Chapter 13: Figuring Out How to: Not Die

Chapter 13: Figuring Out How to: Not Die

“I woke up in the character creation room and, until that moment, I had never even heard of a Delve before. Where I’m from we don’t have a System that shows us status screens or updates, we don’t get missions, we don’t have an inventory, there’s no magic or any of that.”

Xim drummed fingers along her cheek as she digested the information.

“You said your slot in the Delve was a gift from your lord.”

“A generous stretching of the truth. Someone or something put me here, but I don’t really know what it was.”

“Coming from a place without System notifications isn’t that strange. That’s mostly a Delver thing, and some isolated regions don’t have the ability to cultivate Delvers. But, not knowing about the Delve at all is very odd. You’d have to be living somewhere totally cut off from the world. Like one of the primitive tribes in Alkea forest. As for magic, I mean, even small villages have someone who can cast. Where I’m from nearly everyone has at least one skill that uses mana.”

“Well, believe me, where I come from is probably very cut off from wherever ‘here’ is.”

I noticed Varrin glancing back at us. He was clearly listening in on the conversation, but he kept his thoughts to himself and continued watching for any approaching threats.

[This revelation is not germane to our current course of action,] Grotto uttered into our minds. [I recommend your allies consider this knowledge and adjust accordingly, but we must decide how we are going to reclaim the obelisk and repair the Delve.]

“I still don’t understand,” I said. “You were helping Hognay because he was threatening the Delve, but didn’t helping him put the Delve in even greater danger?”

[It was not an easy choice. When Hognay arrived, he decimated my defenses and began harvesting the mana for himself with the C’thon creature. He promised that he would leave once he had gathered sufficient mana reserves, but I did not believe him. I queried the system to have the Delve listed for early harvesting and the system approved my request, but failed to list the Delve at the level I had suggested, using the measure of mana accumulation to determine difficulty rather than the power of the intruders.

[When your party entered, Hognay was furious as your presence risked disrupting his machinations. He threatened to destroy the obelisk and the Delve if I did not assist him in eliminating your group before you were able to find the obelisk room. I did not believe you were powerful enough to stop him, even if you did reach the obelisk, so I agreed. It is unfortunate that your party members perished and I regret that I was forced to play such an active role in their demise, but as the Delve’s core I am often responsible for the deaths of Delvers as part of my duties. I will not claim that it truly bothers me that I had to take such action.]

“So why do you think we can help you now?” I said.

[You, Arlo. Not only were you able to break my invasion of your mind, but you possess an ability that can harm Hognay despite the fact that he is a tenth level silver Delver. Such feats are very difficult for a level zero Delver to achieve. If we work together, we may have a chance to put an end to his meddling and rid Arzia of the scourge that is his existence. Join me and deliver profound justice to Hognay and his beast through judicious application of torment and suffering.]

“He’s a level ten silver?” said Xim. “If so, he has more than double the stat points of me or Varrin, and who knows how advanced his skills are. We haven’t even unlocked intrinsic skills yet, but he could have been developing his for years.” She looked up at me. “I know you didn’t want to tell us earlier, but how many bonus stats did you start with? We need to know if we plan on confronting Hognay.”

“Fourteen,” I said reluctantly. It still felt uncomfortable divulging the information without knowing how vulnerable it made me. “But they were split among the different stats, so none of them were super high to start.”

“What are the scores of your three highest stats?”

I bit my lip and considered how to respond, but didn’t think about it for long. Xim had been nothing but helpful to me the entire Delve. Besides that, I liked her. She seemed honest, enduring, and smart as hell. I decided to take the risk and tell her whatever she needed to know.

“Fortitude is my highest. It’s at thirteen. Intelligence is my second at five, and wisdom is my third at four.”

“That’s incredible,” she said.

[I don’t understand. How is that possible? There is no mechanic for starting with any stats above one or getting more than ten points to allocate during creation.]

“Why is it even called creation?” I said. “It seems like you all already had lives before coming in here. You just spent stat points, right?”

[A Delver’s body is not the same as the one they entered with. It is reforged and made anew to accommodate the power that is granted by the Delves, among other things.]

“So you all got to customize your appearance too?”

There was a moment of silence.

“No,” said Xim. “I look mostly the same as I did before, but there are some changes. I’m, well, I’m more trim, I suppose. I definitely have more muscular definition and much of my appearance has been refined. You know, scars are gone, no more blemishes and all that. But I didn’t get to make any active changes. Did you?”

[That... is not in their nature.]

“Then how about some other type of ‘entity’?”

The runes on Grotto flickered.

[Sure.]His tone was definitely suspicious.

“Fine. Let’s talk about other advantages,” said Varrin. “I don’t think any of us have been able to pull out every tool we have in a fight. This is a situation where we want to hit the enemy with everything we have all at once. Put the pressure on and get them on the defensive.”

“I’ve definitely got one big card I haven’t played,” said Xim, a smile spreading across her face, “but it’s no fun to use.”

We spent an hour discussing everyone’s abilities in detail, asking Grotto for guidance on the enemy as we spoke. The orb didn’t know everything Hognay could do, but had seen him in action enough to provide some good intel. The biggest unknown factor was the C’thon. Grotto had only ever seen it feed, and it turns out that the monster didn’t only eat mana from the Delve. Most of what Hognay gathered with his nightmare melon-scoop was given to the C’thon to keep it happy and docile. He hadn’t only been harvesting organs from our fallen allies, but also from monsters throughout the Delve. Monsters that had proven challenging to us, even when fighting them as a group.

“Arlo,” Varrin said toward the end of our discussion, “Xim probably knows this already, but I doubt you do given your circumstances. Chips can be consumed to restore mana quickly, but there are two major reasons why no one does this. First, it’s an act of extreme opulence. Ruby chips are the least valuable kind, and just one of them is worth enough to feed an entire peasant family for several years. There are alchemists that can dilute chips into potions that are much cheaper to use, and one chip can produce a dozen lower level potions. The potions degrade over time once they’re made, but it’s much more efficient overall.

“Second, chips are concentrated mana and consuming one puts a huge strain on your mana veins. It’s possible to seriously injure, or even kill yourself if you use them irresponsibly. If it comes down to life or death and you’re out of mana, it should be safe to use a single ruby chip to get your mana back, but it will be extremely painful. There are many documented cases of Delvers who consumed a chip and died after getting distracted by the discomfort. So if you end up in that situation, be prepared. In no case should you consume a second within twenty-four hours of the first. At our level, the first chip will cause serious damage, but a second will be fatal.”

I nodded. I didn’t know what mana veins were, but I imagined what it would feel like for blood vessels all over my body to suddenly begin rupturing. I couldn’t imagine it was pleasant.

“Don’t suppose you have any of those potions?” I said.

“No. For whatever reason, the Creation Delve suppresses most magically imbued items. The chips are a workaround because they’re acquired in the Delve, and are raw and unrefined. Because of that, they flood your entire body with energy. That’s why they’re dangerous.”

“And how do I use one?”

“Chew it up and swallow.”

“I hear they taste awful,” said Xim. “And it feels like eating shards of glass. My uncle had to do it once and he told me that there was just so much blood coming out of his mouth afterward.”

“Great,” I said. “Thanks for the info.”

After finishing our preparations to our satisfaction, we had Grotto show us the way to the obelisk chamber. It was, to my delight, in the northerly direction I had suggested we go. Mostly.

Varrin traded his kite shield to me in exchange for Sayil’s sword, allowing him to dual wield. He said he preferred greatswords, but having a second sword was still more in line with the way he liked to fight as opposed to a sword-and-board approach. He assured me that I would not find the sword useful, given that I knew nothing about sword fighting, so I made sure that my pair of daggers pilfered from Chilla was in easy reach and got my left arm through the shield’s straps. It wasn’t as heavy as it looked, but I imagined that it would get rough on my shoulder if I had to use it for any substantial length of time.

The obelisk room wasn’t too far away. Turns out we’d gotten pretty close, which is one reason why Hognay had risked luring away another member of the group even though there wasn’t a good distraction. We figured he knew we were coming so, while we didn’t try to broadcast our approach, we favored speed over stealth.

A series of questions ran through my mind about several things Xim had said during our prep time. Hognay was a silver Delver, but I wasn’t sure what that meant. He had apparently conquered ten silver Delves, and it seemed like the reward for the Delves you defeated were commensurate with the difficulty. Beating a higher tier Delve gave more substantial rewards. What the rewards were specifically, I didn’t know. Chips and stats, I guessed. That’s what Xim had said, anyway.

Our plan heavily relied on the nebulous support Grotto was offering, and I couldn’t help but worry that the murder-ball would backstab us somehow. He didn’t give off the sense of being a kind and caring sort of fellow. More of a ‘revels in the pain and suffering of their enemies’ type of dude. We didn’t have much of a choice, though. We had to solve the Delve’s problems or else we’d be killed when our timer ran out. A timer that was currently sitting with a little under six hours left.

Hopefully, killing or chasing away the C’thon settled things and there wasn’t some other bullshit we had to do for Grotto before we could leave. I’d already been awake for twelve hours when I was killed and had pulled another eighteen plus in the Delve. I felt like the process of dying and being resurrected had given me something equivalent to a night of sleep for my body, but the mental fatigue was starting to grow thick. I was ready for a bath and a bed, not a high-stakes brawl with Hognay and whatever a C’thon was.

Grotto had given us a simple description of the creature, but it quickly became obvious that he wasn’t very good at communicating visual concepts: it was big, had a lot of legs, and was very strong. We also had no idea of its combat capabilities. Our plan had so many holes that if it had been a bucket, well, it wouldn’t have been a bucket. It would have been a piece of scrap that used to be a bucket. And here we were trying to scoop up a deep drink of victory juice with it.

The entrance to the obelisk room was a fifteen-foot tall arch in which two heavy wooden doors had once been set. Now the doors were piles of splintered timber on either side of the archway. As we grew close I could see soft light emanating from inside the room and I drank the antidote Xim had given me after our fight with the gekkogs. My toxicity dropped from sixty-seven all the way back down to zero. Then, after a few breaths, it popped back up to three. The poison fog was a lot thinner down here and that lessened its potency, which was nice. Hopefully an extra point of health regen every minute would make a difference in the fight, but who knew.

We all did a final check of our equipment and statuses, then walked through the large archway and into the obelisk chamber.