God of Zero Cost

Ethan walked through the narrow, twisting stone crack, the rough limestone walls scraping against his leather straps as he guided his clay beetle deeper into the underground cavern.

He didn't look back at the clearing behind him, but his eyes did a quick check on his golem's durability.

342/550.

Hm.. MK II is working but this run is less predictable that planned, Ethan thought, his boots coming to a slow halt on a flat shelf of limestone. If I keep pushing on this speed run, we may not finish the dungeon as planned.

He dropped to his knees in the loose gravel. Instead of rushing blindly into the dark, he took a quick, tactical pause to fix the golem. Driving his palms into a wet pocket of loose wadi silt by the wall, his hands blurred into motion, harvesting the raw earth and packing the thick mud directly into the gaping cracks of the beetle's outer shell to patch the broken armor lines.

Beneath the clay skin, the internal tar sumps were completely over-saturated, the thick black sludge choking the internal passages. Ethan reached into the golem’s underlying valve joints, manually venting a portion of the spent, hardened sludge out through the lower plates while kneading a reserve pocket of fresh, viscous tar stored deep within the abdominal chambers. He massaged the black grease evenly back across the hollow interior vaults, .

The durability bar ticked upward, stabilizing with a heavy hum: 515/530.

Ethan continued forward with his clay beetle leading the way.

The tight stone fissure suddenly broke apart, opening into a jagged, treacherous underground trench where the cave walls were heavily caked with thick veins of dried, dark tar.

The entire floor of the clearing was a labyrinth of deep, bubbling trenches filled with raw, shimmering bitumen petroleum tar. The black sludge welled up straight from the mountain's fault lines, popping with slow gas bubbles that released an oily film over the surrounding rocky banks.

To press down the slope, he had to navigate narrow, three-foot-wide paths of slick stone weaving between the open pools of oil. One wrong footprint, one clumsy shift in balance, and the immense mass of his clay beetle would slide into the natural sloughs, locking its legs into the earth and converting his primary defense into a sitting duck.

A low, grating scrape of metal against stone echoed from the far side of the tar pits.

Three infantrymen emerged from the amber gloom, their forms caked in dried black sludge, but Ethan’s gaze bypassed them completely, locking onto the heavy figure rising from the center ridge: the Tzelem of Shinab, Fallen King of Admah.

The ancient Canaanite king did not carry a standard khopesh or a line shield. In his ghostly grip was a massive, two-handed Canaanite Duckbill Axe. The copper-alloy head was masterfully cast, featuring a narrow, heavy blade with twin fenestrations near the socket that concentrated its entire swinging weight into a brutal, armor-puncturing point.

The sub-boss did not advance with a linear soldier's march. He moved with an erratic, winding stride, using the slippery oil sheen on the stone paths to effortlessly drift his posture, shifting his balance from side to side as his infantry line locked their bucklers and stormed down the narrow rock lanes.

He’s baiting the block, Ethan calculated, his mind spinning as he assessed the terrain. If the Scarab misses the alignment on these narrow ledges, we both slide into the sloughs.

He loaded an iron-reinforced stone, his leather sling snapping into a sudden, vertical blur over his shoulder. The slag ball tore through the cavern air with a high-pitched screee. The heavy projectile caught the lead infantryman's buckler full-force, the concentrated weight crushing the old wood and ripping straight into the phantom's chest plates right into its Nephesh.

The vanguard stumbled across the oil-slick shale, a second iron stone sped pass a helmet and crushing the wind out of a secondary guard's throat, but King Shinab was already closing the distance.

The warlord launched himself off a rock ledge, his massive Duckbill Axe cutting a ferocious downward arc through the amber dark, the narrow copper head aimed cleanly to split the Scarab's core in two.

The clay beetle lunged forward to receive the impact, its heavy front leg pillars bracing against the loose gravel. But as the axe reached the apex of its drop, Shinab violently snapped his torso away, twisting his hips to redirect the entire momentum of the heavy axe into a low, horizontal side-swipe meant to shear clean through the golem’s leg joints.

The Scarab didn't match the pivot in time. Its right front leg pillar slipped on the oil film, sliding off the edge of the rock path and plunging six inches deep into a natural, bubbling bitumen trench.

The golem violently listed to the side, its leg locked fast by the thick vacuum suction of the cavern floor. Before the beetle could re-converge its mass, Shinab’s twisting axe blade connected, slamming directly into the un-shielded side plates of the golem's body. The outer ceramic crust exploded into a cloud of flying shrapnel, the durability bar flashing a critical decrease: 315/530.

The Scarab staggered, its front limb frozen in the natural slough, its balance broken. Tzelem of Shinab sneered as he slid behind the golem's blind spot, raising the narrow duckbill blade for a clean, fatal spine-cut that would delete the core box entirely.

Ethan unslung his obsidian mace, his knuckles turning white as he stepped out into the open limestone lane between the tar pits as he prepared to face the fallen king.