Chapter 392 - Small and Mighty (Patreon)

Zeke dug through flesh for what felt like miles until, at last, he reached a solid wall of bone. At first, he was unsure of what had stopped his progress – especially with everything coated in blood and gore – but it only took a few moments longer for him to realize that he’d reached the cyclops’ skull.

If he’d been equipped with anything more than a cursory knowledge of anatomy, he would’ve expected it. But Zeke had never paid that much attention to biology, and so, he was more than a little surprised. For a while, he didn’t know how to combat the new obstacle, but then, he came to the same conclusion he always did: he needed to smash through it.

The problem, though, was that his tunnel through the monster’s flesh wasn’t even as wide as his shoulders, and with every passing moment, it closed a little more. That meant he needed to carve a new place so he could swing his hammer. With that in mind, he got to work with the same single-minded diligence with which he approached everything else. And over the next couple of hours, he managed to widen the tunnel into a small cave that was large enough for him to do what he needed to do.

“This is incredibly disgusting,” said Eveline. “Even for you.”

“You’re a demon,” he responded aloud. “I’m sure you’ve seen worse.”

Indeed, his experiences with Hell had been riddled with blood, fire, and corruption. In his time there, he’d encountered a host of grotesque monsters.

“Hell is not what you think it is,” she said. “Sure, the wilderness is like that, but the settled territories aren’t really that different from anywhere in this realm. Just slightly more flames.”

“If you say so,” he said, swinging his hammer. It hit with an impressive degree of force, though the bone surface was barely chipped. Zeke swung again, hitting the same spot, but getting only marginally better results. “This is going to take a while.”

And it did. Gradually, Zeke chipped away at the skull until, hours later, he finally managed to widen a crack. That encouraging sight spurred him forward, and he attacked the skull with renewed fury. Still, it took hours more before that crack began to spread, eventually spiderwebbing across the exposed surface.

That hope that engendered was of the false variety, because as he kept going, he didn’t tear through as he’d expected. Instead, the surface of the bone simply flaked off, revealing another, nearly unblemished layer.

“Ugh,” Zeke groaned, putting his hand on the exposed inner layer. With that, he realized that progress would be even slower than expected. Still, he was nothing if not persistent, so after only a short break, he attacked it with renewed vigor.

Over time – he wasn’t sure how much really passed – the cycle continued, and eventually, he managed to get through the second layer. Then the third after that. Over and over, he hammered his way through the cyclops’ skull.

During that time, the monster didn’t remain idle. Instead, Zeke’s efforts were clearly agonizing for the cyclops. But nestled in the thing’s head as he was, it couldn’t get to him. Still, its efforts to do caused constant shifts in gravity, often sending Zeke stumbling one way or the other. Fortunately, the confines of his hand-carved cave were narrow enough that it didn’t affect his progress too much.

Zeke pushed on, slowly carving a path through the skull. A few inches turned into a foot, and eventually, that foot became a few yards. At first, he wondered how a skull could be so thick – even with the massive scale of the cyclops, it shouldn’t have been more than a dozen feet thick – but after he passed the twenty-foot mark, he stopped thinking about such things.

Instead, Zeke occupied his mind with crafting his new skill. There was something almost hypnotic about the constant back and forth of his hammer that made it so much easier to slip into a meditative trance. So, it only took a slight adjustment to shift his thoughts to one of the few facets of runecrafting that had survived the merger of his two paths.

Outside of the simplest of applications, he couldn’t really enchant anymore. And few exceptions to that rule were only possible because of how simple and closely tied to destruction they were. His exploding rocks had fallen under that umbrella, but even those were pushing the limits of what he could do.

However, his ability to manipulate the runes that comprised skills had been completely unaffected. And so, he had no issues sinking into the process of constructing one to fill his upcoming level fifty slot.

When he’d first begun – months before – he’d intended the slot to be used for a repeatable attack. However, now that he had [Hell Geyser] at his disposal, Zeke had chosen to scrap those plans in favor of filling another gap in his toolset.

Even as he slowly carved a path through the cyclops’ skull, Zeke occupied his mind with skill creation. And so, time passed until, at long last, he broke through.

And nearly tumbled into a cavernous pit. He managed to grab the edge of his makeshift tunnel before he fell.

“What the…”

It didn’t make any sense. As far as Zeke knew, there wasn’t much between the brain and the inside of a skull. Fluid, sure. But it wasn’t a huge space. So, why was he looking out into open air? He leaned forward, and at the bottom of the pit, he saw flashes of blue, which made even less sense.

“You’re in a dungeon, Ezekiel.”

“I’m aware,” he muttered.

“The rules are different here. Most dungeons are static, but this one is clearly reactive. Or didn’t you think it was odd that it took you weeks to carve your way through a skull?”

“Weeks?” he asked. Had it been that long? Without any means of marking time, he’d lost any sense of context.

“Weeks.”

His first thought was about his friends, though some of that concern was quickly allayed by his sense of Pudge. He couldn’t point in the former dire bear’s direction, but he knew Pudge was alive. That probably meant the others were okay.

Wherever they were.

“The dungeon is reacting to you,” she said. “Building the challenges around your thoughts, memories, and actions. This creature was never meant to be attacked. You aren’t meant to be able to kill it. So, it’s making things more difficult, building the structure of the dungeon to bar your progress.”

“So, is it going to stop me from killing this monster?” he asked.

“I doubt it can adjust that much,” she said. “The level of mana it would need…no. Once each challenge is built, it can just expand on current structures. I’m sure of it.”

“Then nothing changes,” he said, dropping into a squat. He peered over the edge, watching the lights. They looked like arcs of lightning, and in the bare seconds of illumination, Zeke got a decent view of the surroundings. The landscape below appeared to be composed of rolling, fleshy hills. “The brain.”

“Seems like a logical assumption.”

“If I go down there, I’m going to get electrocuted, right?”

“Probably.”

“Think I can take it?” he asked.

“You’re made of metal right now.”

“That’s not a no,” he pointed out.

“With your weird endurance, I have no idea what you can endure,” she stated. “For all I know, it’ll fry you the moment you reach the surface. Or maybe it’ll empower you. It could literally go either way with you.”

Zeke could acknowledge that there was, at least, some truth to that assessment. He was well aware that he’d made some questionable decisions in the past, and he was far more comfortable going straight at a problem than trying to think of some clever way to subvert expectations. Most people would have long since died, had they found themselves in his place.

But he wasn’t most people.

He was special. No matter how it had happened, regardless of how many coincidences it had taken, he’d reached a point where he could reasonably expect to survive things that would obliterate most other people. Stacking one advantage after another meant that he didn’t need to change. He could smash his way through almost any problem, and when the dust settled, he’d be stronger than before.

Until he couldn’t.

One day, he was going to hit his limit. He knew it. So did Eveline. That it had yet to happen was a minor miracle.

“You can’t go down that road,” Eveline cautioned.

“Huh?”

“Don’t second guess yourself,” she advised. “If you do, you’ll stop being you. And if you’re not you, you won’t survive. What makes you special isn’t your attributes. It’s not your skills. Or even your path. It’s not the spark of divinity buried somewhere underneath all that, either.”

“Yeah? So, what makes me different? What makes me special?”

“Your stubborn refusal to quit,” she said. “I’ve seen your memories, Ezekiel. Going back to the very beginning, when you played your silly sport, the reason you were better than others wasn’t because you were equipped with some special talent. It was because you worked harder than everyone else.”

“That’s blatantly untrue,” he said, and he believed it. His success as a baseball player was rooted in the countless hours of practice. He knew that. But he also knew that there was no substitute for basic talent, either.

“Obviously you have to have the basic talent to get the most out of your work,” she said. “That’s the baseline, though. Lots of people can claim to reach that point. What pushes you forward is your willpower. It was evident on Earth, and the first major turning point in those troll caves where you were reborn supported it. You remember when you first evolved your race, right? That set the tone for everything going forward. That’s your superpower.”

“Stubbornness?”

“An inability to quit.”

“That sounds like a nice way of saying I’m too dumb to know when I’m beaten.”

She gave a mental shrug. “You’re not dumb, Ezekiel. You’re just straightforward.”

Zeke didn’t know whether or not he should take that as a compliment or an insult. Probably both, if he was honest.

Whatever the case, he didn’t have to think long or hard about how to attack the current problem. He’d set out to destroy the cyclops’ brain, and now that it was exposed, he knew precisely what he needed to do.

With his plan firmly in mind, Zeke jumped from his perch. At the apex of his leap, he embraced his racial ability to manipulate his weight, increasing it a hundredfold. As he did, he cocked his hammer back, and swung. At the same time, he used [Unleash Momentum], which he’d charged to its maximum power while steadily tunneling his way through the cyclops’ skull. With that, he loosed the combined might of his considerable strength, the enhanced power of his descent, and the power of thousands of swings.

The results were predictable.

He hit the surface of the brain like a fallen meteor, tearing a huge crater in the grey matter. Flesh and blood misted into the air, carried along by a massive shockwave that tore its way through the area. Zeke was showered in gore as he drilled his way through the flesh, but he knew it wouldn’t be enough.

He stomped down, unleashing [Hell Geyser], and the skill traced a line of destruction across the brain before erupting into a plume of fire and corrosion. Then, he did it again. And again after that. Three times, and the effects of each [Hell Geyser] was worse than the last.

Then, Zeke dove into the slurry of melted brain matter. With his Cambion nature, he could withstand the corruptive power of demonic mana – at least to some degree – so he only had to deal with the heat. And with his endurance, that wasn’t so onerous.

Ripping and tearing, Zeke wrought untold damage on the cyclops’ brain. Still, it didn’t die, though. Clearly, it could keep going even as its brain was destroyed.

But how long could it persist? Zeke was determined to discover the limits of the creature’s endurance. And so, he pushed deeper and deeper, eventually leaning a trickle of his own Will to enhance the destructive power he could bring to bear. It wasn’t a conscious decision. Rather, it happened on instinct.

Fortunately, the trickle was so miniscule that it only did minor damage to his body. The power wasn’t a game-changer – not like the full breadth of his Will could be – but it definitely made a difference.

Gradually, Zeke dove deeper. Meanwhile, the electrical current running through the brain continued to assault him. However, with his incredibly durable body – and the fact that it wasn’t an actual attack – the effect was only mildly uncomfortable.

In the end, Zeke accomplished his goal with little fanfare, and despite all the work he’d put in – which wasn’t inconsiderable – the death of the cyclops was almost anticlimactic. So much so that he briefly wondered if it was really over.

But the influx of kill energy confirmed it, pushing him all the way to level forty-eight. Three levels, most of it for a single kill.

It was only then that Zeke recognized just how powerful the cyclops had been. And he’d killed it. Not by confronting it directly, either.

“Seems like there might be a lesson there,” he said.

Eveline said something, but it was lost to Zeke as gravity shifted. Suddenly, up was to the side, and the side was down. A moment later, a gargantuan impact knocked the wind from Zeke’s chest.

More distressingly, the craterous hole he’d dug into the monster’s brain started to collapse atop him. Even as the monster’s flesh pressed down on him, Zeke kept his wits about him. However, instead of digging himself free – which was admittedly the straightest path – he chose a different tactic.

He looted the creature.

Suddenly, all the meat around him disappeared, and he was falling. He hit a disintegrating wall of bone, breaking through before slamming into the familiar tile floor. All around him, the creature was dissipating. Some of it remained – but it was only the bits and pieces that weren’t useful. The rest went into his storage.

Collapsing onto the floor, he took a deep breath and looked around.

Only a few dozen feet away, embedded into the counter, stood a door.

“I think I found the way out,” he muttered.