by Dakota Krout
“I didn’t, I promise!” Jaxon told him excitedly. “Did you get a sneaking skill?”
“Wha? No, ah just…” Bard rolled his eyes at Jaxon’s misplaced enthusiasm.
“Thanks, Bard, that was really thoughtful of you.” Alexis’s eyes seemed to glow as she took a stick and coated it in something. The next instant, flames began crackling across the wood and light filled the tunnel for a few feet in each direction. “Let’s find out what's waiting for us down here!”
~ Chapter Thirteen ~
Bees. That’s what was waiting for them. Well, ‘bee’ was a very polite and gentle representation. Whatever these things were actually named, they were the approximate size of large hornets, but their stinger was attached via a tail like a scorpion. As the humans came to find out, each of the insects only had a single point of health, but… there were thousands of them. Not only were they furious at the intruders, but their stingers were full of a potentially deadly poison.
As it currently stood, the only reason Joe was still alive was that his Mage armor was perfect for repelling these bugs. Their main damage capabilities were derived from the toxin they were filled with, so even when he was swarmed by the insects, his shielding only dropped by a single point per second. He had his hands full keeping the others alive though.
“Ow, ya blasted bugs!” Bard was swiping at the ‘bees’ furiously, his axes turned sideways so he could use them like giant fly swatters. Each swing killed dozens of the aerial assailants, but there were thousands willing to take their place. Damage was building as the poison stacked, and Joe was hard pressed to Cleanse his team fast enough to keep them alive between healing spells.
“Just keep me going, please!” Alexis called as she furiously concocted a compound in a mortar and pestle. Her health was draining slower than the others, though she had far less health overall. Joe chalked it up to a hefty poison resistance; there was no other explanation that he could think of.
Jaxon was having the most violent reaction, though. “I hate bugs!” He screamed into the air, swatting everything that came near him. Although his palms were coated in ichor and bits of chitin, he showed no signs of slowing down his attacks.
“Are you allergic in real life?” Joe gasped the words out between spell casts.
“Exoskeletons! Exoskeletons, Joe! Do you know what that means?” Jaxon screeched, sparing Joe a dark look. “No bones! They are useless creatures!”
Joe was so shocked by the actual rage in Jaxon’s voice that he almost miscast his next healing spell. “You have a serious fixation on-”
“Eureka!” Alexis called while pouring water into the compound. She mixed it once and touched the torch to it. There was a flash of flame, and then a dense smoke began billowing out of the stone bowl. Any bugs caught in the smoke dropped to the ground without a twitch. Smoke filled the entire room, and Joe was soon able to clear the poison from the others’ systems. A few more healing spells cleared the puncture wounds from their bodies, and Joe finally looked up at Alexis with a bit of hero worship.
“Thanks for that, Alexis! This whole thing could have gone really bad; without you we might have needed to retreat. Um. What are you…?” Joe’s voice trailed off as he watched Alexis crawling around the room sweeping the fallen bugs into a bag.
“It’s a stackable poison, Joe.” Alexis chuckled under her breath as she collected the bugs. “What do you think I’m doing? Heck, the only reason it took so long to make that bug-killer was that I had to make sure that even a concentrated dose wouldn’t degrade their poison.”
“You did research and made a bug-killing concoction… while being literally stung to death?” Joe had to hand it to her; that was some serious dedication to her craft. Even if it had kind of been a horrible experience for the other members of the group…
“Obviously not.” She rolled her eyes, seemingly forgetting that he could see in the dark. “I didn’t die. Hard to be stung ‘to death’ if I survive it.”
“Why is everyone around me always so literal?” Joe sat down and cupped his chin in his hands, knowing they would be in this room for at least another few minutes as people recovered their mental energy and Alexis collected her samples.
“Being very careful and specific with your words is an important lesson that everyone should learn. If people didn’t run their mouths and instead said exactly what they meant, there would be much less confusion in the world,” Alexis stated as she worked. Bard and Jaxon nodded along sagely, while Joe took a moment to think on what she was saying. “Misunderstandings and miscommunication are the largest contributors to anger and fear. I work with poison, and being very specific saves me from respawn at least three times a week.”
“You… make a good point,” Joe admitted slowly, thinking about rituals and the detailed requirements they insisted upon. If he applied the same care with his words and actions as he did with his diagrams, he might do better in life. Perhaps he would make fewer enemies.
“What do you all think we will see further in the mine? More of these… Scorbies?” Jaxon wondered aloud, scratching at a dead bug in his hands.
“Scorbies? Scorpion bees?” Joe laughed at the term. “I love it! Is that their actual name?”
“No idea!” Jaxon was now squishing the insect in his hands, trying to find some way to do ‘tests’ on them. He seemed to grow disgusted and crushed the carapace without another thought. “I don’t have a high enough perception to glean information about them, and I don't have a scan or identify skill yet. So, yes, Scorbies!”
Jaxon went silent for a moment. “Huh. I just got a notification and a title. The title is… Entomologist? No! I hate bugs! This is… oh wait, I get bonus damage against bugs, now. This works nicely for me; thank you, system.”
“What was the notification?” Bard verbally prodded the distracted Monk.
“Hmm? Ah, yes.” Jaxon pulled up his game log. “All it says is: I like your name better; this race has been renamed. Have a title and some experience.”
“That’s awesome for you.” Alexis stood and brushed herself off. “Everyone ready to go?”
“Sure am!” Joe responded to her. “But, yeah, Jaxon. Back to the question, if there aren’t more Scorbies, I’m betting that the only other things in here would be creatures that are either immune to their poison… or have such high defense that the Scorbies can’t damage them.”
“Wha excitin’ options,” Bard deadpanned as he picked at his ears.
Joe looked at the quest information, “Oh, look at that! There’s a progress bar on this quest now. We have apparently cleared ninety-eight percent of the creatures out of the mines.”
“Is that a percentage of total numbers? Because there were literally thousands of the Scorbies. Or is that a way to look at it in terms of power? What if we called all the Scorbies we defeated a single monster? Is this based on challenge rating?” Jaxon seemed to be on a roll, trying out new options in an attempt to gain more titles and experience. Joe tried to do so, but only received a notification in response.
Unable to modify progress bars! Learn one of the following skills in order to make status changes: Probability, Monster Migration Habits, or Beast Ecology.
“It seems that we will not be figuring out what the system uses for progress here.” Joe relayed the information he had learned, and the group had no choice but to shrug and decide that they would simply need to explore. They moved into the next tunnel, moving as quickly as possible while attempting to remain fairly quiet. This was not a natural cave system, and without powerful geomancers or mining equipment from the real world… well, hand tools can’t exactly create massive labyrinths. Plus, this was a small town mine. If Joe’s estimation was correct, they could explore the entire mine in an hour at a normal walking pace if they weren’t sneaking around at a quarter speed.
They had just begun loosening and relaxing up when a cracking, grinding vibration began to rumble through the tunnel. Exchanging a glance, they crept forward and snuck a peek around the c
orner. All of them had a long look at what awaited them, backed away, and then retreated all the way back to where they had killed the Scorbies. All was silent for a moment, but eventually, Jaxon spoke up, “Well. I… I’d like to give it a shot.”
“You want to try and kill that?” Alexis squeaked in horror. “Wasn’t that a golem?”
“Ah think it were ah Rock Monster,” Bard muttered to the group. “Had ah flash o’ insight, pretty sure t’were ‘Skaldic Knowledge’ firing off.”
“So what you are getting at…” Jaxon tapped his chin in thought, “there is flesh and bone under that exterior? It isn’t an exoskeleton?”
“Yup.” Bard nodded at him, and Jaxon’s face brightened. “Has real high defense, but tha’ thing isn’t tae beastie we’re fighting. That’s its armor.”
A flash of inspiration shone from Joe’s eyes. “Armor? I have an acid spell that deals triple damage to equipment. If I get enough time to melt the armor, do you think we can take it down?”
There was another moment of silent contemplation, but then Alexis shrugged and nodded. “I’m willing to give it a try. If things go bad, at least we changed our resurrection point.”
Each of the others agreed, though Jaxon made a stipulation that he would get the body for a few hours afterward for studying and testing. He apparently wanted to map out its skeletal system and find the best way to take it down in the future. Deciding upon a plan of attack, they shuffled back to the room the Rock Monster was inhabiting. Bracing themselves to run away if it were needed, the others watched as Joe slowly moved his hands in the patterns needed to dual cast weak acid spray.
Joe took a deep breath and pushed, channeling the spell. A cloud of acid enveloped the monster, but it didn’t seem to notice the moisture. The creature heedlessly chewed on a stone while Joe continued bathing it in acid. After four seconds–if the carapace of the creature was considered equipment–the beast should have taken about seven hundred and seven damage. Checking his mana, Joe was surprised to see that he was still over three-quarters full; the forethought of setting his class to ‘Mage’ when he left Ardania was paying dividends.
After six seconds of being bathed in acid, the monster suddenly released a bellow of rage and surprise. It bucked in place, thrashing like a branded steer. Its movements dislodged large portions of the armor its upper body was encased in, and it began taking actual damage from the acid raining down upon it. The monster turned in place and stood, looking for whatever it was that was causing it to feel pain for the first time in its life. Locking eyes on Joe, the Rock Monster charged at the Ritualist. Having found a target, the cries of pain vanished; instead, the beast became silent and focused. The abrupt lack of sound was even more unnerving than the cries of pain had been.
Jaxon rushed forward, taking the initiative and slamming his fists into the now-unprotected areas of the monster. There was very little effect; while the armor was no longer in place, the creature’s skin was rubbery and used to immense amounts of weight and pressure. Bard and Alexis had far greater success, their weapons having been designed to either slash or pierce. Arrows sunk deeply into the fleshy portions of the beast, while a single cut from Bard’s axe was enough to expose fatty tissue and muscle. Wherever the monster’s body was damaged, gouts of blood sprayed into the air. Apparently, the circulatory system was under serious pressure.
The creature collapsed several feet from Joe, never even getting a chance to attack. When it fell, all of them felt a shockwave as the several-ton beast hit the ground. Joe gulped as he took in the massive figure, his brain doing flips as it tried to classify the thing’s actual threat level. When it had stood, it was obvious that they had almost been frightened away by a creature they thought was only a third of this thing’s true size. The Rock Monster was nine feet tall and four feet wide, roughly humanoid, and coated in thick armor that it likely grew over time. It had taken over a thousand damage from acid before even noticing it was under attack.
Exp: 100 (100 * Juvenile Rock Monster x1).
In any situation where they weren’t able to destroy the armor before engaging in combat, this creature would have utterly demolished their group. This was the Rock Monster equivalent of a teenager? Joe tried to clear the nerves from his voice, but his words still squeaked a bit as he spoke, “How many of these things are in here, you think?”
Bard’s eyes glazed over a bit, but when he next spoke, his voice was filled with surprise. “Perhaps one more? If’n we’re really unlucky? We wen’ up tae ninety-nine point five completion on the quest!”
Each of them checked their quest information and were jubilant to discover that Bard was correct. Jaxon poked Joe a couple times to get his attention, “Might I enlist your aid, oh gracious leader? I have a need of a potent acid to remove a bit of armor.”
“Sure thing, Jaxon.” Joe followed the Monk to the corpse of the Rock Monster and poured acid in each area Jaxson indicated.
Cutting the creature out of its rocky exterior took longer than the entirety of the time they had spent in the mine to this point. After the first layer of stone had been destroyed, they pulled the actual body out of the shell. It was, for lack of a better term, horrendously disgusting. The body was a blob that had taken a humanoid shape simply to acquire limbs as it grew. When Jaxon cut the fleshy portion open, he became far too excited. Ignoring the smell that was so foul that it was nearly visible, he dove into the carcass. Almost literally.
“Its entire skeleton shifted when we pulled it out! It shifted!” Jaxon babbled as he tore chunks of meat off of the skeleton. “Do you have any idea what this means?”
“Not a clue.” Joe looked at the others, but they seemed about as bewildered as he was.
“Look!” Jaxon finished dislodging the remainder of the meaty body. As the last chunk came free, the entire corpse changed. Instead of a humanoid form, the body now had a generally spherical shape. “It’s a shapeshifter! The Rock Monster could have any number of forms! If your skeleton and muscles will adjust, you could look like anything!”
Jaxon was giddy, and the dazed look on the others faces was lost on him. Alexis glanced at Bard then Joe before speaking, “If it can look like anything… we might be searching a long time for the last enemy.”
“Don’ think like that! No need tae get down.” Bard beamed a smile at her. “Ahm sure it’s wanderin’ around here somewhere. We jus’ need tae find it.”
Jaxon stood up at that moment, seemingly disgusted. Joe, seeing the look on his face, made the mistake of asking the Monk what was wrong. Jaxon turned on him, almost shouting. “What’s wrong, Joe? What’s wrong? Nothing! I seem to have found a useless target though. Not only do these bones shift as needed, but they are solid metal! These creatures will never… *sniff*… need a chiropractor.”
“Are you crying?” Alexis’s voice was lowered from shock.
“‘I’m just so... happy!” Jaxon cried out, reaching down and patting the exposed bones. “I need to open up a few more of these things, see if their skeletons are all the same.”
“This is some kind of steel… I think.” Alexis was tapping the skeleton with a small chunk of rock. Each time she did so, a ringing sound like a baseball bat perfectly impacting a baseball sounded out. “Joe, this is a really high-grade metal material. I can’t even inspect it, and material usage is one of my highest skills.”
“This is ah mine, and it was eating from the walls.” Bard looked at the place the monster had been scraping. “Ah think this is iron.”
“I bet it eats ores then adds the metal to its body! This must be an alloy of all the metal it had ever eaten!” Jaxon had a renewed interest in the skeleton, and he spent an unsuccessful minute attempting to tear a bone off for future study. When his stamina finally ran out, he dropped and stared at the bones longingly. “Soon, my beautiful metallic ossification alloy.”
“We need to get moving. Jaxon, we’ll come back for this but we need to get these mines cleared,” Joe ordered abruptly when he saw everyone’s sta
mina recovering. They started moving, though Jaxon was rather reluctant to leave his prize out in the open. Joe made him move by reminding him that there was likely another one in the area.
Not finding any other enemies for forty-five minutes, the group was getting discouraged and sloppy. Bard was the worst of the lot, the time underground putting him on edge. “Ahm sick ah this! So tae guild will start with ah bad rep in tae town, what else is new?”
“Um. Joe, I kinda agree. We’ve been through this whole place.” Alexis looked down as she said this, obviously uncomfortable with telling Joe something negative. “There’s nothing else here, and unless you want to try destroying every rock in the mines, I don't know if we will find the last monster.”
“Back to the corpse! We can use a very–very–small part of it for bribing the blacksmith and use the rest to make weapons and slay anyone who refuses to allow our guild to take over the area! Love us or die!” Jaxon turned on his heel and made a beeline for the room the Rock Monster had died in.
Joe followed them out of the mine, trying his best to be reasonable. “First of all, we can’t kill the villagers. That’s off the table. Next, I really don’t want to give up on a quest. What do we have but time? We’ll find it eventually.”
“Let’s do some other quests first, how about?” Jaxon smiled a toothy grin at him in a way that said he would not take ‘no’ for an answer. “We can always come back after the monster has a chance to move around a bit. We will be able to find it more easily that way, right?”
As much as he wanted to remain in the mine and search, Joe had to agree that finishing quests for other townsfolk might be more beneficial in the short term. “Fine, but we will come back, right? Remember, this quest chain is pretty much your guild acceptance test.”
