Chương 269: AF Chapter 268 – The Lair of Scold

The Snowflake Charm was a pretty thing, and the Mick took it with a smile. I could see the magic on it, too. Silver-ranked Cold Protection, and it didn't consume Mana, either. Princess Kristie leaned in to me.

"Can you fix them up? They all have those smiles, but you can almost feel the sadness and fatigue coming off of them," she whispered. She was right. The tattered clothing and drooping stances, plus the devastated village that had probably been destroyed so many times the Snowmen had given up on repairing it, gave the whole assembly a depressed air that mere System programming should have ignored entirely.

Obviously these were something growing or evolving past their System defaults as well, Chaos seeping into the order of whatever the System here was doing. Prestidigitation Raised to One with Earth Spell could easily take care of their apparel, fixing it all up, restoring color, texture, removing soils and stains, and replacing them elegantly on their wearers.

The silently waiting Snowmen turned to look at one another, and soft exclamations not programmed by the System escaped them, especially when the comments started about how their scarf or hat or sash was so pretty now! Their ice houses obviously didn't benefit from a ley line connection to make the walls unbreakable, although there was definitely a major line running down through the valley under the village, powering the chilling effect here. Well, I could obviously do something about that.

Stone flowed and rose up where their houses had been, most of them already shattered and in rubble. Easy enough to figure out that they were mostly one-room cottages with enough room to store some stuff in, and not much more, decorate with cutesy stuff, and so forth. I made them about half again bigger, with nice tiled roofs and plenty of protrusions and flowerboxes and shutters and stuff. The snowmen of Frost Haven turned and watched me, "Oh My!" and "My house!"

"Goodness, look at what she's doing for us!" and so forth and so on ringing out one after another as I strolled around the village. Frozen tears dripped from eyes of coal as the snowmen bounced and rolled after me, twig arms clasped to lips or abdomens in disbelief as they looked at the rising houses. - Color these houses. Bright primary colors! - I /instructed Lord Mick and the Roaches.

The Scouts jumped, then broke formation and hustled up to the snowmen and snowwomen, inquiring politely what color they'd like the walls, shutters, tiles, and so forth. The snowmen were jumping up and down in joy, cheering and dripping frozen tears of joy as they called out and pointed at their new homes. Homes now tied to the ley lines below and so basically indestructible without breaking that link, as the Scouts were quick to inform the delighted snowmen.

The Scouts and Lord Mick had big smiles on their faces as they came out to the edge of the town where Kris and I were waiting. The snowmen were in their new houses and outside, puttering and planting snowflowers and ice lilies and the like, bouncing around cheerfully with child-like energy. Bright reds, pinks, oranges, yellows, pale blues and lilacs were painted over everything in whatever fashion the snowmen had desired.

The snowman village basically exploded out of the whiteness of the perpetually snowy valley, bright as a festival or flower garden.

"That were a rare bit of fun in this life," the Mick declared with some satisfaction, rubbing his hands together.

"And now, now I've a measure o' resolve t' going after Scold an' making damn sure he don't come back."

"Killing him here didn't stop him, eh," Kris asked, as we turned and headed up towards the Dungeon of Scold's Laboratory on the slopes of Mount Ingot.

"Well, it never did afore. The big Snowman were one o' those seasonal things that happened every year, but Scold were always to be found in his lab if ye wanted t' go looking for 'im." He caught my look at Kris.

"Ye got that look what fer spoiling my good mood, lass. Dinnae tell me ye gots bad news, like!"

"If he can transfer consciousnesses among his bodies, he's likely got ones hidden outside this lab we'd have to track down, Lord Mick. Killing him here won't kill him, just irritate him," I told him.

"Would you only have extra bodies that all your opponents knew about, especially with fifteen, twenty years to ponder the situation?"

"Huh." He thought that over, wincing as he did.

"Right, done spoiled my good mood ye did, true enough. That still don't mean we can't go in there, trash his home, put 'im to the sword, an' then, huh…"

"I could fill the damn place completely up and erase it from existence?" I offered calmly. Everyone blinked.

"Aye, that's… well, that'll definitely encourage him to find someplace else to do things at," the Mick agreed, and then remembered something.

"If ye've got one o' his Hearts, can ye track him, lass?" he asked, his dark smile returning. A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

"Potentially, one at a time, whatever one is next in the link of extra bodies. So, in the end, it's going to depend on how many he has, and how we're going to chase him."

"Well, now, don't that sound interesting…" the Mick drawled, as the tunnel to the Dungeon, extending impressively out of the mountain as a pair of huge double doors wrought of stone, loomed before us. It had once been only a Portal entry that couldn't be closed, leading into a Dungeon made from mines worked by Golums of various sorts… Golums that we had to prepare for now.

"Ach, could use the big galoot right now. Shame he had to stay with the king," the Mick murmured, speaking of Kopf.

"Aye, he's unhappy to be missing such fun as well, but with the defections of the Gotrok making the lower levels of the renegades' movement fall apart, things are pretty busy among the lugians on several levels. He's one of the most impressive of the lugian warriors who would have been raised to the Tukora in previous years, so he's got status and influence, but he refuses to entertain the Tukora outlook on only classic lugian techniques, armor, and the like be employed by those who adhere to the code.

There's some big debates going on about adaptations and evolving to face threats and forces the original Tukora never had to deal with, and he's one of the biggest proponents for dragging conservative lugians kicking and screaming into the modern age.

"For the sake of his people, he's doing good work where he is. Just not violent melee stress relief, which I'm sure he'd rather be doing as simpler and enjoyable.""'Taint that the truth," the Mick agreed, and all the Scouts nodded along to that as we all stopped before those double doors.

"Bound by magic," sniffed Kris. Ding! Quaver was back in its sheath, an arc of light had cut between the two doors. She and the Mick stepped forward in tandem and kicked out, the massive doors swinging in as if hit by two rams from the impacts.

"Ho, that Ocean pushing stuff comes in right handy," the Mick murmured.

"Long ago, this were a minor Golum-clearing Dungeon, with rocky golums in it ye basically hammered down with blunt damage," he told everyone as we looked down the slope of the long hallways there, the sunken rails that had been there dusty and long-unused… and there was no sign of anything outside for them to dump into, regardless. Just a mine, thrown into existence for some odd reason.

"None o' us believe it t' be that simple anymore. The easy Golums belike still there, aye, but I fully be expectin' golums associated with fire and stuff t' be here as well. Magmas, aye, as well as the gas golum-types o' Vapor and Plasma, what are damn hard to see an' worse t' be cutting at.

"Happily, most o' them be vulnerable to cold, an' the lesser ones will be easy t' take down.

"If we've the chance to use bows, we use bows. The fire golums can use Gold and Pyreal spells, and we saw Scold using Platinum-grade the lass was shutting down. So we do this careful an' thorough, mark all the Summon spots, an' the lass will be filling stuff in as we go, sure enough. This Dungeon won't be seeing Scold working in it again, an' he can take his annoyance on those bouncy little snowballs t' some other volcano until we track him down again." The Scouts piped up that they were ready.

All of them had some measure of Versatile Strike, so their Bonded Weapons were ready for use, and in an emergency and for the later fights could pop Coldphasing on their Weapons or Bows to attack the later golums. Without further ado, we headed down the stairs against the rush of too-warm air gushing up from below, and I spent Mass Silver Protection against Fire and Lightning on everyone, then followed up with Mass Resist Fire and Lightning to supplement.

I didn't expect this to be too hard a Dungeon crawl, but I could be wrong. Better to err on the side of caution, right!

The Royal Scouts were all breathing hard as they looked at one another." Limestone Golum, Lord Mick?" Selena asked carefully. It had taken them almost two minutes to beat the thing down. They were a common and fairly fragile type of golum. It should have taken them seconds to break its Core and collapse it! Instead they'd been spinning about it, taking crashing blows on Shields and Bucklers, blows that were hitting a whole lot harder than any Limestone Golum I'd ever seen.

His face was mixture of consternation and cheerfulness.

"Ye kenned that carving on its chest? No Limey ever had a Rune structure there I remember, aye?" He glanced at Kris for confirmation, who just nodded, not that she'd killed all that many of the things herself.

"He enhanced every golum in the Dungeon, like as not," Rogar breathed out, gripping Accent in both hands.

"This isn't going to be as easy as we thought, Lord Mick!"

"Aye, that be truth," the Mick agreed, hand on Bunita, which had not left his side as he looked on while the Roaches wolfpacked and brought down the Limestone at disconcertingly slow pace.

"Lass, how much Health this Limey have?"

"Ten thousand, Lord Mick," I informed him calmly.

"That be a mite more than the hundred or two I remember," he replied after a moment of hard recollection.

"Stat levels a hundred points higher, too, particularly strength. Not that much more armor, but it moved a lot faster, you noticed, and it was Casting Silver. Limes Cast Iron, as I recall."

"What is it with these Dungeons an' all the damn upgrades after fifteen years or whatlike?" he groused, but his smile was still in place.

"That means we be going t' get a mite more Karma out o' this trip than we expected, lads an' lasses!" he noted brightly.

"That's Mickspeak for 'the princess and I are going to dirty our hands'," I noted to Kris, who just grinned ferally. She'd been prepared to just stand by and let the others do the fighting, but this was looking like it was going to be a grind.

"Except for the raw Health Qi, it was fighting like an Eight, albeit a strong one," she noted for them.

"I think we can expect similar upgrades as we head through the place. Ryin, Silver Imperils if you think you can afford them."

"Ehhh…" I said, and she turned to look at me.

"What?"

"I tried to Imperil it at the thirty-second mark." Everyone looked at me. They knew I had an incredible Caster Level, and so my Spell Penetration through magical resistance was better than most Paramounts.

"You failed to land the Imperil?" Kris asked, just to be sure, and now her hand was on the hilt of Quaver.

"Utter failure. Might have been that Rune on its chest, but the thing had at least some of a true Golem's immunity to magic. I was tempted to try Shards on the thing and see if those worked, testing to see if this was a School-related thing, like the Life Magic immunity of Paradox Olthoi, but figured you needed to see how long the thing took to kill."