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FINAL CORE - Chapter 111
🕑 Added 2022-12-30 18:06:12 +0000 UTCAll throughout the world, where dark things slumber in the forgotten corners of the old places — the deep forests, the locked off caves, the peaks of mountains never scaled by the likes of men in their multiplicity — all of these places rest in an anxious slumber, the wild-monsters of the world watching with curious eyes the change of human behavior in these recent times. In the days of yore, adventurers and wanderers would regularly scour the world’s most remote places in search of treasure and glory.
However, with the birth of the dungeon system and the centralization of monsters, so too have humans centralized themselves, clustering around these dungeons and focusing their energies on delving deeply into them instead.
This reliance, however, has made them weak. Humanity no longer hunts monsters for safety or for the glory of the grand titles to be bestowed upon their tribes. Now, they hunt monsters as if it were a simple a thing as felling trees, or reaping the fields. The romance of adventuring is dead, replaced by economic feasibility.
Without monsters and without dungeons, humanity would collapse overnight, descending down over one another with far more terror than any dungeon-core could ever hope to instill in their selfish hearts.
Let us hope that they never figure this out, because if there’s one thing we know from our rare contact with dungeon-cores, it's that they truly hate humanity.
~The Dungeon Conundrum, Excerpt from Barnatus Barnacious’ Big Book of Dungeons
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Aurin, The Meek
Human, Male, Crusader {Legendary Swordsman}
Location: The Sub-Tower, Floor -100
Precious winds blow through the meadow, reaching the gaps of his helmet and pressing through the slits. Aurelius looks up, dragging the heavy blade of his greatsword behind him as they enter the domain of the enemy. The man’s vision wobbles; he holds his hand before the slits of his visor, the metal of his gauntlet ringing like a chime as it makes contact. Dazed, the man stares through the gaps, out into the distance, across a series of bridges.
The enemy.
He sees them.
The wretched, the wicked, the foul. They are within the region, within the fortifications built inside the tower’s lowest floor.
His vision scans the area, wandering over the thousands of bodies near him. The crusade, they flow, they surge in like water through a floodgate, thousands of bodies and blades, flooding into the heretic’s tower.
Monsters flood in, intermingling with the crowd of men and women from the crusade.
…Monsters…
He tries to think, his head wobbling, as he looks back ahead, past the disturbance in his thoughts that fails to set off any signals of alarm as he looks back towards the fortifications.
— Monsters. They’re monsters. The enemy. Yes.
The man grips his sword, the banner of the crusade flying high above the head of the legion.
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Seide
Dryad, Female, Wood-mother
Location: The Sub-Tower, floor -100
[Floor {-100}]
The Gate to the Kingdom of Heaven
Floor -100 of the sub-tower of Isaiah. A large, elevated stone gate, surrounded by waterworks, sits in the center of the room, elevated. Down below it is a ramp, leading to a floating series of bridges that cross a deep pool of blessed water. Waterfalls rain down from above, being the last stop of the flow of water from the pinnacle of the tower before exiting into the outside world.
- Room Effect: Wild fluctuations in the flow of water will cause the water-level in the room to rapidly flood periodically. Anyone not on a bridge during the high-tide phase will be swept away and thrown back out of the dungeon.
There’s more than she thought there would be.
Seide stands up high on the gate, staring out at the encroaching force that has entered the tower. She’s helped guide defensive operations back in the forest for her tribe, but that was on a minor scale. A few invading loggers that had to be chased away or a lost hunter. She’s never coordinated a defense against a full-on human siege before…
Thousands of bodies move below. But there’s something off about them, about the way they move. They’re more like the undead, like zombies and ghouls, than people. They shuffle and lurch, moving onward indifferently to the coordination of their bodies, which is required to ensure its longevity. They move their legs at poor angles, their heads drooped and hanging low, dragging their weapons behind them, blunting the sharp edges and leaving scars in the stonework.
There’s something wrong with them.
“They’re possessed,” says a voice next to her, the priestess of Isaiah, Scion. The dryad looks at the elf and then back to the army, more and more of them flooding in, black, inky water running off of their bodies and mixing into the shallow pool of water that fills the room. “They’re not undead. They’re still alive…” she mutters, looking at the army of humans, standing next to old monsters of the deep world, dragons and giants, hobgoblins and serpents, and all manner of creatures fill the space, standing together as members of the black crusade.
There is a groaning of strings and a humming of magic as the hundreds of people, humans, goblins, or otherwise, on the wall around the first gate lift their hands, staves, and wands and draw their creaking bows taut, nocking arrows at the ready.
— A horn cries out, signaling the start of the invasion.
Ten thousand things move at once, all around the room.
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Isaiah
“Ring the bell, White,” orders Isaiah. The uthra flies away, setting to the task.
“That’s not gonna work, chief,” says Red, shaking her head. “That’ll scare away Perchta and maybe a necromancer, but it isn’t gonna help those schmucks,” explains the uthra.
The tower bell has the unique property of scaring away any and all dark and undead type entities within distance of it. However, given the nature of the possession of the crusade, it will be of little help for them.
“It is not for the crusade, Red,” says Isaiah, picking up its old sword, which had been resting peacefully against the trunk of the very-big-tree. It had done so for so long that grass had begun to grow around its edge. It stares down at its reflection, still as visible as ever in the sword. This time, it won’t make the same mistakes. This time, Perchta will have to leave this world. There is no other way. It looks back at Red. “It is for my children.”
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Gadrian
Human, Male, Swordsman
Location: The Island
Things are getting hot in the tower.
Gadrian looks back over his shoulder, towards the light glowing in the sky. He and his men have, however, been tasked with continuing their normal patrols of the island. They’re soldiers, he’d rather be in the fray, but he supposes he understands the importance of not neglecting the other flanks.
The sub-tower only works if it’s used as a primary entrance. But if someone finds a way past it and up to the island…
“— Help!” cries a distraught voice. He turns his head, looking.
“Did you hear that?” he asks. His man nods in response. The cry comes again and the two of them run out toward the source, trying to figure out what’s happening.
A woman lies under a fallen tree. The storm must have knocked it over. She waves to them. “Help me!” she cries again, her jet black, short hair sticking to her face. Empty bottles lie strewn around her, clearly healing potions. She must have been stuck here for a while.
The two of them run over, grabbing the trunk of the tree. “Hold on!” says Gadrian. “We’ll get you out of there in a second!” he says, nodding to his man as the two of them get ready to lift. He bends his knees, glass crunching beneath his boot, catching his attention again.
The bottles are of a familiar design and make.
Aren’t these Caeli’s? The tower’s alchemist.
— He looks back down at the woman.
(Nostrae) has used: [Hex {Shadow-Shadow}]
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Crusader Legionnaire Nostrae
Human, Female, (Priest + Warlock) Advanced-Class Inquisitor
Location: The Island
The two men disappear, like the other guards before them.
She grins, as their empty equipment and clothes fall to the grass. Easily, she slides out from below the long-fallen tree and goes through their bags, looking for more of their standard issue potions.
She takes out a few different ones, smiling as she shakes a flask in her hands.
It turns out that the dog that guards the island, the Grimm, is fixated on undead or dark elemented things. However, the potions that were brewed inside the tower, using its holy waters, by its own holy alchemist, carry so much holy resonance inside them that they completely override her natural dark smell for a while.
And given how easy these people are to trick, she has more than enough now to get to the tower.
— A bell starts ringing.
Nostrae lifts her gaze, looking up at the tower that she’s close to now.
The woman uncorks a health-potion bottle, chugging it empty, and then tosses the empty thing over her shoulder, as she marches on toward it, entirely unphased.
The cardinal will be very pleased with her efforts.
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Aurin, The Meek
Human, Male, Crusader {Legendary Swordsman}
Location: The Sub-Tower, Floor -100
A primal scream escapes his quaking throat as his greatsword, long, steady, and sharp, cuts through the forward legion of the counter-offense, throwing bodies and pieces into the waters around them.
Arrows whistle, cutting through the air with much the same intensity as his momentum. The man spins from the momentum of his sworn down onto one knee, holding the blade before himself like a shield.
Aurin has used: [Dragonslayer’s Guard]
The air to the immediate sides of the downward facing blade pulses through exactly once, a ripple of a super-heated air shooting outwards in a horizontal slash away from the blade. Spells and arrows fly wildly out of their trajectory, splashing into the water or into the bodies of the enemy. The man kicks off, shooting forward, entirely unhindered by the weight of his blade, as he charges towards the ramp, cutting through dozens of the enemy’s numbers with every swing.
In his oldest life, he was a boy. In his life after that, he was an adventurer, desperate, and hungry.
Roots bind up around his leg, cast by nature magic from a distance.
Aurin has used: [Grapple Break]
— In the life after that, he was lost, a wander with dreams and a sword that were both too heavy for him to carry.
He lifts the sword, smashing it down into the bridge before himself. The intricate, firm stonework cracks in half, the bridge shakes and people lose their footing and fall off and into the waters, others unprepared for his coming immediately afterward as he moves forward.
And in the lives after that, he found his purpose, his faith.
A fireball crashes straight into him, washing over his body as the direct hit engulfs him in violently burning flames.
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Seide
Dryad, Female, Wood-mother
Location: The Sub-Tower, floor -100
“Did that get him?!” she asks, gripping the edge of the palisades as she leans forward over the wall, watching the chaos unfold below. The front-lines aren’t even holding. They weren’t expected to last forever anyway, but they weren’t expected to fall like this. That man, that single entity, is cutting through them, dancing like the spinning seeds of an ash-tree.
Screams and explosions fill the air as magic, lobbed both ways, collides. The walls shake as magic strikes them, sending rocks crumbling.
Seide watches the cloud of smoke in the middle of the bridge.
They just need to hold out a little longer. Just a minute or two more, and the room is going to flood and wash out a huge chunk of them, which will give them the edge and more time.
They need to buy as much time as possible, not only to weaken the enemy but also to allow the tower to breach the spirit-world before they break through to its summit, according to Isaiah.
— A glint shoots out of the smoke, metal rattling as the man in the dark-gray, tight, sharp armor, carrying a sword of the old world charges alone up the ramp. “STOP HIM!” yells Seide, pointing at the encroaching threat, who is rising up the ramp alone. Hundreds of hands and bows turn his way immediately, illuminating the ramp as if the sun were shining directly onto it, ignoring the rest of the world with its grace.
A bell rings, chiming vividly in the air, the voice of Isaiah making itself heard in the night that never ends.
But with it comes a roar. The explosion, violent and colorful as it is and numbingly loud as it is, fails to hide the voice that she hears, the primal scream of a creature that is said to have died aeons ago. It fails to hide the glow of a pair of eyes, radiating with intensity, that bursts out through them.
A shining image of a great wyrm, wrapped around the blade that cuts through the spells, flies towards the gate, propelled forward by the force of a single man. The soul of the beast is trapped in the sword; its might is imprisoned in the blade and usable at the behest of the wielder.
Seide’s eyes are filled with light.
A true dragonslayer.
Who the hell is he? Why is someone like this in the crusade? They were supposed to have died out, together with the last of the wild dragons.
— A maw, made up of pure light, as wide and large as twenty men whole, consumes her and the gate all at once.
She closes her eyes, yet it is still brighter than before, as she apologizes to Isaiah.
They didn’t even last a minute.
Everything disintegrates.
