Apocalypse Knights 2: A LitRPG Fantasy, page 9
“A distraction,” Nesura suggested. “You only need a few seconds to cross the distance between here and the Dungeon, and perhaps a heartbeat more to cast Temporal Equalization on it. If something were to catch the attention of the brazen incinerators and azure exterminators and not provoke immediate hostility, you should have just about enough time to make it in.”
“Whoever catches that kind of attention would be dead shortly,” Felix pointed out. “Are you saying that one of us needs to run out there and be the sacrifice? You’re an evil, evil bat.”
“No.” Max shook his head. “She’s not saying that. Let’s pull back into the restaurant. I spotted a stairwell that led to a basement when we were passing through its kitchen. We’ll head down there. I want to try something.”
The cohort withdrew into the basement, where the light emanating from Flora’s shield revealed a dingy chamber packed with sacks of spoiled flour and grain. A shelf against one of its stone walls was laden with pickled vegetables and canned meat. Max didn’t want to open the larder at the far end of the basement, given the faint traces of decay that wafted through the gaps between its doubled doors.
A small table and several wooden chairs took up the middle of the room. Max shoved them to the walls and retrieved the Garlocke summoning totem.
Garlocke +2: Soul-Bound Summoning Totem
Consumes 50 Mana to call forth Garlocke, a laconic lizard, for 10 minutes
“That’s a great idea!” Marina exclaimed at the sight of the totem. “Summoned creatures can be destroyed, but they simply return to their totems when that happens. A day or so later, they’re ready to be summoned again. This Garlocke creature will be the perfect distraction.”
“It depends,” Nesura said. “We don’t know exactly what Garlocke’s attributes and disposition are like. If it’s a beast with little mental capacity, it won’t be able to do anything without constant instructions from Max.”
“There’s only one way to find out,” Max said. He nodded to the spirit familiar. “Nesura. Could you?”
Nesura sighed. “Well, at least you’re asking this time,” she said, before pulsing Mana through the bond she shared with Max and putting it at his disposal. “There you go. You’d better expend all that Mana before it dissipates.”
Max nodded and focused his will on the small lizard figurine he held in his palm. Gray smoke poured from the totem to flow all over the basement floor. He directed all of the Mana he’d taken from Nesura into the smoke, causing it to roil, writhe, and grow until it became an opaque cloud tall and wide enough to fill up nearly the entire room.
Eventually, smoke stopped pouring from the figurine, and the gray cloud began to dissipate. Movement, strong and graceful, stirred in the darkness beyond the light of Flora’s shield. Something sharp—a claw—scraped against stone. A pair of crimson eyes looked back at the cohort. Garlocke stepped into view.
The summoned creature was indeed a lizard. It stood on two powerful hind legs rather than on all fours, the top of its head reaching half again as high to the ceiling as Max’s. Its forelimbs, though smaller and shorter, were still corded with muscle that rippled beneath its sleek scales. Each of its feet sported a scything toe-claw of incredible keenness. Its ten-foot long torso ended with a thin but sturdy tail of equal length. The lizard opened its maw slightly, revealing twin rows of fangs.
Max angled his Soul Lens screen at the creature.
Garlocke
Spirit Beast: Raptor
Level 2
Soul-Bound to Maximo Strident
Health: 65/65
Mana: 10/10
Physical Attributes
Strength: 17
Dexterity: 17
Fortitude: 15
Perception: 10
Abilities
Scything Reap
Lacerating Bite
Devastating Pounce
“You’re Garlocke,” Max said.
The lizard tilted its head. Max felt its consciousness push at his own. A flicker of irritation flashed across its crimson eyes.
“Yes,” Garlocke said, in a low but articulate voice. “And I’m a ‘he’, not an ‘it’, and a raptor, not a lizard.”
Felix and Marina blanched and backed away at the sound of the raptor’s voice. Even Flora flinched.
“Got it,” Max said, stepping forward and holding Garlocke’s gaze. “Hello.”
Garlocke nodded politely.
“Hi,” he replied.
Chapter 10
“Run out there and distract the monsters until you can enter the Dungeon,” Garlocke said, looking up at the brazen incinerators and azure exterminators circling Graywind Mage Tower. “That’s my task.”
When he’d first appeared, the raptor had been too large to fit through the basement door. Garlocke had cocked his head, then promptly shrank down in size until he could fit through it, before ascending to the restaurant’s main floor and following the cohort back to the veranda.
“Correct,” Max replied. “We’ll need just under a minute of time, more if you can manage.”
“Understood,” Garlocke said.
“Just like that?” Felix whispered. “You’re just going to listen to Max and do what he tells you to without any backtalk or nasty comments?”
“Yes,” Garlocke replied.
“I wish somebody else would behave like that,” Marina said, casting a pointed glance at Nesura.
“I’m not a mindless summoned beast,” Nesura sneered. “I am Nesura Trillia Fengthela Vix, Mistress of the Venom Blade, Bringer of Woe, Devourer of Hope, Queen of —”
“Was,” Garlocke corrected.
Felix chuckled as Nesura fumed and muttered a string of obscenities under her breath.
“Wow, I like Gar much better than Nessy already,” Felix said. “I can call you Gar, right?”
“No,” Garlocke said. The raptor met Max’s gaze. “I’m ready.”
Max turned to the cohort. “You heard him. Get ready,” he said, before returning his regard to Garlocke. “How long will it be before I can summon you again if you’re destroyed?”
“Twenty hours,” Garlocke replied. “If you dismiss me before that happens, you can resummon me in five minutes.”
“Alright. I’ll try to dismiss you just before we enter the Dungeon,” Max said. “We might need your help inside there.”
“I imagine you will,” the raptor agreed.
“Go!” Max instructed.
Garlocke sprang from their hiding place, his sleek, scaled frame rippling with grace and power, and dashed out into the open. A high-pitched hiss emerged from his throat, interspersed by curious clicking sounds.
The monsters circling the Dungeon took notice immediately. Deranged whoops and cackles rolled from the underbelly mouths of the brazen incinerators and azure exterminators. They swooped down on Garlocke, their inhuman eyes ablaze with curiosity. The raptor trotted away evenly, drawing the monsters’ attention and pulling them away from Graywind Mage Tower.
Max chopped his hand down in the direction of the Dungeon, then hurled himself into a headlong sprint toward it. The cohort followed closely. Max cast a sidelong glance at Garlocke. The monsters had apparently sated their curiosity with the raptor. The closest had begun snapping their underbelly mouths at Garlocke, deliberately stopping shy of biting him in half or tearing off a limb.
The raptor bore the ordeal stoically and fearlessly. He swung his crimson gaze from one monster to another.
Max raised his hand and pointed at the archway at the base of Graywind Mage Tower. The multicolored vortex that swirled within the depths of the archway could only be the Dungeon’s entrance. He willed his Temporal Equalization spell to target the Dungeon instead of emanating from his body. A green beam of light pulsed from his finger, but it fell short of its goal, with him still being about ten or twenty strides away.
Looks like I need to be within five feet or less if I want to use Temporal Equalization that way, he thought. Still, another heartbeat saw the cohort arrive relatively unnoticed at the Dungeon’s entrance. Max cast Temporal Equalization once more. His spell flashed into the entrance of Graywind Mage Tower, and the massive structure of twisted dark stone seemed to shudder. Tendrils of electricity, tongues of flame, spirals of ice, and shards of stone blasted from its summit to land in a ring around the Dungeon, further devastating the already dilapidated buildings in its vicinity.
That instantly caught the attention of the brazen incinerators and azure exterminators. The monsters spun away from Garlocke and set their eyes upon the cohort.
Nesura pulled up a Soul Lens Screen.
Graywind Mage Tower
Dungeon: Level 3
Monsters
UNKNOWN
“Better go if you’re going,” the familiar said.
“Move!” Max barked, pointing at the archway. Felix, Marina, and Flora sprinted into the Dungeon and vanished within the swirling depths of its entrance. He held up the Garlocke summoning totem and extended his mind toward it.
Dismiss summoned beast?
Max willed his assent. From behind the rapidly approaching monsters, the raptor’s scaled form dissolved into gray smoke. He nodded, then hurled himself into Graywind Mage Tower, a hair’s breadth away from the fire and frost that cascaded upon him.
Chapter 11
Wind and cold, laden with the strange miasmic odor that suffused every Dungeon’s interior, washed over Max as he got to his feet. The rest of the cohort stood around him with their gazes cast outward upon the confines of Graywind Mage Tower.
“What does it look like?” he asked, aware that when it came to Dungeons, he was the least experienced member of the cohort.
“Well, we’re standing on a stone platform, approximately fifty feet wide and across,” Felix announced. He pointed at an ascending stone stairwell at the far end of the platform. “That seems to lead to another platform higher up. Also, all these platforms seem to be hanging in empty air.”
Max swept his gaze past the cohort and saw for himself that Felix was absolutely right. They were indeed standing on a platform of plain gray stone, beyond the edges of which were cold and blackly vacant skies. He looked up and saw many more similar platforms rising into the heavens, all of them connected by precarious stairwells of varying steepness.
Despite the situation, Max felt a grin tugging at the corner of his lips. Before he became a Knight-Errant, he’d always thought that the horrors of war and the disappointments of peace had left him irreparably jaded and disillusioned. But that was evidently untrue.
Here, as he looked upward at the physically impossible Dungeon skyscape, wonder flared anew within his soul. It was very much like the curious enthusiasm he felt whenever he acquired or synthesized a new Flux spell or attempted a Flux Conjunction. The two sensations were kin, and together, they comprised what Max now recognized as the thrill of pending peril, the precipice before the unknown, the unfolding of fantastic possibilities.
It was adventure, and it shone brightly enough to drown out all the shadows and sadness of the past.
“Seems like a fairly standard ascension-type Dungeon, though it is Level 3, so we can expect formidable foes and obstacles in our path.” Flora pointed her sword at the distant stairwell. “Once we start advancing in that direction, monsters should materialize and attack us. If we manage to win our way through, there will be some kind of puzzle to unravel or gate we must unlock before we can ascend.”
“The monsters inside a Dungeon are more or less identical to the ones that appear when it produces an incursion,” Marina added. “So whatever we’ve seen out there, we can expect to find here as well. So I’d be expecting Fire Discs, Tanarr imps, Cyclopean Initiates, and whatever the Level 3 equivalent of those Azure Exterminators are.”
“Probably Ice Discs,” Felix muttered. “Dungeons and monsters can be insufferably unimaginative sometimes.”
Max couldn’t help it; he shook his head and chuckled softly, much to the obvious surprise of the cohort.
“No, don’t worry,” he said, forestalling the concerned queries he could see welling up Flora’s throat. “I was just thinking about how maddeningly impossible and wondrous all of this was, while the three of you go on about what we can predictably expect from the Dungeon’s monsters and challenges. Don’t get me wrong. I’m very certain your experience with Dungeons will be the key to victory, and I’m infinitely thankful and grateful for the fact that you’re here with me. I was just a bit amused at how much of an ass I’m being.”
Max sighed and turned to Flora. “You’re the most experienced Level 3 Knight-Errant here. What do you propose?”
“The formation you had us adopt when we were moving through Hisktown should work very well, though I’d recommend you and I switching our positions in it, Max,” Flora said. “As Marina pointed out, the monsters ahead of us will almost certainly be fire discs, imps, and cyclopean initiates, all of which favor elemental, long-ranged attacks. And like you pointed out, they don’t seem to be lurkers and skulkers like ghouls, so we don’t really need to worry about being flanked or ambushed.”
“This means that when the fighting starts, the monsters will attack from the front, but be beyond blade range,” Max reasoned. “With you there to blunt their offense with your Shield spells, Marina and I will be free to retaliate with our own spells right away. This will also better allow Felix to slip away and flank the monsters. If we get enough of an advantage in the opening exchanges, you and I can advance into melee and finish things off from there, along with Felix.”
“That sounds as reasonable a plan as any,” Marina agreed. She cast her gaze skyward. “That’s a lot of ground to cover. How much time do we have left before a monster incursion occurs again?”
Max pulled out a Soul Lens screen.
Temporal stabilization in effect: 4:17:07:17
“Three to four days is about the average time a competent cohort of Knights-Errant takes to vanquish a completely unknown Level 3 Dungeon,” Flora said. A grin tugged at her usually stoic features. “But I daresay we’re far more than competent.”
“And we’ve got time to spare,” Felix pointed out. The Infiltrator cracked his knuckles. “Alright. Max. Ladies? Shall we begin?”
Max hefted Stridentsong and his Magus Staff. “Get into position. Flora, when you’re ready, signal the advance.”
The cohort moved out, with Flora in the lead, Marina taking the center, and Max bringing up the rear. Felix hung slightly behind and to the side, beneath his Cloak spell. As Flora had predicted, they’d scarcely covered twenty feet before the multi-colored swirls of energy appeared in front of them and began disgorging clusters of fire discs and similarly shaped monsters that were blue in color.
The Defender conjured a Triple Shield, and Max reinforced her defenses with his Double Shield spell. Barriers of light flashed into existence in front of the cohort a split second before the monsters unleashed a barrage of fiery and icy bolts from their single eyes.
Max angled his Soul Lens on a blue disc monster as flame and frost washed over the Shield spells.
Monster: Ice Disc
Level 3
Health: 10/10
Mana: 65/65
Physical Attributes
Strength: 2
Dexterity: 16
Fortitude: 5
Perception: 8
Abilities
Icebolt
Swift Flight
Frost Feed
Rewards
Victory Shard value: 3
Treasure Class: C
Looks like Felix is right about Dungeons being relatively unimaginative about their monsters’ names after all, Max thought idly.
“Marina, remember what happened to that fire disc when it used its Flame Feed ability on my Firebolt spell?” Max asked her. “I think these ice discs can do the same with your spells.”
“That means that I’ve just got to aim my spells a little more carefully,” the Elementalist said. “I don’t know if we want to deal with a whole host of empowered ice discs.”
“That might be a way to attain rarer and more valuable Dungeon treasures,” Nesura pointed out. “Assuming the whole lot of you don’t get wiped out, that is.”
“Barriers will come down in about ten seconds!” Flora cried, before anyone could respond to Nesura’ suggestion.
Max leveled his Magus Staff and raked a Jolting Arc across a cluster of ice discs trying to fly around the Shield spells. The monsters shrieked in agony as a bolt of lightning swept through their midst. Their grotesque bodies writhed and convulsed, and their unnatural flights turned into unceremonious flops upon the platform floor. Before they could recover, massive cuts appeared across their eyes and backs. Felix’s invisible blades carved entire chunks of their bodies from their bones and spilled their ichor in steaming gouts.
Marina hurled her most powerful spell, Icicle Burst, into the heart of a wing of fire discs trying to flank the cohort. A blue sphere spun from her palms into the monsters, before exploding into a shower of icicles that shredded the fire discs and caused their viscera to spill from the air in torrents.
Max’s Soul Lens flickered.
Elemental antipathy within Graywind Mage Tower exploited x6
Victory Shard acquisition rate increased by 6% for the next 6 seconds
“We’ve got to make use of this!” Max cried, knowing that a similar notification had appeared for every member of the cohort as well.
“Barriers are down!” Flora announced. The quintet of magical barriers burst apart into shards of white light, revealing a score of fire and ice discs in the cohort’s path. The monsters were chittering in obvious anxiety to one another, presumably at the fact that their opening salvos had inflicted no harm at all upon their foes.
“Get in close!” Max announced, breaking out into a full-on charge. He swept another Jolting Arc across the monsters’ ranks and sent the foremost of the discs into convulsing downward spirals, then overtook Flora upon his Prowess-enhanced stride.
