Ch 205 – The Jinxer
"Left!" Deacon shouted as he remained positioned at the back of the group, with Echoform Reliquary in its Double-Handed Axe form secured to the clasp on his back, and he called out directions to Leon, who had taken point at the front of the group and immediately veered into the left fork of the incoming tunnel split.
Deacon's eyes glinted red with Blood Sense active as he deliberately steered everyone away from the right fork, which would have led them directly into a large pack of Bloatcrawlers who were running as fast as their spindly legs could take them.
The tunnel they were sprinting through continued to tremble and shake violently as the massive Tier Two Thousand-Mouthed Stone Worm kept digging deeper into the subterranean levels far below them, destabilizing everything in its path and everything branching from it.
"I think that Stone Worm belongs to Erik Jensen!" Valorie shouted while gripping her bow tightly with one hand as she ran in the middle of the group formation, having just barely managed to weave out of the way of a falling chunk of stone that would have crushed her skull if it had made contact.
"The Hoarder?!" Bonehead shouted back in disbelief and growing understanding. "Why the hell would he be—Ah fuck!"
Bonehead's voice cut off abruptly as he came to the obvious conclusion about why one of the top-ranked climbers from the older Generations would be actively exploring Floor Twelve.
Previously, Floors One through Ten had been protected by the System to prevent anyone from other Generations from jumping onto their early Floors and raiding them.
But now, after their Generation cleared Floor Ten, those protections were gone, and any Floor their Generation stepped onto afterward would immediately appear on the Floors' World Map, allowing anyone from older Generations to access their Floors as soon as they appeared and steal all the resources for themselves before their Generation could even complete the Floor.
All they would have to do on their end was try to locate where their Floor was on the Floors' World Map, as it would be unmarked until they came across it themselves.
Valuables like high-quality potions and pills, enchanted weapons and tools, and rare armor pieces and accessories were normally scattered throughout each Floor, hidden inside treasure chests. They were also offered as rewards for clearing Dungeons and Hidden Quest Zones.
Some were naturally grown or formed from the surrounding environment in specific locations, while others were dropped as rare loot from powerful creatures and bosses. Each Generation was supposed to discover and claim these resources for themselves in order to grow stronger.
"But wasn't Erik Jensen supposed to be dead?" Bonehead continued shouting as they kept running. "I heard he managed to rob one of the main Vaults belonging to the El-Hindi Family and completely emptied it out of everything valuable, but after a month of searching, they caught him and the head of House El-Hindi personally executed him for the theft!"
"Who else in the entire Tower has a Thousand-Mouthed Stone Worm as a personal mount?!" Valorie retorted as she and everyone else in the group began veering hard to the right in response to Deacon's shouted warning. "That creature had been documented as the only one of its kind that appeared in his Generation — it was the Boss monster of his Floor Twenty-Four, and he somehow managed to tame it and make it into his mount!"
"Duck!" Deacon suddenly shouted as he lunged forward and grabbed the backs of both Valorie's and Bonehead's heads with his hands, forcefully pushing them down into a crouch while they were still running at full speed.
Just moments after Deacon had shoved their heads down, four Stone Worms each approximately the size of two Leons stacked end to end or in layman’s terms around four and a half to five meters in length, burst violently out from the side wall of the tunnel exactly where Bonehead's and Valorie's torsos would have been positioned if they'd still been standing upright.
As the Stone Worms missed their intended targets and slammed directly into the opposite wall before immediately beginning to burrow through the stone at incredible speeds, Leon twisted sharply on his heel and swung his hammer at full force; it smashed into the tail end of the slowest Stone Worm just before it disappeared completely into the hole it had created in the wall.
Despite Leon's hammer strike successfully connecting and reducing a significant portion of the creature's tail to small chunks of shattered stone mixed with a gooey, colorless liquid that splattered across the tunnel wall and the striking face of his hammer, the Stone Worm continued its burrowing without stopping, though it did let out a high-pitched squeal of pain from the injury.
Getting back onto their feet as quickly as possible, Valorie shouted, "What the hell was that?!" as the entire group immediately resumed their desperate sprint forward down the tunnel. Valorie did her best to ignore the stinging pain radiating from the back of her neck after Deacon had shoved her head down to keep her from taking a hole through her chest with barely any warning.
"Stone Worms," Deacon answered, “baby ones based on their size.”
"Babies my ass," Bonehead muttered under his breath as they continued sprinting while the tunnel around them continued to shudder and increasingly large chunks of stone began falling from the ceiling. "Those things looked as long as three of me stacked atop each other."
"–Wait! I thought you said there was only one Thousand-Mouthed Stone Worm!" Bonehead shouted, directing his complaint toward Valorie.
"How the fuck was I supposed to know it had offspring?!" Valorie shouted back defensively. "I thought the damn thing died along with its master, Erik Jensen, who was supposedly executed!"
Turning his gaze to the side where the juvenile Stone Worms had burrowed into the wall, Deacon caught sight of three of them actively burrowing through the stone in paths that ran parallel to the tunnel the group was running through, and during this observation, Deacon decided to try something he probably should have experimented with much earlier.
Keeping Blood Sense active while simultaneously casting Identify on the Stone Worms, he could detect moving through the walls. Deacon discovered that the two abilities worked together seamlessly.
[Juvenile Stone Worm - Elite Lv 27]
[Juvenile Stone Worm - Elite Lv 26]
[Juvenile Stone Worm - Elite Lv 28]
[Juvenile Stone Worm - Elite Lv 27]
Identify seemed to function perfectly when used in conjunction with Blood Sense being actively cast, allowing him to successfully Identify any living beings that had blood flowing through their bodies, even when they were completely obscured by solid walls or other obstacles.
Why the hell didn't I think of trying this combination sooner? Deacon berated himself for not experimenting with his abilities more creatively.
"There are four of them total —two are Level Twenty-Seven, one is Level Twenty-Eight, and one is Level Twenty-Six, and all four of them are Elite rank," Deacon called out to inform the rest of the group of what they were dealing with.
"I've been meaning to ask you this, but how exactly are you—?" Valorie began to ask as she glanced back over her shoulder at Deacon while they ran, the motion causing her long and messily tied ponytail to whip directly into Bonehead's face.
"It's a spell I picked up," Deacon answered curtly as he turned his gaze back to focus on the path ahead of the group and shifted his attention downward to scan below them. "Leon!" he shouted urgently.
"Yeah?!" Leon shouted back at the front of the group.
"We need to head down!" Deacon called out.
"Now?!" Leon shouted in confusion as he quickly shifted his tower shield from his hand onto his back harness.
"No, in about a hundred meters ahead!" Deacon shouted back, simultaneously whipping Echoform Reliquary off its securing clip on his back and using the flat of the axe blade to smack away several falling chunks of rock that would have landed directly on Bonehead's head as he'd just barely managed to dodge out of the way of a much larger boulder tumbling down on his right side.
Without saying anything in response, Leon twisted his grip on his hammer’s handle and pulled, causing the weapon's shaft to suddenly extend and lengthen to approximately three times its original size, transforming his hammer into a warhammer.
"How good is your Wind Magic control?" Deacon suddenly asked Valorie, shouting to be heard over the sound of crumbling stone all around them just as he reached forward with his free hand to push down both Bonehead's and Valorie's heads again as one of the juvenile Stone Worms burst out of the wall and shot directly through the space where their upper bodies had been moments before, the creature passing cleanly through to the opposite wall and disappearing into it.
"So-so!" Valorie informed him while kicking off the ground and leaping high into the air to avoid yet another Stone Worm that burst out of the floor directly beneath where her left foot had been planted, the creature's circular maw of rotating teeth almost managing to catch and sever her foot entirely before she launched herself into the air.
Grabbing a tight fistful of the back of Bonehead's alchemist robes with his left hand, Deacon lifted the skeleton completely off his feet and up into the air before stepping directly onto and then immediately off of the back of one of the burrowing Stone Worms as it passed beneath them, using the creature as a stepping stone before landing back on solid ground and resuming his sprint.
"Can you use Wind Magic to levitate yourself and someone else, or at least break a fall from a significant height?" Deacon asked.
"Without a focus to help channel and stabilize the spell? Of which I don’t have." Valorie shouted back, going quiet for a few seconds as she ran while clearly thinking through the magical requirements. "I can probably manage to safely handle just Leon and myself together – never tried anything heavier than that."
"Okay, then keep yourself ready to cast," Deacon said just as Leon suddenly leaped high into the air with his extended warhammer raised above his head, the entire weapon glowing with that familiar light green aura of channeled stamina, and he swung the hammer straight down with tremendous force onto the tunnel floor directly ahead of where the group had been running.
The impact point immediately cracked outward in a spiderweb pattern that rapidly spread across the entire section of floor, and within milliseconds, the entire section of tunnel they were standing on began to crumble and destabilize catastrophically, causing all four members of the Party to suddenly find themselves in free fall as the floor gave way beneath their feet.
With the floating Mana Lanterns that had been following Leon, Valorie, and Bonehead throughout their run now falling alongside them, combined with the small portable lantern still attached to Deacon's hip, the four climbers had just enough illumination to see that they were free-falling down what appeared to be roughly a two-hundred-meter vertical drop with countless chunks of broken rock and stone debris tumbling down through the darkness alongside them.
As they all descended rapidly downward through the shaft, Valorie straightened her body into a more aerodynamic diving position to reduce air resistance and managed to catch up to her heavier twin brother, reaching out to grab hold of his outstretched hand that he'd extended toward her.
Once she had a secure grip on Leon's hand, Valorie whipped her free arm downward and began actively casting a spell to slow their descent.
Deacon, who still maintained his tight grip on a fistful of Bonehead's robes to keep the skeleton from tumbling uncontrollably through the air, deactivated Power Boost to conserve his reserves and instead began casting Flame Art: Flame Steps while simultaneously utilizing his Air Step technique to create platforms of compressed air beneath his boots, effectively allowing him to break both his own fall and Bonehead's by descending downward as though he was running down an invisible staircase.
As the group continued their descent and Leon began extending his floating Mana Lantern to send it down ahead of them to get a better sense of exactly how far down they were falling and what might be waiting at the bottom, the light from her lantern suddenly illuminated something that caused both his and Valorie’s eyes to widen.
They caught sight of a dual source of faint glowing light coming from somewhere far below them that was steadily growing closer and brighter as they descended.
"Water below!" Valorie shouted excitedly to the rest of the group. "Easiest Floor Quest completion of my entire life!"
Though just as those triumphant words left her mouth, the sound of aggressive chittering and clicking began echoing up from the darkness below and around them.