Auger & Augment

by Wilson A Bateman

  As we moved the furniture mana ash fell away in clouds, to the extent that we were leaving faint handprints on the greyed timber. Whatever was causing all of this seemed to be accelerating exponentially. Mac looked grim as she pointed out that time was short.

  Katz nodded, then eased himself back into the hallway and out of sight around a corner.

  “You guys need to see this," he whispered when he returned, and he led us around the bend and down a new hallway. The stone of the hallway seemed ancient, but the only dust was the mana ash, which rose in puffs around our feet before fading out of existence. There wasn’t so much as a spider web—just sublimating stone. We crept watchfully past two sets of gates that showed hints of a large space through gaps in the filigree, fading into an inky uniformity at the end of our vision’s range. At the second set of doors an opening yawned to our left, and it was into that opening that Katz led us, placing a finger to his lips in warning.

  We all filed in, into what looked to be a large office or study. Broken and crumbling chairs were set around a low table set before a fireplace, and greyed upholstery hung in tatters from the greyed frames. At the back of the room stood an enormous desk made of elaborately carved stone. Or it had once been. Either time or mana drain had eroded what were once elaborate whorls that put me in mind of the augment on my hand.

  The real focus of the room, however, was the bookshelves. Lining the walls floor to ceiling were stone shelves filled with books. Pamphlets, tomes, scrolls—even clay tablets. None of it belonged together, rather it appeared to have been gathered from every imaginable source. The sight so intrigued me that I didn’t see the reason Katz had brought us, until the wall shifted its weight.

  Jumping back, I let out a stifled gasp before I caught myself. There, in the far corner, was a creature. Its body filled the room floor to ceiling, which meant it must have been at least ten feet tall. And it seemed to be made entirely of legs: two muscular legs that reached eight feet into the air before ending at a waist. It looked like nothing so much as waist-down on a giant who had fallen through a hole in the floor of a room above, minus the oversized unmentionables.Only the fact that I could see some space between the top of the creature and the ceiling broke the illusion.

  Su Brahn — Level 19

  Hit Points: 316/316

  Katz waved us back out of the room.

  “Well,” he whispered, “what do we think? Somebody didn’t put much love into creating that thing—especially since the poor bastard didn’t even get a pair!”

  He ducked under Mac’s swipe. Well, he flinched. Not much ducking needed.

  Slynx spoke first. “I don’t see any weapons besides those legs. They look like enough to deal with, though. Level 19’s going to be a peach.”

  “Three hundred HP is too much for us to handle right now. I wouldn’t be able to keep its attention long enough for the rest of you to down it," Me’Almah asserted. “We need to get stronger, or we need a rock-solid strategy.”

  I resisted making Earth mage puns. Me’Almah’s smacks would definitely hurt more than Mac’s.

  “I agree," Mac said. “Let’s see if we can find more small fries first. Everyone think strategy while we do.”

  Katz led us back down the left hallway to the entrance. Whatever was behind those filigreed doors seemed significant, so we didn’t touch them.

  At the entrance, we replaced the empty lure with a partially drained one in order to block any ingress to the right hallway, and then proceeded to scout down it.

  Katz marked three additional krakens for destruction, and pulled them simultaneously, attempting to replicate the success of our first “Fire Shield Special.”

  Three stacks of Wind at Your Back weren’t quite enough to keep him ahead of the krakens though, and as he came hurtling over the stone lure we noted that he’d taken a stack of Mana Bleed and a hit to his health.

  “Zen, keep him up!” Mac commanded between casts of Fire Shield. A Slow Heal had landed on Katz while he was still in the air.

  The first kraken overshot the lure and turned to scramble back toward it, meeting one and then two competitors. As the mana of the lure drained, however, other sources of mana started to look much more attractive to it. Leaving the lure, the original kraken raced toward the group, never having triggered any of the Fire Shield charges. Katz and I were ready with ranged attacks, and Mac was keeping up with the Fire spells, but there simply wasn’t enough time to reduce the Fire Shield charge before Me’Almah met the beast with her shield.

  Slynx was right there in an instant, whipping his axe overhead to chop at the Void Kraken’s legs and tentacles. One, two, three. It was on that swing that Kindled became Ignited, and his arm caught fire. Bellowing in pain, he continued his onslaught. Four swings, five swings, and then a final 180-degree swing that brought the creature’s legs out from under it.

  Varba, for her part, was shouting truly vile things about Slynx’s character, a string of epithets that should have carried a higher DPS—damage per second—rating than any of Mac’s spells. Slow Heals popped into existence on the burning dwarf, even as his skin began to crack and peel.

  Me’Almah finished the kraken off with a critical blow, sweeping aside the tentacles with her shield and burying the head of her mace into the soft tissue behind. Slynx’s bellowing continued as range took down the other two.

  And then all that could be heard was Varba’s cursing and Slynx’s moans. “Bloody hell, that stings!” he growled through gritted teeth while waiting for the minute and a half required for Slow Heal to elapse.

  “Be glad it stings!” Varba spat. “Not feeling it means you’ve lost nerve endings, you incomparable putz! How could you even think to do something so reckless? You know I can’t heal you fast enough! You know!”

  “I’m glad I’m not the one married to her," Mac whispered to Katz, a bit too loudly.

  Varba whirled around, furious, and pointed to the sides of her head with long green fingers. “GOBLIN EARS!” she screeched, and stomped away to the edge of our vision.

  I looked to Mac, concerned, but she waved me off. “It’s alright, Zen. She just cares a lot about him—about everyone, really. It’s what makes her a good healer, but it also means that sometimes you’re in more danger after you take damage.”

  We gathered our weapons and allocated stat points for Level 8, and within minutes Varba was back with us. She checked on Slynx before turning to the rest of us. “Sorry, everyone," she started. “I’m still under the weather from the spellcasting, and this game is…” She took a deep breath and let it out in a rush. “This game is intense. Sometimes I even forget it’s not real. And the wounds are so...” She shook herself. “Anyway, I’m sorry.” She walked over to Slynx, and he wrapped her up in his thick arms.

  Me’Almah had joined Katz in taking on Mana Bleed, but that beat our expectations. We had no idea how large the dungeon was, but taking on only two bleeds after having downed seven krakens beat expectations, meaning we’d be able to get farther. Additionally, my regen was now 100 mana per minute, all told, so we weren’t underwater. Yet.

  The right hallway turned out to be an exact mirror of the left, except instead of a study at the end there was a full-fledged library. It was arranged similarly to the room it mirrored, but was packed with even more books. There were bins of rolled parchment. There were reading stands. There were rows and rows of additional bookshelves. Whoever had used this place had an enormous love of books—or an incredible thirst for knowledge.

  Katz slunk his way through the aisles, quietly taking note of the enemies lurking within.

  “Four," he announced when he had returned. “There are four more krakens in there. Also, is it just me or is it getting dustier in here?” He put a foot down deliberately on the stone and rubbed it back and forth. Mana ash eased itself into the air and dispersed, leaving a gnome-sized boot print in the rock.

  We all looked at each other, disconcerted.

  “Well, does anyone have any ideas?” Mac
asked.

  “Can we get them all to fight each other? Including ole Gams back there?” Slynx asked, gesturing across to the other hallway with his thumb. “Maybe a few of those void chickens would be able to take him out.”

  “How would we get them over there?” Katz asked. “I don’t know if I could keep them all interested for that long.”

  “And how would we get them to fight?” Mac added. “We don’t know whether Legs-For-Days will go after one of the lures, and if we disturb the fucker to try and find out, he might not go back to sleep.”

  There were all sorts of reasons why what we were planning might not work, but constraint is the mother of creativity, and our constraints gave birth to one doozy of a plan.

  Chapter 24

  The party worked its way back toward the leg-monster’s lair, taking turns as carrying the full lure wore our stamina away. We waited on tenterhooks as Me’Almah eased her way toward the enormous Su Brahn, letting out sighs of relief as she reached the midpoint between the monster and the door without eliciting a response. Once she was back, my job began.

  We wound our way backward through the hallways, laying a trail of tasty morsels for the krakens. It was a tedious process, but I unloaded our mana in large chunks every 5 feet or so, until just shy of the doorway to the library. There we placed the nearly empty lure and waited for our mana to refill.

  We were off with a BANG! as Katz’s Auditory Illusion spell fired into the library. Scrabbling sounds from inside indicated the krakens were reacting, and so he followed up with a second BANG! in the library doorway. Deranged krakens poured out of the room and fell onto the lure in a frenzy. Meanwhile, Mac borrowed mana to cast Fire Shield on each one. We feared Ignite, with its active damage, might draw their attention toward us.

  Within seconds, the lure was drained, and Katz started up again, firing off a third BANG! down the hallway, away from us, to accompany the large pulse of mana I sent flying.

  This was the critical moment, and we held our collective breath. Me’Almah set herself up between us and them. Either they would take the bait, or we would have a very unpleasant skirmish on our hands.

  We watched as they greedily tracked the mana and then began to race after it, as though Katz’s spell were a starter pistol. We followed them down the hallway, careful not to draw their attention. We kept the rear-most kraken in sight, and Mac re-upped Fire Shields as necessary.

  Once the four krakens had gotten going, however, there wasn’t much stopping them. The nodes of mana we’d left along the hallway were bite-sized compared to what we’d seen them consume from the lures, and so the krakens barely even paused their charge. In under a minute we were back at the door to the leg monster’s room.

  It was a macabre scene that met us when we entered the room. The distorted figures of the krakens struggling to claim the lure threw grotesque shadows on the walls, and the Fire Shield charges detonated in bright flashes that made those shadows writhe. Mac set to work igniting the krakens that weren’t already aflame, and Varba followed suit with Poison. I steadied my bow against the shadows and shot. Luckily, my target was so large that my arrow sank into the outer quadricep of the Su Brahn’s left leg.

  The huge form flinched, and then began to barrel forward, its feet leaving deep, four-toed imprints in the stone. We had gambled that its eyeless nature meant it, like the krakens, had some way of detecting mana, and our bet paid off. The eyeless behemoth lunged for the lure, scattering krakens as it did. As it struck, so too did the Fire Shields, extending the burn time of each kraken. The Su Brahn didn’t pause, and it hadn’t picked up any stacks of Kindled either. It simply lunged for the full lure, bringing one enormous gray foot down on the stone. As gray flesh met stone, the foot took on the consistency of thick clay, distending to encase the stone, which began to move up the leg, carried by some force beneath the creature’s skin. As the mass passed, features distorted and then reformed.

  I watched with Ether as the concentrated knot made its way up the leg, and saw the final phase of our plan come flying apart as Mac and Varba’s first two spells splashed against the giant’s skin. Whereas spells normally clung to a creature, inside or out, these acted like water hitting a dry sponge, immediately dispersing within the creature to become part of the undifferentiated whole. “Spell Immunity on Leggy McLegface!” I cried, nocking another arrow, and readying myself for oblivion. There would be no Fire Shield on the big guy, and no counter-blasts from the krakens to unload heavy damage. Hundreds of planned damage points were out the window.

  The krakens recovered quickly, and began hurling themselves at the leg that had snatched away their meal. The legs retaliated brutally, kicking and stomping with an accuracy that was uncanny for a creature with no discernible head.

  One of the krakens fell under the weight of one well-aimed stomp, collapsing with an audible snap of its leg bones and lying still.

  Su Brahn — Level 19

  Hit Points: 281/316

  “This isn’t going to work!” I howled. “What do we do?”

  “We improvise!” Mac responded.

  “Damn right we improvise!” shouted Slynx, and he began to cast.

  Me’Almah and Katz joined in.

  “What are you doing?” I called, incredulous, as I loaded yet another arrow.

  “Gotta experiment with the game engine sometime!” Slynx responded happily, once he’d finished.

  Spells were flying thick and fast: heals, buffs, and attacks. I watched in wonder as the group operated like clockwork around me, seemingly in unspoken agreement about everything. Varba lay down three consecutive heals—on the krakens! Simultaneously, mana began to circulate wildly around Katz, indicating that Wind at Your Back was in effect. Me’Almah finished casting and crouched low, her shield raised almost parallel to the ground as Slynx scooped the little gnome up by the waist and tossed him through the air. Katz landed on the shield and immediately rapped out a three-count with his dagger, setting his feet as he did. With a heave Me’Almah unfurled from her crouch, transferring the momentum of her huge frame into Katz’s considerably smaller form.

  Katz flew through the grayscale tableau, a silent shadow floating over the frenzy beneath him, where the Su Brahn was suddenly standing oddly still. Wait. How had Bind worked? Daggers slammed down, buried deep into the left “hip,” 9 feet up and well out of reach of the krakens. Katz began to climb blade over blade, using his daggers to create handholds.

  Slynx had changed focus and was intent on the kraken whose leg had snapped. The once-dead monster twitched for a few seconds before levering itself up onto its good leg. “Get in there, Chickey!” Slynx commanded, and the broken creature hopped forward, dragging its mangled limb.

  Mac had started hurling furniture, books, and whatever else she could find into the fray. It didn’t look to be doing any damage though, and I was baffled until the entire pile suddenly went up in flames, right under the Su Brahn. Me’Almah completed a second casting of Bind to keep the Su Brahn close, but it only lasted a moment before the enormous legs powered through the hardened earth.

  Me’Almah simply called my name and continued casting, and I supplemented her mana as she conferred buffs on the krakens.

  Grounded (1 min 56 sec) — Me’Almah

  Your feet are firmly planted.

  + 10% Knockdown Resistance.

  + 20% Electrical Resistance.

  Then, with a bellow, she stomped ponderously into the madness. Noticing her odd gait, I looked more closely at the icons I’d seen pop into existence around her.

  Stoneskin(5) (1 min 51 sec) — Self

  Your skin has hardened.

  You are Grounded. You are Reinforced. You are Encumbered.

  Grounded (1 min 49 sec) — Stoneskin

  Your feet are firmly planted.

  +10% Knockdown Resistance

  +20% Electrical Resistance

  Reinforced(5) (1 min 48 sec) — Stoneskin

  A layer of rock enhances your armor.

  +20%
Armor Rating

  +10% Electrical Resistance

  Encumbered(5) (1 min 47 sec) — Stoneskin

  You are weighed down.

  +25 kg to Weight

  I didn’t know she had such a spell. Was this an effect of her seed spell, like Playing with Fire was for Mac?

  Slynx followed in Me’Almah’s wake, axe held high and ready to maim.

  And maiming was the goal. The Su Brahn’s left leg had taken my arrows, and had been the main focus of the hungry krakens. Add Mac’s hotfoot to that, as well as Katz’s busy-work, and the appendage wasn’t in the best shape.

  The ingested lure had finally ascended to the apex of the Su Brahn’s body at that point, and though one of the live krakens continued to scramble for purchase on the giant leg, the other two now sensed other sources of mana that were drawing closer. Me’Almah was right behind the first as it turned, and she hit the kraken with a savage backhand blow that overpowered the Knockdown Resistance she herself had given it. The kraken spun to the floor, and Slynx buried his axe deep into the mass of tentacles.

  With Slynx occupying her first target’s attention, our tank met with the other kraken, pushing it back with her shield and then laying into it with her mace. The beleaguered kraken had been burned, bitten, scratched, and kicked, but it was still hungry. Its gnashing beak sought again and again to reach past the tank’s shield. Me’Almah’s training paid off though, and as she parried the attacks she managed to push the kraken back toward the Su Brahn. Her training couldn’t help her to block the huge right foot aiming a punt dead-on at the kraken. The tentacled beast met her shield with a resounding crack, and both were thrown back.