by Dakota Krout
He glanced up and could see the ceiling of the space. Joe had fallen maybe fifty feet total after exiting that tube, and he wondered how high—full?—the landfill actually was. After walking over to the wall and sitting next to it, he allowed his aura to begin dissolving the thick, crusty slime that was coating the stone walls. He wasn't overly concerned about getting dirty; his shell kept new things from sticking to him, and his aura was constantly cleaning him. It took about four minutes to finish, but a large section of the wall was now clean. He easily found the markings that Havoc had mentioned, and tried to make sense of them.
+4189, -22.
Joe eyeballed the distance between his position and the ‘door’ he had fallen through, which was roughly one foot above the marking. No, it was likely exactly one foot above. “There's over four thousand feet of filth in here?”
He tried to look across the room but could not see the other side. Whether it was because it was too dark, or just too far away, Joe couldn't tell. He did know that it was an utter behemoth of a space, and there were probably literally hundreds of square miles of space in the cavern. Joe knew that he had been at the extreme outer edge when he had dropped down here… did that mean this space went under the entire city?
“How… how in celestials’ sake am I supposed to find anything in here?” Joe closed his eyes and flopped backward onto the soggy floor. He laid there for a moment, contemplating making a trash angel, when his ears started to ring with very soft sounds. “Great, now I have tinnitus?”
…Seventy-six Rare…
…Eight thousand Trash…
“I’m hearing numbers? Am I going crazy? My debuff list was empty when I last…?” Joe abruptly sat upright, and the sound stopped. He closed his eyes and leaned his head toward the floor again, and the sound started up very faintly. “All sensory abilities give information on aspect count! That means I’m either getting the info from Hidden Sense or Magical Synesthesia. Either way…”
“Sounds like…” Joe’s eyes popped open, all of the angst and desperation gone in an instant as a plan started to take form. “I have a way to find whatever is waiting for me.”
Chapter Fifteen
Joe started toward the sound, which vanished as soon as he opened his eyes. “Huh… seems like there’s just too much sensory overload. Can’t focus on it.”
Eyes tightly closed, he tried to pinpoint the sound, then opened his eyes and followed the direction it had come from as he picked his way through the garbage. He repeated this process until the sound of ‘something Rare’ was coming from directly below him, then waited for the gunk beneath his feet to be atomized by his Neutrality Aura. Once the film of filth had been removed, he reached down and let his mana pulse out.
Item: Bag of Trash
Reduction value: 86 Trash aspects.
Reduction cost: .2 mana per second.
“Oh. Neat. So, each rarity level down also drops the cost by a fifth?” The bag vanished in a flash, as did all the garbage it contained. That was a stroke of good fortune; he had been worried that only the bag would be absorbed. Food scraps, cans, broken glass; he went through all of them. Listening for the sound again, Joe found that it was closer than ever before, but still a good distance down. This process continued for several layers, and he kept needing to restart whenever the pile became unstable and collapsed in around him.
Eventually, he needed to allow himself to get buried. As Joe continued to struggle downward at an incline, he trusted his shields to keep him safe from any sharp objects, as well as getting crushed. Surrounded by the refuse, he was able to keep his eyes constantly closed as well; following his auditory skills soon led him to what had been calling out to him.
Item: Failed Shield of Hatred (Rare)
Reduction value: 76 Rare aspects, 90 Uncommon aspects, 388 Common aspects, 453 Damaged aspects, 645 Trash aspects.
Reduction cost: 125 mana per second.
Joe didn’t hesitate, allowing his mana to swallow the shield whole. Six seconds passed, and in an instant, nothing was left behind. He checked the gained aspects and grumbled. “Lost about ten percent of all the good ones.”
Quest gained: Failed Shield of Hatred. After trying and failing to make a lowly Unique Shield, Grandmaster Blacksmith Iron McPoundy found that what he had created was too durable to easily destroy. Hating his failure, he threw it in the garbage. He has been terrified that someone would discover this catastrophic experiment and leverage it against his reputation. Let him know that it is gone forever. Reward: Reputation, variable. Failure: None.
“That’s… unexpected.” Joe opened his eyes and contemplated the surrounding filth with a new perspective. “If I can complete quests like this, simply by turning them in… this place really is a goldmine for me.”
However, Joe was now faced with a new fact. He was upside down, and probably at least a dozen feet below the surface. “Didn’t think that one through… gonna be a lot harder to go up than down.”
If only there was a way to get rid of all the trash without having to reduce all the garbage directly… Joe slapped at his head, only the garbage and shield stopping himself from braining himself. “I literally have a spell designed to destroy trash. Acid Spray!”
The liquid sloshed out from his palm and ate its way down, though a fair amount rebounded and splashed off his shell. He was buried, after all. Trying to use the spell as carefully as possible, Joe soon became the cause of a huge garbage sinkhole. Use after use, fifteen minutes of near-continuous casting, and his hand finally met open air. He wiggled forward and pulled himself onto the edge of the ravine he had created. “Boom. Success.”
*Hiss*
Joe paused and turned to look at the sound. “Please just be a rat or something.”
It was something; he’d had that part right. Joe’s eyes were locked on an utterly massive two-headed raccoon, and it was clearly displeased that it had been disturbed. With foam draining from its mouths, the beast launched itself at him and used his shelled body to form a crater in the soft garbage pile. “Dark Lightning Strike!”
The soft sound of his spell striking was offset by the massive explosion that followed in the next instant. Joe was driven deeper into the garbage with the bloated corpse of the raccoon shielding him from a fireball that had sprung into existence.
Damage dealt: 110 (90 Dark element damage resisted by Rotting Rabid Raccoon)
Damage dealt: 3,000 (Environmental)
Damage taken. 50 (50% Dark element resistance)
Damage taken. 1,200 (Environmental, crushing)
Experience gained: 28
“Ugh… how hard did that hit me?” He pushed at the raccoon, but it wasn’t budging. He started washing it with acid and was surprised when a message appeared.
Exquisite Shell: 1,096/2,346
“Been a while since I’ve seen you, shield damage indicator… or maybe I’ve just been avoiding you? Certainly not a fan of hand-to-hand fighting.” Joe scanned the combat logs and realized why there had been an explosion. His use of Acid Spray had caused a buildup of hydrogen gases. Combining that with the methane natural to the area and lightning… well. Big boom. “I’m surprised it wasn’t worse, actually. Why didn’t this whole place go up like a bottle rocket?”
There was no new information forthcoming, so Joe resolved to do his own research later. He was certain that it had to be a magically induced reason; maybe there were containment fields or something? As he pushed through the raccoon, he noted that the garbage wasn’t even on fire. Definitely some magical trickery going on. Joe emerged from the raccoon like a parasite tearing through the lining of a stomach, a fairly decent analogy for this area.
He was going to leave right away to avoid fighting anything else that might have been alerted to his presence by the explosion, but something within the monster called to him. His eyes drifted up to the space right where the two heads connected, and he lightly sprayed it down. As the flesh melted away, a shining Core was revealed. No, twin Cores! He grabbed th
em eagerly but almost dropped them in disgust.
Trash-grade monster Cores found! Would you like to convert this into experience points? Current worth: 89 experience points.
“Of course they’re Trash grade.” Joe had to swallow back his emotions as the indignation of being here washed over him again. “At least it’s something. Bind core for crafting?”
Trash-grade monster Core bound. 89 energy points available for usage while crafting!
“A one-to-one conversion?” Joe had to pause and remember that he only needed to use Cores in the creation of Rare or above… things. Crafts? That would work. “Everyone needs to use Cores when they are making stuff. This is normal.”
Joe sat on his furry new rug and frowned at the literal mountain of trash, with flecks of treasure hidden within. “It’s going to take forever to sort through all this stuff. I have to stay here a week, and… what am I doing?”
He half-stood, then realized this spot was actually as good as any other for thinking. “I’m a Ritualist. I don’t need to swim through trash or keep spamming spells over and over mindlessly! I can, and need to, automate this!”
Joe even had a perfect spell to use. With a flick of his wrist for showmanship, he pulled out a ritual paper and started converting Acid Spray into a ritual diagram. An hour of intense concentration, two, and he had a model that he was pretty certain would work as intended. It was slapped together and poorly done, which reduced the potency of the ritual back to Novice rank, even though his spell was in the Apprentice rank, but even that was within his plans. He took a few moments to draw out the ritual using aspects on the paper, and soon, it glowed a wispy dark grey.
“Totally a waste to use this for such a weak ritual,” Joe sighed as he prepared to activate it. He paused, stood, and got into position like he was about to throw a frisbee. As soon as he had poured mana and the second Trash Core’s power into the diagram, he whipped the paper away. It didn’t go terribly far, but it was far enough that he was only caught in the outer edge of the spray it created.
Ritual of Sprinkling Acid (Novice) created! This ritual creates a fine mist of Weak Acid that will eat away at its surroundings for up to four hours! Can only remove Common or below ranked items. Make a stronger version to get rid of more stuff in one go! Range: 15-foot radius. Time remaining: 3:59:46.
The ritual did its job perfectly; after only a few minutes, Joe could neither see the ritual nor the acid from his re-seated position. He had planned on following after it rather quickly, but a dense cloud of smoke had started to rise out of the pit the acid was creating. As a test, he threw some fruit peels into it. There was a deep hiss, and the smoke started melting the rotting foodstuff. “Acidic smoke, got it. No reason to breathe that in.”
An hour after he’d started the ritual, the ground began to shift. Joe judged that the garbage had been reduced at about a foot per minute, and what was around the pit of empty space had finally destabilized. The varying sections of the landfill came into stark relief as garbage the next section over remained in place. He should have been expecting that the area was magically sectioned off; the area that had shifted was one hundred feet exactly. That must have been why the explosion he’d caused hadn’t gone too far; there were internal safeguards in place.
Once the garbage had fallen by ten feet, the sections opened and allowed the nearby waste to slump down and fill the unused space. Once everything had settled, Joe closed his eyes and slid down into the deep crater that remained. No resonance at all; nothing hidden or magical. That meant that only Common or below rarity items remained, as far as his magical senses could detect. That was okay with him; he was only on the edge of the city limits. It was time to move deeper.
“Can’t just stay here ‘cause it's safe and the most comfortable area. I need to get out there and get the absolute most out of this trip. After all…” Joe turned his eyes to the center of the landfill, and a plan began to form. If he wanted the best trash, he needed to get under the most valuable shops and creation centers. If he wanted to leave as close to the end of the week as possible, he needed to start moving while muttering to himself.
“Staying in your comfort zone means that you lack dedication to improve. A lack of dedication is an insult to those who believe in you.”
Chapter Sixteen
“Cone of Cold!” Joe directed the freezing blast at the two-headed vole that had burrowed out of the trash and jumped at him. He had been attempting to stay away from fire or electrical-based attacks, since he was hoping to avoid blowing himself up again. The vole took the final attack and fell, so Joe walked over to its body and stomped heavily at the base of its necks, breaking the frozen portion open and retrieving a single Trash Core.
He had learned something interesting after fighting a few of these: if he followed their tunnels back to their nest, there was almost always at least an Uncommon item stashed nearby. Of course, if they were not near enough to their nest, Joe would just be wasting time searching for it. It was a good reminder that monsters were supposed to have treasure, and natural monsters tended to hoard it instead of carrying it on them. Though he struggled to keep it in his mind, Joe needed to remember to play by game logic before anything else.
Skill increase: Cone of Cold (Beginner V).
Joe had been traveling toward the center of the landfill for the last day, and monster attacks were becoming more and more frequent. He had defeated several raccoons, skunks, and voles now, but he was expecting to see stronger creatures soon. He had been making good time and figured that, within a few hours, he would be directly under the main portion of the city.
*Boom*.
He looked to the side as a house-sized ball of trash dropped from the ceiling and slammed into the landfill. Just after the enormous sound of the impact, something roared a challenge, and a section of the landfill went up in flames, a fire that reached all the way to the top of the chamber and illuminated the ceiling. It was strange to see a dark sky filled with open pipes, but he was becoming more used to it.
Another thing Joe had found was that whatever the shielding was between sections, it only contained items for a little while, though fire was confined until it was suffocated. He could cast spells between the different sections, and there seemed to be no limit for how far anything other than fire could travel in a straight line.
The downside to the bellowed challenge and plume of fire was that he was pretty sure that it would be the most profitable destination. There was an adage that the most dangerous things tended to give the highest rewards. If that wasn't the most dangerous thing in this entire junkyard, Joe didn't know where to look for it. A nearby sound dragged him out of his thoughts, and he cast a Cone of Cold without looking. “These voles are starting to bother me.”
“Brooo…” a deep voice groaned at him. Joe flinched to the side and almost fell over at the unexpected voice. His eyes shot to the area he had fired his spell, and he found a bearded Dwarf covered in a rime of frost.
“I’m so sorry! I didn’t know anyone else could survive in here…” Joe rushed over to help the Dwarf, but as he got closer, he began noticing that large chunks of its body were missing. “You… aren’t alive, are you? Intrusive Scan.”
Name: Zombified Dwarf.
That was all Joe needed to see. He re-cast Cone of Cold, which set off the new bonus to Retaliation of Shadows for the first time. A shadowy version of himself appeared just as he began casting and followed his motions exactly. The regular spell, and the secondary spell hit at the same time.
Damage dealt: 112 (168 cold damage resisted). Zombified Dwarf is Brittle!
“It’s dead; of course it’s resistant to the cold.” Joe sighed as he tried to decide what spell to use next. On the positive side, being brittle had made the zombie very slow, since its body was frozen stiff. That gave him a few extra moments to decide how he should handle the situation. If a Dwarf as a zombie was anything like a living Dwarf, it had a massive amount of health that he would need to whittle down. Cone of
Cold was simply not going to do it, not when the vast majority of the damage dealt was flat-out ignored. “What was that… sixty percent cold resistance?”
He started going through his spell list, searching for anything that he could use to destroy the creature without potentially blowing himself up. He briefly considered using Acid Spray, but he had a test that he wanted to run after the Dwarf was defeated. Looking up, he oriented himself by inspecting the pipes that were just barely visible on the ceiling. He had discovered earlier that a pipe would be open at the exact center of each section in the landfill.
Damage taken: 1,400!
Exquisite Shell: 946/2,346
Though his body did not take any damage directly, Joe went sailing away from the massive haymaker that he had just taken to the face. He was moving so fast that one of the section barriers blocked his movement, and he stopped as painfully as if he had hit a wall. Two hundred more points of damage came off his shield, and the zombie was already almost on him by the time he got back to his feet. “Enough of that!”
He stepped through the barrier and cast Dark Lightning Strike on the zombie, happy that he no longer needed to drop the spell on his own head to use it. The lightning hit, followed by the expected methane explosion. It was nowhere near as violent as the original mix of hydrogen and methane had been, but it still cooked the Zombie Dwarf for eight hundred damage. The blast also sent the Dwarf flying… directly at Joe.
Joe jumped back, but he needn't have worried. The undead hit the barrier and crumpled just as he had done, sliding down to the ground where Joe blasted with a Cone of Cold, and again, until he saw that the brittle status had come into effect again. “Just die again, abyss it!”