Blood Shaper

It turned out that some of the random piles of stones weren’t distractions. Hell, all of them might not have been distractions. But some of them rose up from random piles into roughly animalistic forms and threw themselves bodily at Kay.

He watched as one of them continuously bounced off of his leg armor repeatedly, looking something like a tortoise made of pebbles as it rammed its “head” into him ineffectively. “So… what’s with this?”

“Part of the Dungeon’s defenses, obviously.” Nudged a few immobile piles with her feet as she walked closer. “Weaker ones too, although that’s about what I expected.”

“Really?” Kay decided to just kill the thing, and he slammed the haft of his weapon into it, scattering the rocks, which rattled across the floor and stopped.

“Yeah, this Dungeon seems new. The pressure isn’t that strong, and the creatures are weak.”

Stephen nodded. “Definitely a newer dungeon.” He crouched next to the first creature Kay had killed and inspected it. “Even this thing was pretty weak; it just attacked in a smart way. Or the Dungeon made it attack in a smart way, or whatever.”

“What does that mean for us?” Kay asked, glancing around and above for more attackers.

Stephen stood up and walked over. “It means that higher tier people like us won’t have much use for it, but it could make a great training ground for weaker people who want to grow combat skills. Especially if you want to grow a crop of Soldiers or other good military classes.”

“… Is there any way to keep this a secret from the wider world?”

“Forever? No.” Leaf replied in his usual short way. “But long enough to work some of the advantages for as long as possible? Sure. And you can set up a schedule for Avalon’s people and make anyone else obey it. It’s our Dungeon, after all.”

“If we keep it.” Claudia reminded him.

“Is there a reason we wouldn’t, at this point?” Kay wondered.

She shrugged. “It’s possible. I mean, we haven’t seen any strange corruptions, undead, or other immediate ‘kill it now’ types of threats, but there could still be something further in.” She pointed down the wide hall. “Onwards, noble Noble!”

Kay looked at her, then glanced at the other two. “Are you guys making me solo this Dungeon?”

“Yeah, totally. We’ll jump in if you need it, but if you can solo it, the First Clear reward is better. That should hopefully make up for the fact that it’s a weak enough Dungeon that you can solo it.”

“Oh.” He started walking along. “Do stronger Dungeons give better rewards.”

“Yup.” Claudia drifted behind him as they walked. “So if a Dungeon has been running for a long time with no clears, the First Clear reward is fantastic. It would be even better if you could solo it, but that doesn’t often happen with stronger Dungeons.”

The hallway rapidly narrowed to the point that anyone moving through it had to turn themselves sideways to fit and then widened into a room.

Kay morphed his weapon from a liquid back into its halberd shape, just in time to block a stone needle that had been thrown at him. Ahead of him was a group of three large boulders with smaller rocks serving as legs. They didn’t have any appendages resembling heads, but they did have thin needles of stone sprouting in every direction from the top of their bodies.

“Weird rock hedgehogs?” Kay muttered to himself as he waved his hand and sent a wave of blood to cling to them. With their legs held down in his red magical grip and the needles so covered in thick liquid they couldn’t shoot out, it took very little time to hammer them into small pieces.

There wasn’t anything interesting in the room after that, although Stephen muttered that some of the rocks were interesting looking after Kay had smashed them up.

They pushed on Kay, still in the lead, and he fought three more different types of enemies on the way. The first was another alligator-looking stone creature, but this one slammed its tail into the ground and threw bits of rocks it pulled up with magic at him. These were a little harder than the porcupines to beat, but he managed easily. That pattern continued with each type of enemy being a little bit harder than the last. There were a few more of the stalactite trap monsters here and there, but the next real threat was a stone armadillo thing that threw itself into a ball and tried to run him down. The last type of monster was a rocky badger that tried to tear him to shreds.

“That one was almost a bit hard.” Kay took a few deep breaths as he stood on top of the dismantled stone animal.

“This seems like a great Dungeon for training!” Stephen cheered. “There’s a progression of stronger enemies as you advance deeper, and the enemies have enough variation to make each one a learning experience!”

“He’s right.” Leaf said from near the exit. “This is a lot like the training Dungeon the Guild runs near my hometown. New adventurers flock there, and they might look to have the same setup here.”

“So we can fleece them for the rights to use it at all and get some good concessions?” Kay asked.

“Damn straight!” Claudia exclaimed cheerfully. “Make them manage access and take a cut of what they charge, plus get deals on usage for Avalonians.”

“Avalonians?”

“We have to call ourselves something.”

“Point.” Kay peered into the next hallway. “Think we’re almost done?”

“Unless this Dungeon is some perfect setup for training people to higher and higher tiers, yeah, probably. Should be a Boss up here somewhere.”

“Great, I’m going to go find it.” Kay headed off with the other three following.

He felt his somewhat dramatic moment was ruined by the next room only being a few feet farther through the tunnel. “Why is there a door?”

They all shrugged. “Don’t know.” Claudia replied, “Boss rooms have big doors.”

“I really hate that answer now.” He muttered. “I’d really like someone to be able to answer questions about why things are the way they are.”

“Suck it up. You aren’t going to get to know what’s behind the veil of reality all the time.” Leaf told him seriously.

“Yeah, but one time? I can expect it to happen one time, right? Also, the way you worded that was a bit creepy, and-or eerie.”

Leaf sighed and rolled his eyes.

Kay grinned and pushed the doors open. They were large double doors set into the rock around them, made out of the same rock, with only the small gaps that showed they could be opened, differentiating them from the surrounding wall. They swung open slowly, stone grinding on stone with a loud scraping noise that made Kay shudder.

With glacial speed, the doors opened up into a large circular room with three large spherical boulders sitting in the middle. The center of the three was at least four times the size of the others, and as Kay stepped in, they started to float. The two smaller boulders bobbed in the air next to the large one as it began to spin in midair. The other two started following along, keeping their relative positions to the big one, and within moments there was a giant spinning death top in the middle of the room.

Kay stepped back a few steps as he gathered blood and his mana. As the death top started floating towards him, he swung his hand at it, a high-speed vibrating line of blood hanging from the edge of his finger. The vibrating blood whip sliced through the stone and landed below it. Kay watched for a moment, waiting for the thing to react to his attack. The variation of his pressurized blood cutter attack had worked pretty well against the armadillo things, although he thought it might still need work.

A tiny piece of the top fell to the ground, and then all hell let loose. The top literally exploded outward, pieces of it cut free from Kay’s attack flying out in every direction as they finally worked themselves free of each other. Kay threw up a blood shield, then stumbled as Stephen threw himself between Kay and the incoming barrage. After a massive clanging noise, like being caught in a giant hailstorm, everything stilled.

“That did not go how I thought it would,” Kay commented as he looked around at the cracked walls and ceiling.

“It’s not the first time I had to jump in front of something exploding unexpectedly, so don’t feel too bad,” Stephen replied. “Although, I’m not sure what you were expecting to happen, other than that. Things keep going.”

“I thought I’d only get a chunk off of it; I didn’t think it’d lose all stability.”

“None of the monsters have been magically reinforced,” Leaf said as he slowly crept up closer, glaring at Kay as he did, “Which supports our theory that this is a newer Dungeon. The only reason you haven’t been completely wrecking these enemies is that you’re up against literal rocks.”

“Oh.” Kay decided to change the subject. “Any reason to kill this Dungeon?”

“No.”

“It should be fine.”

“I can’t burn any of it?”

They all turned to look at Claudia.

“What? I got bored.”

“So we’re keeping it. Awesome. I can envision all kinds of problems.”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re an awesome overlord of all us tiny villagers; you have all kinds of problems. Go get your reward.” Claudia pointed towards where the Boss had died, and Kay saw a thick bracelet sitting on top of the pile of shredded rocks that had slammed directly down into the floor.

“There’s no window?”

“No, there isn’t,” Leaf sighed, “And we don’t know why. Go get it.”

[————————————————————]

Bracelet of Stone Levitation

- An enchanted bracelet made of porous, light rock, it allows the wielder to magically levitate up to one ton of stone by pointing the limb with the bracelet on it and concentrating. Moving the limb too quickly away from the stone will cause it to drop, while moving it slowly will cause the stone to follow the movement. Smaller amounts of stone can move faster and allow for quicker movement.

[————————————————————]

“Well, fuck me!”

“No.” All three of them replied at once.

Kay ignored their dumb joke, “This is fantastic! Darten is going to love this!”

“You’re going to give it up?” Leaf asked.

Kay shrugged at him. “It’s fantastic, but I can’t use it to compliment my build, so why not? It’ll be great for building, I think.” He started walking towards the entrance. “Come one. I’ll tell you what it does on the way back. There’s a lot of planning I have to get started on if we’re keeping this Dungeon.”

On the walk back, there were no more enemies, and he left the three of them gaping after he explained what the bracelet did.

“That’s great!” Claudia exclaimed. “Damn, I’d heard that First Clear items are amazing, but that’s way beyond what I’d expected.”

“You guys haven’t first cleared any Dungeons?”

“No, we never ran into a new or untouched one, so haven’t had the chance.”

Kay glanced at her out of the side of his eye. “Why aren’t you cursing as much?”

Claudia blushed and looked away.

Stephen grinned widely as he leaned in close. “She’s been spending a whole lot of her free time with David and his kids, so she’s been working on cleaning up her language.”

Kay smiled at her. “That’s great! And now I’m going to tease you.”

They stepped into the sunlight a few minutes later, with Claudia still not looking at them and blushing deeply as they covered their eyes, and Meten ran to meet them.