My skeletal tail shot forward, wrapping around the end of her spear. I didn’t bother trying to pry it from her grip. She was far too strong for that. Instead, I simply redirected its point off target, giving me a clear shot.
Tossing the spear to the ground, I dropped Magma Fist momentarily to let Crimson Incubus cover my other fist as well. I stepped forward with all of my weight to throw a powerful overhand right. Despite my superior speed, she’d raised her elbow to block my coming blow, deflecting it to the side. I was off-balance, but she wasn’t fast enough to stop my left hook to her ribs. Despite my own strength and powerful body, it was like hitting a solid wall. She had to weigh a ton.
With Mana Sight at full power, there wasn’t any real danger of her hitting me, but I couldn’t help but acknowledge her martial skill. With every attack, she positioned herself to have a defensive advantage. Her attacks were crisp and never left her off balance. My superior speed still allowed me to find opening after opening, but with my current Strength, my fists weren’t enough to cause her any real harm. As weak as the Faeastein were, this form their queen had taken was just the opposite. Her flesh might even rival the Fire Incubus Form.
Jumping back, my tail changed from skeletal to the condensed Fire Mana flesh of the Crimson Incubus. I gave it a frighteningly sharp point that should pierce her flesh even if her form matched mine in hardness.
At this distance, her spear became her weapon of choice and she took full advantage of its reach. Because of the leverage she held over it, her speed seemed to increase as well. It wasn’t nearly enough, but I didn’t dare to turn Mana Sight all the way down because I respected her skill that much.
As I dodged her attacks, I used her to sharpen my own abilities. The increase in stats had given me far more coordination than I’d ever had before entering the Underworld. It could be said that superior stats did make up for a lack of skill to a certain degree. I’d done a lot of fighting in the last couple of months, so I’d come a long way in regard to skill as well. I couldn’t help but admit that I still had a long way to go. Skill hadn’t been the thing that saved me countless times but manipulating my perception of time and counting on my many magic abilities had. It would be nice to add some additional skill to the equation.
I still needed to test my form against hers, so I pulled my tail in close to myself, grabbed it with my main hand, and choked up on it as if it was an actual sword. All that I had to do was command it with the shifting of internal mana, and a razor-sharp blade formed on one side. I even created a guard. There was one huge advantage to this kind of sword, mainly that I could change its shape at will to get around my opponent’s defense. Practicing that was another skill that I needed to master. For now, I would work on my mediocre swordplay.
I lunged forward and drew back before the queen could even respond. Even limiting Mana Sight and relying on a normal blade wasn’t enough to truly level the playing field. It did allow me to change my normal focus and study her good defensive movements.
For the next ten minutes, I danced around her. My sword found its mark two-thirds of the time, but most of my successful hits were surface level at best. Her spear swung and thrust, not at my current position, but where I would be. It was a game of chess for her—sadly one she couldn’t win. It was only when I started to get a feel for the rhythm of the fight that I finally scored a good thrust on her forward-facing hip. Even then it didn’t sink in deep but left her damaged for the first time. The three-inch puncture wound disappeared as her body repaired itself, which left me laughing. All that work and nothing to show for it.
Bounding back, I held up my hands and said to her, “Do you speak?”
The response I got was a return of her intense glare and the raging hum of fire that was drinking in a heavy breeze. It was definitely a language I couldn’t understand.
“She said that if you’ve grown tired she will happily grind you into powder,” the lich said. He was standing close behind me watching the fight.
The queen lunged to test my endurance. I was sure that with her 7,000 Constitution she was used to outlasting most of her enemies. With my ability to heal, unless I ran out of mana, that was never going to happen.
I jumped to the side to dodge and couldn’t help but chuckle. After my time sparring with her I really didn’t want to just kill her.
“I’ve been comparing her armored skin against that of my form but haven’t come to a conclusion of which is better because our stats are so different. I don’t know if she’s as tough as she is because of her Constitution, or because her rock skin is just that tough…” I said.
“Do you want to fasten her down to experiment on her?” the lich replied.
“No!” I said, glaring at him. “I’m not interested in torture. She’s also very skilled and I’d like to keep sparring with her.”
Seeing the conversation, the queen halted her attack and looked between me and the lich. If I had to guess, she was more afraid of him than she was of me. It was likely what held her back for the moment.
“If you want to take her as a slave, you will have to overwhelm her with far more power than you’ve shown. She currently thinks she is more than an even match with you,” Shamash suggested.
I shook my head. “I don’t want her as a slave. If she travels with us for a while, I’ll let her go.”
The lich began speaking in the airy tones of the queen’s own language. As the point was being received, I saw the scowl return to her face. She attacked.
As her spear sped for my gut, I stepped to the side and flicked my hand out to catch her spear’s shaft with the same hand that her first spear had pierced. Lowering myself to pit my Strength against hers, I stopped her dead in her tracks. In the battle of strength I had a slight advantage, but she had a hold of the spear with two hands and I held it with one.
“You told her that we would let her live?” I said with strained words.
“Yes, and that you meant her no harm,” the lich replied. “And that you are impressed with her and would like to have her as a sparring partner. As I said, you must give her a show of strength. You killed her people, plus she’s not exactly impressed with you.”
She began to win out.
Looking her in the eye, I saw what I should have expected to see. Hatred. Technically, her people had attacked us first, but, to be fair, we probably would have slaughtered them anyways. It was still unreasonable for her to be willing to discuss such things. Fine.
I flooded my body with mana. Master Muscle and Mind Buff began to fill me with strength. It was only a moment before I’d stopped her forward movement. Cutting my buffs at 10x, including Crimson Incubus’s innate buffs, my Strength jumped to over 12,000. I began to push her back. Slowly at first, so she could fully understand what was happening. With a single thrust, I sent her flailing to the ground. Walking over to where I’d left the other two spears she’d thrown at me, I added another one to the pile.
She wasn’t finished. With another spear taking shape as she lifted herself off the ground, she lunged at me with a two-handed grip. Mana Sight wasn’t necessary to do what I did next. With over twenty times her Dexterity, I showed her the extent of my speed. As she began to lunge, I appeared before her and grabbed a hold of her spear’s shaft before she’d registered that I was there. With both hands, I swung the spear while she was still attached to it and sent her flying back the way we had come. Only the wall of the dungeon stopped her from going any further. The rock crumbled under her weight and she fell with a pile of rubble that buried her. She picked herself up soon after. I let her see me standing with her spear in hand a couple hundred feet away before making my next move. Even as she brushed herself off, she seemed to be looking down her nose at me. As she came to her feet, I turned into a blur before her eyes. The next thing she knew, her spear was being held against her throat.
I watched as the remaining fight bled from her when she noticed her predicament. Her legs lost their strength and she fell to the floor, defeated.
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Chapter 9 – Buckets and Buckets
I let my buffs fade and spun her spear around to offer it to her. She looked at it for a long moment before taking it. I pulled her to her feet with it before releasing it into her care.
“So, am I to take this as a yes?” I said.
“Yes,” Shamash replied. “She now considers herself a slave.”
“Tell her that it will only be for a few days, and then we’ll leave her here when we leave and she’ll be free to do as she wishes.”
He relayed my message and she gave him a short response.
The lich relayed the gist of what she said. “She says that you might as well kill her as you did her people for now she’s all alone.”
“Will it be possible to find more of her kind?” I said as I studied her. Defeated or not, I could see her fighting spirit hadn’t left her as her eyes bored holes right through me. Perhaps this was a bad idea. If she was going to attack us every time she got the chance and we’d have to keep an eye on her—should I just let her go? I could use the experience from killing her, but after killing her people and making her spar with me, just coming right out and ending her was a little too dark for me.
Watching Travis as he stepped up to stand beside me while holding the three spears she had thrown at me, I could see the worried look in his eyes under his helmet. I voiced my concerns to the group.
“I can bind her if you wish, but she seems to know what I am,” the lich said. “I don’t think she’ll be a problem.”
“Tell her that you will bind her only if she becomes a problem. She’s to leave all fighting to us and isn’t allowed to engage unless something attacks her directly.”
She seemed to grind her teeth as Shamash relayed the message but in the end she looked at me directly and nodded that she understood.
***
I was thankful that the rest of the dungeon’s monsters had kindly waited for us as we got everything settled. Except for when I was channeling my buffs and making a big magic commotion, they all seemed to be minding their own business.
Travis gave one of the queen’s spears a twirl and tested its balance. Nodding to himself, it looked like he wanted to see what it was capable of.
“They’re impressive,” I confirmed.
Giving me a shrug, he deposited his own spear, as well as the extra Firazite ones. Turning his attention to the mobs before us, he picked out the biggest one and headed straight for it. There was a good distance between us and the rest of the mobs on the dungeon’s ground floor. Individual mobs were giving way to the larger groups and there was little hostility between them. Even the larger groups seemed to be willing to share. So why had the Faeastein attacked?
I watched as the giant Wererat that Travis was aiming for had no chance to react. It was one of the largest ones we’d run across and was nearing level 600. From ten feet away, Travis’s spear expanded, drilling into the creature’s ribs. There was little resistance against his built up momentum, so that the energy spear went right through it. The remaining seven Wererats attacked like starving bear-sized beavers, but the other creatures in the immediate area scurried away and fled.
A wall of spears slammed into the attacking Wererats, then Travis finished off the remaining three that were still moving with the refined Firazite spear. It didn’t have the give of a wooden spear, but neither was it brittle enough to snap from the strain on its shaft.
Looking up from his kills, Travis also noticed that many of the mobs in the area were fleeing.
“Let them go,” I said. “There are plenty remaining that look like they’re willing to fight.”
Just like the Wererats, there weren’t just fire creatures here scavenging. The ground floor included many huge insectoids like beetles, centipedes, and scorpions, but also rock monsters. Some of the insects might be unique species as well, so they might give bonus experience. Unlike the humanoid Faeastein, I had no reservations about killing large bugs and rats.
We returned to our original formation, but this time I kept Mana Sight at full power and did a better job of surgically removing incoming mobs that might overwhelm Travis. I was ready to move in an instant in case another Firazite spear came flying at me out of nowhere.
After the first couple groups of mobs, Travis figured out how to activate the Firazite spear’s fire attribute and flames sprouted from the tip of its blade. It was like a precision blaze and changed depending on his desire. For the fire beasts he deactivated it, but for everything else, he shifted between using his Piercing Skills and the spear’s magic.
It took no effort for me to understand how he activated the weapon. With Mana Sight at full power, I could see the mana flow from him. It was a trickle at best, but it was enough for him to control the weapon’s flames.
Just as with the Faeastein, the numerous Fire and Stone Elementals dropped truckloads of ore before all was said and done. How exactly there were elementals here that usually required summoning, I couldn’t say.
There was little need to traverse every inch of the ground level. By the time we’d reached the ramp to the second floor, with a few exceptions, most of the mobs willing to fight had already come to us. Nearly half of the mobs that had originally been scavenging when we first arrived had fled.
I held back a truck-sized scorpion’s stinger with my skeletal tail as Travis danced back and forth in front of it while trying to find an opening to pierce the monster’s head. The mob caught his spear with its pincher for the second time, but he was too quick jumping to the side for its other pincher to grab him.
Instead of yanking the spear away, he activated his energy extension skill and an ethereal spear point buried itself in the creature’s face. I felt it go slack and let its stinger drop.
As was common with the insect type mobs, I was able to steal the Ebony Scorpion’s essence, but it provided me with another form that didn’t level up. Neither did the Stone Centipede and Fire Beetle forms I’d just acquired. I’d increased the amount of mana I channeled to Force Learn to 20,000 with each use, which was giving me better results than before. It rarely failed to provide me with a new form. I still feared I was bound to end up with hundreds of forms that I’d never use.
The biggest benefit of the insects was that some of them I hadn’t faced before, so Drain gave me a decent take of additional stats.
+16 Str
+12 Dex
+141 Con
That did it for the ground level. Now that it was cleared, it was time for us to decide what to do with all this ore.
I systematically put another 18 levels’ worth of stats into my Wisdom as I headed to the nearest wheelbarrow’s worth of ore that was piled unceremoniously on the group where an elemental had fallen. These creatures, including the Faeastein, had offered some decent experience. They also dropped far more ore than the elementals had in the Head Mistress’s Bone Palace.
I immediately contacted Richard to let him know that I was going to unsummon one of the five working golems I’d left in Sanctuary.
“Sweet,” he replied through his communication skill. “George will just put one of the Cave Swine to work.”
“He can do that?” I replied.
“I don’t know. I’m just kidding. That would be cool, though. All that those enormous things do is eat.”
I snorted. It hadn’t been long, but I was missing the guys—even Richard. “After we finish with this dungeon, we’ll have to catch up. Hopefully we’ll have some loot to send your way.”
“I call dibs on any extra armor!”
“Unless I think Russ will want to break it down, it’s a deal!”
With that, the conversation ended, and I canceled one of my golems. Because of how far away we were, I had no idea exactly how it should work, or how quickly. The golems didn’t rely on me providing them mana, so they were essentially self-sustained. Animation only allowed me to have 7 golems active at one time though. Why exactly did the spell care about the maximum golems and how did it track the number? It
was all a mystery, but that was the rules of the spell.
Picking up a handful of Firazite, I cast Animation as I tossed the handful to the side. There was no delay. At this point, the spell cost very little to summon a normal Golem.
Animation
Level 77
Mana Cost: 1,150 (115 with bonuses)
Single Golem’s Base Level is Equal to Caster
Note: With additional ore, a Golem’s level is limited to the Caster’s channeling ability and the amount of mana provided.
Multiple Golem’s Max Level is Equal to 90% of the Caster’s Level
Note: Golems are Now Capable of Following Complex Instructions Without Micromanagement
Of course, I used many times what was necessary to help speed the spell’s progression. Twenty times the base amount seemed reasonable. I laughed to myself as I watched the fire golem take shape. This spell had shocked me with its original 5,000 MP cost when I’d first learned it. That much mana had once made it the costliest spell I owned, but now 5,000 MP was nothing.
The Firazite I cast it on became the creature’s core, and flames flowed out from it to create a humanoid form. The core wasn’t an orb like we were used to, but slightly larger than a human heart. The golem’s body was literally made of fire and only its heart-shaped core seemed to possess physical substance. I was sure there was probably more to it than that.
Despite my excess mana channeling to the spell, the creature only reached level 432. In other words, I needed to use more ore. Grabbing more from the pile, I unsummoned the Fire Golem and it collapsed into a pile of dust. None of the ore remained in its original state. It was as if the Fire essence that naturally existed in the ore had been sucked out.
Casting Animation again, this time with twice as much ore as before, my Fire Golem took form and was over twelve feet tall with a Firazite heart larger than my head. It reached level 780, which was slightly higher than 90% of my caster level.
Underworld - Vampire Gate: A LitRPG Series Page 7