Chapter 327 - The Guardian of the Ironclad Abyss IV

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Dear Diary,

Today I tried to eat a grasshopper, but it kicked me in the tongue and jumped out of my mouth. Lina laughed at me for ten whole minutes.

Lia

___

Claire haphazardly threw a handful of pins across a magical board as another party made its way to the end of a floor. The resulting positions were entirely random; the lyrkress had scattered the enchanted objects without so much as taking a moment to think. Even the ones launched out of bounds were readily ignored; they would correct themselves in time.

She hadn’t always been so uncaring. The first few groups to reach each floor had certainly been placed with careful intention. Weaker fighters had been assigned to obvious, straightforward paths, whereas the more powerful were placed near tougher foes and larger mobs. She had found some joy in the chore at first, but she had completely given up on it by the end of the third day. Since then, it had effectively been left to the luck of the draw.

If there was one thing she learned from the experience, it was that dungeon management was not her calling. She was so bored that not even her favourite pet was able to soothe her mind. They were flat out of things to discuss. Claire, Sylvia, and Arciel had spent half the last week exhausting every topic and question that happened to come to mind. There might have been more for them to talk about had they spent longer apart, but though Arciel had technically walked her own path, they all lived in the same city and kept up with regular correspondence.

The only breaks from the tedium involved returning to the surface during mealtime. And even then, not all of them went together. Their shifts and schedules were slightly offset to ensure that someone was always awake and watching, just in case the dungeon and its parties needed any extra attention.

That was not to say that their interference was particularly heavy-handed. They were only stepping in to save maids from certain death. The others were on their own, and there had already been a number of cases wherein a fighter had met an untimely end. Still, things were looking up overall. The casualty count was on the lower end, as was to be expected from a gathering of self-proclaimed elites. The overseers only really stepped in to replenish the parties’ supplies. They placed extra bags in their paths, containing items that they were lacking, so that they could at least avoid an end as embarrassing as death by starvation. In the first place, it was the organizers’ fault for failing to account for the differences in calorie intake and expenditure; each group was given the same standardized kit in spite of their differing needs.

Fortunately, the tedium would not last for all that much longer.

The frontrunners were approaching the final test.

___

Ace flicked the rotting guts off of his sword as he dispatched the last zombie in sight. The lizardman was alone. For the sixth and hopefully final time, the dungeon had separated him from his party members and left him all by himself.

The trick was getting old. The petty harassment remained consistent throughout the adventure, with separation as a gimmick around each and every turn. It was a clever trick that served its purpose well—the trial’s goal was to pick competent duelists over individuals that functioned best in parties—but that didn’t make it any less annoying.

Being by oneself was exhausting. The lizardman needed to be checking all directions at all times, and he couldn’t simply ask another to take his place while he rested off the resulting fatigue. Ace wanted nothing more than to scream his complaints at the top of his lungs, but he dismissed the idea on account of the wasted energy involved. His mental state was not yet poor enough that he absolutely needed to vent.

Like four of the five floors before it, the sixth was an ancient crypt filled with wild, winding corridors and decrepit rooms flooded with hordes of monsters. The style of its construction was similar enough for him to recognize it as the same dungeon, but the aesthetic had changed dramatically. The walls had gone from sandstone to solid steel, and the monsters had undergone a similar metamorphosis. They were still undead, with zombies and skeletons still making up the bulk of their number, but they were equipped with powerful artifacts that shared the dungeon’s metallic aesthetic. Many of them had weapons capable of firing lasers and launching explosives; they were far more powerful than the standard fare encountered on the first few floors. And yet, Ace had no trouble slicing right through them. His blade deflected their beams and cut through their breastplates without even the slightest hint of difficulty.

It was the expected result. They were fodder, spawned by the dungeon to only combat a deficiency in levels. With how quickly everything around him died, it only took the man about an hour to map the floor and make his way to the boss pit. The mental model in his head was fully fleshed out, and his tracking skills were all active, but curiously enough, he was unable to find his companions. It was a strange development that left him scratching the back of his head. There were no signs of them anywhere to be found.

After wandering around a little more and confirming his solitude, the lizardman returned to the boss pit and took the plunge below. The jump was transformed into an attack without a moments’ delay. He slammed himself into the giant, zombified frog that awaited him in the ring and cleaved through its towering, armour-clad frame. His blade flashed through the darkness, illuminated just brightly enough by the firelight to reveal its perfectly straight path.

And then, the frog fell over.

Dead from a single attack.

A heavy breath escaped through the killer’s gritted teeth. He nearly let down his guard, in the wake of his herculean feat, but he snapped to attention again as a metallic clank pierced through the darkness. Spinning towards it, he found a centaur dressed in a suit of full metal armour.

It was impossible to tell from looks alone if his foe was a skeleton or a zombie. The only gap in the creature’s helmet was too thin to see through, and its metal skirt hung low enough that only its hooves remained visible. And to his annoyance, they were intact, providing no hints as to the optimal approach.

Still, the lizardman was confident. Until the distance between them was closed.

There was barely any time for him to react. He only threw up his sword because his gut had screamed that there was danger inbound. One moment, the horse was a full ten meters away, and the next, it was driving its spear straight towards his heart.

The lizardman stumbled, but he dug his rear toe into the dirt and pushed back against his assailant. Even then, he barely won the contest of strength. The horse’s power was just as impressive as its mind-bending speed.

It was fortunate then that its technique was lacking. A twirl of the blade was all he needed to knock the monster’s weapon aside and drive his sword towards its chest. After glancing again at his opponent’s arms and confirming his blade’s trajectory, he activated its special ability and bolstered its power threefold. The effect had a cooldown; he could only use it once every five seconds, but he was confident that his strike was true.

A result determined in folly. Because he had never fought a centaur before.

The undead’s body suddenly spun around. The upper half that he had set as his target swerved out of his blade’s path as a set of plated hooves moved to take its place. The armoured feet slipped right under his sword and smashed him in the chest.

He leapt backwards in time to mitigate the force of the impact, but it still blew the wind right out of his lungs. His ribs managed to escape unbroken, but he had to pound a fist against them to get them to take air in again. Worse yet, his foe did not sit idly while he corrected his lack of breath. The horse leapt into the air and catapulted itself towards him like a missile. It was too heavy to block and too quick to dodge. He had no choice but to take the attack.

Swinging his sword, he delivered a counterattack that landed in time with the enemy's lightning-fast strike. With its special effect on cooldown, his blade was not quite powerful enough to cut cleanly through the armour, but he managed to tear a hole in the metal regardless. It was a jagged, misshapen wreck of a hole, and one that came with not a drop of blood.

The question that he had posed at the start of the encounter had finally been answered. His foe was a skeleton, a centaurian skeleton that could match his raw strength even with a complete and utter lack of muscle. A shiver ran through the lizardman's spine, but he shook off his fear and replaced his usual blade with the bludgeoning tool he kept on his back. Technically, it was still a sword—all of his mastery skills applied—but it was not meant for cutting. The twenty-pound blade had no edge. Both its sides were dull and flat precisely so it could be used for smashing.

In hindsight, he realized that he should have drawn the weapon to begin with. The so-called horse-killer was best used against cavalry, and it was precisely that which a centaur was.

___

Chloe panted heavily as she watched a skeletal centaur collapse two feet from her face. It was the seventeenth that had fallen that night, as well as the seventeenth that had decided to target her just moments before its demise. Of course, she was not responsible for its fall. Her ascension hadn’t done much for her ability to combat the undead. Against them, it was summed up as a small bonus to her mobility. And even that was rather suspect.

The tiny, membranous wings that grew from her waist were too weak to allow for flight, but like her brand new, heart-shaped tail, they aided in balancing her body even when her feet were off the ground.

New parts aside, her ascension had done very little to change her features. Her tongue was a little longer, her canines had sharpened, her hair had turned blonde, and her eyes had gone from black to red. That was all. Those were the only changes anywhere to be seen. In the eyes of another race, they were nigh unnoticeable, but for a human, they were on the more drastic end. The fangs alone sufficed to inspire jealousy amongst her peers, and Chloe herself was fairly satisfied with the transformation. She didn't unlock the precise race she hoped, but she has more or less set the groundwork for everything to fall into place well before her next ascension. In the meantime, she would have to decide exactly what it was she wanted.

“You okay?” asked the dwarf, as he batted the dead skeleton away. The bearded man was possessing a heavily armoured zombie—the fifth floor’s boss. He had gone through a number of bodies over the course of the past few days, but he hadn't switched since he took on the dead marlin’s form. It was simply a matter of convenience. The former floor boss came with the ability to effortlessly swim through the air. Of course, being a zombie, the corpse reeked, but one of the dwarf’s skills kept the scent from spreading.

“Yeah. I’m fine, thanks,” said Chloe. She took a breath as she lowered her dagger. Though no stranger to aggression—she was at a much higher level than the average citizen—she still wasn't accustomed to the skeletons’ last act. The sheer ferocity of the charge was what got her. It was far beyond anything else she had personally experienced.

“Can we get a quick snack in before the next battle?” asked Sophia. There was always a small break between one skeleton's death and the next’s arrival. That much, they knew for certain. They had been fighting them nonstop since they took out the frog earlier in the day.

They were in the very same arena in which said frog had fallen. Its massive corpse had loomed over them for a while, but it vanished when the third skeleton spawned. Similar fates had befallen the other skeletons’ corpses; each vanished in the wake of a third replacement. While the type of monster had more or less stayed the same, the encounters themselves were widely varied. Every subsequent fight was more difficult than the last; the centaurian skeletons gained between ten and twenty levels and changed their styles each time, and to the party’s dismay, there was no clear end in sight.

At first, they had suspected that there was some condition to their release. They had tried besting the monsters in duels, killing them in different ways, and even stalling them out, but to no avail. The stairwell to the next floor refused to appear.

They had little choice but to sit around and wait for the problem to resolve itself. Hence the need to snack between rounds. It was more of a way to relieve their stress than it was a replenishment of their bodies’ needs, but at the rate that things were going, even that would soon add to the pits of their despair. They were slowly running out of water. Of the twenty-four skins that they had been supplied, only seven were yet undrained. And that was with a beard that didn’t drink among their number. Some of the other parties, she suspected, were having it even worse.

Whatever the case, they continued munching on their dry bread as one of the centaurs’ bodies crumbled. Its armour and bone were both eaten away, slowly, slowly turned to dust alongside the arrows anchored within its skull.

A shadowy figure appeared in the arena once all traces were gone. Like the previous seventeen, it was a centaur, albeit one with a longer silhouette. Its tail was far fleshier and measured almost twice the length of its body. There were several gaps in its armour that revealed its skeletal form, but Chloe was not so easily deceived.

“Claire? Is that you?” she asked, with a blink.

Though one might have reasonably thought the question to be nonsense, given the exposed bone, Chloe was rather confident in her assumption. Her nose had confirmed the presence of fresh blood, and the silhouette itself was too distinct and familiar to be readily overlooked.

Her recognition, however, earned her little more than the supposed undead’s attention. It rushed her down with a blade raised over her head. It was a charge that only spanned a blink. The only reason the shieldlance missed its mark was because Sophia had been sitting right beside her.

Shooting to her feet, the everglade landshark got between them just in time to parry the weapon with the back of her fist. It was a perfectly executed block. She directed the weapon’s edge away by touching the side of its blade. And yet, her hand was damaged.

A block of ice spread from the point of contact and encased her arm in a layer of cold.

And with that, Chloe was certain.

Claire had decided to administer their final test in person.