[Level Up!]
[Level: 10 -> 11]
[Free Attribute Points: 0 -> 3]
Mia paused, whatever she was about to say dying on her lips and forgotten as she stared at the notification, a slow grin forming on her lips. She didn’t have to think long about where to put the three points she’d just gotten. One in Will, because it was one part of the Subattribute Pair most responsible for the omph of her magic next to Manifestation. Manifestation, which was racing ahead at 24 points while Will lagged behind at 19. It was even worse because Will was still only 90% effective per point due to her Base Will Attribute being at 9 instead of 10 like Manifestation’s was.
[Will: 19 -> 20]
[Main Mind: 21 -> 22]
The other two she had would be going into Sensitivity and Control, the two Spirit Subattributes lagging behind Manifestation. That would improve both her mana reserve and, hopefully, push her over the threshold to finally be able to condense and weave her mana well enough to create Rank 0 runes on her own, even if only by replicating ones she’d learned the shape of from absorbing them before from a lexicon.
[Control: 18 -> 19]
[Sensitivity: 17 -> 18]
[Main Spirit: 23 - > 25]
The change in her Subattributes was hard to quantify, and she had no way to sense how the change in her Mind stat affected her, but Spirit? She could feel it clear as day how her spiritual weight expanded, how keeping the lake of vicious arcane mana inside her Core, raring to lash out, became just that much easier. Her Core had greatly expanded with her Rank up, where it had been full before she touched the Obelisk, her Spirit having caught up to its size near the end. Now, it was once more just a small slice of her Core she could keep filled with mana. Her Spirit would need to grow again to catch up, to be able to keep more and more mana suppressed and under control. This was just the first step.
Another fact that couldn’t be ignored was that Spirit was the attribute that influenced the strength of the two pseudo-spirits that were quickly becoming the most useful tools in her arsenal. They were, after all, latched onto her Spirit like a pair of repulsive, lecherous tumours- Right. Anyway!
By her calculations, she now had 19 Gained Attributes to go until she reached the cap. She was at 91 now, adding together all her Gained Attributes, and being at Level 11 had pushed her cap all the way up to 110. The problem was that the Golden Apple, sitting snugly inside her spatial statchel, gave a nice ‘+3’ to all Subattributes, of which she had 9. Body-Agility, Body-Strength, Body-Flexibility, Mind-Cognition, Mind-Memory, Mind-Will, Spirit-Control, Spirit-Sensitivity, Spirit-Manifestation. A simple multiplication revealed that she still needed one more Level Up to avoid wasting any of those 27 Attribute Points; one more level would push her cap to 120, of which 29 would remain free if she kept one out of the 3 Free Attributes she’d gain on the next level up in reserve for the level up after that.
A single, cold and pointy finger poking her side snapped Mia out of her musings, chasing away the migraine-inducing world of mathematics that was rapidly consuming her thoughts. Mia yelped, blinking owlishly before throwing a mild glare towards Camie, who looked down at her with a curious glint in her ruby eyes.
“What happened?” The vampiress asked, unable or unwilling to keep the amusement out of her tone at the embarrassing noise that’d slipped through Mia’s lips. “You froze up like you do when you sense something horrible, then started smiling.”
“Level up,” Mia huffed out, crossing her arms. Did she really have to resort to poking? That was just unfair.
“Huh, I guess your pets did do most of the work,” Lina said, lips pursed as she glanced back at the cut-up remains of the greenskins covering the cavern’s floor from wall to wall. “You practically did three people’s jobs all by yourself … technically.”
Mia did love such technicalities. To be honest, she was starting to lean more and more towards taking her combat style closer to what she imagined a Summoner specialist might fight like. It was just an added benefit that if she kept up her training, she’d be able to possess one of her summons and fight alongside them to be even safer than she was hiding away behind them.
Maybe it would be worth considering filling her new Primary Skill Slot with a Skill that somehow augmented her summons. Or, how hard could it be to learn a lesser version of Spirit Blink to allow her to teleport to her summons, or even swap places with them? How annoying would it be to fight a summoner who kept teleporting around, and you ended up face-to-face with a murderous arcane construct whenever you thought you finally had them? Mia decided to grill Gabe about how viable that idea was after they got back home.
“Well, there are plenty more monsters to kill in these burrows,” Mia said, shaking her head to drag her mind back to the present. She glanced meaningfully towards one of the dark tunnels leading further underground. “Does anyone need some rest before we continue? Lina? You’ll be the most exhausted out of all of us at this rate.”
Mia would need to find a ward, barrier, or some other spell that could mimic the effect of Lina’s magic and muffle the sound of their footsteps. Maybe Gabe had something like that? No, he certainly did; the question was whether it was a spell she could learn as a measly Rank 1 Arcane Mage.
“I’m good for now. We can continue,” Lina said. “The fight was actually more relaxing than sneaking up on the cavern. I should be good for another few caverns before my mana starts scratching the bottom of the barrel, and I’ll speak up if my brain feels like it's dripping out of my ears.”
And that, Mia thought, was yet another weakness of the Elementalist Classes when compared to a proper Mage’s. If push came to shove, Mia could keep slinging spells for hours if she had a few good mana potions to replenish her reserves and stayed economical about her mana expenditure. If she wasn’t trying to get inventive or push herself, casting standard spells from her Spellbook would place just a minuscule drain on her mind. Meanwhile, active elemental manipulation was hard, straining work requiring constant focus on top of the greater average mana cost when compared to runic spell circles.
“Alright, just speak up like … at least five minutes before you’re about to run out,” Mia said. “We can always retreat for a bit, rest, drink some potions or come back another day.”
*****
They came upon a patrol of three goblins on their way down the serpentine network of tunnels, the small monsters chittering to each other and clearly distracted as they walked in the pitch-black darkness. They barely had a moment to pause in surprise when they heard a heavy footstep from up ahead, and only one of them lived long enough to squeak in surprise as Mia’s Black Knight bulldozed its way through them in two seconds flat with all the grace of an industrial blender.
It was a bit of a challenge for it to fight in the narrow tunnel with its two massive claymores, but then it just impaled two goblins with a single stab and used its spiky gauntleted fist to punch the third one’s face in. It had spikes for knuckles, so the goblin died before the impaled ones, which followed moments later when it tore the sword out sideways. And that was that.
They went through two larger chambers next, neither of which was quite as large as the first, and neither had the same number of greenskins inside. Luckily, both had fires, bonfires, or just torches in them, so no one’s fighting ability was impaired. Not that it would have mattered against the single orc and five goblins they found in both larger chambers.
They took a short rest, having heard no monsters near enough to hear them, and let Lina have a twenty-minute break to let her brain rest a bit.
“We must be at least ten to fifteen metres down by now, right?” Mia mused as they continued down a wider tunnel with rough, rounded steps carved into the floor, which dipped farther into the darkness ahead. The air was getting rather damp, so they moved carefully so as not to slip on the uneven, steep steps of the primitive staircase leading them into the bowels of the Earth. There were no guardrails to hold onto, and the light of the glow rods was just barely bright enough for Helene and Lina to see where they were stepping. “How much further down does this damned thing go?”
What they stepped into at the end of the staircase was a wide, cavernous space that abandoned the look of the previous volcanic tunnels. Instead, it looked like a spacious grotto with an underground river slowly meandering down its length, while the previously pitch-black rock gave way to scenery coloured in pale beige, all the way to light browns.
The air was damp, even more so than before due to the underground river of this grotto, and Mia couldn't help but stare in wonder at the many stalagmites dotting the floor like bushes and tree stumps, the stalactites and thinner, straw-like rock formations clinging to the ceiling or even the handful of columns linking the two like pillars dotted around the wide open space.
Unfortunately, she had to suppress her wonder and put sightseeing off for the future as she finally found the group of monsters she’d been sensing for a while. They were on the opposite side of the cavern, on the other side of the river and largely hidden by the dense ‘undergrowth’ of rock formations filling up the space between them.
One ogre, twelve orcs and nearly forty goblins were mulling about, most of the smaller creatures busy trying to clear the floor of stalagmites and flowstones with clubs and primitive pickaxes, while the stronger orcs were busy carving hollow rooms into the walls of the grotto, the sound of their pickaxes crashing into and shattering the rock filling the large cavern. Already, there were dozens of rooms and little makeshift walkways carved into the tall cave wall, likely to be turned into living space for orcs or ogres in the near future.
“Alright,” Mia mused in a low whisper, crouching behind a larger rock formation near the entrance to the stairway leading back up towards the surface. She would have worried about being noticed or the upcoming fight being overheard, but with the shattering of rocks and the clang of pickaxes on hard stone echoing through the cavernous space, she was more worried about someone farther down the tunnels noticing the lack of noise once they were done here. “They are pretty distracted, so this shouldn’t be too hard … but I’d like to scout ahead first, because all this noise is making it hard to hear where the next batch of monsters might be. We need a better spot to retreat to than this narrow staircase as well; it’d be an absolute pain to fight while retreating up these steps … actually, never mind. I could just drop a Phalanx at the entrance, and we could run.”
With its rank 1 enhancement, her toughest defensive conjuration spell started looking less like a simple wall made of arcane energy and more like actual castle walls. It became two metres high and six metres wide, dotted with murderholes and parapets on top. It would keep the greenskins from breaking through for a good long while if she placed it down properly in front of the tunnel entrance.
Hell, if they made good use of the murderholes, they might be able to triumph even if a force of greenskins three or four times the size of the one she was seeing came to reinforce this group. She just had to make use of one of the spell’s new modifications to turn it from a straight wall into a curved half-circle one. That way, everyone would have space to move around inside the defensive wall’s protective embrace.
Sparkle and Helene’s Sprite zipped off, splitting to go in opposite directions and disappearing down two of the six side tunnels Mia could see leading further into the tunnel network. Only three of them looked natural; cracks in the wall led to other open chambers filled with rock formations, or to tight tunnels one would need to crawl through. The rest bore the distinct marks of manmade tunnels.
“This place is ridiculous,” Lina murmured, free of noise-dampening duty for a change. The loud noise echoing in the cavern was more than enough to drown out their whispers and footsteps. “How was a regular five-person party supposed to clear this entire place?”
“This place looks pretty natural,” Mia mused. “Maybe the upper parts were part of the real Rift, and this down here is just a natural cavern system they’ve expanded into?”
“I never heard of a stalagmite cave like this being under Graz,” Helene whispered, her eyes running across the objectively beautiful scenery. “It would have been a tourist attraction for sure. Could it be new, just not from the Rift? The ‘system’ must have done some terraforming when it slapped a new continent onto Earth.”
That didn’t make sense. Miasma still lingered in every rock formation, clinging to the earth all around them. This must have been part of a Rift … but maybe not the same one as the one above? Or maybe this was a new portion of it, like how the floating island had been a bit different from the rest of the Raid’s interior?
“And five dungeons,” Gabe added in a barely audible whisper. “The planet grew roughly five to ten percent in width at the equator according to the reports I’ve read.”
“Wonderful, so we might have a few kilometres thick layer of terraformed earth under the surface that covers the entire globe?” Lina asked. “Probably full of cave systems like this, and filled with Rifts spewing out monsters? Isn’t it enough that we have to deal with that on the surface?”
“It is what it is,” Mia said, shrugging softly. She was all out of fucks to give on that front. The world was pretty much fucked, and this new possible discovery just meant it might be marginally more fucked than they had previously thought. Not much of a change, really. She perked up, feeling a buzz of affirmation from Sparkle before she felt the distance between them start to shrink rapidly. “Sparkle’s coming back. Looks like we’ll be able to get started in a bit.”
The sprite reappeared a few seconds later, zipping out of a different tunnel than the one he’d gone down to and came to a sudden stop in front of them.
“Mission accomplished!” He said, throwing up his hands above his head. Arcane mana streamed out of his palms and curled around, spreading out into a vague fog before gathering into a network of amorphous blobs and smaller lines weaving between them. Mia blinked slowly, watching as the whole thing stopped wavering, turned semi-translucent and cleared up. “You may praise me now!”
“Is that what I think it is?” Mia asked, her gaze lingering on the now hollow tube leading upwards from a larger hollow blob. If she squinted, she could see a stylised river cutting through the floor of the blob, the rounded steps on the narrow tunnel's floor and the three tubes leading away from the blob.
“If it looks like a superb, three-dimensional map of the cave system, then yes,” Sparkle said smugly. “There are some parts missing, but- Ah! There it is!”
Helene’s storm sprite zipped up to linger next to Sparkle, poking him with a tiny hand seemingly made of lightning frozen in time, and the holographic 3D map above Sparkle expanded to nearly twice its previous size.
“And the monsters,” Sparkle said, and a scattering of bright crimson dots popped up all at once over the map. “There you go!”
“Thanks, Sparkle, that’s awesome,” Mia said with a smile, leaning closer to take in the entirety of the likely illusory image. “Did you find anything nastier than an ogre that might have been the Guardian of this place before it collapsed?”
“Well, there is this cavern,” he said, pointing at the largest cavern chamber near the lowest parts of the map. By a rough estimation, it was about thrice as far down from their current position as they were from the surface. “It has this big fancy pyramid thing and a bunch of stone buildings. There is this big fat goblin sitting on a throne at the very top of it. Looked very Guardian-like.”
Considering Sparkle called every greenskin a goblin, that was probably an ogre, and a pyramid? Huh, well, these monsters were maybe a bit more advanced than they first appeared … or maybe they were just squatting in someone else’s subterranean town.
Mia shook her head, returning her focus to the blob representing the chamber they were in. Her gaze danced around, cataloguing the location of the next nearest groups of monsters while she tried to guess whether sound would travel to them if they just attacked the group they could see.
Lina might have been able to plop down a soundproofing field around the entire chamber if she really pushed herself, but Mia doubted the girl would have been of much use for the rest of the excursion if she did. The chamber was massive, and two of the openings leading to other chambers were yawning gaps that would be a struggle to fully cover with magic.
There was a smaller group patrolling a smaller cluster of chambers connected by a single winding tunnel, another group the size of the one Mia had eyes on in another large chamber filled with rock formations doing the same gruelling mining work, and three more groups the size of the first one they’d come across staying further down, seemingly guarding the circular spiralling tunnels leading down into the earth towards the next ‘level’ of the cave system.
Her eyes went up to the ‘level’ above them, the subset of tunnels and chambers they’d just come down from. No monsters there. Good. That meant they’d have more than enough time to get back to the surface without having to fear getting their path of retreat cut off. There were other tunnels leading back up, of course, there were, but they were winding paths and would take a lot of time for the monsters to traverse.
“Could you mark orcs and ogres in a different colour for me, please?” Mia asked, and Sparkle just huffed and did so, puffing himself up expectantly. Mia was too distracted by finalising the plan forming in her head to provide the praise the greedy little sprite was yearning for, but Helene easily stood in for her, lavishing both Mia’s and her own sprite with whispered praises. “Okay. I think I have a plan that could work.”
*******
Mia felt anxiety twist her stomach into a knot as she slowly crept closer to the greenskins on the other side of the river. At some points, the beige stone under her feet was so close to the other ‘bank’ that they would be able to just step over the river. They had to be careful, the stone was wet and slippery, and the river was deep.
Sparkle was her only currently active ‘summon’, the small sprite busy sneakily carrying one of the alchemical bombs filled with sleeping gas over the chamber. If all went well, he’d drop it behind the patrolling group of greenskins in those side chambers, cut off their escape and then kill them or chase them into this larger chamber. There were only a handful of monsters in that group, so Sparkle likely wouldn’t have much of a problem.
Her pseudo-spirits were the opposite of sneaky, so they would remain de-summoned until the battle broke out.
Mia moved slowly and carefully, following in Camie’s wake and making sure she wouldn’t slip. Getting noticed prematurely wouldn’t be all that horrible; they could take this group even then, but it would be tricky. So it was much more preferable to take a few orcs out in the initial ambush.
It was lucky that the greenskins were busy mining, because the loud noise practically deafened the goblins. Mia could see them grimacing in pain every time an especially loud crack of shattering stone echoed out. The hope was that the other mining group in the adjacent, connected chamber would be similarly mostly deafened by the noise of their efforts, so they would take a bit of time to realise what was going on over in this one. In case they weren’t, Helene’s sprite Bond was hovering above them with another alchemical sleeping bomb.
With their glow rods left behind, and following the light of the campfires burning all around the chamber, Mia’s group blended in well with the shadowy landscape of the dense rock formations.
Slowly and carefully, the group crept to the river, and with even greater care, they crossed to the other side. Mia was incredibly thankful for the sound-dampening barrier Lina had thrown up before they began passing over, because Helene slipped, her knee slamming into the wet rock before her legs disappeared into the icy cold water in a blink.
Camie’s hand was already on her wrist, keeping her from disappearing fully under the surface, but even she almost slipped, dragged into the water by Helene’s weight and momentum. Mia grabbed the vampire’s shirt in a panic, her other hand still locked around a rock column for stability, but all that would have achieved had Camie not been gripping a small stalagmite herself was to drag Mia off her feet as well.
With a small heave, the redhead pulled Helene out of the water and up to the slippery bank, only letting go of her likely bruised wrist once she was safely hugging a thicker stalagmite for safety.
“Are you okay?” Mia asked in a hushed, worried whisper, her eyes scanning her Mom’s face, then her legs for any sign of a nasty cut or something.
“Y-yes,” Helene said, a visible shiver running through her body. She was a bit pale, eyes still wide as dinner plates, but she hadn’t made any noise beyond an initial yelp when she’d slipped. “Sorry. Are we okay?”
Mia paused, listened, then gave a nod. “Lina’s barrier worked perfectly. Don’t worry. Need a potion? Did you get cut, bruised or something?”
“I’m fine, honey,” Helene whispered, taking a slow breath before giving Mia a soothing smile. “I hit my knee, but I don’t need a potion for that.”
“Okay,” Mia said after a moment, searching her mother’s face for any sign of deception. Then nodded again when she found nothing and saw Helene prop herself up into a crouch with nothing more than a small wince. “If you’re sure … then I think we need only a few more metres, then the ambush is a go. Can you keep the barrier up until the last moment, Lina, just to be safe?”
The blonde nodded, and they proceeded forward even more carefully, now only about five or so metres from the nearest goblins hammering away at standing stalagmites.
As agreed, Mia carefully crept up until she was shoulder to shoulder with Camie, from the spot she found, she had clear line of sight to two orcs and five goblins. It would do.
With a deep breath, she palmed her wand and prepared her spell. An Arcane Blast, or rather two in quick succession. That would be the signal. Okay. Three, two, one … GO.