BlaiseCorvin
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Past Life Hero 2, ch 16
🕑 Added 2023-11-16 20:21:41 +0000 UTCBellows and crashes made the ground shudder. Luckily, Max was insulated from most of it, but he still needed to move. Despite the precautions he'd taken against his tunnel collapsing, if it did, it would probably cost him victory and he really didn’t want to leave the dungeon without completing the optional quest. He was unsure what the reward would be, but it stood to reason that it’d be significant. After all, extra rewards and extra treasure was a shiny carrot that only worked if they were actually things that Challengers would want.
It really did feel like the bonus quest was a way to trick greedy students into getting killed. Max was self-aware enough to know that at the moment, he was one of those greedy students.
He shimmied forward into the vertical tunnel, gathered his feet under him, and prepared his mana for an explosive effort. Like a rocket, he shot towards the top of his claustrophobic tunnel. Then, at the same time, he triggered some of Slick's power for good measure. It was a little painful on his head and shoulders since some of the dirt had collapsed, but he cleared his grave-like hiding place with an explosion of dirt. The jump probably carried him at least a hundred feet in the air. From this height, he had a great vantage point to immediately see the results of all his planning.
All three of the giant guards were a mess. One of their legs had even been shredded so bad, it looked like it was hanging on by sinew alone. Max was pleased to see that the handful of long bone spears included in a few of the improvised explosives had been very effective, sticking out of the giants at odd angles. The stone pillars he'd magically grown in the mouth of the chief’s cave were currently doing their job keeping the chief and the shaman at bay. It looked like the two of them hadn't completely understood what was going on yet, or why they were buck naked straining at stone pillars.
When Max had planned this operation, he'd put a lot of thought into his preparations and the kill order. There were three separate targets to consider: the guards, the chief, and the shaman.
He'd eventually reasoned that thinking about it like that was setting himself up for failure. If he killed any of these three elements first, the other two could potentially team up to bounce back and destroy him if he got caught. Furthermore, they all had an advantage. The soldiers had numbers. The chief had raw power as well as likely some sort of magic. The shaman had magic that she used every day.
So the best plan Max had come up was to essentially kill all of them at once.
At the top of his jump, Max borrowed Lavinia's spirits to create a hang glider attached to his chest. This was a usage of their power he had perfected at this point. He glided to the top of the cave, which was part of a large hill. Then he looked back at the stricken giant guards.
The moment he was anchored and stable on solid ground again, he jumped high again, hang glided away, and triggered the next set of traps.
Lavinia's spirits had been the MVPs of this operation. They could not only escape detection, but also manifest as much smaller ectoplasmic entities than they usually did. This meant they were able to get into spaces even cockroaches might find a tight squeeze.
For over a month, the spirits had taken the form of moles and other small burrowing creatures to dig holes into the mountain above the chief’s cave, or merely follow cracks deep inside and plant a number of explosive beads. Also helping the sapper effort, Max had discovered more quirks about Bead Sorcery. Any round object with a hole through it could be imprinted if he considered it a bead, but the same was true for smaller beads. This rule allowed Max to give the sabotaging spirits some truly tiny bombs that would still carry the full force of a standard sized explosive bead.
There were hundreds of the explosives in the rocky hill above the cave, and they extended almost all the way down to the ceiling. Even with his distance away from the cave now, Max still waited until he reached the ground before he triggered them.
The explosions started from the bottom and went up. With a crash, the entire side of the mountain began to move. The sound was absolutely apocalyptic.
It was like Max had unleashed the anger of Nature herself, The crash of all the stone falling was louder and more savage than the actual explosions had been. A dust cloud shot out at a forty five degree angle into the sky like an enormous, angry firework. Max didn't turn to gawk or even wait for all the aftershocks to settle. Instead, he drew his sword and sprinted at the first of the downed guards bleeding on the ground. With all of his speed and weight behind it, he slammed his sword into the monster's neck and ripped it straight upwards. It was one of the cleanest hits he'd ever been able to make on any giant so far.
All of the surrounding destruction had been so sudden and thorough that the last two giants didn't even notice Max's presence until after he had given them similar horrendous injuries. One of Max's greatest fears for this operation was that the shaman would collect her wits fast enough to begin healing or buffing the other giants. He had almost decided to trigger the traps over the chief’s cave first. But after running through all the possible worst case scenarios, he decided that springing the traps the way he’d actually done so would have the greatest chance of success.
It seemed he’d been correct.
And as Max watched the remaining giant guards bleed out and expire, and the last of the dust settle from the destroyed Chief's lair, he was both gratified and vindicated by seeing a new window pop up. It read:
Cradle of Giants, tier five dungeon.
Optional additional clear requirement: kill the Giants Chief or Shaman: Complete
Now on his screen, the button Max had that he could press at any time to leave the dungeon had a gold wreath around it. Suddenly, another window popped up.
Additional rewards for Cradle of Giants: Full Clear.
Choice of Prizes.
Max frowned as he saw the message, wondering what in the world it was talking about, until he spotted what looked like a glowing doorway standing among the freshly slain bodies of the giant guards.
His eyebrows rose in excitement and Max approached the structure. It looked plain at first until he was close enough to see how organic it appeared. Its golden color glowed with a faint light from within. A swirling, grey energy filled the doorway itself, and Max instinctively knew not to touch it.
Despite all the giants being dead, he kept scanning the area for threats. The only thing he really needed to watch for at this point were the giant centipedes. He gave it a fifty-fifty chance whether they would be attracted to all the dead giants or repelled by the explosions and magical residue in the air. Either way, he didn't plan to linger too long.
When he stood right in front of the doorway, his eyebrows climbed even higher as a new window appeared in his vision with a list of items he assumed were beyond the doorway. After the list of items there was a prompt that read:
Please make three choices.
Max did a quick count. There were twenty-five items. But as he got to the bottom, he thought he hadn't expected this sort of reward choice either. On top of that, there was a countdown in the lower left corner of the screen that gave him just over a minute to make his choices. "This is so rigged," he muttered.
Max made the three best choices he could while pressed for time and sure enough after a flash all three items appeared on the ground as the doorway faded away. Max grabbed up the loot in his arms, turned, and started booking it towards the relative safety of his commandeered cave system. It still wasn't quite time to leave the dungeon, but he couldn't wait to get out of this place.
Comments
Braden Moody
Good, but short chapter
Person
Tyftc, kinda short
