Spending the rest of the day grinding turned out to be a loveless task. As he was now free to go directly into Tier 16 (which spanned the levels 81-85), the difficulty increased quite a bit. For John himself, that was less of a problem. His skillset was quite solid, and with Siena actually helping the group, if only as little as possible, they did have the necessary power to deal with what the system threw at them.
Lydia and Rave, however, had a few issues keeping up. Punching 10 levels above their weight had been possible thanks to the innate advantages of being sapient beings, but 20? They weren’t dead weight, but neither did they have any hope of soloing any mob in the Instant Dungeon. John had Undine be close to them for most of the time as they were the most likely candidates to be injured.
The workaround here was using the Flask of Grinding, the item that stored bonus Experience to be consumed by others. It had a limited effectiveness on them, but it did help them nonetheless. John had previously just consumed it himself, guessing that it wouldn’t work on them.
John selfishly indulged in the feeling of being the definitive strong guy in the group. His power was distributed among his familiars, for the most part, and that made it difficult to give credit directly to him. Logic dictated that part of everything they did went to his benefit. When Aclysia saved Rave from a swipe or when Salamander blew up a cluster of enemies, they did that because of the mana he invested to keep them moving.
Much as he enjoyed the sensation of being the proverbial man in the house, he also did not want them to lag too far behind. That was when he had suggested they try whether the Flask of Grinding worked for them.
It did and so that was that. Lydia mentioned looking into getting a stronger version of that item; as she would greatly benefit from it, she would even stem the costs. John, of course, accepted. He was always looking for better gear.
As that went on, they beat the other three new kinds of Instant Dungeon. Thana and Nathalia stayed behind to entertain each other through varying means.
First, they went to the Lizardmen for the Capture category. John had long wondered what the objective to be captured was. He would have guessed a flag, but for all intents and purposes it could have been a person of interest or a village or something else.
It turned out to be a flag.
The dungeon was pretty straightforward: There was a flag on top of a hill. Get the flag, fighting through a set number of Lizardmen who were stronger and gave more experience than the average monster in the process. Return the flag to the party’s spawn point. Get experience.
It was fairly dull, but John noted that this would be a pretty great way to grind out experience for himself (not for the rest of the group though, since the Flask of Grinding quickly became their most reliable leveling tool and the lack of loot meant that there was nothing to eat for Aclysia and Momo).
Then they went to siege the Dwarf fortress. John was nerdily intimidated by the name, and it was a pretty imposing sight to behold. A fortification more mountain than castle with thick metal plates as its gate looked down on them. Well, that was also not entirely true, it was more of a hill shaped like a mountain. A small mountain. The encounter was clearly designed to be beatable by their group. The Siege encounter was interesting in that it was largely different from John’s usual Instant Dungeons.
For a start, unless they came too close, there wasn’t an enemy attacking them. They had more than enough time to draft up a battle plan. After some pushing and prodding, they discovered the vital lack of aerial defenses. All they had to do was send over Sylph, Salamander and the sparrow and bombard the enemies. Once the defences were weak enough, they cracked open the gate.
Aclysia and Gnome did what high strength characters with bodies made out of steel and stone usually do in these types of situations and became living battering rams. Once inside they had to reach the heart of the fortress and touch the throne. This one turned out to be better for grinding out… nothing really, the siege took way too much time to be an efficient use for anything mechanically. It did make for a good team building exercise. That was worth something, kind of. Maybe there was a trick to this John still had to learn? Either way, that was off the checklist.
And then there was Corruption.
“That name is super bad news,” Rave said as she handed back the Flask of Grinding to John. For the moment she, as the lowest level individual in the group, got to drink from it the most. “We’ll probably get karmic balance because Jack made the last thing super easy.”
“Who made what super easy?” John wondered. Did his girlfriend get hit by a poisonous dart and see rum flying about?
Rave pointed at the sparrow on John’s shoulder, “Jack, ya idiot, it needs a name.”
“It is literally me,” John pointed out, spreading his wings and chirping to underline the point.
“Ja and that’s confusing, so you continue to be John, unless I am mad at ya, then you’re Jonnie, and when I want ya to make sweet love to me, you’re tiger, and that is Jack, Jack Sparrow.”
“…” John stared at the window with a deadpan expression.
“What, what?” Rave grinned and danced around him; “Did Gaia just agree with me? Cause that’s the O-N-L-Y only reason I can think of why you’d make that face.”
“Yeah… yeah, she just renamed it to Jack Sparrow…” John admitted and looked at his expanded ego called Jack now. Jack looked back.
It served some purpose to rename the sparrow. In the heat of battle the difference between ‘Send your sparrow,’ or ‘Send Jack’ could be fairly important. John doubted that that was Rave’s actual intention; she just wanted to poke fun at him and employed the argument to that end.
“Okay, so, with that out of the way,…” John put the flask back into its holster, “…let’s go visit that Corruption dungeon. I want to get my legendary ASAP. Gearing up for the tournament is important.”
“For you it is,” Rave snickered; “I am fully outfitted.”
John looked at his girlfriend in her skimpy clothes. Except for the gloves, all of her equipment was just clothes. Abyssal clothes, with an impossible to reach quality, but still just clothes. It wasn’t like Lydia’s clothes, which were already enchanted and custom tailored. Neither did she have the limitation that Aclysia and Momo faced, in that they didn’t get bonuses from anything that wasn’t weaponry. Rave’s refusal was more akin to Thana’s, but, unlike the blood mage, the techno-lover did not have abilities that would cause most of her clothing to be destroyed.
That wasn’t to say that Rave refused outright what John could give her, just that she was extremely picky about it. If it didn’t work with her current fighting style, she didn’t want it. Fundamentally understandable, but John considered much of her refusal to be a bit much.
He kept that judgement to himself though. He wasn’t a physical fighter, and if Rave, their prime martial artist, insisted that fighting in clothes she was comfortable in was more important than a 5% Agility increase, then so be it.
John narrowed his eyes at his girlfriend’s cocky grin. There was something more at play here, he could just sense it. “You are not hiding a battle suit or something, are you, Jane?”
“Whaaaaaaaaaat?” Rave said in the least innocent denial possible; “I would never, why would I?”
“Because you like being a tease,” John pointed out, “and because you like surprises.”
“Like ya can judge me on that, mister ‘look at my glove, my glove is amazing’,” Rave shifted the blame away from her and punched him lightly on the shoulder. John grabbed her fist as she pulled back and pulled her into a passionate kiss. “Assertive, I like it,” Rave purred once he pulled back.
“Just doing what my girlfriend taught me,” he answered and leaned in for a second kiss when he heard someone clear her throat.
“My time is precious, as I have to remind you,” Lydia said. “I would much appreciate it if you could keep the flirtatious exchanges to a minimum until we declare the ‘grinding’ for the day over. Furthermore, Rave, if you have equipment that increases your combat effectiveness, then I would be inclined to ask you to start using it immediately, for efficiencies’ sake.”
“Nope,” Rave denied, “not gonna.”
“Why?”
“Cause that’d be less fun, Lyly. Also, what equipment?” The techno lover added the question with a conspiratorial smile.
Lydia sighed deeply and looked over to Momo for help. The support shook her head, “No way will you learn anything. John is really adamant about keeping that a surprise.”
The princess just gestured for everyone to continue, “Let us just go on, so I can return to my paperwork.”
John opened the I.D.
They fell.
A cavernous pit opened beneath their feet, swallowing them all. The hole above closed, leaving them in pitch black darkness. For a short moment, John imagined he could see a spark. There was nothing like that. Everything was black. Rave fired up her powers. There was a spark.
The walls of the pit were covered in a slimy, mould-like substance, clumping into semi-liquid lifeforms. One being or a thousand, it wasn’t clear. Eye stalks rose like fungal snails from the muck, grinning at them with curved lids. They blinked and the eyes were replaced with nightmarish maws of unevenly sized, unevenly shaped teeth. They locked into each other like crooked fingers.
The spark was swallowed. The walls returned to smooth darkness. The light was gone, but John’s sight wasn’t. His stomach twisted, when his fall was ripped around. His back hit the ceiling and he came to a stop. The rest of the group landed similarly, although at different heights and angles.
“The hell is going on?” John asked, doing his best to make sense of what he had just seen.
“Guys, there is a boss somewhere!” John threw out Observe in random directions. Nothing came back. The darkness was absolute, yet his allies were perfectly visible. The flying trio of the group were the only ones not affected by the strange angles. John did not appreciate this warping of up and down.
In unison, the grinning eyes opened again, rising from the nothingness. The finger-like eyelids cracked in laughter, wiggling on their twisted joints evoking the picture of walls covered in black worms. Everything was off. Then the cracks started to sound like music.
Laughing, maniacal music. The kind of beauty only the most deranged of thoughts could produce. Like a picture drawn in blood, depicting the most stunning of sunsets. The melody was shrill, displaced tones somehow weaving into a symphony that John couldn’t help but marvel at. In disgust at that fact, his heart started pumping as if it refused to live in the same body as a brain that started to understand. Or was it that his heart tried to drum a beat for this symphony?
“You brought us to the Lorylim?!” Lydia screeched and placed her hands on her ears. Her rapier went flying, piercing one of the eldritch eyes. Black ichor gushed from the laughing stalk. The maw split into four segments, rubbing up against each other, sharpening new teeth.
The eyes all sank back down into the slimy floor.
Instead there was a THING between them, standing on the ceiling.
A mass of arms and wings. A knot of limbs of varying sizes, lurching forwards, snapping its bones and giggling. Fingernails like blades extended from some hands, others forked off into more and more limbs. It was a fractal nightmare. Blight glued together flesh. It walked in accordance with the symphony.
The pattern of sounds scratched itself into John’s mind.
“What do I gurgle? What is the weave? What is the third number in John Newman’s cell phone?” It gurgled from its joints. No, those weren’t the words. Those were John’s thoughts. What did it gurgle? Why was that important, he shouldn’t listen, he should see!
That wasn’t even the real deal? His head hurt. What vision? ‘Siena, you should have enough angles to attack him, do it!’ he pleaded to the nightmare elemental. His head hurt.
‘I can’t, there are no shadows, just… them,’ Siena said to him in a tone that made his head hurt. His mouth was dry. Maybe he could drink the boss? He looked a bit liquid.
John shook his head and aimed at the Lorylim. A Mana Ray cut through the darkness, illuminating nothing but creating a shadow behind the mass of hands. Was it hovering or standing on some of them? John grit his wet teeth until he was afraid to crush his own jaw.
Did that attack do something? Did Siena ramming her blades through the being in the shadow of Mana Ray do something? Everyone awoke from their daze and attacked. The boss melted into the ground. Then it regrew from dark spores and corrupted meat. They attacked again. Salamander’s fire looked two dimensional.
It hit John. It hurt. It didn’t. His HP was untouched, the boss had been missed. Salamander was gone. The boss had squished her in darkness. There was no window. ‘The fuck?’ the question rose from Salamander, ‘John, can you hear me? Hello? I am stuck in your head, would you let me out? What am I confused about?’
When did that happen?
What happened when it did? What was time if not a keychain? What was this image of the pit? Dozens of people sitting around tanks filled with sand. The man crawling towards his brother? The man laughing at his brother? A fire.
“”What am I confused about?”” The whole group asked as one; the song of cracking laughter started to make sense. The boss had infinite hands, but infinity was just a growing number. All of this made sense. John checked his cellphone, the first number was home, the second number was adventure, the third number was trust. He couldn’t delete what he lost. He should delete loss instead.
The boss ceased to exist. They left the dungeon and collapsed on the floor. The eyes were cracking with laughter again. The dungeon left them. Gaia reached down. They dropped back into normal reality.
John spat out. It felt like he had been drowning, but there was no relieving sensation of water pouring out of his lungs. On all fours, he knelt on the cracked concrete, struggling to breathe. “Fucking hell!” John exclaimed, while his brain gradually unclogged. The symphony was gone. His heart was still drumming.
“Good riddance,” he said and fought against the need to throw up. The nausea that shook his body was extreme. Everything was swaying like he was on a boat. Having just one pair of feet felt so incredibly wrong for some reason.
“What – just – happened?!” Lydia demanded to know. The princess had managed to stand up already, even if she was swaying.
John explained to her as quickly as he could.
Spending the rest of the day grinding turned out to be a loveless task. As he was now free to go directly into Tier 16 (which spanned the levels 81-85), the difficulty increased quite a bit. For John himself, that was less of a problem. His skillset was quite solid, and with Siena actually helping the group, if only as little as possible, they did have the necessary power to deal with what the system threw at them.
Lydia and Rave, however, had a few issues keeping up. Punching 10 levels above their weight had been possible thanks to the innate advantages of being sapient beings, but 20? They weren’t dead weight, but neither did they have any hope of soloing any mob in the Instant Dungeon. John had Undine be close to them for most of the time as they were the most likely candidates to be injured.
The workaround here was using the Flask of Grinding, the item that stored bonus Experience to be consumed by others. It had a limited effectiveness on them, but it did help them nonetheless. John had previously just consumed it himself, guessing that it wouldn’t work on them.
John selfishly indulged in the feeling of being the definitive strong guy in the group. His power was distributed among his familiars, for the most part, and that made it difficult to give credit directly to him. Logic dictated that part of everything they did went to his benefit. When Aclysia saved Rave from a swipe or when Salamander blew up a cluster of enemies, they did that because of the mana he invested to keep them moving.
Much as he enjoyed the sensation of being the proverbial man in the house, he also did not want them to lag too far behind. That was when he had suggested they try whether the Flask of Grinding worked for them.
It did and so that was that. Lydia mentioned looking into getting a stronger version of that item; as she would greatly benefit from it, she would even stem the costs. John, of course, accepted. He was always looking for better gear.
As that went on, they beat the other three new kinds of Instant Dungeon. Thana and Nathalia stayed behind to entertain each other through varying means.
First, they went to the Lizardmen for the Capture category. John had long wondered what the objective to be captured was. He would have guessed a flag, but for all intents and purposes it could have been a person of interest or a village or something else.
It turned out to be a flag.
The dungeon was pretty straightforward: There was a flag on top of a hill. Get the flag, fighting through a set number of Lizardmen who were stronger and gave more experience than the average monster in the process. Return the flag to the party’s spawn point. Get experience.
It was fairly dull, but John noted that this would be a pretty great way to grind out experience for himself (not for the rest of the group though, since the Flask of Grinding quickly became their most reliable leveling tool and the lack of loot meant that there was nothing to eat for Aclysia and Momo).
Then they went to siege the Dwarf fortress. John was nerdily intimidated by the name, and it was a pretty imposing sight to behold. A fortification more mountain than castle with thick metal plates as its gate looked down on them. Well, that was also not entirely true, it was more of a hill shaped like a mountain. A small mountain. The encounter was clearly designed to be beatable by their group. The Siege encounter was interesting in that it was largely different from John’s usual Instant Dungeons.
For a start, unless they came too close, there wasn’t an enemy attacking them. They had more than enough time to draft up a battle plan. After some pushing and prodding, they discovered the vital lack of aerial defenses. All they had to do was send over Sylph, Salamander and the sparrow and bombard the enemies. Once the defences were weak enough, they cracked open the gate.
Aclysia and Gnome did what high strength characters with bodies made out of steel and stone usually do in these types of situations and became living battering rams. Once inside they had to reach the heart of the fortress and touch the throne. This one turned out to be better for grinding out… nothing really, the siege took way too much time to be an efficient use for anything mechanically. It did make for a good team building exercise. That was worth something, kind of. Maybe there was a trick to this John still had to learn? Either way, that was off the checklist.
And then there was Corruption.
“That name is super bad news,” Rave said as she handed back the Flask of Grinding to John. For the moment she, as the lowest level individual in the group, got to drink from it the most. “We’ll probably get karmic balance because Jack made the last thing super easy.”
“Who made what super easy?” John wondered. Did his girlfriend get hit by a poisonous dart and see rum flying about?
Rave pointed at the sparrow on John’s shoulder, “Jack, ya idiot, it needs a name.”
“It is literally me,” John pointed out, spreading his wings and chirping to underline the point.
“Ja and that’s confusing, so you continue to be John, unless I am mad at ya, then you’re Jonnie, and when I want ya to make sweet love to me, you’re tiger, and that is Jack, Jack Sparrow.”
“…” John stared at the window with a deadpan expression.
“What, what?” Rave grinned and danced around him; “Did Gaia just agree with me? Cause that’s the O-N-L-Y only reason I can think of why you’d make that face.”
“Yeah… yeah, she just renamed it to Jack Sparrow…” John admitted and looked at his expanded ego called Jack now. Jack looked back.
It served some purpose to rename the sparrow. In the heat of battle the difference between ‘Send your sparrow,’ or ‘Send Jack’ could be fairly important. John doubted that that was Rave’s actual intention; she just wanted to poke fun at him and employed the argument to that end.
“Okay, so, with that out of the way,…” John put the flask back into its holster, “…let’s go visit that Corruption dungeon. I want to get my legendary ASAP. Gearing up for the tournament is important.”
“For you it is,” Rave snickered; “I am fully outfitted.”
John looked at his girlfriend in her skimpy clothes. Except for the gloves, all of her equipment was just clothes. Abyssal clothes, with an impossible to reach quality, but still just clothes. It wasn’t like Lydia’s clothes, which were already enchanted and custom tailored. Neither did she have the limitation that Aclysia and Momo faced, in that they didn’t get bonuses from anything that wasn’t weaponry. Rave’s refusal was more akin to Thana’s, but, unlike the blood mage, the techno-lover did not have abilities that would cause most of her clothing to be destroyed.
That wasn’t to say that Rave refused outright what John could give her, just that she was extremely picky about it. If it didn’t work with her current fighting style, she didn’t want it. Fundamentally understandable, but John considered much of her refusal to be a bit much.
He kept that judgement to himself though. He wasn’t a physical fighter, and if Rave, their prime martial artist, insisted that fighting in clothes she was comfortable in was more important than a 5% Agility increase, then so be it.
John narrowed his eyes at his girlfriend’s cocky grin. There was something more at play here, he could just sense it. “You are not hiding a battle suit or something, are you, Jane?”
“Whaaaaaaaaaat?” Rave said in the least innocent denial possible; “I would never, why would I?”
“Because you like being a tease,” John pointed out, “and because you like surprises.”
“Like ya can judge me on that, mister ‘look at my glove, my glove is amazing’,” Rave shifted the blame away from her and punched him lightly on the shoulder. John grabbed her fist as she pulled back and pulled her into a passionate kiss. “Assertive, I like it,” Rave purred once he pulled back.
“Just doing what my girlfriend taught me,” he answered and leaned in for a second kiss when he heard someone clear her throat.
“My time is precious, as I have to remind you,” Lydia said. “I would much appreciate it if you could keep the flirtatious exchanges to a minimum until we declare the ‘grinding’ for the day over. Furthermore, Rave, if you have equipment that increases your combat effectiveness, then I would be inclined to ask you to start using it immediately, for efficiencies’ sake.”
“Nope,” Rave denied, “not gonna.”
“Why?”
“Cause that’d be less fun, Lyly. Also, what equipment?” The techno lover added the question with a conspiratorial smile.
Lydia sighed deeply and looked over to Momo for help. The support shook her head, “No way will you learn anything. John is really adamant about keeping that a surprise.”
The princess just gestured for everyone to continue, “Let us just go on, so I can return to my paperwork.”
John opened the I.D.
They fell.
A cavernous pit opened beneath their feet, swallowing them all. The hole above closed, leaving them in pitch black darkness. For a short moment, John imagined he could see a spark. There was nothing like that. Everything was black. Rave fired up her powers. There was a spark.
The walls of the pit were covered in a slimy, mould-like substance, clumping into semi-liquid lifeforms. One being or a thousand, it wasn’t clear. Eye stalks rose like fungal snails from the muck, grinning at them with curved lids. They blinked and the eyes were replaced with nightmarish maws of unevenly sized, unevenly shaped teeth. They locked into each other like crooked fingers.
The spark was swallowed. The walls returned to smooth darkness. The light was gone, but John’s sight wasn’t. His stomach twisted, when his fall was ripped around. His back hit the ceiling and he came to a stop. The rest of the group landed similarly, although at different heights and angles.
“The hell is going on?” John asked, doing his best to make sense of what he had just seen.
“Guys, there is a boss somewhere!” John threw out Observe in random directions. Nothing came back. The darkness was absolute, yet his allies were perfectly visible. The flying trio of the group were the only ones not affected by the strange angles. John did not appreciate this warping of up and down.
In unison, the grinning eyes opened again, rising from the nothingness. The finger-like eyelids cracked in laughter, wiggling on their twisted joints evoking the picture of walls covered in black worms. Everything was off. Then the cracks started to sound like music.
Laughing, maniacal music. The kind of beauty only the most deranged of thoughts could produce. Like a picture drawn in blood, depicting the most stunning of sunsets. The melody was shrill, displaced tones somehow weaving into a symphony that John couldn’t help but marvel at. In disgust at that fact, his heart started pumping as if it refused to live in the same body as a brain that started to understand. Or was it that his heart tried to drum a beat for this symphony?
“You brought us to the Lorylim?!” Lydia screeched and placed her hands on her ears. Her rapier went flying, piercing one of the eldritch eyes. Black ichor gushed from the laughing stalk. The maw split into four segments, rubbing up against each other, sharpening new teeth.
The eyes all sank back down into the slimy floor.
Instead there was a THING between them, standing on the ceiling.
A mass of arms and wings. A knot of limbs of varying sizes, lurching forwards, snapping its bones and giggling. Fingernails like blades extended from some hands, others forked off into more and more limbs. It was a fractal nightmare. Blight glued together flesh. It walked in accordance with the symphony.
The pattern of sounds scratched itself into John’s mind.
“What do I gurgle? What is the weave? What is the third number in John Newman’s cell phone?” It gurgled from its joints. No, those weren’t the words. Those were John’s thoughts. What did it gurgle? Why was that important, he shouldn’t listen, he should see!
That wasn’t even the real deal? His head hurt. What vision? ‘Siena, you should have enough angles to attack him, do it!’ he pleaded to the nightmare elemental. His head hurt.
‘I can’t, there are no shadows, just… them,’ Siena said to him in a tone that made his head hurt. His mouth was dry. Maybe he could drink the boss? He looked a bit liquid.
John shook his head and aimed at the Lorylim. A Mana Ray cut through the darkness, illuminating nothing but creating a shadow behind the mass of hands. Was it hovering or standing on some of them? John grit his wet teeth until he was afraid to crush his own jaw.
Did that attack do something? Did Siena ramming her blades through the being in the shadow of Mana Ray do something? Everyone awoke from their daze and attacked. The boss melted into the ground. Then it regrew from dark spores and corrupted meat. They attacked again. Salamander’s fire looked two dimensional.
It hit John. It hurt. It didn’t. His HP was untouched, the boss had been missed. Salamander was gone. The boss had squished her in darkness. There was no window. ‘The fuck?’ the question rose from Salamander, ‘John, can you hear me? Hello? I am stuck in your head, would you let me out? What am I confused about?’
When did that happen?
What happened when it did? What was time if not a keychain? What was this image of the pit? Dozens of people sitting around tanks filled with sand. The man crawling towards his brother? The man laughing at his brother? A fire.
“”What am I confused about?”” The whole group asked as one; the song of cracking laughter started to make sense. The boss had infinite hands, but infinity was just a growing number. All of this made sense. John checked his cellphone, the first number was home, the second number was adventure, the third number was trust. He couldn’t delete what he lost. He should delete loss instead.
The boss ceased to exist. They left the dungeon and collapsed on the floor. The eyes were cracking with laughter again. The dungeon left them. Gaia reached down. They dropped back into normal reality.
John spat out. It felt like he had been drowning, but there was no relieving sensation of water pouring out of his lungs. On all fours, he knelt on the cracked concrete, struggling to breathe. “Fucking hell!” John exclaimed, while his brain gradually unclogged. The symphony was gone. His heart was still drumming.
“Good riddance,” he said and fought against the need to throw up. The nausea that shook his body was extreme. Everything was swaying like he was on a boat. Having just one pair of feet felt so incredibly wrong for some reason.
“What – just – happened?!” Lydia demanded to know. The princess had managed to stand up already, even if she was swaying.
John explained to her as quickly as he could.
