Essence Wave Book 2 Chapter 26

*** AUTHOR'S NOTE ***

Meant to post this yesterday, but we've been scrambling to get the yard ready for 6+ inches of snow tomorrow! The front range has some weird weather.

*** AUTHOR'S NOTE ***
They blitzed through the first two rooms. The dungeon had repopulated the Daemons with similar groupings. The Grunts were a mixture of lower and higher levels, and the Imps had different elemental spells they cast. No changes made any difference, the power differential too large still.

At the start of the hallway to the last room David stopped the rest of them. “Hey, I’d like to train with my A Leader’s Due Skill,” he said.

“What’s that one again?” Colin asked.

“The one that lets me borrow your stats,” David said with a grin. “I think if I pull a lot from all three of you my Skill will level quicker.”

“So you want to supercharge yourself before going into the hardest fight, while leaving us all weaker?” Aly asked.

David nodded sheepishly, “Yeah. We know how many Daemons are left, and I’m entirely confident that I can beat them by myself. Even without any type of buff. So I fully expect to utterly dominate them.”

“Alright,” she said. “Leave us with forty of each stat and take the rest?”

“Sure,” David said. He gripped her shoulder and gave it a squeeze, then she told him how much to pull. Colin and Liz both gave him numbers as well, and he focused on them. With a surge of intention, he triggered the Skill.

It didn’t quite work the way he expected, since he apparently couldn’t pull modifiers at all and couldn’t pull any stat below ten base. He still ended up taking around seventy in each stat from all three of them. The transfer wasn’t one to one, so rather than getting over two hundred bonus points in each statistic, he only got eighty or so. That was still a massive bonus, brining all of his stats over two hundred, and his Constitution nearly reached two hundred and fifty.

“Awesome,” David said, feeling immensely powerful.

“Be careful,” Aly said.

He nodded, then walked down the hallway. After two steps, he nearly tripped, pushing off the ground harder than he expected. Maybe I should be practicing this more? Eh, too late now. I’ll crush them, then see about mining.

Slowly, his steps grew more assured, and he quickly reached the end of the short hallway. Directly in front of him was the Grunt Alpha. It turned towards him, bellowing, and he leapt at it, using Vanguard’s Charge to explode forward. Two thuds followed, as his shield smashed through the boss and into the wall.

The wave of Energy that shot out of his shield from the Skill ended up throwing him backwards through a stalagmite. It also sent rocks flying through the air, one of which took down an Imp. David rolled across the ground, belatedly casting a Mana Shield.

It was just in time to block an Icycle from one of the hovering Imps. He grunted, jumping to his feet. Unfortunately, he put too much power into the leap, and shot into the he ceiling. Mana Shield stopped him from begin brained, and he managed to land on his feet. “Ow,” he whined, then shot a Mana Bolt at one of the Imps.

The Bolt was nearly twice the size of the last one he’d cast, the bonus stats and upgraded weapon he’d bought massively increasing its power and speed. The Imp was turned into paste before vanishing. He used Vanguard’s Charge again, focusing this time on limiting his movemnent, and sent a wave of Energy through the air.

The final two Imps were sent sprawling with the attack, and he skewered one on his sword before sending another Mana Bolt into the last. Just as it died, the Leader’s Due Skill ended, and David dropped to a knee. He checked and saw that he was down nearly fifteen hundred hit points, and all of his modifiers had been set to zero and his stats to twenty temporarily.

A minute later, Aly, Colin, and Liz walked in. “Are you okay?” Aly asked, rushing over.

“Yeah,” he said. “Did more damage to myself than the Daemons did.”

“Is that why there’s a crater in the wall?” Liz asked with a laugh.

“Yup, smashed face first into it, then blew myself across the room with the backlash. Jumped hard enough to smack my head on the ceiling too,” David grinned. “Then the ending of the Skill was a doozy, leaving me feeling really weak. So not something to use in a battle.”

“Not yet at least,” Aly said. “What about your Skill gains?”

“Four levels in A Leader’s Due and one in Mana Bolt and Vanguard’s Charge,” David said excitedly. “Nothing leveled last time.”

“Well, you did stress them with extra Mana, Energy, and your stats,” Liz said. “Makes sense that it’d push them up a bit.”

“Yup. I guess we should mine,” David said.

They laughed. Colin and David ran up to bring down the partially full mining cart, then everyone began to smash the walls or scoop up the removed ore. David focused on making good, efficient strikes, remembering the elf that’d taught him to mine.

Each thrust of the sent a cascade of ore out of the wall, and they quickly harvested the five hundred kilograms of metal ore that this run had generated. “Well, that went well,” David said after they hauled the cart back out again.

“One more, then head back?” Colin asked.

“Let me check,” David said, then Visioned the dungeon entrance again.

Name: Metal Gathering Dungeon of Hope’s Refuge

Tier 1 Level 1

Current Status: Cleared

Dungeon Refresh: 2/180 Dungeon Essence

Dungeon Level: 4,962/25,000 Dungeon Essence

Speed up Refresh and Leveling by using Mana and Energy within the dungeon boundary.

Dungeon Refresh passive gain stopped when sapients are present within the dungeon.

“Sure. It’ll be a while to level it at this rate,” David said.

“Want to train your Skill again?” Aly asked.

“Can’t. It has a pretty long cooldown. I definitely need to try again tomorrow though. This Skill with our larger numbers can potentially let me smash any high-level Daemon without risk.”

“Or just let you fight them one-on-one instead of with a team, which is stupid,” Aly said.

“Unless I need to use my challenge ability again,” he said with a grimace.

“Well, our plan is to attack Buena Vista sometime, right? So we probably don’t want to depend on the challenge since you don’t get the same benefits you did fighting the Daemon Lord, right?”

“I know,” David said. “So I won’t use it unless I absolutely have to. Still, I should practice using it. Maybe when I get it leveled up enough the backlash will go away, or the number of targets will go up enough to be worthwhile. If I could pull five Strength from a hundred people, they would barely feel it but I would go up by two hundred or more. Especially if the efficiency increases too. This could easily become a key Skill that’ll make me even more overpowered compared to the Daemons.”

“Careful, don’t want to get nerfed,” Colin laughed.

“Nah, let’s abuse the heck out of the System,” Liz said. “Find every place we can abuse. This isn’t a game. This is the apocalypse.”

“Right, so, let’s go train,” David said.

The next hour passed quickly. This time, David and Colin worked together. “Hey, hit me with your Berserker’s Leap,” David told Colin in the first hallway. “I’m going to practice Mana Shield and Earthen Bulwark.”

“Sure thing,” Colin said with a grin. “I always like beating you up.”

“Ha, ha,” David said, shaking his head and grinning at his friend.

Colin winked, visible through the faceplate of his nano armor, then roared as he leapt at David. David planted his shield, focusing on extending the Mana Shield Skill over it, and formed a small cup of Earth Mana on the back of each of his calves to hold his legs steady.

They crashed together, the sound echoing painfully in the enclosed space. David’s Mana Shield shattered, and the mana-artifact shield he’d created was splintered, but held the axe-head of Colin’s halberd away from his arm. The braces he’d made broke, but his feet only slid backwards slightly, and he kept his feet.

“Again!” David said.

“Again,” Colin agreed.

Colin learned a bit more about how to pierce David’s defenses than David did on strengthening them after the first attack. The second one cut mostly through the second shield and into David’s forearm, requiring him to take a minute and fix it.

Need to create more layers, the shield is too uniform now, David thought, then proceeded to make bands of Metal and Earth Mana over the top of a pure Mana layer. It doubled the cost of his shield, but that was still a drop in the bucket of his massive Mana Pool.

“You know you could probably turn your shield at an angle to make my blade pass to the side,” Colin said before he Leapt at him for the third time.

“Well, yeah, but that wouldn’t train the Skills I’m working on better,” David said. “Might help you though, so every five I’ll try to shed it, and you’ll have to alter how you attack to beat the motion.”

Colin gave him a thumbs up, then Leapt. David’s shield held this time, the total damage significantly reduced from even the first attempt. David noticed that a tiny amount of Lighting attempted to get through, the entire edge of Colin’s weapon sparking with it. The Lightning ended up just grounding into the stone beneath him, not affecting David at all.

“Stupid Metal Mana redirects my Lightning,” Colin grumbled.

“We should try to combine our Mana Bolts sometime,” David said. “Use Metal to punch through armor and then Lightning to cook’em from the inside!”

“Sounds fun,” Colin said. “Leaping again.”

Over and over again, they practiced, changing tactics slightly to make their Skills and techniques more and more powerful. After the first three attempts, no major changes happened as they were trying to refine the improvements and didn’t have any great new ideas for how to modify their Skills. Finally, an hour had passed, and they left the Dungeon to let it reset again.

The third run through it took even less time, and after only twenty minutes were done mining. “Let’s just go back,” David said. “Let another group come here in three hours.”

“Or earlier to train first,” Liz said. “We should make it a priority to level up the dungeon.”

They loaded into the truck, all four of them lifting the mining cart into the back. Surprisingly, the shocks didn’t drop significantly, even with the massive amount of ore loaded into the vehicle. David just shrugged, then laughed at the weird feeling getting into the truck gave him.

“What?” Aly asked with a grin.

“This, loading into a truck, just feels too normal now,” he said, shaking his head. “With everything else that has happened, with how weird our life is nowadays, getting into a truck and driving it back home just seems, wrong, you know?”

“Yeah, but let’s take our normalcy where we can,” Liz said. “Now mush driver.”

“Haha,” David said, then laughed for real. “Hang on!”

The drive back was uneventful, and didn’t take any longer. The Energy and Mana meters did drop a bit quicker with the larger amount of mass to be moved, but it was nowhere near enough of a drop to risk them running out.

Driving across the bridge, David noticed someone ringing a bell. Very quickly, there was a large crowd gathered around. “What is that?” a young man asked.

“A truck. Kind of expensive from the Market,” David answered.

“Is that why it made the light show when you got it?” a woman asked.

“Yup, had to be built by the system,” David said. “And I guess we know how the Market works with items larger than the pillars.”

“Alright, back to work,” Alexander bellowed, walking over. The crowd dispersed.

David grinned up at him, “Alexander,” he said with a nod.

“Baron Black,” Alexander responded, then smiled broadly, “If that isn’t a name for a cartoon villain from the eighties, I don’t know what is.”

“Yeah, yeah, laugh it up. Get it out of your system,” David grumbled. Alexander immediately let out a massive guffaw and belly laughed for almost thirty seconds. “You good yet?”

“Yup, thanks,” Alexander said. “Gotta keep you all humble. Mementos mori and all that.”

“Mentos what?” David asked.

“Mementos mori, the reminder that you are still mortal, given to Roman generals during victory parades, called Triumphs,” Alexander explained. “So, what you got there?”

“Roughly two tonnes of ore, copper and tin specifically,” Aly said. “Speaking of, Seneschal, this is Shadow. Can we get another Forge placed down here by the bridge towards the resource dungeon? There’s going to be a ton of metal coming in.”

“Shadow, yes, we can place one nearby,” Josiah’s voice came through the communication system.

“Can they be focused?” David asked. “Make this one more about refining ore and creating metal ingots, and then get them shipped up to the top to create a final product? Would that be better?”

“Specialization in manufacturing is important,” Christine said, getting tied in by Josiah. “But I’m not sure we’re anywhere near the point where that will matter.”

“I can double the amount of smelting capability in the Forge and only lose one of the actual forges,” Michelle said. “Or triple it and be left with one forge in the Forge.”

“Triple,” Josiah said. “With the mana engines we’ve seen, and David’s new truck, we can easily haul most of the refined metal up here. We’ll dedicate the forge capacity there to providing pieces needed for repairs.”

“What about all the metal pieces we’ll need for new buildings and upgrades?” Aly asked.

“The plan is to eventually build at least two more Forges,” Michelle said. “We’ll put the next one right next to this one, with the opposite specialty.”

“Do it,” David said.

“And, oh, hey, the building was renamed a Smelter instead of a Forge. It comes with a tiny bonus to the quality and quantity of the resulting metal after smelting,” Michelle said.

“Steve and his crew are headed down now to help out,” Josiah said. “Go ahead and start putting it together.”

“Got it, thanks,” David said. He saw the holographic outline of the Smelter appear off to the side, so he put the truck back into drive and moved it close. They all hopped out, and David reached forward to trigger the prompt.

Do you wish to build a Smelter here? If so, please provide Resources, Energy, and Mana.

Resources provided: 0/12 Units worked wood, 0/14 Units worked stone, 0/12 Units worked metal, 0/3 heating Inscriptions

Energy Required: 96,744

Mana Required: 612,216

“Well, that’s a bunch of Mana,” David said. “Needs a bunch of worked metal too. Hey Colin, help me out with the ore cart.”

“Sure,” Colin said, leaping over the truck to the other side. They lifted the cart out of the truck, then shoved it over to the hologram. Colin stuck one hand into the storage area and then tapped the future building. “One hundred kilograms of ore counts as one unit of unworked metal. Makes the Energy requirement jump significantly though.”

“Use four hundred kilograms to make four units,” David said after thinking for a second. “We’ll see what Steve and crew have for us when they get down here.”

A couple of the workers who’d been nearby walked over. “Uh, sir,” the foreman said.

“What’s up?” David asked, turning to him.

“I don’t know if you’ve been told yet, but we discovered recently that picturing what you want to happen when putting in Energy makes it a bit more efficient,” he told them. “Which compounds with putting the items near the correct place.”

“Thanks …” David said.

“Uh, Charles, sir,” he responded. “While we wait for the materials that are coming, you can focus on filling what I’ve taken to calling the metaphysical foundation, or the building's connection to the System.”

“Sure, plus whatever the metal is used for,” David said.

“The smelters themselves,” Colin said. “Look.” He picked up a chunk of copper ore, and a section of the closest smelter glowed brightly. “I think we’re losing some Mana efficiency because we’re using copper, but it’s what we’ve got.”

David reached in and pulled another piece of ore out, then stepped to where the area was highlighted. He pictured the stone flaking off the bright copper, the metal morphing to fit the area indicated. The stone flakes, he thought, should merge into the bottom of the smelter, where the hologram indicated a significant amount of rock was needed for the base.

Energy flowed out of him, joined by Mana, and started to modify the ore in front of him. David watched, fascinated, as the System used his resources to create a new metal from the copper, then he smoothed it into place. It held, floating in midair. The whole process took about two minutes, so he turned to get another piece, only to nearly jump at the young woman who held five pieces.

“Here you are, sir,” she said, handing him two, then she gave another two pieces to Colin, who’d just finished his chunk.

“Thanks,” David said.

“Faster if you keep working,” she said. “I’m already at my daily limit of Mana use, so I can help the rest of the crew this way.”

David nodded, and turned back to the smelter. Every few minutes, he’d turn back to see the same girl handing out ore, and they very quickly filled in the first smelter, or at least the metal parts of it.

“Beep beep, coming through!” Steve yelled, and David turned to look. Steve, Jack, Barry, and Mason were carrying the smelter from the other Forge. “Josiah said we didn’t need this one up top anymore, they’re adding in another anvil set or whatever it was.” They dropped the structure with a thud.

The required stone dropped by one, metal by two, and the Mana by almost a hundred thousand. “This is the Inscription needed,” Mason said, pointing to a carving on the front of the smelter.

David nodded, “Interesting. It’s simpler and similar to the Fire bomb Inscription.”

“Yes sir,” Mason grinned. “That’s where we got it from. Took a few tries, but it worked out. Saves us from having to burn wood in the bottom.”

“Got it. I’ll carve it into this one, once we get some stone,” David said.

“In the truck,” Mason said, and David walked out to find Steve, Jack, and Berry hauling blocks of stone from the rear of an old F-150. Planks of wood were stacked next to the rest of the stone. A line of others were grabbing items and bringing them to the hologram.

David hefted a cubic foot of stone, then grabbed a second one. They weren’t heavy, at least to him today. Several of the newer members of the city were struggling with even one block, but no one was unable to lift it. These things weigh at least a hundred pounds, and yet that girl is able to pick it up. I don’t know if she weighs that much! We really are superhuman.

Shaking his head, he walked back to where the Inscription would go on the first smelter. Colin and Aly were already working on the last one, while Liz was manipulating the wood, floating it into place over their heads. Several of the helpers were staring at her unabashedly. He laughed, then placed the blocks in the highlighted area and began to channel his Energy.