Chapter 67: Soul Snatcher (Patreon)

Coop shook his head as he led Jett through the first corridors in the basement of the fort. He turned around and used Presence of Mind to inspect her again.

[Awakened Cat (Level 54)]

[Sentinel of Shadows (Agility)]

[Venerated of the Blessed Mau Collective]

[Sharp, Dark, Silent (Slayer)]

How was it possible for her to be leveling so efficiently? He wanted to know her secrets. Maybe he could copy her strategy, if only she would show it to him. She had barely lifted a finger, or claw, ever since she casually rescued him from the monsters that swarmed him while he was stunned. She just observed while he cleared the rest of the second floor, then the first, and now the basement. It felt like escorting a supervisor that was constantly judging his performance.

Still, he was making good progress fighting the Ruin Excavators in the hours that they had been exploring the fort’s corridors. It reminded him of stemming the tide of Primal Trackers, with the density and level of monsters slowly increasing as he pushed forward in their open air golf course dungeon.

In absolute contrast, the basement was dark and damp, the sounds of dripping water constantly tricked him into thinking it was the footsteps of a Ruin Excavator. They hid in the shadows, and not just on the ceiling, waiting to ambush him with their awful debuffs. To make matters worse, they increased in strength every time they went down. They were already level 40 with elites sprinkled among them in the basement level and he was slightly worried they would keep getting stronger.

The monsters really didn’t stand a chance in a fight with Coop. He wouldn’t be overwhelmed again, unless they could find a way to spring a trap on him. Coop was being more careful, checking the corners and ceiling while moving at an even slower, deliberate pace. The monsters were almost always in large groups, but Coop could handle them as long as he didn’t wander into their midst. Really, he thought he would be fine, even if he did end up in the center of another full swarm, but it wasn’t a pleasant experience the first time around. It was also faster to systematically eliminate the monsters instead of rushing between them, so he and Jett didn’t travel through the fort quickly.

Jett seemed to prefer a slow pace, as it gave her opportunities to resume cleaning herself, or otherwise lounge at the edge of rooms while Coop stomped and crushed his way through monsters.

As they moved through the basement level, the amount of water steadily increased. Even though the first floor was damp, with small puddles in some corners, and a really humid atmosphere, the basement was just plain wet. Most rooms had barely enough dry spots for Jett to carefully pick her way through. The constant dripping and occasional rushing of ocean water made Coop nervous.

There was a reason basements generally didn’t exist in this region of the world. The bedrock was porous limestone, and the ocean was an enduring presence. The fort’s foundation was reinforced with packed sand, but being in the basement really brought his confidence in the sturdiness of the walls way down.

The number of Ruin Excavators was also increasing. Coop glanced at the tip-toeing cat, daintily choosing her steps to avoid getting excess dampness on her paws. He suspected that she had already been clearing the monsters before he had started. The second floor only had the one room infested with monsters, but the first floor had a dozen, evenly spaced around the northern half of the fortress, and the basement had monsters in every room so far. Coop had seen evidence of her attacks even on the upper floors.

Jett sat down in a dry spot and waited for Coop to pass through a rusted iron gate and engage with the next group. Knowing her level, it might seem a bit annoying to be doing all the work, but Coop thought it was fine. He could reap the benefits of defeating the monsters and progressing his quest while developing some technique with his new weapon.

Coop had summoned his first blunt weapon to fight the Ruin Excavators. He thought it would be fine to experiment a little with Jett keeping an eye on him. The precision necessary to actually pierce the compact creatures with his bladed weapons was too extreme and the difficulty led him to really want to try something new. When Coop first got his Retribution ability, he and Jones had experimented with dozens of weapons: swords, polearms, and bludgeons, so he had options. He just hadn’t developed any technique with most of them.

Coop first tried a flail, which had a shaft with a chain on the end that attached to a heavy spiked ball, but he abandoned the weapon before even trying it. Just holding the thing made him worried about smacking himself in the face with the striking head. It was definitely not the tool for the job he was doing, and was something he would need to practice with before he risked using at all. Not to mention the silently critical glares that Jett shot toward him as he barely dodged his own weapon when trying to figure out how to properly hold it.

Instead, Coop was using what Jones called a morning star. It had a long shaft, similar in length to his spear and glaive but twice as thick, and the end had a solid ball attached instead of any kind of blade. Coop had opted to leave the spikes off the watermelon-sized ball and instead had a perfectly round sphere on the dangerous end. Swinging it around experimentally had led him to wielding it almost like an elongated sledgehammer, with the added benefit of not worrying about the orientation of the head. He kept one hand almost directly under the head while the other hand held near the base of the shaft in a much wider stance than when he held his polearms.

Using both hands, he hoisted the morning star, holding it firmly across his chest and entered the next room. Even in the dark, he immediately noticed the shovel-like claws of hanging monsters, waiting for an opportunity to ambush him. His eyes automatically scanned for the ambushers after the hours spent in the fort. He triggered the traps with his morning star, teasing the monsters into attacking the mace instead of himself.

They shot down, propelled by their triple-pronged tail until they met the stone ground, clattering with their mechanical spider legs in the shallow layer of water until they faced him. Coop smashed them with the morning star, keeping his distance and letting the length of the weapon keep him safe. It wasn’t quite as long as his glaive or his spear, but it was close enough that he could demolish any of the Excavators within five feet of him. He repeatedly hammered the creatures like he was securing railroad ties. Every swing came down with the force of Coop’s Strength, splashing the shallow water and sending legs and segments of the monsters flying in all directions to dissipate into mana vapors before coming to a rest.

He didn’t need a lot of technique to smash the heavy end into the monsters, but he still felt like he was given hints by his Haunted title. His hands needed to be constantly shifting to properly leverage the length of the morning star, almost throwing the ball end, then hanging onto the shaft and pulling down to accelerate the strike. His forward foot needed to be planted while his back foot leaned on his toes and it was necessary to engage his entire body to properly swing the weapon instead of isolating his arms. Small adjustments on every swing both gave him more power and allowed him to repeat the actions with more speed, instead of being caught with the weighty mace planted on the ground.

Before he moved forward, he knocked the most patient remnants from their ready positions with his morning star. Not every monster ambushed immediately, some waited for a second target, and others needed to be goaded down. These were the ones that ended up meeting the mace head while still clinging to the ceiling, being launched across the room or into the stone arches that divided the ceiling.

He cleared the room in sections that roughly matched the reach of his weapon. Jett remained near the doorway, on the one dry spot, barely paying attention. In the middle of the room, one of the Ruin Excavators landed with a solid thump when it attempted to ambush his mace. Coop picked it out and immediately charged it, abandoning his careful sweep, because he recognized the heavier landing as an elite.

[Elite Ruin Excavator (Level 35)]

[(Body)]

[Minion of the Primal Constructs]

The first time an elite had joined the regular monsters, it had been split into 10 different sections before Coop even recognized it was something different. He knew Jett had done something, but he’d missed the cat’s attack. She seemed content to leave them to him at this point in their adventure.

The monster revealed its own fleetness by recoiling its tail before Coop closed the gap. Coop sidestepped as soon as the tail raised, anticipating what came next. It sounded like a pneumatic gun when a spine shot from the tail, aimed where Coop’s head had been just a moment before, flying until it struck the stone wall with a muffled thump. Coop slid through the inch deep water with the morning star leveled at the elite.

A second rush of air preceded the clink of a second spine colliding with the head of Coop’s weapon. The weapon followed through and collided with the monster’s raised claws, forcing them backwards and the creature stumbling off balance despite all of its legs. Coop tightened his core and raised the morning star in front of him just half way to his chest, then slammed it down with enough pressure to demolish the elite, leaving its metal tail to rattle against the ground before disappearing with its last dart unfired.

Coop caught a glimpse of Jett yawning as he prepared to engage with the surrounding Ruin Excavators. His rush to defeat the elite put him right where they wanted him, near the center of the room, but Coop was more experienced with their simple traps, and he began swinging his morning star even as they rotated toward him.

He smashed a few further in the room, and moved through the space created by their absence, then turned and swept the end of his mace through the group that crowded after him from behind. The morning star was like a bowling ball shattering brittle metal bowling pins that dared to enter its path. Coop then lunged back the way he had come, keeping the swarming monsters on one side of him and moving to the sections of the room that had no more waiting to ambush him from above. From there it was just another simple game of whack-a-mole until the room was clear. When it was done, Coop checked his notifications from the previous fights.

[You defeated Ruin Excavator (Level 32)]

[+12 Basic Credits]

[Quest Complete! Defeat Ruin Excavators III]

[You have a new quest!]

[Congratulations! You have leveled up!]

…

[You defeated Elite Ruin Excavator (Level 31)]

[+72 Basic Credits]

[+1 Soul Dredger (Uncommon)]

[Congratulations! Your profession has leveled up!]

…

[You defeated Ruin Excavator (Level 38)]

[+22 Basic Credits]

[Defeat Ruin Excavators IV (371/5000)]

One more level until he had another opportunity to claim a new skill. He wanted it, but he only had one more day before the settlement event began. The next stage of the Ruin Excavators quest would take too long, and the same was true for defeating 250 Primal Kites. He’d have to try fighting some of the monsters in the mangrove forest to sneak another level. There might be better ways to prepare the settlement for an unknown challenge outside of expanding his personal arsenal, but having another skill wouldn’t hurt.

The room was clear, but they had a new problem. There were no more dry spots for Jett to use as a path. Coop waited for a moment, standing at the threshold of the next room, to see what she would do. The cat daintily tested the water with one paw and seemed to immediately regret it, shaking the water off with vigor.

“You wanna wait there, or do you want me to carry you?” Coop asked the cat. She sat down, which Coop interpreted as her decision to wait there. He wasn’t going to go for much longer as it was already night and he needed to check in with Marcus, so she wouldn’t have to wait for long. Maybe two more rooms.

The next room was more of the same, with the Ruin Excavators using their tails to launch themselves from the ceiling and a pair of elites complicating the encounter with their ranged attacks. When Coop was done, he realized Jett had braved the water, carefully choosing her steps as she stuck close to the walls where she thought it was shallowest. He was happy for her company.

The next room was different. It had been a storage room in an era long past. Pieces of old barrels and crates lined the walls, and none of them remained whole. It almost seemed like a car had plowed through them with the way bits and pieces were scattered across the floor. The strangest thing was the complete lack of Ruin Excavators attached to the ceiling. Every room in the basement had them until this one.

Coop stared at a massive hole that had been dug through the interior wall of the room. It could have been a train tunnel if there were tracks, and it seemed deep, angling down just a few degrees as it extended toward the center of the fort. The hole should have been dug through coral rock, but as he got closer, it seemed like the walls were made of something smooth. He could feel a slight breeze coming out of the darkness. When he rubbed his hand on the edges, he realized that it actually had been coral rock, but the rock had been melted into a perfectly smooth, glassy surface.

“Is this the entrance to a hive?” Coop mumbled to himself, getting Jett’s attention as she inched along the far wall, shaking each paw as she lifted them out of the water only to put them back in on the next step. She froze and locked her eyes onto the hole.

The familiar red light of a Primal Construct’s minion lit up in the center of the hole, deep within the darkness. The single light seemed extraordinarily far away, and Coop was already thinking about how annoying it would be to fight in the darkness. Maybe he’d come back the next day with a torch.

A pair of synchronized red lights lit up on either side of the first light and Coop raised his eyebrows. The lights were about halfway up the hole. Coop’s head wasn’t quite halfway up.

More lights appeared all around the first one, a dozen at least. Coop took one step, away from the hole, and heard what sounded like a pneumatic cannon. In the time that he took a single step backwards, all of the lights rushed toward him in unison. The wind hit him first, blasting him while he struggled to retreat further. The air launched the water away from the hole in a wave and propelled the broken bits of wood from the old crates into the air like confetti. The extra push was enough to get him out of the way, at least. The distance that the lights covered in an instant was completely absurd.

Coop completely abandoned his morning star and spun away from the hole. Jett had arched her back and all of her fur stood straight up. Coop scooped her into his arms while being battered by splinters and ran for his life, giving one glance back to identify what had shot out of the hole.

[Field Boss: Ruin Excavator (Level 40)]

[Felrog the Soul Snatcher (Body)]

[Manifestation of the Primal Constructs]

Coop ran through the cleared rooms of the basement until he found steps up to the first floor, then he ran through the first floor rooms until he found an exit to the courtyard. He was not ready to fight a Field Boss again, especially not in such a dark, confined space.

Coop didn’t stop running until he was in the center of the courtyard, equally distant from every opening. He still didn’t feel comfortable knowing there could be a tunnel underneath him somewhere, but beyond abandoning the settlement, there was nowhere else to go. At least there hadn’t been any signs of pursuit. When he thought about it, the Field Boss had been too large to fit through the regular doorways anyway. It didn’t seem like it was smashing through the walls to chase after him.

He shifted Jett to his shoulder and looked around the courtyard. It was quiet on the north side of the canal. Even the training yard was peaceful with the last of the day’s training already complete. The residents seemed to prefer the southern half during their free time, for good reason. There hadn’t been anything built on the northside previously, so there hadn’t been much to do aside from relax in the open fields underneath scattered trees.

Marcus had constructed several buildings while Coop was in the basement. The Town Hall was obvious, so he headed toward it. The building was located at the very northern point of the courtyard, where the main street would lead once Balor completed the roads. One of the radial streets was also populated with smaller buildings that appeared to be some of the workshops and smiths that they needed. Coop skipped checking out the new services. He needed to arrange for the basement of the fort to be made off limits until the Field Boss was dealt with.