Chapter 66: Bookworms

Chapter 66: Bookworms

Hannah hadn’t noticed until she was looking down the hallway that she’d leveled up from 30 to 33. And she’d done so without a side quest. She’d gained three levels of experience from merely being part of a spectacular, world-changing event.

Hannah could hardly believe it. Hell, she could hardly believe the part she’d played in all of this.

I messed with something I shouldn’t have. Reiki could’ve been destroyed.

Thankfully, she had a demigod with gold notifications backing her.

Zarian forced the Star System to patch a new set of rules into Corma instead of letting Reiki get destroyed.

Hannah allowed herself to shudder from the close call and obvious power Zarian had. She felt very mortal right now.

She used her Level 0 Tranquil Mind skill and pushed aside useless thoughts. She sharpened her focus.

She gave out orders. Sharp. Direct. No nonsense. Perhaps she sounded too cold, but nobody disagreed or argued like a self-important engineer would.

She added a ‘thank you’ at the end just in case and looked back to see Reiki smirking at her, many arms crossed, with one hand propping her chin on her palm. Hannah didn’t dare order the dungeon boss around, letting Reiki decide when to interject or not.

Twenty spectral spiders faded from view and moved into the hallway to scout ahead.

Hannah kept the goblin skeletons – Loner, Glowy, and Darko – close to her. The gnoll skeletons – Flamer, Windy, and Icicle – moved up as the vanguards. She left the human skeletons – Mighty, Hasty, Blender, and Warper – as backup next to Zarian, Roller, and Reiki.

Para wrapped a few strands and thin tendrils around Hannah. None of that impeded Hannah’s movement. It seemed like the Parasite Cloak wanted to cling close for safety measures.

Hannah appreciated the gesture and thanked Para.

“Zarian, visual from scouts, please?” Hannah requested.

He activated the magic hologram feature of his monocle and revealed a portion of his fractured world connected to the Spectral Spider Network. The magic holographic display moved with blurring motion from a low angle, a spider’s eye view, of the hallway ahead.

Hannah watched as the spectral spiders scurried stealthily, stopped to check the area for traps, then continued on their way.

She looked up for Zarian’s reaction and realized he was only paying enough attention to activate the monocle and display what the scouts were seeing.

There was a spectral spider on his shoulder. He was reading through its eyes as he flipped to a new page in his grimoire.

Something on the livestream spider hologram caught Hannah’s attention. The scouts noticed movement in a new room with two exits, one to the right and left.

There were more books lying on the floor. Some in thick piles about knee high.

Hannah waited, and so did the spectral spider scouts. Nothing shifted again, but she could’ve sworn she and the spiders had seen something.

“Alright, let’s move,” Hannah said.

The gnoll vanguard led the way. The elemental magic of Flamer, Windy, and Icicle crackled, whirled, and crinkled as they moved their rattling bones.

Hannah felt like she was in a large, otherworldly crawl, like Dungeons and Dragons, but even more fantastical. It was a good thing she liked to stay focused or she would’ve lost herself in the whimsy of it all.

She searched for any traps that the spiders might’ve missed.

The dungeon’s obscurants tried to block her Rune Scan +1 skill and Weakness Scanner trait. In most sections, the obscurant was mighty, but not impossible to pass.

She pierced through the weak points. She didn’t find anything.

“Halt,” Hannah said.

The gnoll skeletons stopped short of entering the next room where they might’ve seen suspicious movement among the piles of books. It looked less like a library, and more like a ruin of left behind reading material that nobody could decipher.

“Windy, here.” Hannah tossed him a pyramid shaped runic device the size of her palm. “Push your element into it.”

The gnoll skeleton did as he was told. The little pyramid shook with his element.

The runic device had two major enchantments: absorb and burst. She called it the Co-opt Bomb.

Each bomb was rare quality and had cost plenty of materials from the supplies she’d ransacked at the Lovewar Mansion. They had war manuals and other sophisticated teaching materials that Hannah had read in order to make them. She had to take up sculpting and learn how to craft some of these things out of pieces of aura-sensitive stone.

Again, Hannah wasn’t sure how she found the time, but she did.

Hannah had the bright idea of turning to Zarian before kicking things off. “Can you Identify anything?”

Zarian snickered. “I already have. It won’t show through the hologram, unfortunately. But here are the deets.”

There were five dungeon monsters, all described as this:

<Bookworm, Monster, Level 28 Dungeon Ambusher, Best Alpha Skill: Mind Scribble.>

Hannah crouched down to look past the trio of gnoll skeleton legs and search for movement. The bookworms had hid themselves well among the piles.

Ugh, it’ll take too much time to re-alter the monocle’s runes for that highlight feature. Hannah wished she’d kept that. I’ll fix it later.

She checked her person. She’d brought a considerable amount of Co-Opt Bombs. Should she go for the overkill option?

Yes.

She passed a Co-Opt Bomb to Icicle. The gnoll skeleton charged it up with his frost element. Hannah looked back at Reiki, who encouraged her to go on with a wave of a few hands.

“Three, two, one, throw,” Hannah said.

Windy and Icicle chucked their Co-Opt Bombs into the room. After a minor delay, the bombs burst with a surprising force that shocked even Hannah.

The wind bomb whirled around the room, intermingling with the frost bomb that tore at the books with ice needles. Hundreds of books lifted away from the floor, thrown into a spiral that shredded them apart. Hannah hid behind her skeletons as ripped up covers and separate pages blew into their hallway.

After a while, the elemental bombing settled down, and five torn up and angry monsters reared up like massive snakes. They were made from stacks of books combined by the spines and fused by the covers, forming serpentine bodies that were thirty feet long as their pages flipped to make aggressive hissing noises.

The bookworms’ heads glowed with an ethereal and ghastly light. Then they shot pale orbs into the gnoll skeletons’ skulls.

Hannah noted how the smoke seemed to phase through the ceiling. The flames didn’t spread as far as they should in a dusty and dry environment. She even noticed certain dungeon runes activating to keep the fire contained.

The option to burn monsters without heavy consequence was certainly available.

“All spiders, web them. All skeletons go on the attack. There’s no point in holding back.”

Hannah strode out at the front. Her posse of skeletons came rushing out from behind her.

Originally, she’d wanted to level them up one set at a time. But the jump in difficulty nixed that plan. So, she adapted.

A massive bookworm towered over her, its cover and pages still smoldering. An ethereal and ghastly glow appeared around its head.

Hannah raised her gauntlet faster than the bookworm could fire its Mind Scribble skill. A long lance of kinetic energy pierced its head and sent the monster reeling back.

She saw movement from the corner of her eye and turned to face it. Another bookworm slithered fast across the roasted, book-heavy floor to tackle her.

A few arcane web strands caught the rushing bookworm, slowing it down, but not by much. Hannah extended her gauntlet and released a shotgun blast of kinetic force, stopping the bookworm in its tracks.

She heard a buzzing thunderclap to her right and saw Loner streaking through the air like a rocket out of a cannon. He tackled the bookworm that had failed to tackle Hannah.

Loner’s bones glowed with his skill, Enhance Runes. Every part of him that was reinforced, amplified, and covered in vibration magic intensified.

With one skeletal punch, he blew apart the bookworm. He sent its many pages scattering far across the room.

Hannah watched for too long in amazement before noticing another more subtle bookworm trying to get the jump on her from behind. Arcane webbing slowed it down considerably, giving Hannah a small time window to move.

She leaned on her 51 points in Agility and the Level 0 Wondrous Speed skill. She moved so fast it was almost dizzying as she fully dodged the bookworm’s lunge attack and had plenty of room to spare.

She aimed her gauntlet and blew up its head, defeating the monster. More indecipherable pages scattered about.

Scanning the room, she liked what she saw. The skeletons worked in two teams.

The goblins and gnolls worked together.

The humans stuck together.

They took down a bookworm each, using gang tactics to speed up the killing. That left the spectral spiders with the task of slowing down the excess bookworms with arcane webbing.

It was a dizzying, fast-paced, roaring battle, and Hannah was in the thick of it. She twisted around to see the skeletons’ growing accomplishments before twisting back to bookworms trying to crash into her or use their Mind Scribbles on her head.

Incredibly, she stayed a step ahead of getting harmed. She found herself eliminating monsters at the same pace with Loner and the two groups of skeletons.

She even caught sight of Warper, the one with the most expensive runic setup, and saw that he was merely sliding around attacks, providing distractions, and hitting back with simple punches. The way he avoided hits – as if warping around them – was curious, and wasn’t as large of a drain as Hannah had feared.

Warper was definitely talented at defensive tactics, at least. His warp rune required further study.

The battle ended. Hannah’s side won with her in the center of the aftermath.

How miraculous.

Hannah managed four kills on her own. Loner achieved five kills. The human skeleton group managed four kills. The gob-gnoll alliance achieved five kills.

Maybe I should spare myself the Adrenaline Jolt. Hannah’s heart was racing. Her excitement was sky high.

She hadn’t gained a level, but Zarian informed her all the skeletons had grown. The skeletons even had playful rivalries between the two major groups, the gob-gnoll alliance and the human federation.

Loner, of course, leaned against the wall coolly, staying out of it.

“Okay. Another choice. Which hallway this time?” Hannah looked around the room and saw chaos.

There was still smoke and some embers here and there. Bookworm bodies lay everywhere, displaced from where they originally had waited. It was a mess.

Hannah tried to search for hints on which way they should go. The dungeon didn’t give away its secrets easily. Both exits looked valid.

“Reiki?” Hannah requested.

The White Spider Dungeon Boss gave Hannah a pretty smirk. She sauntered by, patting Hannah on her helmet. Then she stood by the rightmost exit.

How does she know?

Hannah waited for an explanation.

Reiki shrugged. She knew what she knew. Maybe there was a reason why dungeon bosses from different dungeons shouldn’t crawl in another dungeon.

The System didn’t patch this exploit correctly, did it?

Hannah couldn’t believe it. The almighty and universal machine-like god of Infinita had done a rushed job that left exploitable holes.

What more will we discover as we crawl?

Hannah looked over to Zarian who leaned coolly next to Loner. The demigod was backtracking on some pages and frowning. The third folktale spell of the dread mire gator must’ve been more difficult than originally thought.

Still, his presence was a comfort.

Looking down at her incredible gauntlet and the supply of runic devices she had in her pockets, Hannah clenched her hands into fists with a sudden rise of determination.

Alright, Reiki was a cheat in the System. Hannah wasn’t against exploiting that. This was a life-and-death game, after all, and Hannah wanted to win for keeps.

What would happen if they conquered the Devouring Librarian Dungeon? Nobody had done that before based on her records. Wouldn’t that mean all the guarded secrets of the Hemlock Family and dungeon would belong to Hannah’s party?

That would be a pleasant start to Hannah’s vengeance. First, take away what the Hemlock’s valued most. Second, have that delayed appointment with Lady Rhea Hemlock and show her the error of her ways.

“Let’s keep going.”