition zone,” she mutters with wonder, stepping closer to inspect the runes forming the circle.
As she approaches, a low rumble fills the chamber, and a bubbling black mass rises in the centre of the room. She pauses and lowers into a combat stance as the mass grows, morphing into a towering humanoid figure. The black liquid solidifies, taking on a dull, stone-like finish. It slowly gains definition, holes forming in the head to create an unsettling face with an empty, gaping maw and abyssal eyes.
The black stone giant finishes its birth after a few moments and slowly turns, its empty gaze falling on Emily.
“What are you?” she says with curiosity, beginning the slow casting of four fireballs as she starts slowly circling the creature.
The thirty-metre-tall being doesn’t respond. However, the moment Emily’s mana flows out of her body and begins to form magic circles, it raises its thick arm with surprising speed and points towards her. Its fingers suddenly grow, shooting out and piercing her magic circles, ripping the mana constructs to pieces.
“Tsk,” Emily clicks her tongue and sprints away, avoiding the sharp spears of rock that fall towards her after breaking her spells. “It doesn’t seem to want me to cast spells.”
The creature follows her body with its eyes, drawing back its fingers and bending its legs. It springs forward, creating a thundering crash with each footfall, closing the distance between them to crush Emily.
Grinning, Emily moves forward to meet it, internally casting an acceleration spell that meets no resistance from the inhibition zone and wraps her legs with lightning. She runs through the giant’s legs, slashing a Claw along its ankle. The metal blade bites into the dark stone, crackling with machina and cutting a clean line through. She skids to a halt, spinning around and killing her momentum with a knee against the ground and the spikes on her boots extended.
The stone giant pauses its charge, slamming a foot down to instantly halt its momentum before slowly rotating unnaturally at the waist to face Emily again.
It’s fast, but it's slow at turning.
Emily contemplates the creature as she watches the gash she left behind being quickly filled with more black liquid that quickly solidifies, removing any sign of the wound.
“Tsk,” she clicks her tongue with a frown. “And it regenerates small injuries.”
She tries to summon a mana grenade from her belt but finds it slow to appear, also affected by the mana inhibition zone.
Damn it.
Emily charges the grenade with machina, turning the small metal orb into a brightly crackling harbinger of destruction before angrily hurling it up at the creature’s chest. Sensing the danger, the creature quickly raises its arm, blocking the projectile as it fractures, spewing flames and metal shards that tear streaks through the stone limb and cause cracks to form along it.
A small satisfied smirk starts to form on Emily’s face before the arm simply liquefies itself and reforms as good as new.
“And big injuries?” she mutters with slight confusion. “Wait, is it a golem?”
She dodges as the golem slams its arm down towards her, smashing it against the ground with a loud bang that shakes the room.
If it is, I just need to destroy the core.
With newfound confidence, Emily starts summoning the Whisper from her storage as she sprints through the golem’s legs again to delay its next attack, narrowly slipping between a sudden wall of spikes that shoot from its ankles to try to skewer her. She keeps running, creating distance between herself and the giant construct as a sleek black rifle appears in her hands.
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Reaching the chamber’s wall, she spins back to face it and raises the Whisper. She flicks the firing selector into full, lighting up the barrel with a green glow before lowering her finger onto the trigger and squeezing. A small crack and a light hiss, barely audible to the unenhanced ear, follow as a bullet flies out, almost instantly connecting with the golem’s head. A narrow hole appears from the creature’s forehead straight through to the back of its skull.
The golem barely flinches, the hole in its head closing up as it pulls back its arm before thrusting it forward. The sturdy black stone transforms into a torrent of pressurised viscous liquid that blasts towards Emily. Reacting quickly, she digs her heels in and leaps to the side. Unfortunately, she’s a moment too late and the stream catches her foot, sending her tumbling to the ground with a harsh cracking sound and a burning pain flaring in her right leg.
“Shit!” she yells angrily as her gun clatters away and she rolls to a stop.
Pushing off the ground quickly, Emily glances down and sees her leg twisted at an awkward angle, her foot facing backwards and her boot heavily damaged. She snarls angrily, lightning crackling between her teeth as she grits them and stands up, activating all eight injectors along her spine, sending a flood of healing potion into her veins.
Her leg slowly knits itself back together, her ankle rotating back into place as she leaps towards her dropped weapon with the other, narrowly avoiding a spike of rock shooting towards her from the golem’s extended arm. Making a snap decision, Emily shuts off the pain receptors in her leg temporarily as she runs along the chamber wall, splitting the control of her upper and lower body between multiple threads to maintain a perfect gait while racking the Whisper’s bolt and taking aim at the golem’s chest.
She pulls the trigger three more times, absorbing the kickback without breaking her stride and boring three more holes in a line across the golem’s centre mass. It barely reacts to any of them, continuing to swipe at her with its malleable arms to no avail.
It’s too big to find the core with normal bullets. I need to do a large amount of damage quickly to find it.
Dropping and sliding under another arcing swipe from her opponent, Emily pulls the Whisper’s bolt back and flicks the mag release, dropping the useless ammo from the gun before she reaches into her belt and pulls out another magazine with a small, ornate flame engraved on the side. She slams the new mag home, racking the bolt to chamber a bullet before aiming the gun at the golem’s head.
She takes a deep breath and pulls the trigger before racking the bolt and adjusting her aim again: left shoulder, thorax, right shoulder, stomach, left hip, right hip. She sends seven bullets out in rapid succession. The first shot reaches its target as the last leaves the barrel. The hollow bullet crumples against the giant stone body with devastating force, the impact alone sending a web of cracks across the stone as the fractured bullet digs in regardless. The real impact comes at almost the same moment, when the runes tracing the metal projectile break, triggering the explosive mix within.
A thunderous explosion rings out as the stone head is blown to pieces, shards of black rock being flung across the room. Next, the golem’s left arm falls off, its shoulder disappearing in a ball of fire. Then, the centre of its chest caves in, a burning, several-metre-wide hole punched through to the other side. Its right arm falls next, and another gaping hole appears through the golem’s gut.
Finally, as a heavy explosion rips through the oversized construct's left hip, Emily hears a clear shattering sound, almost drowned out by the explosions but still discernible to her sensitive hearing. The golem starts to lose its form, its step towards Emily halting as it starts melting back into a liquid state, starting from the destroyed hip, like blood seeping from a grievous wound. The last bullet hits as the stone has begun to liquefy, cutting straight through with ease and exploding against the wall behind the dying golem.
Emily pauses in her sprint the moment the creature starts to dissolve, lowering her rifle as she no longer senses any danger from the dying golem. The red circle on the floor fades as the golem melts into it, and Emily lets out a small breath of relief as its pressure vanishes.
“Note to self: having my casting blocked feels gross,” she mutters with a small, victorious grin.
She chooses not to relax her caution completely, still aware she is inside a dungeon, and keeps the Whisper in her hands. She reloads the gun, filling it with normal ammunition again and placing the explosive bullets back in her belt before resting it against her shoulder.
“It was worth using normal fire crystals instead of lesser in these. That firepower was perfect,” she says as she glances at the web of cracks in the chamber wall, still repairing after the last explosion. “It’s a shame I can’t control the breakdown of a greater crystal yet.”
She shivers slightly at the memory of a greater fire crystal blowing her room to pieces as time ground to a halt, The Clock saving her from the aftermath of her own experiment. As she shakes the memory away, Emily feels the mana in the room bubble with purpose, gathering in the centre. Her gaze follows it to where she sees a large, black chest rising from the ground.
Is that my reward, or another challenge?
She steps forward to answer her question, wincing slightly as she reactivates the pain receptors in her right leg. Accepting the buzzing pain telling her that she isn’t fully healed, she approaches the plain black chest, poking it with the barrel of the Whisper without attempting to open it. When nothing happens, she tries pulling up a system information window and sighs with relief as it works.
¯¯¯¯¯
[Dungeon Chest]
[Rank:] E
[Description:] A reward chest for completing a dungeon’s trial.
______
The explanation is brief, but it reassures her that the trial is over, so Emily lowers her gun and reaches out, pushing open the heavy metal lid. A bright light washes out of the chest, blinding her for a moment before her eyes adjust. At the bottom is a layer of large, greater mana crystals of various elements, and sitting above them, drawing Emily’s focus, is a ring. It has a seemingly simple design, just a thin band of green metal. However, as Emily looks closer she realises the metal is actually a bluish-silver, mythril, with a dense mass of tiny green runes covering it.
“Incredible,” she mutters, picking up the ring and admiring the craftsmanship of the fine engravings while wrapping all the mana crystals with a layer of space mana and sending them straight into her belt.
¯¯¯¯¯
[Air Walker]
[Rank:] E
[Description:] A ring engraved with an easy-to-use flight spell.
[Effect:] Upon activation, allows the user to step freely on the air around them.
_____
Her eyes light up at the description, a giddy grin parting her lips.
“Jackpot! I couldn’t find anything about flight spells in the library,” she says while storing the Whisper and sliding the ring onto her right pointer finger.
The mana in the room moves again, and the chest morphs into a swirling portal, but Emily ignores it.
Instead, she channels mana into the ring, lighting up the runes around it before taking a step forward and watching wind mana flow from the ring to form an invisible platform along her sole. Her foot freezes ten centimetres away from the floor, allowing her to step off the ground onto the nothingness above. Grinning, she takes one step after another, slowly climbing into the air. After rising ten metres, Emily removes the mana flowing into the ring, but it keeps pouring out wind mana on its own, and her next step freezes ten centimetres lower than the last. She keeps walking, slowly lowering to the ground where the ring’s runes go dull again, losing their pale glow.
“So it drains twice as much mana as each step needs to lower you down afterwards,” Emily mutters, analysing the function of the ring.
She tries attributing her mana before injecting it into the ring, pouring in wind mana and finding herself able to control it still after it leaves the ring. She gathers it around her foot when it’s fifteen centimetres off the ground this time and steps up. She repeats this a few times, stepping up varying heights before cutting off the mana and finding herself lowering by the same odd distances each time.
“So I can gain more control, but still not complete control. I’ll decipher these runes later to make my own spell then give this ring to Jules. This will be helpful for someone without the ability to completely split their focus between multiple spells.”
The walls of the chamber start to break apart as she finishes her tests, falling away to reveal the same void as when she entered. Getting the message, Emily finally turns to the portal and steps through to rejoin her friends outside.