Day 121
MIDDAY
Some dungeons are real holes-in-the-wall—or holes-in-the-ground, as the case may be.
A FRONTIER DUNGEON
GREED, THEY SAID, would be the downfall of us all. And, as I got a bit greedy and started air running with hyperreflexes, tripped, bashed my head on the ceiling, and fell down—I thought I’d have to agree! Downfalls, falling downs—same diff.
“Had I not lessened the impact with Qing Qigong, that would’ve been two dead Harukas with one stone ceiling!”
I got sloppy because I’d wanted to rush through this battle, head outside, and have lunch. I hadn’t planned to meet my doom at the hands of a fantasy-world dungeon ceiling, but life always conspired to find a way to trip us up. Literally, in my case.
“Shouldn’t I have a way to negate this issue? Wisdom, have at it!”
The level 49 gravity phantoms could, you guessed it, manipulate gravity. Qing Qigong wouldn’t do nothin’ on them. The phantoms didn’t cause air movement when they glided around, and they frequently yoinked me straight to them with their gravitational powers while I was up in the air. This made for highly unsafe flying conditions. Fighting them was turning into a bit of a hassle, so I whipped out the spirit-banishing charms I had purchased in the Theocracy and waved them in their phantom phaces. The phantoms phell like phlies. Phrom there, it was a simple matter of sweeping across the room until the last phoes had phainted.
“Phighting would’ve taken phorever. Exorcism is much phaster! We have to make up lost time from the phunnel battle, so let me multitask a bit. I need to get the phly juice off my poor phunnels. Phortunately, it’s nothing a little Water and Vibration magic can’t phix. Lemme just scrub them down a good seven times over. God, I wish I had more insect-repelling plants…”
Slimey mopped up the phinal phantoms for a quick bit of phood to tide him over until lunch.
“Is that Sublimation or Digestion? Either way, guess what’s up next? The 50th floor.”
Jiggle jiggle.
Oh good, more undead.
“Hmm… The floor boss is a darkness-element wraith, so our Holy-magic-main Saint should be able to hold her own. Its stats are pretty high, but it’s a scaredy-cat. Oh look, there it goes, falling to the floor.”
Wiggle wiggle.
The level 50 Dark Wraith, a beast cloaked in the twilit trappings of death and darkness, was fortunately not a servant of the darkness—it was just a regular old undead Dark magic main. It was equipped with a rapier imbued with the Instakill Trait and a robe that erected a protective Dark magic wall. Worse, it slung Instakill spells—or it would have, had it not been stuck on the ceiling. Why had it been stuck on the ceiling, you ask? ’Cause Sleeping Beauty had skewered it with her halberd, where it’d wriggled and writhed until, upon exhausting its strength to free itself, it collapsed to the ground and died of fall damage.
“Um… It’s true that the Saint’s Sacred Staff’s blade pierced the Dark magic wall. But the rest… The wraith fleeing up to the rafters, the ensuing stabbity-stabbity-stab, the falling, the collapsing into a spellstone upon the ground… I don’t know if I’d call that an epic battle betwixt the forces of darkness and light. Rather, it’s more an epic failure to defeat the forces of physics.”
But this did prove one thing—Dark magic wasn’t affiliated with the darkness. Sleeping Beauty’s Holy magic tore through this creature’s barrier with such ease that, had she been so effective against the darkness, she would never have lost her fight in the ultimate dungeon. The darkness wasn’t magic, then, nor an element of its own. Its only weakness was my divine swords, which suggested it was an enemy of god—oh no. They said an enemy of an enemy was a friend. Did that put us on the same side?
“Nonsense! I don’t vanish when you stab me with a divine sword. Unless I’ve just built up a resistance to them after being around them for so long…”
Bobble bobble.
Slimey interrupted my doomspiraling to bring me the boss’s drop item. Good boy! Head (?) pats for you. Hm? Why are you lining up, Sleeping Beauty? You want head pats too?
Back to the drop item. It looked like some basic-ass black ring, but Appraisal labeled it thusly: “Dark Ring: Intelligence +30%. Dark Magic. Shade. Dark. Smokescreen. Blind. Instakill.” Ooh, I liked the intelligence buff…but Dark magic was meh at best.
“All it does is turn off the lights, y’know? But creating darkness could be kinda cool. I could put it with the other ring and make a darkness futon. Maybe I’ll have to reconsider tossing this guy.”
Intent on wasting no more time, I zwooped off to the next floor and broke out into a trot. Bullets whizzed overhead; I shot magic spell after magic spell. Ice magic unlocked new frigid Freeze Bullets. I didn’t have stellar control over them yet, but they were certainly fast and energy efficient. Packed a pretty good wallop, too. I could fire off these babies in rapid succession and never break a sweat.
“Freeze! Get it, ’cause—’cause it’s Ice magic? Get it? Man. Talk about a cold reception.”
Shards of ice and balls of flame skated around each other, riding the rush of wind off the various exploding golems around us in a delicious chain reaction. Level 51 bomb golems were, apparently, exploding flame-element monsters. The church’s exploding old dude suicide bombers were based off these monsters, or so I’d heard. I was also told the monsters were a lot less cute ’n’ cuddly than their churchy counterparts, but I was more willing to snuggle up to a fireball than an old man. Explosions were awesome enough as they were, and really, nothing could beat old men in the not cute department. I must have been given wrong info. Oh well. Anyway, let the fire-and-ice bullet hell commence!
“Huh. Mitigating the thermal energy via an ice bullet equals a smaller explosion. I guess it’s true what they say—you don’t know how ice you have it until it’s gone.”
Wiggle wiggle.
These would-be arsonists kept rushing at us and detonating the moment they got in range. Their fires refused to go out, creating balls of flame with major staying power. Attacking with ice bullets weakened their explosions and stopped the fires from spreading literally everywhere, but still, I didn’t want the golems to get too close—it was tedious, having to dodge all those bombs. You know how it is. So I launched a quick salvo of ice bullets to keep the bomb golems at arm’s length.
The splinters of ice froze the ground solid, and in its mirror reflection, a galaxy’s lifecycle played out in miniature: supernova explosions, star clusters of sparks, twinkling comet shards of ice. The chain reactions kept getting a little too close for comfort. Sleeping Beauty wasn’t even level 40 yet, after all. The last thing we wanted was a golem ramming her and blowing her sky-high. She, armed with an ice spear, and Slimey, armed with his slimey self, rushed into the fray heedless of my worries. Even with Sleeping Beauty’s Magi Elemental bangle, I felt like a spear shouldn’t be the weapon of choice against a bomb… But what did I know? She got through it without so much as a singed hair.
“Nice going out there. You okay on MP? Keep an eye on your breathing and lianqi, ’kay? No, no, no. Not the ‘hoo, hoo, hah’ thing. That’s different. Well…you’re having fun, so who am I to stop you?”
Jiggle jiggle.
“What is, inside, magic spells? That thing, you added to spell. What, that? Strong, whatever it was.”
Oh, the warheads? Being a fellow magic main (kinda), Sleeping Beauty was quick to pick up on the purpose and unique traits of my magical ammunition.
“Here, check ’em out. I call them spellstone warheads. I take a chip of a cheapo spellstone, put it on a magic circle, and harden it into a point. In the same way that magic alone struggles to stop physical attacks, physical weapons alone often fail to deal damage to magical beings. A bullet with a magical warhead, then, is almost impossible to stop. It also saves on MP and decreases the chances of the enemy reflecting the bullet. Just watch out for ricochet.”
I gave her one to play with, and she was quite intrigued, adding her own MP to it and running it through her fingers. I, too, was a fan of pulling on and tweaking and twisting and rubbing certain bullet tip-shaped obje—please don’t aim the magic bullet at me! A glare is one thing; a weaponized flare is another!
“It’s difficult to defend against a combined magical and physical attack—that’s why there are so many magic swords out there. But no one’s put much research into magical weapons of mass destruction. It’s a waste of MP to bull your way through magical barriers via magic, and losing kinetic energy defeats the purpose of a physical attack, so that’s why it’s a must to think outside the box and penetrate barriers with a third kind of energy. Yes! When it comes to penetration, se—”
Glare!
The downside of magic warheads was the impracticality. Turning all those lumps of spellstone fragments into bullet tips was a tedious task. Rock, however, was in ready supply everywhere, so it was nice and practical to commandeer it into magic weapons. Although, come to think of it, there weren’t a lot of rocks just lying around in dungeons…
“It’s most effective to use a warhead that matches the element of whatever bullet you’re casting, but we sometimes have to make do. Low-rank spellstones are free to come by, and what other use are we gonna have for them? Make ’em into cheap and easy bullets, that’s what I say. You could also make better, high-quality warheads from more powerful spellstones, but that’s a waste of resources, by my count.”