by Alston Sleet
On her ninth firing, she tried to jump forward as she had before but stumbled and almost face planted. She laid on the ground panting then clumsily straightened out her limbs and pressed her armored body to the cold stone. I wasn’t sure if she was trying to cool off or she was just that exhausted, but she rested on the stone either way. Thirty minutes later she gathered herself for her final shot. When she managed to trigger the last target, and the reward stand triggered, she again rested on the ground panting.
I was expecting her to return to her slow crawl across the room, but she seemed too exhausted to continue her dungeon crawl. She trudged across the room and collected her coins, tapping the new coins a bit with her claw and sniffing them gently before pocketing them. When she passed through the doorway, and she gained the new achievement her eyes slit and her mouth opened in another wide grin before she huffed and trudged back to the entrance.
The exhaustion she was feeling must have been massive, and it seemed to hit her even harder when she noticed the shorter guard was standing in my doorway waiting for her.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Teamwork is Key
Ooooh, I want some popcorn. This drama was amazing. What happens when you have a matriarchial society, and the only female leader is just caught doing something dangerous and against the rules by a low-rank male guard? She has the societal power, while he is in the right.
Result? She snapped and hissed and vigorously gestured while he merely stood stony-faced. Then he would calmly make a comment, and she would flinch and then look away. Oh man! Win one for the boys!
Not being able to understand them it was mostly my own interpretation of course. I started making up a story in my own head, I started mockingly providing dialogue for them. Gruff and deep-voiced for the short guard and a high-class British accent for the female. Why? No clue, but it was funny to me.
Stone-faced, the shorter guard said, “You are not supposed to risk yourself. Your job is to lead the tribe, not to die in such an amazing, wonderful, stylish, and might I add a functional set of challenges.”
Snapping her arm out she brushed aside his recrimination, “I am not a little girl, I can handle myself, besides its good training in this wonderful challenge dungeon full of wonders!”
Nodding his head the shorter guard continued, “Yes it is a place of wonders, but also danger and the tribe needs you, what of your duties? Your responsibilities?”
My imagined words didn’t line up correctly, but the guard seemed to be making sense, and she seemed to be losing the battle. I was worried I was going to lose my dungeon crawler. She was the only one who tried a more difficult challenge, and I was looking forward to her trying the others, even if she did insist on inching her way through everything.
Whatever argument he was making was winning until she said something that had him almost dropping his spear. I had a bet I knew what it was, I think she just told him about her achievements.
Ooooh, now that was interesting. I watched silent emotions flicker across the small guard's face. He snapped his eyes to my entrance, her face, her body, then all around. I think Mr. ShortStop here was secretly crushing on Lady Lizard even harder then Romeo! Oh man, I thought it was drama before, but we have a real love triangle going on here, and now ShortStop is cooking up a plan on how to win his lady love.
I wasn’t the only one who noticed the eye scrutiny either. The confused puppy dog head tilt that Lady Lizard did was comical, but once she figured out what he was thinking she also did the eye scroll over Mr. ShortStop. It was like she just realized that he was a possibility. The result of her mental tally? I wasn’t the best judge of character in my past life, and the whole lizard body and face made it difficult, and I sure as heck didn’t understand women, but it seemed to come up with ‘meh, not bad, I guess we could, 6/10’. Not a rousing success for him, but she seemed to like the bright green and gold scales on his arms if her lingering eye tracing was any guess.
Tapping his spear on the ground absentmindedly he started to suggest something. I didn’t know what it was he said, but she paused, then answered back. They both seemed to reach a careful agreement. Walking off they started to lean towards each other as they whispered.
Ok then, I might get to see more dungeon crawling, or I might not, either way, I’m definitely checking out more of the drama later. This is now my favorite TV show.
I used [Far Seeing] to follow them, but they quickly broke up to return to their huts. While I was hopping along, moving my view from one location to another to pursue, I felt [Far Seeing] tick up again, but it felt like a different kind of increase, a more substantial increase in some way.
I glanced at my status to see if I could figure out the cause.
True Name: Dale Erickson Ender.
Race: Dungeon Core (Variant: Sapient)
Class: [Spatial Hedge-Mage][Spatial Traveler][High Priest].
Level: 37
Mind: 5
Body: 1
Soul: 8
Blessings:
[Blessing of Secrets] (hidden)
[Blessing of Cunning] (hidden)
[Blessing of Wealth]
[Blessing of Fame]
[Blessing of Magic]
[Blessing of Travel]
Traits:
[Focus of the Divine]
[Soul Seal - Divine]
Skills:
[Far Seeing]: Level 100
[Directed Prayer]: Level 4
[Mana Sensing]: Level 72
[Spatial Manipulation]: Level 64
[Will of the World]: Level 59
[Conjuration]: Level 60
[Etheric Pattern Formation]: Level 49
Hmm, [Far Seeing] just hit one hundred. If I were building a system like this and I wanted to make significant milestones, I would make multiples of tens or hundreds important. Given that feeling, multiples of one hundred seemed to be it. Focusing on [Far Seeing] again I checked to see if anything had changed, and oh had it ever!
[Far Seeing] allows the caster to see locations distant from their own. Locations can be selected through memory or by casting a distance from the current location.
Rank 100 Bonus: The caster can directly move the point of view with an increased cost of mana and will.
Willing my [Far Seeing] viewpoint to move around was relatively simple, and the mana cost was very minor. Well, small for me. My estimate was every second of movement, and it was a rather slow movement speed, was equivalent to a little more than one of those target practice shots Lizard Lady used. A regular caster might only have a few seconds of movement before being totally tapped out, that is if casting [Far Seeing] hadn’t drained them, to begin with.
I was starting to get the sense that magic was rare, magic was expensive, magic was focused, and magic was used mainly as a force multiplier. [Far Seeing] was probably more useful on a battlefield than a fireball. You only needed to see the enemies battle plan once for it to be exceedingly valuable, while you could burn all your mana on fireball spells and still have minimal effect on a battle.
Turning my imaginary eye to each of my other skills I eagerly considered what each might bring when they hit the first rank bonus. Most of my efforts had been in [Far Seeing] since I had to use it consistently to see anything beyond my dungeon, I even used it inside to get a different human-like perspective on things. [Mana Sensing] was also used continuously and in different ways since I was always trying to modify the way mana moved through my dungeon to hide my pathways. So far I had had little luck with that project, but I was still hopeful. My next three highest skills -[Spatial Manipulation], [Conjuration], and [Will of the World]- had all slowed in their gains lately. I guessed that just doing the same thing wouldn’t improve my skills, you had to find new and exciting uses to continue to grow.
Now that the love triangle show was over I turned my attention to the newest headache to bother me. My team of intrepid dungeon finders. They had settled down into a camp a few miles away, and they spent each day tracking back for
th looking for me. I guessed that they had decided a dungeon wasn’t here, but that something else magical was. I needed them to find something, something not me, then leave. The best idea I had was to let them find a small amount of manastone. Whatever this stuff was used for, it had to form in a mana dense area, any such area would resemble a dungeon, this would give a distraction away from me. It was the just like a magician’s assistant in practice; look over here at the pretty lady, nothing to see over here in the magician’s hands…
So I tracked back and forth over the cliff side of the northwest, in the far corner of their grid search area that they hadn’t explored yet. With a bit of searching, I found a small overhang. If you squinted your eyes, the protrusion could pretend to be a cave mouth, but it wasn’t anything so grand as a cave. Next, I hollowed out an area in my dungeon, similar to the way I made my treasure room, then I worked to form an overhang that looked as closely like the outside area as possible.
Matching the overhang area as closely as I did was probably not needed, but it hurt my artist’s soul not doing things as well as I could. When I was done, I grew a small thumb-sized chunk of manastone. It was actually pretty the way it developed. It was nothing like when I built it in the form I wanted, when growing wildly it seemed to connect to the mana flows and branch to follow them, a cord of mana growing through each branch. There was mana running through the stone in an unbroken stream like it was pulled along.
The next step was actually the hardest, I kept my domain in the area, but I pulled my free mana out of the air and stone. This felt so unnatural that I would have been light headed if I had a head. Eww, not fun. I could hold it out like this, but it just felt weird and wrong. Nothing seemed to be getting worse, but I did not like this in any way, but it was necessary for my plan.
Ok, now for the trick. Space twisty time! What I was going to do was pull the face of my cave wall and put it over the cave wall which was there, then I was going to remove part of the wall that was there already in front of my wall. The twists were nearly mind-bending, but the end result should be that you could go in and out of the cave wall outside and enter into my cave inside without seeing the inside wall of my dungeon from within the outcropping. I basically put a part of my dungeon outside and…around?…the other walls.
All this to trick away a small group of trackers, ugggh. But if it worked, they would get a manastone, convince themselves that there was no dungeon, and then go away. That last bit was the important part.
Grabbing ahold of the two bits of space in the dungeon and the cliff face I pulled things around and turned, then pushed and pulled, yanked the one bit of space through the other bit of space, then tried to hold it all in my mental fingers as I tried to push down and hold the other bit and…ugg. I got it, but I lost a bit of mana that I had been trying to hold out at the same time.
Once everything was locked down, and stable I used [Far Seeing], and sure enough, the tracker and team were up and gathering their gear. Oh, I’m sorry, were you trying to sleep?
The group of six formed up into a rough formation and started hiking in the direction of my new semi-cave entrance. I had drained massive amounts of mana out of the area before I had moved it, but it still must have been a lot of mana being released at once. It’s one reason I had kept my [Far Seeing] point of view away from the tracker and instead had followed along from a bit higher in the air. I didn’t know how much the spell was using and how easy it would be to track. I wasn’t even sure there was anything they could do if they detected my watching, but knowing they were being watched would not be good either way.
The six men were rough, dirty, and sweaty. They had obviously had a nasty time reaching my mountain range. I could literally see the sweat making rivulets in the dirt on their skin, the torch the tracker was using just highlighted how disgusting these men were. The only one not holding a weapon was the tracker, he kept one hand free to catch himself if he fell while clambering over the rough terrain, he left his dagger strapped to his belt. The other men had a collection of chipped and worn weapons.
The largest of the team had an odd sword with a strange perpendicular to the blade metal spike. It looked like what might be the love child between a short sword, and a climbing pick. That said, it was very intimidating. It was also the best maintained of all the weapons on display. His scarred hands held the blade at an odd angle as he walked, sort of diagonal and kept with his elbow away from his chest. His bare hand leading forward as he walked. I didn’t know much about swordsmanship, but he looked like he knew something.
Everyone else seemed to hold their weapons on their shoulders or tapping against their legs as they tried to walk and clamber over rocks. One of the guys had a nasty looking lopsided mustache and what I could only call a butchers knife. He seemed to move easier than the rest of the troop, but only by a small amount. The other two men didn’t really stand out much, one had a mallet or maul like thing, and the other had a rusty and very dull short sword.
I followed them with my view, practicing my new ability to move my viewpoint, and watched as they steadily trudged towards the outcropping. The walk was mostly uneventful except that the man with the dull short sword tripped and smacked himself in the face with his sword while trying to catch himself. Graceful he was not. None of the others laughed (I did) but they did form up relatively professionally as they waited for him to dust himself off and get settled.
I had noticed a small amount of wildlife in the area, mostly mountain cat type animals, so I wasn’t surprised they were cautious. Their excessive caution though made me wonder how dangerous some of the nightlife around here could be.
When they reached the region around my outcropping, the rest of the team seemed to figure out where to go pretty quickly. The small troop seemed to gravitate in the right direction, only the tracker seemed to be able to feel it from any distance. Note to self, humans seem to be able to sense mana when it is close even if they lack a specific skill.
Closing in on my outcropping I tensed as I watched to see if they would notice anything amiss. I had forgotten that the humans were seeing through torchlight at night while I was using a magical vision. When the thumb-sized chunk of mana stone was glinting in the light, the troop rushed forward under the ledge of rock and into my dungeon domain. I could actually sense the lice and vermin clinging to their bodies. Eww.
Only the large trained man stood guard outside the overhang while the tracker brushed away the dirt from the base of my mana stone. Once he figured out that it wasn’t attached to the rock he picked it up and called out.
Now that they were at my domain I could hear them, and they were speaking whatever the language was that Denda had been speaking…which I apparently now understood. Common I guess. But the ‘conversation’ they were having was more of hollering and cheering rather than anything sensible.
The big guy just watched with a smile as his friends began digging around in the dirt to try and find more Manastones. Their excitement quickly diminished when the tracker said he couldn’t see any more concentrated mana, he sensed a substantial diffusion of mana in the area, but nothing like the Manastone.
I missed when he started to move, but I sure felt it when he arrived. The bladed side of the large man's sword sliced through the short sword-wielding man's neck like he was trying to chop all the way through. He didn’t even work to finish him off, he just reversed his direction and slammed the spiked side into the mustachioed man's chest. He yanked the spike out while kicking the man away and onto the tracker. The two fell into a tangle with the tracker on the bottom. The torch fell out of the tracker's hand as he tried to push his friends twitching and bleeding body off of him.
The guy with the maul scrambled away while the large man followed, the large hammer's head dragged on the ground as he tried to get his feet underneath himself. His scramble ended with his weapon only halfway into the air before the large guy nailed him in the face with his elbow as he practically ran him over. A single downward swing with hi
s sword, the move as casual as someone putting a golf ball, had the man trying to close the bleeding wound that was once his neck.
By this point, the tracker was out from under the mustachioed man’s body. He fumbled for his dagger as he made an odd sign with his other hand in the large man’s direction. He muttered words sounding like “doo’ga dun’el” or something like that before a small spark of greenish lightning jumped from his hand towards the large man. The lightning hit, and the large man grunted clutching his unarmed and now burned, hand to his chest before he stomped forward toward the tracker.
The tracker barely stumbled a few feet away before he plopped onto the ground and then under the big man's blade. He almost managed to stumble out of my domain before he died. The big guy then methodically slammed the massive spike into the heads of each man before he took some deep shuddering breaths. I spent the entire time reeling as the memories and lives of the four men flowed through my mind. I had only a tiny bit of awareness, enough to resist the urge to try and consume the remains. If they disappeared, the large man would know it was a dungeon, and the entire point of the ruse would fall apart.
After his coup de grace hits, he plopped down for a bit and took deep breaths and wiped the sweat from his forehead. It had been a short fight, and the rest of his ex-team had been overmatched the entire time, but even I felt exhausted from just watching. His large body must have been running on vast amounts of adrenaline the whole time.
Eventually, he gathered himself and searched through his friends' clothes, tucking the mana stone into a leather draw bag. He took off their boots, stripped them entirely naked, and even ran a dagger through his buddies long unkempt hair. This guy was familiar with searching bodies. His rich collection was the crappy weapons, a few leather items, a sharpening stone, and a couple of copper coins, and the manastone, let’s not forget that.
