Chapter 44: Chapter 37, Numbers over strength

Chapter 37, Numbers over strength

 

 

Entering the chamber of the 9th floor guardian I study the creature that is the final test to gain access to the floor below. It’s a giant Goater with 4 slithering and split tongues, sharp looking pointy teeth along their sides. It stands at 2.5 meters in height at the shoulder and there’s no hooves on this one. It has gray, human-looking feet with scales and disturbing proportions, too large at the back and too small at the front. Unsettling is the word I would use to describe this creature.

Its eyes don’t glow at all but the dim lantern light cast from those hung in the ceiling still show the vine monsters hiding behind it, just out of sight. They look like the usual thorny, green vines, each vine getting close to 10 centimeters in diameter. I identify the floor guardian in hopes of something exciting but am disappointed once again.

 

 

[Terror Teeth Giant Goater (Floor Guardian) - Level 90]

 

 

I snap my ring blade together with a burst of power before sending it whizzing in an arc towards the floor guardian. It follows the flying disc of death with its square pupiled eyes and lets out a horribly loud and all too deep scream, charging at me and disregarding the ring blade.

I have to readjust its trajectory slightly but it’s barely any effort and the floor guardian's head falls to the ground with a heavy thud, its lifeblood spurts towards me out of the neck, almost reaching me 10 meters away. I sigh in disappointment as the ring blade sweeps through the vines and cuts them in half, clearing the chamber.

 

 

Ding! You have slain [Terror Teeth Giant Goater (Floor Guardian) - Level 90]. Less experience awarded.

Ding! You have slain [Large Dusk Thorn - Level 50]. Less experience awarded.

Ding! You have slain [Large Dusk Thorn - Level 50]. Less experience awarded.

Ding! You have cleared the 9th floor of the Grizklesat dungeon.

 

 

Disassembling the blades I let them carve up the giant goat skull and vines before collecting the cores and I’m about to continue down the stairwell when I notice something next to the double doors that definitely wasn’t there a moment ago. It’s a bronze colored chest of metal and I excitedly approach it. It has to be a reward chest, the first dungeon loot I’ve gotten so far and I wonder what it is.

“What do you think, Ari? Do we get some sort of legendary sword that can kill a dragon with one slash?”

Ari chuckles slightly before mentally swatting me to get a move on opening it. We both know that our first loot isn’t going to be something that impressive. As a matter of fact, it’s not impressive at all.

“Seriously? We got a steel dagger and 2 silver? Wait a moment… There’s even an engraved depiction of a vine monstrosity on the blade!?”

I pluck the silver and the small, basic looking steel dagger from the chest while looking at it with distaste. What am I supposed to do with this exactly? Even the motif is horrible.

“We’re only on the 9th floor but I have to agree that is a pathetic piece of dungeon loot.”

“Let’s save it anyway, Ari.”

Ari radiates feelings of confusion as I send it into storage.

“What do we need it for? It’s useless to us.”

“It might not have any real value now but who knows how we’ll feel about it in the future. It’s our first loot from our first delve, no matter how pathetic, after all.”

 

---

The 10th floor’s decorative addition is a slight variation in the luminosity of the lanterns, making it even more difficult to spot everything without carrying an external lightsource all the time. There’s only one corridor continuing forwards from the stairwell, turning out of sight 50 meters or so ahead of me and it’s 10 meters wide and 5 meters in height. In the lower corners where walls meet floors, slightly glowing emerald depictions of thorny vines snake their way along, white thorns glinting like diamonds in the flickering light.

They’re not diamonds of course. One can find ore and gem deposits in dungeons on occasions but diamonds wouldn’t appear on the 10th floor. It’s pretty though and gives the previously slightly dull decor a good boost in mystique. I can’t let myself get distracted though as my sensors pick up on a vine coming for my neck from behind as I move through the corridor, studying the glowing designs.

I use a blade section to carve through the vine before continuing, keeping a closer watch on my surroundings to make sure I don’t miss anything else. As I near the corner of the corridor the ceiling behind me suddenly slams down, blocking the path towards the stairwell, and I hear shrieks and screams coming from out of view up ahead.

It sounds like monsters I’ve killed before and I pull out my daggers and assemble my ring blade in preparation. The ground vibrates slightly from the sheer amount of creatures and they don’t take long before rounding the corner, coming straight for me. It’s a mixture of what I’ve seen before but with slight differences, Goaters with an additional horn lowered in a charge, their split tongues caressing and slabbering saliva on them as if to lube them up in preparation.

There’s also 2 meters tall pangolins with a few sharp blades on their sides. They cut their closest fellow monsters to ribbons as they roll in the horde, blades spinning furiously fast.

The ramming lizards have also made a comeback from their disappearance after the 7th floor. They’re half a meter in height and 1.5 meters long, green scaled and with large bone plating on their extra wide heads. Excellent for ramming into things. These however seem to have gained suckers on their feet as they run upside down on the ceiling and on the walls, avoiding being trampled by the larger monsters on the floor. I identify one of each to get a look at the increased difficulty.

 

 

[Slabber Horn Goater - Level 92]

[Giant Shredder Pangolin - Level 95]

[Climber Bonehead Lizard - Level 97]

 

 

They’d all gotten new names and a nice boost in levels and there must be 60 monsters in total. I grin in anticipation, lowering myself into a half crouch as my ring blade flies from my back, carving a path through them and splattering gore everywhere as the fallen carcasses get sent in all directions by the rest of the horde. They make the last 10 meters towards me in under 3 seconds and the first to reach me is a lizard with a bony skull coming straight towards mine from above.

I crouch slightly lower and dodge the lizard’s headbutt as I stab upwards with my right dagger into its belly, carving it open before rolling forwards to dodge another one coming in from my left. I kick backwards after my forwards roll and just miss my mark, breaking its tail instead of its spine.

Enhancing myself I kick the goater coming at me with a horn in the head hard enough to kill it instantly before retracting my leg, giving me the momentum needed to perform a spinning backflip just in time to avoid being run over by a pangolin. My ring blade has made it to the other end of the horde and is now on its way back and I keep my eyes focused on the pangolin as I descend, willing the ring blade to alter its course slightly and make its way towards it.

 

The pangolins aren’t the most dangerous but they sure are the most annoying as they often interrupt the flow of battle by simply going through anything and everyone. My ring blade slamming into its side and piercing it, going straight through between the scales is satisfying and I get back to slicing with my daggers, ring blade dancing behind me and covering my weak spots.

As I stab a goater through the eye and kick an airborne lizard hard enough to slam into another one of its kind, killing both, I manipulate the velocity of my spinning ring blade, carving through a pangolin on a collision course with me and 4 goaters who charge in an eerily synchronized line.

I know my own killing speed with my daggers has slowed down significantly as I’m mostly focusing on using my ring blade and testing its efficiency but I just can’t help marveling at how quickly it’s killing the superior numbers of monsters. My daggers are great when space is limited or when delivering concentrated attacks with accuracy and speed but they simply can’t compare in efficiency when it comes to slaughter.

My mind is racing as I try to think of various ways I might increase my efficiency with my daggers but it keeps coming back to higher skill levels, more power and more enhancements. We’ll be able to increase the amount of power we can use to enhance ourselves when overhauling our body with the [Power Profiler] skill’s information that Ari’s constantly getting fed with. That isn’t the issue though. Should I even still be using daggers?

 

That’s the question, isn’t it? In the beginning I made use of daggers as I couldn’t manifest any greater construct and because I’d only ever trained with a hunting knife before. I’m not as weak any longer though and I could be creating a lot more than mere daggers as my spinning wheel of death, arcing past me to slice the neck of a lizard, is currently showing me.

What then if not daggers? I can’t see myself wielding a sword. It just doesn’t feel like me somehow. I’m only really comfortable with my daggers as they're linked tightly with my nostalgia of past struggles, a necessary companion back in those days when my mana ran out after one or two simple spells.

The ring blade on the other hand…

I stomp the last lizard to death, moving a few red locks of hair that had come loose in the fight and stuck to my forehead, away from my eyes. With my vision cleared I look towards the circular blade slicing the legs of the last horned goater before arcing back, turning on its side and cutting it vertically in two, sending body parts and innards flying.

“That feels right somehow.”

“What was that, Zel?”

I’d spoken my internal musings aloud and Ari sounds curious as I kill the last pangolin by kicking it hard enough to crack its scales and stopping its momentum. Pouncing on the stunned foe I tear out its flesh concealed beneath with my daggers, dragging them through the open wound 3 times before it goes still and stops shrieking, giving my answer to Ari as it collapses.

“This!”

I point vaguely with my daggers towards the pangolin and Ari picks up fast on what I’m getting at.

“You don’t think daggers are useful any longer now with our fancy ring blade?”

 

There’s some humor in her voice and I have to smile at that as well. No matter the efficiency in slaughter, daggers have been our main way of killing since day one and we won’t just abandon them completely now. We’d have to truly see them as useless to just cast all that skill progression away.

“It’s not that, Ari. They just feel inadequate for this sort of work now that I’ve been using the ring blade with more and more proficiency. Daggers are still very useful and I don’t think I’ll ever want to go without a pair hanging on my waist, it’s just…”

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Ari waits for me to finish but picks up the unsaid words as I trail off and don’t continue.

“It’s just that we aren’t restricted with our mana capacity or regeneration in the same way anymore. We might actually be able to create something that suits us better and is more efficient against monsters.”

“Well, yeah. We haven’t really been fighting against tough opponents like these before. The most dangerous opponents we’ve faced were definitely the fungi creatures but they’re soft enough to punch through, making daggers a viable way to kill them.”

“I see what you’re getting at, Zel. These monsters will likely only get larger and tougher to penetrate the further down we go. Daggers will be incredibly inefficient against them as even if they’re able to pierce the scales they won’t get deep, making death by a thousand cuts the only way of taking them down.”

 

I go around picking up monster cores while the ring sections slice through the ones still encased in bone and meat. Sighing out loud I look around and take in the aftermath of the battle with my eyes instead of my sensors, deciding it’s too much of a bother to continue harvesting them.

It might be good practice for my telekinesis but I’d rather not spend a quarter hour carving up carcasses. I’m sure there’s going to be more where these came from and it's not really like I need the money from selling the cores as I’m doing postings for that very reason.

Pulling all the blade sections towards me and keeping them steady in a ring without assembling them I ask Ari to clean my face and hair before tying it up once more. It’s not worth the hassle to disperse all my clothes and clean up properly as I’ll just get filthy again in 5 minutes.

As if recognizing my disregard for the rest of the monster cores as a signal that I’ve fulfilled whatever conditions this corridor has for completion, the stone wall blocking the entrance towards the 9th floor slowly rises with a grinding noise, shaking loose a few grains of dust and gravel on its ascent.

Strange… It’s making this much noise on the way up but it was completely silent during its descent before slamming into the floor.

Ignoring the dungeon theatrics I continue past the bend in the corridor, walking a dozen meters before passing yet another bend, entering a large chamber. It’s 50 meters wide and long with a ceiling reaching 5 meters in height. There’s no monsters though, well none still alive that is.

Around a small fire conjured from some sort of magical device sit 9 adventurers, all looking curiously my way as I make my entrance. They’ve made their camp in the middle of the room and there’s carcasses heaped in piles in each corner. As I watch, another lizard makes its way into the chamber upside down, crawling onto the ceiling and going towards the adventurers around the fire.

One of them, an archer, sends an arrow through its eye before putting the bow back down and looking back at me with a slightly cocky expression. A girl to the archer's right, a nature mage by the looks of her green robes and gnarled wooden staff, gives him a withering look, getting a point of silent gratitude in my book. That archer looks far too smug for someone who downed a single monster.

 

I assemble my ring blade fully on my back before walking towards them, looking curiously around at the piles of monster carcasses they’d collected, trying to spot something new I haven’t seen before. There’s nothing obviously different about these monsters and I ignore them to introduce myself.

“Hi. I’m Zelaria. Are you guys taking a rest or why are you sitting in the middle of the chamber?”

“That’s right. Just taking a breather before getting back to it.”

A burly dwarf with crooked teeth, arms larger than my thighs and a belly rounder than a rolling pangolin answers me. He’s some sort of tank if I had to guess as two rectangular shields lie against his short, crossed legs.

“Cool… Are you the last party I’ll have to pass?”

“Excuse me?”

The dwarf’s eyes become slits and he looks furiously at me. I’m about to explain myself but am spared by the nature mage casting another withering look towards the dwarf this time.

Should a nature mage really be that good at withering things with a mere glance? My question is a reasonable one as the dwarf goes slightly wide eyed from the glare before coughing into a fist and backtracking.

“I’m sorry. I’m sure you didn’t mean it like that.”

Feeling unsure of who’s in charge of this band of adventurers I try to word my question a little more clearly.

“What I wanted to ask was how many more adventurer parties are further down into the dungeon, as far as you know.”

“Of course that’s what you meant. Don’t take Drillars fury to heart. He’s short tempered and usually assumes the worst. A very efficient mindset when trying to protect someone but not in conversations.”

The nature mage explains for me before asking another adventurer, rogue by the looks of her gear, the same question.

“Silla, how many tracks did you say you saw yesterday?”

“Four.”

 

Turning back to me she gives me my answer.

“A pleasure, Zelaria. I’m Helsie. As Silla said she counted 4 tracks of parties being lower than us when we came down yesterday. We’ve seen one party return in that period but we don’t know if the others are dead or just on lower floors.”

“You can track in a dungeon? Doesn’t the restoration cause everything to go back to normal, scrubbing tracks free?”

I pose my question to both of the girls and the rogue answers.

“They do disappear quickly but some tracking skills work just fine for a limited time even if someone without the skills can’t see anything.”

“Which means that there might be an unknowable number of adventurers further down if they came through this floor before their tracks expired.”

I could have figured that out myself but still nod appreciatively at the dwarf who’s still looking a bit pale from whatever withering spell the nature mage’s gaze contains. His comment about it really did drive it home though. I’ll never be able to tell if I’m the only one on a floor before I’ve conquered it all as someone might have been here for a whole month before resurfacing.

“Alright. Thanks. Got a map of the floors I can have a look at? I want to avoid any dead ends if possible until I get to the lower floors.”

 

Getting a look at the map from the adventurers I continue through the 10th floor, carving a path through each chamber and corridor filled with an ever increasing amount of monsters. Plant monsters also start increasing in numbers the further I go and I have to constantly redirect my ring blade to slice the ones who manage to snag me if I don’t want to rely on my daggers all the time.

With each chamber I clear I get more sure of my choice of learning to fight with something other than daggers but I’m still not sure of what it should be. I want it to make use of my ever increasing mana pool in an efficient and flexible way to not find myself in a situation such as this again. If it only excels in niche situations I’ll have to create lots of different weapons and never truly master any of them.

I communicate my thoughts to Ari as I carve through yet another corridor where monsters have begun to assault me from both directions after activating some sort of trap.

“About a new main melee weapon. Have you figured anything out, darling?”

“Not anything specific but I think it would be cool to somehow integrate it into the ring blade. We will probably be using telekinesis more as time passes which will make the ring blade an essential tool on the battlefield for us.

"I don’t think we should discard our daggers either as they're a good fallback weapon if we can’t use the ring blade for whatever reason. Having both daggers and some other melee weapon hanging on our belt isn’t the way to go though. Or what do you think, Zel?”

I consider her arguments and find that I agree with them. They’re logical and stylish, just the way Ari does things.

So what exactly should I add to the ring blade?

The question bounces through my head while I almost absently dodge a few tongues trying to shred me and brain a lizard with an uppercut, they’re surprisingly soft underneath the head, maintaining most of my focus on my ring blade.

My sensors and the short visuals I get of it with my eyes guide its trajectory but I’m more focused on the weapon itself, how it’s constructed and what its weaknesses are. What can I add to make it work better both as a ring of death from a distance and be used in melee at the same time?

 

---

The 10th floor guardian, an even bigger pangolin, is rolling towards me with great momentum and I don’t manage to stop it with the amount of telekinetic force I’ve been using up until now. My ring blade simply bounces off its flaking, brown scales and I get a closeup of them, quite a pretty pattern in fact, before it hits me in the face and drives me into the wall with a thud and crack.

I’m assaulted by the agony of having my ribs crushed, arms, legs and neck broken as well as my jaw splintered, swallowing a few teeth by accident. As the floor guardian rolls away in preparation for another try at crushing me even further into paste Ari spends all the mana she needs to start rebuilding our body, still going too slow to make it in time before we get crushed once again.

I increase the amount of power I put through [Basic Arcane Telekinesis] by twofold before sending it back towards the floor guardian. This time it’s enough to slice through the tough scales and draw a pained cry from the creature by severing its spine. Wanting to get some more practice with my blade sections I split the ring before finishing it with a barrage of slashes to the face.

 

 

Ding! You have slain [Rusted Pangolin Matriarch (Floor Guardian) - Level 110].

Ding! You have cleared the 10th floor of the Grizklesat dungeon.

 

 

Did its scales oxidize and do pangolins even have a hierarchy? Questions for another time perhaps but not for the current moment.

Carving out the monster core from its skull by having the blade sections slam the skull into pieces and then gouging the contents out I search for a few seconds with my hands before pulling out a much larger monster core than I’ve seen before in the dungeon. The reason for this is that monsters, just like sapient creatures, gain more power when reaching level 100. They do this through evolution though and not by selecting classes.

“That’s surprisingly pretty for something called rusty.”

It’s a spotless and shiny iron colored piece of crystal, 5 centimeters in length and 3 in width. I store it in my storage ring with all the others for now though. Maybe I should start a collection of monster cores of the more powerful creatures I’ve killed? Might be a more fun use of them than simply exchanging them for coins I could get through other means.

I can ponder on that later though as I think I’ve just gotten a spark of inspiration from the battle and I need to hear Ari’s thoughts on it. Do we really need to create a new melee weapon at all? Don’t we already have something we’ve never really made full use of in combat?

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