The Witch Tamer, Book 1

by Naosu N R

  Those monsters shouldn't have gotten through the roof. It was a weird situation. But technically at the time we were next to the safe zone spot, and not in it, because we didn't think they could get in another way and bypass it. Plus, the safe zone enchant wasn't quite stable.

  Now nothing should be able to get it.

  It was not long after that, that the darkling nest woke up. We had to go back in when a lot of them were out and in our same building.

  I took a half hour nap.

  "Oh shit!" Miguel cried. (12:17 PM.)

  I had been laying down with my head in Melanie's lap and sat up.

  When I look over I see Miguel is pointing towards the other end.

  Damn. We're trapped!

  The east side exit of the lobby is the east way out of the both the lobby and the safe zone.

  That particular spot is full of darklings! There's like 11 of them there! And just one of them takes all of our effort to fight! Previously they didn't have that many of them there. 11 of them is way more than I'm ready to fight. And this could potentially cause a party fail.

  They are also sniffing the mana of the safe zone enchant also, which worries me.

  Will the safe zone enchant hold?

  The others are getting restless.

  And the only other way out is the west entrance to the building with the glass doors. But outside that is the hundreds and hundreds of zombies waiting to chomp on us.

  We're very trapped!

  ...

  By 1:30 PM the darklings have somehow figured out we're in a safe zone. It almost looks like some kind of pink tinged barrier spell to be honest, with how it encloses around the edges of the safe zone.

  They sure are sniffing at it a lot.

  And it looks like they can't just walk in a safe zone enchant. I think they had a theory of that being possible before, but now its confirmed. I was told this was true, but I had still been worried about loopholes until seeing it.

  Something about how it smells or something keeps them back.

  Some of these darklings look like floating inky black slime octopi with tons of tentacle arms. Others look like black snakes with fish tails for the last parts of their bodies, but with no eyes; really freaky actually with empty eye sockets staring at us, and razor sharp metal teeth.

  But others are shaped in different ways. As a species the more I see them, the more I get the feeling like they each have a custom appearance.

  Further attempts from my team to call for help won't get through.

  By 2:30 PM we still haven't worked it out.

  I found out I could enhance the dungeon looted 'ranger boots' to +2 easy enough, now that Simone can wear them. It didn't change the stats on them; this was part of why I wanted to find out what would happen.

  I'll have to finish it later, after I regenerate more mana.

  Darn...

  I'm not wasting an ounce of mana right now, in case there's trouble even though I want to enhance something else.

  But it got even stranger when Miguel turned to see what Simone was looking at, through the windows facing the zombies.

  "Oh wow," Miguel gasped.

  I had to remember Simone hadn't actually met Josh and Sadie. So she wouldn't have known to look for them.

  !

  There staring at us on the other side of the window glass less than ten feet from us...

  ...were Josh and Sadie, turned into zombies, just standing there eerily looking through the glass!

  "Th-they shouldn't be able to see through the glass right?" Rita asked, gasping. I can see her hands shaking also. Any second now I'll have to hit her with a 'pacify' treatment also.

  Shit. This is crazy!

  They must have not been able to get to the level 5 zone line! I knew that spot looked dangerous. But I had no idea they didn't make it until now.

  Miguel is openly crying. But much of it is probably not for himself, for his family that he doesn't even know if they are alive or dead.

  Any attempts to send messages in and out of the dungeon are failing now. But my system says its not the dungeon failing them, but something outside the dungeon is causing everything to fail!

  What the heck is going on?!

  We got a bit desperate.

  But I can buy time for 2 days, then things will get really desperate.

  ...

  By 1 day later, I'd enhanced my remote control to carry enough charges for 1 more skill! This time I'd added 1/day 'combat enhancement' buff. The skill gives the user +2 defense, +1 combat skill, and +1 defense skill per 5 levels. The buff is temporary for only one battle however.

  Weird how that came out of enchanting a remote control?

  Still, maybe it will help.

  Using it on me won't change much. But using this on someone that already has significant combat abilities like Linz or Mandy will do a lot of damage.

  I confess, I had a lot of wife intimacy time while we were stuck inside the safe zone.

  But for some reason that boosted my mana regeneration rate. And I used the time well to keep enhancing our gear!

  I managed to enchant Rita's buckler to do +1 bonus defense action per round! This is a huge enchant gain, giving her much better combat power. If a newbie fighter could attack maybe once per round, a fighter Rita's age might do 1 combat attack per round, and 1 defense action in the same round. At some point in about 10 more levels there probably would be an additional action per round, and so on?

  At least that's my theory.

  It reflects the idea that, as someone gets stronger and more powerful with mana and evolving they get stronger in combat. This is why a level 1 knight can't just accidentally somehow get lucky and kill a level 10 knight.

  I fell asleep in Melanie's arms with her warm breasts enveloping me on my couch with the blanket around us.

  The others give me a lot of privacy even though we're in the same room. The lobby is big however. And I did manage to stabilize the safe zone enchant a lot.

  But by the end of the first day I made another discovery!

  Since I'd repaired the unstable enchant I no longer have to keep a team member inside the enchant to stabilize the mana flow. That's where the weak spot was. I realized if I stabilized the enchants own flow, it wouldn't require someone to be inside it to keep it going.

  But then I realized if I had a few more levels, I'd be able to even strengthen the enchant further enough to lock and unlock it so that only I could use it!

  This discovery was mind blowing.

  And at 5 levels past that, I'd be able to further upgrade it still!

  Wow.

  ...

  By the midpoint of the second day we came up with a plan.

  First, we'd remove the patch I did on the skylight and sneak out that way. Unexpectedly its become the best way for us to flee.

  It took some time to cut through the spacing. But by trying to do it quietly and hanging sheets up as a screen the darklings can't see what we're doing.

  Still, they are watching us.

  "Let's go!" Mandy said.

  Unexpectedly the darklings suddenly smelled that we're not there.

  But its too late, we left!

  It will be some time before we can come back to this building.

  We fought on the run.

  Making our way back to the one sub-boss, we farmed out 2 sets of 'ranger shoes'. As an enchanter I can wear them. And the other nobody can use, but we'll sell.

  We hid in another building.

  It was then that we realized there were more people in the map than there should be. Plus, that's especially weird because nobody ever comes here.

  ...

  By 5:21 PM, we'd gone out a second time.

  This late time finding a way out is worrisome in another way also because it means we'll also have to get far from here, fighting our way through, and then find somewhere else to hide in and fortify before the sun goes down.

  And with tall skyscrapers everywhere in town, it means that the dar
kness comes faster.

  We worked hard, fleeing and running. We used the roof to escape and then jump across several building roofs. The darklings don't like the roofs during the day, and the zombies can't get to them.

  But we're still separated from the car...

  But then another group of adventurers is suddenly in front of us when we had escaped and fought our way through several alley ways.

  "Hey, look there's another team by us," someone shouted from the other side.

  Then they started running towards us.

  "Uh oh," I heard Linz say.

  They started increasing their speed. It looks like they are going to hit us!

  We braced for an attack incoming.

  "Oh no. Guys defense formation! Someone's coming!" Mandy shouted expecting an attack.

  "Wait! We mean you no harm! Please! We need your help!" another group of 4 dungeon adventurers is suddenly in front of us, looking pretty desperate. Actually, the weird thing is they look all tore up with wounds and their clothes both.

  Their discipline and formation spacing look good despite their haggard and scuffed up wounded appearance.

  They quickly lowered their weapons. Well, they lowered them as much as they could in a forsaken zombie one-bite-death wasteland.

  "We're not here to fight. Wait" one told us again.

  We weren't sure if we could believe it at first. After all, why are they approaching us?

  I got nervous as they closed in around us.

  Let's see...there's five of them?

  I wonder what happened to them? They look pretty poor looking.

  "We don't want whatever you are selling," Linz said quickly.

  "We're not selling anything. We have information for you. Please its important," one said.

  "It sounds like a trap," Miguel said.

  "Actually its not. Did you guys hear about the calamity that hit?" one from the other team said.

  "What calamity?" I asked.

  "They must not know yet. Plus, look. They aren't burned up like the other refugees," one on the other side's team told their leader.

  This conversation sounds strange.

  We glanced at each other.

  "There was some kind of calamity that hit the Earth. Things went bad. Have you noticed you can't communicate with anyone on the surface?" one of them asked us.

  "How did you know that?" Simone asked them.

  "That's because of the calamity," they replied.

  "This...is a trick right?" Rita glanced at me to decide what to do.

  It was then I noticed that I'd mistaken what was wrong with them.

  This adventuring team looked more like refugees than adventurers! Their gear is all damaged and piece meal also like they'd picked it up on the run.

  "Wh-what calamity?" Melanie asked.

  "Something happened and the world is burning. Not sure if it was nukes, or China. Or something else, but everything went dark on the outside. Its bad," their spokesman said.

  "How bad? Which city was hit?" Mandy asked.

  "Not city wide. Its at least the whole continent," the one said.

  "What?! That can't be."

  "We don't know if its only Europe and North America, but there was also some huge Earthquake also. I'm not sure if anything is left," one of them said.

  "What...how can this be happening..."

  "I don't believe you!" Miguel challenged.

  But they look sincere and really tore up like real refugees.

  "I'm telling you that's how it is. We're not lying. Hell we're wearing damage from it," one coughed out blood while saying, and sounding pretty awful.

  "I think they are telling the truth. As strange as it sounds," Melanie told me.

  "I also think they are telling the truth Jay," Shelly said for the first time.

  Its not easy to convince Shelly of anything.

  "We need to talk please," one of them said.

  "We should go somewhere safe then. Let's get inside a building," I said.

  "We have a spot in this building here. That's how we spotted you. We have a look out up top," one of them said.

  It turns out this is an advanced party. Their levels are in the 40s and if they wanted they could wipe the floor with us.

  But they hadn't intended to go hunting. They don't have any of their good gear. At least two of them openly admitted their gear was being serviced and they were between missions on vacations when it happened.

  And two others didn't have inventory slot spatial magic to preserve their gear. So they couldn't get it back when the calamities hit.

  The only one that still kind of had gear was a martial artist class, who only kept a pair of steel knuckles with him in his back pocket.

  So this is why when the calamity had caught them by surprise on the surface and they'd not had a chance to really get their gear before leaving. They'd left with the shirts on their backs and just dove in the dungeon while everything was going bad at the same time, as they explained it.

  There's 5 of them total, but originally they weren't all in the same dungeon team. But they'd met each other while inside trying to escape the calamity. And it seems the fifth one isn't here but is guarding their camp spot.

  Two of them have terrible fresh burns on their faces and lots of 'health damage'. This is evidence of the calamity and its clear they will have scars for life. They are also in pain.

  Shelly tried to help them.

  They have worse equipment than us.

  Two of them have basic gear, copper swords from the first two floor level drops. And they are just hanging on. They'd only been able to get the copper swords, because the martial artist helped them, and one other had fairly decent unarmed combat skill from sparring.

  It seems that even if you have a high level if you have no gear, there is significant vulnerabilities. And its too easy to get wounded. Plus, copper swords are very common and everyone knows its basic newbie gear for the first two floors for people under level 10. For them to have this type of stuff proves they were really rushed and forced to move fast, backing up their story.

  One of them is a ranger, which is why they are here and not starving. A guy named Ebenson. He seems to be their leader.

  (So they have a ranger, a mage, a martial artist, and 2 unknown (??) classes...)

  They don't even like this floor. But they say the lower levels are flooded with refugees killing each other for a scrap of food.

  They didn't actually want to beg from us but just hoped by sharing the information things might get better.

  "There's something else you should know also," one of them said.

  "What's that?" I asked.

  "Since the calamity that means the only town for any survivors to go to is the one on level 5. That means its going to be flooded out, and it could even crash from the massive demand of housing and food all at once. They won't have any warning on that either. It will become a place of hell if you go there," Ebenson warned.

  "So how badly damaged is Los Angeles? And Seattle?" Shelly asked.

  "Gone. They both fell in the sea. We were inland at one of the level 1 entrances near Barstow. That's the only reason we're still alive," one of them said.

  "After the fire and whatever the hell that was, we could feel it going bad. We literally ran to the entrance. But I think the entrance is covered also. Not long after we got inside there was a mountain of rubble where the dungeon exit was that I had just come in," one of them said.

  "That's how it was for me too," the mage said.

  "So you guys met up with each other after you got in the first floor dungeon tunnels?" I asked.

  "That's right."

  "I found Ebenson first. But then I ran out of mana. If we hadn't found our martial artist friend after that it might have been a party fail," the mage told us. "Particularly because our injuries were so bad, even though we were way above the level of stuff there."

  They nodded.

  "So that's why you'd risk this zombie map?" I asked.r />
  "Yes it is a risk but we need to get to the next town on level 10. But truthfully we can't risk going deeper unless we can get some more drops. So we're kind of stuck. But the second floor and third have too many refugees in them, and so its impossible to get food there," one of them said.