Dungeon of Knowledge

Chapter 184: Flamecaller Spear

- Aurin ‘Stabby’ Wizzlecrank, Assassin, Leader of the Crimson Sprockets, an all-Gnomish dungeon group operating out of Thorel Moldur.

Aliandra

Ali’s friends were in good spirits, chatting happily while tackling the fully respawned Emberforge Mines. Well, Mato was roaring more than he was chatting, but he looked energetic in how he took on the elementals.

He and Calen had taken a fair while to complete the quest on the southern road, and it had given Ali an excuse to work on the library: cleaning up, making more bookshelves for their expanding collection, copying the books Ryn had collected, and studying her mother’s book. She was beginning to realize Clarence was unruly by nature, but for some reason, he had allowed her some quality time with the content he contained – even helping direct her

+100% Racial (Human).

+100% Relentless.

+705% Clarity.

+335% Sanctuary.

Total: +1240%

“What the heck do you need to test that requires burning yourself?” Ali asked.

Without bothering to say anything, she just shared her stamina regeneration with her friends.

“What the heck!” Calen exclaimed, sitting bolt upright. “How…”

“Clarity,” Malika said, grinning at him.

“Did you get an advancement, Malika?” Ali asked.

“Nope,” she said. “I’m just using it four times.”

“You… what?” Calen gasped, and Malika was treated to the half-elf being literally speechless for a moment.

“I get double Clarity for sitting and focusing,” she explained. “And I can give Clarity to anyone I heal for a bit more than sixteen seconds. It works on myself… and Mato.”

“Ooh!” Calen said, scrambling for his notebook, and then immediately storing it again with a look of chagrin on his face as the pages caught fire. “And…”

“Yes, his Sanctuary reflects it back to me for the fourth instance.”

“Ok, that’s… really ridiculous,” Calen said. “But… we can use this!”

“You’re regenerating your entire stamina pool every five minutes?” Ali said, still staring.

“Four minutes fifty seconds,” Calen corrected absently, his eyes taking on a faraway glaze.

Her mana regeneration was nearly as good, just not getting the advantage of Relentless. And to make it even more useful, Sanctuary reflected her Clarity boost to every member of their team in range, including Ali’s minions. All she had to do was heal Mato when he was damaged – and that was nearly always.

Finally, having resolved her confusion to her own satisfaction, she turned her attention back to the results of the fight. Ali got up and resumed her deconstruction of corpses and the no-longer glowing spears.

“Those Flamecallers have a temporary duration armor boosting skill,” she said, thinking about the most important skills she had seen during the fight.

“Yup, when the scales glow, the only thing that gets through is my nature magic,” Mato agreed, finally shifting back to his Beastkin form. “By the way, that Clarity thing is awesome, Malika.”

“Thanks!”

“They can also do pure fire damage with those spear attacks, and it leaves your wounds burning for ages.” Malika had spent a substantial portion of her resources continually combatting the persistent flames.

“Yep, I noticed that one,” Mato said with a wry grin. “They figured out that I have a lot of armor and swapped to that very quickly. I was burning a lot. What is that flame – it’s very not fun.”

“It’s hellfire,” Ali said, joining them on the rocky ground. “I can identify their mana affinity. I can’t see that hiss thing, so I’m not sure what it does. But it’s really bad for my rogues – they couldn’t fight.”

“It’s a martial arts intimidation skill,” Malika answered. Both she and Mato had high wisdom, and her Clarity helped her keep her mind calm under pressure. “Your rogues are probably not high enough level to resist a level sixty Intimidate.”

Ali twisted her mouth and frowned. “I need to find some higher-level minions soon,” she said. “This is becoming a real problem.”

“What about these Flamecallers?”

“Not sure,” she answered. “They seem to be some classed variant of a hellfire elemental, so I’m thinking I probably can’t summon them. I will try though, if we can get enough.”

“You didn’t get it for your elemental imprint?” Calen asked, looking surprised.

“No, and I really have no idea why,” Ali grumbled. “This stupid classification system makes no sense.”

“That’s too bad, they’re very tough,” he said.

Having something like this on their team would solve a lot of Ali’s challenges with low-level minions. Malika continued sharing the insights she had learned by observing the monsters and their stamina patterns and combat behavior. The others all listened with interest and active questions – even Ali, who she knew was now a highly motivated student of combat. Malika didn’t hold back – every little bit of new information may provide her with some help for her other minions, or even choosing which ones might work the best.

Aliandra

Ali sighed. The Flamecaller Warriors were unreasonably powerful and incredibly durable. Their scaled hide was so extraordinarily tough that more often than not, her Kobold archer’s arrows just bounced off. When they activated their defensive skill, making their bodies glow with radiant heat, there was no chance her Bone Mages or archers could even scratch them.

Her rogues were a lost cause – she stopped summoning them. All the Flamecallers had a powerful intimidating hiss that completely incapacitated the black-scaled Kobolds, rendering them quivering and helpless, unable to even dodge or attack. They just became a mana soak for her Acolytes’ healing magic.

The only minions she had that seemed to do any damage at all were her shamans – from a distance – and that seemed to be entirely due to their lightning vulnerability curse. The Sparkling Ooze also seemed effective, but of course, they hurt Mato and the rest of the melee with their explosive area damage, making the fight unacceptably dangerous.

“This way,” Calen said, his voice a low whisper.

They crept forward following the path Calen had picked out, winding through the desolate, heat-fused landscape past the vigorously bubbling black pools spewing sulfurous black smoke and the pillars of blazing black hellfire.

“Give me a moment,” Malika said, halting their progress as she studied the bubbling pools before retrieving an empty vial from her ring. “I want to collect some of this for Morwynne, it looks interesting.”

Healing mana flowed through her arm continuously as she reached out through the hellfire and dipped her hand and the vial into the boiling black goopy stuff, coming back with an arm aflame, a grimace of pain, and a vial full of the black stuff.

“What is that?” Ali asked curiously. The substance stank of sulfur and even in the vial, it continued to boil and burn with the intense black flame.

“It seems to be a reagent, useful for explosives,” Malika answered.

“And you want to give that to Morwynne Fizzlebang? Is that really a good idea?” Ali asked. It seemed that every time she entered Pretty Powerful Potions, something was in the process of exploding. The Gnomish Alchemist seemed to need no extra help blowing things up.

“She’ll be ecstatic,” Calen grinned.

Mato snorted, “Best warn… well, the entirety of Myrin’s Keep!”

“Hmm…” was all Malika said, but she stored the foul-smelling stuff in her ring.

“Incoming,” Calen said, interrupting them and raising his bow to aim at the three rapidly approaching reptilian elementals.

“Same strategy?” Malika asked, getting an affirmative nod from Calen.

This time Ali had no rogues, and instead sent in her Hobgoblin, along with all her shamans and the Sparkling Ooze. She still had no idea what to do with her Bone Mages and archers, but she made them shoot anyway, deciding that even the paltry damage they were able to do might be worth it.

The first intimidating hiss caused the entire melee group to stagger, except for her ooze which, to Ali’s surprise, seemed to be immune. It was not like it had a lot of wisdom. A few tense moments passed while the flamecaller had free rein to stab and slice at Mato, but Malika twitched, recovering her wits quickly, and healed him. Mato was the next to respond, blocking two sweeping spear strikes on the banded steel of his armor.

The Hobgoblin attacked, shaking his head as if trying to dislodge a bug from an ear, but her shamans remained down and out, cowering near the ground. The simultaneous spear cleaves from the flamecaller warriors cut down two of them in an instant.

Ali winced at the snap of her reservation and tried to pull the remaining shaman out of melee range to save it, but it was still incapacitated and unable to respond. It fell quickly to the next reaping strikes of the long-bladed spears.

“” Ali instructed, glancing at her archers and mages, but it was arguable if they were having any effect. She ignored them for now, turning her attention to her Sparkling Ooze, impressing on it her intention to aim its shots near, but not exactly on top of the enemy monsters. The bright balls of light shot up, arcing over the battlefield, but most of them missed entirely, and the ones that hit caused Malika to have to dodge and she almost killed her own Hobgoblin when the blast synchronized with a particularly nasty spear cleave.

“” she told it, and instead encouraged it to go try eating the Flamecallers, or at least hit them with a pseudopod. But that only increased her frustration as, without any fire resistance, the ooze struggled against the molten armor and the flame. Eventually, she had it disengage so that her healers did not have to worry about keeping it alive and instead fired barrier shards at the flamecallers.

Her frown didn’t go away even after the Flamecallers dropped – mostly as a result of Calen and Malika’s damage.

she thought, paging her Grimoire, but she had the entire thing memorized already, and nothing new could be found lurking somehow undiscovered among its pages. She walked over and deconstructed the corpses while she considered her options.

The warriors were strong, and their spear attacks were powerful, and she considered the possibility of using them against their own kind. She didn’t hold too much hope though, given that they identified as some type of elemental monster.  Still, they were a high-level, robust monster, so she had to at least try it.

“You got it?” Calen asked.

“Yes…” Her Grimoire was currently full, and as she ran through the list, her eyes stopped at the chapter encoding coins. She was loath to create money directly because it would disrupt the economy of Myrin’s Keep in a much more devastating way than what they were already doing to it with their essences and massive demand for potions. Besides, she could create all the metal directly, now. There wasn’t any pressing need for them to be created into the shape of a coin specifically, other than the nostalgia and historical value of the Dal’mohran gold coin. And she still had several of those in her ring so she could learn them again if she wanted to.

Ali made the decision, quickly replacing the coin imprint with the Flamecaller Warrior, and then summoned one. But to her dismay – and not wholly surprisingly – it collapsed to the ground like every other elemental besides her Forest Guardians, destroying her hope of using the powerful snake-like monster against the denizens of the Emberforge Mines.

“It was worth a try,” Malika said.

“Yes, I know,” Ali answered, but it wasn’t much consolation. In a fit of frustration, she created everything that might even remotely have a chance of working, and then, when Calen pulled the next patrolling group of Flamecallers, she systematically tried out each of them.

The first thing that happened was one of the Flamecallers hung back and threw its spear with enormous force at her flying Lux Drifters, retrieving the spear with some ridiculous magical boomerang skill and flinging it again, wiping out the entire flight of the swarm oozes she had made in a matter of seconds. The Scalding Slime and the Lava Lurker did not struggle with the ambient fire damage in the dungeon, but they did the wrong type of damage, steam and lava both being based on heat and thus proving ineffective against the hellfire elementals. The Brine Oozes hung back out of range firing their water bolts, but they struggled in the fire of the mines and took an entire Acolyte’s mana pool to keep them alive for the duration of the fight. Her wolves just died to the fire, her non-fire-based spiders were all way too low-level to be useful, and her giant bats were simply skewered out of the sky by the thrown spears.

“This is stupid,” she announced finally as they took a break. “I need better minions, everything I have is useless.” Without fire resistance, most of her beast minions were worthless, and the ones she could equip were simply far too low-level to have much effect on the level sixty monsters.

“Still struggling to find effective monsters?” Malika asked.

Ali nodded. It was depressing that she was the highest-level member of their group, and they were basically carrying her at this point. All she had was her shards and her Acolytes.

“He’s pretty effective,” Mato said, plopping himself down nearby, pointing at her tall plate-covered Hobgoblin. “Why not make more of those?”

“He’s level forty-one, they cost too much…” she stopped suddenly. She had been about to say her Hobgoblins would cost her too much mana and she couldn’t afford it, but that had been an automatic response. she realized, glancing at her substantial free mana pool.

“I guess I can afford them now,” she admitted sheepishly. She had not considered it because she had been struggling with mana for so long. It took only a couple of minutes for her to summon some new minions, most of her others having been wiped out in the last fight.

“What kind of weapons do you prefer?” she asked, speaking in Goblin.

“Axes, mistress,” the female Hob replied. She wore her long, coarse black hair up in a topknot and was the highest-level Hobgoblin of the group.

“Sword and a shield,” one of the males answered, echoed by the second.

“Easy enough,” she replied, making each of them a Fireforged hybrid plate armor to replace the leather items her skill had automatically chosen.  Then she created a pair of nasty-looking Eimuuran steel axes for the female Hob and shields and swords for the males.

“There you go,” she said, pointing at the heavy equipment she would have struggled to even lift.

“Thank you, mistress!” The three new hobs swarmed over the gear, equipping it immediately, and soon she had the new hobs and the one from earlier standing in a nice, neat row before her. It was almost eight-hundred mana for four Hobgoblins, but as she saw them standing in the burnished Fireforged- and Eimuuran-steel she felt her spirits rising and the frustration of the day beginning to fade.

“Here,” Mato said, handing her a tray of fire elixirs.

“Wait, these are the expensive ones,” she exclaimed looking at the potions he had just given her for her new minions.

“They’re high enough level to use them,” he answered with a shrug. “Might as well have the best defenses on our team. We want them to live, right?”

“I guess so,” Ali said, nodding and then handing out the elixirs.

One of the Hobgoblins snarled at his neighbor, puffing up his chest and raising his sword, but the female hob simply barked a sharp command, and the others immediately stood down. Then she took the elixirs and distributed them.

Ali thought, recalling just how hierarchical the Goblin society was – even to the point of them having aptitudes and skills that were more powerful when fighting with other Goblins. The hobs in particular had the ability to pull the unruly members into line, as long as the hierarchy was clearly established. She checked each of their skills and abilities, finding minor differences in masteries and weapon skills, but all of them had decent defensive abilities and an impressive-looking Rallying Cry skill that she had liked the look of.

With that thought fresh in her mind, she resummoned her Goblin shamans. she thought, deciding to think of them like replacement mages. They wouldn’t be quite as effective, but they wouldn’t die during the intimidation, and their lightning was decent damage still. And they were Goblins, boosting the power of her Hobs.

“Are you making the beginnings of your own Goblin horde, Ali?” Mato observed with a grin. “How about we try them out in battle?” As was usual, Mato did not like sitting around when there were enemies to fight, but Ali was just as excited to see her new army in action too.

“I’ll go scout,” Calen announced, grinning with eager abat-litrpg