Chapter 22 (Patreon)

“Okay,” Bruce said, hopping up and down as he tried to bleed off energy from his recent run.  “Fourth floor.  Can I finally try fighting and earning a little EXP now that I’m here?”

“Theoretically,” Kassar replied slowly.  “I wouldn’t recommend it.  Encounters on the third floor will yield less EXP, but they should also be a lot safer.  Here, if you are canny you should be able to win a fight so long as you limit the fight to one opponent.”

Bruce nodded thoughtfully, as he started walking down a passage at random, careful to scan for any upcoming traps.

“One enemy at a time, got it.”

“As long as you und-” Kassar sputtered to a halt.  “No enemies at a time!  Bruce, you’re not ready yet.  Fighting on this floor isn’t suicide, but we’ve come too far and overcome too many struggles for you to lose your life fighting against some entry tier trash monster.”

He looked over the mental map created by Eyes of the Void, tuning out the alien in his head as Kassar ranted about how dangerous the Labyrinth was.  There were a couple of monsters visible, but like the first floor it seemed that most of them hunted in packs.

Bruce picked a path that avoided the clusters of maze denizens.  He might be discarding most of Kassar’s advice, but that didn’t mean he was a fool.  Even on the first floor, a second shade more than doubled the difficulty of an encounter.  Unless he was strong enough to kill a monster in one hit, a factor he wouldn’t have any information on until he tried, that would leave him fighting two creatures at once.  If they were both coming from the same direction, it would be incredibly difficult.  If they split up and came at him from either side?  Well.  There was a reason the millennia old ghost in his head was screaming at him.

His face lit up as the fourth brown blob he scanned turned out to be one creature roving the hallways on its own.  A second scan indicated that there weren’t any other monsters near it, and the only other group that was visible was on the other side of two sets of walls.

He took a deep breath before breaking into a run.  Ten feet later, he jumped over a red patch on the floor, arms pinwheeling wildly to catch his balance as he barely landed on the other side of the trap.

“See!”  Kassar yammered away.  “You can barely handle some of the traps in here.  How in the name of the Void Mother do you plan on actually killing a monster?  You’re being foolish Bruce and you know it.”

Bruce’s hammer and shield hummed into existence.  There wasn’t much of a difference from his recent upgrade to the warhammer.  The weapon’s head was slightly bigger, the point on the back slightly longer, and it crackled with a bit more barely restrained psychic energy.

“Aw,” he said sadly, looking at his hammer.  “I hoped there would at least be an embossed hilt or skulls on the side of the head or something.”

“You can worry about customization later,” Kassar replied unhappily.  “If you insist on this absolutely idiotic course of action, make sure to use all of your advantages.  So long as you track the monster’s movements you should be able to hide behind a corner and gain the element of surprise.  I won’t know how strong its defenses are until we see the creature, but hopefully that will be enough for you to at least knock it off balance so that you can finish it off.”

“There we go,” Bruce responded brightly.  “That’s actually a good idea.  You need to work on your positivity bud.  My third grade teacher said that my optimistic outlook on life would take me far, and look at me now.  I traveled to another world and now I’m one of the first two humans to ever enter an extra dimensional deathtrap.  My name is going to go down in the history books right next to the Wright brothers and Neil Armstrong.”

“If you’re not careful,” the alien ground out, “It will be a footnote next to Laika instead.”

“Who now?” Bruce asked, distracted.  The brown dot of the monster was getting closer as he hurried toward the blind corner that it would be turning in ten to fifteen seconds.

“The first creature from your planet to successfully orbit it,” Kassar replied dryly.  “Despite that important milestone, no one remembers her because she died horribly.  A lesson that you should take to heart.”

Bruce burst around the corner, hammer tracing a rapid arc through the air as he brought it down on the monster.  At the last second, Gravity Hammer activated, pulling a small amount of energy from Bruce.

It hit with a flash of light and enough force to dent solid steel and crush bones.  Any human hit by the blow would have been dead or maimed.  No amount of modern combat armor could have withstood the impact.

Instead the monster rolled backward a single step.

It was bipedal after a fashion.  The creature’s torso and upper body resembled an eyeless human with an overly large mouth and bronze skin.  Its lower body on the other hand was a two wheeled cart, fused to the bottom of its torso and with blades sprouting from the rims of its wheels.

Gravity Hammer disappeared with a mental ‘click’ as Bruce stepped toward.  There was a large dent in one of the creature’s shoulders where he had struck it, but that didn’t stop the monster from rocking forward and planting both of its hands into the maze’s floor.

It opened its mouth, and without thinking, Bruce brought up his shield.  A tongue, almost three feet long and ending in a sharp bony spike, darted toward him, slamming into the purple wall of energy and leaving a webwork of tiny cracks in the psychic construct as it ricocheted upward.

Bruce swung his hammer again, his pattern doubling its weight at the last second as it slammed into the monster’s injured shoulder a second time.  With a satisfying crunch, the bronze armor gave way, crippling the limb.

Before he could celebrate, pain erupted in his left shoulder as the deflected tongue curled around his shield, jabbing downward through skin and muscle.  It wasn’t anywhere near as fast as the initial spitting attack, but even if it didn’t kill him, a knife wound was never pleasant.

The monster reached down with its one good arm, shifting to the side to lift up the wheel on its injured side and spin it toward him, blades out.

He swung downward, putting all of his weight behind an overhand blow that bashed into the top of the wheel, destroying the rim and slamming it into the ground.

His shoulder burned as the tongue was ripped from him as Bruce hurdled the planted wheel, slamming his shield into it for good measure.  He landed right behind the monster and flipped the hammer around in his hand.

Sparks flew as the narrow spike punched through the back of the creature’s head.  He couldn’t use Gravity Hammer with a puncturing weapon, but it wasn’t necessary.  His attack ignored the creature’s armor, driving itself deep through its skull and into what passed for its brain.

It twitched once before it began to fade away, leaving nothing but the steady ache in his shoulder.

“Okay,” Bruce said, feigning cheerfulness as he dismissed his weapons.  “That could have gone better but it wasn’t so bad.  Any thoughts?”

He could practically see Kassar shifting in the back of his mind as the big alien glared at him.

“I think that eighty EXP isn’t worth taking a serious injury and being poisoned, but I’ve only lived longer than your entire civilization.  What would I know about combat?”

“Wha-” Bruce’s vision flickered and he dropped to one knee.  It felt like all of the energy was leaking out through the hole in his shoulder.

“You will survive,” the alien replied smugly.  “The poison does not seem to actually deal much damage.  Instead it saps your psychic focus and stamina.  If your battle had lasted more than ten to fifteen seconds, you would’ve collapsed at its wheels, helpless to stop it from consuming you.”

“Thash not great.”  The room was dim and swimming around Bruce now.  He didn’t feel like he was dying, rather it was like someone had injected him with opiates or he had drank too much grain alcohol.

“No,” Kassar replied.  “It’s not.  Sweet dreams Bruce, and when you wake up with a headache, I hope you remember that I was right.”

He shook his head.  It was hard to focus through the haze.  He wasn’t really tired, it was just that his eyelids were heavy, maybe if he just rested them for a second-

Bruce blinked.

He was laying on his back, the unmarked ceiling of the Labyrinth above him.  It felt like there was a rock quarry in his head with twenty or so miniature miners trying to dig their way out of his skull with pickaxes.

“Rise and shine sleepyhead,” Kassar said brightly.  “It’s time to face the day.”

Bruce just groaned.

“But seriously,” the alien continued.  “You need to get up.  You’ve been napping for about an hour and your mental focus is almost half full again.  More importantly, there’s another of those monsters approaching.  Given that our lives are intertwined, I would prefer that you survive.”

“Thanks I guess,” he choked out through a raw throat, rolling over onto his stomach and pushing up off the ground to stand up.  His shoulder still hurt, but an hour of Healing Factor had closed up most of the wound.

Eyes of the Void clicked on, and Bruce winced.  All of the auras were too bright.  They felt like a thousand needles stabbing into his eyes and urging the miniature miners in his head to work faster.

Sure enough, a brown spot was wheeling steadily toward him.

Bruce stifled another groan as he mentally measured the speed and distance between the approaching monster and himself.  Apparently their wheels really let the creatures move quickly when they wanted to.

He slipped around the same corner he had used for his last ambush.  If escape wasn’t an option, he’d have to replicate his previous performance, except this time hopefully without getting knocked unconscious.

The only sound was the creak of its wheels and his ragged breath as it rushed toward the intersection where Bruce was hiding.  His shield and hammer crackled into existence as he focused on the monster’s approach, calculating its speed and tensing his muscles.

Just before it arrived, he spun to his right, performing an almost three hundred and sixty degree rotation as he took a single step out into the hallway.

Bruce’s headache twinged as Gravity Hammer drew energy from his reserves, pulling the energy through sore mental pathways and dumping its force into his strike.  The skill, surprise, the enemy’s momentum, centrifugal force, and good old fashioned mental muscles all combined to smash the oblivious monster in the face hard enough to make Bruce’s arm ache.

It slumped forward on its carriage bonelessly, most of its face caved in by the attack.  Bruce’s second strike hit the back of its head, and evidently that was enough to finish the monster off.  It began fading into flecks of energy.

“That was much better,” Kassar said grudgingly.  “I still think that fighting monsters on this floor is a bit above you, but at least you managed a decent showing this time.  You’ll be much more ready to fight them when we venture down here after a couple of pattern upgrades.”

“I’m glad you think so,” Bruce replied, dismissing his weapon so that he could reach up and massage his aching temples.  “But if it's all fine by you, I think your initial advice is spot on. I’d like to find a sanctuary and then sneak up to the fourth floor.  Eighty EXP is nice, but I’d much prefer a lower EXP total in exchange for safe fights.

“I told you so,” the alien said smugly.

“Yeah, you did.”  Bruce rolled his eyes as he located the nearest sanctuary and began walking toward it.  “Sorry about jumping the gun there.  I spent so long running from everything that my hands were itchy at the idea of trying out my new abilities.  I got impatient and it cost me a migraine.”

“You were lucky,” Kassar responded, his voice softening.  “I know what it is to be young and to have the blood of a warrior pumping through my veins.  Still, so long as we chalk this entire encounter up as a learning experience, it won’t be a total loss.”

“Got it,” Bruce said with a quick nod that sent a spike of pain through his head.  “Don’t get EXP hungry and jump in over your head.  If you’re going to jump into a pond, make sure you know how deep it is first.”

“No, not exactly,” the alien replied, “Always listen to the unfathomably old and powerful warrior ghost.  He knows best."

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