Chapter 5 – Behold, The Machine

The door was made of hard, cold iron with an enormous monster skull fastened to it. Sickly green runes floated around the monster skull, shifting in appearance. I recognized exactly none of them.

“So, this is a Dungeon Lord door?” I asked Cinza, who looked at me and shrugged.

“I don’t know, I’ve never fought one. But, I have a feeling it’s going to suck.” Cinza looked back, some fear on her dessicated face.

“What are you most afraid of, I don’t know that I’ve ever asked.” I pulled a small, orange glowing vial from my belt and took a quick swig, feeling Magic Power course through my veins.

>>>

Buff Added

Font of Power: Imbibing the blood of a Fae has granted you the power of their race, providing you with a boost of 15 to your Magical Damage Output, while reducing your Mana Regeneration by 15%. Duration: 30 minutes.

>>>

I offered the vial to Cinza, but she shook her head. “Nah, I don’t drink and fight.”

“Fair.” I responded, then finished the vial, doubling the duration.

Cinza put her hand on the monster skull and the door shifted downward, disappearing into the ground.

Behind the door stood a mirror.

“What?” I stared at the mirror for a minute, then stepped forward.

“Do you not see the room? What’s the problem?” Cinza asked, stepping beyond the mirror.

“No, there’s a fuckin’ mirror here.” I said, though I didn’t hear a response from Cinza. “Figures. First Leese, then Cinza.”

I tapped the mirror, causing a ripple effect to start from the point where I touched.

The silvered liquid poured out of the mirror and puddled on the floor, then vanished, leaving a door behind it.

“Ah, there’s the door.” I stepped through the frame of the mirror and darkness consumed the room entirely.

The sound of a roaring flame surrounded me, overhwhelming my mind and taking me back to a place that I thought I had forgotten.

I stood in front of my childhood home, watching it burn. Magical Power in a Wizard’s life comes from pain. My father had just left my mother and I, heading off to the front lines of the war with the Dark Wizard’s Guild as a Sorcerer for the Hero’s Guild.

I cried for hours in my room when a spark of flame caught my attention. It arced from one of my fingers to the other, and my magical power awakened.

Being a child, I was immediately curious, and infinitely stupid. I played with the fire, manipulating it, and seeing how big I could make the flame. Then it got out of control.

The flame ignited the sheets and bedding of my bed, then spread quickly to the rest of my room. I dashed out of my room, heading downstairs screaming and crying about the fire, but my mother didn’t respond.

I ran through the living room, trying to find her, while smoke poured down the stairs, and the dry wood of our home began to burn ever faster.

My mother’s body was lying on the floor, an empty bottle of my father’s most expensive liquor sitting next to her. She had drank herself into a stupor again, a common thing since my father told us he was leaving.

In the intensity of the moment, I screamed and shouted at her, but got nothing more than a simple moan and a slap across the face for my efforts.

So, I spat on her and left the house. She was abusive towards me when my father didn’t take care of her “womanly needs,” she said, and I wandered if part of my father’s leaving was due to her being abusive to him as well.

I rushed outside, trying to get someone, any one of the number of passersby to get help, but they averted their eyes and continued walking, muttering horrible things like “They finally got what they deserved,” and “If only that house would have burned down sooner, this entire village would be better off.”

Suddenly my child body was gone, and I stood in front of the house as myself, watching the house burn. I went through the myriad gestures required to cast Rain, knowing that, now, as Dark Wizard, fully capable of controlling the elements of the world, I could fix things. I could stop the fire.

I went through the gestures, made the runes, and felt Mana seep from my body. I watched, waiting for the rain to start, but it never did.

So I cast Rain again, and again, then I switched to Water Bolt, casting it as a sheet of hard water, but again, nothing happened.

My Mana spent, I collapsed onto my knees, feeling even more powerless, somehow, than I had as a child.

The building burned to the ground in double time, and I stepped through the ashes, finding my mother’s charred corpse in the same place I had seen it when I was a child.

“Mother, I’m sorry I couldn’t save you.” I said, kneeling by her charred remains.

The body was still whole, though her skin was black and crispy.

I reached down and rolled her body over, wanting to see her face one last time.

It had been years since I dreamed of my mother, and though she was abusive, I still missed her. I wanted to tell her I was sorry, that I would try harder to make up for my childish mistake. That I would give of myself to correct the issue and bring her back. I just needed to master Death Magic, Dark Magic, and somehow, get my hands on the scrolls of Life Magic that would provide me with the talent to cast it.

Her eyes were hollow, empty shells, completely incinerated from their sockets. Her mouth hung slack, open. Her lips were cracked and split and half melted.

I held a hand out, to touch the side of her scorched face. Just to feel her again, one more time.

Her body spasmed and she sat upright, her hollow eyes and her black hole of a mouth looking at me.

Her hand clasped around my throat and her burned face screamed a sound that hurt me deep down, all the way to my soul.

I recoiled and her arm broke off, her body shaking and collapsing to dust.

I ripped the hand off of my throat and the place it had grabbed was blistered, burned from her touch.

The world spun around me and dozens of scorched corpses stood around me, all reaching out and grabbing at me, pulling at my robes, my armor, my skin.

Everywhere they touched, my skin blistered and a black mark was left in the shape of a handprint.

The shrieking was unbearable, it made my ears bleed, and I could feel the inside of my head starting to throb.

My face hurt and, for an instant, I could see myself from the outside; much like the traditional Wizard skill of Astral Projection, but physically present in both places.

My face was beginning to scorch, the skin turning black and burning. It burned in such horrible ways, and then I was in the position of my mother, lying on the floor as she walked by, spitting on me and fleeing the burning house.

“It should have been you.” Her voice whispered in the back of my mind. “You should have died instead of me.”

I could do nothing, aside from dealing with the pain of being burned. My flesh hurt, my insides hurt, my head hurt.

And then something slammed into me, jarring me from the nightmare.

“Wake up, you enormous dumbass.” Leese was floating in front of me face, her little wings flitting.

“You’re back?” I shook my head, and then realized that I was standing in several inches of water and was soaked to the top of my head. “Why in the Underneath am I wet?”

“You’ve been standing here, chain-casting water spells on yourself for, like, ten minutes. What were you even doing?” Leese slapped me in the face, which did little more than feel like some wind blowing against my cheek.

“Nightmare. Horrible. It’s over now. And why are you back? You fucking ditched me.” I said, confused, wet, and somewhat irritated, if not relieved.

“I told you I would try to help, but I didn’t even hold up my end of the Fae Contract.” Leese landed on my shoulder and looked at me hard. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, not as sorry as the asshole who runs this dungeon is about to be for dredging up my worst memories and making them real.” I waved my hands over my body, drying my clothes off with a mild burst of heat, then stepped through the empty mirror.

“Grimm!” A familiar voice called from one side of the room.

Strung up on the wall, in a circle of burning metal, was a fellow Wizard, whose name I didn’t care to remember at the time.

Kill him. You want to finish your objectives, yes? Get that bonus? Of course you do. The Dungeon Lord’s voice bounced back and forth inside my head as I stared at the hanging Wizard.

It was true, I did want to complete the bonus objective, and the Wizard was writing in pain inside the ring.

Killing him was a mercy.

My fingers went through the motions of Fire Bolt, and I launched it at the hanging Wizard.

The bolt of flame punched through his chest and his eyes went wide for a moment before his head fell, his AMHUD flashing, showing that his countdown to resurrection had started.

All too easy.

“Hey, whoa, don’t kill me like that. Get me down, and I’ll help you with the boss.” Another voice called from the opposite side of the room.

Flames burst to life around an identical circle of metal, with another Wizard hanging in the center.

“Oh, it’s you.” I sneered at him as I spoke.

The man hanging in the circle wore heavy armor over his robes. Typically, he wore a full-plate helm, but that had been stripped off and lay on the floor far below where he had been hanged.

“Grimm Darkfyre. You need a Battle Wizard for this, man. Get me down, don’t kill me, yeah?” Jiamandi, the most annoying, and arguably most powerful, Battle Wizard in the Guild, called down to me.

“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t end you. This is my chance, you know?” I shouted up at him, pointing my open hand in his direction.

“Whoa, whoa, don’t be rash. Look, you killed Mith without a thought, but you hesitated with me, right? That means something, doesn’t it?” Jiamandi tried struggle against the invisible tethers that held him inside the ring.

“Still waiting.” I said, impatience beginning to grow inside my chest, causing me to get irritated.

“How much armor do you have?” Jiamandi asked, outright.

“Enough.” I started to form the runic shape for Soul Rend in the air.

“You really think so? I have one-hundred eighty five, and Caiaphous still managed to tangle me up.” Jiamandi hung his head low and shook it.

I continued the spell gestures, though I stopped short of activating it, because a thought formed in my head. I could use his help, and still meet the requirements for the secondary objective.

“Alright, Jai,” I started, shifting my aim to the metal ring he was tied to. “I guess I could use your help.”

I cancelled the spell, and switched to Ruin, targeting the metallic ring instead of the potential meat shield, then ended the casting with the necessary somatic trigger, cracking my knuckles.

>>>

Spell: Ruin

Calling upon the power of the Darkness, and utilizing the Entropy that is inherent within the world as a whole, your target experiences an instantaneous burst of Ruination, causing it to corrode, collapse, or decay at a hyper-accelerated rate, dealing considerable, non-elemental damage.

Spell Category: Dark Magic

Spell Class: Tier I

Spell Cost: 265 MP

Casting Time: 12 Seconds

Range: 100 Feet

Effect: Deal 100 Non-Elemental Damage to a single target

Effect 2: Rapid Decay

Rapid Decay: The enhanced rate of entropic force on a target causes it to age by 25 years, in addition to the initial damage.

It’s not every day that you get to watch a civilization literally crumble and fall apart before your eyes, but if you expand the scope of Ruin just enough… ~Arden Firebreaker, Antihero

>>>

The ring that held Jiamandi in place aged, corroded, then snapped, dropping him almost twenty feet.

He managed to land safely, leaving a crater in the ground.

“Whew, thanks.” Jiamandi picked up his helmet and put it on, covering his bald head.

“Yeah, yeah. We’ve got a boss to slaughter. Speaking of which, have you seen Cinza?” I looked around, but there was no sign of her.

“Nah.” Came his reply, tinny through his helmet.

“Figures.” I rolled my eyes and scanned the rest of the room.

The chamber we were in had a small throne, no bigger than a dining room chair, at the far end. On the top of it was carved an enormous, multi-eyed monstrosity with tentacles. It made my skin crawl.

“Ugh, no taste for decorum.” I said, waving a hand at the chair. “You going to fight me, or just keep hiding in the shadows?”

“Ah, you noticed me.” A tall, slender, dark-skinned creature with excessively long arms, and no facial features, stepped out of the darkness.

“That’s creepy as shit.” Jiamandi pulled a pair of swords from his back, sliding into a fighting stance I had seen him use before.

“Where’s your face?” I asked, tilting my head and smirking.

“Everywhere.” The creature said, raising his hands.

As if to prove a point, eyeballs appeared on the walls, the floor, the ceiling, everywhere. And they all focused on me, blinking in a staggered form, making the walls look like they moved of their own accord.

“Wow, this is messed up.” I jerked away from an eyeball that was on the floor, squinting at me because my foot was in it.

Hurk, the creature lurched backward, holding its face.

A metallic Shiiiik echoed from behind me, causing me to turn around.

Jiamandi had plunged his paired swords into one of the eyes on the floor, causing it to spaz out. Blood poured from the floor, making a small puddle.

The slender creature grew in size, a red aura building around it, before it threw its head back and roared.

A notification popped up in front of my vision, the words surrounded by a gold border and a musical fanfare arriving with it. The music was deep and intense, and made me a bit nervous.

>>>

Boss Battle Initiated:

Caiaphous, the Undermining, Level 12 Daemon

Good Luck, Wizard.

>>>

The words faded slowly, burning their final warning into the back of my mind.

Good Luck, Wizard. Nari’s voice echoed in my head, and my AMHUD chirped, starting a count-down in the corner of my vision.

It sat at thirty minutes. Was that a boss timer? What did that mean?

“On your toes, Grimm.” Jiamandi said, stepping up next to me and handing me a small red vial, which I accepted.

I slipped the vial into an empty slot in my belt, then clenched my fists and popped my neck. This fight was going to be a major challenge, especially since I was only level five.

If Caiaphous was level twelve, I had a sneaking suspicion things were going to be exceedingly difficult.

The suspicion grew more intense when I was punched in the face by an arm that appeared from a black portal in front of me, throwing me back against a wall, knocking fifty-five HP off my health.

I shook my head, trying to clear the daze from the sudden impact, and started casting Liquid Armor, a quick, efficient water spell that would bolster my defenses.

My hands went through the motions, and a quick thought triggered the final Mental requirement for the spell.

>>>

Spell: Liquid Armor

Coalescing the water from the atmosphere surrounding you, and making it a fluid substance that ebbs and flows around your body, increases your physical and magical resistances to all incoming damage.

Spell Category: Water Magic

Spell Class: Tier I

Spell Cost: 135 MP

Casting Time: 5 Seconds

Range: Self

Duration: 30 minutes, or until overridden by a more powerful enhancement

Effect: Increases Physical and Magical Resistances from all sources by 25%

Effect 2: Increases Fire Damage Resistance by 50%

Water can be incredibly powerful, if used in the right way. If not, well…consider it a mistake. ~Hydromancer Agore, Lord High Regent of Brynly

>>>

The cool reassurance of the spell triggering flowed over my body, and the symbol of blue armor appeared in the corner of my vision. I felt slightly heavier, and would be less agile, sure, but I knew this fight would take everything I had.

And I worried it still wouldn’t be enough.