The Dungeon Raid Pt3

I could not even answer after having spent so much time in the production, straining my body to consume and produce magic and materials as if making gold from lead. The mental strain alone had left me with my head hung low and my eyes closed while sweat ran down my face and mask. I was so close to a full volley that I just did not want to stop.

"Is your boss dying?" Little Thirteen asks with an oddly pleased tone of voice, sounding as if he were enjoying my predicament.

"No, he's training his sphincters," Go assures him with a smirk in his own voice. "His body has evolved twice and let's him literally shit monster materials that he consumed. Input rarest mob materials and outtake material farm. So far, he's the only person in the game with this duplication cheat."

Suddenly sounding not as happy as before, Mr. Thirteen says, "This suddenly makes me want to quit gaming. What's the point of collecting and crafting the best if someone can just… be Leo."

"With the new level requirements on everything but self-made equipment, the sale of ready equipment will become somewhat obsolete for a while and the sale of materials will skyrocket," Go continues with a distinct lack of care in his voice. "We already collected the best we could find, now we have all we want of it and plenty to sell. We can even make the same things you have better without even eating them."

"That's the divine thing?" Donna asks suddenly after the clinking and rolling of spears sounds out, probably from her pulling one out of the pile to examine.

"No, that's in crafts, I'm talking materials," Go corrects her simply. "Our crafts are blessed in quality, but Hack can actually bless materials because he's a few levels above priests and paladins. He's favored by divinity is all I can say."

This small talk continued back and forth as more people in my team added bits and pieces of cryptic information to tease the other clans. By the time I had finished producing five hundred spears, the others had hinted at all of their secrets and even made obscure references to more of my own.

Sitting straight down on the ground as I finally take a break, I just silently glare around before saying, "It gets back in the hole. Put the lotion on the skin or it gets the hose again."

"Where's my AutoTrader?" Go asks shamelessly despite making his way back toward the pond without a care in the world for the five hundred spears piled up on the ground.

While the rest of my team started following his lead, I raise a hand to stop the others and say, "This is five hundred of some of the base weapons I can make, have your people practice with the material and raise their skills by studying material enchantments to make them stronger. This is one volley for either our offense or defense and I cannot make many more volleys like this."

Recognizing the material of the spears as the same 'rewards' that the clans had received at the end of my fight with the original Trollbone, Mr. Thirteen quickly asks, "How do we divide them?"

"Your top ten crafters of your three guilds, which is Mistress' entire party by default, will work it out somehow," I reply with a shrug, "That's thirty people, I'll make two more volleys for fifteen hundred spears. Five hundred a group, fifty per person. Just give every group fifty for now and make use of your time for study."

After simplifying the process to keep arguments from arising between the three clans in our impromptu alliance, I end the conversation by settling into a meditative position. However, instead of going through the full condensing process I simply refined what was already present in the air to simply refill my mana faster and rest my slowly aching head.

This rest only lasted for the ten minutes it took the people present to divvy up the spears present and leave. Once the others were gone, I knew I would only have so much time before their people had done all of the studying they really cared to and wanted to work on experimenting. I had about twenty minutes before all of the spears would already be gone some way or another.

Luckily, I had leveled my skill twice in the previous hour and after resting the effects should be noticeable. With most of my buffs still in effect while continuing to refine and channel mana from my surroundings, I could not ceaselessly put out on hundred and fifty spears in fifteen minutes. If I actually put in over two more hours of effort for the original estimate, I could easily produce around three thousand spears.

Three thousand was only six volleys by the current standard, but that would be further divided into three volleys for anti-siege and three volleys for getting into an outpost. From the damage done to the actual personnel of the outposts, a single localized volley should be enough to breach their much higher walls. After that, we have two volleys to maintain the breach.

This was just in consideration for the previous weapons, working overall conducting enchantments throughout the shaft and heads could possibly double the previous magical output.

If I had taken the time to actually bless them before crafting, they would be downright terrifying. Even if I could produce a few tens of thousands of them in a day, I would have to be sure all of them were used up. There was no way I could let a group like Thirteenth have access to even a few hundred of these weapons for outside use.

Not surprisingly, the others arrived before twenty minutes to collect the next sets of fifty spears.

After an hour-and-a-half I was able to bring our total number up to the promised fifteen hundred, leaving me with some time to refine and recover. Once the last of the spears had been collected for the last time, I was finished resting and got up to busy myself elsewhere.

Elsewhere was simply in a neighboring mausoleum structure that was missing most of its back walls. The front and one side facing the cathedral still had most of its solid stone walls and even some ceiling while everything else was rubble and the crumbling remains of coffins. Oddly enough, there were no signs of actual remains anywhere in sight.

After checking the dark privacy afforded by the ruined building, I start producing crystalline soul materials in a variety of new shapes. After having self-studied numerous different kinds of skeletons and anatomies in general, I had some idea of how the human and other animal bodies functioned. Based on this, I started designing the skeleton of a beastly body based around Zekrom's use of multiple spines.

The first thing I did was create a spiral of enlarged humanoid vertebrae and held them together in place with cordycep silk. Hanging these strands of silk from the ceiling, I grow out the ribs from the spiral of three different spine before making four connecting points to a prism shaped crystalline sternum. Around these connecting ribs I set about making a kind of cage around the upper body to act as the shoulders with some socket cups for the arms.

From each hinged scapula in the back of the cage wee two connecting sockets for two arms apiece. The hinging here would give either pair of arms to function in tandem as well as on their own similar to a spider's legs. The actual arms themselves were simple looking lengths of black crystalline bone from which permeated ethereal darkness set around a single ball joint for an elbow with smaller bearings for the shoulders.

At the ends of these arms were another large ball bearing for the wrist with sockets for finger bearings that were tapering lengths of slender crystal with two small ball bearings for distal joints. After wondering at its ability to grip things with a ball for a palm, I transmute the palms flat while making slots and sockets for rod hinges within the bearing that would allow the palms to fold and bend with its thumb.

Returning to the bottom of the spine, I make a pair of pelvis and fit them together loosely around cordycep silk through the bottom of the spine before completing the hips together and making simple sockets for the legs. Unlike the arms, there was only a single pair of backward hinged knees similar to a bird's or reptile's with bearings at the hips, knees, and ankles all connected by dense crystalline poles that looked like femurs all the way around.

For feet I produced and worked a set of five hinged bars for the foot bones that ended in shortening lengths of sharp 'toes' with increasingly smaller bearings. At the ends of these iguana toes, like the ends of its fingers, were long crystalline hooks transmuted to a razor sharpness so that they could pierce stone with enough strength behind them.

Once again returning to the bottom of the spine, I string out a slowly tapering spiral of tail bones from which short and curving blades like claws spread out at all angles for ten feet of tail. The body itself was around eight feet tall even without a head so ten feet of tail should have been plenty. Now, I just needed to make the head.

Using the gecko demons as a base for my design, I form a large skull that could contain a basketball for a brain with the rounded triangular shape of a gecko. However, like a CordAniCol Blossom, the snout could open in three directions with multiple mandibles and each jaw had three rows of alternate angled guillotine styled teeth. All of the inside of the skull, though, was completely empty.

When my masterpiece was completed and held together with cordycep silk I quickly set about using Shadowmancy and Reanimation at the same time. Either skill had low mana consumption under most circumstances, being one mana per second to Reanimate or give substance to my shadow. Performing different actions or giving commands, though, required more energy to sustain and moving while channeling either skill increased the base requirements to ten mana per second.

Currently I was only experimenting, so funneling reanimating energy only cost one mana per second and moving my own shadow to envelop and integrate with the crystalline material cost thirty per second. For an actual corpse, I could shove a thousand MP into it and get about a minute of heavy combat or until the corpse was ruined.

For something that was technically organic but never originally alive, I believed I needed to use my own shadow and dark elemental energy to replace the usual 'lack of life' with Reanimate to create a new life entirely. This process took a fairly long time as the 'bones' began to glow with a dark purple light and permeate darkness.

Finally, as I was actually running out of mana after a few minutes spent maintaining my efforts, a pair a dark grayish purple flames burst to life in the empty eye sockets of the skull before the flow of mana cut itself off. The eyes went out like a candle in the wind in an instant just as the body started to move on its own, leaving it swaying gently from its moorings.

The skeleton itself, though, still glowed brightly with the essence of darkness and 'chaos' that was awakened in the crystalline bones. Just using Reanimate, I sent a few MP into the skeleton and the eyes once again came to life.

[Successfully Crafted: Chaotic Soul Golem]

[+1200XP]

[+1200 Reanimation XP]

[+1200 Shadowmancy XP]

[Reanimate Leveled x3]

[+300XP]

[Shadowmancy Leveled x5]

[+250XP]

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