Chapter 18: Chapter 18: Rolling Death

Mila

The Nightmare challenge Rolling Death is now starting.

Survive for eight days.

Trial Points will be rewarded at the end depending on performance.

 

Mila found herself in a dark, damp, and slightly cold room, her bare feet on mossy stone. There was no light, but thankfully her training with Nana Xara had granted her two abilities to see her surroundings.

First, she could create a hologram which would give off light in exchange for mana using her Law Egg of Hologram and a technique of the Weaponmaster. It was nowhere near as efficient as using a skill, or even an artifact, but for just light it was fine. It would, however, allow anything else in the area to see her, so she instead went for option two.

She spread out what aura she had into a sphere two meters around herself and then walked around the room, gaining an understanding of where she’d arrived.

The space was carved out of stone, a box of roughly 3 meters by 5 with a 2 meter ceiling, the right angles of the cave making it obviously not natural. There was an open archway that led to a hall in one of the walls, which had obviously once been a doorway, only the door had long since rotted away. Most important, however, there was a pile of bones which had at one point been a body and that body held an artifact of some kind.

Taking a risk, Mila created a spherical hologram of low light and took a closer look at the skeleton. It wasn’t human, but it was humanoid, with two legs and two arms. Each hand seemed to have only four fingers instead of five, and the same was true of its feet. There were horns growing out of its forehead and extra bones for what looked like a tail, which made Mila think demon, but she wasn’t going to make any assumptions on such little information.

Reaching down, she took the artifact it had been holding, a 16 by 8 cm tablet, about the shape of a large phone.

 

Information Access Tablet (G-Common)

In your world, this mana-charged artifact would be called a smartphone, and it once had all the same capabilities, but the network it was connected to has since been lost

Effects: Store information, take pictures, connection to a standard mananet

Requirements: None

 

By charging it with her own mana, the front of the tablet began to give off light of its own, so she stopped her own hologram and focused on the screen in front of her. There was thankfully no access protection, so she could see everything which had been downloaded to the device itself, but, without a connection to the local equivalent of the internet, there wasn’t much.

There were only a total of three files on the device, and the first two weren’t all that useful. One was a text file which looked like a grocery list, though Mila didn’t recognize any of the ingredients other than milk, which she guessed was likely not from cows. And the other was a video file showing a young child of the skeleton’s race tearing through boxes containing coloring supplies, stuffed creatures from nightmares which would put Uglydolls to shame, and, for some reason, socks. From the video file, it seemed the skeleton’s race looked like smaller versions of Wookiees from Star Wars, only with less fingers and toes, horns coming out of their heads, and prehensile tails.

The last file was supremely useful, however, and Mila was reminded of how Nana Xara had explained how the Luck stat was magnified in the tutorial. It was a map showing a total of seventeen underground levels and helpfully marked all the rooms with words she could translate.

“Aalam,” she sent through the telepathy provided by the ring on her finger, “I found a map in my starting room. Did you find anything.”

There were a few seconds of silence, then she heard Aalam’s telepathic voice. “I arrived in a room full of large F rank insects and am now somewhat injured, but I managed to kill them all with a Wintery Grave grenade.

“In exchange, I’ve found three skeletons with tablets holding information, but I can’t read them.” Aalam sent several images over the telepathic link, including a map like hers, a couple to do lists, and what seemed to be a checklist of valuable items and their locations for a  visiting higher up to look at.

He’d found more where he’d appeared, but he’d also been immediately put into danger, and, as she sent back the images with translations, Mila began to ponder on the nature of the Luck stat when interacting with the tutorial. She’d learned about Aalam’s stat distribution, and she had less than two thirds of his Luck, yet she’d arrived somewhere completely safe while his arrival was within the middle of a swarm of insects.

She was careful while he currently had no inhibitions, however, so it was probably safer for him to immediately face danger.

“How hurt are you?” she sent to him.

“I’ll be at 100% again in about an hour with a couple qi recovery potions.”

Translation, he was quite injured, to the point he likely couldn’t move, requiring him to pour all his qi into healing himself, but not so injured as to his life being in danger. Lucky indeed.

Aalam then sent over a video file of one of the Wookiee-like creatures giving what were likely her last words and the setting of the challenge became quite clear.

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“The surface was bombed by the Jem-Hadari today, so we’re all trapped down here. But the shaking broke the cages. The Rollie-Pollies and their feed larva escaped, gaining access to the vitality fruits and growing. Then they started killing everyone.

“There’s no more food. And the water we have access to is contaminated.

“Scientist Morithil Maan tried to access the chambers of the mana and mental fruits, but there’s a species lock. Only human variants can enter.

“But we killed the Jem-Hadari inspector.”

There was a pause in the video as the woman broke down and cried.

“We’re all going to die.”

The video was time stamped and Mila checked it against the time shown on her own tablet, learning 3,097 days had passed.

She quickly translated the video for Aalam and gave him her time estimate.

“It sounds like the fruit are the ultimate reward of this trial.” Aalam sounded contemplative. “We’re in a closed off system with seventeen floors and a total surface area of a little more than 300 thousand square meters.

“From the maps we found, we’re in a closed off lab, at least a kilometer away from the surface, previously only accessible via teleport. But there is oxygen in the air, despite these bugs I killed having to breathe, so the air filtration system has to still be working.

“From the Yin Yang Sage’s knowledge of tutorials, a Nightmare challenge like this one should have one D rank threat, 12 E rank threats, and an untold number of F and G rank threats. And, from the information we have, whatever these Rollie-Pollies are should be the D, E, and maybe some of the F rank threats while these insects, mostly F rank now, are the things they eat.

“So, if we want to kill them all, we should start by releasing Creeping Death in the output of the air filtration system, accessible from floor fifteen. Then we should just have to hide for a few days and everything will become quite a bit easier.”

He paused the telepathy for a bit.

“I guess first we need to figure out where we are, though, so we can actually use the map.”

Mila snorted to herself, the sound not transmitting over the telepathy, then she sent, “Stay where you are and recover first. I’ll look around where I am and see if there are any signs on the walls so, when you’re back at 100%, we’ll be able to more quickly figure out where you are as well.”

With that, Mila put the Information Access Tablet into one of her bags of holding. Then she used Artifact Activation on her cloak to slightly boost its concealment effects and wrapped herself with the power of her Law Egg of Obfuscation, before slowly walking through the archway.

The hallway was straight and she didn’t sense anything moving with her aura, but she did quickly notice two other doorways leading into rooms almost exactly like the one she’d been in. From the layout and the map, she was pretty sure she was in one of the office-lined hallways on the sixteenth or seventeenth floors.

Looking around the area for another fifteen minutes, slowly walking so as to not be spotted herself, she didn’t find any other skeletons, but she did find two insects of the type which had ambushed Aalam. They looked like terrier-sized cockroaches and, lucky for her, they were not traveling together.

F rank and very low leveled, with most of their stats seemingly in Toughness and Vitality, neither noticed her even as she got close, and, with Aalam having several around him for analysis, she already knew their weaknesses.

For both, she transformed Legacy of the Weaponsmaster into a spear and quickly stabbed the insect through the gap in its chitinous armor right behind its head. Then she pulled out the weapon with speed and quickly backed away, the monster only able to move its front legs and still not able to sense her presence.

Both insects then took about a minute to fully die.

* * *

As she moved through the hallways, she eventually reached a much larger one, about five meters across. Then, pushing her body up against the smaller hallway she was in, she risked creating a hologram out in the main hall to provide light.

With the light, she could see a couple signs pointing toward different locations on the complex’s sixteenth floor and, with that information, she knew where she was.

Before she could put out the light, however, she heard a noise and then, within a second, a huge iron ball flew past her down the larger hallway, destroying her hologram in the process.

It took her a couple seconds to realize it hadn’t actually been a five meter diameter iron ball. Then it took her a few more to register that the thing which had just passed her at speeds quite a bit higher than a car on a highway had been a living creature, something like an armadillo rolled up in a ball and traveling near mach one.

“Aalam, I think I just saw a Rollie-Pollie and I think I now know why this challenge is called Rolling Death.”

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