Dungeon Robotics (Book 7): Collapse

by Matthew Peed

  I could only watch as this went on for about ten minutes. It seemed to be about over when a flaming roar washed through the valley. I turned my eye back to the other side of the mountain and saw a behemoth that was formed out of flames. He wielded a giant warhammer made from magma, or lava since it wasn’t underground.

  I watched as the figure brought the weapon down onto the ground. I couldn’t see past the mountains from my prison, so I could only hope that Louella and her people survived when the hammer impacted and caused a ripple that sent the mountain on the west side of the valley rising a dozen meters from the shifting lands.

  I felt new mana start to pour into me from my portal that was connected to Louella’s fort. It was the purest fire mana I had ever felt. It literally flooded the gate room as it manifested into lava upon coming through the portal. As I watched the gate building outside of the city become encased in lava, Ignea transferred the exit point to the portal in the dungeon.

  Only one person died from the sudden appearance of the lava, but many were severely burned. I could only worry about what happened to Louella and her people for a moment when the amount of mana being funneled into my dungeon cranked up due to the size of the portal on my floating island floor. It was made to allow an army to travel through it quickly.

  “This can’t be good,” I said just as I felt the object that housed my soul crack—this time with a lot more pain. “Yup. Definitely not good.”

  Chapter 36

  Louella

  Ezal’s spell was completed with quite a flashy display. Streaks of fire fell from the sky and burned through anything they came in contact with. When they reached the ground under the enemy ranks, they continued without stopping, as if they would melt through the planet. With that alone, Ezal managed to take out nearly a third of the enemy army.

  The giant was struck almost fully by the magic but managed to survive. I began to wonder if there was some truth to rumors that giants had partial mana immunity. I would have to deal with it when it got closer. It continued on its path even while it was on fire.

  Fire mana rippled through the air, causing random bursts of flames. I turned and found Ezal unconscious, so I flew over and ordered a few soldiers to send her and her mages through the gate while they could still be sent. This was still a battlefield, and if the enemy managed to breach the wall, the portals might become inaccessible. The soldiers had their commanders; she was no longer needed and didn’t need to endanger herself by being here.

  I overlooked the battlefield and saw that any fire magic being used was amplified a great deal. To make matters worse, to reduce collateral damage, the spell had been aimed for deep enemy lines. The frontline soldiers were still making for the wall. Both sides’ large-scale barriers were about to collapse as well.

  “Form up! We’re about to engage in a melee with the enemy!” I shouted, taking to the sky. The sky flashed as lightning arced between the darkening clouds and Gulv as he flew around the battlefield, harassing the enemy.

  Flying over the ranks, I pointed my staff at officers in the enemy army. With a blast of mana, a bolt of lightning would cross the distance in the blink of an eye, turning my target into charcoal. I managed to take out five people like this before they had their Lightning mages divert any of my attacks into the sky.

  The Thonaca army finally managed to cross the fifty-meter threshold and were almost to the point of being able to use their fallen as shields against our attacks. I came to a stop at the closest point and charged my mana. My dual pools arced between each other as I unleashed a stream of black lightning, which I used to strike a forty-meter-long section of the front lines.

  All the metal around them, from dropped swords to dead bodies with armor, was magnetized. More than a few people were run through from swords that came flying point-first. Bodies, living and dead, went flying as they crashed together and rebounded off each other. After about twenty seconds, there were four balls of metal and flesh of varying sizes on the front lines.

  I sensed something and dropped a few meters down. Less than a second later, several rays of light flashed over my head. I could tell they were from the lowest-tier-three priests. I counted five before the lights vanished. Tracing the light back in the split second I had before they vanished, I was able to locate two of them.

  Pulling from my negative pool of mana, I formed two black balls in my hands and threw one at each priest. The spells vanished from sight as they impacted the area. Everything within a twenty-meter radius stopped moving as all the surfaces gained a sheet of ice. Unless they were high-tier two, that spell would have killed them as it pulled all the energy out of their atoms’ electron fields and caused them to come to a stop.

  I created a small barrier around myself so I could check the battle. The enemy had reached the walls. Mages with flight were leaping from the front lines to assault the defenders to try to gain a foothold. We were holding for now, but we were severely outnumbered.

  As I watched, the ground started to shake violently. It appeared to be focused in front of the walls. I flew over my soldiers. “Careful! Something is coming!”

  With an explosion of dirt and stone, what appeared to be hundreds of tunnels opened along the base of the walls. I didn’t have to wonder for long as I saw the BronzeStone clan’s banner on the dwarves who rushed out from the tunnels.

  Cries of “For the glory of BronzeStone!” rang out along the line as the dwarves took to the field. The Thonacans were unprepared for such an assault and lost hundreds of soldiers by the second. In less than a minute, the dwarves had pushed the enemy back two dozen meters from the walls.

  Flying over the line of dwarves, I found who I was looking for. I shot down and landed with a crack of the ground. Nastok stood decked out in armor that looked like it should have been on a king. I found it suited him more than when he wore his blacksmith leathers.

  “Your Highness,” Nastok said with a bow. “Five thousand BronzeStone clan fighters have come to assist you in your time of need. We apologize for being late, but it took some time for us to finish.”

  “Better late than never! I’m so glad to see you!” I said, giving him a hug even though it was against protocol.

  Nastok patted my back and we separated. “We’ve learned a thing or two from our mutual benefactor, and they will all be . . . tested today.” He whistled and several hundred dwarves rushed from the tunnels and planted shields that were almost a meter larger than the dwarf holding them.

  I felt terra mana surge up from the ground as if it was being pulled into the shields, and a green barrier rose into the air several dozen meters. With another whistle, the shield-planters turned and went back into the tunnels as another set of dwarves rushed out, several holding what looked like four or five tubes connected together. I realized these were similar to the weapon Regan had made for me a few months ago.

  A gun. The dwarves placed the guns next to the shields and slid them into slots that I hadn’t noticed before. With a few swift movements, they had the weapons assembled.

  “Stage two, boys!” Nastok shouted.

  The dwarves fighting on the front lines suddenly threw something that exploded into clouds of pitch-black smoke. I expected them to run back behind the shields, but the gunners pulled the triggers of their weapons before any of them made it back. A hail of bullets flew from the four-hundred-plus gun emplacements, tearing through the black smoke and into the enemy.

  As the wind shear from the bullet rain cleared the smoke, all the dwarves who’d been on the receiving end were gone, but I noticed small dents in the ground roughly where they would have been. They must have burrowed under the ground to safety. I was almost worried about Nastok’s state of mind for a moment there.

  The bullets from the guns were cutting through five or six of the soldiers at once. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen such wholesale death in my life and hoped never to see it again. The enemy quickly realized they couldn’t push the walls with the dwarves defending it.

  The
giant had almost reached the wall when Nastok motioned toward his dwarves. They rushed back into the tunnel and dragged out another, much larger gun. The giant slammed into the terra wall formed by the dwarves. With a grin, Nastok lit the back of the giant gun.

  There was a resounding bang followed by a large amount of smoke. I turned and found the giant’s head was missing. The remaining Thonaca soldiers finished retreating to a small hill that put them partially out of target for the guns.

  Even with the timely retreat, they’d lost close to fifty thousand people in the ten minutes they had tried to push. They had less than half their army remaining. Personally, I’d seen enough death for one day. A break in the fighting would not be turned down. We’d lost our own share of people today.

  “Amazing, Nastok. Where did your people learn about these?” I asked, gesturing at the weapons. I knew the gnomes had access to something similar, but their air rifles weren’t nearly this deadly on such a large scale. Plus, I didn’t think Regan would allow access to knowledge like this in his library.

  “Not all the talented people work for you, Your Highness. We have more than a few dwarves that literally live in the library. One has even managed to make it to Goblin City, though we don’t care for publicity, so we haven’t advertised it. There is a much nicer library there,” Nastok said with a hearty laugh.

  “Still, I am surprised that Lord Regan would put knowledge of these weapons there,” I said, looking again at the guns.

  “And you’d be correct. We actually learned about these through copying the goblins. They don’t exactly hide them, and by the fates, they have fights all the time using them,” Nastok said, shaking his head. I wondered at what he was remembering.

  “Well, I think the dwarves may have won this war . . .” I started to say when the ground shook.

  I cast out my senses and felt the fire mana in the area hadn’t gone down. In fact, it felt like it had increased a thousandfold. I looked to the ground and could almost see several hundred meters down. All the fire mana from Ezal’s spell had converged into a single point. I couldn’t be sure, but it seemed as if something had taken control of it.

  Nastok also looked in the direction of the fire mana. He was a fire cultivator, after all, and had a better idea about it than I did. “If that does what I think it’s going to do, everything in a two-hundred-kilometer radius is going to be leveled.”

  “How much time do we have?” I asked.

  He narrowed his eyes as he stared at the anomaly. “I’d say twenty minutes. Tops.”

  “We need to evacuate,” I said, then opened a portal to the gate room. I found Bruce with a protective pose over Ezal. “Why haven’t you left yet?!” I shouted at him.

  “The gateway isn’t working, Your Highness,” the gate attendant reported.

  I rushed over to the device and placed my hand on it. Sure enough, it felt like something was interfering with the connection. Its origins felt otherworldly. I tapped my staff as I thought about how to get everyone to safety.

  An idea came to me. If the gateway wasn’t working, I could use my portals. I initially tried the valley, but sure enough, something was blocking the connection. I kept trying until I only had one location left to choose. I didn’t care for the location, but it was far from here.

  “I am opening portals around the fort! Get to the nearest one and get through it!” I shouted, amplifying my voice with mana. Pulling every ounce of mana I had left, I opened a hundred portals around the fort. My mana drained a little bit with each person who went through.

  The ground outside the walls had bulged until they were higher than the walls and glowed a deep crimson. I silently sent a message via my bracelet to Regan, knowing that he probably couldn’t hear it. “It was fun. Hopefully, this isn’t my end.”

  The bracelet crumbled into dust after I got the last syllable out. I lurched over as pain struck my whole body and coughed, splattering the ground with the amount of blood coming from me. I was powering the portals with my life force, but there were still people who needed to leave.

  Finally, the last of my people passed through my portal, and I collapsed to the ground. I ground my teeth and pulled myself up. Limping slowly, I managed to make it to the wall just as the magic went off. An explosion unlike I had ever witnessed before destroyed everything around me, the force throwing me back. I wasn’t sure how far I flew until I collided with the wall on the other side of the fort.

  Gritting my teeth through the pain, I opened my eyes, vaguely aware blood was leaking from them. The fort was gone. Only a small section, that which I’d collided with, had survived, likely due to the fort’s keep taking the brunt of the blast. I coughed up more blood, personally amazed that I was still alive. I realized that some protective measure on the armor Regan made me had kept me alive.

  A cloud that reminded me of a mushroom ascended into the sky from the center of a crater that was deeper than I could see. The sides of the crater glowed and were partially turned to glass and partially turned to lava. In the distance, I could make out yellow and orange lightning from the intense mana discharge.

  “I guess . . . this is . . . how I die,” I mumbled through coughs before I closed my eyes to welcome the darkness that was eating at the edges of my vision.

  I wasn’t sure how long I lay there, but something caused me to open my eyes again. Nothing had changed, so I could only wager a few seconds to minutes had passed. All the mana discharging in the area was being sucked into one place, a ball of flames that was quickly growing in size.

  It wasn’t long before cracks formed on the ball as it exploded outward. The flames soon took the form of a giant man who wielded a massive warhammer. I knew I should flee, but I couldn’t move anything.

  “I have returned! Finally! After a millennium!” the giant shouted, and the entire area shook. “I shall free you, Master!”

  The flaming giant suddenly lifted his warhammer and brought it down in the distance. It had to be close to ten kilometers from me. With a horrible sound, there was a wave of flames that exploded from the spot and soon reached where I lay, washing over me. If not for the armor Regan had given me, I’d likely have been ash two or three times over by then.

  For the next ten minutes, he hammered at the ground. He was making good time, as he’d already made it at least a kilometer deep. I couldn’t imagine it taking him long before he reached his “master.” I knew that he needed to be stopped. I tried to put my hand under me to at least lift myself up and ended up only causing myself a to cough more blood.

  The giant figure stopped mid-swing. His massive form turned and looked directly at me. “Interesting. A mortal that has survived my flames for so long.”

  I didn’t even have the energy to gulp as the giant walked over to me. Each step shook the ground with a quake. How does something made from flames cause the ground to shake? That thought bounced through my head as the giant reached down and picked me up. To my amazement, his flames were merely warm to the touch, even though they looked like they should melt anything that came near them.

  “Today is a wonderous day. Not only am I revived by the greatest amount of mana I have seen in more lifetimes than I care to count, but I find a suitable Legara. Pity it looks like you’re about to die. We can’t have that.” The giant placed his warhammer on the ground, then closed both hands around me. I felt like I was wrapped in sunlight, it was so bright.

  “My flames to your heart. Your heart to my flames. In the forging heat, may your body be tempered!”

  I felt my heart beat once, then couldn’t hold back the scream that left me. I felt everything about myself changing. My last thought before the blinding light overtook me was of Regan.

  ~~~

  Darkness was the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes. I stood and looked around, not sure what I was seeing. I appeared to be in a cavern, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember how I got there. I placed a hand on my head as several grayed-out images flashed before my eyes. People with faces
I couldn’t see, places that looked like ones I hadn’t been to in years.

  “Ah! You’ve awoken, my Legara! I was starting to worry about you,” a voice called from behind me.

  I turned and found a man who glowed with beauty. He was the most amazing thing in this world. Everything flew away as I looked at him. “Master!” I ran up and threw my arms around him. He stroked my hair, and it made grin me in pleasure.

  “I am glad to see you are alright, my Legara. The change kills most people,” my beloved said, pulling my hand to his lips.

  Something caused me to pause—my hands had flames and lightning tattooed on them. I panicked and the flames seemed to respond to my emotions as my body burst into flames. “What! What is going on?!”

  “Calm, my Legara. You have become the embodiment of fire. It was not much of a change since you were already a lightning user, which is basically fire that’s been condensed to a different state of being,” the man said as he stroked my hair.

  What he said did not sit right with me. A man made from metal handing me a book on lightning and energy flashed through my mind.

  Something in his voice calmed me down, though, and I leaned into his chest. “Why did you change me?” I asked, not sure why it mattered.

  “You were dying. I had to save you,” he replied and brought his head down level with mine. He was quite a bit taller than I was. His words sounded truthful, but wrong at the same time.

  He did it to save me. There must not be any reason to doubt him, then. I threw my arms around his neck and snuggled close. “Thank you. I guess I owe you my life,” I said, my words muffled slightly from his chest.

  He laughed, then wrapped his arms around me. “I guess you do, but I’m just happy to see you alive, my Legara. Come. We have work to do,” he said, as he set me down.