Luca DR
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Edge of apocalypse 54
🕑 Added 2023-06-02 14:46:43 +0000 UTCDungeons are a strange place. Are they natural phenomena, born out of mana, or are they put there by higher powers? Are the cores sentient? The Quadrangle surely looks like it is, but nowadays AI has shown us that it doesn’t matter whether it looks like something is sentient or sapient or at least generally intelligent, the truth is that you never know.
For instance, is the dungeon Albert was exploring sentient? Who knows? One would need to see what’s it like to be a dungeon core, and although Albert did read his fair amount of dungeon core stories, there is no telling whether those are accurate or not.
Although by extrapolation, after having seen a system and elves, they might very well be and he wouldn’t be surprised.
Albert walked along the tunnel at a brisk pace, now that the illusions did not bother him anymore. The fact that his ring had not activated when he was ‘attacked’ should have told him that something was off, but in his altered state there was no way he could have noticed and realized it at the time.
The tunnel now appeared as a crystal cave, with a solid floor of stone and walls that were littered with huge crystal growths of various sizes. Appraising one of them simply said [Crystal], and trying to dislodge it proved to be a much harder thing to do than one might think.
Hard enough that Albert decided not to waste his time on it, which – considering his propensity for hyperfixating on random things – meant that it really was impossible to pull it off in a reasonable time frame.
Eventually the tunnel opened up into a cave, a large room with a high ceiling and a slightly slanted ground. But that was not the interesting thing about the cave, because what really caught the eye was the structure at its center. It was like a cathedral of ice, but instead of the ice there were a myriad of huge crystals that shone and sung with glittering light.
There was a small entrance to the cave, leading to a room bathed in cyan light. Something like a large arch, made of solid blue diamond. Below it, standing crooked and bent, was a shadow of a person. Its eyes were red and solid, visible under the dark garbs it was wearing. Its single arm bore a long, heavy sword.
As soon as Albert locked eyes with it, he felt the weight of magic settle upon him. A little bit of his mana begun to be drained, but he didn’t break eye contact with the shade, instead staring right at the twin beads of red light surrounded by shadow and darkness.
“Kneel.” A voice, raspy and suffering, reverberated through the cave.
Albert looked around. Was something supposed to happen?
“Kneel.” The voice repeated itself, sounding like it was a death lament of an ancient spirit.
Still. Apart from a little amount of mana disappearing from Albert’s mana pool, nothing happened. It didn’t take long for him to understand what was going on.
“Ah, mental attacks right? I… uhh… they don't work anymore.” Albert said.
The shade didn’t lose its composure. In fact, Albert could feel something like smug contempt in its stare.
“You are unarmed.” It said, brandishing the large sword and bolting at him with great speed.
The shade was easily three meters tall, and the sword itself must have been at least as tall as Albert himself. With Bullet Time slowing the flow of time to a crawl, he observed the tall husk of a person run at him like a collection of shadows loosely bound together by the dark garbs it was wearing.
The sword was embossed with gold and finely decorated with gems and silver reliefs. It fell down on Albert in an overhead strike, descending like a guillotine to split him in two halves down the middle.
But, with the protection of his ring, Albert knew that he could tank the first hit without problem. He added the bonus resistances of [Strengthening] for good measure, and lifted his left arm to intercept the blade as it fell. Not without appraising it first.
[Blade of the Late Eiiri: this sword once belonged to the fictional backstory character persona of the dungeon core. Created for it much in the same way as the rest of the place, through the strangeness of mana.
With its enormous size and edge that never dulls, this blade inflicts both blunt and cutting damage, delivering judgement to even the most resilient of foes.]
The implications of what the system said were too much to think about now.
Albert refocused on the fight, mere instants of real time having passed while he did his thing.
Calmly, almost in a bored fashion – in truth he was concentrating so much on the movement that his face did not bear any expression – he moved to strike at the shade himself, making use of the opening.
The sword impacted the shield, breaking it, and was met with the momentum of Albert’s arm moving up to intercept it. The strength behind the simple movement was more than it seemed from his perspective: not only was he moving five times faster due to time dilation, but he also was five times stronger than normal.
For a total of a 25-timefold bonus.
This is why the shade, overconfident it was about to destroy an unarmed kid coming at it without preparation, was dumbfounded when the hit only managed to dispel a shield and the impact sent it careening backwards. Already having only one arm, it didn’t have much balance, but now it was wide open.
Albert did not wait, striking it in the gut with all his strength.
It felt like hitting a sandbag. The shade flew backwards in slow-motion, no longer inside the altered entropic field of bullet time, with the air resistance sapping its kinetic energy away. Albert ran to it, caught up with the falling creature, and yanked the sword away from it.
He strained and groaned with effort as the heft of the sword was almost too much to lift even with [Strengthening]. Still, he managed to swing it before the shade landed and managed to regain its footing, and with one swift motion the blade cleanly severed its head.
A gust of dark wind swept the cave. And as the air settled, all that was left was the empty husk of garbs and blackened cloth that once contained the shade, fallen to the ground in a heap.
- [Mana]: 29FU + 25/hour -> 32FU + 26/hour
The system confirms the kills now? Awesome!
Only later would Albert realize that – prior to this kill – he still had the same amount of mana he had before allegedly killing PsyOps, which either meant that the man was not dead, or that killing people did not grant the additional mana bonus.
With the shade defeated, all that was left to do was investigate the structure at the center of the cave. But as he walked, Albert’s mind analyzed the fight, trying to understand how it went down and how he could learn from it.
As his grandpa said once: “Failure is an opportunity to learn. But you would be stupid to think that success isn’t.”
The hypothesis was that the fight had been so easy because the shade was not a melee fighter, rather it relied on disabling its opponents with mind magic before finishing them off. Too bad Albert had spent hours earlier to develop a basic immunity to this kind of threat, courtesy of his hyperfixation on dispelling the illusions of this dungeon.
Perhaps this was the way to go when exploring unknown and dangerous places. Always overprepare.
There was also the fact that this was a very young dungeon, as stated even by the system itself. If dungeons were anything like in the novels he read, this meant that this place was among the easiest, shortest and stupidest there are.
And yet it still managed to almost get to him with the illusions.
I bet the core spent all the mana on maxing the illusions and summoning the shade. It should be easy now.
Indeed, it was. There was nothing standing between Albert, who was still carrying the oversized sword, and the unprotected core at the center of the structure in the cave.
It was just a little blue sphere, the core, with white streaks like small clouds hovering below the glass surface, standing on a pedestal. Albert placed the sword down next to the pedestal and paced around it, watching it pulsate and feeling the waves of mana that would eventually become more monsters and dungeon rooms wash over him.
It felt like such a waste to destroy it. There had to be another way, right?
