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Chapter 22
10:23 AM
I’m feeling good about this.
A goblin platoon just entered my first plaza room. I’ve lured them in. The traps are going off.
The massive amounts of traps just captured several of them. This is the ideal condition! It set them off in a panic. Even if they don’t die right away, they feel the danger. Most of them are running to get out of the room, only they fear their boss and coming home empty handed, so they move forward deeper into the trap instead of moving to run away and escape.
By also flipping their panic switches, they are now moving faster, without having time to clearly think about their situation clearly. This means making decisions while panicked. Its never a good situation to decide things when in a negative mood. And while panicked is worse.
I don’t flip the traps right away after they flee inward deeper into the maze to get them into a false sense of security. But then as soon as they are in deep enough, I have the traps going off one after another. After they are too deep in to get away. Now they don’t know whether to go forward or backwards because traps in both directions are nailing them and pulling them into the hedges.
Then I used an extra mental projection illusion on a simple program from Byx to lure the group after what they think is a half naked elf hottie girl to the next room (blinding them with lust). Byx is the perfect lure to draw them in deeper, with that sexy almost naked body, which they don’t realize is much taller than she actually is in the illusion.
It didn’t take long to trap the next group! They had gone crazy chasing her illusion projection, which actually they can’t even touch!
Damn. Having a sexy elf to lure them makes this whole thing easy as pie! Its almost too easy when they are acting on their lusts.
“Good job Byx,” I told her, as we’re both sitting in the secret room watching the monitors.
The combat is now mostly over. I just have to go finish them off, trapped in the thorny vine hedge traps.
I’d gotten quite a few of them trapped.
“I’ll be right back,” I said after zipping up my jacket.
“No problem!” Byx said, with a small salute.
“Oh, can I play that solitaire game again?” she asked.
I cringed. “Wait till I get back. And we need to finish this first. I need you focused while these guys are still alive.”
She groaned. “Fine…”
I’d made the mistake of showing her how to play solitaire last night. But it was to try to get her to not want to leave me and my dungeon, to go back where she came from when she thought Styxa was stable and not really needing my help.
Now it will take probably at least an hour chopping up the goblins into little bits. Surprisingly they have a good amount of health, so it can take a good 2 minutes just axing them up one by one each. And I have the 2 treeman warriors to help me with those. Although I don’t like them getting close while they are still weak since that could have unpredictable results.
…
Chop, chop, chop… (screams)
Chop, chop… (goblin crying…)
Spplekk….
Then repeat.
“OK. You do this one,” I told the treeman warrior.
“You help him but only after he’s got their attention,” I told the next one.
…
As I walked down to the captured goblin plaza rooms, I made a mental note of my dungeon.
Since this morning…
Maze stats;
The overall thorny hedge walls are about 10 feet high all over (still not high enough), and all maze wall hedging is very sturdy, and sharp, lots of long thorns
There are 6 plaza rooms (minimum 20 by 20 feet big), and many corridors and halls between each plaza room
4 dead end rooms at the end of corridors (also that have traps)(20 by 10 sized room typically)
At least 4 secret rooms for hiding allies in as bunkers
2 pithouses underground made log cabin style (both severely damaged)
Numerous tunnels, alleys, dead ends
Lots of turns in corridors, L shapes, and even some U shapes
140 feet of moat along the middle partitioning the whole maze in two main areas (I need to do more partitions, not just only increased moat length)(moat unfinished)
3 Tree Warrior spirits (level 7, level 5, level 4)(future guards or henchmen)
And yeah, everything here is full of traps. And I had summoned another treeman warrior and been leveling up all 3 of them as much as I could.
Ping!
I got another message in my mage mail.
The great mage Mick is making an ‘official complaint’ at my behavior. The timing couldn’t have been worse, with the goblins here.
I dismissed him and didn’t reply.
But then there’s another message, this time from an unknown sender.
And then another after that!
What is this…?
I looked at them one by one.
‘Dear esteemed mage, please consider an alliance with the North River Kingdom. We offer the best recruiting possibilities for young mages, and young dungeon masters. Enclosed is our mission statement and some demographics and introductions regarding our small kingdom. We are a family friendly environment dedicated to saving people of all races from monsters. We also boast several immortal folk living among us, that sponsor humans…’
I felt my heart tug a bit. And while reading it, I used my item create skill to create some fresh delicious apples to eat. (Why don’t I eat more apples…? I love this stuff!)
What did that just say in that mage mail? Immortals? Does that mean elves, or…something else? Something about it makes me curious.
This world isn’t like other fantasy worlds that you’d see in games and so on. I really need to figure this out. But the fairies themselves like Byxxell and others aren’t people that live in cities in the world and among normal people. They wouldn’t know about that. And in fact, Byxxell wasn’t able to answer many of my questions last night.
Before answering that one, I looked at the next message from another group entirely also.
‘Dear esteemed mage, we offer sponsorship into citizenship in our country for free for mages such as yourself! Why settle for less? Why not be the best and have the best?! In the Westburger Magic Kingdom, our focus is on growing the country and expanding a mage population as much as possible in order to stave off annihilation. Great mages are given noble status in our kingdom, we also do land grants and sponsorship to those who are ‘worthy’. Why not join us to reach your full potential, while also surviving the monster invasions of this continent? Of all the various kingdoms in this continent, we are the 2nd largest human kingdom…’
The pictures on the pamphlet remind you of the style back on the place I grew up where they’d show happy smiling friendly stuff only. And make you think everything was family friendly. But just as often as not the image might not match their actions.
The rest of the phamplet was just propaganda without fact.
But both recruitment letters are very artistic and beautiful. They both have great art and show happy people in them. Only showing happy things and delusions. This isn’t reality, I thought looking at it. In truth, there’s darkness in the world and light both. And you need to be able to see how people act in each to tell what they really are like.
Interesting…
It seems they are doing a scheme similar to college recruitment for those graduating college on…oh headache again. I was remembering something from the world I was on before this one. And then the censorship blocked it.
That’s 3 main human factions so far that I’d discovered, so far. Or that had discovered me, rather.
I began to think about this…how did they find me or know who I was?
Ah!
One of the 3 Black Mountain kingdom mages that visited me yesterday must be involved in buying and selling information! That must be it! That would explain how the others reacted so swiftly and how they all ended up contacting me at the same time. Of course they might say it got leaked through spies. But spies would have taken longer and not all come forward at the same time, whereas sold information would have everyone rush forward to beat the others with a nearness of time window.
Yes…this makes sense. Actually they would do something like that. Especially after they’d blown any chance of meeting me, they’d have to sell my information to try to gain something, so that they could get a profit out of what would have been a loss expededition.
I didn’t get a recruitment pamphlet from the Black Mountain Kingdom guys, but I do recall they said they were over the mountains. They didn’t say how far they were, though. Or is that bad that they didn’t send a recruitment pamphlet?
But I did see that there’s a map for the 2 other kingdoms. The North River guys are …north of me.
Well that figures.
The other guys are to my west. That would be those Westburger guys.
Eh…dang it. They only showed one city on one of the maps. There’s a town called East Gate to the west of me, which is the eastern most city in that Westburger Magic Kingdom. The other kingdom, the North River Kingdom was much smaller…and probably had to worry more over releasing information, and had like half the territory that the Westburgers seem to have.
I wonder…should I ally with one of them? Or stay solo?
Its tempting to ally with someone because it would add a lot of security and defense to my game.
These other two are probably much friendlier than the first two, who got greedy.
Or…maybe I should buy time while I level up?
Also, I couldn’t help but notice the human territory on the maps is only in highly defensible natural terrain. It seems that nothing is built out in the open plains areas, for either faction. This suggests this world is difficult to live in also. Plus, they’d mentioned having the cities INSIDE the dungeons, rather than without them.
The fact is, my recruitment scheme will only be as good as they value me for. This means, if I jump in early and attach myself to another faction its not likely they would give me much after I’m already in the door and level up. So even if I want to cooperate and join its in my best interest to wait and get stronger first.
So the best thing to do is wait and also gather information. I don’t know if any of those 3 factions is trustworthy anyway.
Plus…is any of these kingdoms good? Or any of them evil? Do they oppress people? Or try to help them?
Huh? Hey wait a minute…
I have this life link skill, what happens if I link the life of the tree warrior spirits to the maze? In theory, I could life link them to myself, or to the maze area. The life link spell is supposed to help make them hardier and sturdier in many ways too.
I tried it by adjusting and tweaking the formula. I wanted to experiment with it. And also have it work as a network connection between me and not just one of them but all of them linked to me.
Failed..
I failed again then.
And again…
But on the fifth try it worked!
Ping!
I opened up the system notification window to read the status update message.
[You have created a dungeon zone! Creatures living in your dungeon now have +50 bonus health, and +10 armor! Congratulations!]
But then there’s an error message also…
[Dungeon linked creatures are healthier and stronger but tied to the dungeon area. Your (3) tree warrior spirits now will become sickly and deathly ill if they go beyond 1 mile per caster level from their dungeon zone. Their life forces are tied to the dungeon zone itself. The dungeon zone also has its own life force zone, and has an established map area now. The dungeon zone will now also reflect either light or darkness depending on what’s in your heart, and what kind of creatures you use in it.]
Huh…?
Well given that its a trade off its still worth it, while I’m figuring out my power. I think I still prefer this change, but it does mean that going outside my reach is suicide now. And conversely its very possible the sickly state would be similar in stats to the opposite of the gains I received. At least that’s a hypothesis.
For now, in my current warfare, this…wow, this is nice…
+50 health, and +10 armor rating?
That’s a nice gift to do. It basically means the tree warrior spirits would fight above their level by 4 or 5 whole levels! Of course I’d need to tie all 3 to it. But +50 health is a substantial bonus.
But if the creatures tied to this aren’t of the ‘element theme’ of the dungeon, would the bonus be less?
‘Hey are you coming back? You are spacing out right in the dungeon halls. And there’s another big group of goblins incoming,’ Byx sent me a mage mail.
Oh, oops.
I’d been so excited about my growth and discoveries that I’d spaced out looking at stats and my status screen information.
Whew…
I need to try to recruit Byx.
It took me just a bit to get back to the secret room.
“Byx, have you seen a human house before?” I asked.
“Wh-what? A human cabin? I’ve seen human log cabins before,” she said while clicking on the solitaire program.
“Not a cabin, I mean really advanced technology nice human house,” I said.
“Uh…human houses can’t be that great. If you saw a fairy house you’d like those,” she said.
“Oh yeah? Can you show me one?” I asked.
“No way! I can’t bring a human there!” she said wide eyed.
“No I mean like a picture.”
“I don’t know…that might get me in trouble. We’re not supposed to reveal our secrets.”
“Wait…I don’t want to know. I just want to give you a recruitment offer. But to do that I have to know how you want to live,” I said.
“Wh-what? Work for a human? Are you crazy?!” she said. She’s giving me a look like I’m nuts, and like she’s partly offended.
“And what does that have to do with what our cities look like anyway?” she asked.
“I thought I might be able to build you a place to live, to make you happier, and easier to stay here with me.”
“Oh?”
“You won’t be a slave. I just want to have you work and live with me. I’ll build you a nice house. I already have the tools and plans. I just need to work out the mana costs,” I told her.
“A house huh…like a nice house? And lots of solitaire?” she asked.
“Yes…”
(Thank goodness I have mana feeding the laptop. Looks like the solitaire game caught her. But I’m afraid to let her have anything too addictive.)
“So would you think about it, if I got a nice house for you?” I asked.
“Hm…there’s a fairy queen. I’m not sure if she’d let me…Oh shit! I didn’t mean to say that. Forget that please! I’ll get in so much trouble if its known that I told people about that!” she groaned.
It took a bit to calm her down. She’s worried she’ll get her powers censored by the fairy queen.
Wow. I found out a fairy secret today. All day she kept telling me to forget what she said. And she’s chewing on her fingernails nervously a lot.
Nice…
11:30 AM
Fought two big skirmishes then. Goblins both groups. I’m purposely avoiding to kill the giant hornets under the ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ doctrine. I even set 2 of them loose from my traps, in the hopes that they’ll go eat goblin meat afterwards.
The goblin tunnel is getting close to completion. I’m getting worried now. My attempts to slow it down didn’t work.
Shit.
If I let them have that then they’ll be able to move past the giant hornet nest, the biggest one, unchecked.
I made it through both sieges. My health bar is at 83%, mana bar is… less than 50%.
I tried to take out a warg knight but they fled when they saw me coming. Interesting? They are not letting their elite units be slain by me! They are getting smarter. But to save their elite units, they sacrificed plenty of the smaller units.
Eh…my axe blade is looking gross. The effect of goblin blood over time on it isn’t good. It smells bad too even though I kept washing it. And I’m worried that filth will pollute the stream bed. I need something to both clean it and sharpen it.
I should have figured that out already, but I’d had too much to do, plus being in a new world messed me up also.
12 PM
I want lunch…hungry.
But 12:07 PM I had to go defend the front gate. 3 full squads of goblins then. I led them one by one into each room and finally stopped them at the fifth plaza room. (Wow this was dangerous… I almost ran out of places to run them through. They’d gotten almost to the end!)
I began executing trapped goblins with my 3 tree warrior spirits by 12:11 PM, until about 12:29 PM.
12:31 PM we got back to the front gate where I put down several rejuvenate spells to regrow the damage of the thorny wall hedge traps.
12:32 PM
It seems that my 3 tree spirit warriors are leveled up. I also life linked the second one to the dungeon (now 2 out of 3 ).
Level 9, level 7, level 6
Good. That’s enough to actually help me a bit.
Also, I’m going to try an experiment to see if I can hide some of the tree warriors IN the traps! I wouldn’t be able to do this with monster species that aren’t plant elements. But the tree warriors might be able to do it at some point…
Later on I realized leaving a single treeman warrior in a pit trap might get it killed since it could get surrounded by goblins. Unless… the room was full of them? So its not something I can implement right away.
1 PM
Fought another skirmish…
Wow, there’s too many of them coming at me now. I’m spending a lot of time just refueling and resetting my traps.
…
“Hey, what’s that? It looks good,” Byx asked me while playing solitaire on my laptop.
“Its called a turkey BLT sandwich,” I said, trying to chew and not show my mouth full.
“BLT?”
“Bacon, lettuce, tomato. And yeah with mayonaisse. Its to die for,” I said.
“…” she’s drooling I think as she stares at it.
I’d used item create today to create from mana the sandwich in front of her. And I’d made one of the nice ones I’m sure came from a previous life somewhere. This thing has beautiful soft bread, lots of meat, and cheese with lots of olives, lettuce, pickles, and trimmings.
There are some mana inefficiencies from having more than one type of complex matter in the sandwich though. (More than 1 ingredient). And with each ingredient it makes it less efficient as you add in more stuff. But totally worth it.
“C-can I have some of that?” Byx asked.
“You can,” I relented.
I then grabbed my knife to cut it in half.
“Why are you eating fried fish everyday if you can make those big bad ass sandwiches?” she asked.
“Um…that’s a good point,” I agreed.
The real answer was that I wanted to develop skills.
But…I’m tired of camping now. I want to work out a real house too, but that’s been hard since those ass hats burned my pit houses. And because the pit houses were made of log cabins, dead wood. I can’t rejuvenate the wood.
I really want a house. Not just to live hiding in fear. But I feel like its too early for that since I don’t have a lot of strength or levels yet. And I need more defense power.
Someday… I’ll have the dream of a nice house, living free.
…
It took me 2 days with almost no sleep to finally push back the goblins and ruin the tunnel they made, by filling it with cement, that I’d received by using a welder and steel rebar, made by item create on the end of the tunnel and then covering it with the cement. And the cement was made using the create materials skill but had exhausted me from how much mana I had to use.
It wasn’t very fun doing that. But I used item create skills to sling it together.
I think I collapsed because the next thing I know Byx is trying to help me.
When I woke up she’s there with me, even giving me the royal treatment nursing me.
“Bout time you woke up. You know its been a full day with you collapsed. The goblins…got to the end of the dungeon. They haven’t found us yet, but parts of it are wrecked,” she said.
“Oh shit…” I got up.
My muscles and body are sore. I began casting rejuvenate.
As the plants and everything in the maze is mana linked, I can rejuvenate from anywhere.
But then I heard the goblins running around free!
Crap. They must have cut each other loose when I didn’t respond quickly enough to execute them. I can also see that there were a lot of holes in foliage and thorn hedge walls that they’d cut into getting each other out! Whole platoons of them are in here!
[Thorn trap activated!] (-18 mana)
Eh…I got a bit better at this. Nice. Its costing me 2 less mana for my traps now. And its about 10% stronger than before.
The trap momentarily blocked that corridor.
I opened my inventory box to pull out my huge wood cutter axe and then executed a goblin. Then another, and another.
4 goblins slain.
“Eh…where are my tree spirits?” I wondered.
“They are in the last room holding it off. I’ve been guiding them until now,” the fairy illusion projection, Byx said. It looks like she’s following me now, and knows its serious.
I feel worried. Parts of the maze are even starting to smoke from goblins trying to burn the hedges. They are all over the place and there’s a lot of damage everywhere.
I can activate the water create skill over those without actually being close to it, by aiming the technique over the hedges. Plus, I’m waiting for the temporary trap to evaporate.
I casted two water creates quickly. (-9 mana)
(-9 mana).
Whew one fire is out.
Its lucky I woke up in time. But now two other fires are growing.
I used another rejuvenate technique (-10 mana).
And then a water create over the second fire. (-9 mana).
The second fire is dying but not quite dead. But I’m too far from the third fire.
I’ll have to move.
I hear a goblin platoon approaching from around the corner of the corridor.
I casted another trap, which grabbed them as they spilled into it. But unexpectedly one of them resists!
He charges at me, I block his blow with the shield. Then I countered with a kick to the groin, switching to my katana with my off hand I got ready for his next move.
I blocked a few more hits but already I can hear goblins in other parts of the maze calling out that I’d been spotted. (So it seems like also this whole time they’d been trying to find where I was, and where my secret room was!) I’ll have to hurry to finish this guy before the next group arrives.
But he’s a higher level than me! He tried to use a power strike hit on me, but I evaded to the right. Then I countered him.
[System alert; close combat counter skill acquired!
Eh? This is a skill?! Cool. Then I just kept outsmarting his moves. That’s part of the advantage of being a smarter, more intelligent creature you can learn to predict where and how they will move. Then use the counter skill to block or turn it against them. In a few blows I’d severed that goblin’s arm. Then I got some critical hits in the neck.
Goblin is slain.
I casted another trap as another group of goblins came from the adjoining corridor that joins this one. (5 are trapped, with one hanging back on the wrong side of the trap, unable to advance.) But he starts pulling out javelins instead.
Crap…
The goblin made the mistake of trying to attack Byx’s mental projection, which does look real, but isn’t. Then she learned to use the illusion to bait and distract them to buy me time, which is what she’s been doing all this time.
I hit him in the back with a slash combo. Then I kicked him into the dirt off balance. A finish move finishes him off.
Then one by one I slit the throats of the other goblins, that can’t move stuck in the traps. It took a few minutes.
“I kept your tree warrior spirits alive. I did good right?” Byx said.
“Yes…you did. Thanks,” I told her.
But near us the level of smoke and flames are increasing on the other side of my dungeon.
I had to move and work fast.
While moving Byx tells me the 3 tree spirits are holed up in one of the dead end rooms which they’d barricaded while Byx told them how to keep the enemy out. She’d even managed to use some kind of simple heal spell on them this whole time!
Amazing…
And I’d been getting XP from them fighting off goblins while besieged at the one room, which they’d barricaded a simple wall in front of!
I checked the team party window menu…
Level 9, level 8, and level 7.
The level 9 didn’t level up yet. But it looks like he gained a few skills possibly, and he looks slightly taller.
Level 9 Tree Warrior spirit
Health max; 125 (Defend skill, Bark Armor Plating skill)(Unknown fairy buff ??)
Level 8 Tree Warrior spirit
Health max; 116 (Unknown fairy buff ??)
Level 7 Tree Warrior spirit
Health max; 109 (Unknown fairy buff ??)
No longer are my warrior tree spirits about 3 to 4 feet tall. They grow with each level up, at least six inches, but sometimes up to a foot!
Ping!
It looks like I just got XP from one of the tree spirits killing goblins.
I should ask Byx about her fairy buffs. But she might not tell me them, or be willing to share. I can only hope to earn her trust a bit more. Plus, the only reason she’s here is to wait for Styxa’s body to be repaired.
But the health of all three tree warrior spirits is at about 30 to 40%! Without Byx they’d probably be dead already. And many of the goblins are a higher level than they are too, which adds to the danger.
We began making a comeback as we swept the maze free of monsters.
I got the fire put out…magic traps don’t burn very well actually anyway, because my life mana made them more resistant. But if I’d gotten there any longer it would have been bad.
Still..
I did lose a room from fire damage. It cost me (300 mana) to repair the room.
Only then can I look at the clock.
Wow.
Its 7:32 PM the next day. I was out of it after collapsing awhile. But the damage is stopped and is being repaired.
I’ll have to express my gratitude to Byx. She held things together by manipulating my minions while I was passed out from exhaustion.
Speaking of which…
I have a level up!
Name; Javen
Race; Administrator class (Censored)
Job class; Life/Creation Wizard
Level; 13 –> 14 –> 15
Age; NA
Health; 204/239 –> 206/249
Mana; 498/817 –> 498/860
Stamina; 72/213 –> 72/222
Health regen; +12 per day
Mana regen; +106 –> +113(+1) (hourly)
Str 37
Agi 40 –> 41
Con 80
Int 135 –> 142
Wis 136 –> 142
App 106 –> 108
Skills; Survival, Mana Sensing, [Censored], Summoned Danger Sense Turret(human shaped), Smash, Defend, Create Item , First Aid, Meditate, Axe Mastery, CC Counter, Minor Flame Wave, Create Water, Minor Heal, Root Trap, Improved Root Trap, Camouflaged Root Trap, Rejuvenate, Create Life, Magic Item Box (11 –> 12 slot), Vine rope snare(trap), Life Link, Heal, Create Summon; Tree Warrior Spirit
Traits; [Memories have been censored], Blessing of the Heavens, Mana Genes, censored skills & traits, Life Affinity, Intermediate Life Affinity, Mana Efficiency, Advanced Life Affinity, Creation Affinity, Intermediate Creation Affinity, Advanced Creation Affinity
Equipment; Leather Gloves, Wizard Robes, (Kevlar) Shield, Splitting Maul 34″ Axe, Katana, Backpack, Coat, Throwing Dagger (3), Hunting Knife, Flashlight, Combat boots, Goggles, Soldier Helmet, Leather Armor, Orc Knife +3, Mage Rod (Low grade)(+5% to cast effects), Shin guards, wrist guards,
Ris; 1,412
Unused stat points; 14(+2) –> 0
Passive skills; Life magic efficiency (description; +1% –> +2% to life element effects!), Water element efficiency (description; +1% –> +2% to water element skill effects!), Life Affinity, Intermediate Life Affinity, Advanced Life Affinity, Creation Affinity, Intermediate Creation Affinity, Advanced Creation Affinity
System notice; skill award for 5 level increment threshhold; Create Familiar (new!), Mage Shield (new!)(WEAK!)
Nice!
But this is a lot of work for getting this. And I think it awarded me the shield skill because I didn’t have one, and gave it to me late…very late. Most people probably start with at least one default shielding skill given to them between level 1 and level 5.
But the create familiar skill looks exciting to find out about and explore!