Soulforged Dungeoneer

The next biome, starting with floor 21, was a little less amenable to us tooling around in a Humvee, but they gave it their best shot. We found ourselves in a snowy mountain range with some narrow, sheer-sided cliff roads and rope bridges across some otherwise very deep valleys, the kind where if the Dungeon didn't treat it as a bottomless pit, you'd almost wish it did--and I still didn't know exactly what happened when someone took a dive into one of those.

I asked Susie as the Humvee went forward at a pace that was, frankly, alarming, failing utterly to keep my mind off of the fact that if she screwed something up I'd be finding out really quickly.

She just kept staring off into the middle distance, and said, "Bottomless pits send you to the nearest designated safe zone with at least one random broken limb and a shit-ton of damage. Worst case, the breaks are something fatal, but it's not a guaranteed death."

I grimaced. I thought I'd seen somewhere that Dungeoneers could heal broken limbs faster, but it was "a day or two" fast, not "an hour or two" fast, unless healing magic was applied.

Eventually, I couldn't stand sitting inside the humvee and joined Max up top, him sitting with the turret and me using substantial grip and some telekinesis to make sure I didn't fall off. The world up here was beautiful as well as dangerous--I don't know how much of the dungeon terrain was real rather than pictures on the wall, but it sure did look like we were in the middle of a huge mountain range, and every nearby mountain peak at least seemed to exist, whether it was actual rock or not.

I thought about making small-talk with Max, but he seemed entirely on edge, and frankly, I thought he was single-minded enough that if I distracted him, he might end up fully distracted.

Now, I didn't need to be told that this Dungeon level was going to be more dangerous than previous ones--that's just how it went. But it took a while for us to see the monster half of the equation, and when they did, they came out in force.

You might have thought, looking at them, that they were peasants. They didn't have uniforms, their winter weather gear was shoddy, and they were using a lot of equipment that was obviously formed from tools--scythes, hammers, axes, pitchforks, even some people armed with just a length of wood, with nothing else on it. But whatever they were in a past life, these were not civilians. They appeared out of nowhere from within a deep snow drift, where they must have been freezing their asses off, and they had crazed looks of hatred and madness on their faces as they, every one of them, jumped ten feet in the air, screaming like they were banshees and preparing their weapons to stab, bludgeon, or slice at us. The only real clue that they were dungeon monsters was the unnatural color of their skin and the fact that they seemed to breathe out air that was even colder than the snowy mountain itself. Well, that and the dungeon species ID over their heads, labelling them as "Frost Mountain Bandit"

Max had already been ready for it. From the moment he saw the snow drift, his gun was trained on it, and I saw him making mental measurements of about how high they'd jump, well before I knew that they were going to be in the air. There were enough of them that he couldn't do more than spray back and forth at them as they leaped, but his aim was good, and his bullets knocked most of them back far enough that they wouldn't land on the car.

I handled the ones that did pretty easily.

I say that, but I was surprised to find that these guys resisted my telekinetic control a bit. Not enough to matter--I was on edge because we were driving... uh, on the edge, of a cliff, you know... never mind--but I felt the difference in levels more than I was expecting, as they seemed to feel just a little bit slippery, a little bit heavy, compared to what I was used to. It still wasn't a fair fight by any means, because there was a bottomless pit right there, and they were jumping in that direction anyway, but for the first time, I got a really clear sense that Dungeon magical resistance would passively stop me from having my way with everyday creatures with the skill.

Which was, of course, obvious anyway, but this was kind of a bad time to discover it, you know? I'd never counted on it for bosses, expecting that they would be some kind of exception, but if even common creatures could resist it, I'd get out-levelled pretty fast.

Amy stopped the Humvee, and the guys that didn't get thrown off the cliff started beating on it. It was, clearly, tougher than the average car, because I saw it take a Dungeon scythe into its armored side and come away with only a dent. Susie piled out of the car with her punching gauntlets and laid into them, and I decided this was a good opportunity to snag one of them for a one-on-one duel.

I went ahead and took a guy with a big fuck-off hammer, not that it seemed to matter either way, and dragged him a little ways away from the rest. Now, this optional boss ahead was going to require me to not use weapons, so I had already thrown together an item that had my martial arts skill boosters--I had one for Tai Chi, specifically, and one that was a general booster from the Administrator's cheat item, though I doubted they would help because I didn't know Tai Chi--and wrapped telekinetic force around my hands, not that that would help much, most likely.

The frost-man scrambled up from where I threw him on the ground at the start, and moved on me like a berserk thing that had no sense or reason. His speed was enough that I had to push at myself with Telekinesis to make sure I was not gonna be hit, but at the very least, his crazed nature meant he was not thinking ahead or fighting tactically. He went straight for an overhead downward smash, and the resounding hammer impact when it hit the ground made me glad it didn't land on my skull.

I made the mistake of expecting him to pause a moment, there, and almost regretted it. Instead of lifting the hammer and turning, he turned first, and with a single hand, swung the hammer up from where it had hit the ground, diagonally across his body. I flared Telekinesis as a shield, and most of the potential damage got converted to throwing me away instead, and I smashed against the mountainside, already getting my bearings and getting back into, uh, the swing of things.

He was already coming.

Instead of going over or around, I threw myself forwards, tucking and rolling into a ball and smashing into his torso. As soon as I hit, I was already pushing myself away with my Skill, and he was already shifting his grip on the hammer to try to hit me while I was in close.

I felt the slightest hint of something strange, though, when I was in there close, inside his guard. Although I immediately pushed myself away, in those fleeting moments, I felt a strange sense folded over my telekinetic grasp of the situation.

It was over before I could study it, but I could swear it was there.

And then the hammer missed, and I dodged away, and he charged forward recklessly, almost immediately. I assessed the charge quickly--again, his motions were straightforward, if brutal. And almost casually, I tried nudge his center of balance with my telekinesis, pushing him aside and making his entire wild swing look entirely off-course. I'd done things like this before--the fight with the harpies came to mind. Somehow, the instinct seemed a little sharper, now, but the fact that he resisted the telekinesis wasted my effort.

I toyed with the thought and instincts over the next minute or two, always playing it safe. The instincts were weird, because they were all about the guy's position and how I should move him. If I were the right level, they might have been helpful; I mean... obviously, this was a side effect of the Martial Arts booster, or maybe the Tai Chi one in particular, trying to tell me something about bodies and weaknesses and whatever. I wasn't all that sure how those skills would work going into it; the only really analogous skill I had was Assassination, because it gave me instincts on where and how to hit people. Most of my other skills of note were magical things--I include stealth in that, since it made my physically disappear. This was more like having a bit of experience with a field of study that I'd never looked into; nothing really useful or advanced, but some basic pointers on what to look for, and thta resonated pretty well with some thinking I'd already done.

In the end, though, I was no good at it, which frankly put me at a low odds for wining the upcoming bout. I could, if I followed the instinct at exactly the right time, make everything look like I knew what I was doing, but even with telekinesis, a lot of intelligence, a fair bit of speed, and a fairy looking over my shoulder (she didn't help too much, and was nervous about trying unless I invited her to, because my thoughts were complicated and hard to jump into, apparently) I was more likely to miss my cues or start too late, which meant I had to overreact and put a bunch of extra force into my dodges and blocks so that I wouldn't get hit.

Everyone else cleaned up, of course, and they were waiting on me after only a couple minutes. When I stopped playing around and focused on doing damage, I found that my assassination effects were still viable for a guy of his level, but not enough to make it quick. To speed it up, I asked Merry to play with Psychokinesis, which made for a whole new level of complications to the fight; in order to make the energy damaging, she had to rile up my emotions, and the fury she used to get me there made it almost impossible for me to function the way I had been doing.

I was able to confirm, though, that I could use Telekinesis in battle while Merry used Psychokinesis, which was a trip. The problem was that my brain ...fuzzed out, I guess, asI got riled up. I wasn't able to pay attention to details, my aim was off. Merry seemed to be able to aim just as well as ever, but I wasn't. Maybe I just needed practice?

In the end, although we could have gone for a devastating "I hold him, you hit him" strategy, I focused on defense and movement and tried to get the hang of operating while she held me in that furious state, and Merry basically stabbed him with glowing energy. Once we got started on that strategy, the rest didn't take too long; in fact, I felt like I'd really not gotten enough practice in, but we packed it back in the humvee and moved on anyway.

People wanted to talk to me, but I clammed up and tried to focus on what I'd just been through. Rude of me, I realize, but I was having trouble with a random mob while also planning on going after a challenge boss, so I needed the time.

We got into a total of five fights on that floor, and aside from me slowly getting back in the swing of things, they all more or less followed the same pattern as the first. The worst of it was one where we had to get out of the car and walk on a very narrow ledge for a while, and the ambushers came in from above on ropes, rappelling down the snowy cliff. I sensed them coming, and had to spend most of my own attention on making sure nobody fell (mostly, me and Louise, since the others knew this floor), but Merry and her PK were helpful in cutting ropes, tripping bandits, and similar.

The second floor of the biome was the same, except that the weather was amped up significantly, the roads were too slick in most places for the Humvee, and there were avalanche zones where gunfire and other loud weapons were a no-no. The blizzard that rioted along the paths all throughout the level could have been a major fucking problem, but Susie and everyone on Max's team all had ice climbing shoes and other gear to keep from slipping, leaving me and Louise to be carefully shepherded by my telekinesis as we went along.

Since I knew the boss fight was in the mountains, I thought that this might have been the floor with it, but apparently this set of ten floors was some other new and different pattern, with all ten having the same general snowy mountain locale but broken up into a weird set pattern. So we got through this blizzard nightmare and I did my best to forget about it, just waiting and following and trusting everyone else.

The twenty-third floor was again in the mountains, but very different. Instead of narrow path in the side of a cliff, there were a maze of rope bridges between two sheer cliff faces. Not just a couple; it really was a dungeon floor that made very little sense, where you would cross a bridge, walk along the cliff no more than a dozen feet, then take another bridge, all the while maybe going up or down. The goal of it all, apparently, was in one of the many caves into the side of the cliffs.

Meanwhile, there were bandits on the bridges, and also (and this made an unfortunate amount of sense, of course) giant frost spiders that wove webs in between the bridges and lurked between them. If you crossed one of the connected bridges, they'd attack; stay away from them, and you'd be fine. Of course, the "safe" road was longer.

It didn't matter, because Max came prepared to cheat, again.

All it really took was a long ladder with hooks on both ends. There were dozens of places where you could climb up or down between bridges, and although it was unsteady, everyone moved up the ladders with the practiced grace of Dungeoneers who'd been through fucking worse things than unsteady ladders. That, and the fact that we (well, everyone but me and Louise, of course) knew where we were going meant that everything was finished with a minimum of fuss and only one encounter with bandits.

Twenty-four was the same thing except the valley below us was a haunted volcanic nightmare that spewed occasional ghosts, and there was a snowstorm. Which, if we're honest, didn't actually change the solution to the floor at all, it just kind of pissed everyone off. And in the end, I felt like that was a running theme, not only with this dungeon, but with most of the ones I'd seen so far. All of the repetition didn't feel like it was serving a purpose.

Anyway, Twenty-four was also the level where this challenge boss was. You could see him from a mile away; he was a yogi sitting comfortably on a flat rock plateau towards the bottom of the area, where the ghosts and hot updrafts from the lava vent were thickest. One bridge led to where he was, but that bridge went nowhere.

Max pointed him out as we got close. "That's your boy, Jerry," he shouted over the wind. "Fucking pain in the ass to get to, and it was disappointing as fuck when we didn't get any treasure for doing it. Ghosts stop fucking with us if we go down there though, so it ain't all bad."

We got relatively close, and I jumped down. The moment I did, there was a field of calm that I felt radiate out from the center, and the bridge where everyone hung nearby steadied and stopped jostling in the wind. The group all took that as a cue to sit down on the bridge and get comfortable. Whether they figured I was going to get my ass handed to me, or whether they thought I was going to win, they all seemed to think it'd be a show, either way.

I wished I had their confidence.