Duskbound 1: A LitRPG Adventure, page 33
I don’t need five small spears. I need one huge one. Come on, work with me, you piece of shit skill.
Growling, he summoned a new spear and stabbed it into the scorpling’s back. Then he made another one and slammed it down on top of the first one. It split the spear down the middle, tearing through it and banishing it, only to take its place. Combine! Do it!
Another spear formed and shot down. It might have been his imagination, or he could have lost track of it for a moment as the scorpling abruptly changed the direction it was turning, but for a split second, he thought he saw the spear grow bigger before it broke. Again!
[Phalanx] hammered that spot, as fast as he could make new spears. They broke, reformed, merged, and split back apart. The skill resisted him, but then, it always had. What he needed from it wasn’t what it wanted to do. But he was sick of it. It was time for the skill to merge or break.
The light from [Phalanx] intensified as the spear stuck in the scorpling grew bigger. It drove deeper and deeper, but it still wasn’t enough. The monster was too big. He needed to drive it at least ten feet down, and the spears weren’t even that long. Even with the partial size boost he’d managed to drag out of the skill, it didn’t have the penetrating power.
“No,” he growled, his knuckles white from gripping his own spear just to hold his place. “Work! Work, damn you!”
The next spear got empowered with [Kinetic Charge], and when it slammed home, there was an explosion of light. The brood mother screamed loud enough to deafen Velik, and a geyser of black blood shot up high enough to paint the ceiling.
[Kinetic Charge has been folded into Phalanx.]
[Phalanx has become Dread Lance.]
[Dread Lance set to rank 1.]
It wasn’t what Velik had wanted from the skill when he’d picked it, but it was exactly what he needed right now. Knowledge of its function was instantly at the forefront of his mind. With barely a thought, he ripped his spear out and activated the skill. Light arced down the length of the shaft as it was imbued with energy, all of it coursing forward to build up at the tip.
That was an element of [Kinetic Charge] there, he knew. It felt the exact same. But when he went to strike, his spear hit with explosive force. The head buried itself deep, far deeper than any of his previous strikes. The spear went in five feet, then six, to the point where there was barely any of the shaft left for him to hold onto.
Then the mystic energy surged downward and exploded outward. Chunks of exoskeleton, meat, and blood bounced off the ceiling to rain down on the floor of the cave, and Velik himself was thrown clear of the brood mother. Its underbelly slammed into the ground, cracking apart two legs and splaying the rest in the process.
A cascade of notifications hit him, dozens of kills all at once. Must have crushed a bunch of scorplings underneath it when it collapsed, he thought somewhat woozily.
It took him a moment to realize that, despite the massive wound in its back, somehow the brood mother was still alive. It was definitely down for the moment, but it kept twitching and none of his kill notifications included a champion elite. Of more immediate concern was the fact that his spear was nowhere in sight, and there were still a few dozen scorplings on the ground, all of them heading his way.
Velik climbed to his feet and tried to clear his vision with a few rapid blinks, but things still swam across his eyes. With no time to waste, he did his best to circle the incoming swarm and reach the brood mother, but they didn’t go out of their way to make it easy. At one point, he ended up jumping up to a wall and kicking off it just to get around a trio that were blocking his progress.
The brood mother twitched feebly as he approached. Velik had a brief thought that it was trying to attack him, but then he realized the truth. It was eating the corpse of one of its scorplings. It’s still trying to make more of them? Why?
But that wasn’t it. Even as he watched, the massive wound on its back started to heal. It twitched its mouth, dragging another nearby corpse in, and consumed that too. “Hell no,” he said. “We’re not doing this all again.”
He quickly located his spear, somehow still stuck in the scorpling’s back, and climbed up to jerk it free. Then he started charging up [Dread Lance] again. When it was ready a minute later, he leaped down directly in front of the scorpling’s mouth, thrust the spear in, and unleashed the built-up power.
There was still a lot of collateral damage, and he got absolutely coated with scorpling chum, but he was still smiling when he saw the next set of notifications.
[You have slain Scalithex the Brood Mother (champion elite, level 40).]
[You have advanced to level 35. +2 Physical, +1 Mental, +2 free points.]
65
Velik ended up spending another hour taking care of the remaining scorplings. Rather than fight them in the cavern, he retreated to the tunnels again and ambushed them in small groups as they spread out to look for him. The fights were challenging more in that he hadn’t slept in days and was exhausted from killing that champion, but he still got the job done.
It was only once he was finally safe again that he realized he hadn’t received a champion seed for killing the giant scorpling. As far as he was concerned, that was confirmation that he was in a dungeon, which meant if he didn’t hurry, there was a possibility that the champion would reappear. He didn’t really understand how the mechanics of its mana recycling process worked, but the fact that the monsters didn’t stay dead was common knowledge.
Which means no matter how many of these monsters I kill, there will always be more. But I bet I could break those damn invisible walls now.
[Dread Lance] truly did solve all the problems he’d been having since coming to the deep wood. He’d leveled up several times and gotten a nice bonus to his physical when he’d upgraded his spear, but the champions were still so tough that even injuring them was a daunting proposition. The skill was not without its drawbacks—namely that it was exhausting to use, and he got caught in the collateral damage. Even the two shots he’d unloaded into the brood mother had left him feeling winded like he was coming off a six-hour sprint. The skill also took a minute or so to charge to full power, and trying to hold it there for very long was an exercise in futility.
But it did turn his mystic stat into a true powerhouse, stacking it right on top of his physical and releasing all that energy in an explosive burst. He hadn’t had the opportunity to test it out yet, but he was reasonably certain that it could catch multiple enemies in the detonation if they were close enough together. Of course, if he wasn’t careful, he could also easily injure himself, so it was sure to be a tricky skill to manage.
Retreat or press forward? he wondered to himself after he’d finished hunting down the scorplings. On the one hand, he was tired and sore. He finally had a way free, and a large part of him demanded he take it. On the other hand, he still had plenty of healing potions and his haste potion, and if he left now, he’d have to kill the brood mother again when he came back. He’d already checked the compass and confirmed that his target was still here, or maybe that ‘here’ was the target if he was right about this place being a dungeon.
If that was the case, then it was the source of the monsters. An undiscovered dungeon hundreds of miles from civilization, just far enough away to never be detected, but close enough to threaten the frontier, was exactly the kind of problem that could account for the monsters constantly filtering out of the wild lands. And that meant, now that he knew where it was, that the smart thing to do was to flee, report the location, and let the experts dismantle it.
But if he did that, he would never get the answers he needed. Chalin was somewhere out there, tied to these monsters somehow, maybe a monster himself. Maybe he was this dungeon, and if so, maybe it was possible to free him somehow. A dungeon cracker team wouldn’t bother to try. They’d slaughter the monsters, break the core, loot the place, and pat themselves on the back.
Is it worth risking your life over?
It was a decision he could put off for a few more minutes while he made a different one. Thanks to the skill merger, he had an open skill slot to fill. [Dread Lance] had been an entirely unexpected acquisition, and it changed what he needed by functioning as a high damage skill. Ideally, he’d like to test it on a group of enemies, but not when the stakes were so high, and especially not in such tight confines where he had to worry about turning a monster into shrapnel.
The question was whether it functioned as a multi-target skill, but Velik wasn’t sure that even mattered anymore. He’d wanted a skill for large groups of monsters. Now he’d fought hundreds of groups like that, and he’d found his own natural skills up to the task. His coordination and timing were flawless, and his speed and raw power were more than enough to put down anything even five levels above him as long as it wasn’t an elite. And if it was, now he had [Dread Lance] to crack its shell.
In light of that, he had to take a moment to think about what he really needed. More offense never hurt, but a utility skill might make more of a difference. The biggest threats to his life right now were a lack of shelter and water. He couldn’t safely rest, and at some point, dehydration would overcome the limits of a 107 physical. It wouldn’t be today, but it would happen eventually.
But he wasn’t planning on being in the flesh caves that long. So, if he dismissed a survivability skill option, that left him with offense, defense, speed, or expanding to rely more heavily on his slowly growing mystic stat. Offense and speed were fine, sort of. It would be nice to tear apart champions ten levels higher than him with nothing but his spear, but it wasn’t necessary.
Maybe something to resist environmental damage, like that burning air that comes out of the walls when I damage them. I can always dodge a bite, but how do you avoid the air around you trying to melt your skin?
[The Black Fang] as a class didn’t have much in the way of defensive skills. It was focused on hitting hard and hitting first, not on trading blows, but there were a few options in the general skills list, depending on what he was looking to fortify himself against.
[Mind Fortress] helped to insulate him from any sort of mind control or illusions, but he already had that amulet Torwin had given him. [Thermal Regulation] helped with extreme temperatures, and he found something called [Inert Matter] that he didn’t really understand, but which claimed to help resist chemical alterations to his body. [Ivory Bones] was a contender in that it strengthened his whole skeleton, but that wasn’t really what he needed.
The problem with any of those was that he didn’t really see them merging with his current skills. Nothing in his current list played nice with the idea of just taking a blow, be it by tooth or by flame or by… chemical alteration, whatever that meant. If he took one of those four skills, that was likely to be the basis of a new skill to start building on, so he wanted to be sure it was the right one.
Or he could go the other direction and grab something else that was powered by mystic. There were a few utility class skills that used it, but they all felt so situational that he felt like he’d have the same problem. Whatever he took wouldn’t have a prayer of merging into any of his current skills.
Either I’m starting a new branch in my build and I’ll have to wait until I hit level 40 to pick up something to advance it with, or I need to take something that I can fold into what I’ve got now which may not be immediately useful. Really, it comes down to whether I should be building for the future or for the problem in front of me, and I already know the answer to that.
[Spear Warden] was his highest ranked skill, which meant if he merged something into it, he was practically guaranteed to get an extremely powerful skill, maybe even something to rival [Apex Hunter]. If he’d been able to rank up [Kinetic Charge] or [Phalanx] a few more times, he could only imagine how strong the skill he’d have gotten instead of [Dread Lance] would have been.
That brought him back to considering [Savage Rhythm] again. He could see it merging with either [Spear Warden] or [Dread Lance], and while it wasn’t useful for a quick skirmish, if he was going to keep hunting champion elites, it wasn’t a terrible choice. It didn’t give him armor penetration, but not every champion was so tough that he couldn’t hurt it with a normal attack.
A lot of them are, though, even if it’s only because they’re always a higher level than me. Maybe this is a skill better left for later, but it would be so useful if I could merge it into [Spear Warden]. Alright, let’s go with that. Maybe it’ll help cut apart these packs of scorplings I keep running into, too.
Decision made, he added [Savage Rhythm] to his skill list. New knowledge flooded his mind, ways he’d never considered to build off each successive strike until an opponent was completely overwhelmed in an avalanche of blows, or to chain one attack into another against a different enemy. The skill was actually more flexible than he’d given it credit for prior to choosing it, and he was hopeful that he wouldn’t regret the choice like he had with [Phalanx].
There was an easy way to find out. With an eager grin stretching his lips, he started hunting for his first group of victims.
66
Sildra had been impressed with Jensen’s work. He was quick, decisive, and devastatingly accurate with that bow of his. When the monsters had threatened to overwhelm them, he’d magically pulled something out of nowhere to turn the battle around. She’d been quite taken by his performance.
Then Torwin had caught up with her outside of Beldrit the night he’d returned. He’d needed her [Eye of the Moon] skill to confirm the corrupted seed bearers were entirely purged, and her quest had evolved from saving Deshir to encompassing the entirety of the frontier. It was immediately obvious what the difference was between a gold-ranked monster hunter and his young apprentice. He had arrows in the air even before she could open her mouth to let him know a monster was approaching.
How high is this man’s mental stat to not only hear everything around him, but to be able to track them through the brush? He has to have at least a couple of skills helping him along.
They reached Beldrit after a short hour of travel, and Sildra caught her breath upon coming in range. “There are at least twenty or thirty monsters inside the walls,” she informed Torwin.
“Probably more under the roofs,” he said. “We’ll have to drag everyone out house by house to make sure we’ve got them all.”
That wasn’t going to go well, but then again, the people of Deshir had been far more pliable than she’d expected after she and Jensen had rescued them. She expected that had more to do with the more recalcitrant elements of the town being dead than anything, either because they’d resisted the invaders or because they’d been part of the attack.
Beldrit was in better condition, but things were still tense. They’d survived the initial assault, but a quarter of the town had been killed, and they had no way to know how many monsters still lurked among them, no way to know if a man who’d been on the side of humanity yesterday was still himself now.
Sildra could tell, though. It was only a question of whether they’d believe her. No woman wanted to hear that her son had been killed and replaced by a monster. No husband would believe that his wife was working with the body snatchers, not even in the face of overwhelming evidence. That, more than anything, was what made it so hard to quell the invasion. People just wouldn’t do what was needed when the victims were their families.
At least, that was how things had gone in Deshir. When they walked through the open, unmanned gates of Beldrit an hour or two before midnight, they immediately found a crowd gathered in the middle of town, loudly arguing.
“I’m telling you, you’re wrong! I think I’d know if my own brother had been replaced by a monster!”
“Then what was he doing in my house!” another man yelled back.
Torwin turned a questioning gaze to Sildra, and she shook her head. There were seven corrupted seed bearers in the crowd, but the man in question wasn’t one of them. Whatever it was he’d been up to in his neighbor’s home, it wasn’t to spread more corruption through Beldrit.
“Which ones?” the old monster hunter asked.
“There, the bald one with the scar under his eye. And there, the young man with the long hair in the faded green coat. There, to his left—the girl with her hair in braids.” Sildra choked for a moment as she pointed Torwin there. The girl couldn’t be more than twelve. She took a moment to compose herself, then pointed out the remaining monsters.
“There can’t be any mistakes,” Torwin said. “Make sure you’re sure.”
“I am,” she told him with a firm voice.
“It would be better if the blame for this falls squarely on me. When this job is over, I’ll be gone, and everyone who wants someone to blame for the death of whoever was important to them can point their anger at me. When the rest of them make their move, just keep your calls under your breath. Do not worry; I will hear you.”
“Your ears are truly that sharp?” she murmured, practically inaudibly.
He grinned and said, “They are.”
And then that terrifying bow of his came up, and an arrow appeared out of nowhere, already set on its string. Torwin killed all seven of the monsters before the first scream started, then he pushed his way through the crowd to where two men held a third by the arms and had him pushed down on his knees.
“This one is no monster,” he said. “At least, not one recognized by the system. Whatever he was doing, it was of his own free will and not because he is a corpse puppet controlled by a seed of corruption.”
“Who the hell are you?!” the accusing man demanded.
“The hunter,” Torwin said simply. “And a damn good thing I’m the one who came out here. The scope of this infestation is far greater than your towns reported. No bronze-ranked monster hunter could have handled this threat. Despite the fact that my apprentice and I have killed thousands of monsters over this last month, more and more keep showing up. This is an absolute disaster, and now your towns are infested with monsters the likes of which I’ve never seen.
