Chapter Twenty-Seven
Denny chose to head back to the tenth floor.
Vester had spent another hour trying to talk to his brother, only for them to realize that just being near each other caused Denny to experience violent impulses. While it didn’t seem like Denny wanted to attack Vester, the need colored the entire interaction.
Unfortunately, Vester missed the departure of the Hero’s Party because he was dead at the time. He hadn’t intended to be dead—he’d simply tried to make a music player that Kimmy could take with her to help the woman maintain her mental health.
The Trickster had focused on the simple idea of a portable speaker with the memory of all the songs he knew in it.
He’d wanted it to be durable, so he’d decided on a case made from the same alloy as Reve’s limbs, and since he knew Kimmy would need to power it, he’d used an inscription that allowed someone to fuel artifacts with mana.
The small brick had come together in his hand, speakers dark on either side, and then the world had gone fuzzy. The sensation of mana sucking out of his body was Vester’s last clear memory before he woke up to find his Party looking at him with various degrees of annoyance and frustration.
“What… what happened?” he asked groggily. It was like his head had been wrapped in wool: everything felt fuzzy and distant. He had to put real effort into focusing on the people around him, though the sensation was lifting second by second.
“You ignored the advice of your goddess and created something beyond your power,” Reve said, shaking her head.
“Your mana and life force drained out, your body crumbled to dust, and you collapsed into a pile in the middle of your tent. All that remained of you were your clothes, your cane, and your mask.”
“It was horrible!” Krysta exclaimed, lashing at him with her tail. The huge fluffy appendage battered around his face until Kora reached out to catch it. Krysta curled into Kora’s arms for a hug, while Skylar stepped closer to join them.
“Sorry,” Vester replied. “I thought because it was small…”
Li Ra sighed and knelt at his side, wet cloth in hand which she used to rinse off his forehead.
“Non did warn you it would happen if you weren’t careful,” the oni pointed out.
“But don’t worry, we gave the thing you made to Kimmy, since you mentioned to Skylar that you wanted to make her a gift. What was it?”
“Something to play music from Earth,” Vester admitted. “I didn’t think it was going to kill me to produce something no bigger than a pack of cards.”
Krysta shifted into a red panda and scampered up Kora’s body to sit on the kitsune’s shoulders. When she let out several squeaks and chitters, Vester had no doubt he was being cursed out in pandali. Kora reached up and scratched the Hospitality Mage under the chin.
“The issue probably stemmed from what you made it out of,” Kora decided with a shake of her head. “Using a mithril-adamantine alloy likely demanded a great deal of energy.”
“Not to mention producing artifice from Earth,” Skylar added.
“The technology of your old world is well beyond what we can produce without incredibly complicated scripts and formula. And if the artifact contains the memories of all the songs you remember, then it likely demands an equal level of mana to produce them.”
“Yeah… that makes sense,” Vester agreed. He slowly pushed himself to his feet and looked around. They were in one of the tents Krysta had made from a column, but it seemed larger than he remembered. “And where are we?”
“About a day away from the blood elfling city,” Kora said.
“We swept you into a sack and carried you while we traveled. It’s been almost a week since the Hero left.
You took that long just to rebuild your body, though Krysta felt her Sanctuary feeding energy into you every night.
I don’t know how long you would have had remained dust without that rejuvenation. ”
“On the positive side the rest of us have hit level 50 in the meantime,” Li Ra interjected. “Fighting our way across the floor has helped us gain levels, and we also got a special Quest for keeping your remains safe until you came back from the dead.”
Krysta let out a squeak, crossed her arms, and stuck her tongue out at him. Vester knew he’d have to make it up to her, but he wasn’t sure how at the moment. Skylar looked like she was trying to hold back a smile.
“I’ve also got Woody almost done,” Skylar stated, “if you think you can help me finish up.”
Vester, who was trying to process the fact his lovers had basically used a broom to pour his ashen remains into a sack and carried him around like a used vacuum bag for a week, was struggling a little.
He couldn’t believe he’d managed to fuck himself up that bad, yet he had no doubts they were being honest with him.
It was more than a little humbling to realize that even his enhanced intelligence couldn’t stop him from being an utter dumbass at times.
“Yeah,” Vester said with a nod. “I can do that. For what it’s worth, I am sorry. A music player isn’t considered anything special on Earth. It didn’t occur to me that the recreation here would come with such a powerful mana draw.”
“Mistakes are bound to happen,” Kora replied with a shake of her head. “Your new class is incredibly powerful, but it’s also dangerous. It is fortunate you made this mistake while we were camped and not in the middle of combat.”
“Definitely,” Vester agreed. Now that he’d pushed himself to his feet, he made a point to wrap his arms around each of his lovers and hug them tightly.
Krysta chittered, batting at him, but she relented when he started scratching her tummy and playing with her ears.
Eventually, she hugged her tiny arms around his neck and buried her face in his throat. “Sorry to scare you,” he whispered.
Then Vester turned his full attention on the rest of the Party. “How did level 50 treat you?” he asked.
“My class evolved into Force Master,” Reve said. “It gives me an even greater control of my Telekinesis, as well as more powerful barriers. I don’t fully understand it, but I also gained a bonus to my charisma each time I level.”
“Wilderness Sage,” Li Ra announced. “It’s similar to Frontier Duelist, but my Foraging Skill has evolved into Master Harvester and now works with Chaos Thief. I can collect materials if I’m within a hundred feet without needing to touch them.”
Wow, that is powerful, Vester thought. His eyes went to Skylar and she shrugged. The djinn was looking proud of herself, and he suspected she’d gotten something that made her happy.
“Still an Artifice Maker,” she said, “but now I have a skilled called Psychic Graft that lets me implant mental energy into my golem cores, which will give them rudimentary instincts and basic thinking skills.” Vester had no doubt that was thrilling her.
She had already treated her golems like living companions, and she was one step closer to making that a reality.
Kora’s lips curled up at the left side, a crooked smile.
“I am no longer an Elemental Knight,” she announced proudly.
“The class evolved into Prismatic Paladin. My elemental powers have expanded, and I’ve gained a skill to absorb damage from others in my Party and direct it back at our enemies. It’s called Retribution Blast.”
“Which is a nasty one,” Li added quietly. “Reve took some brutal hits, and Kora just sucked the damage out of her, and then released it in a shield blast that blew up her foe. It magnifies the damage by Kora’s constitution, though we don’t understand the full extent yet.”
Vester let out a whistle. “Amazing.” He meant it.
That sounded like a truly powerful ability.
His fingers rose and scratched Krysta on the back of her head.
“What about you?” he asked. She just swept her tail around and wrapped her arms around it, hugging herself while she curled into a ball in his arms.
“Krysta is still a Hospitality Mage,” Skylar said gently, rubbing the back of Krysta’s skull.
“She gained a skill called Feed the Needy that lets her create food out of mana, and it synergizes with her other skills. We don’t ever have to worry about starving with her around.
Water and other drinks count as food—except for alcohol, apparently. ”
“Probably because alcohol is a poison,” Vester replied absently.
When he realized they were staring at him, he shrugged.
“What? On Earth we discovered that the reason alcohol makes you feel giddy and changes your mood was because it moves through the bloodstream and damages your nervous system. It’s just a poison people enjoy, so it makes sense she can’t make it with her skill. ”
He could tell the others had questions about what he’d said, but Kora cleared her throat and brought everyone’s attention back to her.
“Now that Vester is with us again, I believe we should take some time to let Skylar finish Woody and prepare for how we’re going to interact with the blood elflings.
We still have the Quest to summon Non before them; hopefully whatever force took her from the Sanctuary will allow her to return so we can complete our mission.
Then we have to find the island Elondolin told us about, trigger the secret Quest, and claim the reward before the Church of Light. ”
Vester and the others nodded, because Kora was right: they had plans to make and things to sort out. Krysta returned to her humanoid form and allowed Vester to spend a few moments kissing her breathless—finally accepting his apology for scaring her—and then they began working through their tasks.
Krysta started them off with a meal, and Vester loved the steak-and-mushroom dish she prepared. The food immediately improved how he felt, and the last of the cloud fogging his thoughts went away.
Then Vester joined Skylar in assembling the new Woody, and he found the golem… terrifying.
Woody’s spine was a long whip of flexible vertebrae that reminded Vester of a serpent, lean and powerful with carefully sculpted ribs that formed a cage to protect the golem core—which Vester saw was somehow mounted on a slider that let it move up and down the length of the spine.
The puppet had two sets of hips, which supported legs that splayed out ninety degrees from the spine like a lizard’s. Those legs terminated in long, talon-like claws: five of them, which were evenly spaced. The talons had serrations along the inner curve, like skinning knives.
Similar to the hips, two sets of shoulders were locked around the upper half of the spine, and they had long arms that hung half-again the length of the legs, giving a vaguely simian vibe.
The upper arms had human-shaped hands with retractable claws, while the lower arms had talons similar to the feet, though all were oriented along the same axis.
The claws at the end of those fingers were the thickest, likely to work as digging implements or climbing tools.
Woody also had a tail that was nearly the same length as its spine and ended in a spike that looked like two short swords melded together to form a four-edged blade. Opposite that tail was a wedge-shaped head with hooked fangs and gleaming onyx eyes.
The entire golem had mithril thread muscles waiting to be attached, once Vester finished engraving the inscriptions onto the bones, and then an outer sheath of interlocking scales that would give the entire puppet a reptilian cast. The scales, Vester noted, were made from a bronze-and-iron alloy.
With his new intelligence, Vester found it remarkably easy to do the spatial manipulation for his enchantments, and his heightened dexterity allowed him to inscribe them onto the bones with remarkable speed.
While he was tempted to see if he could simply will the engravings into being, he kept in mind his recent “accident” with the music player and focused on doing things the old-fashioned way.
Even with his new class, it took nine hours for him to finish all the formulaic engravings and thread the muscles into place, then help Skylar lock the scales on.
But once they’d finished and Woody shook itself and rose to its full, nine-foot-height, Vester shivered.
The golem was imposing, and there was a dim glow in its gemstone eyes that made Vester wonder what psychic imprint Skylar had woven into Woody’s core.
Seeing Woody move to stand next to Ripper made Vester realize they had to give Dent a serious overhaul at some point. The massive iron golem had served them well, but it was falling behind in terms of pure lethality compared to Skylar’s other creations.
But they didn’t have time for that now—they had to join Kora and the others in figuring out their plan for the elfling city.
It turned out that Reve had helped Li Ra get up one of the tallest columns, and that had allowed the oni to scout out the edges of the place.
The pillars within the city had all been hollowed out, like termite mounds, and the blood elflings lived within them.
The dungeon spawn used glowing mushrooms and moss to illuminate their city, and they’d clearly cultivated them for aesthetics.
Each district was its own color of fungus.
Li Ra estimated that they’d have to move through a third of the city to find the large lake upon which the blood elflings raised their cattle, which was too far away for her to get a clear view. She could see the water, but not the island itself.
Reve proposed that she be the point of contact between the Party and the dungeon spawn, and no one could think of a better idea. With the way the monsters had reacted to her on the airship, Reve was their best chance of making it through the city without complications.
It was Kora’s recommendation that Vester create and wear a thick cloak—one with a deep hood that would make his gender hard to identify. He couldn’t disagree, since nearly all the points of friction they’d had with the airship crew had stemmed from Vester’s nature as a man.
But their planning was interrupted by Krysta pulling a brush out of her inventory and sitting down next to Vester.
The pandali Hospitality Mage made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that they wouldn’t be going on any more adventures until Vester gave the Party some quality time to make up for his earlier mistake.
To his chagrin, Kora agreed, her five tails swishing behind her, and Vester saw that Skylar was fingering her braid and giving him a contemplative look. Despite the pressure, he didn’t hesitate to promise them the attention they deserved.
They’d carried his corpse for a week through the eleventh floor of the Great Dungeon, and Vester would have been a fool not to acknowledge that the dedication deserved some reciprocation—besides, he loved them, and he wanted them to be happy.
So it was with a warm smile that he started some soft music playing and picked up the brush.