230, 1/2

 

The night was dark, and the university standing before Erick was pretty damned dark, too. Only a few roof gators prowled the walls and flat surfaces above the water lines, their illuminated noses adding star-like glows here and there. Or at least that’s what Erick assumed those lights were. Erick barely saw any actual roof gator bodies from this angle, for their noses were the only part of them that was truly visible when they weren’t moving around.

It was more than most other people would see, Erick assumed.

Erick suspected, if the drops of the dungeon were tailored for him, that other people in this same situation would have gotten [Light] spells, or something like that, to help them counter the darkness. Maybe the sky would have had more stars, or maybe this whole thing would take place during the day. The Old Cosmology had daystars, after all; they were like suns, but not, and every inhabited plane had at least one. There was surely at least one daystar up there… Somewhere?

Unless Riam had taken it for themselves, but then it would be orbiting Riam, wouldn’t it. Most planes of the Old Cosmology had multiple ‘daystars’, with one daystar serving as a sun and the rest serving as moons.

The [Witness] Erick had experienced back at the guardhouse, with ‘Ashes Woodfield’ overlooking the market, had been at day.

Eh.

Erick was fine in the dark, and he could find his way to the university, anyway, if that’s what it was. Now that he was here, he was absolutely sure that it was a university… Or maybe an arcanaeum. It was all about 25% destroyed, with rubble and open floors here and there, but this was definitely a place of learning.

The landscape itself was expansive, with hills and valleys, or at least it would have been before the war, and the flooding. Half of the buildings were still above the waterline. Erick suspected that many of the low areas should have had trees, but no trees grew in the water. Maybe they had been blasted away?

There were maybe 10 or 12 buildings in all, for Erick could not see everything from this particular angle, but he could see a lot. Most prominently, there was a coliseum-like place taking up a full city block in the back of the campus, while most of the rest of the place had a few different ‘main’ buildings, surrounded by satellite structures.

Erick would need to wade or swim between some of the places, but…

If he started over there, and moved through there…

He could avoid most of the need to swim unless he felt like visiting… Looked like 3 places were fully flooded. Maybe 75% of the campus was open to him, with a bit of wading.

It had been a depressing sight to see a city so torn up by war, as Erick hopped from rooftop to rooftop, but what actually sent a chill down Erick’s back was the fact that there was no reconstruction anywhere at all. No wooden bridges ramshackled together between buildings, to help people get from place to place; not even a single wooden board stuck across rooftops. No boats anywhere. No fires in the night, illuminating tiny spots of civilization here or there. No people manning the walls to fight off monsters. That big castle way on the other side of the city was completely dark.

This was a fully abandoned city.

Whatever destruction had happened here, in the course of the story of Insten’s past, had been complete. But then again, this was a dungeon. Maybe the story had become more apocryphal in the retelling.

Currently, Erick stood on some sort of business or apartment-like building across the street from the gated entrance to the university. That gate was blown to shit. According to the remains of the statues standing on both sides of what had likely been a very nice entrance, there had probably been some school name, done up in wrought iron and arching across that entrance. But that signage was gone, now. Erick couldn’t mana sense anything like a sign anywhere near the front entrance, and he was surely close enough to do that, if such signage existed.

Erick turned his attentions to other matters.

Erick had enough experience to understand what ‘a monster in the area’ looked like to his mana sense, and there was no characteristic cloud of unknown space down there, at the gate to this place of learning. He could go in that way. If he wanted.

He wasn’t going to go in the front way, though, because the front entrance led to a very wide, open lake-like space, and the front building nearest to that space was still a good hundred meters further in from that entrance. That was a lot of water to wade and swim through.

So Erick hopped across a few more buildings to the right, until he came to a space where the average land of the city rose a little, and only half a meter of water covered the roads. Over here, a gatehouse leading into the campus and the iron-bar fence had been ripped apart by some wartime force, giving Erick a clear line of entry into one of the buildings that was almost above the waterline.

Erick killed another two roof gators for another pair of MP-ups and made his way down to ground level, jumping from broken rooftop to broken upper floor, and then sliding down a rubble pile to finally splash down into the water. Rocks tumbled and water splashed as Erick trudged across a wide, open street.

He was the only one making a sound in the area, his tiny splashes echoing into the night, so Erick tried to make less—

Something growl-yelped from beyond the broken fence ahead, from inside the university. And then that sound deepened, becoming a minor horror that was the sound of death, crawling across the world, and then slipping back into the shadows—

Beyond the waters, up the incline, the entrance to the nearest university building was covered in shadows. And then some of those shadows split away from the broken door. It was only a small blob of shadows. No more than the height of a normal house cat. In fact, it was a normal house cat. The blob had become a black housecat. All Veird’s house cats were all 20 kilo tiny tigers, though, and this one was no different. It was as big as most normal dogs.

Erick hesitated to call it a shadowcat; those shadowy masterminds who, through shadow control, could turn most lesser animals into formidable infantry units. Shadowcats had multiple tails and were made of shadow stretched over exposed bone and meat and pain. This cat was quite different from that. It only had one tail. As far as Erick could tell, this cat was completely normal. It had normal cat eyes that did not glow at all…

Well maybe there was a bit of a golden glow, there? Could just be the tapetum lucidum; the ‘shining layer’ in cat eyes shining back at him… No. Ah. Yes. Those eyes were glowing a slight gold color. Yes. They were glowing, and flexing, focused on Erick, and glowing a little bit brighter as the cat recognized that Erick had seen it, and was looking at it.

The cat looked at Erick, over in the waters.

Erick stared back. He unlatched his rod of the guardian from his belt and hefted it, waiting for the fight.

The cat sat down on its butt, its tail languidly swishing back and forth in the air. It yawned, and half its body opened up, the face and ribs and all the way to the pelvis opening up into a great big maw, leading into some dark place beyond the cat, and letting out a tiny roar, before the cat closed up again, and resumed its patient wait. It was not about to get into the water.

It was a horror, and it was okay with waiting for Erick to come to it.

Erick walked forward, ready to oblige.

The cat stretched out, its butt raising into the air as it reached forward and clawed the ground with claws that were each suddenly the size of a tiger’s, carving five grooves in the ground for every claw scraping through stone. The cat soon stopped stretching. Its massive claws returned to normal size.

And Erick stepped out of the waters, to stand ten meters away from the cat.

The cat paced forward, not thinking Erick a threat at all. And then it casually leapt into the air, aiming to fall upon Erick with tiger claws spread wide and its body half open, its mouth ready to bite his head off, its purr turned into a hunting growl.

Erick stepped to the right, raised his rod of the guardian, and smashed to the left, aiming to catch the cat right at its butt, the only part of the creature that couldn’t turn into a full mouth.

The cat went spinning through the air with a sudden yelp.

It was like hitting a thousand-kilo boulder. Erick still managed to adequately deflect the cat, of course. He had put his entire force into that swing. The cat went tumbling into the waters, its yelp turning into a sudden shriek as it touched dark water. Freaking the fuck out, terrified for its life, and making sure everyone knew that by the tone of its roar, that cat was still unable to do anything but paddle around, frantically trying to get out of the water.

Erick thought about going out into the waters to kill it, but he had smashed that cat ten meters out there into the waters, and he wasn’t going to allow it to pull a watery trick on him. Instead, Erick stepped back, further onto dry land, to see what happened to the cat when it came out of the water. If it ever stopped panicking—

The cat suddenly stopped panicking.

Fully wet, and treading water easily, even though Erick thought that it should have sunk right to the bottom, the cat looked at Erick with hateful, golden eyes.

And then it melted into the shadows of the water, vanishing from sight, and all the water for fifty meters around suddenly turned invisible to Erick’s mana sense. The cat was out there, in the water. Waiting. Erick stared at the wate—

Erick’s mana sense returned to everywhere but right behind him, where a shadow leapt out of the waters, aiming straight for his head.

A twirl and a smash sent the cat back toward the university, where it turned in the air, righted itself, and landed on its feet right in front of the university door. Again, striking the cat had been like hitting a ton of rock. The cat looked fine, too. The cat sat down on its butt, its tail not moving at all, as it looked at Erick with bright gold eyes.

It was completely silent. No purrs. No roars. No whines of anger.

The cat turned around and slinked into the shadows. It was gone. Within a moment, even the shadowy space in Erick’s mana sense had vanished.

You have cleared a part of The Arcanaeum of an unknown threat! 1/13!

MP up! +50 mana production per day!

… Well okay then.

It was a good thing that the fight had ended there, Erick considered, as he looked at his Rod of the Guardian, and saw it healing from great scars. The rod had been fine as Erick killed all those roof gators and spiders, but every single time he used it too hard, it took damage. Before its two confrontations with the boulder cat, the thing had been pristine. But after two contacts with the boulder cat it had gained some scratches, as though the beast had managed to scratch the metal when Erick wasn’t looking. But he had always been looking, so that was odd. Perhaps the cat had a damage-reflection power? Possible.

Probably just had a damaging aura. Kinda surprising for it to have an aura when Erick couldn’t use his aura properly…

Maybe it had a Domain, then? And it was using it?

… Maybe.

Anyway. Whatever damage the cat had done to the rod had healed the very moment that Erick ‘won’ the battle, driven the cat off, and gained that 50 mana. A good portion of that mana had instantly slicked away from him, falling directly into the rod. Repairs happened immediately.

Erick suspected that once he gained enough mana per day and a [Meditation] skill that could turn his per-day into per-hour, any damage to his weapons would be instantly repaired, all the time, even in the heat of battle. But for now, the rod seemed to take small damages all the time when in use.

“Status: Rod of the Guardian,” Erick said to the air.

Rod of the Guardian (depleted), 274/300

The weapon being ‘depleted’ probably had something to do with it taking damage, too. But Erick was at an arcanaeum now, according to the previous message. Surely something here could tell Erick a bunch about how these metirons and metamonds actually worked, and allow him to actually make some magic of his own.

Erick fully expected to need to kill that cat later, but for now, he grinned as he stepped forward into the dark halls of the arcanaeum.

– – – –

If you’ve been to one arcanaeum, you’ve been to them all. This one was mostly the same as all the rest, and subsequently filled with lecture halls, classrooms, and a few specialized casting rooms. There were even a few different libraries.

No monsters at all, which was nice to see. There weren’t even any eels down in the flooded basement. Maybe the cat ate them all. Or maybe this was just part of the story. Erick didn’t feel safe enough to walk around without a care, but the game-like nature of the dungeon seemed to have certain rules, and those rules included things like ‘making noise in one area doesn’t attract every monster from kilometers around’ and ‘once an area is clear, it remains clear’. That might not be strictly true, but from Erick’s experiences so far, it seemed true.

According to the quest marker that told Erick that he had cleared out 1/13 of the arcanaeum, he suspected that would need to fight that cat 11 more times, and then another time at an unknown 13th location, in order to clear away that quest and actually kill that cat. Erick had gotten a better look at the rest of the buildings through the various holes in this one, though, and he only counted 12 buildings out there, including the coliseum. Maybe the 13th spot was a courtyard somewhere? Some hidden location?

Eh. Erick would figure out all that eventually.

For now, he searched this particular building for bits of magic, wherever that magic might be, starting with the least-most promising area. The library. There was a major problem with the library, though.

“All the books are fake!” Erick said, slamming the tenth book shut, and throwing it down into the rubble of the nearby broken wall. The library had been shelled by heavy ordnance and was half gone, but still… He had been hoping for something good. Some trove of information. Maybe even a ‘spell tome’; whatever those might be. Erick stared down at all the illegible pages inside all the open books laying on the ground, and sighed. “It’s all scribbles.”

Erick grabbed out a few more books, just to be sure that what he was seeing with his mana sense was what he was seeing.

And then he tossed those books to the ground, too.

The library was a bust, but then again, he had expected it to be… Well. Not a complete bust. There were many places in this particular building that looked promising. The library simply hadn’t been one of those places.

Erick moved on.

– – – –

After a few steps down the hallway, up some stairs, and around a corner, Erick arrived at the actually-most-promising space in the building; the whole fourth-floor hallway. There were two student laboratories and one professor’s office, and none of them looked like the rest of the wrecked university.

These rooms had lights, solid walls, and more. Erick couldn’t see the light from outside the hallway, or even in the manasphere, since the windows to the rooms were all blocked and boarded up, and there was some fuckery going on with the nature of reality here in the dungeon.

As for the rooms themselves, they were pretty special.

The first laboratory had what appeared to be a metal-working furnace on one side, which was not meant for simple work, like cast iron or steel, with their beds of coals. This furnace was smaller, and looked like something that one would use with specialty metals, like for making enchanted items. The other half of that room held wax and carving tools, which seemed to fit with the specialty furnace Erick was looking at. It was all stuff to use in the lost wax casting method, where a person would take a wax shape, bury it in plaster or other materials, then burn out the wax, leaving a hollow that could then be filled with liquid metal. Only in small quantities, though. The rest of the lab had some benches set before tiny anvils and assortments of metal files, which was again like what Erick would expect to find in a jewelry shop, or enchanter’s workshop.

This first room looked like a good place to cast metiron.

… But maybe not, now that Erick was looking closer. Maybe this ‘display’ was more of a hint of things to come, for though the room existed, it looked more like a museum piece or reenactment, than a valid work place. There was no visible fuel for the furnace and where the fuel should have been, all there was were pipes leading off into empty air. Over at the wax station, there was no sand or plaster or other material with which to surround a wax casting. Perhaps Erick could turn this location into a working workshop, through gathering supplies located in other parts of the arcanaeum, but for now, the other two rooms held a lot more promise.

For the other two rooms had actual dungeon script floating across their doorways, like ephemeral barriers Erick would need to break to cross.

The professor’s room read: Ask a professor ONE question.

The other laboratory read: Make a new spell, using remnants of other spells.

Erick didn’t go into either room, but he did look around inside both. The professor’s room was a standard office space, but without any personal effects at all. The walls were bare. The book shelves were empty. All the room held was one nice leather professor’s chair, a desk, and then a student’s chair sitting on the other side of the desk.

Across the way from the professor’s office sat the spell-making lab. That laboratory had quite a lot of stuff, and it looked set up for multiple experiments. There were black lab tables and bits of metamonds sitting on those tables, alongside various arcane tools. None of those metamonds were whole, though; they were all broken. Erick suspected that they would be used as fodder for the creation of new spells, as the writing on the doorway said. The most interesting item sat in the back of that space, beyond the lab tables. It was a large, dull-grey metal box, maybe 3 meters cubed, with a vault-like door and several small windows. It was large enough for most people to fit inside.

The walls of the container were opaque to his mana sense, but the vault was open, so he could mana sense inside just fine, and there was nothing in there. Looked to be easy to open from both sides of the vault-like door, too.

Erick was… Not sure what he was supposed to do in the laboratory. He had ideas. Some of them were probably correct. Obviously he had to make a new spell using remnant metamonds sitting on the various lab tables. But how? By using the vault in the back? Well sure; that was the obvious answer.

The goal of Floor One was for a person to make their own spell, using a spell creation tome, and then advance to the next floor. None of this here was a ‘spell creation tome’. But…

At the very least this probably served as instruction on how to use a spell tome.

Erick felt the [Murky] gem in his pocket, and wondered if he could use the stuff in these rooms to make that gem into something useful. [Murky] was an intact metamond, fully spherical and filled with sparking grey light, while all the metamonds in this room were broken.

Each table only had one color of broken marbles…

There were six tables, and each of those gems were color-coded to match the Six Primary Elements, of Light, Shadow, Stone, Fire, Air, and Water. Hard to tell the exact colors, but the flavor of mana there seemed pure to Erick’s mana senses. Metamonds weren’t normal items to sense, though, so Erick wasn’t quite sure if he was correct about them being ‘pure elemental’, but he was pretty sure they were pure.

Well.

There was one place to get answers about all this, and it wasn’t this lab.

Erick turned toward the professor’s room, where the words ‘Ask the professor ONE question’ floated, and he walked through the script—

The room came to life.

“Look, Debbie,” said the professor to her student, “Your grades are down, and if you can’t get a 60% on the upcoming exam, then your scholarship is over. I cannot state it any plainer than that, and it does not matter that mana is faltering faster and faster. The entire arcanaeum has adjusted its curriculum to help young dabblers overcome this Emptying and it is your duty to compensate right alongside the rest of us. Now please leave, and join one of the many study groups I have outlined for you. You have taken up enough of my student hours, and I have a new arrival.”

The professor was an average human woman of brown everything, from skin to hair to eyes, who seemed stern and solid in the face of Debbie, who looked just about ready to throw a punch.

And then Debbie suddenly burst into tears and raced out of the room, almost colliding with Erick on the way out. Erick stepped out of the way, though, and Debbie kept rushing away, down a hallway filled with students lined up for the professor’s office.

Erick was next in line, though, since he was already inside the room.

Politeness demanded he not take up too much time with the professor, and though Erick thought he had a question about how to work the vault-like thing sitting in the other room, he suddenly had a different question entirely.

Erick got right into it, “Hello, Professor. I would like to know how to make this item non-depleted, and what that would mean.”

He set the Rod of the Guardian onto the professor’s desk.

And the professor arched her brow. When she had spoken to the student, it had been with a voice filled with stern concern. Now, though, her voice came out as though half-robotic, without any real inflection or stress on any particular words, “I have more experience with meta-diamonds, for the meta-irons are rather more reservoirs than anything truly special. Are you sure this is your question?”

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Erick realized he was not speaking to a real person rather quickly, but that little act with Debbie had almost thrown him for a loop. He had almost thought that he would be talking to a real person, who was just sitting behind the scenes, as people sometimes did in dungeons. But, no. This was more like interfacing with a [Familiar] who was still a good half-century away from maturing into an actual person.

He was probably talking to a routine created from the Dungeon Core itself.

He almost asked some much deeper questions about the [Witness] he had seen with Ashes in the courtyard back by the guardhouse. But… He had time for that, later.

Erick stayed on task. “Yes, I am sure these are my questions.”

“Metairons are all created with specific metamonds in mind, for the whole process of item creation begins with a function, and form comes later. The metamond comes first. The metairon comes afterward.

“You have a depleted form. The function it should have is already ‘baked into the cake’.

“Therefore, create or find a metamond that will bond to the iron in the way the rod is missing, then soak the iron in enough of its own mana in order to loosen the metal, and then join the metamond to the metiron.

“Repairing a weapon-shaped metiron is almost impossible, though, so I suggest you focus your efforts on any other endeavor instead, and only use this weapon for as long as it serves. When you find an upgrade, or when you need one, break this iron and reshape it entirely into a new form, around a new function.” The professor tried to lift the rod to hand it back to Erick, but she failed due to the weight. She left it on the table, and said, “Please take your weapon and depart. There are more students to deal with after you.”

Erick easily picked up the weapon and clipped it onto his belt, saying, “Thanks,” as he took his leave.

Another student stepped into the professor’s office as Erick entered the hallway—

The professor’s office went dark. Every single person in the hallway vanished, and the sounds of soft conversation vanished with them. Only two rooms remained lit in the hallway; the metamond laboratory with its 6 elemental fragments, and the furnace room that had no supplies besides wax.

… Erick turned back toward the professor’s office. He wanted to see if he could get another [Witness]. And so, Erick cast his sight through the manasphere, into the distant past—

The world flickered.

– – – –

Ashes paused at the closed door, in the dim hallway. Classes were out, but the professor, Markie’s wife, was in. Or at least she was supposed to be. Her door was closed, and the hallway was silent…

The only sound was of soft crying coming from behind the closed door.

Ashes felt a chill sweep through his body at that sound. He froze, unsure how to handle what lay beyond that closed door. Ashes had never been the most empathetic when it came to crying people, and Sofie had told him that she was fine, and that she was taking some time off. But upon hearing that Sofie was here in her office, he had to go talk to her.

And here she was crying.

He realized what he needed to do. Stepping back softly, maybe ten steps and outside of hearing range, Ashes leapt up and came down on the floor rather solidly. With briefly loud steps, he made his way back to the office.

Markie’s wife, Sofie, was no longer crying.

Ashes knocked on the door.

“Co—” Sofie’s voice broke. “Come in!”

Ashes opened the door.

Sofie’s face was puffy and reddened, and tears marred all of the paperwork in front of her, but she noticed Ashes noticing her paperwork, she tried to smile at him as she slid a folder over what she had been working on. With false joy, she said, “Ashes! What brings you here?”

“Don’t tell me they told you to come in after what happened. You should be at home, Sofie.”

Sofie froze, and then her smile became both more strained, and more true. “I’m fine. We expected it might happen. And… There’s no baby leave if there’s no baby, right? I’m fine. Please, distract me with whatever you came in here for, for you never do social visits.”

Ashes frowned. He went over to their house for dinner and beers every week… But she was mostly correct. He wasn’t here at the arcanaeum for a social visit. Ashes got right to it. “I’m looking to contact the resistance.”