Dungeon Novel: Chapter Twelve (Patreon)

The cloaked figure with magic walked into the open forest floor, its two guards following on by its sides. The newest undead invasion slowly moved into the floor killing every small creature that ventured into their path, the void elemental remained unnoticed behind them.

Unbound was curious, the undead here was very different to the invasions that had happened prior to the current one. The skeletons, whilst the same as other skeletons that had attacked, displayed more tactical use of their equipment. If there had been more than two, they probably would of overwhelmed the boss designed to tear apart skeletons.

The earth elemental, far slower than the void variant, was moving through a more direct path to the boss room of the second floor. Whilst Unbound wanted to use a cracked core weakest elemental as boss the full earth elemental would make a stand in for this incursion until a permanent solution was made.

It was then that the undead met four cracked core elementals, the two sets of combatants clashing immediately. There were two earth variants and two wind variants for the elementals. The two wind elementals showed far superior speed and shot at the cloak wearing figure as their earthen counterparts engaged the large bone boar monsters.

Large fists of stone cracked hides of bone whilst the air twirled and sliced the cloaked figure. The blades of air, slashing the tattered cloak until it fell from the figure.

To reveal a living person. Pale flesh and taut skin covered by blackened leather resembled the other undead he had seen and even the pale green glow in the man’s eyes were reminiscent of the skeletons flaming orbs. But his blood pulsed slowly through his veins and his lungs took in the air around him.

With a quick order to the air elementals the air around the man was removed, pulled away by the elemental’s dominion over its element. The man noticed this and with surprising dexterity dashed out of the growing vacuum. A snarl came across his face as a bolt of green energy slammed into the cracked core, widening the damage there. He sent out three more bolts before the gem shattered and the wind dispersed.

However, during that time the two earth elementals had managed to dispatch one of the bone animals. And had ganged up upon the badly shattered form of the remaining one. The man looked at this and sneered before quickly fleeing the floor.

To immediately run into a body of the reverse of reality. The man had fled so quickly he had run straight into the void elemental and his torso had disappeared alongside his armour and lower jaw. The formerly living limbs fell to the ground followed by the sliced skull and brain. the green glow faded from the eyes replaced by a milky white.

Unbound quickly absorbed the results of the battle, the broken limbs revealed nothing, something he expected due to void contact, and the bone boars gave a new learned pattern.

Bone Plated Undead: Boar variant

Whilst they were stronger than the strange skeleton patterns Unbound would have to devote a large amount of time to create a stronger evolution. They would probably prove useful if he ever tried to build a floor with an Undead theme.

This set of intruders had brought questions. One how a living person was not immediately killed by the undead and secondly how it could command them. It reminded Unbound of the rumours of a necromancer from when he had been human, but that necromancer was famed for raising the undead army.

The two couldn’t be the same and there was no real knowledge of the necromancer flinging spells like a mage did.

Unbound had slowly seen stronger and stronger undead attack his dungeon but someone who could make all the undead attack intelligently was dangerous, very dangerous. He considered for a moment before placing a new void elemental where the older one used to reside before hiding the old void elemental nearby his core, unseen.

The earth elemental he moved into his testing chambers in preparation to try and change them slightly. Hoping to create a roaming creature fully focused on destroying undead.

That left the second-floor boss to create, he remembered creating the tie between the Bone Tearing Spider and the previous floor. This time he summoned a cracked core elemental, earth variant, before trying to tie it to the idea of the current floor.

Unbound and Elvinia watched as the smaller elemental grew, its earthen shell become darker and textured, like bark, and small green cords wove through and around its body.

It remained mobile, unlike the first-floor boss, but its larger feet seemed slow and designed to steady the greater bulk of the earth they held up. The end result was a large earthen elemental that resembled a tree carved from stone. The gem had shifted to a muddier brown colour and the crack had partially healed.

The second floor boss moved into the centre of the small cave that Unbound made as the boss room but, due to the tree like appearance of the earthen elemental, it looked out of place in the stone and dirt cave.

Unbound started twisting the walls and building large root like pillars, all with a similar texture to the boss, around the cave. He shifted the walls to add specks of copper ore, green tinged, and small spots of quartz that made the cave slightly brighter as it reflected motes of light from the entrance.

The result was a dim cave with large shadows and tree like stone, as the boss moved slowly it could cause sentient intruders to grow nervous if they could only catch glimpses of the camouflaged creature.

Unbound twisted with annoyance as he felt a new set of invaders, wanting to see if he should add anything to the second-floor boss room. Until he looked upon the invading force.

It was huge. Zombies, Crumbling Skeletons, the Unknown Skeletons and one or two Resurrected slimes and Bone Plated Undead of several variants including the boar. It felt like time to spawn a lot more defenders.