Chương 143: Chapter 141 The mummy

Mummy. Legendary rare elite undead, level 60. HP: 300, 000/300, 000. From the floor, I shoot it with a Fire Bolt. The Fire Bolt splashes harmlessly off the wraps, and I don't get a notification of doing any damage. So it's actually immune to magic, in the really real way. It has at least 143% resistance. Otherwise I would've gotten through at least a little bit. I really hope it's not immune to our weapons, too. That's a lot of hit points. Luckily for us, this room is a bit cramped.

Especially with all the statues filling the room. So we can't fight all four of us against the mummy at the same time. We can really only fight it two on one. Maybe three if we let it step far enough out of its sarcophagus. But I don't think that's a great idea. I feel like the more we let it move, the more dangerous it could become.

"Guard our rear," Ash says to Gigi as she and El move around me and engage the mummy. That was a smart plan. I hadn't considered it, but the thirty skeletons we saw before probably also just came to life, and will be hurrying this way to trap us, to flank us. We need to be ready for them. I pull out my bow as I rise to my feet, and I nock an arrow.

It's not easy to shoot between my friends, but at this point I've got enough practice doing it that I can put the arrow right between them and into the throat of the mummy with a Power Shot. I deal 1, 830 damage. That means it has at least a limited resistance to the damage that I'm dealing. I should be doing a lot more. I should be doing close to three thousand damage with Power Shot. This is not good. I do a Sniper Shot, but I can't do any Rapid Shots.

The five arrows would get too close to my friends, and one of them might hit one of them, and I don't want that. The quarters are a little too tight for that. But I can keep shooting, doing about 360 damage per hit. It doesn't bleed, of course, but every little bit helps. Ash seems to be doing the most damage to the mummy with her mace. Every time she hits, it's like there's a tracer of flame behind the mace, tearing away portions of the wrap around the mummy and knocking it back a step.

It keeps reaching for her, trying to claw at her, but her shield is always there to intercept the blows. They'll be able to take the mummy in time. It's just a matter of how long it takes. Will they need to back off and trade off when their stamina starts to get low? It's hard to say. Three hundred thousand hit points is a lot. Even if they're doing twenty thousand damage a minute, that's still fifteen minutes before they'll be able to actually kill it. And I don't know if they can do that much damage that quickly.

If I keep shooting at my maximum speed, I can do about twenty thousand in a minute. I'm just not sure if El and Ash can keep up that fast a pace against the mummy themselves. I shudder to think how bad this would be if we weren't all as powered up as we are. If we were only as powerful as Gigi, I don't think we'd survive. She's clearly the weakest among us right now, only really able to keep up because she weighted her build so heavily. But I doubt she has a presence, manipulation, or willpower above 50.

She has all her points where she needs them, which does let her stand with us, but she's only been through the death cycle twice. The skeletons show up about three minutes into the fight. If Ash hadn't warned us of them coming, they probably would have surprised us. They might even have overwhelmed us. But instead, we're ready for them. Gigi immediately begins shield bashing and slashing at them with her sword.

It doesn't do nearly as much damage as any of us would like, but she's able to hold the entry to the chamber for now, at least. I turn and throw a Fire Bolt at one of the skeletons. Sure enough, it does 804 damage. That's the full amount it should do; the skeletons don't have any magic resistance. Skeleton. Very rare elite undead, level 50. HP: 25, 000/25, 000. Once I know that magic works on them, I cast Mab's Rage. It slows them down a little bit, making Gigi's job a lot easier.

Also, I know that the spell lasts for three full minutes at this point. At one hundred and fifty damage per second, that comes to 27, 000 damage for the three minutes. More than enough to kill all the skeletons. All Gigi has to do is hold her ground for the duration of the spell, and she'll be fine. The skeletons will be dead, and we can deal with the mummy. I turn back to the mummy and take the time to identify it again. It now has 213, 500 hit points. So we're making good progress.

It has scraped its claws down Ash's shield several times, and has even managed to get a few hits on El, but I don't think it's gotten through her Shell yet. I wonder if it will. Will it be able to do enough damage to any of us to force us to recast our Shells? Fighting the beach guardian was a different story. It was attacking us with three attacks each every time we attacked it. It drained through our health pretty quickly. This mummy seems to be hitting fast, but not that fast.

Maybe once every three seconds or so with the debuff from Mab's Rage. Those strikes might be pretty nasty, but it's getting hit twice for every time it hits one of us, almost three times, if you count all the arrows I'm sending into it. The arrows are already covering most of its body, as I've had to move the grouping around so that I don't just shoot my own arrows. I'd like to collect back as many of them as I can once the battle is over. After five minutes, I know that stamina is starting to drain.

But it's draining so slowly that I don't think anyone cares. Another minute and the skeletons will be dead from Mab's Rage. At least one of them is already dead thanks to Gigi's attacks. The mummy is already not faring well, and I'm starting to think that this battle is going to solidly go in our favor. Then the mummy lets out a roar. Its jaw drops far lower than a human jaw has any right to drop, and the roar it lets out is dry and cold and terrifying. My muscles spasm, and I drop my bow.

I see that I'm not the only one who dropped their weapon; all of us have let go of whatever was in our hands. That's not good. For one thing, when she dropped the mace, Ash's light went away. And I was right; with no source of light at all, dark vision doesn't help. Our vision just enhances the light. It might enhance a pretty ridiculous amount, but it needs the light to be there in the first place. Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

Not being able to see makes picking up our weapons a bit more difficult. It still only takes me a few seconds, but those seconds are pretty precious in the middle of battle. And it's almost ten seconds before Ash's glow comes back. Once the light returns, I see that the mummy has grown. It's now towering over the two of them, its arms elongated and thrashing around in almost a blur, gouging away at both of them in turn. It still reads as a mummy, but I feel like we've moved into a second phase of attacks.

And these attacks are much nastier. On the plus side, there's more target for me. Now I can safely use Rapid Shot, and I do. It deals 2, 379 points of damage. Almost enough to put Vincent down, or at least rip through his shell. I wonder how he's doing. I bet he's bored. I'm not bored. Not right now. The skeletons are all dead, and Gigi has her sword back in her hands, but I'm not bored. El is struggling to get to her feet with her sword.

It seems like every time she tries to rise up from one knee, the mummy's huge arm clubs her back down. She still hasn't lost any hit points, but it's got to be just a matter of time. The mummy keeps pounding down on El with one arm, the other arm scratching at Ash. I see that its fingers have grown into foot long claws, making the scratches a lot more dangerous. I'm still not worried that we're going to lose the fight, but it's becoming clear that this is no pushover.

The mummy is going to get its pound of flesh; it seems determined to draw blood on at least one of the two fighting it. I shoot it again, with another Power Shot. It continues to just ignore me. I can't help but feel a little insulted by that. I try shooting it in the head. For the first time in a long time, I start to miss my shots every so often. The head is a small target, and it moves a lot. Sometimes it moves after the arrow has left my bow; nothing I can do about it then.

The mummy is moving a lot, and very quickly. Maybe shooting for the head is a bad idea. It doesn't seem to do more damage, and it doesn't get the mummy's attention or anything like that. So I go back to shooting it in the torso, where I'm more or less guaranteed to hit every time. It's below half hit points when it screams again. This scream is different. It's like nails on a chalkboard, drawn out into a wail. The wail actually does direct damage, rather than forcing me to drop my bow or something like that.

And it does a lot of damage. Even with my defense, I still take 4, 653 damage. That means that the attack starts off at five thousand. And it clearly hits all four of us. That's a lot of damage. That's almost enough to kill Vincent outright, even with Shell. I put away my bow and draw my sword and dagger. Time for a switch.

"El!" I shout, when I see her health actually go down a bit.

"Pull back!" She still hasn't made it to her feet, but she's able to roll backwards without any difficulty. She does leave her sword behind, but I kick it behind me when I move to take her place. I step in and start to slash and stab at the mummy, trying to cut off one of its arms. Maybe if I can do that, it won't be able to attack as effectively. But every time my sword cuts into its arm, it hits bone and stops, as if the bone was made of iron. I'm still doing damage.

Only about three hundred points at a time, but I can hit it pretty frequently. Three hundred time twenty is what, six thousand? So I can do six thousand damage per minute with my sword. That's significantly less than I was doing with my bow. But at least it gives El time to recover her stamina and to recast Shell. And while I'm not doing that much damage, it sure seems like Ash is. Her mace cracks one of the arms and breaks it, snapping it in half. Unfortunately, the arm doesn't fall away.

Instead, it begins to articulate on the break, as if the broken bone was just another joint in its arm. It's more than a little disconcerting, and the arm is now better able to reach around Ash's shield and scrape against her armor directly. I dodge most of the blows from the other arm. The mummy's two arms are moving independently of one another, able to attack us both without difficulty. It's almost impossible to attack two different targets at the same time, with a weapon in each hand. I can't do it.

I don't think any of us can do it. Realistically, I don't think it's humanly possible to do it, at least not well. But the mummy is managing just fine. Its claws rake down my back as I try to get out of the way of another blow, and I take 653 damage. Nowhere near as dangerous as that scream. I wonder if there's a silence spell. That might not even work in this situation, but we keep running into things that scream with some kind of nasty effect to their screams.

It might be worth investing in if such a spell exists. I keep slashing and stabbing, gradually wearing the mummy down. El comes back and takes my place three minutes later, just as we get the mummy down below six digits of health. I step back and switch back to my bow. Gigi has her own bow out, and we continue to turn the mummy into a pincushion. It does the roar again, knocking us all back and doing another 4, 653 damage. But that's the last hurrah of the mummy.

Ash and El manage to start chopping it down, breaking it into pieces, and finally manage to take the thing out. We're all left breathing heavily. It didn't take long enough to really drain anyone of stamina by all that much, but there was just something exhausting about this battle. The mummy pulled out a lot of tricks none of us had seen before, and it left us all a bit worn out. You have defeated skeleton x30 and mummy. You receive (1, 050, 000/4) 262, 500 experience. That's enough for all of us to level up.

It's almost enough to put me to level forty three. I'm within fifty thousand of another level up. Gigi goes up two levels. I take my twelve points and put three each into strength, agility, vigor, and willpower. Now Mab's Rage will do 153 damage per second. But, more importantly, my stamina is now 6, 426, my hit points are now 16, 296, and my mana pool is now 5, 880. We strip the jewelry off the mummy's corpse, ready to add it all to what we're bribing the dragon with, and search the room for anything else of note.

El is super excited, because she finds a new axe. This one looks like it's made of gold, but it clearly isn't; the blade is solid and doesn't bend when she bites it. That's why people used to bite gold coins. If it was real gold, teeth would leave a mark. Gold is soft, as far as metals are concerned, and it doesn't make a good weapon. But the axe that El finds is clearly meant to be a weapon.

It has one broad head and a spike on the back end, allowing for two different kinds of attacks, and while there is a lot of gold inlay in the metal, it's clear that the metal itself is not gold. It's a kind of black iron or steel that shows off the filigree very well. It's pretty, but it's clearly also functional.

"My sword was climbing so slowly," El says, swinging the axe around.

"It's still only at twenty one." My sword skill is at forty one, so I understand her frustration.

"At last, I can go back to my axes." She puts away her huge two handed sword and pulls out her other axe, flipping the two axes in her hands a few times to get used to the different weights.

"This is going to be awesome," she says, smiling. We make our way out of the pyramid, stepping over the skeletons as we go. They clog the passageway a bit, but they're not in the way of any of the traps, so it's not that big of a deal. Soon enough, we're back out on the island, the dungeon behind us.