Chapter 424 – Grinding is a constant in the Gamer’s life

Chapter 424 – Grinding is a constant in the Gamer’s life

The pale screech of wailing souls cut through the air as their blue translucent forms curved through the darkness of the necropolis, illuminating it with baleful light only matched by the flickering of torches that stood aside the long walkways. Fields of gravestones grew like fields of wheat on perfectly square areas of sick looking grass, only intercepted by the occasional tomb complex amongst them, which stuck their moss-covered grey stone entrances out in the shape of roman style mausoleums.

The ceiling of it all was an arrangement of green crystals, dropping necrotic energy as they glowed selfishly, to only reveal their own existence but nothing else of where they hung from or how they were fixed in place in the pitch black. The air was cold and moved in swirls of stench, as if a giant with rotting flesh between his teeth was breathing upon them.

“Moody,” John commented on the pretty chilling environment, the group standing on a crossroad of pale pavement, watching one of the many drops fall upon a gravestone. It quickly took the colour of the crystals above, and then an arm burst out of the soil, rotting flesh sticking to pure-white bone with fingers sharpened to the point of being a natural weapon. The undead rose from its temporary resting place in a rusty armour, green energy filling him to the brim, and holding a sword that had seen better days but whose hue identified it as dangerous in other ways than just the cause for slashing wounds.

Wherever the drops hit gravestones, they caused such a zombie to rise. Armed with an array of different weapons, all dropping with the dark energies that reanimated the corpses in the first place, they rattled their bones and began moving towards John.



These undead seemed less coordinated than the orcs had been, at least John couldn’t see them form any ranks or formations. However, it wasn’t like they were alone or the only threat around. Where the drops didn’t hit a gravestone but instead the ground itself, they sunk into the soil, only to then rise again as some form of ooze creature that slugged its way forward.



If the drops happened to land on John or his allies, they dealt damage. Only where they hit the white stone of the walkway pavement did they do nothing.

“Okay, battleplan-“ John tried to quickly throw together a basic strategy.

Metra immediately acted and charged ahead on her own. With the force of a train, she crashed right into an Un-damned with her shoulder first. The ribcage shattered under the impact, but the being wasn’t quite as weak as to be done in with just that, raising its sword in an attempt to ram it into the berserker babe’s back as it was being carried. The attack was thwarted by Metra ramming both of them into the wall of a mausoleum, yet more bones cracking, causing the arms of the being to shake out of focus. Before it could readjust, Metra with a triumphant scream took Qiada and executed an attack that had the upwards pointing tip rush even higher, into the decaying head and ripping it straight up.all new stories at n0ve/lbi/n(.)com

Holding the weapon high like the banner of victory for a moment, Metra then suddenly swung it down, sending the scattering remains of the created enemies into a crescent as she took stance. With that straight charge she gained the focus of at least half the figurative room on her own. Whether or not that was a good or bad thing remained to be seen in the long term, but John seized the opportunity to model something as close to an ideal situation as he could.

The ideal began with a roof. Now the question was how to get that roof. Without Momo around, erecting the tower they had usually used as the base didn’t quite work out, being just too mana intensive to complete in one go. He could put up some walls, but that would be very costly for a limited effect, especially with those slimes looking very much like they could just do as slugs do and travel up anyway. Really, what he wanted was protection from the random damage of the falling energy drops, an advantageous standing came after that.

The question remained how. There were three ways. One was Gnome, one was Nadine (the two type combination from Undine and Gnome that had control over plantlife) and one was Smlere (Gnome + Salamander, lava control). The last one of those would do the exact same job as the first one but also give a cheap lava trench in addition to having more mana on her own, thus needing to take less from John himself. Meanwhile, the decision between Gnome and Nadine was one of reliability versus cost. He already knew that stone negated the falling drops completely, would vines have the same effect or would the drops slowly trickle through?

It was a risk not worth taking, so John came to his conclusion. ‘Gnome, Salamander, Stirwin, fuse!’ he mentally instructed them. This was another advantage of Metra going off on her own, he could go back to using mental communication, which was way quicker.

It was something between a bad habit and a wise policy that John tried to come up with plans to defeat everyone, even his summons or enemies. At the very least it kept his mind tactically trained, and there was little need to adapt to the current situation anymore. The roof held, Smlere had already split again so Gnome and Aclysia were guarding the entrances. Meanwhile, Salamander and Sylph were throwing their airborne attacks as per usual (albeit the endflame elemental also used her new melee capabilities whenever she felt like it) and John and Undine provided support from within the bunker. They were pretty set in their usual pattern.



Of course, those tended to shake that up quite a bit. John noted that the Necrooze didn’t have influence in that spawning. Did that mean there was a secondary boss that could spawn or where the slimes just extra? Judging by the earlier Observe he had thrown their way, he guessed the latter.

Through Jack’s eyes, he soon spied a new kind of undead walking up the stairs of a mausoleum. It was a skeleton, all the flesh that could have covered it had liquified into a gelatine mass of greyish pink that stretched over the warped bones, more spikey and thicker than usual.



The aptly named undead raised a black wooden staff to the ceiling and thus more drops began to fall from the crystals above. He wasn’t doing anything else, just standing there, but there was simply no reason for him to move either.

‘I hate spawners,’ John thought as he became aware of the situation that this put them in. Ignoring the Raincaller meant that more Un-damned would spawn thanks to the increased rain. They would then kill those Un-damned, causing a second Raincaller to spawn. That would then increase the rain even more. Eventually they would find themselves in a figurative storm of necrotic energy raining from above and undead attacking them. It was a pretty mean cycle. It also would have been a pretty quick road to certain death without a roof.

Luckily the easy fix was to kill the boss. Of course, there would still be some more enemies than before, but it seemed the dungeon was somewhat balanced with that in mind. The early wave had been a joke compared to the orcs and the Un-damned were not particularly intelligent; they could handle a few more.

If they could handle a few more stretching over three hours, that was a whole different question.

‘Sylph, Salamander, you deal with that Raincaller,’ John instructed as he turned Jack around to keep an eye on the rest of the situation. That was when a miscalculation struck him. When the drops had been few and far in-between, dodging them as a sparrow hadn’t been that hard. But now that it had almost doubled and approached drizzling, that quickly changed.

John realized his mistake too late, altering the course of the sparrow to come back to the bunker. A drop hit one of the wings, dissolving the feathers and showing the underlying mechanical skeleton. Gliding with a giant hole in one wing proved to be difficult, and then a second and third drop dissolved other sections of the sparrow’s body.

‘Shit,’ John thought as the mechanical animal landed on the floor only to then be crushed by an Un-damned, ‘there goes the money I put into that... this is like the fourth flying Possession target that I lost!’

In good news, the Necrotic Raincaller turned out to be one of the weaker bosses. The monster saw the two flying elementals approaching and threw neon-green energy bolts at them. Sylph was too small and flimsy a target to be hit by something like that, while Salamander either dodged them narrowly or simply broke through. Sylph then began a turbulent dance of winds by circling around the Raincaller at absurd speeds, her body a pale green streak inside the tornado. The battle was then decided by Salamander using her unleashed ability, reinforcing that storm with grey and golden fire.

‘We can definitely do this,’ John thought and the battle continued.