Ch 228 – Explosive Entrance & A/N: Major Announcement
Ending the desperate cry of a miner who had abandoned all notion of fighting back and sprinted for the ladder at the end of the cavern with an arrow punched clean through the back of his neck and out the front.
The hatchet in his hands fell from his grasp as the miner’s hands reached for his neck, and he only managed to take a few stumbling steps forward before collapsing onto his knees and pitching face-first onto the stone floor just a few feet away from the ladder.
"Y-You mons...ter," the miner hoarsely uttered out with its dying breath.
Letting his eyes roam freely over the nine corpses that now littered the first floor of the mine, Deacon turned his focus toward the wooden ladder at the end of the cavern that would lead him to the surface.
"So do you have an estimate of just how many guards I'll be dealing with up there?" Deacon asked Arne while already mentally preparing what he would need to breach the surface.
While he was somewhat winded by how many he'd killed to reach this floor, it was more mental exhaustion than physical as he'd been conditioning himself to fight with Arne's stats rather than his own, which, while it wasn't hard per se, was just... different. Where he would have tanked a hit, he now needed to dodge; where he would have overpowered a blow, he needed to parry; where he would have fought a group head-on, he needed to employ hit-and-run tactics.
"Seventeen total," Arne answered while taking a pensive look. "Thirteen on the ground, including the Head Guard himself, and four in the two archer towers built into the quarantining us in the mine.”
“Though... that was just on the day they found me and forced me down here, so they could be more or less in number now, I'm honestly not sure," Arne scowled.
A bit less than I'd expected there to be, Deacon mused as he eyed the ladder critically. They've also definitely heard all the screaming that's been echoing down here for the past hour.
Not to mention a couple of miners probably managed to escape up the ladder while I was busy, he continued his analysis as he noticed the number of corpses scattered around him did not match the number of pickaxes lying abandoned on the ground.
Dropping the now-empty quiver and crossbow he'd taken from the dead dwarf he'd killed earlier, along with the blunted longsword he'd pried from the blond-haired human's corpse, Deacon began scavenging weapons from the corpses around him.
"Do you recall the direction of your house from here?" Deacon asked Arne as he fastened two daggers to his body, one atop the small of his back and the other strapped to his right thigh.
"No, I don't remember the exact direction," Arne answered with a shake of his head while watching Deacon arm himself. "All I clearly remember from that day is falling into the Visul River after going over the cliff edge."
Fastening a broadsword to the left side of his waist, Deacon asked, "Do you think you'd be able to direct me to where your house was once we reach the river and head whichever direction upstream is from there?"
"I should be able to, yes," Arne answered while giving Deacon an increasingly odd look as he watched him become covered from head to toe in various scavenged weapons, and noticed that only his left arm— the completely limp one— was covered in salvaged plate armor while the rest of his body remained unarmored except for the steel-toed boots he was currently taking off a human's corpse and putting on his own feet.
After a few more minutes of scavenging and strategizing on what he should do next, Deacon finished eating two hard ration bars a gnome had stored in his leather fanny pack before tossing the wrappers to the ground and pulling out a red-gemmed wand from his back pocket.
"Do you even know how to use all of those weapons?" Arne questioned skeptically as he took in just how many weapons Deacon had strapped to his body— he could clearly see a broadsword, a hatchet, multiple daggers, a spear, the wand, a hatchet, and an axe all fastened at various places of his body.
"Of course I do," Deacon smirked as he carefully molded his mana to create the magic circle for Flame Mine within the wand's gem and waved it across the ceiling above him, his smirk growing at the sight of four Flame Mine circles appearing on the furthest part of the ceiling from where the ladder was positioned.
"Was my performance in the mines not enough to prove it?" he asked while seven more Flame Mines materialized on the ceiling in quick succession. “None of them could get a hit on me,” he cheekily said.
Arne's only response was to remain silent as more of the ceiling became covered in Flame Mine circles, noticing how Deacon was using roughly a quarter of his mana reserves to set up this trap before returning the wand to his back pocket.
Taking several steps backward to be nearer to the ladder's base, Deacon stared at his handiwork for a few seconds before grabbing a dagger from the corpse of the goblin and tossing it up through the ladder shaft.
However, just as the blade passed beyond the ladder's top rung and was about to strike the inner ceiling of the mine entrance, an arrow suddenly collided with the dagger mid-flight, and Deacon could hear the muffled curse of someone above him waiting in ambush.
Nodding to himself in confirmation of his suspicion, Deacon turned sharply on his heel and snapped his fingers.
Within the same second, his fingers snapped together, and all twenty-eight Flame Mines on the cavern ceiling 30 meters above him detonated.
Despite each individual mine holding just a small portion of his mana reserves, each explosion fed off the others and grew in size and force, causing massive sections of the ceiling to collapse inward along with half a dozen screaming guards who fell with the tons of stone and dirt, no longer blocking the view of the morning sky where the sun had just begun to rise above the tall log walls that quartered off the entrance of the iron mine.
Feeling the red gem of the wand heat up significantly as he reached into his soul and cast Flame Art: Flame Steps, Deacon's boots erupted into flames as he launched himself out of the cavern, using the massive falling chunks of stone as his stepping stones, unwilling to expend even more mana than necessary before killing all of the guards.
Deacon swung the hatchet gripped firmly in his hand and chopped clean through the neck of one guardsman holding a glaive who looked twice his age before immediately landing on another falling boulder and leaping out of the mine shaft, propelling himself fifteen feet into the air and finally breaking through to the surface.
Arne's ghostly eyes widened dramatically as Deacon took in a deep breath of fresh morning air, and despite being merely an echo of a soul no longer in control of his own body, Arne could somehow still feel that crisp air filling his lungs and his dimmed eyes getting an eyeful of the rising sun peaking out over the mountain and beginning to wash the forest in its warmth.
Deacon, on the other hand, immediately began taking in his new battleground, noting that there were two log archer towers with two archers positioned in each one, and around seven guards scattered within the ground below, with six having already fallen to their deaths in the collapse below if they'd possessed—
Nevermind, Deacon cut himself off as six guards— seven if he counted the one he'd just beheaded— lay dead on the ground. They didn't have any mobility skills or techniques that could have slowed or halted their fall.
Of the seven surviving guards still standing, Deacon's eyes immediately locked onto the [Human - Elite Guard Lv 29], who was surrounded protectively by three guards who were similarly leveled at [Human Lv 28] each.
Though Deacon's observations were abruptly cut short by having to quickly tilt the hatchet in his hands to deflect an arrow fired directly at him by one of the archers in the left tower.
Narrowing his crimson eyes as he reached the apex of his leap and began falling, Deacon's flame-wreathed boots gripped the empty air as his legs compressed before he launched himself even higher and changed trajectory toward the left archer tower, flying directly overhead of the Head Guard and the guards below.
"Aim at him, you idiots!" Deacon could clearly hear the Head Guard shouting frantically as Deacon passed over his head and was now just a few jumps away from reaching the archer tower.
Must be because of the contracts, Deacon mused to himself as he wondered why there were so few guards stationed around the mine. With the protection of the System enforcing the slave contracts, it gives the people in charge less of a worry about a revolt – or even completely dismisses the chance of a revolt if the contract penalty is death if broken.
However, as he zigzagged between the multiple arrows being fired at him from all four archers, Deacon quickly closed the distance and reached the archer tower, vaulting cleanly over its wooden railing with his hatchet, slicing through a bow, and its nocked arrow before the blade continued through to behead the human archer in one fluid motion.
Then quickly pivoting on his heel, Deacon struck the other human archer across the face with his armored but limp left arm before spinning again and beheading the archer he'd just smacked with the hatchet.
Dodging another arrow fired at him from the opposite tower while yet another missed him entirely and struck the wooden beam beside his head with a solid thunk, Deacon immediately hopped onto the railing facing the other archer tower and launched himself forward through the air, deflecting another incoming arrow with his hatchet before flinging the weapon at the archer who was about to release his shot.
The spinning hatchet sliced clean through the bow and its taut string before continuing to slice through the goblin archer's exposed jugular and finally lodging itself deep into the wooden support beam holding a corner of the roof behind him.
Landing gracefully on the opposite archer tower's railing just before the last remaining archer could fire his nocked arrow, Deacon viciously headbutted the archer and sent him staggering backward before rolling into the tower platform and quickly downing the disoriented archer with a solid punch before then stomping harshly down on both his elbows with his steel-toed boots, preventing him from being able to draw or fire his bow.
Might need him alive for directions on where I can find the Visul River, Deacon mused to himself before he moved to quickly rummage through both dead archers' pockets and whatever supplies they had stored in their roost.
"Come down here right now, you cowardly bastard!" the Head Guard shouted furiously from below. "Are you not ashamed of being one of the mighty warmonger races that you choose to hide and cower up there rather than face us properly in honorable combat!"
"What the hell is his problem?" Deacon complained aloud as he downed the Stamina Potion he'd found in the goblin archer's leather satchel. "Also, how is it that random people even know about us jötnar? From what I learned from the Floor Guardian, we lost our Multiverse War pretty badly?"
Deacon asked while tossing out the excess potions he wasn't able to store away in the goblin's satchel that he'd appropriated, preventing the still-living human archer from healing himself and potentially thinking he could attack him while he dealt with the rest of the guards.
"In my Tower I've never heard a single mention about the jötnar until I got my Class— I only found out I was one when I saw my Status Page for the first time, and from my uncle who said we were the only ones remaining within the entire Tower and that after some war had been waged across all the Floors against the jötnar, they wiped all records and erased the public's knowledge about our race's existence," Deacon continued while walking to the tower's edge and preparing to leap down to deal with the remaining guards below.
"Was it not the same for you guys in the Multiverse?"
"Wait, the war ended?" Arne asked in genuine confusion as he floated beside, following him down, though his response caused Deacon to falter somewhat in his plunge downwards to face the remaining guards.