by Matthew Peed
“Yes, Creator!” an automaton answered over comms.
Based off Natsuo, the mechanics were quite powerful outside combat, though these would be his upgraded version. As a mixture of all the smith models, they were slender and possessed the ability to shape just about anything that fell under terra’s jurisdiction. With four arms, they were able to work quickly.
“My girls will be done in less than a minute,” Queen said in her human form.
“Oh, Queen. Decide to join the fun?” I asked when she walked up next to me.
“We are rescuing your princess from her tower. I felt it would be better for me to participate than to sit back,” she said with folded arms. “Plus, my floor is basically automated now. That’s the reason I was here in the first place when I felt the ability to move between the dungeons get locked.”
“You wouldn’t happen to have some imprinted knowledge about that as a floor boss, would you?” I asked hopefully.
“Sorry, my lord.” Queen bowed her head.
“It’s alright.” I waved her off.
The mechanics, which were all basically clones of Queen, quickly reached the front lines. Walls of steel and stone rose around the drill sites. They were able to make it like a fort so that all the drills were included in one large wall. Weapons placements soon joined the walls. As these were humanoid undead, they went with machine guns and some heavier artillery.
It looked like my decision was the right one. The rate the undead army was turning to dust had dropped significantly. There were still about two hundred left, plus the main boss. I could sense that Anubis was reaching his limit. He would need time to recover from the massive amount of mana he had used.
“Anubis Corps! Make ready. The spell is about to wear off,” I warned.
“Second division has reached main breach!” the comms announced.
The damaged drill suddenly broke through, dropping down to the floor. It righted itself and resumed its work. A few mechanics jumped off it, their feminine faces covered in grease and grit but looking like they were happy with their work. I checked the time. They’d managed to repair it in less than ten minutes. I was impressed.
“Your girls are quite handy,” I commented to Queen. They did have four of them, after all.
“Thank you for the compliment,” Queen said with a curtsy.
“That was a good warm-up, but I need something more challenging!” Vetur shouted when he landed on the front line.
“Anubis is about to be out of commission for a time. Protect him,” I ordered the new forces as they joined the first division.
“My brother!” Vetur said.
Anubis suddenly collapsed. The darkness that filled the room soon flowed back to him in a surge. The remaining hundred and forty or so undead collapsed but almost immediately stood back up. The two-headed undead troll roared, causing pieces of the ceiling to collapse. With a surge of mana, he started to charge the defensive line.
“Fire!” I ordered.
The weapon placements began to unload their ammunition into the wave of undead, blowing off pieces of them with ease, but the undead would continue to charge until their heads were destroyed. This was more difficult than it sounded, as the armor they wore was thick enough to protect them from the machine gun fire. Even if it managed to blow the head off, it could pick it up and restart the charge if it didn’t get shattered.
A wave of explosions soon joined the symphony as the mortars and cannons went to work. They fired in a fan pattern to cover as much of the oncoming horde as possible. The undead troll took one full in the chest, its armor managing to protect it from the worst of the damage, and it soon made it to the wall.
The troll crashed into the wall. Its amazing brute strength from being both a troll and a zombie ripped the walls to shreds over a span of about five meters. It would have been bad, but when the troll glanced back to check its army, only about ten remained. Those were soon focus-fired down to bone meal.
“A worthy opponent! I challenge you. Let us see who the stronger dungeon floor boss is!” Vetur shouted as he spun his staff.
The undead troll glared first at him, then at the drills behind him that were almost out of sight in the ground. It roared and leveled its massive two-handed sword at Vetur. Vetur grinned and took a stance. They both began to channel mana. A massive pillar of dark and unholy mana formed over the troll, and a similarly sized pillar of blue and white formed around Vetur.
A tension filled the air. Then in a blink the battle began. Vetur shot back with an explosion of ice, and the troll followed him. The troll’s massive sword ripped into the ice like butter. Vetur formed several dozen spears of ice that floated around him, then launched them. The troll obviously couldn’t feel pain as it took them full on, each being embedded several centimeters into him. When there were nearly ten spears, the troll spotted them, then ripped them out. The massive holes quickly closed.
“Good! An opponent that can handle itself,” Vetur exclaimed happily.
The troll brought his sword around, and a massive black wave followed the edge. Vetur reacted by creating a wall of ice to block, then used it to slide farther from the attack. He reminded me of a surfer. The troll kept it up, sending several more strikes toward Vetur.
I glanced at the drills. They were starting to cut through the ground faster, which meant they were out of the floor’s influence. They would slow down when they hit the next floor, but with their speed, it wouldn’t take long.
“Vetur, end it soon or I’ll have the others join in,” I ordered.
Vetur sighed. “Always a rush. Of course, it’s a battle so I understand.”
The ice mana that was forming a pillar around him suddenly condensed into a sphere while he came to a dead stop in midair. The blades of darkness collided with his sphere and . . . froze, in much the same way Z2 had frozen Noir’s darkness during the tournament. The darkness was frozen in midair. Vetur kicked off from the ground and stopped right in front of the troll. He tapped him with a single finger, and all the mana from the sphere snapped into the enemy.
Vetur turned around and started to walk away from the troll. About five meters from it, he snapped his fingers. The spot on the troll where he had pressed his finger started to crack, and soon the frozen troll fell to pieces.
“Are you an anime protagonist?!” I mumbled. All he needed was some wind blowing his cloak around him.
“Anime, Monarch?” Queen asked from next to me.
“Huh? Ah, nothing. Don’t worry about it,” I replied.
With the sixtieth floor taken, there were less than forty to go. I was winning the mini war, but I wouldn’t press my luck until I had Alara’s core in my sights. There were an untold number of ways that the tide of the battle could shift. The mechanics started setting up the cables so that mana could be sent down, basically shifting the current support line to the sixtieth floor.
With the lull in the battle, the only thing left was to wait until the drills broke through to the next floor. Depending on how Alara had designed her dungeon, it could be anywhere from ten meters to a thousand meters. Taking my own dungeon as an example, twenty meters separated the first ten floors, then it ranged from fifty to five hundred for the next. The asteroid floor had six hundred meters on either side of it, just to be safe.
“Readings are in. Time until breach, five minutes!”
So, roughly a hundred meters for this floor. She was sticking to how she’d built her earlier floors, or whoever designed the dungeon was. The first forty floors were all designed how I figured a nature dungeon would be, with groves, forests, and plains, but all horribly twisted. It made me feel some real anger at the loss of such beauty. I may like my modernization and metal, but I knew the gifts that nature provided. One of the divisions back when I was still in control on Earth was made up entirely of drones that planted trees. I think my company managed to reforest more of Earth in a year than all of humanity combined for the previous thirty.
“Vetur, how’s Anubis?�
� I inquired, looking at Vetur in the monitor.
“The stones are recharging him now. He should wake up in three minutes,” Vetur sent back.
“Good. Keep a watch. I want you to go with the next wave. I can only assume that the floors will get more dangerous,” I sent back.
“Yes, Creator.” Vetur bowed, then the screen closed.
“Breach in thirty seconds!” was announced via comms.
The forces waiting for the breach began jumping down the holes. Some of them had flying equipment and would hover right behind the drill once they reached it. For the less mobile, levitating platforms brought them down at a slower pace. The main bulk of my forces was still on floor fifty-five.
“Tunnel enlargement in ten minutes!” reported a different comms automaton.
I glanced over to that section of screens. Rods were being lowered down each hole that were the same length as the tunnel. Inscriptions on them were pulling all the unholy and dark mana that came anywhere near them. Once they reached critical mass, well . . . boom.
“I am awake, Father,” Anubis reported as he regained consciousness.
“Are you good to continue?” I asked, concerned that I was pushing him.
“I can continue!” he declared, then jumped down the hole with Vetur.
“Breach!”
The drills broke through simultaneously, falling a great distance. I was impressed at the size of the cavern. The height alone must have been near two or three kilometers. The drills activated their thrusters but still took a bit of a beating when they landed. The other forces quickly joined them and formed a protective circle.
“Drills have been damaged! Mechanics report they’ll need ten minutes to get them all repaired. Drills One through Three can continue, but it will be at reduced efficiency,” comms reported.
“Hold off until all drills are repaired. I have no intention of splitting the forces any more than necessary,” I ordered.
“Visuals in, putting them up now!” another automaton reported.
A mountain appeared on the screen, surrounded by an eerie forest. Alara had even managed to create a night view inside the environment that cast a new full moon over the floor. There were no monster sightings yet, but there were mana readings all over the floor.
“Readings show that this is most likely four floors combined. It displays the same mana structure as the Creator’s.”
“So, a boss is on the next floor. All the more reason to sit and wait,” I murmured. “Alright, we’ll wait one hour! The armored division will have met up with the front line by that point.”
“I wonder how the mortals would feel if they saw you tearing through a dungeon in this fashion,” Queen mused aloud.
“Hopefully, they’ll never have to find out,” I replied dryly.
“I pity any mortal kingdom that pisses you off, Monarch.” She snickered.
“So do I,” I added, thinking about the annoying politics that would most likely result in me turning their city into a pile of rubble.
“Movement detected on the floor!”
“What is it?” I asked, turning toward the feeds.
Trees that were forty to fifty meters tall were crashing to the ground. Whatever was moving toward the front line was massive, causing the units with cameras to shake. I ordered some drones into the air for a stable feed. It only took a moment before the creature came into sight.
Nearly twice the size of the undead boss troll from the previous floor, a . . . monster crashed through the forest. It looked like it was made from hundreds if not thousands of bodies. Several giant-sized heads sat on its shoulders, all of their mouths gnawing with a desire for food they had been so long starved of. A few of the bodies were distinct enough to make out from the distance, and they had looks of anguish on their rotting faces.
“Designate target as Behemoth! Begin firing when in range!” I ordered.
I couldn’t begin to get a read on this thing’s abilities. Its mana rating was through the roof, even higher than Anubis and Vetur. It had to be tier three. I just hoped its “parts” were its weakness. If we could destroy enough of its body, it might collapse in on itself.
The few artillery that had already made their way down aimed at the Behemoth. They loaded explosive rounds and began firing nonstop. The barrage certainly made the massive undead stop moving, but debris soon filled the air and the feed couldn’t make out the damage being done.
“Hold!” I ordered, and the barrage quickly came to a stop.
Tension filled the air but was immediately broken when the Behemoth stepped through the cloud of dust. Craters littered its surface, but the bodies that it was made of started to move and reshape the Behemoth to “repair” the damage. I personally wanted to say it looked a little smaller but wasn’t confident in that assessment.
“So many tortured souls,” another voice said from next to me. I glanced to the left and found Julie standing there with a serious face.
“That bothers you?” I asked.
“No, but it will be hard to kill that thing. It has thousands of souls to power its mana.” She shook her head.
“Hmm. You done with your toys?”
With a shrug, she admitted, “I broke them all.”
“Fair enough.” I nodded.
“And I suspect it’s not the only one on the floor,” Queen added from the other side.
I grinned. “Then it’s time for a little fun.”
“Tunnel enlargement commencing!” a comms automaton reported.
Soon there was an explosion that shook the entire dungeon. The ten-meter-diameter holes were blasted to nearly fifty meters, easily large enough for some of my bigger weapons to finally make their way down. Mechs jumped down, relying on their boosters to reach the floor safely. Weapons platforms with more armaments than a sane person might feel were necessary followed, being lowered via antigravity platforms.
By the time they reached the front line, the Behemoth was only a hundred meters away. The new forces wasted no time pointing all their weapons at the monster. Beams of energy, concentrated bursts of mana, and physical rounds that could crush a person if they were dropped on them slammed into the Behemoth. There was so much firepower that it literally forced the massive undead to fall over, crushing several trees.
It couldn’t repair what was vaporized. If it were a bit faster, it might be able to dodge some of the weapons fire, but this thing was built to take a hit. Even with the barrage, it managed to last for a solid four minutes before I finally got a drone to drop an Anubis metal bomb on it. When the bomb detonated, the shards ripped through the undead and pulled massive amounts of unholy mana from it.
The entire encounter took ten minutes, and that was for just one. As if on cue three explosions echoed throughout the floor. I sighed, then ordered all my forces to concentrate on the closest Behemoth. Looking at their positions, I could see it was going to be close. I went ahead and ordered several Anubis bombs to be sent down.
Thirty minutes later, all threats on the floor were eliminated. Luckily, these undead were mainly just large. I could see it being nearly impossible for regular adventurers, but I’m not an adventurer. I made sure to send scouts out in case there was something hidden or equally dangerous but found the Behemoths were the only real threat.
“Drill maintenance complete! Divisions One through Five have all reached the front line. Division Six is maintaining guard duty until the next wave of reinforcements arrives from the gate.”
“Alright. Resume drilling!” I ordered.
Sparks soon began to fly as the drills reactivated. We were much closer to Alara’s core now, so I tried to reach out to her. The wall was still there, but it was much weaker now. I wasn’t surprised it was because we’d killed so many of the necromancers on the previous floors. Controlling a dungeon core must require a tremendous will, something I wouldn’t doubt several or even hundreds of people worked together on.
I frowned when I felt the wave of pain from her. I knew my method was
the cause, but it was the fastest and most assured way to get down to her. I felt past the pain and smiled when I sensed a tiny bud of hope buried in her. Slamming my fist on the arm of my throne, I thought, I promised to save you and will do so.
Chapter 15
Izora
Allowing no one on the deck was a rule that had to be added once we were underway. If they went out there, they would be thrown from the airship, that was how fast we were moving. We nearly lost a crew member when we accelerated outside the valley. Next time Lord Regan said he was upgrading something, I planned to make sure he explained the changes more fully first.
“At this speed we’ll reach home in two days,” Captain Shido commented from where he was studying some charts.
“Good. Three months is much too long to be away,” I said, thinking about how long we’d stayed in the valley. While Jade Wind might make me feel claustrophobic, it was where I’d grown up. Even with how amazing my time at the valley was, I still missed home. I only feared it would be a place I never wanted to return to now that my mother had passed away.
Sure, I easily felt the time away had been worth it, given the advance of our magic and people, and I really didn’t want to leave, but I would never deny that Jade Wind was my home. Nothing could change that. I just wished my mother would be there.
“The airship is going to hold up, right?” I asked idly, hearing some loud creaking beneath my feet.
“This ship is completely different than it was when we came,” Captain Shido answered with a grin. Whatever Lord Regan had done to his ship, the captain must have really liked it.
“Alright. Let me know when we arrive,” I ordered, then left the bridge.
I retired to my cabin and sat down at my desk. I felt a sensation from the lance created from Regan’s mana and reached forward to grab it off my desk. As always, I felt complete when I took ahold of it. Something I didn’t mind, considering Lord Regan was the one who’d given me this power, inadvertently or not.