Dungeon Novel 2: Chapter Four (Patreon)

“She sacrificed her levels,” Elvinia said dully in the silence after the explosion. “She quite literally burnt away all she had gained across the course of her life in one explosive conflagration.” The sadness in her tone was unmistakable.

“It is bad then?” Unbound asked his Dungeon fairy, hearing the sadness that almost bled from her.

“Bad,” Elvinia said almost incredulous. “It is worse than bad she destroyed everything she was and had the potential to be to destroy everything around her. I don’t know what could have prompted her to do it or even how she knew how to perform it. The knowledge is banned for good reason.”

Unbound did not feel the same as his fairy, instead strangely angry at the fire mage it galled him that intruders were not killed by him or his people but instead by a suicidal mage. It struck at his Dungeon instincts wanting him to do anything to protect himself and what was his.

Flames still flickered in the tunnel, the heat still high enough to melt the stone and dirt. Within the explosion, Unbound noted that twelve of the larger ants died alongside seven smaller ants, two Bone Abominations, and three Weak Draugr.

It was a problem with frequently fighting Undead that despite the damage they could do was not proportional to the amount gained once they died. Some of the ants, that had started developing their own lifeforce, had given him more shop points when they died.

Shop points were what was received when a non-native being died within the Dungeon. Elvinia had said it was not fully known how the amount of Shop points was decided but the quality-of-life aura played a massive part in it. Life Aura was a way to measure a being’s general level, experience, and knowledge, even new-borns had a Life Aura as small and weak it could be.

The other invading Undead, out of the range of the explosion, was continuing forward. Marching over the small pools of molten stone and ash that now littered their path. The Undead were not hampered in the slightest by the loss of numbers and for all of the damage, the detonation did most of the Undead were out of range. There were several injuries and a couple of lost limbs, but the largest casualties were in the ants and the destruction rendered to Unbound’s Dungeon floor.

The Undead trooped deeper into the Dungeon, closing in on the boss of the second floor and the portal to the third floor. Unbound knew that the Undead would have little trouble fighting the Queen ant and that she would likely die quickly.

Flooded tunnels posed no obstacle to the tireless Undead, pulling themselves through the water and stabbing any of the aquatic ants within they burst from the pool of water in the boss chamber and raced towards the Queen ant.

Two of the Draugr reached her first and for the first time ever the Queen’s blow was outright ignored. Lazily blocking with one ax, the Draugr held the Queen’s ax-like limb above its head even as it struck out with its other hand.

The ax cleaved through the chitin covering the Queen’s arm, slicing it off, and letting the ax head fall to the ground. She let out a scream of pain as she lost part of her body and her small amount of innate magic struck.

A wave of stone and gravel blew out in a circle, knocking the two Draugr away and partially filling the pool. The Queen howled and charged at the closest Draugr with her last limb held high, the other Undead were slowly pulling themselves out of the pool, pushing through the mass of earth.

A Bone Abomination’s spike caught the Queen in her abdomen, the force bringing her to the floor with a squeal as chitin scraped across stone. The crash gave time for one of the Draugr to leap in mid-air and bring down both axes in an overhead blow that cleaved the great ant’s head from her shoulders.

The body shuddered, twitched then fell still on the floor. The Undead did not pause at the boss’s defeat but immediately moved to the portal leading to the third floor. Several more Undead, Weak Draugr, and various Bone Abominations had pulled themselves from the pool and walking towards the portal too.

Unbound could see that the Undead, whilst far smarter than their ‘wild’ counterparts were not used to working together, unable to stay in step with their comrades. However, there was definitely a controlling force behind them, even if it didn’t have as much control from a distance, as the Undead followed in each other’s footsteps instead of diverging outwards from the portal.

The Draugr were faster than the various Bone Abominations, the fact that they had semi-working flesh empowered by mana, meant that they ranged several feet further into the floor than the skeletal Undead. Their axes cut through defenders’ flesh and bone alike and their strength shattered the elementals with cracked cores, they were strong enough that they didn’t need to aim for the weak point instead shattering stone until the elemental had no form.

It made Unbound wonder if he could use elementals with reinforced materials, Elvinia said that stronger elementals naturally reinforced the materials their bodies were made of. If the material were already strengthened, then the elemental in question would likely be far tougher than should be natural. He was starting to get to a point where he could experiment with elementals in his fighting chambers without worrying about any significant mana drain.

Strangely moving towards the right-hand side of the floor, where opposition was the fiercest, they were moving steadily towards the sentient’s residence. If he still had a human body Unbound would likely narrow his eyes in suspicion. There was no reason to go that way, Undead was mainly drawn to life signs and elementals counted as constructs, not a living creature.

They were heading directly towards the sentient living beings Unbound had sworn to protect and he wanted to know why.