Menseio Station, orbiting Veria
Menseio Station
11:02 Ship Time
September 18, 2019

And that brings us to today.

It was late when our grandparents left, so after a good night’s sleep, my friends and I headed down to Veria to hit up some dungeons, but not before handing out skill gems and some upgrades. Sonja got the ring that would allow her to store and cast air spells instantly, while Mason got the [Stoneskin Band]. I didn’t have any need for it since I had the [Metal Skin] perk.

With their new skill gems significantly increasing their strength, my friends and I started out with a dungeon suited to those that were at least level two hundred, but found that it was way too easy. I think we drove Zaszi and the Watchdogs nuts in how much we hopped around trying to find something that was at least somewhat challenging. It was then that we settled on a rank XXXXV dungeon, with a total of 262 floors.

It proved to be the most disgusting dungeon we had been in, by far, and we were also extremely unlucky when it came to equipment and skill gems. It was impossible to tell the exact number unless you counted every single kill, but we estimated that we had killed over fifteen hundred monsters, including eleven bosses, while only seeing a single epic item, which was a chest piece. Not that any of us could use it since it required someone being at least level 400 before they could use it. Our luck definitely could have been worse though. Bosses were said to drop items of epic quality every twenty kills or so, so we still had a little ways to go before we hit that mark.

We were planning on heading down right away for our second day of delving in a row, but Oya and Hayir wanted to meet with my friends again, so that was why I was once again reading what was on the tablet my father left me. I had already watched the message from my mother twice, and now I was going back through the very long and very detailed plan for the second time.

It wasn’t all text, either. There were a lot of images, architectural plans and even schematics for all sorts of devices, many of which I couldn’t make heads or tails of. Abi could, however, but she stated that many of them were incomplete; missing the key components that would make them work. She could tell me what they were, but not how to complete them. Well, at least not all of them.

I had once again lost track of time when the doors opposite of where I was sitting opened, and my friends filed out. I could see Oya and Hayir behind them, but Oya was looking down at the top of her desk, while Hayir was talking to someone else. He waved, but pointed to his ear as the doors swung closed.

“So?”

“They just wanted to go over their initial designs so we could see how they could look and where weapons and things would be placed,” Ben replied. “It was interesting seeing some of the other designs, and I think that prompted all of us to make some changes. They work fast and said that they’ll probably see us one more time before we go home.”

“Cool. Were your designs how you pictured them?” I asked as I led the way back to the berth Abi was in.

“Pretty much. There were a few small things that she got wrong, but it was my fault for not explaining it as well as I could have. She said she’ll have them fixed in the next iteration, and I’m excited how it’ll look.”

“What about you, Mace?”

“Well, they definitely set me straight about the ship that I was designing for my mom, so we went back to the drawing board, going with a significantly smaller 90 meter long yacht. She’s going to change the size of my ship since it freed up more room than I would’ve thought. I’ll probably give the go ahead on the next version she comes up with.”

“And you two?” I asked the twins.

“We decided to make it easier on them and ourselves, so we went with a single design that uses up a third of the total allotment. That way they can just build three of the same design.” Anja answered for the two of them.

"You made sure to take any extra shuttles into account, right?"

"Yup," Sonja nodded. "It didn't reduce the volume of the design all that much to add two more shuttles so each ship has two, so that's what we went with."

"Good," I replied before stepping into the first of three portals that would get us back to where we needed to be.

---

It only took us a few minutes to get back to our rooms and get changed, and the Watchdogs were ready to go as soon as we arrived on the hangar. Ben gave the coordinates to the level XXXXX dungeon we would be tackling today, and as soon as Zaszi approved it, we lifted up off the deck. Our target was the Emyk dungeon, located within a city of the same name. Not that we had really had any issues with it so far, but the dungeon was still at 86% in its current cycle, so it would remain open for a few days, at least.

Our Grasshopper landed while the other two remained cloaked in the air, but we still needed to wait for the Watchdogs onboard to spread out and secure the area. With how much they had done it the day before, it was no surprise that we got the go ahead within three minutes. Zaszi walked us to the door, and then the five of us went through our scan before we descended down into the dungeon.

---

It was easy to see that higher level dungeons were a lot different from their lower level counterparts. For one thing, you didn’t have a small chamber followed by a tunnel or passageway to another small chamber. Instead, many floors seemed to be like cities on their own or they were one big room that felt bigger because of the obstacles and traps that were always in your way.

This one was the former, and it was easily the coolest floor we had seen so far. The city was made to look like what I imagined a dvergr city would look like, though one that was heavily in disrepair. There were destroyed houses or shops everywhere, and fires burning all over the place as figures huddled around them. Aside from the figures around the fire, the streets were absolutely filled with monsters, and not of the living variety. There were skeletons of all kinds, though I picked out a few zombies and draugr interspersed in the massive crowd.

“I should mention that this is a Dark-themed dungeon,” Ben said as I was shifting into my dragonkin form. “There will probably be a lot of hostile spells, including curses, so make sure you keep your shields up as much as you can to negate the damage.”

[And make sure to let me know if you do get cursed, since I can remove them now,] I said, referring to the fact that I had a new skill that was self-explanatory: the Light spell [Cleanse].

Curses were different from other hostile spells that dealt damage over time, simply because they don’t fall off like those other spells do. In high level dungeons, having at least one team member with the skill was essential. That was because you would otherwise be bouncing between the floor you were on and the first floor of the Adventurer’s Guild building, since leaving a dungeon removes any hostile effects.

Just before we were ready, Ben stored a [Meteor Shower] within his [Mageband], and then began casting [Summon Fire Elemental]. The moment the fire elemental had appeared in front of him, he sent it forward into the sea of undead. At the same time, Mason ran forward until he was within range of the closest group of figures that had been hidden around a fire, and proceeded to use his trusty opener.

The moment he arrived, body parts and blood of seven or eight separate monsters flew all over the place, though it took him a little bit longer to deal with them all fully. It was hard to tell because of how dark the room was and the fact that they were all wearing cloaks, but I saw at least three staves among the weapons they were holding.

It was time to pay attention to what was in front of me, however, as the fire elemental had made it several meters into the mass of metal and bone, burning those skeletons that mindlessly walked towards their enemy in an attempt to kill it. The zombies and draugr were a lot smarter in comparison, and actively avoided the large ball of fire, and they also moved just as well as a person would.

The differences between the zombies in front of us and ones in fiction were that these ones could actually regenerate any damage that wasn’t to their head, and they could think. They didn’t just mindlessly walk towards what their brain told them was food. They knew it was food, but they also knew that that food could easily kill them. They could also use weapons, and there were many examples of that. Most had axes or swords, but there were more than a few that had bows or even guns.

Draugr were another thing entirely. They were like super skeletons in that they were primarily made of bone, but they weren’t just a re-animated corpse. They were built. Made as strong as they could be. Perfected. If they were present, it also meant that there was a lich nearby. By far the easiest way to deal with draugr was to kill the lich that had built and animated them, but that was more easily said than done.

More often than not, a lich would be in command of an entire army, and they were crafty. They didn’t look much different than a regular skeleton, so it would be very easy to hide among them. The only way to really tell them apart is that liches will have eyes that glow light blue, while regular skeletons have eyes that glow purple.

As Ben activated his Aura of Flame now that he could maintain it for a longer amount of time, he and the twins opened up on the zombies with the railguns they carried. We still couldn’t use any energy-based weapons, but as soon as we had surpassed level 150, we were able to surpass our outdated weapons and use something with a little more power. They still weren’t the top of the line railguns that we would be able to use later on, but they would get the job done.

Breathing in, I projected a jet of flame and swept it across the wall of skeletons that ambled towards us. I found that it wasn’t hot enough to turn bone to ash, especially with how brief it was, but it was very effective against the zombies, and it lit anything that was flammable on fire. The skeletons weren’t very dangerous outside of the few that carried guns, so I removed the two gauss pistols from my storage and started focusing on zombies that were almost like beacons, while also taking out any draugr I could see with a shot to the chest.

By the time that we had made it fifty meters down the main road, I wouldn’t have been surprised if we had killed over a thousand combined skeletons, zombies and draugr. That’s how many there were, and they just kept coming without any sign of slowing. It would have been an amazing place to level up and increase the damage of [Siphoning Strike], [Siphoning Shot] and [Siphoning Bolt], if not for the fact that these skeletons granted significantly less experience. For example, if each draugr granted us 100 experience, then each skeleton was only giving us 10.

That was because they were minions in a hivemind, likely being controlled by a lich lord that was at the end. Since it was actively controlling them and they weren’t autonomous like the zombies and draugr were, the system treated them differently than other monsters. So not only did they give very little experience, but they didn’t have a chance to drop any loot.

After realizing that moving one hundred meters down the street had taken us over ten minutes, I decided to skip to the end of the floor to speed things up a bit. As soon as the lich lord was dead, it was as if all the skeletons in the room had their strings cut, causing them all to fall down into a heap of bones. It was also somewhat comical to see more than one of the lesser lich freeze in place as its camouflage was taken away.

Also, unlike the lich lords and skeletons, when a lich was killed, one got the experience for all the draugr that it had animated, since they would die at the same time. Draugr also had the same chance to drop loot as a lich does, so it was like killing two birds with one stone whenever a lich died.

Unfortunately, the sheer amount of bones littering the entire floor made it very difficult to spot anything smaller than a mana crystal, so we decided to just push onwards and see what was in store

---

The second and third floor were similar, but the second floor had a lot fewer skeletons than the first floor did, and the third floor had a lot fewer skeletons than the second floor did. By the time we got down to the fourth floor, the skeletons were almost entirely gone, which left only zombies and draugr, along with the occasional ghoul.

If a zombie was just a reanimated corpse, then a ghoul was a reanimated corpse on drugs. Not the good kind of drugs, either. They were significantly faster and were capable of running on walls and ceilings while on all fours. The most common strategy was for them to run on the wall or ceiling and then jump down at you, but there were so few and they were easily noticeable, which led to them being very easy to deal with. For now, at least. Even as strong as the five of us were now, we would need to make sure to take our time when dealing with them in greater numbers.

The fact that we were dealing with less skeletons and more zombies and draugr meant that were were almost going up against an actual army. They still did whatever they wanted to, basically, but more and more of them had firearms which made things significantly harder. Ben was the only one that was even remotely close to me in terms of mana and mana regen so we were able to weather the storm, but Mason and the twins had to duck between cover as they waited for mana.

I hadn’t gone ahead and learned all of the skill gems I had recently acquired, simply because I wouldn’t be able to keep track of them all. In fact, I had only used a dozen and a half so far. Most of them were defensive perks that were mostly forgotten about once they were learned, but I also had some offensive tools as well, one of those being [Chaos Storm].

[Chaos Storm] was extremely powerful against the undead for two reasons; it does a fair amount of damage, and it also drains mana every time it deals damage. Since zombies and draugr are given ‘life’ with mana and need mana to continue functioning, the moment their small mana pools hit zero, they collapse. Normally this doesn’t happen because they have no skills or spells that rely on mana to speak of, but it was a lot of fun seeing a big group of them fall lifelessly to the floor.

Unfortunately it wasn’t a permanent solution since ambient mana permeates every floor of a dungeon, but it did buy time. Quite a bit of time, in fact… like enough time for Ben to cast a [Meteor Shower] or Sonja to cast a [Lightning Storm]. If, for whatever reason, neither of them could do that, then all it took was a shot to the head for zombies or a well-placed chest shot for draugr and they weren’t getting up again.

I had initially thought it odd that draugr didn’t go down when we shot them in the head, but it made sense. If you were designing a creature made out of not much more than bone, then why keep such a vulnerable weakspot? It wasn’t as if they had brains that needed protecting since everything they knew was literally written onto their bones, and it was a simple affair to move the small matrix of dark mana from their head to their chest where it couldn’t be dissipated as easily. Slap on a breastplate, and a draugr is many multitudes stronger than a regular old skeleton.

It was slow going, but it was easily the most amount of experience we had received in such a short time. So much so that all of us were gaining another level every five minutes or so, thanks to the massive level discrepancy. By the time we had reached the first boss of the dungeon on the fifth floor, we had been in the dungeon for a little over ninety minutes, but we had gained twenty-two levels.

None of us had bothered to spend our attribute points since we had leveled so much, but we decided to take a moment before entering the boss room to spend them.

“You know, I’ve been thinking…” Mason said.

“Try not to hurt yourself, big guy,” Anja replied, but Mason just ignored her.

“Aren’t liches supposed to have phalatories or something where their souls are stored? Like as long as their phalatory isn’t destroyed then they can keep coming back to life. Why are these ones staying dead?”

“Phylactery, you mean,” Ben said. “We’ve been fighting lesser liches up to this point, which are only really capable of animating or re-animating the dead. They aren’t strong enough to create a phylactery or cast any other spells, which is why we see them hiding. I’m sure that we’ll see the liches you’re thinking of as the difficulty ramps up.”

Ben’s words seemed oddly prophetic, since the first thing we saw when the boss room door closed behind us was an urn-like object sitting on a stand. While there were coffins or iron maidens up against the walls behind the item that we assumed to be a phylactery, there were no monsters in the room whatsoever. After giving Ben time to store another [Meteor Shower] and summon another elemental, we stepped further into the room.

The first thing that happened was that the urn in the middle of the room was encompassed by a light blue barrier that disappeared from view but was clearly still there. Next, six doors in the back of the room that we didn’t even know were there opened up and draugr marched out of them. When the marching stopped, there were six groups of forty draugr, though these were different from the ones we had seen just a few minutes earlier.

There were two different types, with each group being made up by thirty of the first type and ten of the second type. The first type were dressed head to toe in armor, and carried tower shields in one hand and long spears in the other, while the second type was dressed in lighter armor and carried guns. Somewhat odd was the fact that the guns they were using were old even on Earth, and were likely positively ancient for any of the space faring species in this part of the galaxy. That was the lever action rifle.

They weren’t pulse rifles designed to look like a lever action rifle, either, they were legitimate bullet-firing weapons. A few seconds after they all stopped moving, the group of forty draugr to our far left started moving, while the remaining five groups remained where they were. All five of us had [Precognition] at this point, so before the front thirty draugr could even kneel down, the five of us were activating Mana Shield and taking aim.

It turned out to be for naught, as the entire group of draugr was suddenly bombarded with meteor after meteor. It wasn’t quite enough to kill all of them because the meteors fell in random locations within a certain radius, but the majority of them were dead. Those that weren’t were easily picked off by Sonja, but it was clear that Ben may have been a little too hasty. The moment the last draugr fell, the next two groups of draugr advanced, this time from the far right.

We turned in that direction while making sure Sonja had clean sightlines so she could pick off the ones with rifles, while Ben sent his fire elemental forward. Just like before, the undead tried to kill the fire elemental by firing at it and thrusting their spears, but they hit nothing but superheated air. We left the elemental to deal with them since it only had a minute or two remaining, and moved forward to deal with the adjacent group instead.

Knowing that we weren’t going to be able to do much in close with the forward draugr having shields that could cover them from their toes up to the middle of their chest, we decided to take them out of the equation as much as we could. Mason and I blinked forward simultaneously, though I was in front of him by a fair distance. Lowering my shoulder, I used the heavy bulk of my dragonkin form and pushed right through the formation. Some went right over me as I charged through, but even more were pushed to the side.

Almost immediately afterward, Mason blinked forward once again and slapped his hand on the stone floor while activating [Seismic Shove], sending every draugr it hit tumbling through the air. He cast [Earthquake] to finish it off, and then Mason, Anja and I stood there with our guns in hand, shooting them in the chest before they could get back up.

For Anja and I that was two pairs of the same gauss pistols, but Mason being Mason, went with something a little more powerful; the railgun equivalent of a rotary gun. Rather than have the barrels spin around, each barrel fired sequentially to reduce the heat and overall strain. It couldn’t fire nearly as fast as something like a minigun could, but it still had a very high rate of fire and the projectiles it fired were a lot more powerful.

Just like when we had dealt with the first wave, when the second wave was finished off, the third wave advanced. And just like the second wave, the third wave was also bigger, totaling one hundred twenty total draugr. We were down two of our strongest skills for a little while longer, but we had a few more tools at our disposal.

Even while their Mana Shields were being peppered with bullet after bullet, Mason and the twins stood there as they summoned their respective elementals. After ten seconds there was an earth elemental, air elemental and water elemental standing in front of our group, and they were immediately sent forward.

As if knowing they wouldn’t be able to do anything to the air elemental or the water elemental, the draugr turned their attention to the earth elemental. It was a little bit bigger than it was when Mason had first acquired the skill, which also meant that it was quite a bit more durable. Where before there probably would have been head-sized chunks of rock breaking from all the rifle fire, now there were only pebbles.

Raising its arms high over its head, it brought them down with a resounding smash, sending a large portion of the shieldbearers flying, if it didn’t crush them outright. Taking advantage of the sprawling draugr, my friends and I picked off the ones that were vulnerable, even while the twins’ elementals made their move.

For the water elemental that was simply a torrent of rushing water than knocked down many of the draugr, and for the air elemental that was conjuring bolt after bolt of lightning. Each time a bolt hit a draugr, especially one that was standing in water, its armor would melt slightly and its bones would shatter. If a bolt wasn’t enough to take care of it, then a quick pummeling by the earth elemental certainly would.

The third group was almost the easiest group yet, and the three elementals easily could have dealt with it all on their own. The three of them had been directing them mentally, but we could have just stood there and watched them work. Unfortunately, this time the last draugr fell, a wave of energy pulsed from the phylactery to cover the entire room, and it had a unique effect.

As well as blowing the earth elemental up into chunks of rock that rained down, the other two elementals were destroyed as well. The air elemental simply dissipated, while the water elemental lost its form and soaked the floor. Not only that, but every single one of us had our mana pool completely drained, not that it mattered too much.

Moments later, the top of the phylactery popped off and it was almost like a djinn exiting its lamp. Smoke poured out, as did no shortage of bones, jewelry and cloth, and soon there was a lich floating in front of us. The moment its eyes glowed blue, it turned its head and raised its staff sending dark bolts of energy towards us. My friends took cover to try to avoid the hits, while I just remained where I was standing to see how much mana it would take to absorb the hit.

To my surprise, over about an eighth of my mana pool was wiped away in a second thanks to that hit. Relaying it to them, it became vitally clear that all of them, except for perhaps Ben, needed to avoid that spell. Thankfully it was somewhat slow moving and [Precognition] would help a bit, but that wasn’t the only spell in the boss’s repertoire.

Even while the dark bolts were flying towards us, the boss was channeling another spell. This time it wasn’t as flashy, but instead another wave like the first one that had wiped away our mana swept throughout the room, but this time it did something differently. I felt my power being sapped away and transferred through a boss, so I cast [Cleanse] on myself which certainly got the boss’s attention.

While I waited for the cooldown to expire so I could cast it again, I ordered Mason, and the twins to start attacking it, even while a beam of black energy shot between the boss and myself. It didn’t have nearly the same power that the bolt of energy did, but it was still doing damage faster than my mana could regenerate. Using [Blink] to appear roughly ninety degrees to the bosses left, I cast [Cleanse] again, this time on Ben so he would be at full strength.

I realized that the boss’s shield was still up from when it formed when it was in its phylactery, and my friends were doing their best to bring it down. After cleansing Sonja, I turned to the boss while grabbing my sword and activating it so I would be granted the bonus from [Spellblade]. Immediately casting [Arcane Familiar], I followed it up with [Curse of Pain], [Temporal Chains], and [Disintegration Beam].

The first and the last were two skills that Abi had recommended for me over a week beforehand, so I took the opportunity to learn both of them the day before. [Arcane Familiar] had the primary effect of increasing all my arcane damage and the duration of arcane spell effects by 10%. It also sent out small bolts of arcane energy at whatever I cast a spell at, which was a nice bonus as well.

[Disintegration Beam] is essentially the arcane school’s nuke, and is a channeled beam that gets stronger and stronger as time goes on. At the same time, the mana cost increases at a rate equal to the damage increase, and it’s rather hard to control. That’s where [Temporal Chains] comes in. When cast on a target, it slows not just their movement speed, but also the speed at which they attack and cast spells.

Even being slowed by roughly 80%, the boss was able to move out of the way after three seconds or so, putting a pillar between myself and it, forcing me to cancel the channel and starting the cooldown. Still, those three seconds were just about enough to drop his shield, as it dropped within ten more seconds as Ben casted [Chaos Bolt] over and over, and I casted [Chaos Storm].

The moment it's shield collapsed, the cloth, jewels and bones that made up the boss were sucked back into the phylactery, and the shield formed around it once more. At the same time, another pulse of energy traveled through the room and the draugr began getting back up. Not only that, but two of the doors that had opened to let the dragr in, this time revealing something entirely new.

“Aw, fuck!” Ben yelled.