Chapter 73 Alric’s Toughest Battle

            After hearing the dungeon’s voice, Alric muttered, “So you are sane?”

            The dungeon responded at haste speed. “No. I am compelled to consume mana creatures like yourself. Fortunately, the compulsion is only particularly bad when mana creatures are in my area of influence. Beyond this compulsion, I refuse to act like an animal, and so I have kept my mind.”

            Alric nodded and said, “You are a rare dungeon core.” He paused for a moment and noticed that the glowing blue field of lightning force was still moving toward him, so he decided to try and stall by asking, “How are you talking to me? Shouldn’t you need to use one of your essence creatures to speak for you?”

            “Fortunately, my soul gives off electrical signals inside of the crystal you forced it into, and our material science has progressed enough to finally give me direct control of things, like this speaker. There is still a long way to go before I can make a robotic avatar, but we are well on our way.”

            “Control? You have complete dominion over your area of influence.”

            “No, I can inject essence into matter inside my area of influence and absorb the matter, before materializing the matter elsewhere, but I could not push, pull, touch, or directly interact with anything. Perhaps this indirect control is normal for the naturally occurring dungeon cores of this world, but for a human mind, it is difficult, and I am fixing the issue.”

            So far, their conversation had not slowed down the battle. For instance, Alric’s familiar used singularity, a gravity spell that drew in matter and creatures for one hundred feet and crushed them, on the squirrels inside the lightning force bubble, but the energy was deflected. This was surprising as gravity tended to affect everything, but magical variants of physics did not always work like their counterparts, so for some reason, the lightning force shield deflected magical gravity. The familiar then tried to use a light attack that went through a hundred feet of lenses hidden inside the body of the familiar, but that too was deflected. Then he tried to make an explosion happen inside the force bubble, but the energy didn’t get through. Then the familiar tried to set up a dozen explosions in a circle around the worm-like bubble to force it to collapse, but the electromagnetic shield shrugged them off.

            Every one of these attacks happened during Alric’s short conversation with the dungeon. One thing was very clear: Alric’s familiar moved and reacted much faster than the dungeon’s essence creatures, but that didn’t matter because the essence creatures had so many lightning cores and spells daisy-chained together that they were overpowered by comparison.  

            Seeing how ineffective his familiar’s attacks were, he yelled out, “Use lightning immunity and go through their field of force and attack them directly.”

            The familiar instantly moved to obey. He had his bones made out of metallic hydrogen, just like this labyrinth’s creatures, and was able to run on air toward the sage squirrels. Although he used the motion of his body to move through the air like a snake, and his hands and feet to grab ahold of the magnetic field and move himself even faster. This was compounded by the haste times twenty spell.

            As soon as the familiar moved to obey, the dungeon said, “You know what’s funny about the sage squirrels?”

            “You called that monstrosity a sage?”

            “Of course. That monstrosity is smarter than a mage because of its shared mind. What were you going to call it?”

            “Glowing worm.”

            “I like your name better, call it that.”

            “What, why do you like my name better?”

            “Because your name suggests that the sage squirrels are not what’s powering the flowing electrical shields. That name will cause many more of you, tier three creatures, to die.”

            At that moment, the familiar broke through the shield; although the shield stayed up thanks to lightning immunity, he was not pushed back.

            When the tier three mage saw that, he said, “It doesn’t matter, the shield can’t touch my familiar.”

            The dungeon said, “That’s what’s funny about the sage squirrel. It wasn’t designed to kill you or your mages. It was designed to give my other essence creatures support.”

            Alric was confused for a moment, until he looked over at his familiar and watched as void dolphins that were hidden at the back of the sage squirrel formation leapt forward and began blasting the familiar with their two-mile-per-second projectiles.

            As the projectiles hit the familiar, its non-Euclidian geometry took over, as the familiar was much bigger on the inside. Each projectile that hit caused a massive one-foot-diameter hole to open up, and one even made the familiar lose one of its claws, but that’s where things began to get weird, as the familiar only had a waist size of twenty-one inches. The projectiles should have cut it in half, but instead, it opened a hole into its massive body, and for a second, you could see that it was much bigger on the inside, but a moment after the projectiles hit, dozens of gallons of blood began gushing out of its wound, and its powerful healing core got to work fixing it. In moments, a wound that went dozens of feet into its body was healed.

            Alric’s reaction and the dungeons couldn’t be more different. The dungeon’s area of influence went into the hollow of the familiar for a moment before the familiar’s healing ability pushed it out. This made the dungeon dazed for a moment, although the dungeon was very glad that it got a good look at non-Euclidian geometry that was a mainstay of folding space abilities.

As for Alric, he began to grow afraid. He knew how much energy each of his familiars' abilities took. One of the main reasons to have a familiar that was bigger on the inside was to give them the ability to cast spells that could only be cast by giants, as it took a lot of room to draw the mana channels for the most powerful spells. Usually, these spells ended battles in one cast, but the essence creatures were easily tanking these attacks. Worse yet, Alric could tell that with so many creatures linked up, they were recharging their mana cores faster than Alric and his familiar could deplete them.

With all that said, his familiar was still a ridiculously powerful beast that Alric had spent centuries developing. Even while taking devastating attacks, he kept fighting. He cast the most powerful explosion spell called oxygen combustion. This spell made all oxygen within five hundred feet combust, including oxygen inside the blood of other creatures. The dungeon that created the spell was destroyed to make sure the Labyrinth of Force did not create a creature with the spell.

Normally, the familiar would not cast that particular spell with its master so close, but they gambled that the shield would not let the energy of the spell out, and they were correct. That said, inside the long worm-like like glowing field, all the air flared up for a moment, and the void dolphins inside the field were instantly killed as all the oxygen in their blood burned their insides to coal in a fraction of a second.

Unfortunately for Alric, the sage squirrels had not created just an outside lightning field, but an inside one as well. The two fields were layered on top of one another, and the squirrels created small bubbles between the layers of the shield to protect them from outside and inside threats. Once Alric saw this, it became obvious that the dungeon was very aware of the weakness of the shield, where anyone with lightning immunity would be able to bypass the shield, and so created the two layers so that no one could get inside the shield and wipe them out with one spell.

Seeing this, Alric yelled out, “Attack them directly!”

The dungeon said, “He can’t hear you.”

Before the dungeon could gloat, the familiar dashed through the air and attacked one of the squirrels with its claws. Alric said, “He is my familiar. He can hear me anywhere, no matter how far away, with our soul connection.”

“I stand corrected, but it matters not. I doubt your familiar can kill enough squirrels to shut down the spell before he is killed.”

As the dungeon spoke, more void dolphins broke through the shield and fired on the familiar, and they were not alone. An upgraded electrical version of shredder geese broke through and launched their monomolecular feathers at the familiar. The familiar took more massive wounds from the void dolphins and wiped out the two types of monsters with an ice spell known as absolute zero, but this was a major mistake, as it froze the feathers and slowed down the familiar’s healing spells. It turned out that even though the familiar had spells that made it immune to damage from heat and cold, massive temperature changes significantly slowed down its healing ability. With the help of extreme cold, the feathers were causing more damage to the familiar than the two-mile-a-second projectiles.

Despite its severe injuries, the familiar kept moving and killing squirrel after squirrel with its claws, while using its spells to destroy every labyrinth creature that entered the worm-like shield. Only one in ten labyrinth creatures were able to get an attack off on the familiar before being killed, but that was enough. Before the familiar could kill even twenty squirrels, it was obvious that it, along with its attacks, was growing weaker and weaker, and its healing was slowing down significantly.

Realizing that his familiar would not be able to escape the battle, Alric had no choice but to attempt to escape himself. He had already learned that he couldn’t directly leave the labyrinth, but he could fold space to one of the lightning fields keeping him trapped and step through it, and fold space to the next one over and over again until he left. With that in mind, he cast a spell, folding space and took a several hundred yard step to the closest lightning field, leaving his familiar behind. Then he tried to step through the lightning field, but his clothes couldn’t come with him. He sighed for a moment before attempting to take off his clothes. As he stripped one of the dungeons' many hummingbirds with a deadly beak and speed, updated with a lightning core, zipped through the field, attempting to attack Alric.

As the hummingbird bounced off an invisible wall of force. Alric said, “Did you think I was going to leave such an obvious avenue of ambush open for attack?”

“Well, I kind of hoped.”

Alric ignored him until he was stripped fully naked. Then he looked at the glowing blue field, then back at his things. He stared at his bottle for a long moment, unable to take it through the field, before turning around and attempting to step through. Unfortunately, he had to dispel his force wall before he could go through. As soon as his force wall was dispelled, he leapt through.

As his feet landed on the ground, they went into the earth, which had been turned into liquid by earth rabbits. Nearby, a ghillie dragon spat out liquid hydrogen, and a projectile bear on its back shot a two-mile-per-second projectile at the mage.

Once the projectile hit the mage, he died instantly, never having the chance to use his healing core.

The dungeon's reaction was muted as he gained a massive amount off mana, and he began to grow. For once, it wasn’t overwhelming, but as the labyrinth grew, the dungeon was careful to make sure it grew straight up.

That said, he was satisfied to have killed the mage, which he considered a hunter. When hunters go out, they bring whatever is necessary to kill their prey without being harmed themselves. In this case, the mage brought his familiar, tools, armor, supplies, and spells he had cast long before reaching this dungeon. To kill a hunter, the prey simply had to separate the hunter from all the things they brought. The electrical shield did a fantastic job of that, as the electrical shield made it so the only way to bypass it was by getting naked and dispelling all your spells except electrical immunity. That meant that anything passing through it was defenseless… anything that wasn’t a familiar. The dungeon was just lucky that the mage panicked and ran before recalling his familiar.

As for the familiar, it died as soon as its master died. That said, the dungeon was surprised when the familiar… exploded as the folding space spell that allowed it to be much bigger on the inside collapsed. So much mass came out of the familiar the several hundred foot long shield created by the sage squirrels became completely filled with its insides, and nearly caused the shield to collapse. Even so, the process of the spell dying taught the dungeon a few more things about folding space, and the dungeon gladly absorbed the familiar’s incredibly strange corpse. Even just absorbing the corpse taught the dungeon a few things about biology he would never have realized.

            During the growing process, the imp's eyes went wide, and he said, “You have committed a grave sin by killing a tier three mage. Your core will be destroyed.”

            The dungeon asked the imp, “Why? Tier-three mages must die all the time in tier-three labyrinths.”

            “They do, but that isn’t a problem because tier-three labyrinths should be able to kill tier-three mages. The problem is the Labyrinth of Force can copy everything you create, and if it were to get ahold of whatever you did to kill a tier-three mage, no more tier two mages would survive that labyrinth. That would mean no more tier-three mages as the Labyrinth of Force is the final dungeon for tier-two mages. It’s the only tier-three labyrinth that tier-two mages can survive, but that would stop if the Labyrinth of Force gets whatever ability you used to kill that tier-three mage.”

            As the imp explained this, the imp broke through the wall separating it from the dungeon core room. For the last several hundred years, the imp had stayed out of the dungeon core room because of radiation. Even after figuring out fusion, the dungeon continued using fusion in its core room because that harmed the imp. That wasn’t to say the dungeon hadn’t upgraded his core room. Obviously, the dungeon understood how dangerous folding space was, and so his core room had several hundred electric bottles blocking a folding space path to his core.

            “With my electrical fields protecting my core, how are you going to get to my core?”

            As the imp slowly walked toward the core, it said, “Walking, of course.”

            “Have you ever heard of antimatter?”

            As the imp continued to walk, he said, “No.”

            “Did you know that antimatter can survive in electrical fields such as the ones surrounding me?”

            The imp showed no emotion as he neared the core and said, “So what?” Then the imp crossed into an electrical bottle that contained antimatter, and his skin turned into pure energy, and the imp was flung back.

            The dungeon had been creating antimatter with his many particle accelerators for several hundred years at this point, and it was a very difficult substance to work with. The dungeon could not input his essence into the antimatter and so could not magically move it around. Instead, he had to make a ton of magnetic bottles to move the antimatter from the particle accelerators to his core room. Even then, he had to be careful, as if the antimatter touched his core, he would die immediately, and so the dungeon had hundreds of electrical fields protecting himself from folding space and antimatter. The purpose of the electrical shields and antimatter was to make sure anyone who wished to do him harm had to walk through a room with a minefield of antimatter.

Even after three hundred years, the dungeon didn’t have enough antimatter to fill the room, but he had enough to make a patchwork across the core room.

After the imp hit the first patch of antimatter, he was blown back and bounced around until he hit a second, then a third, and he continued bouncing around the room. The thing was, antimatter wasn’t like other explosives. The only antimatter that was lost was the antimatter that touched the imp, and so when the imp bounced back toward an electictal bottle, he already hit it, blew up again, and would continue blowing up every time he touched it until it was out of antimatter.

The thing was, the more antimatter the imp hit, the faster he continued to bounce around the room, and it wasn’t long before the imp was moving at mock speed as he bounced off of the antimatter and walls of the room. Despite the fact that the imp was a familiar and so was much larger on the inside, so it took nearly twenty seconds for the imp to be killed off with antimatter. Perhaps killed was the wrong word, vaporized would be the closest English word, except that word wasn’t correct either. The imp's atoms literally turned into pure energy, completely annihilating the imp.

With the imp gone, the dungeon turned on an electromagnetic forcefield around the great black tree labyrinth, and began preparing for the arrival of an immortal in earnest.


Author's note-My schedule is going to be super busy next week, so post may not come on time, and I may or may not be able to write the next dungeon chapter next week. My schedual will remain weird to about mid october, sorry about that.

On a side note patreon has changed the interface for creators this week, so I have to ask have they changed it on your end, or is it the same?