Chapter 35, Daggers or multitask carnage?
Zelaria
As I pass the bend I take in the lit corridor in front of me with glowing eyes. Dispersing my wet clothes, letting Ari clean me up and get the water out of my hair I study the pattern making up the design of the corridor itself. Hanging from the ceiling on short iron chains, placed at intervals of 10 meters going down the passage, are dimly lit lanterns casting a flickering fiery glow. The distance between them is just enough to leave a dim few meters in the middle where the light doesn’t reach.
The walls, ceiling and floor are made of smooth gray stone, unadorned except for some moss growing in a few corners and water trickling down through a few cracks that must be placed there intentionally for that purpose. The corridor itself is 6 meters wide, 3 meters high and 30 meters long, splitting into two different paths going left and right at the junction at the other end.
If these dimensions are the norm in this dungeon, having a lower ceiling and greater width, then I can understand why larger numbers of opponents might become an issue. With a limited party size or for adventurers delving alone like me it’s going to be hard not to get surrounded by a horde of monsters.
Manifesting back my clothes and styling my hair I start walking down the corridor, my glowing eyes filling in the dark spots between the lanterns. I’ll have to keep them blazing all the time if the lighting is going to be this irregular in the whole dungeon. It doesn’t consume my own mana though and the added clarity in fights is always appreciated.
Reaching the junction I look to my left and right but don’t see any difference. The corridors look the same and they both turn in the same direction I’ve been walking in after 20 meters or so. I focus on the walls and floor with my sensors, trying to pick up anything irregular that might give me a clue to the best path forward but there’s really nothing to find.
The dungeon always cleans itself up and any tracks that might have been left behind by the adventurers now making merry in the tavern have been wiped clean.
“How often do the dungeons reset their chambers and corridors, Ari?”
“They don’t really reset anything if you want to be specific. They slowly restore everything back into their original patterns over time. The speed at which this restoration occurs is dependent on a lot of factors but it’s usually done in a way to be as invisible as possible to the adventurers delving.
"It also prioritizes restoring parts of the dungeon patterns that are most crucial to keeping the floor at the intended difficulty. If we were to mark the paths we take at every junction it would be wiped clean a lot faster than gore covering the floor from something we killed for example.”
“That’s going to make this a lot more difficult. I can understand why people draw maps of the dungeons they delve often to avoid wasting time down here. Had we not intended to face this challenge and conquer it I would have spent any coin necessary to procure one.”
I pick the right path and start walking down it. I keep my pace slow for the moment as I really don’t have much information on this dungeon other than it having animal and plant based monsters. Turning the corner to my left at the end of the corridor I see an open chamber a few meters further ahead. There are lanterns hanging from the ceiling and green moss covering the stone floor in patches varying in diameter from a half a meter to a few meters.
I walk into the room and take in the new curiosity. It’s a 1 meter tall plant swaying in a nonexistent breeze, green vines 2 meters in length with tiny centimeter long white thorns that curl around the bottom of the plant and a white flower that blooms in its middle. It looks quite beautiful with it’s sleek and shiny petals but I’m not stupid enough to think it harmless.
[White Thorn Lily - Level 5]
The level is absolutely pathetic but it’s what I expected from the first chamber of the first floor. It will be easy getting through here, that I’m sure of. I don’t want to get my clothes torn tangling with it in melee and instead tear the plant apart from a distance, using [Basic Arcane Telekinesis] with a hundred mana as I walk through the chamber towards the exit on the other side.
Ding! You have slain [White Thorn Lily - Level 5]. Less experience awarded.
I walk through the chambers and corridors while tearing the plant monsters apart from a distance as they steadily increase in number. In my third chamber I have to kill six of them but it’s no more difficult than the first one. It’s honestly quite boring even if I get some good practice with using telekinesis as a weapon and not merely as a tool to redirect or amplify my own or my enemies movements.
“Zel, We should definitely train our [Basic Arcane Telekinesis] skill more but doing it on these weak monsters won’t give us much. I say we instead should focus on what we can do with our [Arcane Manipulation] skill. It’s been kind of neglected in its potential as we only use it to manifest daggers, missiles or other tools we need for everyday tasks like our pipe.”
“I guess you’re right about that. Telekinetic force manipulation has been so fascinating and fun to experiment with that I almost forgot about our most powerful skill. There’s surely a lot more we can do with it coupled with [External Modules].”
I think for a little while as I walk through the next corridor, taking the right path at a junction before coming to a dead end, turning back and picking the left instead.
“How about this, Ari. We create a new type of external module to use as a weapon with telekinesis? We’d then be able to level all those skills together.”
“I was thinking along the same lines. We could do that with something like an improved arcane missile but it’s honestly such a boring way to kill creatures. It’s still useful at times but it would be better to have something that we can always keep around like we do our daggers.”
We both spend some time in silence thinking about that as I tear apart plant monsters and backtracking dead ends. A vague idea of a good weapon is slowly taking shape in my mind but I can’t figure out the last pieces that tie it all together. I’m about to ask Ari for her opinion when I step into the next chamber but stop myself as I take in the much larger dimensions around me.
The height and width is about 4 and 15 meters respectively and a lot more of the dim, flickering lanterns fill the ceiling. On the other end of the chamber stand closed, dark metallic double doors and I’m reminded of the chamber where the [Ruby Trance Bat Queen] had made its nest. This must be the guardian chamber then but I can’t see the floor guardian anywhere.
Moving out of the corridor I came through and towards the doors on the other side I’m assaulted by small rocks and gravel from the explosion in the center of the chamber announcing the guardian’s arrival.
It’s a mass of quivering and thorn covered green vines with lengths varying from a few meters to those reaching all the way to the ceiling. There’s a red rose in the center of the plant, 40 centimeters wide and protected by its vines from all sides. I identify it before doing anything else even if I don’t think I will have any problems killing this monster.
[Rose of rage (Floor Guardian) - Level 20]
The monster comes straight for me with its long vines but I adjust their trajectory away from me before tearing the red rose out with a bit of telekinesis. The floor guardian lets out a high pitched screech before spasming for a few seconds and then going still. Where did the screech come from?
Ding! You have slain [Rose of rage (Floor Guardian) - Level 20]. Less experience awarded.
Ding! You have cleared the 1st floor of the Grizklesat dungeon.
The doors open on the other end of the chamber and I step towards them after having extracted a small, red monster core from the rose I’d torn off, voicing my disappointment.
“Well, that was boring.”
“This is the first floor and the Iron ranked adventurers that might be coming here have to start somewhere. Level 20 for a guardian of the first floor is expected since we’d already heard from Maya that this dungeon is more focused on larger quantities of monsters.”
I guess that’s true but I want to have a real challenge again. It was fun fighting the fungi parasites because of the ever increasing difficulty and their adaptation to my fighting style.
I step into the stairwell and sit down on the first step, the double doors closing behind me. The stairwell is made of the same smooth gray stone but there’s a little more moss in here and I think I can see a fly buzzing around near the bottom steps before it flies further down and out of sight. The lanterns in here are placed on small shelves carved into the outside wall going around the stairwell instead of hanging from the low ceiling.
“What was with that name? That didn’t sound like a type of monster.”
“‘Rose of rage’? Don’t you remember that all guardians have unique identifiers? They can be descriptive of what kind of creature they’re representing but they might also be named something completely different.”
“Oh right. I’d forgotten about that. How about the key then? Can you see it placed in our soul, Ari?”
“Yes, I noticed when it was placed. It’s only on the most outer layer of the soul though and won’t interfere with us in any way. No need to worry.”
“I’m not worried, just curious. Anyway, the reason for me stopping was to discuss the weapon we’re going to create. We might as well get it done now as fighting through the upper floors will be a good opportunity to learn to use something new and incorporate it into our style. We don’t want to be floundering when we reach the truly difficult opponents on the lower floors.”
“Sounds like a good plan. Got any ideas on a weapon that will make use of [Arcane Manipulation], [External Modules] and [Basic Arcane Telekinesis]?”
“I do. I’m thinking multiple flying blades that I can manipulate separately to target several opponents at once would be a good idea. I was also thinking that we might combine them to make a larger and deadlier weapon on demand if we ever need to cut through something very large or tough. I’m not sure how to best go about something like that though.”
Ari spends a few minutes thinking about the problem with me before I can feel a sudden burst of excitement coming from her.
“Ari? What did you figure out?”
“I think you’ll love this, Zel! What if we make a ring blade and split it into several parts, keeping it all together with arcane mana when it needs to be in the original shape and releasing the power binding the blades together if we want to manipulate them separately?”
“A ring blade?”
“Imagine a hollow circle, or ring, with sharp edges that can cut from all directions, like a wheel of death. We could make it quite large and keep it afloat in the air behind our back or something. That would look so cool!”
Ari’s enthusiasm gets me all excited as well. The weapon sounds highly unconventional and might be too unwieldy to be practical but we might as well give it a try. It will be good practice for our next weapon if it doesn’t work out in the end.
We set to designing the overall shape of the ring blade first. What we eventually settle on is a hollow circle with an outer diameter of 70 centimeters and inner diameter of 40 centimeters. The thickness of the circle is at 5 centimeters at the spine and tapers off into razor thin edges on both the inside and outside.
We then split the circle into 8 uniform pieces, making the outer edge of each blade about 25 centimeters in length and the inner edges about 15 centimeters in length. This gives each blade the look of a razor sharp, curved axe blade that can come together into a perfect circle.
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The next thing to work out is the mana structure and this takes a lot longer to get right. We use the [Sensors] skill to study the mana structure of the double doors behind us. The material they’re made of is some sort of mana infused metallic alloy and it has to be a good material to use as a guide. It shouldn’t be easier to forcefully get through the doors to the next floor than to kill the floor guardian and gain entry the correct way. It’s therefore the perfect mana structure to take inspiration from as we create our own.
The mana structure we manage to create has a base heavily inspired by the metallic alloy and it’s sturdy and uniform, perfect for using our telekinesis on. The second layer of the mana structure handles the physical appearance of the manifested structure, allowing us to change its color, luminosity and other visual aspects.
The third layer of the structure is the one that makes it all come together though and it is by far the most difficult to figure out. What we come up with is a passive attraction field that tries to find mana structures just like its own and draw them together to specific points. The passive attraction field will only work as long as I supply the third layer of the mana structure with a constant flow of mana, the amount of mana determining the force of attraction.
After we are satisfied with our mana structure and the design we start creating the ring blade for real. It takes about 5 minutes to manifest the whole thing but we’re both very happy with the result. Our growing skill with manipulating the arcane has made an endeavor that would surely take us days if not weeks to complete a few years ago take mere minutes to complete today.
I hold our new weapon aloft in front of me using telekinesis and study it with excitement written all over my face. It’s currently assembled into one smooth ring with razor thin edges and a spine of 5 centimeters in thickness. The arcane material making up the ring blade looks like glossy, white metal.
Between the eight blades making up the circle, golden light is blazing. The arcane material making up the sections’ edges allows the golden energies tying them together to shine through slightly, making it look like the power within the weapon is barely contained.
I lower the amount of power I’m feeding to the ring blade and the segments slowly float a few centimeters away from each other, going back to being uniformly white with hazy, golden lightning silently crackling between the separated blades. Turning the power up again the blades slam back together with a satisfying metallic clang, combining into the perfect circle once more.
Turning the power holding it together off completely and removing the golden glow I try making the blades spin around me using telekinesis. It’s difficult in the beginning but after a few hours of moving them around separately or together in smaller groups I feel like I’ve gotten good enough to be able to hurt something low leveled with them.
I move them back together into the vague shape of a ring before feeding them power, watching them reorient themselves and snap together, assembling into a cohesive whole. I then try moving the assembled ring blade instead of the separated blades and it’s a lot easier.
As it’s one weapon and not eight different blades in its assembled form I soon become accustomed to moving it in every direction I can think of. I even try spinning it and manage to get it to rotate quite fast, becoming a white and golden blur, before my telekinetic force manipulation isn’t good enough to keep up with the ever changing velocities.
I move it to my back and let it hover about 20 centimeters behind me, slowly turning clockwise from my perspective. The top of the ring blade reaches a height just above my ears and the bottom ends just before going past my lower back.
“Damn! That looks so cool, Zel!”
“I know!”
We’re super happy with the end result and I skip around in circles at the top of the stairwell for a little bit, keeping the floating ring blade moving smoothly after me with a slight drag. It’s actually quite easy to keep it perfectly in place and to never get in the way no matter how I move as my sensors do a good enough job with giving me a visual on where it is even if I don’t focus on it. It’s easy to match the kinetic mana of the weapon to my own, making it lazily drift after me without getting too far behind or too close.
The sound of battle on the other side of the door leading to the floor guardian has me stopping in my tracks though. How long have I been here anyway? Is it the adventurers I saw at the inn the other night starting their daily delve perhaps?
Not really feeling like being seen jumping around like an idiot on the stairwell from the first floor I speed down the stairs as fast as I can. It would be highly embarrassing if they believed it took me this long to clear the first floor.
I go down revolution after revolution until I finally walk onto the second floor, not seeing any enemies in the immediate surroundings. The chamber isn’t very large and the corridor leading straight ahead is the only way forwards.
“What should we call this weapon, Zel? I guess ‘ring blade’ is fine when it’s assembled but should we just call the separate parts ‘blades’? It will be confusing.”
“How about calling the separate blades ‘ring sections’, ‘blade sections’ or just ‘sections’?”
That gets me an eye roll but no counterargument. It’s not very imaginative but keeping things simple is the way to go if you ask me.
I run through the short corridor before coming upon the next chamber a mere 40 meters further ahead. It has a new type of monster in it as well. They look like small dogs, 50 centimeters in height and about a meter in length without tails and no fur. Instead they have gray scales looking like something a large fish might have and flat teeth wholly unsuited to cutting through flesh.
Their paws are more like hooves but they look soft and squishy underneath the scales instead of hard like hooves should be. Their eyes are black and they’re all pointed straight at me, hackles raised and showing those herbivore looking teeth. As they charge towards me I identify one of the three.
[Scaled Crusher Canine - Level 11]
I’ve never heard of anything like them but dungeons are known to blend patterns of monsters to create some truly bizarre and grotesque creatures. I let my daggers rest as I use telekinesis to manipulate the ring blade on my back to shoot out in an arc to my right, going wide before returning with speed and moving straight through the three monsters who’d been coming straight at me side by side.
The ring blade goes through them without issue, only bouncing slightly as it separates them in the middle of the stomach, sending entrails and gore trailing out as they instantly collapse and die. I mute all kill notifications again as I’m not going to get anything interesting while killing these low leveled creatures.
I move forward to start extracting their cores with my dagger but stop myself and instead separate the ring blade and manipulate the blade sections to carve up the carcasses. It’s difficult to control that many parts smoothly and it looks more like I’m hacking than slicing. It still gets the job done and I retrieve the three small cores before sending them into my storage ring.
“It worked quite well on these low leveled creatures but I think you should incorporate a spin to the ring blade itself when using it to slice something. It will surely help with getting through tough opponents.”
“You’re probably right. It might have gone straight through without even bouncing if it had a fast rotation.”
I feed the blade sections arcane mana, making them snap into the ring blade’s assembled form before moving it towards my back and continuing into the next chamber. There’s more of the scaly dogs here and I let my ring blade sing as I run it through the four of them, resembling a hollow disc of blurred white and gold radiance.
“That worked much better! The rotation really does help.”
“Told you so.”
The only downside to having the ring blade spin is the absolute shower of blood it casts behind itself as the blood picks up momentum from clinging to the blade before dislodging. It’s not really an issue as long as I don’t want to stay clean, I suppose.
I continue through the next four chambers in the same fashion, meeting ever greater numbers of monsters and only using my ring blade in its assembled form to slice them apart. I then cut out their cores with the blade sections before collecting them and moving on. I get better at it with every chamber I move through and after taking a side corridor into a dead end chamber I grin in anticipation.
[Scaled Crusher Canine Alpha - Level 35 (Roaming Guardian)]
It looks almost exactly the same as its minions but is twice as large and has a few white scales on the tips of its ears. The 30 meter long, 20 meter wide and 4 meter high chamber is filled with at least 30 of the scaly dogs and they all surround their alpha, the roaming guardian. It’s not a high leveled one but it’s a lot better than the first floor guardian.
I meet their charge with my own and even make a pathetic attempt at matching the alpha's howl. I should have just kept quiet as it sounded ridiculous. My ring blade is rushing to meet their charge tilted horizontally to cover as much area as possible while spinning in a blur. As it meets the pack of monsters it just goes straight through them at a height to cut their stomachs in half, leaving the neck and back to slide off the lower part that instantly collapses beneath them.
It even goes through the alpha but I didn’t change the height in time and merely cut its legs off. I run towards the downed alpha in the middle of the pack as the remaining 20 or so monsters come at me from all around. I rapidly bring my ring blade back from the other side of the room and instead of going straight in a path and carving them up as usual I try orbiting it around myself.
It takes about a second for the ring blade to make one full orbit and it’s sadly not fast enough to keep every one of them out. It does slice apart the first few who come at me but their kin behind adapt quickly and use their carcasses as springboards to leap over my ring of death.
I try adjusting the elevation of the ring to match all the monsters coming at me from all around and my sensors are a great help in figuring out the optimal path to get as many of them as possible. I can’t get them all though and that pisses me off slightly. I’ll surely figure out a solution in the future.
Gore and blood shower me from all directions and I have to do a few kicks to get rid of the dead bodies falling on me and to kill those who managed to get through. It’s such a monstrous looking way to kill these creatures and a lot gorier than using my daggers, also so much more fun. Had I really been using melee weapons with my hands all this time? This is so much better!
It doesn't take long for all the monsters to kill themselves on my orbiting ring blade or my steel toed boots. The alpha gives another howl when he’s the only one left but this one sounds as pathetic as my own had been. I give it the mercy it seeks, letting my ring blade slice its neck cleanly off before cutting the power flow to the external modules and using telekinesis to carve up a different carcass with each ring section.
I walk among the bodies and collect the cores uncovered by the split skulls, all the while butchering the remaining carcasses around me as my [Sensors] skill gives me a good enough view to manage multitasking it all.
“You’re getting a good handle on this quite fast, Zel.”
“Yup. It’s quite an adjustment as I’ve been using my daggers to fight until now and only the occasional missile to cover distance or take advantage of opportunities. It’s really been a waste of our potential to ignore the more ranged magical aspect in favor of only using our body to fight.”
“Hm. You’re only partly right I would say. We didn’t have the required mana or [Basic Arcane Telekinesis] when we started creating our fighting style. We also had to delve deep into melee to really get a handle on our new body and learn how to work it to its utmost potential.”
“I suppose that’s true enough. But now with our great ability to multitask and enough mana to support all these external modules we should really be able to increase the amount of carnage we can deliver. We just have to get used to wielding this strange ring blade of ours and then start thinking of ways to improve our close quarters combat.”
“True. What’s our [Multitasking] skill at now anyway? We turned off all notifications regarding it as soon as we got it and we haven’t checked our full status sheet in quite a while.”
“No idea but it must be quite high as I’m getting used to manipulating the velocities of eight different external modules while simultaneously collecting cores and talking to you. Let me check.”
Ding! General skill [Multitasking] has leveled from [134] to [587]
“Holy shit, Ari.”
“I honestly thought it might have been higher. Don’t forget that I’m multitasking a lot of stuff all the time even if you’re not. This body doesn’t run itself after all.”
“I suppose that’s true. Thank you, Ari.”
“For what?”
Ari sounds slightly confused.
“For being ‘The brain of the operation’.”
I chortle at that and Ari joins me with a giggle. It had been she who coined the term all those years ago in the dungeon core chamber after all.