B3 C48: A Disk

Metal quills pinged off my armor by the dozen as an entire room full of wall-clinging urchin-like monsters honed in on me. As for the others, they lazily sat by the chamber’s entrance, none of them wishing to turn into a pincushion as I wrapped things up.

Crunch. Another urchin’s body caved inwards as I poked at it with my harpoon spear. Parts of it fell to the floor while the main body clung to the metal wall even in death.

Figuring that the small targets would be a good leveling opportunity, I’d started clearing the room with my bow, but it had been taking too long. Instead, I now paced the room’s perimeter feeling like nothing more than a glorified window-washer, or perhaps one of those trash collectors with the little trash.

And of course, while I moved, I was on the lookout for anything suspicious.

Vitality Sight reacted to the urchins, making the entire room look like it was polka-dotted. After a time, Death Sight did the same. For completeness’ sake, I cycled through every variant I had, though I’d come to accept that I was unlikely to get anything out of some of the more situational ones like Water Sight here.

Right as I was starting to accept that the room was a bust, however, I found something strange.

Tremor Sight. Good for detecting things moving in the earth, but also capable of picking out pockets of differing densities in material. The range wasn’t great, so I hadn’t spotted it from afar, but something was wrong with the stretch of wall I was on.

To one side, solid, dense metal as far as Tremor Sight could see. A few meters to the other side, and once again, nothing but metal.

In the middle though, the wall was barely visible to my sight. It was as though the wall vanished a few centimeters in, replaced entirely by air.

It’s… hollow? It’s hollow! A few more quills bounced impotently off my armor as the realization struck me far harder than the urchins ever could.

With a renewed vigor, I swept through every urchin in range, clearing off a wide swath of the room surrounding the suspect secret passageway. Satisfied that nothing would be hurting the others, I used my spear to draw a line in the dirt marking off the passageway’s boundaries and shouted to call everyone over.

“Secret room behind this wall! Bonus points if you can all figure out how to open it before I’m done!”

The four needed no more encouragement — anything was more exciting than idly waiting for me, after all — and all of them hastily scrambled to the section in question. Even as I continued to clear the room, I listened in on their conversation.

“Perhaps, uh, more holes somewhere? The quills would work as well as the wolves’ fur.” Emin scooped up a few of the thin metallic spines from the floor but found nowhere to put them.

“If not by ingenuity, it will yield by force!” Without stopping for approval, Alara slammed a fist into the wall with all her might, the shells of the nearby urchins falling to the ground from the force. Unfortunately, that was all that happened, the wall otherwise unaffected by her strike.

A corrosion potion from Oachin dribbled ineffectively to the ground.

They went through a dozen attempts and conjectures in no time at all. Perhaps it had to do with the placement of the urchins on the wall — some sort of pattern or puzzle. Or perhaps the opposite — there was something hidden by the creatures’ bodies, either behind them or inside them. They discussed everything from digging a tunnel under the wall to searching for hidden buttons elsewhere in the room.

At last, the most silent of the bunch weighed in. Seemingly unamused by the puzzle denying their loot, Nella scowled at the wall with her arms crossed. “This is dumb. I’m just burning it down.”

Twin jets of flame burst from her hands, rapidly heating the wall before her. The metal grew notably red in no time at all, but other than that, the only visible reaction was the gentle shaking of Emin’s body as he chuckled.

“Nella, I don’t think the dungeon will let you, um, burn down a puzzle. Might I suggest-”

Drip. The first drop of molten metal hit the ground, silencing the baffled researcher. Drip, drip, drip. Drawn in by the sight, I paused in my cleaning duties just to watch.

Singular drops soon turned into small trickles and then molten rivers as the entire wall melted before our eyes. By the end, the heat was so great that only Nella could withstand it, a puddle of bubbling silvery liquid pooling at her feet.

When all was said and done, the wall now sported a perfectly clean rectangular cutout.

“Rejoice! The great Nella’Larin has solved your silly puzzle!” she yelled. She then rocketed over to Emin, snatching one of his ears before he knew what was happening. He made a few pained noises of protest as she continued on in a more subdued tone. “What were you saying, Knowledge boy? Think the outstanding Nella’Larin is too dumb for puzzles, is that it? Better figure out how you’re going to make that one up to me once we’re out of the dungeon…”

Leaving a speechless and bewildered Emin behind, she was the first to enter the secret room.

Only moments later, a string of invectives emanated from the passageway.

“All that, and it’s just more fucking ore!”

Some time later, with my arms aching and another minecart filled to the brim, we forged onwards with a new trinket to show for our efforts, this one with the gray sheen of tin.

Metal Disk (2/4)

~~~~~~~~~~~

A completely new room. After five runs, we’d stopped seeing as many of those, but apparently even veteran dungeon delvers would occasionally run into something they’d never encountered before.

It started out completely empty, leaving all five of us confused as to what the goal was. Things rapidly became clearer when a stream of liquid metal began pouring from the ceiling. Tracing its path upwards, we discovered a vent of sorts from which the metal flowed.

After a while of absolutely nothing happening, we decided to test an attack, with me loosing an arrow at the growing puddle. Immediately, it pulsed and quivered, the entire pool morphing into a mid-sized metal golem. Well-used to such foes, we dispatched it with ease.

I repeated my earlier attack on a now much-smaller puddle, only for a few metal slimes to form instead of a golem. Even faster than we’d dealt with the golem, we demolished the slimes. The flowing metal continued, unabated and unimpressed.

A few more tests confirmed our growing suspicions: The longer we left the pool to build up, the larger monster we’d have to face. Worse yet, when the puddle touched the corpses of any of the metal creatures we’d already defeated, it absorbed them with the threat of the small pool growing into a massive lake if we weren’t careful.

For a few tense minutes, we cleared the liquid as fast as we could, hauling each defeated enemy to the side of the room to keep it from getting reabsorbed. No matter how much we fought, though, the liquid continued its downwards descent.

Whether the metal would have stopped flowing eventually or whether there was some clever mechanic to clear the room, I never found out.

“I’m sick of this!” Without another word, Nella launched herself into the air, flames from both her hands and feet acting like a jetpack. She rocketed directly towards the vent in the ceiling, momentarily switching off her hand thrusters to grab something from her pouch — the same metal ingots we’d found earlier.

“This dungeon will pay for forcing the great Nella’Larin to use her mythic skills like a common blacksmith!” Thus said, she began to cover every open hole in the vent with solid metal, only kept aloft by the flames from her feet.

That didn’t mean she wasn’t applying any effects to her hands, though. The metal she held grew red-hot before rapidly cooling down, her skills serving as some sort of flash-welding of soldering device.

When she was done, not a single drop fell from the ceiling. Nella returned to the ground with a triumphant grin.

“See, Knowledge boy?” she said, singling Emin out. “I’m not just radiant and powerful beyond comparison. I can use my head too. Behold my handiwork!”

With a flourish, she gestured towards the vent, covered up sloppily enough to make any welder weep for days.

Emin opened his mouth to reply, but whether it was to deliver a retort or diplomatically agree, I couldn’t say.

For at the very moment he started to speak, the vent exploded.

No longer dammed up, tons of liquid metal burst forth at such a pace that I was half convinced we’d be swimming in it soon.

Without pause, I fired off arrow after arrow into the growing pool in hopes of keeping the “water” level low, but it was no use. The moment an enemy formed, it melted back into the liquid.

On the bright side, the deluge of metal did eventually end.

On the dark side, the encounter ended in exactly the way one might expect it would. Even without us attacking, once all the metal was on the ground, waves formed on the pool. Ripples shot out from its center at a rapidly growing frequency, until all at once, the entire lake pulled itself upwards, forming into one colossal behemoth of a golem.

It tilted its formless head down at us, managing to impart a sense of judgment and shame even without a face.

I’d like to say that it was some epic battle that taught Nella a hard-earned lesson, but by now, we were well-used to fighting giant enemies. As an added bonus, this one didn’t even have the ridiculous reflective armor of the Warforged Titan dungeon boss.

If somewhat tiring (and painful to our ears as each of its movements shook the entire room), we thrashed it. Alara was, as expected, the MVP here, with the only real time we were in danger was when the metal monstrosity’s body fell to the ground.

With the fight completed, as a single unit, the four of us turned to Nella. She squirmed under our collective stare.

“Hey, don’t look at me like that. For all we know, it would have continued forever if I hadn’t done it. Look, I bet there was some magical metal-generating spell up there!” Glad to have an excuse to get out from under our gazes, she rocketed off once more to the gaping hole where the vent had been, disappearing from view as she fully entered it.

In an almost eery moment of deja vu, a cry sounded out from the vent only moments later.

“Gods dammit! It’s just more fucking ore! I can’t believe-” Her words abruptly cut off, leaving me worried that something had happened to her, but my fears proved unfounded as she shouted out once more.

“I mean, this was my plan all along, you know? Look at what I’ve found us!”

One collective eye roll and a lot of mining later, we walked out of the chamber with a new piece to add to our growing stash, this one made from iron: Metal Disk (3/4).

~~~~~~~~~~

“It’s there.” I pointed, with the other four all following the direction of my finger.

“How, uh, how do you know?” Emin, while not outright denying the claim, seemed somewhat dubious of it. “We haven’t even cleared half the dungeon yet. Wouldn’t it be strange for the fourth piece not to be later in the dungeon?”

In answer, I simply gestured at the scene before me.

None of them seemed convinced, but come on. It was a waterfall for gods’ sake! Of course there was going to be something behind the waterfall. I’d barely even played any games back on Earth, and even I knew that one.

Then again, I could hardly blame them. It wasn’t as though Sylum had any waterfalls of its own, and I had the sneaking suspicion that none of them had played too many video games growing up.

“You’re just going to have to take it on faith. We’re checking out the waterfall.”

In fairness, “waterfall” was perhaps a bit of a misnomer given that there was no water involved. As expected from a metal dungeon, and well in alignment with the previous rooms, liquid metal flowed endlessly down from one side of the room, forming a giant river that bisected the space.

A quick check with Vitality Sight confirmed that there was some variety of monster in the waters, but that could come later.

Now was the time for entering secret caves behind waterfalls.

“I believe you, PPG! Lead us to loot and victory!”

And thus, with Alara’s endorsement, I dragged us all to the bank of the river closest to the waterfall.

Oachin was the first to chime in here. “What’s the plan here? Are you going to just jump straight in and hope for the best? Because that feels ill-advised.”

On that, I agreed. Cautiously, I neared the metal and stuck the tip of my spear in. A toothy creature shot out from the river and snapped at the spear tip, God’s Eye catching its name: Metal Piranha.

Delightful. To make matters one level worse, when I pulled back on my spear, there was a thick coating of solid metal on it. Apparently the river metal solidified on contact, which turned swimming in it from an unpleasant experience to a potentially fatal one, even for me. Even with as many tools as I was picking up from my class, I didn’t have one to escape being encased in a metal shell.

“Okay. No getting eaten by piranhas and no falling in. If we need to, we can probably get Nella to fly everyone over, but I still want to get what’s behind the waterfall. Anyone have good skills for this?”

Nella immediately shouted in response, pointing to the top of the wall where the waterfall was pouring from. “I could dam it up just like I did the-”

“NO!” A chorus of refusals immediately crossed that option off.

Honestly, I wasn’t sure anyone did have an answer here, so it came with no small measure of relief when Oachin raised a hand.

“I have something a little strange, but I think it should do the job? Here, let me show you.” He uncorked one of the many vials at his waist — one I hadn’t seen him open before — and a small ball of milky white fluid levitated up to his chest.

“Remote Application.” The liquid soaked into the ground by the river bank, and while I’d been prepared for something to form, I hadn’t quite been prepared for what.

A spongy, yellow-whitish substance oozed upwards, looking like a cross between some sort of ungodly fungus and a hunk of cancerous memory foam. It started to spread out over the river, and while a few piranhas threw themselves at it, they all bounced off with thuds.

“Cloud in a Bottle potion. Great name for marketing, but as you can see, not the most accurate. It’s actually heavily based on a plant called Wortcushion. Works great as a fire retardant, or in a pinch, a platform. I keep a lot around for when I need to put out fires.” He gave a sidelong glance to his sister who threw her hands behind her back with faux innocence. “Pretty sure it should work for what you want though. Watch.”

Another few Remote Applications and the foam extended until we had a broad walkway directly to the center of the waterfall. More than that, though, Oachin started to extend the yellowish cloud into the waterfall itself. He applied it in a wide arch shape, forcing the liquid that hit it to divert to the sides rather than flowing over it. It took a while to get the shape just right, but when he did, the metal at last parted to reveal-

“Huh. I guess there really was something back there, wasn’t there?” Despite going out of his way to redirect the waterfall, Oachin seemed somewhat surprised as his efforts revealed a cave entrance smack dab behind the center of the waterfall.

Internally, I heaved a sigh of relief. Man, that would have been so awkward if I’d been wrong. But I wasn’t!

After making absolutely sure that the foam was stable and none of us were about to become piranha chow, all five of us entered the fourth, and hopefully final cave.

As expected, it was filled with ore veins and a minecart.

Only, it wasn’t quite the same as we’d seen previously. For one, the cart was significantly tinier, as were the ore veins. More than that, the streaks of metal had a blueish tint to them that I hadn’t seen before.

Ever the scholar, it was Emin who made the connection first, stuttering out an exclamation. “G-gods! Is that a mithril vein?”

While I knew essentially nothing about metals, God’s Eye did, and it was happy to confirm that, yes indeed, it was.

“Just that much alone… The price.” Emin slid his eyes towards the minecart as his lips subtly shifted downwards. “Do we… Do we have to put it in the cart? We could just take it, you know. It’s not like this is guaranteed to give us anything if we don’t figure out what to do with that disk.”

Before anyone could reply more tactfully, Nella took a jet step to his side and for the second time in the dungeon run, grabbed his ear. “I don’t want fancy metal; I want treasure, Knowledge boy! If I wanted some mithril, I’d just go buy some mithril!” She cocked her head to the side as if just realizing something for the first time. Quickly, she let go of his ear and amended herself. “But if you’re going to be a wimp about it, then perhaps the great Nella’Larin will be magnanimous! If the disk doesn’t lead to anything, I’m happy to just pay out what your share of the mithril would have been. Happy?”

Seemingly not interested in hearing what Emin had to say to that, Nella turned her focus to me. “Now that we’ve settled that, let’s get to it! Go, go, go!”

Does she get bonus points for agreeing to compensate Emin, or do we subtract points for her telling me to ‘get to it’? Eh. I think we’ll give her this one. By now, I’d come to realize that she was something of an acquired taste, but for all the bullheadedness and delusions of grandeur, she might have actually been growing on me.

“Yes, yes. Give me a second.” I summoned my pickaxe, selected the juiciest ore vein, and revved up. As hard as I could, I slammed the pick into the rock.

Only for the pick to stop dead the very moment it hit the wall, the backlash rattling my bones.

Wait, what?

I tried again to the same results, bewildered.

Seeing my fruitless efforts, Emin hummed out an answer. “Hmm. Perhaps to be expected. It is mithril after all. If your Mining level is too low, you may need more Strength. I can help, I believe?” He fiddled through the pockets of his robe before seeming to find what he wanted, using it to activate his signature skill.

You have been enhanced with the Strength of Greater Force Rhinoceros! +5 Strength

Newly buffed up, I reared back and reattempted my earlier strike.

Sadly, nothing changed.

“Friends! I believe it is time to apply all buffs to PPG!” Without further warning, Alara slapped a meaty hand into my back, and I felt myself grow heavy to a nearly intolerable degree as I struggled to pull in breath. She repeated this on my pickaxe until it felt like I was hauling around a claymore and then some.

Before I could eke out a protest, a few balls of liquid coalesced before my mouth before streaming down my throat.

You have imbibed an Explosive Strength Tonic! +10 Strength for 5 minutes. -5 Strength for 10 minutes afterwards.

You have imbibed a Potion of Professional Potency! For 30 minutes, gain a bonus to all profession-based checks for any profession at Apprentice rank or lower.

…

The notifications just kept coming as Emin layered on a few more effects and Oachin continued to force-feed me his elixirs.

The entire time, Nella stood off to the side with her arms crossed. Alara raised a brow her way, but she just shrugged. “What? You think a class called Rising Star comes with any buffs for other people? Not my job.”

In actuality, I was glad she didn’t have any. By the time it was all over, I thought I was visibly pulsing with energy, and it felt as though I was about to burst.

“Okay, when we’re done with all of this, we need to have a serious conversation about pre-warnings and buffing consent.” And maybe about what Oachin was putting in his potions, because some of those had been nasty. “But for now!” Once again, I brought my pickaxe up above my head, earth mana flowing into my Miner’s Mitts. For some extra oomph, I even activated Overload Weapon, sinking a solid 20 mana into the strike.

I swung forth like I’d never swung before. The pick slammed into the wall, and-

Thunk.

All five of us watched as a very tiny shard of rock chipped off from the site of impact, crumbling to the floor. The same horrified thought was written over each of our faces.

This is going to take forever isn’t it?

~~~~~~~~~

Several eternities later, a tiny minecart advanced down its tracks. The very moment it began to move, I collapsed to the ground.

Potions had been depleted. Mana pools had been emptied and refilled over and over again. Alara had reapplied her density skill on me enough times that I’d forgotten my real weight.

And my arms huurrrrrt. They hurt!

But at last, it was over. Even as tired as I was, I figured I’d earned the right to finish us out. I shuffled on the ground until I was by the rail tracks, eventually finding the final quarter-circle, this one the subtle blue of mithril.

Pulling out the other fourths, I slotted them together.

With a hiss and a flash of mana, they combined.

The progress counter for Detect Secret shot upwards to an entire 70%, but I barely even noticed.

I stared at the disk we’d put so much effort into completing, my mind only having room for one thought.

So what the hell do we do with it now?