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SOM - Chapter 7 - Shinies
🕑 Added 2024-03-18 13:05:45 +0000 UTCOnce Luke finished re-reading his latest system messages, he forced himself to close the interface. It was hard not to worry about the implications. What if the reason he was in the top thousand was because the awakening had killed everyone else?
He hoped that the reason was something more innocuous.
Maybe Gaia had safely tucked everyone away in the tutorial, or perhaps only people in dungeons like himself could earn levels.
Luke shook himself. He didn’t want another rat-king to catch him unaware. Cautiously approaching the window, Luke checked the streets outside. No monsters roamed the streets that he could see. All he could hear was the hum of the blue streetlights, and could just barely hear the distant rush of water.
Though the river was loud, he hadn’t been able to hear it before from inside the house. It was tangible evidence that his senses had grown sharper after his latest gains. He wondered which attribute boosted his senses and suspected it was his [Wisdom] based on his knowledge of RPGs. Luke briefly considered putting his free point from level five into the attribute as a test, but held off the impulse.
Back in the centre of the room, the corpse of the rat-king called him, so Luke left the window behind to go poke at it. Outside of the heat of battle, the smell was more noticeable, particularly with his empowered sense of smell.
It certainly tested his gag reflex.
Luke wasn’t entirely sure how he was supposed to loot the amalgamated beast. All the gear he had collected so far had come from just picking stuff up; the tool belt from Patrick, and the handbag from the unnamed woman. Rats didn’t have pockets, so where was his loot? The heap of rat-flesh was shimmering with a barely perceptible white light.
Maybe I have to cut it open?
Luke was going to have to wash off the gore from the fight anyway, but he didn’t relish the idea of butchering the beast. However, in the end, he didn’t even have to get his hands dirty. As soon as he reached down to touch the rat-king, a white substance exuded from its pores and touched his fingers.
When Luke pulled his hand back in alarm, the liquid followed like a sticky thread of a spider web. Despite his panic, the fluid did him no harm and instead condensed into a grey rod in his hand. The rod dropped to the floor when Luke didn’t grab it, and the rest of the white stuff formed itself into nine skeletal tails.
[Swarmbreaker - Mortal (Uncommon) - Whip with Swarm domain.]
Picking up the weapon slowly, Luke examined it. Much like the monster it came from, it gave off the busy and crowded sensation of the [Swarm] domain. A chorus of cracks split the air when Luke tried giving the weapon a practice swing.
He was a natural.
How practical it was as a weapon was up for debate, but the weapon was undoubtedly intimidating. The tails took on a life of their own as Luke waved them through the air, undulating and snapping like vipers.
Unlike Luke’s hammer, the whip did not easily fit in his tool belt. This meant that Luke spent an awkward minute trying to figure out the best way to carry his shiny new weapon. The whip was bulky, long and the bones forming the skeletal tails were quite sharp, like segmented razor blades.
Fortunately, Luke’s skin had become rather tough with his three points in [Endurance]. So, he could wrap it around his body without it slicing up his skin. He took off his shirt, now ripped in several places by the whip, and left it on the floor. It had been uncomfortably tight against his new muscles, anyway.
With the loot plundered, Luke set about exploring the other major development that came about in the aftermath of his fight. He wanted to go shopping. Blue boxes sprang to life and Luke found the menu had added another tab: the marketplace. Dreams of going grocery shopping failed to materialise when he read through it.
The marketplace was practically empty. It wasn’t too surprising, as he was one of the first to unlock it, but the meagre offerings were still disappointing. There were a total of nineteen items listed for sale, and almost half of them were a common grade weapon called [Leaf Blade]. Each of the daggers was listed for a price of a thousand credits, but Luke had no frame of reference if this was a good deal. Even if they were a good deal, Luke couldn’t visualise how they would fit into his burgeoning fighting style.
Whilst having an off-hand dagger wouldn’t hurt, using the door as an improvised barrier had worked reasonably well. With that in mind, Luke scanned the marketplace but found no shields listed. Maybe I should just carry a door around.
Only one item on the market caught Luke’s interest, and that was [Eve’s Apple - Uncommon]. A man called Jonas Hewitt had listed it. Jonas was doing well for himself, as he was the same guy selling all the daggers. The description of the item stated that the apple was a fruit imbued with the intellect of a serpent.
Though Luke hadn’t yet figured out exactly what [Intellect] did, he wanted the fruit anyway.
He was still hungry.
Motivated by forbidden fruit, Luke set about trying to figure out the marketplace. The first thing he learnt was that he couldn’t just grab random junk from the dungeon and put it up for sale. The only thing the interface accepted as a valid item was the whip, and Luke spent a good couple of minutes agonising about putting his shiny new toy up for sale. It was his loot; he earned it, but he recognised that reasoning as counter-productive.
As he sent off the mental command, the whip liquified to the same ethereal fluid from whence it came. It floated for a moment before his palm sucked in the liquid like a sponge. He hadn’t expected that.
[Swarmbreaker placed in your personal storage slot. To store more items, it is suggested you take the tutorial on controlling Dreamspace.]
It would have been nice to know that I could store shit before I ruined my shirt, Luke complained. A bit more testing showed that the whip didn’t have to be on the market to be stored. Now that he knew how to use his storage space, he could take it in and out at will.
Re-materialising the weapon took a few seconds, so wasn’t something well suited to a quick draw. Perhaps with practice he could speed it up. For now, he would have to trust in his hammer, which fit in his tool belt snugly. When he glanced at said hammer, he paused and squinted for a moment.
Luke wasn’t entirely sure, but looked like the hammer’s head had grown just a fraction larger, and the shaft was just a little longer. During his last scuffle, Luke remembered wishing the hammer had a bit more heft to it: now it had. Perhaps this was what the system meant by his concept augmenting the weapon. If it continued to grow, he would have to cut a hole in his tool belt.
After playing with his storage a while longer, Luke discovered the marketplace had a settings menu. One notable setting was an option to tithe a portion of his experience gained to the system itself. Luke left the tithe at 1%. With the marketplace in its infancy, the value of credits was uncertain compared to his own personal growth. He would rather sell the whip to get some cash, and after a moment of consideration, that’s what he did.
Luke listed the uncommon weapon for the same price as the apple and put it out of mind. Ultimately, the whip felt too unwieldy, and he suspected the [Warhammer] and [Whip] domains didn’t get on.
He wasn’t sure if the stress of his situation was getting to him, but he got the impression that concepts and their domains had personalities of a sort.
A little sad to sell his first proper loot, Luke went back downstairs to check out the rat nest. The large apartment might have had something shiny. Compared to those below it, the room on the first floor was massive. It took up the entire floor by itself. Whatever kind of society the dead city once held appeared to have been rather unequal, based on the difference in accommodations.
This meant it had space for more furniture and luxuries. The bed was the largest Luke had seen, though with it being sized for dwarves, it was still small for him.
Better than the floor, Luke thought.
The sheets were covered in scruffy rat hair, but beneath them, the bed was in surprisingly good condition. The mattress looked to be made of a porous stone resembling a pumice. However, when he sat on it, he found it behaved more like memory foam.
Besides the bed, the room contained a few useful things worth taking. There was a luxurious ebony hairbrush Luke stowed in his bag, a portable glow stone he grabbed from a side drawer, and a tiny fruit knife lying in an empty bowl. The obsidian blade was quite sharp, and it fit into his tool belt nicely. He wouldn’t kill anything with it, but it was nice to have.
Inside an ornamental display case stood the most interesting item of all: a full suit of plate armour. Much like mismatched clothes from lower floors, the dwarven armour was too small for him. It was a shame because the flame red and white design looked pretty badass.
Taking the armour apart into pieces, Luke found that the only part that comfortably fit him was the metal helm and the mail coif beneath it. Having protection for his head and neck was better than nothing, so Luke gave it a go. He found it to be a snug fit, but the Y-shaped face opening gave him room to breathe without affecting his vision too badly.
Once Luke accustomed himself to his shiny new helm, he went to the door and considered if he could fashion it into a makeshift shield.
Luke had always enjoyed working with his hands.
It definitely could work, even if he didn’t have any real woodworking tools. The door already had a handle, and the sturdy frame was almost short enough to resemble a tower shield, even if it was far too wide. He could always carve it down to something more elegant with a bit of time and effort.
The door was covered in scratches and splintered where the locking mechanism was ripped out, but was still better quality than the doors further down, so he stuck with it.
A couple of bashes with Luke’s hammer were enough to knock the pins out of the hinges. He found it ironic that he was finally using the carpenter’s hammer for its intended purpose.
The immediate problem with the door was that it was too big and unwieldy, so Luke lay it flat on the floor. He then used the claw of the hammer to split it lengthwise and widthwise until it was a quarter of its original size. The result was hardly a work of art, but it was just about usable.
Luke spent the next half hour tidying up his new ‘shield’, but didn’t worry too much about aesthetics. He hoped if he mentally labelled the door as a shield, the system would recognise it as such, and give him a free concept.
I look like an absolute moron, Luke thought as he regarded himself in a polished mirror. Looking back at him was an oversized barbarian. The musclebound warrior held a hacked-up door in one hand and an oversized carpenter’s hammer in the other. With the flame-red helm covering his face, he resembled a masked mediaeval wrestler. All he was missing was a cape.
Though he felt a little stupid, Luke was ready to hunt more rats. He was clearly falling behind other forerunners like Jonas, who was spamming the marketplace with loot drops.
On his way to the top floors, Luke took a moment to look out of the window in the entrance hall. He didn’t notice it immediately, but after a few seconds, he caught sight of movement in the distance. Luke recognised the squat figures of the undead dwarven soldiers. It was impossible to tell if it was the same troop he had seen earlier in the day, but they looked and numbered the same.
He wondered how many undead roamed the city? Were they an invading force, or did some cataclysmic event turn the city into a necropolis?
Luke didn’t know if the city was an actual place, or pure fabrication. The flying train obviously didn’t fit with the city below, and neither did the giant gothic church look like it belonged.
Before ducking out of sight, Luke’s curiosity pushed him to reach out his mind towards the dwarves to feel their auras. They were so far away that Luke didn’t get much of an impression, but the system jumped in to fill in the gaps.
[Level 13 Dwarven Ghoul - An aetherling that walks the path of the Death Guard. Core Domains: Steel and Bone.]
It was an ominous combination of concepts, for a monster so much higher than Luke’s level. That there was an entire unit of the [Death Guards] made it so much worse, especially when one of them turned to look towards him.
That’s not good.
Comments
Miakaru
Tftc, it’s cool he’s that he’s not the only one stuck in a dungeon.
