Chapter 25

It had slipped his mind entirely that this level was supposed to be an aquatic level. Known as the sewers by the other dungeon delvers, it was a randomised maze-like layout of lightless narrow stone passages. Normally the water would only be ankle or waist deep.

By the time Jack tumbled down the stairs, the water was already up to his chest.

“Shit!!” He exclaimed as he stood up and took stock of his situation. It was dark, with only some dim light coming from the stairwell behind him, the sound of rushing water like a waterfall drowning out his voice.

With nothing else to do, he plunged forward, the water slowed him down massively and he had to use his hands to pull himself onward like he was swimming. Despite his situation, he’d absorbed a tonne of top quality lightning essence and could feel it fueling his muscles. He felt like he could deadlift a bus right now.

He forged onwards, the light from the stairwell behind him faded as he got further away. He took out a waterproof flare and lit it. The flare hissed and harsh red light bounced off the water and the stone walls. With the amount and speed of the rushing water, it was easy to follow the flow and find out which way to go to reach the next level.

Jack had made some dumb decisions in the past and he knew he probably would again in the future, but exploring this floor while the water level was rising was definitely not going to be one of them.

He followed the flow of water, allowing it to direct him, after numerous twists and turns, the end came within sight. The water was up to his chin but a sudden dip in the water up ahead let him see the stairwell, if not the actual stairs. Jack kept going forward, the water rose further and climbed above his head. He struggled further and further forward until he suddenly felt the ground beneath him give out and he was plunging downward.

He tumbled down under the water for several metres before landing on a hard stone surface with a crack.

“Urgh…glub…” It was a hard landing onto a stone floor. Torrents of water continued to cascade down on top of him but it seemed to be draining off somewhere. He got to his hands and knees and blindly crawled away from the weight of the cascading water. When he couldn’t feel the water pounding onto his back anymore, he looked around. He was in the graveyard level, looking back to the stairs up to the sewers, he saw water flooding downwards but being drained away by metal grates in the paved stone floor just beneath the stairwell.

The level was just as he remembered it when he’d visited with the others, rolling grassy hills covered in gravestones, all illuminated by dungeon fireflies. Picturesque but creepy.

The only sound for the whole level was the gushing water that continued to cascade down the stairs and disappear down the grate behind him. As he made his way through the grassy hills, the sound of the water faded and everything grew disconcertingly quiet, there was no wind nor people, just the occasional buzzing of a passing firefly.

The eerie quiet was soon broken when Jack heard a scrabbling noise to his left. He turned to look and just as he expected, the ground in front of one of the gravestones was moving. The last time he’d been here, he and the others had been attacked by scores of animated human skeletons garbed in rags.

What crawled out of the ground this time was not a human skeleton. Instead of long bony fingers crawling out of the dirt, a smaller hand covered in dirty plate armour emerged. Jack began to hear earth shifting from the other graves all around him. Everywhere he looked, short squat figures clad in dirty ragged armour crawled out of the graves.

In short order he found himself completely surrounded by scores of short figures wielding an assortment of weapons and all clad in plate, chain and leather armour. Upon closer inspection of one of the creatures, he saw underneath one of their helmets, it looked like the rotted desiccated face of a goblin. It stared back at him impassively but with a twisted grimace brought on by death.

Except for the great rattle of armour and bone, the horde of undead goblins silently charged at him.

Jack pulled out another rod covered in the fire runic matrix from his utility belt. There was a reason why fire was considered the best element for combat. Proper fire cultivators and hunters didn’t just send impotent wisps of flame at their enemy, instead they could turn the heat up to that of a blast furnace, reaching temperatures of one thousand degrees celsius. The strongest of them were perfectly capable of melting metal. There just wasn’t a defence against that for most beings, unless you were a high ranking powerful monster then things become more complicated.

Jack pointed the rod at the charging enemy and let rip. A large plume of fire blasted outwards for twenty metres or so, he swept it back and forth across the surrounding area. The enemy turned to piles of flaming bones and armour, multicoloured light and vapour mixed with the fire and smoke, rising upwards.

The enemy continued to charge and many more creatures dragged their way out of the graves, it seemed the dungeon was determined to kill him this time. Jack kept the fire going, he felt his core steadily draining of power, it seemed to be taking extra energy to power the fire rune matrix as opposed to simply using lightning straight from his core. He theorised that there may have been some extra energy required in order to convert his lightning energy to power the runes. After seeing such heavy use, the rod began to sputter and misfire and cracks started forming in the wood. But before it failed, it got the job done.

Eventually, the enemy numbers ran low, there were just a few smouldering armoured corpses shambling around him, still stumbling forward. Jack stopped setting everything on fire and approached each walking corpse and used them as cultivation fuel. Fresh dungeon energy flowed into his core and he took a deep breath, suddenly feeling alive and invigorated, like he’d taken a lungful of crisp mountain air. Again, the dungeon upon witnessing this, shook and trembled. There was an unmistakable shriek of frustration and rage emanating from all around him.

He smiled, he didn’t know what was happening precisely but he was beginning to succumb to that giddy, heady feeling he sometimes got when his core was full of top shelf lightning essence. He kicked a stray skull as it disintegrated before heading up a slight hill towards a small mausoleum that housed the stairs that would lead down to the next floor.

He reached the mausoleum gates which swung inward with a rusty creak and headed down.

The next floor wasn’t quite how he remembered it. Before, it had been fairly bright and well lit, with the ceiling made to appear like a blue sky over the top of a ramshackle stone fortress manned by goblins.

Now however, the sky looked like an angry mixture of swirling bruised purple and red hues, with cracks covering it as if the sky were made of glass. Black Smokey clouds drifted across the ceiling, leaking out of the cracks before dissipating again.

As he watched, more cracks formed across the sky with audible cracks which echoed throughout the vast chamber, after a little while the cracks would fade before more took their place.

“Well this is different,” Jack mumbled to himself in concern. That sky…did not look healthy. It was like the dungeon was sick or crazy or something…..there was something he’d heard once about dungeons…something Cheryl had told him once, but he couldn’t quite remember what. It was in the back of his mind, but what was it?

Taking his eyes off the ominous sky above, he looked across an open barren expanse of bare rocky earth set before the ramshackle stone fortress. The fortress was surrounded by and set within a sheer cliff face.

From what he remembered, this was the portion of the delve where he had to zig and zag. The accepted tactic used by other hunters and delvers here was to charge towards the gates and in order to avoid being hit by goblin crossbow bolts and ballistae bolts, he had to zig zag.

He took a breath and made sure his armour was strapped on tight, it was still soaking wet and it squelched uncomfortably. He started to run towards the walls, but just before he was about to start his first zig, he saw the large main gates within the wall begin to open. That was new, he stopped in surprise and watched, however he was shocked back into motion when several crossbow bolts and a ballista bolt passed worryingly close to him.

He began forward again, keeping his eye both on the gate and the top of the wall. A shrill screaming and metallic rattling began to pour out from the opening gate. As he watched, scores of plate armoured goblins charged out of the gates towards him, shrilly screaming a goblin war cry.

He couldn’t afford to stop, he continued charging forward and reached into his utility belt for another item. He grabbed the water bomb from his belt and got ready to throw as he neared the charging goblins, just as he got within twenty metres or so, he primed the grenade and threw.

The device landed within the midst of the front runners and went off, letting out a gigantic rushing sound like a waterfall. Immediately, several enormous floating blobs of water emerged in the air, numerous struggling goblins were suspended within.

Jack hastily erected a shield and deflected some suspiciously well aimed crossbow bolts and kept running forward. He weaved in between the floating blobs of water towards the open gate. The panicking goblins within were all letting out bubbles of air and flailing around as they drowned.

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When he got past the water bomb’s effects, he was within a stone’s throw distance from the gate but there were still plenty of well equipped goblins to get through before that. Honestly though, he didn’t know why the dungeon bothered equipping them like that, from Jack’s experience a goblin wielding a quality steel sword was exactly the same as a goblin wielding a teaspoon.

He whipped out his axe and running a strong current of electricity through it, he barreled into the mob of goblins. He cut his way through them with ease, his axe cleaved through armour and goblin and the surges of lightning he sent out with each strike ripped through everything surrounding him.

He fought his way forward until he was within the gate under the walls and so he didn’t have to worry about crossbow bolts from above. When he felt he was safe, he reduced the charge in his axe and began sending out weaker ripples of lightning against the goblins that were left. This served to stun them rather than kill them. Before long he had about fifteen dungeon goblins on the floor, twitching and spasming, but still very much alive. He then went from goblin to goblin, cultivating from each one.

The dungeon rumbled and shook like there was an earthquake, the sky above let out even more cracking noises like breaking glass. Another loud rage filled roar accompanied it all. It was at this point that Jack began to feel he was wearing out his welcome, clearly what he was doing was pissing the dungeon off. But he was nearly done, he just had to get through the keep to the final boss’s room. Just a bit longer to go.

Once he was done cultivating, he walked through the gate into the courtyard and turned back to go up the stairs to the curtain wall ramparts. Once there he killed the goblins on top before once more cultivating from them. Strangely, this did not elicit a reaction from the dungeon. He didn’t know if that was a good thing or not.

With the exterior clear, he walked back down to the courtyard and approached the main keep. He opened the thick wooden doors and stepped inside. He decided not to explore the main keep; the dungeon's actions had instilled a sense of urgency in Jack to finish his business and get out.

So rather than heading off for one of the side corridors, he walked down the main wide corridor towards the keep’s ‘throne room’ and boss chamber.

A minute later he was there, he emerged into the wide chamber, wondering just what the dungeon had cooked up for him this time.

There were no goblins this time, instead it just seemed to be the dungeon boss. Before, it had been a single ogre, but this time, he didn’t quite know what he was looking at. It sat at the far end of the room, or it squatted, or it lay, in fact he wasn’t entirely certain what it was doing back there. He just couldn’t quite ascertain just what shape the dungeon boss was, only that it was big.

A gurgling growl echoed around the chamber, originating from the hulking thing across the way. It shifted its great mass and Jack began to get a clearer picture of what he was facing as it rose to its feet.

Whatever it was, it wasn’t an ogre, nor did it look quite right. It might’ve started out as a dungeon spawned ogre at one point, but whatever intelligence designed it, clearly they had conflicting ideas on how the end result was supposed to have turned out. The thing was a hideous, bizarrely twisted amalgamation of limbs, some withered and puny, others swollen with muscle and strong. Its bloated torso sprouted these limbs randomly all over, some hands were empty and waved impotently in the air and some clutched the standard two metre long giant cleavers ogres were known to wield. At first it looked like a large, single malformed head rested upon its body, but then Jack saw that the head actually had two stretched out, snarling faces that shared a wide, fang filled, gash of a mouth. The entire monstrosity was propped up on three thick, trunk-like legs that clumsily propelled it forward. Overall it had to be three times larger than a normal dungeon ogre.

“Bloody hell, the others are never going to believe this,” Jack murmured to himself under his breath before taking out his pager and taking a quick selfie with the ogre in the background.

The mutated ogre lumbered over to Jack, letting out its gurgling growl, it looked both wrathful and in pain, as if every moment it was alive was fueling its rage and agony.

Jack charged up a fully powered lightning bolt and unleashed it towards the ogre. The bolt hit and sheared through a couple of its stunted limbs. The ogre howled in pain but continued to lumber forward, multicoloured vapour streamed out of its wounds. Jack frowned before taking out some steel marbles from a pouch on his belt and throwing them through an electromagnetic repulsion field. The marbles flew out with a snap crack of displaced air and a burning tang of ozone, they ripped into the ogre’s torso with a great spray of multicoloured vapour. Half its torso just disappeared and Jack thought the fight was done but after only a slight pause, the ogre continued forward with a rasping wet growl. To Jack’s incredulous amazement, the multicoloured vapour and light jetting out of the ogre’s chest and stomach wounds seemed to coalesce around it before its wounds rapidly healed within seconds. The chamber and keep shook and rumbled, several pieces of stone from the ceiling fell to the floor, as if the keep was coming apart before it all stopped again.

The ogre was nearly upon him, some of its multiple cleavers lashed out at him and Jack was forced to erect a shield as he couldn’t dodge in time. His shield prevented him from getting cut into pieces but it immediately buckled. The ogre spun around like a drunkard and rapidly but clumsily attacked again with the arms sprouting from its back.

Jack flooded his brain with lightning essence and felt everything slow down to a crawl, the massive cleavers that had been rocketing towards him slowed down to almost nothing. With his increased perception, he saw the nearest safe place he could dodge to and quickly slid over a few metres to his right, allowing the cleavers to pass him by harmlessly.

He quickly backed off as far as he could, before him, the mutated ogre continued to twist and spin around, flailing its half dozen giant cleavers around, like a demented combine harvester. He wasn’t going anywhere near that.

Jack reached into his utility belt again and took out the quagmire bottle. He threw it at the feet of the flailing ogre and watched as the bottle shattered and a black brown viscous fluid spread across the floor.

As the ogre stomped around, at first the floor beneath it seemed to ripple as if it were the surface of a trampoline. Then one of its feet got stuck, then another and then the third, its feet began sinking downward and the ogre lost its balance, its torso bent forwards and some of its hands and arms got stuck in the floor. It struggled to free itself, letting out distorted double snarls of frustration. The limbs that were free continued to wave around their weapons and its empty hands reached out for Jack even though he was standing nowhere near it.

Jack stood back and watched, it looked like the quagmire was going to finish this for him. However, before the ogre could sink much further, the dungeon rumbled and shook like an earthquake again, multicoloured vapour appeared and coalesced from nowhere and surrounded the struggling creature before seeming to pour into it. The ogre stopped sinking and with an ear splitting screaming roar, it dragged its legs out of the stone floor before using its free blade wielding limbs to cut off the limbs that were still stuck. The ogre then dragged its way out of the quagmire affected area and furiously made its way over to Jack. It snarled, thick viscous saliva streamed from its grotesque mouth. It still had five different giant cleavers that it waved around menacingly.

“Ahh shit!” Jack backed off, wondering if he should just cut and run. He looked back and saw that the doorway to the hall was shut because of course it was. He was going to have to slug it out with this thing.

He turned back to the ogre and took out his last resort. He took out a small vial containing the strength serum and downed it all in a single sip, almost straight away he felt a strange tingling tightness in his muscles around his body which then loosened up again. He took out his axe and noticed how much lighter it felt than usual, it felt as light as a feather, which was impressive considering the thing was well over thirty kilograms. He didn’t have time to investigate the effects of the serum as the ogre was nearly upon him.

Jack again flooded his body with lightning and made sure to run a more controlled charge through his brain, the world around him slowed down and allowed him to comprehend the ogre’s bewildering array of attacks.

The first cleaver came at him and Jack easily parried it with his axe blade, the ogre swiftly followed up with a second and third strike in rapid succession. Jack watched it all come at him and knocked each attack away. The ogre continued to attack and flail at him with angry roars and howls, the attacks were clumsy and lacked accuracy but they had power and speed behind them. With his enhanced perception and strength, Jack managed to knock the attacks away and found time to get a few of his own attacks in.

He concentrated on hacking and slicing away the ogre’s limbs whenever he got the opportunity. He duelled with the ogre for several minutes, both combatants were furiously attacking each other without letting up. Jack had managed to dodge and block all of the ogre’s rapid attacks and slice off several of its arms including two of its cleaver wielding arms.

The beast was beginning to show signs of slowing down, Jack had kept the flow of lightning from his core constant and with every hit, a surge of lightning would discharge into the ogre.

Before long, the ogre was on its many hands and knees, though it still towered over Jack, it erratically swiped a couple of cleavers at him but otherwise didn’t move towards him. He stepped back and observed it. The beast didn’t look like it was going anywhere.

Time to finish things. He took out his black chain and swung several loops randomly around the monster, the chain randomly settled around several limbs and its head, good enough. Though perhaps he should learn how to properly lasso one day.

While still holding onto the chain, he ran a powerful charge of lightning through it. Right away, the beast howled in pain as the chain began contracting and crushing it. Another few seconds and the monster’s head and part of its torso were crushed with several sickening wet cracks and squelches. Multicoloured light and vapour jetted outwards from the massive corpse, engulfing Jack briefly. When his sight cleared, the ogre’s body was just a blackened tarry looking mess on the floor, nothing was left for him to cultivate from.

An ear splitting, howling scream that sounded like it was coming from multiple voices reverberated throughout the hall and the entire dungeon shook harder than it ever had before. Pieces of the ceiling started falling from above and didn’t stop, the surrounding walls began to crack and cave in. It was time to go.

He turned around and ran, the doors into the hall had cracked and partially crumpled so he managed to hack his way through with his axe. He continued to run through the keep as it collapsed around him and eventually made his way outside. Once he emerged he saw it wasn’t just shoddy goblin architecture that was causing the keep to collapse, it seemed the entire dungeon was coming apart.

If the sky had looked bad before, it looked positively apocalyptic now. It was completely covered in cracks and poisonous looking black clouds, like it was all about to come down on top of him at any second, which he wasn’t ruling out. Despite his less than optimal situation, he still felt the need to take a selfie with the ominous sky in the background. He really needed to rub this in Nate’s face when he got back, or if he got back.

He put his pager away and right as he was watching, a piece of the sky actually did start to fall. It looked like a massive shard of swirling purple red glass the size of a house, it fell and impacted the ground with a great shattering sound of breaking glass. Following it, coming from the gap it left behind, was a pillar black smoke which dropped from the sky in a descending haze. Jack very much doubted that stuff was healthy to breathe in or even come into contact with. More giant shards of sky began to fall along with more black smoke.

“Oh fuck, here we go,” Jack muttered and began to sprint across the ground.