Ch 216 – Guild Talk
An arrow suddenly shot past both their heads with a sharp whistle, causing Deacon and Leon to snap their heads in the direction the arrow had flown to see it punch straight through the skull of a Bubonic Retainer that had gotten within just a few meters of them without either of them even noticing its approach.
Along with the alarming realization that they hadn't even registered an enemy getting that close to them, Deacon's eyes widened as he took in the state of the Central Hall and realized that in the few minutes it had taken to kill the Manor Lord after it entered its Second Phase, the entire hall had flooded with Bubonic Retainers who had responded to their master's earlier whistling call.
However, what immediately caught Deacon's attention was that these Bubonic Retainers looked far more grotesque and mutated than he remembered them being when he was killing them just minutes ago.
Their skin had become much greyer and was now covered in significantly more boils, with many of them actively oozing thick, black pus that sizzled and melted the marble tiles it spilt onto, as well as their own clothes.
On top of that, the most glaring thing he noticed was that the retainers were now displaying much more bestial characteristics, such as tufts of matted fur or stray feathers sprouting from their limbs and faces, while their fingernails had been replaced entirely by wickedly curved claws.
In his eyes, it had looked like they had overdosed on booster tonics, and as a result, their bodies mutated. Was this what he could have looked like if he had drunk all three of the Lesser Beastblood Tonics, the booster tonics, he found on Floor One, at once?
Looks like the Manor Lord's whistling did a lot more than just calling them over to support it, Deacon mused to himself as Echoform Reliquary shifted in his hands from its Ulfberht form into its dual short sword form while still retaining the effects of the Hemorrhage Grease coating on both blades, which was a nice little benefit from the Devour Enhancement he hadn't been entirely sure would work that way.
Or did it always preserve applied coatings when shifting forms, and I just never noticed because I normally only use grease when I'm already dealing with a massive horde where everything becomes such a blur that I constantly have to reapply it and never really pay attention to whether it transfers between forms? Deacon thought to himself as he broke into a sprint toward the nearest Bubonic Retainer.
Beheading the mutated servant with a swipe of his right short sword, Deacon immediately turned on his heel and dropped into a crouch slide to avoid two arms holding iron pokers that swung at his head from a four-armed retainer beside the one he'd just killed, and while sliding beneath the attacks he sliced through both of the retainer’s legs at the shins before rising up behind it and cutting off its head as it collapsed forward.
And holy System, just how focused was I on the Manor Lord that I didn't even notice just how many of these things were pouring out of the walls and flooding the entire hall? He asked himself in exasperation.
"I guess anything with a Rank higher than Elite is just gonna keep putting me on edge like this..." he mumbled to himself as he ducked under a horizontal swipe of a rusted spear from another retainer and swung his left short sword upward above his head to cut cleanly through the wooden haft of the spear.
Twisting his body as he rose from beneath the swing to position himself behind the retainer that had tried skewering him, Deacon thrust his right short sword through its heart before yanking the blade free and sprinting toward the next nearest Bubonic Retainer.
After an hour and a half of cutting down every last Bubonic Retainer in the Central Hall, Deacon and the rest of the group stood around the Manor Lord's corpse in a loose circle, each holding either a can of soda or a sandwich while watching Bonehead methodically finish dismembering and harvesting parts from the dungeon boss.
"So all of these parts can actually be used for alchemy?" Valorie asked before taking another long sip from her orange soda can.
"Yup," Bonehead confirmed as he carefully sealed the cap on a large glass jar containing the Manor Lord's kidneys that were easily three times the size of normal human kidneys. "These samples would go a long way in helping me learn what I need to avoid when creating booster potions and pills in order to minimize the side effects that can be caused if too many are consumed."
"So… what do we do now?" Valorie asked as she watched Bonehead carefully put away the many glass jars containing the harvested organs and bones of the Manor Lord into his Spatial Satchel.
"Well," Deacon said before taking another large bite out of his chicken wrap, eyeing the large heart Bonehead had just stored away, "seeing as how Bonehead didn't find the Manor's Main Entrance Key on the boss as he was harvesting it, that means we're going to have to search the entire manor for it."
"That's probably for the best anyway, I think," Leon said as he crumpled up the aluminum foil wrapper from his sandwich and let it drop to the floor, where it joined the three other discarded wrappers he'd dropped earlier.
"We've already been inside this dungeon for approximately five and a half hours or so at this point, but… I'm not entirely sure if it would even be worth the risk to leave after less than a full day, especially since the Hoarder could very well still be waiting for us to emerge with his attempts at trying to get us to surface.”
"And I'm sure it has absolutely nothing at all to do with the fact that you want to explore more of this manor and its little tricks and traps it has hidden about," Valorie teased with a shit-eating grin spreading across her face as she kept rhythmically tapping her brother's shin with the toe of her boot.
"N-No, not at all, that's not the reason," Leon stammered while clearing his throat and raising his closed fist to cover his mouth in an obvious attempt to hide his caught look and the flush creeping up his neck.
Smirking at the twins, Deacon glanced around the relit Central Hall, courtesy of him relighting the torches with Ignis, before his eyes caught sight of the upper foyer landing, specifically focusing on the ornate double doors that were still standing wide open and led into the room the Manor Lord had burst out of at the start of their boss fight.
Turning his gaze back to the twins, Deacon said, "Since there's nothing else of interest down here, I'll start by checking out the room the Manor Lord came bursting out of," jabbing his thumb over his shoulder toward the upper foyer. "Hopefully the Main Entrance Key is in there since it's probably its office or leads to it, but if not, then we're stuck searching this entire manor room by room, and if we don't start now, it's gonna take us a hell of a lot longer than a day to find it and get out."
"Ah shit, you're absolutely right about that," Valorie said with an audible groan of frustration.
Key-finding quests were the absolute worst, was the collective thought shared by everyone present in the hall, a sentiment they all gained from their training simulations at the academy.
"Well then, Leon and I will get started on searching through the East Wing," Valorie announced while tilting her head toward the right side of the Central Hall, where a large archway led into that section of the manor.
"I'll join you both to help with the search right after I finish checking the Manor Lord's chambers," Deacon said with a confirming nod.
"Same here, I just want to collect some additional samples from a few of these mutated Bubonic Retainer corpses scattered around the hall for comparison with the normal ones," Bonehead said, before pausing as he suddenly remembered something important and adding, "and I should probably check through at least some of the corpses to make sure they don't have keys randomly lodged inside their bodies as well, just to be thorough."
"Ah fuck, you're right about that," Deacon groaned as he recalled exactly how they'd discovered the Garden Key earlier.
“I could use some help with that,” Bonehead said, giving a not-so-discrete look at the three of them.
"Well then," Valorie said while crunching up her now-empty soda can and casually dropping it onto the cracked marble tiles to join the growing collection of trash, "Leon and I are going to uh… explore the Eastern Wing.”
“I can let you borrow my shield mask,” Bonehead offered. “So you don’t get any of the blood and pus in your hair.”
"Let’s rain check that," she called out cheerfully as she grabbed her twin brother's armored arm with both hands. "Go, go, go!" she hissed urgently as she began forcefully dragging Leon along with her toward the East Wing, practically hopping over the many, many corpses littering the floor in her haste to escape.
Valorie didn't even take a single chance to glance back over her shoulder at Deacon and Bonehead, deliberately avoiding any possibility of making eye contact with them and risking feeling even the slightest bit of guilt or pity at leaving them to handle all of the corpse-searching work by themselves.
"She didn't even look back," Bonehead observed in a mildly amused tone before turning his skull to glance at Deacon. "Looks like we're going to have our work cut out for us."
The comment caused Deacon to let out a soft chuckle as he shook his head. "Just follow me up to the Manor Lord's chambers first," Deacon said as he began making his way toward the twin staircases that led up to the upper foyer landing.
Walking up the stairs and passing through the ornate double doors and entering what was clearly the Manor Lord's personal office, Deacon took a moment to cast Blood Sense and carefully scan their surroundings.
Finding nothing alive nearby and confirming that Valorie and Leon had moved far enough into the East Wing that they wouldn't be able to overhear either him or Bonehead, Deacon canceled the spell and reached into his Spatial Sling Bag to pull out a fist-sized onyx rock covered in the same squiggly runic text he'd only ever seen on the Floor Waystones.
"Wait, we’re making the guild now?" Bonehead asked in genuine surprise as he recognized what Deacon was holding. “And making this place our guild base?”
Deacon shrugged. "It has a solid foundation we can work with, and would allow us to squeeze more out of the Iron Scales Guild than if we were starting out from scratch," he said while turning the Guild Waystone over in his hands. "Not to mention with the Hoarder raiding this Floor, and with the entire Tower probably knowing by now considering many probably tore a Return Ticket and spread the news online or managed to get to the next floor in the past couple of hours, barely anyone's gonna search through here for anything other than water since he always leaves the places he raids picked clean."
“That is true…” Bonehead muttered as he considered Deacon’s words.
"Plus, we get access to the hidden doorway features that dungeons have without having to pay for shit," he added.
“True,” Bonehead nodded. “Unlike man-made hidden doors, dungeon doors are concealed by the Tower and are incredibly hard to detect unless you're some insane sensor or you knew where it was beforehand.”
"But," Deacon said while lengthening the word and meeting Bonehead's gaze, "if you're against using this place as our base, we can find somewhere else. I can't even officially claim this land as the Guild's territory until we clear the dungeon anyway."