K3e9e7
RAGE
A ball of black and white fire
RAGE
mixing together purification and corruption
RAGE
was shot into one of the nearby ships
RAGE
the combined power eliminating a hole into one of Leviathan's ships.
RAGE
A portal opened nearby, an axe head the size of a wall wrapped around a tree root
RAGE
and slammed through another of the ships breaking them in half.
RAGE
Ice wrapped around the legs of the Giant Skeleton as more ships appeared inside of the ice.
RAGE
The Skeleton slammed its fists into the ice trying to break it open and get at the ships inside.
RAGE
One of the ships still on the surface suddenly burst open as Coral and Slime ripped through the ship.
RAGE
I slammed my fists into the block of ice with ships inside.
RAGE
The ice was broken apart and the ships inside along with them. Storm clouds gathered above and lightning charged through the air and was slammed down on top of me.
RAGE
I was so numb to everything I didn't even feel it. A flying Spear and a winged cat flew around me-AAARRRGGGHHH!
Apas
The two little birdies tore the mess of the Keeper's body apart and slurped them up before abruptly being pulled back together again slamming together again into a new evolutionary cocoon. Leonaidas's spear, carrying the new cocoon, abruptly flew away being sucked into one of Treyni's portals leading back to the tree. If she can make portals anywhere that she likes why did Keeper bother with setting up that trade route through Helheim? A tree branch poked through another portal and a young woman carved from wood emerged from teh branch. It wasn't Treyni's real body, just a gargoyle made out of wood.
"I assume you had a good reason for that right now?" Treyni asked as she looked at me suspiciously.
"Considering the magical tumour that was eating away at him we naturally have more important things to worry about than losing a little extra fire power." I explained myself as I looked over at the ships that had started circling around. "It looks like he's gotten sick of Ring of Fire's volcano." One of the Ships was unusual, like a beached ship that was filled with earth and plant life into a miniature jungle planter, with a active volcano in the middle of it. From that mass of fire and stone several flaming masses were shot out and volleyed against Thing's body with several loud crashes. "We have better things to do than argue." I stated the obvious but apparently it needed to be said.
"Agreed." Treyni changed to her Leshen form as they got ready to resume the offensive, another had swirling storm clouds, from which a giant figure emerged wielding a bolt of lightning as a spear. "I'll have Archie and the other skeletons get the bottles ready to start eating their ships."
"Get your totems to look in on the core." I instructed bluntly. "Offing the Fiend has delayed the damage but it doesn't do anything for the damage already done. Figure out the damage immediately."
Treyni
The birds, or the creatures that used to be birds, were getting slaughtered. Dungeon drops tend to come in one of three flavours, weapons, armour and consumables, the latter sees the least amount of use, living day to day makes adventurers rather stingy, not using a item unless it is needed. Most of the time these items get sold to the adventurers guild itself, turned in as proof of monster subjugation or simply sold for extra cash. The Guild leader proved herself a relative spendthrift in this regard, two bank styled bags of holding were hanging off of her hips and she was pulling items out one after another, single shot high fire power flintlocks and blunderbusses were being fired one after another with a variety of different elements and status effects before being discarded down a hole.
Such 'Trash cans' dotted the town in a number of different places, they were basically holes that led to the fourth floor but this way it was possible to recycle material and aid the Keeper's growth, Julia wasn't the only one who had positioned themselves over such a can and was dumping various single use items after using them up. Which was good because Treyni suspected they needed to feed Keeper all the junk they can get their mitts on. Treyni had stretched one of her roots all the way over to the new fifth floor room to the core that was full of cracks, some of the pieces of it looked missing, the effects of the soul damage no doubt.
"You three, stay here to cast healing magic and support spells on the core." Three of my totems did an approximation of a bow, as they each surrounded the core and started casting magic to hold it together again.
"The rest of you follow me." The Civilians were being led through Leonaidas's floor and into the Helheim breach, and through that into the two breaches of Bellfast and the Skunkape.
"The Bellfast territory is too close. After he's done here Leviathan will go there next." One of Charles dwarfs gave me the sum of the situation on the first of the breaches. Leviathan will be finished here, but it'll be when we kill him alongside master.
"What of the second?" To my question another Adventurer emerged from the Skunk Ape's breach. "It's a jungle over there. Looks like some interesting species of plants. If we had a base we could use I'd recommend trying to exploit the area."
This wasn't the time to build bases. I let out a sigh as I turned to the last breach, the one that was still in progress that would act as a short cut to the city of necromancers, a few thousand undead warriors would be pretty welcome by this point, even if the only thing they can do is shoot the birds out of the air. As I was thinking about that the tower shook, Leviathan wasn't only attacking us in the Mortal plane, his Cocoytus ice ship was here too. Graves, his contracts and all the undead under their command were already too busy dealing with them. Not only had the bastard come here to attack us, but he had also used the Bag Halls like what Master and the Dragon had, so the bastard had lots of monsters helping him with support. Well it's not like Graves was showing any mercy either, he had adopted the use of the Bag of Holding Bomb with great enthusiasm even though he was sending monsters on raids one after another. And Because Leviathan was being raided he couldn't raid either which significantly freed up our own forces, who were mostly dedicating themselves to fighting in the water along with the bosses.
Levi
This little asshole. You keep me distracted by sending ships after the Trio and in the mean time you're hanging around here waiting for the chance to attack Keeper. I bet you even took advantage of me destroying your ships so that you could rebuild them into your fleet! Well how does it feel getting used as a short cut? And I'm not even alone here either! Reconstituting myself at the bottom of the bay I took the form of one of my rarest used schema's: A giant clam! Opening myself wide I expelled my many passengers. For weeks I have been hunting various powerful female monsters and fertilising their eggs using a combination of my own genetic material and the Maride's water. I then had the skulls in my possession utilise the Reanimation Monster rearing method and selected the most savage forms available to me after maxing out giant slayer and each and every one of them.
[B Rank Monster Barrier Reef Turtle-]
[B Rank Monster Water Genasi Kraken-]
[B Rank Monster Jormangandr-]
[B Rank Monster Jet Jawfish-]
[B Rank Monster Dracosuchus-]
I was so proud of my creations I could cry! The Turtle surfaced first, it's shell built to repel or neutralise all the magical energy that came into contact with him, and for that matter so was his beak, my monster opened his massive jaws and clamped down on one of nearest ships, the magic formed material was torn apart like a hot knife through butter. Already another block of ice had formed, it was such a shame though that I already had my countermeasure in place to deal with the bastard making icebergs. From the depths lightning arced between the jaws of my Dracosuchus, I watched as water turned into hydrogen and oxygen, was gathered together, spat with force strong enough to cut steel, and set on fire!
The ship was destroyed before it could be rebuilt! Water started to turn into a whirl pool under the influence of my Jormangander, an offspring of the two headed dragon, but thanks to Giant Killer so much larger, and with hydrokinetics too! Not just Hydro kinetics, this child has poison that could bring down a god, and now he has the power to weaponise it as the very waters themselves were turning into a deadly poison. My Monsters with scales and shells that repel mana were immune to it, that bastard's monsters wouldn't be. The piece de-resistance here though went to the Kraken, who greedily gobbled up Leviathan's monsters from the ships and used their genetic material to remake them into Genasi hybrids under her control with improved souls so that they can live outside of a dungeon!
In the mean time the Jet Jawfish I prepared was circling around and making sure that none of Leviathan's ships escaped, if any of them attempt to run away he and his siblings will chase them down and wipe them out! No act of cowardice or self mutilation would let Leviathan escape my revenge this time!
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
"Try to figure out which one of these ships keeps freezing the water over!" Leonaidas's weapon swarm tore through another ship. "If we take out that blessing then we can stop him from getting back up again!"
I felt around the waters around me feeling out the shape of every ship in the area, I even paused in my efforts to destroy Leviathan's re-spawning warships so that I could add them to my tally, and my face twisted in rage. All around me the ice snapped and crushed as the ships were torn apart like shredding paper for stress relief!
"99!" I let out a growl in sheer anger.
"Are you certain?" Leonaidas asked and even his face twisted in horror.
"Positive!" My main body turned into a urchin and fired spikes of anti-dungeon coral. "There's only ninety nine of that bastard's hundred warships here! We're missing one!" Billowing storms intensified as the monsters in the bay raged on. They could be out here breaking ships apart all day long and it would never matter because Leviathan's core wasn't even here!
?
I groaned as I pushed up from the ground, flipping onto my back and was greeted by a black void. Where the heck...?
"Get up!" A voice I couldn't quite remember where I heard it before spoke to me. "I said get up! I might be sitting down but I'm not talking to someone who can't even be bothered to sit up straight." I turned to face the one who had been talking to me, seated in a chair that I couldn't see. Black well worn sweat pants worn over grey shoes, a grey hoodie worn over a black shirt with a rainbow splash on the front, the words 'Bad Wolf' visible to my eyes. A red flannel mask was worn covering most of his face, well used yellow and grey work gloves over his hands and a pair of glasses obscured his eyes.
"Where is this place?" I felt another invisible chair appear beneath me and bump me up to his eye level.
"The Afterlife? Your core? Wherever else you've been keeping me? Who knows?" The Figure shrugged but I only got more confused.
"My core?" My memories clicked into place. "You're my...?"
"'First Material' as your mentor oh so delicately put it?" The man snorted in derision. "I understand that you are confused but you see I am on a time table. So let's begin shall we?" The Man shrugged his shoulders and gestured to the side. "I used to write as a hobby so pardon me my embellishments. This is a story of a man, we'll call him 'Brandon.'" A pause, presumably for dramatic effect. "Brandon came from a world that honestly? Was going through a little bit of trouble. There was a pandemic going on that had claimed millions, a war was raging, and his own people's industrial output was threatening their continued survival. He also, like so many other people in the world, honestly doesn't really care about any of that, he got all his vaccines, the war was across seas, and he got driven to work every day over a distance that he could honestly pretty easily cover in half an hour to a job where he helped cut wood all day."
"'Brandon' sounds a little bit like an ass." I replied levelling a glare at the self proclaimed writer.
"Brandon lived his life listlessly, watching anime, porn and occasionally writing 'fan fics' about what he saw while working a dead end job in which he could easily be replaced by a machine but hasn't been because society took pity on him."
"I like Brandon less and less."
"It's not like he didn't have dreams of his own, after years of practice with writing about other people's work he had decided to give writing original work a try. But you see, those dreams don't matter now: Because Brandon is dead!" He spat the sentence, anger and frustration clear as day in his tone of voice. "He took some days off from work, and when he returned it was all business as usual. Then the electrical socket that his dumb-ass coworkers didn't bother to clean while he was gone was all full of saw-dust and it caught on fire! Like a dumb-ass Brandon tried to put out the fire with a extinguisher he didn't know how to use, right next to the Petroleum tanks!"
Eeeh. The longer I let this guy talk the more upset he seemed. I don't want to know what he looks like under that mask anymore.
"And then he un-died." Breathing a sigh, the Writer started to work up to another rant. "Like in so many of the shows that he had watched and wrote about Brandon didn't wake up in a hospital room after the explosion but instead on a Altar, not a scratch on him, hell even his clothes were intact. Now Brandon was never one to be ungrateful for being saved, but his lifestyle left him with a unique perspective on his new situation. The Isekai Genre is pure psychological dread, in the best case scenario you have died, and if you're lucky then you're the same species as what you were when you closed your eyes."
Which made sense to me, I didn't like the idea of being forcibly yanked away from my friends and family who would get all wound up about my disappearance, and if it happened enough times or on say national TV then the governments would inevitably get all wound up about people getting snatched away all the time, in the worst case scenario there could even be a war between worlds. I paused my train of thought, how did I know all that?
"Oi!" The Writer snapped at me. "Listen when people are talking to you ass-hole!" The Writer cleared his throat as he continued to talk. "Brandon you see wasn't person, not to the people who summoned him. He was a bomb, worse than a bomb he was a delivery mechanism." The Writer pulled up his shirt, revealing a blue crystal lodged in his chest, a very familiar blue chest. "The people who summoned Brandon had a 'independent contractor' of sorts, dude who commanded a army of monsters and fancied himself a pirate, his job was to take the bomb his associates had prepared and transport it to the enemy."
Leviathan?
"You wanna know the worst part? After being killed and turned into a disposable weapon of mass destruction Brandon was feeling spiteful enough to go ahead and take as many people down with him as possible, and he got his wish. Cause that Pirate was such a pain in the ass that as soon as the people of the continent he was dropping his weapon off at saw that he was coming they gathered a whole ass army together just to put him down." Okay I really don't like Brandon now. "And in the end they ended up drowning under the influence of the weapon of mass destruction, and with his ammunition exhausted the pirate saw no more use for the bomb and destroyed it before anyone else could get their hands on it. But that wasn't it though." Brandon tapped his finger on his chest again, on the blue crystal located therein. "Cause you see that bomb was something pretty special, a piece of crystal cut straight from Leviathan himself."
From the who now?
"And it had absorbed some very special material as soon as it's host had died."
I'm still on the 'Cut straight from Leviathan' part.
"Focus you dumbass!" The Writer growled, eyes glowing blue as the crystal ate away at his body. "The Block on my memories that kept you from shattering is being lifted, no doubt the work of Satan drawing out my anger! My little primer can only do so much! Let's hope you don't break this time!"
"Wait What do you mean-AAARRRGGGHHH!"
A high pitch screech echoed out as all of mine, all of his, experiences poured into my mind all at once! For the second time today I rolled onto my back, and looked up to see the ceiling of my core room. I felt like I could throw up. I turned my head to face my core, cracked, looked ready to fall apart, but still in one piece, with misty mana working to fill in the gaps. Benefits of fifty cores slaved to my will I guess. I floated up more than stood up even with the massive headache as I got dizzy. I was on the... Hel I was on five floors already? I needed to be one my first though, luckily I could disappear and reappear anywhere that I wanted. The dungeon was shaking, Thing was fighting. I closed my eyes and let my thoughts out.
"What's the situation?" A pause in the train of thoughts, as if conveying absolute shock at my words.
"How are you-?"
"I don't have time to explain, I need to know what the situation is!"
"Ninety nine ships in the bay and not one of them the one we need."
Which means I can't just do this the easy way and get thing to drop me off at the moving iceberg, I had to find the ninety ninth ship/floor and break into the 100th that way. I looked at the entrance, the familiar accursed dungeon fog was in my way again!
'A genie is less a proper living being and more a mass of element themed mana.'
I breathed deep, the Professor's lectures in the back of my mind. I've switched between 'dungeon mode' and the fiend a bunch of times by dissolving him down into pure mana and reconstituting him right? I looked down at my hand, a familiar glove. No I would have to do this the right way. I remembered Jack, the remnants of that Hateful bastard was still in my pile of Schema's but I couldn't make a monster out of him, but I bet I can cram his parts into another schema. The same shape was important, I didn't have the time to get use to another body type, I used the Warlock Skeleton Schema as the basis, combined that with the Goliath pieces, and I filled the gaps in with the Fire Frost Fiend, and wrap it all up in Leonaidas's armour. I looked down at my hand and breathed deep as I felt the bones growing inside.
[Warning: Dungeon Avatars cannot leave the Dungeon]
Really what's the difference between a Ifrit and a Dungeon avatar? I've had to pull the fiery bastard back together so many times already.
[That is not my decision to make!]
No. It isn't. Looking at the fog, I took a running start and jumped.
Charles
"Keep pumping Mana into the Dead Man's rope!" Vines of algae were being shredded, rewoven together and healed over and over again, becoming stronger as they went along, even the Dryad had come out to help them. The vines were being sent into the water in a net, Leviathan would have to break them before he got close to the town.
"Another volley from the Volcano ship!" I looked up into the air and held out my hand as the flaming debris exploded, their own heat turning into kinetic force.
"The Rope is finished!" Announced one of the land based druids. "Beginning phase two!"
Druids on land manipulate plant life, Druids from Lemuria manipulate coral. Familiar rainbow like material crawled up the ropes and expanded forming a huge grill, which was then being raised into the air via more Dead Man's rope, some people had already secured themselves to it, others were running across a platform of ice to climb onboard. The Coral was the all too familiar material from the Dungeon's third floor, one that repels and neutralises magical energy. Without the creature it's supposed to be attached to it will slowly fade over the next three days, at which point it could be enchanted to have it's anti magic properties permanently but for now they didn't have the time for that. Instead, dozens of individual archers, mages, and other range specialists in place, their artillery opened fire, releasing shots of magic, arrows, and disposable offensive items with the intention of picking off any of the ships that tried to break away from the battle, ostentatiously.
With the cover fire in Place I could move forward. By the looks of things the prided fire magic I had spent so much time to develop would be of minimal usefulness here, Leviathan had taken care of that much. But that didn't mean that I wasn't stubborn enough to find a way of burning a hole through his ships anyway, and he had just the thing in mind. Strapped to his person were several bags of holding filled up with a compound the Keeper created, an Aluminium and Rust mixture, Thermite is what he called it, I watched it burn through a metal shield after lighting it up a while ago, I was quite fond of the idea of doing much the same thing to the bastard's ships now. As I was flying forward I saw something drop out of Thing's skull and land on top of one of Leviathan's ships. Already water was climbing onto the deck to attack the new figure, and to my surprise Apas, Thing, Treyni, Levi and Leonaidas all swarmed to knock away the attackers as they looked at the new figure confused.
"What madness has the Keeper unleashed now!?" I looked at the figure, tall, easily as tall as Jack is clocking in at three meters, he was wearing metal knight's armour that did nothing to hide either the glow of fire in the joints or the frost that had covered the metal. "Keeper? What are you doing up and about?" His equipment was unfamiliar too, a spear with familiar rainbow material on one end, and a large diamond from a mages staff on the other, neither made Charles feel very reassured.
"Ending this." The Keeper swung his weapon, the Thermite sand was pulled out of my bags of holding and ignited, transforming into humanoid figures under the Keeper's command. "There are spatial corridors connecting these ships together, one of them leads to elsewhere. Find it!" The numerous balls of fire scattered through the air, naturally Leviathan attempted to shoot them as it shot at everything else, but what is he going to do against creatures already made out of powder?
"More of your tricks!?" One of the figure heads emerged from the water. "Even if you could-" The Figure head was destroyed in a burst of flame. "Travel to the ship after the one that you're on and climb onto the deck and release a burst of flame." I watched the Keeper as it worked, commanding the beings made out of fire. If he didn't know better he'd say that... "It's the entrance being guarded by a boss monster, kill it and move on." I shook my head in the negative. It was over fifty years ago from what he heard. Suddenly a geyser of flame emerged from the decks of every ship, including the one we were standing on. "Now which one of you don't see another geyser other than your own?" Another pause. "Under stood. Thing you have a lot of work ahead of you. We're going straight to phase two." And with that the Armour collapsed, the individual inside of it having disappeared. While I was trying to figure out what was happening the Giant pile of bones picked me up and ate me.
