by Aaron Jay
The minor enhancement crystal was next. I looked up Minor Bane again. Bane was very focused. Pick one type of monster and the weapon or armor was very effective against that monster. It dropped in effectiveness against anything else. So a Sword of Kobold’s Bane was hot stuff against Kobolds but the sword was even weaker against all other monsters than it would have been without the bane enhancement. It hadn’t been strong enough to make me think it would let me go toe to toe with monsters so much higher level than I. The sub-menu dropped down: Bane Ants, Giant… Bugbears… Chimeras… Dragons… Ettins… Firbolgs… Goblins… Harpies… Ichor, Giant… Jotuns… Kobold — there it was. I could turn my sword into a Sword of Kobold’s Bane - making it about 50% more effective against kobolds. However, this time when I checked it there was another sub-menu: Atreides Tribe… Big Skull Tribe… Cutthroat Tribe… tribe after tribe most of whom were redacted. And then, Wyrmmdigger!
Raising my sword, I selected it.
The water that flowed from The Bracers of the Elements turned colder and colder. The drops that fell from its tip froze first and then the ice spread back up the blade. First a faint rime was sloughed off as the water continued to flow out from the bracers. Then the ice took hold and the metal of the sword creaked as the cold shrank and stressed the steel of it. Complex and delicate patterns of ice and sharp crystals grew out to incredible thinness. With a dangerously stressed sound from the metal contracting, an edge of ice tapering to the width of a snowflake grew along the spatha. It was so thin and translucent that no matter how closely I looked I couldn’t make out where the edge finally ended. It was as sharp as the bite of a winter gale. But it also seemed incredibly delicate. Without a doubt, this blade’s edge would shatter against anything. That is, anything other than a Wyrmmdigger.
I held my blade. The game renamed it Wyrmmdigger’s Bane.
Looking at the ice, clear as glass, I knew I was ready. I was a glass cannon. All offense no defense. The perfect weapon against the Wyrmmdigger tribe. But all they had to do was hit me a few times and I would shatter. It was going to take all my wits, my Eyes of the Hunter, my knowledge of caves and mines and the Wyrmmdigger tribe to pull this off. But, it was possible. I had the barest sliver of a chance. A chance as thin as the edge of Wyrmmdigger’s Bane. And as fragile.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Walking down the tunnel (I can’t keep thinking of these things as adits), my feet crunched through the loose sandy soil and remains of buttresses and rotted out reinforcement. I stopped every few moments to listen. The tunnel made a slow turn to the right and the entrance was slowly moving out of sight. Recently acquired vocabulary popped into my mind, and I knew that this tunnel was a drift. The miners had been following along the edge of a body of ore. I missed Remus.
Wyrmmdigger’s Bane vibrated in my hand. My sword was smarter than Sting. After all, who wants a sword that lights up when enemies are near and lets them know you are there too? I pressed myself up into a slight divot dug out of the wall on the inside of the curve of the drift. The smell of wet dog came to me first. Then the sound of footsteps. It sounded like only one of them.
It came around the corner. Kobolds are a disturbing mix of canine and saurian. Its snout was long like a dog or jackal. Instead of skin it had scaled hide like its supposed saurian ancestor. From the dog/jackal side of its ancestry, it had hair, but it was wiry and sparse, often coming out in patches or wisps from the gaps between the scales. It just looked wrong.
Wyrmmdigger’s Bane whistled through the air as I swung for its neck. Bane’s edge slipped into its flesh impossibly easily. Scale, hide, and hair that would otherwise have slowed a blade parted, and warm black blood drowned out its cry of alarm. My sword came free with ease, and a hollow whistling sound came from the kobold’s throat.
Panting, I backed off, hoping that it would bleed out, but no such luck. There was still some fight left in it. Crouching onto its powerful hind legs the monster leapt at me. I got Bane in between us mangling one of its clawed hands, but the other managed to swipe down my chest. Pain washed over me. I might have dropped Bane, but the hilt seemed frozen into my grip. One more hit like that and I would be sent for respawn.
I hacked at the creature over and over. Short sharp swings like taking a machete to a bunch of woody vines. Its ruined voice hissed and bubbled as slices and gashes opened up along the arms I butchered. Wrymmdigger’s Bane opened wounds with the slightest graze of its edge. Before I knew it, the fight was over.
Reviewing the combat logs, I had to whistle. I had taken down over half the hp of what I found out was a level nine Wyrmmdigger Corporal with my first strike. Bane was incredible. The other thing that was made perfectly clear to me was that I couldn’t take a hit from the monsters in here. The corporal only got in one good shot on me, and he took down half of my hp. If he hadn’t been a lone wandering monster, I would have died.
I collected a whopping 500xp. Well, I did just solo a creature three times my level while on hardcore mode. Four more just like Corporal Punishment there, and I would hit the next level. Looking the monster over, I received a few silver and a rusty dagger.
The classic roles of adventuring are tank, damage dealer, healer, and crowd control. I had the damage dealer role filled in spades. I couldn’t heal and even if I could, I wouldn’t be able to do so in combat and still attack. I needed a method to apply crowd control or some way to tank.
Magic was, of course, the only answer. I pulled out my grimoire. I only had a few low-level spells, but I had one advantage. I didn’t need twenty-four hours to recover my mana. A half hour of meditation would refill my magical batteries. A half hour might as well be forever in combat, but it did mean that I needed to rethink how magic worked for people at my level.
Typically when running a dungeon, you saved your best spells for the bosses and most difficult encounters. Applying spells on the minions filling out the upper levels and outer rooms left you empty at the boss room. Of course, at level eight a caster had multiple spells that were as good as my best ones, so they could do at least a bit for the party in the early stages of a dungeon. At level three I had one decent spell in me—wizards were just sad at low level. I was low level, QED I was sad.
Even if my magic use were normal instead of chanted, I would still need to use magic on every encounter. Melee by itself was a death sentence for me. The silver lining of my odd casting style was that I could sustain a pace faster than one encounter a day. If I had to wait twenty-four hours between each encounter for my mana to recover it would take me months to clear the dungeon. It would only take me weeks to get through a dungeon that a full party of properly leveled players could finish in a day or two at the worst. Weeks is a lot better than months. And weeks is incredibly better than never.
The huge downside of the way magic worked for me was that casting in the middle of combat was incredibly difficult. Spells took a lot longer for me to cast with all the chanting and breathing. More importantly, if I got hit even once I didn’t think I could keep my breathing practice from falling apart and the spell with it.
Maddie had given me instructions for the typical set of first and second level spells. I dismissed the spells that increased my offense, like Divination Strike. I already hit like a train. Unless I could get something that let me accomplish multiple one-shot kills, that spell wouldn’t help me if I faced more than one kobold. I had an Arcane Armor spell, but it only lasted a few minutes. It would help, but it didn’t stop all attacks, it only ameliorated them. It would temporarily let me absorb some hits like a level eight player. I also had a few spells designed to control some of the monsters while the rest of a party killed others. Sleep. Grease. Charm. Daze. I had a number of spells I could use on myself as well. Short term invisibility, some spells that let me enhance my abilities.
That was the other thing. Most spells were pegged to your level. For example, the effects of invisibility would last one minute per level. You can’t do that much sneaking around in three minutes. My Daze spell
would last ten seconds for every level. So, I could take a creature out of the fight for a grand total of thirty seconds. A lot of my other spells probably wouldn’t even work given the level disparity. The game would look at our comparative level, inherent defenses or vulnerabilities (remember attacking frost trolls with fire and things like that?), and then look at the relevant ability bonuses or deficits. So, a charm spell works best against creatures with low wisdom scores. It also fails on creatures whose intelligence is so low that there is no mind to even magically trick. Given that the monsters were two to three times my level, something like a Sleep spell was going to fail on most if not all of the kobolds in a group in this dungeon. That would stay true until my level was higher, or if my intelligence bonus was through the roof.
That gave me an idea. I had a spell called Cunning of the Fox. It raised my intelligence by four points for one minute per level. That would boost my intelligence to 16, as smart as your average beholder or succubus. Way smarter than any kobold. So: Cunning of the Fox + Sleep = crowd control.
The realization hit me that my meditation-and-breathing-based magic’s big advantage wasn’t speed but flexibility. Being able to swap out the spells I did have in half an hour instead of once a day was a huge advantage. True, I couldn’t cast while in the midst of combat, but in half an hour I could prepare the right spell for each encounter.
My plan came together. It was going to be tedious and repetitive. Well, that’s why they call it dungeon crawling and not dungeon walking or dungeon running. It would be slow and awkward, and my butt was going to hurt from all the sitting I was going to be doing.
My breath came in bursts as I cleared my channels, then settled down into an even rhythm. I noticed my mana level fill but did not allow that information to alter my stance or breath. My hands found the mudra of light and then the mudra of illusion after I stood and started chanting “Invisibility.” In the corner of my vision, a timer began counting down from three minutes.
I set off to scout out the kobolds. My plan was simple. Step one: find each group and scout them thoroughly while invisible. Step two: pull back to prepare. Take a half an hour and tweak my spell selection. Step three: go in and kill everything. Step four: smile as I loot my victims. Step five: rest and reload invisibility. Rinse and repeat.
I almost couldn’t stop myself from whistling as I made my way through the tunnel looking for a bunch of victims. The last thing I heard was a click. I looked down, and a javelin was all the way through my body. As I sank to the floor, I recalled that the Wyrmmdiggers were also known for their trap construction.
“God damn it! Mother fucking fucker fuck fuck fuck!” I screamed as I found myself back at the entrance to the dungeon.
Death was less disorienting than moving in or out of the game. Things went dark. Some hazy imagery of clouds and a graveyard and then you woke up at your spawn point. Who knows what it means that it is more disruptive to your brain to go from reality to this place than it is to be skewered with a javelin and then bleed out. I could ask my father why that was. The pain was actually less than my fights with the hares, as I died almost as soon as I saw the shaft sticking through my stomach.
My father’s admonitions while I was under his roof not to become over-confident raced through my head. “Pride goeth before a fall.” Or “Don’t stick your nose up in the air or you won’t be able to see where you are going.” Or, the timeless, “Great kid, don’t get cocky.”
The experience loss for a death at this level wasn’t too brutal - I was still level three. Any more deaths and I’d fall to level two. There was no chance of anyone else robbing my corpse of my equipment. The upside of being killed by a trap was not needing to somehow clear other monsters from around my corpse before I could re-equip. My armor would need some patching. Best news of all, I respawned. Some part of me had worried that Hardcore mode meant you only got one life, no respawn.
Trudging down the abandoned mine entrance I made my way to my corpse. I tried not to look too closely as I touched it. It fell into dust and disappeared. The stupid trash belt I kept for no good reason dropped. I put it back in my inventory and restarted my plan. This time it was going to be even slower. Step one A: search for traps while invisible. Step one B: find each group and scout them thoroughly while invisible. Step two: pull back to prepare. Take a half an hour and tweak my spell selection. Step three: go in and kill everything. Step four: smile as I loot my victims. Step five: rest and reload invisibility. Rinse and repeat. This was going to be slow.
Prāṇāyāma. Breath moved into and through me. Casting a spell in hardcore mode is a great way to find your center and move past your death. Mudras set my intentions. The chant droned out with my breath. I am hidden from the world. I wended my way further into the abandoned mines. Part of a basic dungeoneering package is a pole, and I am the proud owner of one, thank you Smitty. Carefully, I pressed every stone. The pole swung forward checking for tripwires. My eyes scanned, looking for murder holes that might unleash arrows or bolts. Was the cracked stone flooring ahead a carefully balanced facade leading to a spike filled pit? My progress was slow and meticulous, and was brought to an absolute crawl by the need to recast Invisibility every three minutes and meditate after casting Invisibility just a few times. Six minutes of searching interspersed by half an hour of meditative breathing. I needed to meditate just to overcome the stress and anxiety of needing to meditate so often.
My breathing practice improved. I fell into the habit of Ujjayi, or victorious breath, as I moved. This was the breathing practice that was considered acceptable to engage while moving your body. The circumstance forced mindfulness. My mind could not wander. I had to pay attention or I would die, but I could not worry about the death. I must be present. I must look at a stone. Was it where it should be, or did some clever Kobold place it to mask a trap’s trigger? Is this floor real? I became an invisible point of observation slowly moving through the dark. The only sound was the slight hiss of my Ujjayi breath moving through the back of my throat.
There was a light resistance as I carefully pressed on a rock embedded in the floor of the tunnel. The walls of a mine tunnel were not smooth and polished. There were holes and indentations and crevices everywhere from the picks and shovels that created it. But, I noticed a collection of shadows at chest height just forward of the stone. The shadows were right where one might be if you had stepped on the rock while walking down the tunnel.
A tone sounded and a game notice informed me that I had discovered a poison dart trap. A small amount of experience came with the discovery. Noting the location of the trap on my map I moved forward. I crept down the tunnel, breath moving in through the nose and out the mouth. Soon enough I noticed a tripwire. The beams that reinforced the tunnel weren’t real. The beams and who knows how many boulders and stones would fall on you if you were unlucky enough to trip the wire. Another notice and another handful of experience.
The tunnel split and I followed the right-hand wall. When I found the third trap a new notice came from the game.
Congratulations!
You have learned the skill
Trap Detection (active)!
Look before you leap! With focus and care you can see traps and triggers more easily.
Novice Trap Detection:
0/250 to Beginner Level
Further reading informed me that at higher levels this skill would take on a passive component, allowing me to detect traps without making a conscious effort. How nice that would be. This skill was going to be ground hard by the time I finished this dungeon. A smile flashed across my lips and I continued down the tunnel.
The tunnel opened up into a stope, aka a downward expanding cavern created by excavating ore. The miners had left a number of natural columns to hold up the cavern ceiling. Scattered around the chamber were three groups of two to three kobolds. There were also four individual kobolds wandering from group to group and around the circumference of the stope.
I pulled back. This seemed
like too large a bite right off the bat. Being in no particular hurry, I decided to go back to the intersection and explore in the other direction.
The next time I discovered a trap it glowed faintly. I’d like to think that I’d have detected it without the faint red glow but it was nice to have the system working for me instead of against me. I refused to change my thorough method, though, as false negatives were a possibility. My skill level and the dungeon being set for a level seven party made it extremely likely that the system wouldn’t alert me to every trap. The skill would miss some that I could hopefully find by the old, painstaking way.
Shortly my concern was borne out. A patch of gravel seemed too loose to me. The floor should have been long since compacted down. The top layer seemed to shift too easily as I gently brushed my hand over it. I carefully removed the layer of gravel and saw that a glass bottle had been lightly buried, wedged over a blade edged rock and then covered with gravel. Inside the flask was some sort of murky liquid. If I had stepped on it the bottle would have shattered, releasing whatever was inside. Nothing good I was sure.
There was also another pleasant surprise. The experience and skill increase from discovering a trap through my own efforts was three times as high as what I received when the system glowed and told me itself. It put me over halfway to the Beginner level of the Detect Trap skill. Hardcore mode plus soloing a dungeon over twice my level meant that the rewards were commensurate with the risks.