Chương 114: Penicillium - Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Three"That's a golem," Phillipe said as he casually pointed to the creature ahead of us. In the end, we'd gone with Tyro's proposal to slip into the next room. This was one room closer to the end, which would mean a tiny bit less work the following morning, and, on top of that, this was a forest room. Or, it kind of was. The room next to the entrance into the sixth floor was a plain space, all stonework and pillars, with deep alcoves. The space didn't quite follow the sewer theme of the fifth floor.

This was more... abandoned mage's tower, maybe? I wasn't an expert in dungeon interior decorating, but that was the general vibe I was getting from this space. It had a few desks which were mostly broken and covered in dust, with a few alembics and glass-tubed alchemical devices left shattered on the few tabletops still standing. Further in, the room had a narrow archway into another space. This one, from what I could see, was an indoor forest.

I didn't quite get to explore that, though, because the entrance was blocked by a six-foot tall monster entirely made of moving stone who didn't seem very happy to see us.

"Should we be, uh, worried?" I asked.

"No," Phillipe said.

"Golems move at... well, you can see the pace it's moving at now. If it grabs you, then yes. There's little you can do, and its grip can snap bones with ease, but strength doesn't matter too much when it isn't coupled with any speed." I looked at the creature. It was lifting its left leg to take a step forwards. I watched the limb rise, move forwards, then come back down with a dull thump. That one step, while it did cover a lot of distance, took several seconds.

It was like watching someone pretending to move in slow motion.

"Tyro, do you see anything in the forest?" Phillipe asked. Tyro tore his eyes from the golem.

"Uh, no?"

"Good. Don't just watch the big threat. Look past it. Look around it. Don't hyperfocus or something else might hit you from a place you should have seen but didn't. I once saw a delver get an arrow to the knee because he was staring at the thing he was scared of and not the goblin with the bow in the middle of the room."

"Right, got it," Tyro said.

"I doubt that," Phillipe said.

"But you'll get there. Take its right side. Strike from afar. Never bring yourself close enough for it to grab you. There's a reason our hammers have such long shafts."

"Alright," Tyro said. He and his father moved up to the golem and I stood back, because I was a sensible, non-idiotic person who didn't come up to the monster's hips and who didn't want their bones crushed. I tried hitting the golem with [Blight] but it didn't do anything. Or at least, it didn't do anything noticeable. It was possible that [Blight] worked on living rock, but if so, the effects weren't clear. Something told me I was wasting time trying to take it out with that particular skill.

If I had to fight this kind of thing on my own, how would I do it? Probably that new magic-absorbing mushroom. It might be able to sap the magic out of the golem enough to kill it. I knew that when I ran out--or nearly ran out--of mana, it left me feeling like death warmed over. Wracking pain, a full-body soreness, shortness of breath, mild fever-like symptoms. It wasn't pretty. I suspected that the body was to some degree linked to the production of mana, but...

no, I'd have time to wonder about that later, when I wasn't watching my guardians kicking the stony behind of a rather slow golem. Phillipe was the better of the two, but Tyro was doing his share as well. They moved in while swinging, the ends of their hammers slamming into the golem's body with hard thumps that often resulted on fist-sized chunks of rock coming loose and falling to the ground.

Consecutive blows around the same place linked cracks together, and after four or five hard impacts, Phillipe managed to splinter off one of the golem's forelimbs from the rest of its body.

"Watch the detached parts," Phillipe said.

"The fingers can still grab your ankles."

"Right," Tyro said. He probably would have been a little wordier if he wasn't breathing hard from the exertion of ramming the golem's side. I flinched back as a few bits of rocky shrapnel flew my way. The golem was falling apart, chunk by chunk, but it was obviously not easy. Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation. Had I been alone, there was no way I could take it out. On the other hand, it was very possible that I could slip past it.

A final, heavy blow to the golem's knee from Tyro sent it crashing down onto the ground. It was still alive, at least until Phillipe went the long way around to its front, raised his hammer high above, and brought it racing down onto the monster's head.

"I think that's it," Phillipe said.

"Whew," Tyro said. He wiped the back of his hand across his forehead.

"That was not that bad."

"Hmm, wait until you reach a room with three or four of them. You need to keep in mind where all of them are at once, and your muscles will be burning before you're halfway through."

"Oh," Tyro said.

"Not looking forward to that."

"They're not too common in this dungeon," Phillipe admitted.

"We probably won't have to deal with that many at once."

"And this room only had that one enemy?" I asked.

"Let me be sure of that," Phillipe said. He hoisted his hammer and moved into the next section over. Tyro took the opportunity where his father wasn't around to twist his arm around to loosen the muscles.

"It's clear!" Phillipe called back. I moved up behind him, then paused at the threshold to stare. I'd seen an indoor forest in the dungeon before, but... well, it took my breath away the first time, and this was no different. The room had a copse of trees, some three dozen in all, placed more or less at random. These weren't any sort of tree I recognized. They had wide, fat trunks that didn't rise all that high above.

Their branches formed a tight canopy, with heavy fruit hanging from the branches which glowed faintly. That light was all that illuminated the space, but it was enough. A soft, firelight-orange glow which suffused everything from the tree's coarse bark to the dirt-covered floor. Phillipe touched one of the trees.

"Might as well stay in this room for the night," he said.

"Good cover. We can keep any fire we make on the other side, with the door open to the stairwell to carry the smoke away."

"Are those fruit?" I asked.

"They're not edible," he said.

"Not unless you have a strong stomach. There's a sort of oil in those. Some alchemists will play with it, but there's not much demand for them."

"Can you cut one loose, I'd like to see it from up close," I said.

"I thought you were more into mushrooms?" he asked.

"Yeah, but that doesn't mean I'm not curious. Besides, I've seen what Sir Nibbles puts in his mouth, who knows, maybe he'll eat that?" Phillipe chuckled, then easily reached up and plucked one of the fruit from the tree. Interestingly enough, the glow almost immediately started to fade, though some of it remained as I took the fruit in hand and inspected it with [Druid Sight] Glowing Burtree Fruit The Fruit of a Burtree that has grown in a mana-rich environment.

Capable of storing large quantities of organic mana, inedible by all but a few specific species of insects and Burwood macaques whose stomachs are evolved to eat this fruit.

"Cool," I said.

"I thought it was warm," Phillipe said. I shook my head and ignored that.

"So, we're going to be staying here?" I asked.

"We are," he said. And so saying, he shucked off his backpack and set it to the side.

"I might cut one of these trees down later. Or parts of it, at least. They're relatively easy to bring down for all that they're large. It'll make for good firewood. But in the meantime, let's set up a basic camp?" That meant, apparently, pulling out a rolled up tarp and stringing it between two trees to create a rather large enclosure. I didn't understand why he did that until he lit a small kerosene lamp that produced as much heat as it did light and the walls of the tent kept the warmth in.

Then Phillipe brought out a set of complicated spring-loaded traps that he placed just at the entrances to the room, to make noise in case anything barged in. He even disguised them with a few pieces of debris. Once we had a fire going, I was allowed to be the one to oversee the cooking. Fortunately, while I didn't have any skills for it, I was a pretty decent cook, and soon, the smell of firewood was complemented by the scent of cooking beans and jerky, along with a few of my tastier mushrooms sizzling on a pan.

A little break, then, once I was full, I'd look at how my skills changed while down here.