ushernet Chapter 76: Ruins of Dal’mohra: Suspended City
Chapter 76: Ruins of Dal’mohra: Suspended City
Chapter 76: Ruins of Dal’mohra: Suspended City- Excerpt from Nevyn Eld, University of Dal’mohra.
Aliandra
Ali put the dangerous book down and rubbed her temples. The headache throbbed unpleasantly under her fingertips, refusing to ease up, and she was not quite sure if it was from studying or if she was still recovering from her fainting spell at the guild. She wasn’t quite sure what to make of Malika’s rather shocking theory about Mieriel, but she would definitely be more cautious around her from now on – and wisdom was a smart investment for her class anyway.
She had been feeling a little better and had eventually plucked up the courage to start reading the book that she and Ryn had uncovered in the library. A book that filled her with both anxious excitement and chilling dread. The last remaining intact book from the Grand Library Arcana, potentially full of insight into the domain aspect of her class, and a powerful link to her past. But she could never forget the Blind Lich who had killed her family and destroyed the city – even though this book had been written way back when Nevyn Eld was still a human re
“I wish you could have seen it before,” Ali said.
Bone crunched underfoot as everyone took in the sight of the dungeon and the ruins.
“Whatever took out that section of the city above got this level too,” Calen said, gazing off to the north. The central ring had a large section that was simply missing in the direction he was facing, and of the outer ring, only half remained, the edges where the ring had shattered were left jagged and broken, jutting out over the emptiness.
“There is something out there,” Calen said, shading his eyes with his hands, whatever good that would do down here so far below ground. “Bats, I think. Big ones… and something else…”
It was frankly quite astounding how good his eyes were. Ali couldn’t even see anything moving, let alone identify what it might be.
“Are we just going to stand around and look? This is a dungeon, it probably has monsters we should be fighting,” Mato said.
A loud grinding and the snapping of shattered bone reverberated from a darkened alleyway up ahead, followed by an inhuman screech.
“Spitter Drone!” Calen shouted, pulling out his bow and firing.
“This doorway!” Malika yelled, darting toward a bone-encrusted building as several tons of angry armored bone elemental shot out into the open plaza, spraying vile-smelling liquid in all directions.
Ali threw up a barrier just in time to deflect the brunt of the ossifying spray before it hit her, leaping backward reflexively as the heavy domed gray carapace smashed into the too-narrow open doorway, sending a spray of splintered bone and rock flying toward her.
“” Ali commanded, trying to catch her breath from her unplanned athletic maneuver. There was definitely a bruise on her hip already. Her minions responded immediately, most of them charging into the house after the giant monster, Malika, and Mato.
“Firebolts now,” she added, directing her mages to open fire and sending a stream of arcane bolts into the chaotic interior to mingle with the lightning flashes and bursts of soul magic from within.
She kept a close eye on the monster, alert for its devastating magic, but she found herself to be surprisingly calm. Surprise attack notwithstanding, she found it easy to slip into their well-practiced routine, and in record time she was calling for fireballs. It was remarkable how a few levels improved their damage output.
As Ali called out the explosion, she studied the magic, now much clearer to her than before. Her resolution and acuity had both improved with the increased skill level and additional attribute points in perception. She blocked the doorway with a barrier, watching curiously as the layers of bone encrusting the walls of the house were blown off when the monster’s corpse exploded.
“Add! Piercer Scorpion!” Calen called out, ‘pointing’ to it with a speeding incandescent arrow.
Mato’s heavier form tore at the bone layers on the ground as he propelled himself at great speed to crash into the monster with a roar. It instantly wheeled to attack him.
Ali organized her minions, getting them engaged in the fight as quickly as she could.
“Another! Mato, behind you!” Calen called the second incoming scorpion.
Ali thought. The monsters kept coming, attracted by the noise of battle and the explosive release of mana. But with each additional monster, Calen simply called it out, and Mato used his Challenging Roar to taunt it to attack him. Her shamans kept up the assault with their lightning magic, and whenever there were two or three, Ali would slip into their Skeletal Wyvern routine, dropping fireballs on the pack and making certain Mato was getting a heal between each strike.
Ali lost count of the number of monsters they killed, but silence finally returned, and she found they had moved across the entire inner ring and were now quite close to the edge, overlooking the broad gap into the abyss separating them from the suspended second ring set slightly below.
“Can we rest a little?” she asked. Her own mana pool was still almost full, recovered periodically during the long-running fight by the simple expedient of deconstructing whatever corpse she could reach, but her minions were running low, and that – particularly for her healers – was not something she wanted to ignore.
“How many did we just kill?” Malika asked, a little out of breath, exactly echoing Ali’s thoughts. Previously, these bone elementals had been incredibly challenging to take on, even one at a time, with a long rest in between. With just the advancement of a few levels, they had torn through a host of them, sometimes fighting two or three simultaneously, and they had come out at the other end breathing a little heavier and needing to take a bit of a mana break.
“Sixteen, if you don’t count the Spitter Drones,” Calen answered.
Mato
Mato stood near the edge, gazing down into the darkness below. The dim greenish-yellow light filtered upward but whatever lay down there was well beyond his ability to make out. It smelled though, of rot and growth, a stark contrast to the dry bone dust that covered everything up here. There was no railing or wall, just the treacherous-looking bone stuff layered on top of the underlying stone of the enormous supporting platform that held hundreds of encrusted buildings in various stages of ruin. Off to the side was what looked like a giant toppled statue, but it was hard to tell what lay beneath all the layers encrusting it, attaching it to the floor.
The ground shivered lightly underfoot.
He looked down when it happened again. The vibrations grew progressively more powerful in a regular rhythmic pattern.
“Whoa,” Malika exclaimed, noticing the effect.
As dust and small loose chunks of bone began to bounce, Mato looked up catching a flash of white down one of the adjacent alleys. He didn’t wait, shapeshifting immediately to his Bear Form. When the monster stepped out of the shadows, he was ready.
But it was pure white and towered at least twice the size of every bone elemental they had faced so far, its spear-tipped limbs thicker than his leg, its stinger gleaming with unnatural sharpness as it quivered upright, ready to strike.
Mato charged without hesitation on all four paws, tearing across the clear space at high speed. Survival Instinct flared as the spears blurred into action, stabbing down viciously. He triggered his Brutal Combat block a hair before the spears even moved, reacting to the premonition of danger rather than relying on his vision to track the immense speed. But as the spears ripped through the stone pavement, the ground beneath him erupted with a devastating pincushion of stout yard-long spears of bone, impaling him through the ribs from below.
He roared in pain but still managed to imbue his voice with his Challenging Roar skill, while he twisted, snapping the spears of bone, and spraying his blood across the ground.
“Mato, it’s a boss! Be careful!” Calen yelled.
he thought, settling his focus on his Survival Instinct as it began screaming for his attention. He swiped at the monster, spending mana to empower his strike using Brutal Restoration, but his heavy paw bounced off the dense armor while the nature magic of his Brutal Restoration barely penetrated to do the minimum damage.
Suddenly, the heals from the Kobolds landed, beginning to slowly force the shattered pieces of the spears out of his body, but he was already bracing against more as the giant scorpion of bone lashed out, making bone explode from the walls and the ground wherever it struck.
Mato roared, lowering his center at the last possible moment avoiding the powerful tail strike that punched clean through a stone wall sending shards of bone and rock ricocheting off his armor.
He narrowed his eyes against the brilliant flash of lightning, delaying his attack slightly to better exploit the damage the magic would do.
Again, the urgent awareness of Survival Instinct burst in his mind as the scorpion’s tail raised and he recognized the potent bone magical attack.
“It’s using magic!” Ali’s voice carried clear across the battlefield.
He calmed himself a little – these attacks were well-telegraphed and easy to avoid. But instead of the expected spear of bone, the ground exploded with a violent eruption of bone spears and shards in a nova that shot out in all directions, picking him up and flinging him ten yards to bounce off a wall.
“Calen! No!” Ali screamed, and for a brief moment, Mato saw his childhood friend impaled through the stomach by a large spear of bone, suspended in the air out over the darkness with nothing but yawning emptiness below to catch his fall.