A Jaded Life

By the end of the chaotic melee, I was utterly drained. Losing track of one’s allies, and having to constantly move, dodge and weave to avoid getting shot, stabbed or punched was incredibly stressful, to say nothing of the need to strike back and make sure that it wasn’t my family that was doing the dying but the other guys.

Only after the numbers had greatly lightened, I could start to make sense of things again and what I perceived at that point was not pleasant. Lia and Silva were both sporting massive bruises and lacerations and the scent of burned hair was hanging thick in the air, indicating that at least one of my furry companions had been struck with one of their energy weapons. Luna, too, looked worse for wear, while the plants she routinely conjured were charred and burned from the blasts sent her way. Without the hyperfocus on staying alive, I became conscious of the signals sent by my own body, telling me that I hadn’t been able to dodge everything either, something truly punctuated by the fact that one of their knives was stuck in my side, like a slightly macabre exclamation mark.

The further their numbers dwindled, the easier things got until finally the last of the snakeheads was on the ground and I could let myself sink against the wall, my body screaming in pain.

“We need to hole up and recover,” I decided after taking another look at my companions. Their state only drove that need home, so we backed up a bit before breaking into one of the side rooms. Luckily, it was a simple briefing room, nothing special, and we could make ourselves at home for a bit, eating, drinking and, most important of all, recuperating our wounds, restoring our magic and generally coming down from the incredibly brutal fight. We even managed to sleep for a bit, taking turns to keep watch, but we all managed to get some shuteye, which we all desperately needed.

When we were all recovered, we continued on our path, but only after we checked the bodies of our fallen foes and the room they had been holed up in. Their bodies didn’t yield a lot, only more of the usual stuff we had found before, but the gold-armoured guy, titled Prime by the system, had a few curious artefacts. One was a serpent armlet, another a thick, metal choker while the third was a knife, only this knife had a slit right through the blade, separating it for over half the blade’s length for some reason. I couldn’t come up with any distinct advantage of such a geometry but maybe there was some cultural significance or there might be foes that needed to be stabbed twice at the same time or something like that. There could be a reason, I just couldn’t see it.

But that wasn’t the reason why these items were so curious. No, that reason came from the simple fact that these items, contrary to all the other stuff we had found so far, were considered items by the system. The blade was labelled a ceremonial dagger, though it was also a highly practical weapon that Lia immediately snapped up and planned on using, while the serpent armlet increased Courage, Charisma and Intuition. In addition, it could be mechanically triggered to snap forward, striking a point in front of the wearer’s hand, right where the arm of a person the wearer was shaking hands with would be, making it an effective tool to attack from ambush during negotiations or greetings. We would have to check out the liquid the serpent’s teeth were releasing but I was about as certain I had ever been of anything that it would be poison of some sort. While I wasn’t certain Luna would ever use the poisonous handshake, the attributes of the thing made it good enough for her to wear. And, in the privacy of my own mind, I was quite happy that my daughter had a hidden weapon, just in case she needed it to protect herself.

Lastly, there was the chocker, providing solid protection for the wearer’s neck with incredibly fine and intricate metal plates. It was somewhere between scale and chain-mail, but better than either. As long as the choker wasn’t stressed, it was moving smoothly, almost like cloth, but the moment a force was acting on it, the choker solidified, spreading the force across its entire surface, making it incredibly useful as armour. Additionally, it increased the Endurance of the wearer by multiple points. This item, too, was immediately snapped up by Lia who asked me to put it around her neck, looking quite happy to have it. She admitted that these strange worms had come close to burying into her neck during the last fight, far too close for comfort.

The room, on the other hand, was fairly bare. The only thing of interest we came across was a first aid kit, containing some medication from before the change. Normally, those wouldn’t be interesting as the change altered them too much and too randomly to be of any use but, according to Alex, these were fairly unaltered. If anything, the medication had been improved by an order of magnitude, to the point that simple bandages could stem even the worst of bleeds and heal deep wounds that would have needed sutures before. It made little sense but given the things we had encountered thus far, the improved bandages didn’t register as overly weird.

Finally, rested and with our new jewellery equipped, we continued our way downwards, wondering once again just how many levels this base had. More and more snakeheads tried to bar our way, offering up more and more EXP, to the point that I was grinning madly as we continued to battle. Heading down level after level of the base made me go up level by level, something mirrored by my companions. By the time we reached level twenty-seven, I had gained enough EXP to reach level ninety-nine, with only a fairly limited amount needed to reach level hundred.

But that was when things got… interesting.

When we opened yet another set of doors, trying to make sure we didn’t accidentally bypass a group of snakeheads who’d gladly shoot us in the back, we saw that one of the walls in the conference room was replaced with windows. Given that we were underground, that didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, but it was interesting enough to investigate.

When we stepped up, I was even more surprised as what I saw was far different from what I had expected. My expectation had been that it was an interrogation room, or maybe another briefing room, set up to allow people in one room to observe those in the other room unseen. That wasn’t what they had set up here.

Instead, the windows allowed the observation of a massive room below us, the room itself easily three stories high and big enough to play basketball or something down there, an insane size for an underground room, especially as it had no load-bearing columns.

What made the room even more fascinating was that down there, some ten metres below us, was a massive, metallic ring, standing upright, and in that ring was some strange blue thing, it looked almost like some glowing liquid. But given that it was floating in an upright ring, it couldn’t be, unless there was some sort of magical force-field keeping it in. Curiously, there was a metal ramp leading up to the ring, as if people had been jumping through it like circus lions, though why anyone would set up a massive military base with a metallic circus ring at the bottom, I had no idea. If that even was the bottom, we would have to see.

Last, but certainly not least when it came to strangeness in that room was the guy standing in front of the metallic ring. His pose and entire bearing screamed importance and arrogance, though I couldn’t pin down why I got that impression from this far away. Maybe it was the way he had his arms crossed before his chest, maybe the look on his face, I wasn’t sure.

His equipment, what we could see from our perch, was curiously similar to the golden prime, only more intricate and elaborate. Where the prime only had golden armour, this guy also had adornments around his arms, intricate, golden jewellery somewhat similar to the serpent armlet Luna was now wearing but, in contrast to all the other snakeheads, he didn’t have a snakehead, simply a golden cap on his head, making me wonder about the differences.

Whatever the case, this guy was important and his bearing strongly suggested that he was powerful. In other words, this was almost certainly the boss of this dungeon. Now, we only had to figure out the best way to fight him, unless we wanted to simply go down there and brawl it out with him in melee.