Dungeons and Noobs

by Ryan Rimmel

  Activating Mana Control, I infused the weapon with a slight amount of Mana. It looked dim, due to being unattuned. Since Badgelor was still gorging himself on Scorpider, I took the time necessary to attune the weapon. As my Mana seeped into it, I became aware of its capabilities. Its current issue was that it lacked poison.

  Walking over to Badgelor, who was busy gnawing on a leg, I pulled out one of my daggers. Carefully, I began to cut into the Scorpider’s tail, searching for the poison gland. Thanks to my Poisoner perk, the gland was highlighted in purple. It only took me a few moments to expose it and cut it out.

  “Thanks, that stuff gives me gas,” stated Badgelor.

  “Considering how much of that stuff is in my system, we all better hope it doesn’t,” I said, delicately expressing the venom into vials. Once I had milked that gland for all it was worth, I discarded it over my shoulder. Then, I carefully poured a small amount of the raw poison into the back of the Scorpow.

  I reached back to cock it with its almost syringe-like plunger and felt the weapon drawing slight amounts of Mana from me. Checking my bars, I confirmed it was only a single point of Mana that I quickly replenished. The fast result of the poison was impressive. The venom had formed itself into a magical green bolt. I inhaled sharply. Lifting the weapon to my shoulder, I aimed at a nearby rock and activated my Power Shot skill.

  ● Rock takes 65 points of assorted Damage. (50 Points of Poison Damage and 15 Points of Piercing Damage) Cost:10 Mana.

  “Can rocks take Poison Damage?” I asked.

  “From magical sources, sure,” replied Shart, glancing at the hissing green rock.

  The familiar sensation of lockdown that my other crossbow caused didn’t happen, but I also didn’t get the extra boost that my mechanical crossbow gave me. I considered that for a moment and decided it was a wash. The extra power was useful, but locking out my Mana pool put me at an extreme disadvantage. Now, I could use a crossbow without crippling myself.

  ● Magic Shot, Damage 65 Magical. Cost: 10 Mana

  I could also still use my Magic Shot, allowing me to do a double shot like I had been before. The cost of the Magic Shot was much greater than when I was shooting a regular bow, but I didn’t need to cock the crossbow, either. As I was focusing on the Magic Shot, I realized that there was a new shot option.

  ● Web Shot, Damage 0, Entangling. Cost: 2 Mana

  Next, I tried the new Web Shot. That seemed to be a kind of shot specifically for this bow. It caused a solid glob of webbing to fly out and stick to whatever it hit. It got better, though. If I concentrated, I could make it stick to the bow as well, allowing me to quickly generate a rope. There were even handholds on the weapon to make it easier to hold while swinging.

  Reaching backward, I slapped the Scorpow to my back. It instantly adhered there with some webbing. No amount of shaking would break it loose, but when I reached for it, the weapon came right off.

  “SueLeeta is going to have a cow,” I chuckled.

  “Surprised you aren’t going to give it to her,” stated Badgelor.

  “I’m sure she’s found a better bow by now. Besides, I’m a gentleman, not an idiot,” I said, petting my bow protectively.

  “Debatable,” deadpanned Shart.

  I held the tip of the stinger. Even without the poison, the stinger was painful and cruel looking. Small spines ran the length of its tip. With my crafting skills, I could already see a half-dozen different ways of adding it to my weaponry. Alas, all of them would take equipment and materials I did not have. I’d just have to make do with the totally awesome Scorpow.

  “The amulet is less obvious,” said Shart, “But it grants Spiderwalk. That allows you to walk on walls, like a spider, for up to fifteen minutes a day. Don’t ask, Dum Dum. You can’t wear two amulets at a time, unless you have two heads.”

  I looked down at my groin.

  “Well, you have about as many brains in that one as you do the one on your neck, but no. For some odd reason, penises don’t count,” said Shart sarcastically, rolling his eyes.

  “I’ll have you know my wife said I did most of my thinking with that one,” I smiled.

  “That explains a lot,” said Badgelor.

  “That’s what’s wrong with you? You lack experience thinking with your brain and not your head? I see,” said Shart, before he lifted off my shoulder.

  “For your information, it was perfect,” I said calmly.

  “Well, it's not now,” grumbled Shart.

  I picked up the amulet. It was impressive, exuding more power than my Amulet of Shadows. I was considering my options, when Badgelor looked over at me.

  “Can I have that?” he asked.

  I looked at the tiny strap holding the amulet and perceived that it was magical. “Sure. I’m curious to see how that fits.”

  “It's always so annoying. For you humans, it's a nice little necklace. However, that’s not the case for me,” grumbled the badger. He pushed the metal spider symbol onto his neck, and the little leather cord that was supposed to hold it expanded. First the cord thickened. Then, it grew much longer to accommodate Badgelor’s massive neck. By the time it was done, the amulet was very clearly a collar. Badgelor looked upset and happy at the same time.

  He walked over to the wall and placed his front paws on it. Within moments, he had climbed to the ceiling and was standing overtop me. I stepped to the side as he released and flipped, landing neatly on all four paws.

  “That’ll do, Jim. That’ll do,” stated Badgelor.

  “Are you ready to kill Charles now?” I asked.

  “Yes! I can feel that we are getting closer to him. Pretty soon, I’ll spot the bugger. Then, it's curtains for him,” stated Badgelor. He headed for the exit that led deeper into the dungeon.

  “Hopefully, we will find Charles soon,” I said, rubbing my face with my hands. I debated taking a healing potion but decided to hold off for the time being.

  “Me too. It would be nice to finally get rid of Badgelor,” stated Shart.

  “Maybe he’ll calm down once we kill Charles,” I retorted.

  “Imagine Badgelor calm,” chuckled Shart.

  I grinned like a loon, feeling some blood from my earlier wounds run down my cheek and into my mouth. It tasted like badger balls.

  “Damn it, Badgelor,” I said.

  Chapter 37: Skills and Powers

  “I think we are getting closer,” I stated, as I attempted to sense where my other party members were.

  “You could just check the map,” grumbled Shart.

  “I’ve already zoomed out as much as I can. From what I can tell, they aren’t on it,” I stated.

  Shart grumbled more and reached into my mind. Instead of going toward the group, he began retracing our steps. Pretty soon, he was back up the crevice and to the floor where everyone else had been.

  I got some notifications on the map about where treasure had been located, based on SueLeeta’s findings. Shart spun the map around for a moment, then found the door they had traveled through last. He zipped off in that direction for a while. Several rooms and a boss later, the demon found five of them sitting around a fire.

  “Dungeons are non-Euclidean space. There are only a few constant points, so you sensing them ‘that way’ means jack and also shit,” stated Shart. I tried to see where I was on the map, but I was lost to the strange folds that made up the space. Zooming in, I could at least see all my party members were alive, and that their health bars were full. Several of them were low on Stamina, though.

  “Bashara’s not there,” I said.

  “I didn’t see her anywhere else,” replied Shart, before grinning wildly. “Guess that situation sorted itself out.”

  I wanted to say something, but I didn’t have any witnesses around. I opted to keep my mouth shut.

  I glanced at my Stamina bar and realized I was in the same boat. There was no nefarious reason for it. We had been in here for hours, and everyone was tired. I looked around for a place to rest. Now
that I wasn’t fully engaged in battle, I had to admit that this place was pretty spectacular.

  We were in a natural looking cavern with a massive waterfall on one side. The entire floor was made of jagged rocks, with a single stream cutting through the middle. You could have flown a jumbo jet through here, the cavern was so vast. We were about half-way up one side, and there was a massive bridge spanning the cavern. The bridge curved, so I couldn’t see what was on the other side. Our side had a nice covering of moss with a small fire pit in the center.

  “Safe zone?” I asked, as I stepped into it. Badgelor stepped past me and plopped down in the moss. He promptly started snoring.

  “Yes, it’s fairly normal after a boss to run into one of these,” said Shart. “I could explain the reason, but you wouldn’t be interested in it.”

  “I have perks to go over,” I said. There was a poof from my shoulder. Shart hated it when I tried to figure out my perks, but it still needed done.

  Flipping over to Alchemy, I was actually interested in how I’d earned enough Skill Points to level that particular skill. With Jarra the Healer making potions constantly, I hadn’t had much need to practice. Turning to my skill logs, I found the reason quickly enough. I had suffered hundreds of points of Poison Damage, but my Poisoner perk reduced that Damage by 50%. Because I had that perk, whenever I took Poison Damage, I’d also get Skill Points. I’d taken an absurd amount of Damage.

  As it was a crafting perk, all the bonuses seemed to be moving in that direction. Dual Flasks let you make two potions at once, if you had twice the normal amount of ingredients. Miserly Flask let you make more doses for less reagents, but the benefits didn’t include rare ingredients. Those options didn’t look appealing, so I continued sifting through the dozen or so possible perks. Finally, I spotted Superior Weapon Oils. That one was more impressive.

  ● Superior Weapon Oils: You can turn any base potion into an oil. When crafting a weapon oil, you can apply a mixture to the formula to allow additional properties.

  Whenever I leveled up my skills, I tended to pick up a bit more poison knowledge. I knew oils were superior ways to put poison on blades. That was my biggest issue with general poison use at the moment. More often than not, I couldn’t actually get the poison where I needed it, when I needed it. Furthermore, most of the poisons I knew how to make didn’t easily convert into an oil. This corrected everything, all at once.

  The application of a mixture was also handy. Mixtures were kind of like chasers for potions that would grant them additional effects. Jarra the Healer could do that for healing potions. At least one of the healing potions I’d gotten from her also granted a Stamina buff. The problem was that mixtures tended to degrade after a while, at which point both the potion and the buff typically stopped working.

  I selected Superior Weapon Oils and moved on.

  Monster Lore was easier. As a Woodsman, I had Hunter’s Lore, which was an improved version of general Lore. However, Lore itself had many categories, from Insect Lore all the way up to Demon Lore. I had dozens of ranks in Lore. In this case, my Monster Lore had finally leveled because magical insects that were hybrids of two species were Monsters. The other creatures, the ones that were mostly just big scorpions or spiders, were classified by the as insects.

  As usual, the bigger and meaner the creature was, the more Skill Points you gained. Fighting a boss Monster was a huge gain; fighting house flies was not. The perks for Monster Lore were actually pretty simple, broken down into two general categories. You could choose something that gave you faster information, or you could choose something that gave you more detailed information. They were pretty narrowly defined. I took a moment and found one with more detailed information that I liked.

  ● Improved Monster Criticals: Locations where a strike would cause increased Damage will highlight in your vision.

  That seemed the most helpful, so I selected it.

  That left me with Swords and Fancy Footwork. Swords was, likewise, a pretty simple choice. I had enough defensive options, so I focused on Damage. When I’d hit Journeyman a long time back, I’d taken Unavoidable Strike. It let me use the Force of my Will to strike a target unerringly. That was great, but I’d frequently had to make some compromises to get it to activate. Now, I was looking for a purely passive benefit. I found one quickly enough, when I spotted Enhanced Damage.

  There were damage types for physical attacks. At the lowest level, it was simply untyped Damage, which I was tremendously resistant against. After that, you got up to the higher tier damages, like Slashing, Piercing, and Bludgeoning. Those had better results when striking a target. A Slashing strike could sever a limb, while a strike that simply caused Damage would just give you a bruise.

  My Soldier’s Longsword did about half Slashing and half normal Damage. Thanks to my Sword Master perk, I also did 2 points of Severing damage. Severing was the more serious version of Slashing damage. Where it took 10-20 points of Slashing Damage to remove a limb, a Severing attack could do it in 5-10.

  Plus, armor on Ordinal mitigated Damage. My armor caused a certain amount of Damage to be converted from Severing to Slashing, and from Slashing to Damage. The higher damage types were always harder to resist, so anything that could reduce such Damage was a plus.

  That’s what I was looking for, Enhanced Damage. It would turn absolutely all of my Damage into Slashing Damage. It would also make my strikes much harder to ignore.

  That left me with Fancy Footwork. When I’d first hit Journeyman, while training with Glorious Robert, I’d taken Combat Reflexes. It was supposed to further enhance my reaction time, especially versus attacks from multiple opponents. Yet, when I’d chosen that perk, it didn’t seem to change anything. Now, I wondered what it was going to do, because I didn’t have an accurate yardstick.

  I scanned through Fancy Footwork, searching for something to pick. Unfortunately, the Journeyman perks could be divided into two categories, better Dodges or closer Footwork. The problem with focusing Fancy Footwork toward Dodging or Footwork meant it became a more expensive version of that skill. I needed to pick something that made Fancy Footwork better.

  As per usual, there were too many options to review. Filtering to find something useful was impossible, based on my criteria. Except. . .

  Instead of trying to filter out the options I didn’t want, I used my filter to deselect all the perks that met the criteria of being either a better Dodge or a better sidestep. That left me with only a few options.

  The first was called Leaf in the Wind. It simply ignored the penalties for avoiding multiple attacks. Given that additional attacks increased the cost of Dodging, Leaf in the Wind held some potential. Next was Whipping Willow Branch, which let you avoid an attack in such a way that you’d be in an optimal position to counterattack. Finally, I saw another Force of Will perk. I had to take it.

  ● You have gained the perk, Perfect Dodge. You can, without fail, avoid any one attack directed at your person. Cost: 30 Stamina, 1 Force

  My Force pool also increased by one, for a total of two points. I was living the dream.

  The Mage Knight choice was also easy. I had spotted a talent called Weapon Channeling. It allowed you to channel your spells through your weapon like it was a wand. That didn’t sound impressive, until you realized it meant that I didn’t need to have a hand free to cast certain spells. Those just so happened to include almost all of my Biological Aeromancy spells.

  Sitting down next to Badgelor, I flicked my fingers toward the firepit and ignited the loose sticks that were there. Shart was sitting on the stones, and, as the fire started to burn, he sighed contentedly. The demon concentrated on the fire for a moment, and it began burning brighter.

  ‘Magic could do just about anything,’ I thought and recalled that I’d leveled up Arcane Lore to Journeyman. I hadn’t selected a perk at the time, mainly because I didn’t have any idea what I was doing. Now, I did have an idea. I found what I was looking for quickly enough.

&nbs
p; ● Arcane Scribe: Allows you to develop and record advanced magical runes.

  Each magical spell was cast using runes. Those runes were similar, but not identical to, the magical runes I used when inscribing something. So far, my main issue had been that I was using basic runes, which were both simple to use and underpowered.

  The main reason for that was, in order to make a spell work, you had to use those runes to program the spell. The instructions I had for those programs were very simple. The second issue was that I could only maintain a certain number of runes at once, and that number was six. Beyond that, I couldn’t focus enough to keep the runes functional for the spell.

  That was what made my simple spells, like Flame Stream, do more Damage than the more complicated spells, like Fireball. When I cast Flame Stream, there was one rune to make the spell into a stream, and a second rune to make it burn. Fireball had a similar effect, but required three runes. I could stack additional runes, using the pair of Flame Stream runes three times while casting, and I’d get a spell that was three times more powerful. With Fireball, I could only do that twice, so it tended to be less effective than I hoped.

  However, with BioLightning, I’d combined the Aeromancy runes with a Lightning Bolt’s runes and compressed them into a single rune. That meant I could stack BioLightning up to six times. Doing so required quite a bit of mental focus to pull off, but I could do it. I’d combined those runes with Arcane Lore. Doing so had improved that skill.

  I reviewed all of my casting runes using Arcane Lore. I quickly found that, of the ones I knew, only the ones in the Fireball spell would actually work to make Fireballs. I got a solid impression that the other runes would be explosively incompatible.