Chapter 430 – Establishing a beachhead

Chapter 430 – Establishing a beachhead

An hour later and after realizing that it was pretty hard to find a hotdog stand at 9 PM on a Saturday, even in NYC, he returned to a slightly smaller camp. With a hotdog in his stomach. Just because it was pretty hard, didn’t mean it was impossible.

The decision reached evidently hadn’t satisfied everyone. “We accept the offer, Mister Newman,” Seth respectfully said. Now the man was smaller and weaker than him and thoroughly in the worse position, but John still felt incredibly weird being called a mister, especially by someone more than a decade older than him.

However, his response was distracted by a few windows.







Well, there went two more Guild Perks, which he immediately put down in the Wealth category.



Just one more and he would get his first Guild Hall Tier upgrade. Anyway, that was not the thing he should be concentrating on right now.

“Please, just John is fine,” he told them as he looked at that new Vassal menu he had gotten. Apparently, he could set tax rates and everything. When he tapped the slider once. Seth and those who seemed to hold some positions of power within the group gasped as they were surprised by a window. “Sorry, just experimenting with stuff. My powers are weird and I am still uncovering new stuff. For now, I will set the tax to zero, going to let you build without much interference...” John looked around. “Speaking of building, I think I can drastically improve your situation already.”

They began reorganizing this little slums from a spontaneously grown field to a properly laid out area of makeshift buildings made by Gnome. While somewhat artistically textured, Gnome still blushing whenever this was pointed out to her, they were a far-fetch from proper houses. Still, an upgrade from sheds and tents. John also planted the endpoint of the Transport Station at the centre of it all, right in front of the memorial. It looked exactly like the original over in his Guild Hall, a pavilion with bronze tiles on the roof and a blue floor, which now activated, glowing a bright blue where he stood.

John checked his watch, it was now almost midnight. “Okay, I will call it quits here for today,” he said and yawned. “Seems like only guild members can use this thing. Metra, would you do me the favour and guard this thing for the night?”

“Sure,” Metra rolled her head, “better than patrolling that empty corner of the island, something might actually happen here. You guys got booze? Alcoholised metals? I feel like getting drunk.”

John left her to it and went back to the yacht to sleep.

_______________________________________________________________________

“I guess this will at least somewhat break the monotony,” John said as he put down the new special building he had unlocked. The Transmutation Forge was special in that it didn’t cost John anything to build, not even Room Slots. ‘Guess that’s the case for the other Perk buildings as well then,’ he thought and looked at his new acquisition.

It reminded John of a big chimney: a metal tube, decorated with rings of sigil covered stone, sticking out of a square body on the floor. With the intent of testing it, a window opened while he was close to it.Rêạd new chapters on no/v/e/lbin(.)com

He was presented with a list of different crafting materials, most of them either basic, real life stuff or some common Abyssal ones he could find in dungeons between level 5 and 25. In other words, it wasn’t that great right now. However, the materials were also cheap. A plank of wood three metres long was just five dollars, no matter what kind of wood either. “Mhm... okay, I can work with this,” John decided and bought a shorter one to experiment with. A confirmation window asked him if he was sure and if he wanted the materials transferred to his inventory, the Guild Bank or simply spewed out into reality. For the moment, he picked the last one of those option.

The money was withdrawn from his vast wealth of over 300 million. The Abyss Auction had been working quite well for him recently. He was still over two thirds off his goal of a billion, but he was getting there. In response, the Transmutation Forge, began to work, smoke rising from the chimney until the short board began materialising bit by bit from the square base, eventually falling into the grass in front of the apparatus.

John picked it up and tested it by bending it a little and such things. It was just a normal piece of wood, not enchanted with anything or special in any way. “Time for the next experiment,” John decided and walked over to the Transport Station with the board in his hand. He placed it on the floor before the teleportation was activated, then he found himself in front of the memorial. Looking at his feet, the board was still there. “Interesting,” John mumbled and placed the board in Aclysia’s hands. The weaponized maid was accompanying him for the moment, although she did say she wanted to buy groceries later.

“Understood.”

There was a thing about the Elves dungeon that made them especially random, which was that the name didn’t specify what kind of elves. With Orcs or Undead, John always knew what he had to expect. Between an orc clan and an orc warband, the only real difference was proficiency at warfare and the occasional special unit. Compared to the massive changes between dark elves, wood elves and high elves, to name the three widest known categories of the very intricate fantasy race, that was basically nothing.

It seemed that they had landed in a wood elf dungeon this time around, unsurprising as the four Tiers before this also had been filled with the brown-skinned knife ears. Still though, the large trees were covered in shimmering blue leaves, their dark bark illuminated by the sun shining through and blue crystals growing out of them.

‘I guess a forest floor is a kind of floor,’ John thought as he looked around. There were no pre-defined walkways like was usual with this kind of dungeon. There were very few points he could orient himself on, thankfully he didn’t want to draw this time around either. “I am halfway tempted to tell you to just burn it all, Salamander,” he joked.

“Ready when you are,” the endflame elemental raised a hand with a sizable flame already hovering over her open palm. When she realized he wasn’t serious, she squashed it in her fist and clicked her tongue in a disappointed fashion.

“I think Siena will be the MVP here,” John told everyone as an elf suddenly fell out of the trees above, throat slit, hitting the floor and turning into a cloud of quickly scattering particles. In the many shadows that the branches above cast, the nightmare elemental had a network of high-speed lanes only accessible to her that also reached up the high trees. The crystals did little in the way of stopping her, only making her route a bit more complicated.

“Like that is anything new,” Siena stated dismissively when she appeared back in John’s shadow. They made their way into the forest to the sound of some minor bickering between her and Salamander.

John was halfway unsure that this even qualified as a core floor as they made their way through. The occasional elf they encountered was the same as the one from the previous Tier, just levelled up. Did Gaia fuck this up again? Wouldn’t be the first time.

The answer came when he was suddenly showered in arrows and throwing spears, eliminating most of his pre-charged Mana Protection. He looked up to find a very interesting boss. It was a mixture of octopus, spider and tree hut, a slow-moving base that slung its tentacles around trees one at a time to get forwards. At the rim of it stood several dozen wood elves, along with a queen that was wearing nothing but leaves to hide her privates.

Not for the first time, John regretted that he didn’t have some sort of a taming skills to get beauties like that dragged out of their theoretical existence inside Illusion Barriers and add them to his very real harem. The sad reality was, they wanted to kill him, so he would have to return the favour.

John jumped behind a tree to save himself from the second wave of fire. He wouldn’t be of great use in this fight, but at least getting to safety was easy enough. That’s what he thought until the wood elf queen summoned a javelin of thorns that only missed John because Gnome reacted in time and dropped him into a hole. The construct of wood had penetrated straight through the tree he had been hiding behind.

Seeing the roots around him, John didn’t assume that this was a safe place either. ‘That boss is definitely new,’ he thought, crawling out of the hole and then scrambling to gain some distance. He didn’t need to be close for his elementals to do their thing. Gnome and Aclysia were quick on his tail.

In the meantime, Salamander and Sylph decided that this was a good time to put their heads together, literally, and combined. While Salamander despised doing so, the firepower thus obtained would probably be needed.

The result was a girl by the name of Sylfrena. She had light skin and pale red hair of average length. Her chest definitely took after Salamander, having shrunken only a bit to a D-cup, hidden underneath pale green fire that covered most of her torso under an ever-shifting leotard. Translucent flames of the same colour took the shape of insectoid wings behind her back that beat with such speed that they became just a blur of fire.



“Do I go? I think I will, yes, yes!” Sylfrena shouted out and became a streak of green that left only burning air in her wake. She circled the hut-spider at enormous speed, with the simple goal of dealing as much damage to the tentacles holding it as possible. Attempts to stop her came in the form of homing spells of nature magic, all of which failed to catch up to her.

One tentacle gave in, then a second and third one. The whole spider was dangerously slanted but still held on until Sylfrena sent a powerful strike at a fourth one, causing it to shrivel up and lose its grip. That was the last line, and the whole creature and the structure atop of it came falling down.

The sound of shattering wood and chitin were the signal for Aclysia and Siena to descend on the wood elves buried within. John supported them by sniping those he saw with Shardbound, Gnome protecting him in turn from whichever elves identified him as the biggest threat.

When they killed the queen, unluckily fallen and trapped under half the hut she had ruled over, they had officially beaten the dungeon. ‘That was a rather short one,’ John thought. ‘I guess this one is packed with optional content or something? Well, I can find that out another time.’



They gathered up the loot and left.