DAY 119
MIDMORNING
If I’ve learned anything from Urashima Taro, it’s don’t beat up turtles if you want hot girls to take you home!
A KINGDOM DUNGEON
37TH FLOOR
I DIRECTED THE NERDHEADS to take the speedy, wheely, carriagemobiley to a different dungeon while the girls took a slower route back to the frontier. Looking over my map of dungeons speckled across the Kingdom, I realized it was highly likely that I would need to take a detour and knock out as many of them as I could. I didn’t have time to fiddle-fart around this dungeon, then. Time to get a move on.
“Hello? Did you hear me? What part of ‘get a move on’ do you not understand? Stop spawning one at a time!”
It was like yelling at a brick wall—or “Mimic Walls, Lv: 37,” if you would. When you heard “mimic,” you thought treasure chest, right? Not these guys. They were all wall.
“…Which is kinda an issue, if you think about it. The word ‘mimic’ means one who practices ‘mimicry,’ a noun that contains several disparate definitions in and of itself: imitating, resembling, parodying. But these mimics are not imitating infrastructure. They do not merely resemble rectangular roof-reinforcing ramparts. And parody? Parody of perpendicular pavilion-propping partitions? Ha! No, these mimics are walls through and through. Which means I can go smashy-smash? One-man demo crew with a crowbarlike implement?”
See, this floor was an unsolvable maze. The walls shifted such that, no matter what route you took, your escape would be blocked at every turn.
“Look, Jupiter Eye shows me you’re mimics… You could come out en masse for group smashing therapy, y’know. It’d be faster than waiting for you to block my path one at a time.”
But they did not. They sat there as unmovable as—well, walls—and waited for me to approach. They wanted the unobservant to wander into their midst and get lost in the ever-scrambling labyrinth. By the time their hapless prey had caught on, it was too late. Boom went the walls and splat went the adventurer.
“But if you know the trick ahead of time, boom goes the wall via your crowbarlike implement? It’s hard, boring work, but someone’s got to do it.”
I placed my hand on one of the walls. Holding magic seeped out until it covered the wall’s entire surface area. I controlled my breathing; I tempered my qi. Magic surged through my veins and sketched arcane sigils across my physical form. My qi and magic became a farrago of how far I’d go for victory and slammed through the wall in a rolling, rollicking wave. No brute force, no powerful tremors—just a single, subtle oscillation at a precise frequency. Just the Vibration magic developed through incessant, adolescent, finger-lickin’-good training!
Brrrrrrrllglllglgglglglglglg!
Talk about a wake-up call! Even Sleeping Beauty looked alive when the walls shuddered and wailed like my well-pleasured partners in Vibration-training crime. Technique and magic melded. Qigong and Skills synergized. The ubercharged spell sent magical shockwaves shuddering through the mimicked brickwork until the would-be architecture came crumbling down around me.
“All physical objects possess a set of ‘natural frequencies’ at which they tend to oscillate when disturbed. When synthetic stimulus is applied that mimics this natural frequency, the object’s oscillation will continue rising until the object destroys itself. Thus, according to these principles of sympathetic vibration, we find the key to destroying virtually anything we please. Especially if we slap ‘tongbei’ on the attack name.”
“…Huh?” in triplicate.
Theory, however, rarely played out perfectly. Vibration destruction was inversely proportional to the distance from the stimulus squared, limiting its utility as a long-distance attack. That’s why I used Holding magic to latch onto my targets and pump out qi and magic shockwaves. Mimicry be damned, these faux walls shook like their real counterparts!
Yeah, I think I’ve got a better hang of controlling my magic than controlling my body at this point… I was relegated to the back row in most dungeon runs whenever locomotion became my sole focus. Now, the dungeon emperors were the ones sulking behind me with nothing to do but watch me massacre monsters en masse. I could feel the glares bore into my back as I cast Vibration magic—I had interrupted them moments before a tongbei bash fest. Sorry!
The Vibration magic made me a real threat. No, not to monsters—to my female companions. They glared at me so frighteningly I cut short my plans of trying another Vibration sympathetic frequencies spell and returned to smashing walls one by one. Vibration magic paired well with the Universal Crowbarlike Implement. That rapidly pulsing rod was a miracle tool in the right hands… Why were the girls eyeing it in fear?
“What? I’m giving everyone a turn with my thunder rod! Wouldn’t want to stint on the magic stick, right?”
Glare!
While I was in this great spirit of experimentation, I added a pinch of Vibration magic to the earth elemental hengquan. Skill factorization activated and a wall shattered into a pile of rubble!
“Whoa! The nerds were right! Wuxingquan was made to pair with magic. I’ve unlocked…magic fist! Unless the nerds tricked Wisdom into making a weirdo cheat ability again… Whoops.”
Double glare!
This development opened up all kinds of new possibilities. I could use wuxingquan to counter enemy spells or enhance my own spellslinging! Combining magic and martial arts allowed me to devise whole new forms of fighting. Were Hoplology and Entanglement a cross of magic and martial arts in and of themselves? Maybe… Who was to say? Regardless, this demo job was truly breaking new ground!
40th floor, here we come. Aaaand…it’s a golem. Well, what’s good for the fake walls is good for the golem.
“It’s certainly an efficient fighting method, if a bit boring… One tap from the crowbarlike implement or a wallop of hengquan, and these earthworks go down like dominos.”
Earth was inextricably linked to fire. Fires burned to ash—and from this ash fire created the dust we call earth. Following this formula to its logical conclusion, fire-element cannonballs + earth-element magic = ashes to ashes, dust to dust. This fighting style packed a wallop—on the flip side, it was difficult to control and very, very extra.
“Yeah, I can never remember if fire begets earth, or water destroys earth, or… I think I need to get a flowchart, sit down, and memorize it!”
Speaking of memorizing, because wuxingquan was the only fighting art available to me in my weakened state, I drilled it so it would become muscle memory. I didn’t do anything fancy; I just repeated wuxingquan moves over and over. Upping the ante could come later—when the dungeon emperors were less glare-happy!
“I can’t even do ichi no tachi yet. It’s guaranteed to kill me if I try. Plus, practice got me slapped with teenage girl sashimi allegations, so I’m better off quitting while I’m ahead. Oddly enough, I never knew studying the blade had anything to do with human sashimi…”
I walloped the would-be walls; I gashed the genuine (I guess? I dunno what they were—earth elemental monsters, at any rate) golems. Wood beat earth, so I whipped out my wood magic.