The Quizard Mountains: A Dungeon Core Epic (Station Cores Book 2)

by Jonathan Brooks

  Soon enough, the tunnel narrowed as the sides sloped inwards, creating a doorway just barely taller than Mox. It was relatively narrow, so her muscle-bound husband ended up needing to turn sideways to fit through. Once they were past that non-obstacle, the passageway opened to its former proportions and the traveled down a short section of it before it turned into the first room she had sensed.

  She could see that Moxwell had paused at the threshold as he looked inside, assessing threats as his vision roamed over everything. When he didn’t see any immediate danger, he took a cautious light step inside the room followed by a few more. He’s really taking my warning to heart.

  Even standing outside the room, she could barely sense anything other than there were some faint emanations of body heat scattered throughout. It was only when she stepped into the room proper that she was able to at last use her Air affinity to “map” the room.

  The walls, floor, and ceiling were made of a strange stone – black with white spots running all over it – but there were also columns of sandstone slabs that led up to the ceiling. Using her Earth affinity, she could tell by their placement that they were precariously stacked, as if a firm push would bring the whole thing toppling down.

  “Whatever you do, don’t touch the columns,” she unnecessarily warned Mox. He wouldn’t touch them anyway – he was too good for that – but she just wanted to make sure.

  He acknowledged her order with a grunt as he continued to walk along the room.

  There were also strange concentrations of the body heat she had sensed along the sides of the various columns. Using her Air affinity – which was still largely unreliable due to the concentrated power – she could feel large lumps along the columns, as if they were a tumorous growth sticking out of them.

  A soft click grabbed her attention as Mox stepped on a portion of the floor that dropped beneath his foot. Suddenly, he was by her side with his shield extended as he blocked a long wooden spear that had shot out of the wall. It ricocheted off and went spiraling away, its momentum mostly spent by the time it came to a rest against a distant column. Even that small of an impact caused the sandstone slabs to shake a little, but fortunately it stayed standing upright.

  She thanked him for his timely rescue, even if she didn’t need it. Just like the detection field she always kept active, she always kept a hardened layer of air surrounding her body. Normally it was a thin layer, enough to stop someone from knifing her in the back, but before she entered this place she had thickened it considerably. There was a slight draw on her pool, but the protection was worth the expense in power.

  Moxwell was even more cautious after that. Although it was extremely hard to see, especially on the black and white floor, thin lines denoted other sections where these “traps” were set.

  The only other event that occurred was when some of the “growths” attached to the columns dropped down on them and attempted to take them by surprise. She had already warned Moxwell about them after the first trap went off so neither of them was surprised in the least. They had been ambushed too many times in the past by wilier beasts and their reaction times meant that even if they were surprised it didn’t last long.

  It was almost a shame to destroy the larger versions of the cute little animals she saw so many of out in the forest. If they weren’t trying so hard to kill them, she would have let them live. As it was, however, neither of the two Proctans gave any mercy as they quickly and efficiently slaughtered each one. Mox sliced two of them in half with a few almost bored-looking swipes, and Rosewyn created a super-thin sliver of sharp, hardened air that – with an unneeded but sometimes satisfying wave of her hand – quickly beheaded the other two. She made sure the slivers dissipated shortly afterwards, because she didn’t want to accidentally knock down a column.

  They avoided every other trap they spotted, dispatched another dozen or so cute fuzzy enemies, and shortly saw the exit from the room up behind a nearby column. That’s when, of course, they were attacked by the remaining body-heat signatures she had detected in the room. Over twenty of the large brown woodland creatures came at them at once, dropping down from the columns and attacking from all sides. They put their back to a column so that they wouldn’t be flanked from behind and prepared to slaughter some more of their relatively harmless opponents.

  Unfortunately, the large group of attackers had other plans. While half of them kept Rosewyn and Moxwell busy with their basically suicidal attacks (which seemed strange to Rosewyn, as even the dumbest creatures they’d ever faced off against tended to have some sort of survival instinct), the other half completely bypassed the defending pair and aimed for the column behind them.

  They both realized the creatures’ different target (if not exactly their intent) a moment too late, and as a result they were unable to prevent all but three of the fuzzy animals from impacting the unstable pillar of sandstone blocks behind them. Everything happened too fast for her to comprehend what happened; the next thing she knew, she was flying forward, eventually landing on her face as she skidded along the floor. The air barrier around her absorbed the impact and she quickly turned around, noticing that she was safe outside the area of destruction.

  She didn’t see Moxwell anywhere and she started to panic as she stared at the pile of sandstone rubble topped by a large circular piece of the strange black stone ceiling. Shocked at the destruction that erupted in the last few seconds, Rosewyn froze as she heard something shift underneath the curious ceiling remnant.

  Convinced that this was her husband, she used her Air affinity to try and lift the stone and was surprised when it only shifted an inch or two before the strain on her power started to become significant. However, that extra bit of leverage was all Mox needed to lift himself out of the devastation, using his enhanced strength to raise it even further.

  She could see the strain on his face – which was doubly strange because she had honestly never seen it before on her husband – as he attempted to stand up completely underneath the outrageously heavy disc of relatively thin stone. Eventually, with a little more power that Rosewyn pumped into the lifting force, coupled with various braces she formed out of the sandstone underneath, he was able to wiggle out of the deadly trap. Fortunately, it was only deadly for the creatures who caused the ceiling to collapse; she could see small flattened body parts and blood when the rubble was exposed for long enough.

  “Are you ok, my love?” she asked, with concern on her face as she observed numerous bleeding scratches along his forehead and cheek. Within moments, however, they closed up with just the rapidly-drying blood left behind as evidence of any wounds.

  “What the fuck was that? I barely got you out in time – if it wasn’t for those stupid bastards getting in my way at the end I would have made it out as well. Goddess-damned suicidal beasts!” he looked both angry and confused at their actions, “and sorry I had to throw you, there wasn’t time to be gentle,” he apologized, which made her heart melt even more since he was the one that was squished under the ceiling, “ah, damn, I lost my shield! I loved that shield…”

  “We can see if we can get it back if you want,” she told him.

  “Nah, we’ll get another one for me later. It would take too much power and time to fix – it absorbed the initial impact and practically crumpled under the weight. Speaking of that, what the fu—,” she stared at him, silently conveying that one curse word in the heat of the moment was enough for one day, “uh, heck is that stone? I’ve never felt anything that heavy – it was heavier than a house.”

  She believed him because she’d seen him try to lift a house to impress her when they were younger. He succeeded in lifting it but ended up cracking most of its structure and had to help rebuild it. Even then, though, he hadn’t strained as much as he had a few moments ago.

  She was curious about the stone herself. She walked over to the giant heavy circle and placed her hand on it. Normally, the way she was able to learn about different rocks, dirt, and other minerals w
as to hold a sample of it in her hand and “commune” with it, for a lack of a better word. She knew other Elemental Casters who could just touch it for a couple seconds and learn everything they needed; she was jealous of the ease some of them exhibited during the learning process. However, that was just how it worked for her and there was nothing she could do about it.

  Either this sample was too large to properly “commune” with, or she needed to physically lift it – because she got nothing. It was also possible that the power-saturated environment was interfering with her senses, like how it was disrupting her detection fields. No matter the reason, despite trying for a few minutes she got no further in understanding (and thereby being able to manipulate) the stone beneath her fingers.

  Mox was respectively silent as she went about her research, because he knew from experience that she didn’t care to be interrupted. To be fair, I can get a little irritable and won’t hesitate to snap at him – and he knows it. Instead of raising her ire, he brushed the sandstone dust off his armor and got ready to move on when she was done. He busied himself with looking around for any more threats and potential traps around the last small stretch toward the exit.

  Knowing that time wouldn’t make any difference in her success at understanding the stone any more, she didn’t want to waste any more of it. “I have no idea what it is, but before we’re done here I want to see if I can get a small sample of it. I can see many applications for something like this. I wonder where it came from…but that’s for later. Lead on, my hero!” she added with a smile.

  Smiling back at her acknowledgement of his life-saving actions (which was probably true, since she wasn’t sure how her protections would have held up under that kind of weight), he carefully picked his way through the rubble and got them safely to the door without further incident. They didn’t have to worry too much about being attacked on their way out since she was reasonably certain that the suicidal fuzzy brown creatures had all died in that last attack.

  Another tunnel greeted them as they exited the room where they had narrowly escaped with their lives. If it hadn’t been for my husband’s speed and strength, it was quite possible that I and even he might’ve died.

  They never worried about death before, because it was a normal part of their lives as members of the Guardian Guild. However, now that they were married and looking forward to their – hopefully – long lives together, she started to regret taking this last job. If anything happened to her love because of the Cordpower Company, she didn’t know what she would do.

  All she knew was that they would rue the day they ever hired her.

  Chapter 30 – Cheater!

  “Did you see that! How did he do that? There’s no way he could have survived the ceiling being dropped on him! He must be cheating somehow – hacking with a cheat code or something. So unfair!”

  He knew he was rambling, calling out accusations as if he was back on Earth yelling at someone else through a computer screen. He’d known of plenty of people who’d been banned in the games he used to play when they tried to manipulate the game code, giving them things like invulnerability and duping (or duplicating) items. What he just saw looked just like that – except it was real life. At least he thought it was; sometimes he still wondered if he was in a coma somewhere and this was all a dream.

  “Based upon what you showed me, the probability that he’d survive that trap was at least 50/50. Now that we’ve seen what he can do, I would probably change that to 90/10.”

  “That doesn’t help, ALANNA,” he told his AI guide, as she experimented with a personality that was somewhere between soulless construct and no-nonsense science teacher. Well, that’s what I think it sounds like.

  And he wasn’t even the worst of their problems. The other one with him, the Elemental Caster[26], was so powerful that he was worried that their dungeon wouldn’t be enough to stop her. After he saw her status – and after he recovered from his subsequent freak-out – he changed his strategy around a little.

  Normally, he would’ve sent something aboveground to test their abilities, thereby knowing how to prepare and change anything inside the dungeon around to better stand against them. Standard gamer operating procedure – find out their strengths and counter them, find out their weaknesses and take advantage of them.

  When he considered that she was nearly the highest power “ranking” Whisp had told him about, and her Intelligence and Wisdom were in the thousands, he thought better of it. Especially when he saw that somehow, she had mastered her affinities with the four main elements – and had two that he had only heard of used in games before: Light and Dark. There was no need to test her abilities – she was an unstoppable freak of nature.

  The armor-clad Proctan by her side wasn’t much worse[27]. Although he wasn’t an affinity master like the Caster, his Physical Augmentation abilities ran the gamut of possible ways he could enhance his body. With his ability to raise his Strength by 2,600 points, his Agility by 2,100 points, his Constitution by 2,000, and his Perception by 1,660, he was going to be like a freight train barreling through their dungeon. Added to that the fact that he could heal himself and others using their flesh, and the two of them were the whole package – they really didn’t need anybody else.

  That left two options: surrender and hope they didn’t kill them all outright, or fight and hope the dungeon was deadly enough to at least dissuade them from pushing deeper. He obviously didn’t want to surrender, so he decided to do everything he could to kill or injure them enough to get them to leave. He didn’t have much hope, but he would throw everything he had at them after they entered his dungeon.

  That was why he left them alone aboveground – he was betting the element of surprise would at least give them a fighting chance. Being forewarned is being forearmed; or at least that’s what he lived by when he would utilize strategies against monsters, dungeons, and other players in the games he used to play.

  He worked on finalizing the placement of his defending Combat Units in the first seven rooms, fiddled with the traps throughout the entire dungeon (he even added a few from his Defensive Weapons Factory in the rooms without defenders with his dwindling BMU reserves), and again tried to contact Brint without success. He was hoping his Proctan friend would come back in range and hurry back with what was left of his Raid Group – he was going to need their extra firepower to pull off a successful defense.

  Before they arrived, he tried to send Whisp down to her workshop where she would be safe, but she refused to budge from the Core Room with the reasoning that if Milton was destroyed she didn’t have a chance against them anyway. Giving in, he allowed her to stay and ALANNA volunteered to keep her apprised of the incoming attack.

  Milton’s initial assessment of their far-superior abilities proved to be right on the money. Their reaction time was incredible and his Squirrelings didn’t even have a chance to get close to them. When the one trap they set off released its deadly projectile, the Augmenter moved so quickly he appeared to teleport from one place to another – it was only when he went back afterwards and slowed down the recording that he could actually see him move.

  And now this – even the extremely heavy Weightonite ceiling falling on the guy hadn’t killed him. He was fortunate that the Caster couldn’t learn enough about the heavy stone to manipulate it; if she had, he didn’t think he had any chance to pull this off. When he checked their statuses after the ceiling collapse, he was excited to see that they had ended up using a small portion of their available power to dig him out. At least the room had served a purpose, even if it didn’t kill or injure them.

  The war of attrition against their dwindling power pools had begun. Now, I only hope they don’t have any Power Potions on them…

  Chapter 31 – A snake in the grass

  After an eventful experience in the first room, Rosewyn hoped – but didn’t really expect – that to be the extent of the security system here. The strange stone, the odd behavior of the beasts, and the entire s
ituation was so out of the norm that she didn’t even know what to think anymore. She felt like they were way out of their element here, but also as if it was something that they were meant to face. She didn’t know how to explain it; it just felt right to challenge themselves against this place.

  Well, dummy, you wanted an adventure before you retired – this is it.

  No matter what she felt, however, they had a job to do. It didn’t look like it was going to be a quick “get in and get out” kind of deal here – whatever this deal was anyway. The disturbance in her detection field was even worse as they traveled to the next room, leaving her without the ability to sense anything past what she could visually see. On the surface, she could feel that this place had a lot of rooms or “voids” because of the black and white-spotted stone, but once she got inside this place she was effectively distance-blinded.

  As they walked down the tunnel, she could see that despite losing his shield, Moxwell was enjoying himself as well. A small smile tugged at his lips as his eyes roamed around the black stone-covered passageway, looking for signs of traps or other dangers. He held his sword loosely by his side (which he had been lucky to keep intact after he was squished by the ceiling), but she knew he could have it ready and attacking before she could blink.

  The tunnel was dark, but the light from the previous room lit it enough that they could see for a short distance. Before it got too dark for Moxwell to see, she used her Light affinity to contain and enhance a portion of the visible light, creating a floating ball of luminescence that clearly illuminated the way forward. She could have produced a small flame and made a ball of fire to light the way for Moxwell (since she didn’t necessarily need visible light to see); however, she was constantly on the lookout for ways to continue improving her new affinities.