NOVEL NEXT 102 - Improving Operational Efficiencies (As Expected for a Fantasy Novel)
Gelias shot a Monster in the head again.
The arrow stuck, blinding the beast, but not enough to tear right through and kill it instantly.
He grimaced.
If he was using his Skills, he'd be able to kill Monsters instantly. But he didn't want to emit any of his magic into the Dungeon. He wasn't an irrational elf, prone to flights of fancy, but he had faint flashes of memory from his long-dead ancestors of their journeys through Dungeons. It would just draw Monsters to him, thus defeating the point of leaving in the first place.
He shot a barrage of arrows. Real arrows, made of wood and metal and fletching, not the arrows formed from his magic. These arrows drew less attention, but they were weak and fragile and limited.
By the time the Monster collapsed and began disintegrating, it looked like a pincushion.
He walked over and waited for it to disintegrate fully. It left a pitiably tiny Gem, which he pocketed. Most of his arrows were recoverable, but a few had snapped off inside the beast's flesh and were now useless. He grimaced. He'd do this for as long as he could, but eventually he'd have to emit his own magic to survive.
There was another arrow remaining.
It was one of his, an arrow created by one of his Skills. For a moment, he panicked — had he shot this arrow in his maddened barrage, lost in the moment?
Many pieces of Gemstone Gear granted Skills that forged projectiles out of the magic stored in the weapon. If they didn't, projectile weaponry would've remained the realm of the mundane. While individual Dungeons would tend to generate Gear of a roughly standardized shape, that didn't hold across all Dungeons, and while fletchers were more than willing to make custom arrows for a fee, it would have been far too costly for Empire-roaming adventurers to need to commission custom arrows from every fletcher in every new town they visited.
It was an obviously acceptable trade-off. A tiny expenditure of magic, accounted for as part of the cost of the Skill, allowed a wielder to use a bow Skill as if it was a magical attack. Those with limited capacity for magic could use the innate power of their souls in conjunction with the physical power of their bodies.
Philosophers of magic often discussed the obvious similarities between magically-coalesced projectiles and Gemstone Gear, and how it suggested that Monsters were the dead. This was obvious to people who regularly fought Monsters but dismissed as a ludicrous lie by those who did not. It would be horrific if this was the nature of life after death, after all. Besides, Gemstone Gear had a certain permanence. Magical projectiles dissolved in hours.
But those hours were more than enough for a Monster to find them and consume them.
It was the constant give-and-take of Dungeon and delver. The living drew magic from what humans called the Numen, while the restless dead were hellfreed magic given physical form. The living killed the dead to take their loot, while the dead could strengthen and restore their spirits by devouring the living. The Dungeon would eat your magic as gladly as it ate your body. If a Monster found your scattered bolts and projectiles, its first instinct would be to devour that power to increase its own.
Which made it all the more concerning that this Monster hadn't. It was no longer being driven by instinct. Something was overriding that part of it, which meant that all the hunting tactics he'd ever learned weren't guaranteed to work.
Gelias had to use one of his other tricks.
He allowed a tiny blip of his magic out of the thick cocoon he wrapped around himself, until he could reach the magic latent with in the structure of the arrow. It was a construct, like Gemstone Gear, but of a living legacy of mingled magic, of his own magic but also that of the ancient lineage of his long-dead ancestors. They left their traditions for him, but it was his duty to build upon them.
He felt that magic, and he drew it back into himself. Like a bubble popping, the physical form of the arrow crumbled into dust, as it felt like a cool wind blew into his soul as a tiny fragment of his power returned to him, and an even tinier bit was caught in the Dungeon's mists.
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That would draw Monsters to this location — but he'd be far gone, soon enough, to the next arrows. Hopefully somewhere safer, where he could assess his next steps.
Archmund had a bad feeling about this.
He was scared of being betrayed, but he wasn't sure why. And he didn't want to believe that was happening.
He'd fought besides these people. Trained with them for months. Was their companionship so cheap?
Especially when he was working for them.
Gelias had vanished, and Archmund's best efforts to find him were meeting with failure. If he understood this Gemstone Tablet better — if he'd spent more time investigating its power, maybe, instead of messing around with his trinkets and toys, maybe he'd have been able to figure out how to best use it.
Alas, he was here now, and his new project was improving the combat capabilities of his comrades. Social conventions could wait.
Archmund had a strongly-held belief that in the right environment and with the right stimulus, anyone could grow in leaps and bounds and achieve practically anything. If someone was a failure, they just hadn't been given the resources, or encouraged the right way.
The alternative was believing that his failures to achieve what he'd wanted in life, both this and the last, were a result of something inherent to him. Something inborn, inbound.
He had to believe improvement was possible.
Hence why he was willing to go to such efforts to craft powerful Gems for his comrades.
He brought up the stat tables again.
The issue, of course, was that when these Monsters ate others, they did it in a wholly additive way. After a certain point, they'd get stronger and stronger in all aspects, physical and mental.
One possible way to get around this was to just focus in on one set of stats, and specifically choose Monsters with weak Willpower or weak Constitution, letting them vent their excess stats in the form of Gear. That Gear could still come in handy and useful in the outside world, where he could sell it to the Empire or supply his own forces with it.
But it wouldn't allow for the creation of truly specialized Gems, ones that let him shoot fire or call the lightning or turn his very flesh into a shield.
"Gemmy, how do Monsters do it?" he said. "How do they create Gems that have specific Enchantments or gear that fits their hands perfectly?"
He suspected he already knew the answer and that it was one he couldn't use.
"Instinct!" Gemmy said. "As you know, the dead are largely mindless. They are driven by regrets they never resolved in life, but they often no longer have the intelligence to process any effective path towards resolution! Therefore, they lash out by grasping onto familiar weapons."
"Was my mother a fire mage?"
A fleeting question, one that was almost reflexive. Why else would her ghost have used a fire gem?
"I have no information on your mother's magical abilities!"
That didn't sound right. He'd seen a description of her status on the Gemstone Tablet, and it had also updated with a 'Matricide' title. He suspected there was some bizarre permissioning conflict but whatever. It had just been a moment of weakness, an off the cuff question about a mother he remembered far more vividly as a Monster. Even the harshness of his past life was more vibrant than memories of her embrace.
None of that mattered. Now was the time to craft.
That still left him with a problem of subtraction. When Monsters ate each other, all of their stats stacked on top of each other. But that meant it wasn't possible to create a Gem that purely enhanced strength or intelligence.
He had a guess to the method that would work.
He dragged a Monster up in front of him, and he smacked it in the face.
No, a few slaps wouldn't be enough.
He drew his Gemstone Sword and sliced it in the side deep enough to draw black blood.
But nothing of note happened.
For once, the black blood didn't solidify or transformed. For once, it behaved like blood, and it oozed and dripped.
"Gemmy," he said. "What causes a Monster to create Gemstone Gear?"
He'd already asked that one way, but he hoped that asking again but with slightly different wording might yield better results.
"I can list the causes for Crystal Extrusion in most relevant to least relevant order, based on your current thoughts and our current situation! Would you like me to do so?"
"Sure."
Damn, it was still creepily reading his thoughts. But at least it was upfront about it. Back on Earth, at any given moment at least five social media companies were assembling a profile on him based on his actions, and they hadn't been nice enough to telegraph it to him.
"Most likely cause: The instinct to return to the waters of life and the womb. The Monster, in seeking to kill the living and repel outsiders, draws upon its strength to manifest familiar tools from its past."
He knew that, of course.
"Second most likely cause: The instinct to reduce pain. The Monster, once provoked by external stimulus, expends its energy to reduce further damage to itself. An investment, in effect — by spending a small amount of power, it hopes to reduce an incoming larger harm."
"So why isn't it doing that?"
"You've overridden its will," Gemmy said. "You've completely dominated what remains of its mind, rendering it docile and unable to resist anything you do to it. If you want it to defend itself and surprise you, then you need to let it react."
"I'm not stupid," Archmund said. "If I let it act on its own, what's stopping it from killing me right here, alone?"
"There's a way around that! It'll just take a little more power to narrow how much you're keeping it in place."
A new button popped up on the Gemstone spreadsheet.
"Restore… defensive… capabilities," Archmund said. "How very convenient."