For better or for worse, I’d taken a lot of earth-shattering blows since grabbing the Arcane Arsenal class. First had been the tsunami-like wave from Drawgin’s shower elemental. Then I’d been body-checked by a multi-ton obsidian snake in the dungeon of Emer’Thalis. While not technically something I’d had to endure, I’d then watched Alara duke it out with Sylum’s Warforged Titan.
Much more recently, I’d stopped a charging giant scorpion dead in its tracks, been whacked with oversized greatswords by skeletal champions lying beneath the desert, and slammed into the earth by a raging hydra. Without a doubt, I’d seen some real heavy hitters across the four dungeons I’d been in.
And without a doubt, none of those attacks came close to what I’d just been hit with.
Had we been out in the open, perhaps I would have been able to appreciate the speed at which I flew back as my entire body broke the sound barrier. Unfortunately, the pit wasn’t particularly wide. Almost instantly, my entire form smashed into the rocky walls, releasing a clanging crash so loud that I was sure the others would hear it from multiple regions over. Unable to fully stop me, the ore-laden rocks at first flew apart on contact, only the deeper rock eventually absorbing the force, shattering into a deep, crack-filled crater.
Here, my armor fared no better. Courtesy of my earth mana enhancement, the thick layer of earth surrounding me was the first to go, crumbling off without much of a fight. Force Dispersal then evenly distributed the attack to every part of my enhanced armor, and for the first time, my Arcane Armory class skill was entirely disabled as the blow overloaded it. My physical armor came next, parts of the metal shattering while the rest was torn and scratched up.
By the time the force finally reached my body, the bulk of it had undeniably been dispersed. Even so, it attempted to outright erase me from existence, only my considerable Constitution keeping me from getting pasted. As a series of notifications flared up to detail all sorts of fractures and internal bleeding, I quickly skipped past all the chaff, urging the system to give me a raw damage report.
Ore Muncher has punched you for 563hp!
Hell. Where does that leave me? With the earlier earthen column attack already having shaved off some of my health, that put me at an abysmally low 287/850, and quickly shrinking.
Under different circumstances, I would have liked nothing more than to lie right there, tenderly nursing my wounds while slowly healing myself back into shape. As another pulse of Danger Sense was quick to remind me, however, that was only the first attack. Even as my body threatened to fall apart at the seams, the boss was already winding back for a follow-up, and I had no illusions that I’d survive another direct blow in this state.
Leaning on every ounce of Pain Resistance and adrenaline I could muster, I pulled myself from the wall and got my feet firmly under me. Thankfully, while the overall pain was leagues worse than what the munchling had done to me, the damage was less localized to my legs, allowing me to stand with only minor issue. Already, the second punch was coming, the sheer air displacement stirring up a fierce wind.
Right before the boss could send me directly to the afterlife, with a dash of spatial mana and a single step, I was gone. The cavern shook as it connected directly with the interior of the pit, only my Dexterity keeping me from stumbling to the ground.
I dismissed my broken armor, not bothering to resummon it. While it would appear back in tip-top shape, what I needed now was speed, not protection. Opting for only a set of mana armor, I swapped out my previous earth mana for life mana, letting the skill slowly go to work healing me.
At the same time, I moved.
Jet Step brought me into the air, and this time, I kept to the very center of the room, not daring to get too close to the walls. As expected, the boss didn’t intend to let me escape unscathed. One after another, pillars of rock erupted from the walls, angled slightly downwards to pummel me back towards the Ore Muncher.
For all their speed, the attacks were useless. With more room to maneuver and some better forewarning, I was as agile as a fly, combining Jet Step with Featherfoot to alter both my speed and trajectory. The entire time, I made ample use of the reward I’d gained from the dungeon’s air region, a feathery anklet which improved my aerial stability.
On the few occasions where it seemed like the pillars would graze me despite my best efforts, I threw spatial mana at the problem, funneling it into my armor while also casting Mold Space and Bend Space. Distance warped around me, turning blows that should have struck me into nonsensically near misses. Whenever possible, I used each of the nearer misses as springboards, vaulting off the rock to speed up my ascent in a way that I would have considered impossible before I’d picked up Acrobatics.
From start to finish, the entire fight -- if it could be called that -- lasted perhaps ten seconds before I managed to return to the room’s exit. One more pillar shot forth from the ceiling, but rather than aiming for me, it attempted to seal off the passageway out. It nearly succeeded too, but it seemed that the boss didn’t have perfect control over the size of its pillars. A small sliver of space still remained, through which I could see further into the tunnel. Touching down on the lip of the pit for a split second, I stepped forward once more, another Spatial Step allowing me to teleport straight out of the chamber.
Not willing to test just how far the boss’s influence could reach, I channeled Spatial Step after Spatial Step until I was back within the safe room. As soon as I reached it, I collapsed to the ground, panting, my body unable to fully relax even then.
Slowly, as the flood of adrenaline ebbed out of my body and my mind calmed down, though, a small chuckle escaped from my lips. It grew until it was a genuine laugh, only stopping when I at last remarked on the aftermath of my daring escape.
“Damn. I’m totally going to be lying here healing up for a while, aren’t I?”
Recovery was a slow process, less because it needed to be, and more because I was scared to rush it. I’d already shied away from using Heal to handle one fracture, and I was even more hesitant to use it on a dozen. Without a nice clean entry wound for me to operate on, I was forced to leave my innards in whatever shape they were currently in, and it was all I could do to hope that any lingering bone fragments wouldn’t cause issues.
Not wanting to further aggravate my condition, I pulled out my mattress from storage and spent a full day just lying there, channeling life mana into my body through my armor. The bulk of my internal bleeding tapered off shortly thereafter, and when the first of my fracture notifications disappeared, I did my best to celebrate while fully immobile.
If there was one benefit to my long convalescence, it was that it gave me a lot of time to think. I used a small portion of that time to reflect on how close I’d come to dying, but frankly, there were only so many times you could freak out about near-death experiences before you learned to get over it. Instead, I spent most of my time planning.
How exactly did one beat a giant metal monster?
I’d done something similar with the Warforged Titan in Sylum, but that was at least a flesh-and-blood creature with a metal coating. Once the coating was gone, I could actually harm it, and it was susceptible to death mana. As best I could tell, the Ore Muncher was metal through and through.
Still, a full day was a long time to mull the problem over, all the more so with Intelligence speeding up my thoughts. By the time the steady supply of life mana fixed the worst of my problems, I had a few ideas for our upcoming revenge match that would hopefully even the playing field. The real question was if they would be enough.
Let’s try one more time. I was pretty sure that I could dodge anything the boss could throw at me now that I was aware of its abilities, but clearing the region wasn’t worth dying over. If I lose again, I can always wait until I level once or twice more. That, or I could figure a way to light everything up and then conscript Verin and Cal.
With my body having done the bulk of the work, I hit myself with a few Heals before testing out my range of motion. A few spots felt a bit lumpy, and I had a stubborn bruise that my magic refused to heal, but otherwise, I felt good. With any hope, my system would eventually handle the lingering damage, or I’d ask Sett or Arbor to fix me up later.
Thus prepared, I first left the mines entirely. As much as I wanted to wrap this up before the others were back, I had some preparations to take care of.
Five days later, I was ready.
Were this some boxing movie, or perhaps a kung-fu film, I would have spent that time in an intense training montage. In reality, there was little I could do in five days to change anything on my status sheet.
Instead, I used my time to gather a number of important items. All of them were incredibly mundane, as far as most things went, but hopefully they’d be exactly what I needed.
Returning to the site of my previous crushing defeat, I lingered before the entrance to the Ore Muncher’s domain.
“I’m going to be kind of embarrassed if this doesn’t work at all,” I admitted to no one. Then again, if I completely failed, I was by myself. No one would ever have to know.
Steeling myself, I overcharged my armor, activated Flash Feet for some extra speed, and then bolted into the boss chamber.
The first thing I noticed was that the many columns of earth the boss had hit me with days before had disappeared. Whether the skill had some sort of timer or the boss had manually shoved them back into the wall, I couldn’t say, but it did give me more room to work with.
If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
Unfortunately, my arrival didn’t go unnoticed. The moment I jumped into the pit, the first stone pillar came rushing towards me. Having expected it this time around, I was already redirecting my downwards flight with a Jet Step, rocketing me towards the floor at breakneck speeds. Thankfully, flying down was a much more straightforward affair than escaping upwards, and I reached the ground without issue.
All right. Now to set everything up.
For this fight, I was hoping to use one of the skills I hadn’t ever relied on in combat: Arcane Storage. While the class skill had rapidly become one of my favorites since grabbing it, that had largely been for its out-of-combat utility. This time around, I was hoping to change that.
With a thought, a large pile of wood appeared next to me, some of it shaved down into wood chips while some of it was essentially just an unprocessed tree trunk. Even as I placed it down, another pillar erupted from behind, scattering the wood around the pit even as I dodged it. Thankfully, this wasn’t much of an issue for me.
In a blur of speed, I raced around the pit, circling the boss with both Flash Feet and Spatial Step whenever necessary. With every step, I further emptied my storage, removing what felt like an entire forest’s worth of wood.
Not just any wood, though. Every piece had been treated with a few casts of Dry until the recently-fresh lumber was fully desiccated. On top of that, the wood had a pungent vegetal smell coming from it, courtesy of the same substance that gave its surface a glistening sheen. It was this, more than anything else, that I was proud of.
Indeed, after months of travail and hardship, of suffering and healing, I had at last accomplished my grand design. While it was hardly what I expected to use it for, I had at last created oil.
A brief trip to Arbor was all I needed to collect the necessary ingredients, and as an added bonus, the master of life magic had corrected my earlier healing attempts, ensuring my bones wouldn’t be giving me problems down the line. Forgoing any actual produce this time around, I’d just had him hit me with every possible vegetable we could think of that might yield oil. A lot of that was just seeds, although I was happy to note he did know what olives were.
I’d originally worried that processing it all into usable oil would be tricky, but in the end, it was the easiest part. A bunch of pressure was all it took, and with my Strength, I was well equipped to supply that with or without the proper machinery. I already had made some fine strainers back when figuring out how to get sugar from sugar beets, too, so it was only a day’s work to get my first usable batch of oil.
The taste could use a bit of work, to be honest, but for once, that wasn’t the point. Binding my newest creation to Conjure Liquid, I’d spent the following days collecting as much oil as humanly possible. The result was an unreasonable amount of oil-soaked wood.
A stony punch shook the room as the boss tired of my flitting about, but with Spatial Step in play, it stood no chance of connecting. Wood chips scattered about the pit as the force entirely pulverized the lumber I’d summoned. By now, there was more than enough wood for my plan, but I didn’t stop there.
Circling the room once more, I dumped out reams of oil-soaked cloth, courtesy of my neverending roll of bandages. As the final puzzle piece, I brought out a wealth of coal, some of it the regular variety that I’d mined myself, some of it the more condensed, anthracite bodies of the munchlings I’d fought.
As the space filled up, my footing grew less sure, forcing me to lean more and more into my Dexterity to dodge the flurry of titanic punches and earthen pillars both intent on flattening me. With my preparations complete, though, I left the ground behind, reenacting my first visit by rushing to the top of the pit. I summoned my bow as soon as I was in the air, and even as I flew and jetted about, I was charging an attack.
Frankly, I wasn’t sure how much mana I’d need, so I erred on the side of overkill. Fire mana surged into my arrow until it threatened to ignite the very air around me. Only then did I fire at the kindling I’d set up below.
A great roaring boom filled the enclosed space, echoing off the hard walls. Quickly, it was overtaken by the low, crackling hum as a quarter of the room erupted in flames.
Not bad, but not quite enough. While the fire quickly began to spread on its own, I decided to help it along. A few more arrows full of fire and air mana were all it took to finish the job. What had once been a mine shaft had transformed into a roaring fire pit.
Trapmaking has reached level 2!
Let’s see how you handle that, then. Fire had long been one of our strongest weapons in Sylum’s metal dungeon, and while I was no Nella, that didn’t stop me from creating my own flames, did it?
Had the Ore Muncher had any sort of mouth or vocal chords, I was certain it would have been crying out with rage. As it was, the boss began to rampage at the bottom of the pit, smashing its fists into the tinder and kindling. Completely ignoring me, it used its pillars to try smothering the fire.
Ultimately, its attempts only served to stoke the flames, its punches creating fierce gales of wind that acted like bellows. Higher the fire rose until it nearly swallowed the boss entirely.
Not content to leave things at that, I took out a final few buckets of oil, dumping them on the sentient mass of metal from above. It didn’t stick nearly as well as I’d hoped, but I was glad to see a small bit of fire sprout directly on the metal’s surface, clinging to the titanic creature.
No longer under attack, for a while, I simply hovered there, sending down more fire arrows to tend to the raging conflagration I’d conjured. Even at the top of the pit, the heat was almost unbearable, and I was forced to enhance my armor with frost mana just to cool myself down. My breaths soon grew labored as the air grew both too hot and too smoky to handle, but between my already high Breath Control and my Arcane Choker, I was able to endure without issue.
“You know, a small part of me was really hoping that I wouldn’t need to do anything else.” Of course, I wasn’t quite so lucky. Through the haze of the smoke, I was glad to see the boss’s metallic form grow red-hot, and I thought I spotted a few drops of molten metal falling off of it. Sadly, that was the extent of the change -- it wasn’t as if the Ore Muncher was completely melting into a puddle.
While not exactly thrilled with what I needed to do, I’d been prepared for this. Knowing that the fire’s fuel would eventually run dry, I was on a timetable, too.
There was no helping it. Overcharging my frost armor to the maximum, I dove back down into the pit.
Heat Resistance has reached level 11!
Internal Breeze took care of most of the otherwise overwhelming scent of smoke, but it did nothing for my eyes as I plummeted down. My armor and Arcane Vision, for all that they were worth, didn’t block gasses or particulates, and I was forced to heavily squint to avoid blinding myself from all the soot. Still, with the boss as occupied as it was, it barely seemed to notice as I landed directly atop its flat head, activating Friction Foot to stabilize my footing.
In the end, I needn’t have bothered. Partly liquified, the boss’s metallic exterior sucked me in before rapidly solidifying around my frost-enhanced feet. Not wasting any time, I summoned a spear of fire mana, striking into the Ore Muncher’s head with all my Strength. A bit of slag was blasted away from the blow, but the metal deeper in was still perfectly solid.
Which is fine. I hadn’t expected to finish things with a single hit anyway. Speeding the melting process along, I overloaded my spear with more fire mana and held it directly into the small dent I’d made in its head. The impact site grew red hot once more, and when a bit of metal began to pool up in the indentation, I struck again.
If only slightly, the dent grew deeper.
This, however, did not seem to greatly please the Ore Muncher. Whether or not it had any nerves to begin with, it appeared the boss was not content to let me slowly burrow into its head.
A pillar of earth came from the side, perfectly horizontal to avoid ramming into the boss itself. I tried to jump over it, only to recall at the last moment that my feet were encased in molten metal. Bringing all my Strength to bear, I ripped my legs free, but it was too late. For the second time, I was clobbered by a metric ton of rock, and I went sailing from my metallic perch.
If there was one saving grace, it was that the boss wasn’t in a position to easily capitalize on the awkward angle of the attack. Rather than catapulting me directly in front of its fist like last time, the pillar shot me directly into the wall. Even as I impacted the hard interior of the pit, I was pushing myself off with a shove and a Jet Step. A punch landed where I’d been only moments before, sending a spray of shrapnel bouncing off my armor, but the damage was small enough to be ignorable.
With another Jet Step, I rapidly returned to my previous position, taking care to freeze the metal by my feet before getting sucked in. When the next pillar came, I was ready this time, shifting to the side with ease.
Its two strongest weapons effectively neutered, the Ore Muncher shifted to more unconventional tactics, charging into walls and pillars, attempting to either scrape or buck me off. Dancing atop its head, I avoided the obstacles while stabilizing myself with Friction Foot, completely resisting its efforts. It significantly slowed down my rate of attacking, but soon, that proved to be a nonissue as well.
The closest to the flames the boss’s feet were taking on the brunt of the heat. As it charged towards the next wall, it stumbled, its liquified legs failing to support its weight properly. Immobilized, all it could do was lie there, impotently waving its arms about as it summoned more pillars.
Sorry, pal. Pretty sure this is it for you. The rest of the fight was a formality as I slowly excavated deeper and deeper into its head, melting away a narrow hole until I could dimly spot the creature’s core below. Only a few more strikes, and it would be over.
Or, at least that was the plan.
Seeming to sense its impending demise, the boss held nothing back. From its barely revealed core, I sensed a frightening amount of earth mana amassing, and while I had no idea what it was for, I knew enough that it was a bad sign.
No, no, no, no, no! Just chill out! Let me kill you! I bashed into its core, but unlike the munchlings, the Ore Muncher’s core was made of sterner stuff. A crack appeared on its surface, but it ultimately withstood the attack.
A second, a third -- I could feel it on the verge of rupturing. Just once more!
But of course, I was too late.
As my spear descended to land the finishing blow, the torrent of earth mana was released from its core, less to form a true spell, and more to create a force of nature. My blow finally landed, shattering the crystal into thousands of tiny shards, but the damage had been done.
The pit around me began to shake, heaving back and forth with an ominous rumbling, this time with enough force to finally overcome my Friction Foot and throw me to the side. Each time I tried to get my bearings, the titanic forces at play laughed at my attempts, tossing me around like a rag doll. At last, I managed to get myself into the air with a well-timed Jet Step, but it appeared that the earthquake’s main threat was yet to come.
Slowly, at first, the ceiling began to crack and crumble, sending a single stone tumbling down into the flaming pit. Then, as if waiting for their predecessor to show them the way, the rest of the rocks followed after that, the entire ceiling transforming into a deluge of rocky debris.
I put up a valiant effort, weaving between the falling rocks, hoping against hope to make my way back to the tunnel, but it was no use.
Twice the size of my body, a massive boulder rammed into me from above, bearing me down beneath it.
I smashed into the ground as a few -- and then many -- rocks fell atop me, threatening to thoroughly paste me. I tried to move a muscle, to move at all, but it was no use.
With an entire mountain piled atop me, I was trapped beneath the earth.
Want to keep reading? Find the next 20 chapters on !
without spending a cent? for book three on Amazon. You don't need to buy the book to rate it, and three quick clicks can help the book a bunch!
