By the time Shrek and I woke up, Juniper was feeling much better about the whole Earl fiasco. She had been communing with the spirits who lingered on the level we had just completed. Listening to their stories, about the horrors inflicted upon them by the foreman even before he became a lich, she got a much clearer view of how truly awful the man had been. She was still a bit shaken by the memory of watching his life end in such a torturous way, but the fact that he put others through the same torture in life made her feel somewhat less conflicted about it, at least.
After a quick breakfast, we decided to open our loot boxes. Shrek scored a pair of Copperplate Bracers – they didn’t add much in terms of protection, but they came with a damage buff to thrown objects. Juniper received a new ability called The Foreman’s Ledger. I was a bit miffed that The System saddled her with an ability that would continuously remind her of the scene from last night, but I had to admit that what the ability actually did was probably worth it. Once per day, Juniper would be able to call upon undead minions to fight for her.
Then, it was my turn. My legendary loot box contained exactly one item: a crafting kit of legendary rarity. It was similar to my Infiltration Kit in that it contained myriad tools that would aid in my crafting projects, but that’s where the similarities ended. The Infiltration Kit was basically just a leather tool roll filled with various lockpicks and whatnot. From my understanding, the tool base within would grow over time as the kit leveled up. The Crafting Kit, however, was much more. It was like an entire mobile workshop sitting right in my inventory available on command whenever I needed it. It had a crafting table, mineral vials, several types of metallic powders and compounds I’d never heard of before. It seemed like something I should be excited for, given my relatively newfound Crafting ability and how useful that had been, but I had a lot on my table already between the adventuring, my plans with the Eidolon, and being a surprise newlywed. I was a bit underwhelmed…but maybe it would grow on me.
I also had a rare loot box from the achievement I got for accidentally letting a “forget about it” slip out. It seemed like a lifetime ago, already. I tapped to open the crate and immediately regretted the decision. It was basically a lifetime supply of Piggle Wiggle brand Draught of Unrivaled Frenzy – the berserker potion that The System had given me so that I’d survive that first night of passion with Jasmine.
“Sounds strong. What’s it do?” Juniper asked after I trailed off while reading the name of the potion.
“What?” I asked, “Oh. Uh…it’s a berserker potion. Enhances strength and…stamina…anyway, we should probably head out. We’re burning daylight.”
“Maybe you should try one on the next floor,” she suggested. “You have an awful lot of it there.”
“NO! Uh, ahem. I mean, no, I don’t think that’s a good idea. I should probably focus on maintaining the difficulty so I level up efficiently…or something?” I shot a glance at Shrek and he was glaring at me with undisguised disgust. I cleared my throat again. “SO. Time to go. C’mon, Stoat!”
The stoat squeaked at me from inside my front pocket and looked up at me with the same look Shrek had given me. They didn’t agree on much, but they seemed united on this much: from now on, I should open my loot drops in private.
This new section of the dungeon was vastly different from the last in both form and function. It was a grand hallway with vaulted ceilings, rather than the claustrophobic tunnels of the mines. The walls were lined with bronze statues that appeared to be stylized homages to the dwarves’ more heroic ancestors. Their design reminded me a bit of the aliens from that movie with Bruce Willis and Chris Tucker – not the dog-eared ones, but the hulking, benevolent behemoths with the ancient bronze armor.
We walked along the corridor cautiously, though my Environmental Mapping was coming up empty. There were no traps, no resources, no enemies…just one long stretch of deathly quiet, if impressively ornate, hallway. Of course, we had no way of knowing at the time that the silence itself was the trap. Once we had walked the first quarter length of the hallway, the boss room icon appeared over an attached room where the corridor ended. It was the only mark on an otherwise blank map in my UI.
“It can’t be this easy, can it? It’s just one long, empty hallway that leads to the next boss room,” I said. Something creaked, nearby. The sound of metal groaning echoed throughout the hallway and my once-empty mapping ability suddenly had two big, red enemy indicators on either side of us. The statues nearest us seemed to be powering up.
“I told you to stop saying things like that,” Juniper hissed as the statues stepped out of their respective wall enclaves and clanked into the hallway, flanking us. I used Threat Assessment immediately and saw that they were level 20 Dwarven Automatons. The ability card said that they were powered by spirit fragments which laid dormant for centuries, guarding the Ancestral Halls. Shrek wasted no time going on the offensive. He slammed his axe into one of the automatons with the same force he’d used on Earl the night prior, but instead of the machine being rocketed away like the lich, there was just a deafening KLANG that echoed through the Hall.
“Oh, fuck me,” I murmured. Ten more enemies appeared in Environmental Mapping. Shrek had just awakened every single automaton in the Hall. To make matters worse, he’d barely left a dent in the contraption’s armor. I shot a few rounds into the one on my side of the hallway and while the bullets did penetrate, they made a minimal difference in the automaton’s HP. I slashed at it with the Blade of Seredh and even the conviction damage was barely moving the needle.
“Guys,” I called out nervously, “we uh…might have a small issue arising, here.”
“You don’t say?” Shrek said, grunting as he hoisted one of the automatons off its feet, his new bracers glowing brightly. My eyes widened and both Juniper and I leapt to the side as he hurled the great machine at its counterpart on the opposite wall. The enemy he’d tossed crashed into the one I’d shot with a dinful clatter, and I watched as both of them retained about half their health.
“First of all…a heads up would be nice. Second, how the hell did you pick that thing up?? Third, the issue isn’t these two necessarily, though they’re bad enough. It’s that you woke up ten more of them with that first attack that are firing up and about to step off their pedestals.”
The three of us turned to look down the length of the hall and yep – they were stepping into the hallway, one at a time. Fighting two of the dwarven security bots was bad enough, now we had a full dozen to contend with. I quickly ran through my options with increasing desperation. I was about to suggest we use one of my prayer beads, when Juniper inexplicably began walking down the hallway toward the incoming automaton horde. Shrek and I looked at one another in horror, then shouted our protests. We implored her to stop, come back, regroup. She did none of those things.
“You two deal with those,” she answered back. “I’ll handle these ones. Or at least buy some time.”
I would have loved to argue more about it, but the two nearest automatons had regained their footing and were slowly clanking their way toward us. I decided that I was going to have to trust that Juniper knew what she was doing and just focus on the two injured constructs at hand. I tried using Environmental Mapping again, this time trying to apply the Advanced Schematics filter to find potential vulnerabilities.
“Keep them off me for a moment,” I told Shrek, “I need a minute or two, here.”
“I’m not your meat shield,” he growled. But then, bolted forward to fend off the incoming robots. I zoomed my vision in on the mechanics of the automatons, looking for structural weaknesses. There were none. Dwarven engineering lived up to its reputation. These things were built with every conceivable weak point accounted for and addressed. The joints were all reinforced with extra armor and support. The heads were mostly decorative. But then, I remembered something – the spirit fragments. I traced the lines of energy flowing throughout the machines to a single point in the chest. There it was: the fragment glowed like a beacon once I had thought to look for them. Shrek bounced back to my side looking a bit worse for wear.
“Why are your eyes on fire? Did you find something?” he demanded.
“Yeah, I found their power source, it’s – wait, my goddamn eyes are on fire?!”
Shrek slapped me. It didn’t break anything this time and I wasn’t flung through the air, so he was holding back considerably. I snapped out of Environmental Mapping and gaped at him, holding the cheek where he’d struck me.
“There,” he said. “I put it out. Now tell me what we need to do.”
Before I could, however, a thousand groaning voices filled the hallway like an unholy choir. Shrek and I looked back toward Juniper for a moment in unison. She had used the Foreman’s Ledger ability and summoned her own little zombie apocalypse. Her feet lifted off the floor, dangling a foot above the stone tiles. She looked as though she was being blown upward by a strong wind. Her hair flowed upward and thrashed around in the nonexistent updraft, her bonnet having apparently flown off completely. Her farm dress fluttered and thrashed in a torrent of what must have been some sort of ghastly energy flow. She looked back at us over her shoulder with an expression that communicated a command more effectively than words ever could have: mind your business and get back to work.
Then, she turned back to her makeshift army and raised a single hand. The horde attacked without hesitation. A massive sea of bodies swarmed over the armored automatons, engulfing them completely. The zombies tore and scratched and sought to rend the constructs by sheer force of their numbers. It was like watching an ant colony overwhelm a herd of tarantulas. The automatons, for their part, did fight back. Bodies were flung around like rag dolls, splattering black gore against the walls and ceiling of the corridor. For every zombie they splattered, however, five more took its place. The automatons were covering themselves in sticky black goop with every undead fighter they destroyed. The blood and guts and bones of the fallen fighters seeped into the mechanics of the automatons, clogging gears and jamming servos.
“Looks like she’s got things under control,” I said, “We need to focus. The automatons have spirit fragments in their chest plates. You distract them with your axe, I’ll try to target the fragments.”
Shrek nodded, and we got to work just as the two automatons launched attacks at us. I dodged a strike from the machine’s piston-like fist by mere inches. I slipped beneath the fist and stabbed upward into the machine’s chest with my dagger, puncturing a few inches into the armor. I yanked the blade back out and fired a few pointblank shots into the crease I’d cleaved in its armor. It swung its other arm at me and I danced sideways, spinning around its back. Shrek, to his credit, saw the damage I had done and disengaged from the construct he had been fighting to attack this one, instead. As the machine reared its massive arm back, recovering from the punch it had aimed at me, Shrek slammed his axe as hard as he could into its chest. There was the sound of rent metal followed by a sound like glass cracking. The machine hissed as various ports vented steam from its interior and then, it hunched over like Shrek had given it a dose of fentanyl. It was completely drained of power.
I would have celebrated, but I was too busy fending off attacks from the second bronze drone. This one had more life left in it than the first and it was much more difficult to counter-attack. Even with Shrek and I working together in semi-coordinated attacks, we couldn’t break through its defenses. But then, someone stepped between us and leapt onto the construct’s frame. And then another. And still another. Shrek and I stepped back and the trickling stream of undead became a torrential river of bodies swarming the enemy until it was lost in a writhing, gnashing mass of rotting flesh. Juniper floated toward us with dried tear streaks adorning her face. She had hated what happened to Earl and this had been so, so much worse…because she had been the one to do it.