by Ryan DeBruyn
He moved throughout the bodies and collected an additional sphere as the counter reset to sixty seconds with the telltale boom.
He now had two of the silence and perfume spheres, but only one and a half of the command interrupt. Based on his previous experience, he was assuming that the next wave would finish the sixth sphere, and then he would face another mini-boss.
This wave was unlucky number thirteen, and he labored to catch his breath. At least he was power leveling. How long would it be before Dara and Verimy started searching for him? How long would it take before they discovered the dungeon above? Finally, could they even break in here?
Don’t count on anyone.
The Assassins had been level fourteen, and his earlier calculations suggested the final boss would be in the Journeyman rank. This wouldn’t end at a fourteenth challenge. Maybe twenty-one or twenty-eight. All he could do was keep pushing forward. After the fourteenth stage he might get another five-minute break. The fact that he hadn’t found a use for the orbs yet added to his feeling of unease.
Even with his Ether rationing, he was at ninety points and considered dumping free stat points into Intelligence or Wisdom. His health was hovering near one hundred despite not having any serious injuries.
The arena door swung open to admit his next opponent. This time the creature was an amalgamation of an Ant and a Beetle, and he groaned. This dungeon was running out of ideas it seemed. Unfortunately, this idea could be the death of him. Especially when he combined it with the level increase.
Beetle Ant
Apprentice-Warrior
Level 15
The beast had the back shell of a beetle with six legs, and the two first segments of an ant. The ant portion of the mutation stuck straight up like a humanoid, and its four limbs ended in sharp chitin blades, like the Assassins.
Azrael, seeing the Warrior class, chose to wait until it came to him. Warriors were notorious for having limited or no ranged attacks.
The Beetle Ant didn’t possess the Charge skill of the beetle mini-boss—luckily. Azrael had been ready to dodge in any direction to avoid ending up skewered on the end of those chitin blades if it charged. The enemy was forced to close slowly and when it had, all four of its arms shot straight up above its head. The arms began to glow, and Azrael dove under the beetle’s backside to avoid the telegraphed hammer blow.
A muted boom sounded, and he was peppered with sand. His legs screamed as he slid, and his sweaty arms were now caked in sand. Instead of rolling, he shot his sword up at the tender underbelly of the insect. His skill-assisted blade pierced through the underside, then stuck hard.
He got to his knees and lunged, levering his sword with every ounce of strength he could summon. The wound opened wider, and ichor poured out on top of him. The sand that coated him turned a sickly green.
He gagged from the smell of burnt rubber the blood exuded, but continued to step forward. The back end began to collapse under the severity of the damage he was inflicting, and he abandoned his blade to roll out from his cover. The ant half of the body continued to thrash around, attempting to turn and attack Azrael, but without its beetle legs, it was rather useless.
The sword-like appendages were slicing through the sand as it tried to drag itself around unsuccessfully.
Azrael calmly walked over and extricated his sword. The dungeon needed to learn that beetles had a mobility issue. Once he had caught his breath and his two bars were full, Azrael executed the Beetle Ant.
He looted the beetle and completed his second Sphere of Command Interrupt. If he was right, he would have three of each completed sphere at level twenty-one, which was looking like the final boss according to calculations. At least, as he began using the new data from each wave.
He felt his body tingle. He had a shot at this. If all this dungeon was going to throw at him were beetles and ants, and various combinations, he could win. Possibly.
The timer ended with Azrael feeling a rush of adrenaline and hope. He could beat this mini-boss.
The doors opened with a sliding hiss of stone on stone. Something black and yellow began squeezing out of the room. It was too big to exit all at once. Instead, the creature dragged its head out, followed by its middle, and lastly its abdomen. Its translucent wings began to blur, and the air hummed.
Do not let an opponent fight from strength.
Azrael licked his lips, then spat insect ichor onto the sand and charged. Allowing that insect into the air would be a very bad choice.
Wasp
Apprentice-Stinger
Level 18
Mini-Boss
Mid run, Azrael loaded a Phantasmal Blade into his Sovereign Sword. The insect flexed its legs as the wings’ humming became steady. Azrael released his slash. The wasp jumped up, and the invisible skill connected. A line of ichor bloomed along the shiny black abdomen of the wasp.
Azrael sighed in relief, seeing his skill connect. It should be torn apart by his Phantasmal Blade. Or not...
The wasp barrel rolled and landed back on the ground. Azrael’s skill no longer pushed it back through the air. The skill’s momentum had created more of a separation gap and the wings began to pump again.
He sprinted toward the insect, again trying to close the distance. What other options did he have?
He was fifteen feet from it, and still out of range of a melee slash. He charged his blade with the skill in preparation and closed.
The wasp jumped back into the air.
His eyes widened—he had been limiting himself to a single charge of Phantasmal Blade. He forced Ether into his blade, and it worked. He had a double charge of his skill. He hesitated for an infinitesimal moment, not knowing what to expect, before releasing the new double-stacked skill in a horizontal trajectory.
Had Azrael missed? Nothing happened for a strained heartbeat. Then he saw the six legs and the wings separate simultaneously. The wasp fell back to the ground, screeching. What had just happened?
Something hit the back wall behind the wasp. Azrael felt his mouth twitch and he leaned over to see around the fallen insect. Two grooves slowly ground into the wall, accompanied by a deafening cacophony. They were spaced six feet apart and acted exactly the same as a single Phantasmal Blade. He was liking his first skill more and more.
Azrael glanced at his Ether, which was at eighty-seven, and charged his melee strike with a single stack. Without wings or legs, the wasp wasn’t moving to attack but still managed to spin in quick circles. He would kill it soon. But first he would let his resources recharge a bit.
As soon as his bar was nearly full, he executed the struggling bug.
Stinger Sword
● This stinger is forged from a mutated wasp’s stinger. It has unusually high inherent Ether, which is strengthened even further by an Enchantment.
Ether Pool: Small
Current Ether Pool: 1/45
Enchantment: Poison I
Poison I
● Adds a wasp’s poison damage to any physical wound made by the weapon. This adds severe damage and a chance for anaphylaxis.
His sword was much more reliable than this new weapon, but he had to admit that, for a low-level adventurer, it was quite something. If this was the quality of the gear it dropped, he had a real chance to defeat it. A real chance to use this as a stage for leveling.
His skill tree was turning out to be very beneficial. Both En Sphere and Phantasmal Blade were strong.
The Etherience Azrael gained for the wasp only amounted to a thousand, unfortunately, and that wasn’t enough to push through level eight.
The five-minute timer counted down, and Azrael scanned the coliseum. As he moved around to fight, each kill had sunken into the sand. Absorbed back into the dungeon once he was farther away from the corpse. His adventuring teacher in the Sovereign Halls claimed that the dungeon cores gained back some of their spent Essence, if not all of it, in this way.
His heart sped up, sending heat into all of his extremities. Only seven cha
llenges left. A first clear dropped the rarest gear the dungeon could create. Of course, the sword and shield he had acquired weren’t fantastic, but that didn’t mean the final boss wouldn’t be better.
***
Azrael fought through six more waves. The fifteenth and sixteenth were flying ants and had been hardest to deal with because they were agile and ferocious. Waves seventeen and eighteen, however, were beetles that he assumed were meant to fly but couldn’t. Instead, the dungeon had messed up the wing to body ratio. They could jump and sail for a period before landing.
At first, the beetles froze him in place when they took to the skies. A mobile tank would be devastating. However, they could only coast in straight lines and always travelled a set distance. He had managed to incapacitate both specimens and regenerate full resources before starting the next stage. Beetles in this dungeon were turning out to be his savior.
The final two waves were insects that were hard to look at. He gazed pityingly down at the twentieth wave’s single creature and grimaced. It had the abdomen of a wasp, with two ‘stingers’ that moved like a beetle’s mandibles. Its thorax was the hard carapace of a beetle, and its head contained the maneuverability of an ant, with long thin antennae.
Instead of making the creature more powerful, the amalgamation had seemed to want to attack and defend in three different ways. The beetle portion wished to stand in and tank blows, the wasp section wanted to be airborne to avoid them, and lastly, the ant head seemed overwhelmed by the conflicting signals.
This failure of amalgamation told him that he was likely one of the first adventurers in this dungeon. At least the first to make it this far. If the dungeon got it working together in unison, it would be more powerful than either of the two mini-bosses. That didn’t bode well for his plan to farm this dungeon. Young dungeons grew in strength very fast when adventurers arrived and began giving them demonstrations of weaknesses to fix.
He ended the ghastly insect’s suffering and prepared for the final stage. He looked in his ring at the three stacks of different kinds of spheres.
The last six stages of the arena had managed to fill his Etherience bar for level eight, and Azrael placed his skill point into En, which increased the radius of the sphere to six feet. He held onto his free statistic points, hoping for a glimpse of his third-tier Skills before deciding. He just hoped that the four unplaced points wouldn’t be the death of him.
When the timer reached zero, Azrael looked to the spawning chamber door. It didn’t open, but he could swear he heard the stone grating sound he had expected to accompany it. He listened intently and instead his ears picked up the slow hiss of—falling sand?
He scanned the arena and found small circles of what could only be described as churning, vortex-like patterns in the white grains.
Each pattern was spaced evenly around the combat floor and near the wall. Azrael moved slowly away from the twisters closest to him—eventually finding himself in the center of the coliseum. He scolded himself and began a slow shuffle back towards a wall. Suddenly the subtle sound of falling grains was eclipsed by a hum that mutated into a buzzing roar.
As Azrael watched, fat black and yellow bodies began shooting from the holes. The creatures were five feet long and matched that in girth. It was a hive of wasps. Wait—they were furry. He gasped. Bees!
The hive continued to pour out of the holes in all directions.
He managed to Analyze one that hovered near the ceiling.
Worker Bee
Apprentice-Buzzsaw
Level 15
He continued scanning through the ever-multiplying creatures and found that there were two different types.
Drone Bee
Apprentice-Warrior
Level 21
The creatures didn’t attack him. And that was the only reason he was still alive.
If they all descended on him, he was beyond screwed.
He looked back up the slide he had entered from. Was it better to try to break back into the antechamber?
The humming was oppressive. He could feel it through his bones. A cacophony of demise.
He noticed a change in the light of the room when a golden glow began to coalesce behind him, stretching a shadow self out in front of him.
His head snapped around and he found a bee slowly gathering Ether. A spell! He kicked forward off the sand and faced front. He sprinted through the sand in random patterns as the light grew in intensity.
Just when his shadow stuttered, Azrael pivoted hard and reversed direction. His shadow grew and then reversed, telling him the spell had gone above him. Just before the shadow elongated to his actual height, he dove forward and rolled. Something flashed behind him before wind and sand blasted his shabby tunic and pants.
He turned and found a massive crater. He looked back up and desperately tried to find that bee again. He hadn’t had time to Analyze it the last time.
Three sharp hums sounded through the buzzing din. The drones landed all over the arena and attempted to bulldoze him out of existence. They weren’t agile or dexterous, though, especially on the ground.
He ducked and dodged, making each movement purposeful and concise, as he had been taught. He counterattacked when he could and even managed to cripple two drones. But truthfully, the drones’ bulk saved him, as they often ran into an ally, preventing multiple bees from attacking in unison.
A quick assessment told him that the Worker Bees had stayed out of this conflict.
Two sharp buzzes cut the din again. The drones took back to the air, and suddenly bees were attacking him from above.
The bees were trying to pick him up. They surrounded him, creating a circular stack of bodies hovering just above his head. Again, their bulk made it so only three to four were attempting to grab him at one time. He entered into Cooling Fan and circled his sword above his head in continual slashes. This was somewhat effective, but then the Worker Bees started landing to try another avenue of assault.
Azrael couldn’t stop Cooling Fan for the risk of the attacks above. Instead, he used En and footwork to avoid grasping forelegs from the ground. His body began to sweat desperately from the exertion. One loud buzz signaled the bees to take back off into the air.
Azrael stopped his technique and examined the room, expecting a new method of attack. Golden light caught his eye, and he nodded. Three spheres, three attack patterns—he pulled out a Sphere of Silence, turned, and threw it at the magic-wielding bee. As the orb flew, he Analyzed the creature.
Queen Bee
Apprentice-Mage Queen
Level 25
Boss
As soon as the orb connected, the spell cut off, and the Queen buzzed violently. Azrael watched closely, and that likely saved his life. The Queen dove so fast that it blurred. He felt it enter his En sphere and swayed as soon as he could. Its stinger missed him, but its abdomen hit his arm and torso, spinning him like a top. He hurtled away from the impact and rolled to absorb momentum. Gaining his feet, he looked at his health bar. The attack had removed thirty points, and his right shoulder was currently throbbing. He moved the limb and breathed a sigh of relief, not finding it broken.
He attempted to locate the Queen in the swarm but failed. Three loud buzzes rang out.
This time he pulled out the Sphere of Command Interrupt and lobbed it into the air. One of the attacking drones collided with it, and a pulse of blue shot out like an electromagnetic pulse. All of the drones fell from the air, and Azrael dodged massive bee hail.
An angry buzz was his only warning, and he dove behind one of the incapacitated drones. The Queen collided with its subordinate, and the momentum shot the drone’s body into Azrael, who reeled backward into another incapacitated drone. The fur and bulk of both organisms softened the blow, so he only took five points of damage. The Queen struggled to free its stinger, and Azrael attacked all out. His melee version of Phantasmal Blade connected three times, leaving shallow crisscrossing cuts on the thorax of the Queen before it detached it
s stinger and flew away. As he watched it retreat, another stinger grew to replace the old one.
All around him, the drones began to buzz and slowly rise back into the air.
Two agitated buzzes emanated from his retreating foe, and Azrael responded by pulling the Sphere of Sweet Perfume from his ring. He lobbed it across the arena and watched as a gold fog sprang forth from where it impacted. The Worker Bees swarmed the mist, and Azrael was beginning to congratulate himself when the angry buzz reminded him of what came next. He realized he shouldn’t have thrown the sphere so far, as it left him without cover or a way to trap the boss.
Instead of swaying, he fell to his stomach, face down on the floor, as wind and a screech tore by overhead. He shot back up and waited as the fog seemed to drain into a nearby open hole in the sand floor.
The workers rejoined the rest of the bees in the air. Azrael continued his search, attempting to find the spell that came next. Based on his minimal damage inflicted during the Drone phase of the fight, he needed to figure out a way to make the last two sets of spheres count. How could he ground the boss in the Silence phase?
He accepted that he would need to attempt a counterstrike and rely on the other two phases for more significant progress.
A glow of golden light alerted him, and he pulled the sphere and threw. Then he entered into Highway Robbery, sword held above his head. The angry buzz gave him some warning, and he began a split-step. This technique was usually completely unsuited for traditional duels, but it was the only way he could think of to react fast enough.
He had timed the maneuver well, and when his En flared its warning, his feet touched the sand, allowing him to kick left, and swing down. He scored a triple-charged Phantasmal Blade melee strike against the fast blur that shot past. Unfortunately, the creature didn’t fall from the air as he had hoped.
