Chương 181: Chapter 179: Cave Golem

The next morning, we follow Amanda's tracks again. She left from this cave and continued up the mountain, once more blazing the path for us. Every so often, Vincent checks to see if he can cast his spell again. I think he's hoping that the anti magic area was just a ring around the mountain. But it never comes back. I don't expect it to, not for as long as there is this path from Amanda. If she can fly again, I'm sure she will. She's probably checking as often as Vincent is.

It's much faster going for us than it was for her, but that doesn't mean we're moving fast. The cold wind bites at us as we go ever higher up the mountain. The ground below is lost in the morning fog, making it feel like we've moved through the cloud layer. But I know there are clouds above us, too. Looking up at them, they seem to be darkening as we travel. In a few hours, they might open up and snow down on us. That would obscure Amanda's path a bit, and make progress even slower.

I really hope we find another cave. An actual cave that goes into the mountain, allowing us to climb from the inside for a while. I know it will be full of monsters, but I'll take monsters over the boredom of trudging through snow. I used to trudge through snow back home. There's a special way that you walk on snow. I don't really know how to describe it. It's kind of a combination of walking and sliding.

It makes it easier to keep your footing when there's still snow beneath your feet, but it is absolutely exhausting. My lower back is aching before noon, and I'm sure the others are having just as much trouble. Vincent seems to be taking it the worst. He moved down the line and is now bringing up the rear, but I can still hear him complaining as we walk. He's not using words, but the groans and grunts that float forward from him make it clear that he's not having a good time. Got too used to flying, I suppose.

It's late in the afternoon when Amanda's path takes us into a cave. This cave is warmer than the outside, but not by all that much. At least there isn't any wind in here. Vincent still can't fly, and Ash's mace won't glow, so we end up with an actual torch. I didn't know any of us still had torches, but Gigi has apparently been carrying one with her since we were in Minneapolis. It won't last forever, but it's better than nothing. I can see Amanda's path in front of us.

She seems to have kept near the wall, probably trusting on her sneak skill to keep her hidden. She can't just float past enemies anymore, but sneaking is still a possibility. Something occurs to me, and I check my sheet. I'm still getting the bonuses from my weapons and equipment. So we still have magical items and magical stuff, we just can't cast any spells. Small miracles, I suppose. The cave we move through is pretty tall. The ceiling is maybe twenty feet above us. That makes me nervous.

For one thing, the ceiling is covered in shadows. More of those cave spikes could be up there, ready to drop on us at a moment's notice. But that's not the only reason it bothers me. I'm also worried because it means that there is probably something in this cave that needs that much height. There is probably something in here that is tall enough for twenty feet to matter. I let Gigi lead the way, torch in one hand and shield in the other. Ash walks right behind her, ready to step in when combat begins.

El has her axes in hand as she follows next. I take up the rear with Vincent. He is clutching his staff and looks a little bit panicked.

"You okay?" I whisper as I ask him. I don't know if whispering is important, but it seems right in this circumstance.

"I'm useless," he says.

"Without magic, all I can do is hit with my staff. And that won't do much of anything."

"How much damage does your staff do, when you add your strength to it?"

"One hundred and forty," he says. I wince. That really isn't much. It's better than nothing, but it won't even get through the armor of the cave spikes. It really will be useless.

"Do you have any potions left?" I ask him. He shakes his head. I give him the two healing potions I have.

"If nothing else, you can act as a field medic," I say.

"If anyone starts to go down, you can bring them one of these."

"Thanks," he says.

"Do you think the magic will come back before we get to the top?"

"Definitely," I say. Though I have no idea. Maybe magic doesn't work above a certain altitude. It would be a really weird rule for magic to have, but that doesn't mean it's wrong. Still, he seems a bit more confident when I tell him it will come back. Maybe it's delusion. But delusion is confidence. At least, delusion is where confidence begins. You start off telling yourself that you can do something, that you can succeed or survive or whatever, and you do so with no evidence to back it up.

That's delusion, plain and simple. The longer you go, the more you prove yourself right in your delusion, the more that delusion becomes confidence. Confidence is earned, but it grows from delusion. And sometimes, delusion is all we have. I spot movement ahead of us. Gigi apparently spots it too, because she stops moving and props the torch up on a rock so she can draw her sword.

"What do you see?" El asks, her voice a stage whisper.

"It looked like a cave spike," Gigi says.

"But it isn't moving anymore." Cave spikes are going to be a slog without magic. When we can stun them for a few seconds with cold spells, they go down relatively easy. They have a lot of armor and a boat load of hit points, but being stunned makes a real difference. Without magic, without being able to strip away their armor or slow them down, we're going to have some difficulty if there's more than one or two. Stolen story; please report. But what I see isn't a cave spike.

I mean, it could be, but it looks too big to be one of them. It looks like a stalagmite, sure enough, but I swear it's taller. Or several of them connected to something.

"Shit," Ash says. Then she steps to the side and readies herself for combat. I look to where the movement was, and now it's unmistakable. The cave is moving. It's not a cave spike, though. It's much bigger than that. Cave Golem. Mythic elite guardian, level 62. HP: 310, 000/310, 000. Good news and bad news. The good news is that killing this thing is going to level me up. The bad new is that there are two of them. And I have no idea how much armor they have.

The cave golems look like several cave spikes stacked together. Two cave spikes form each of their legs, with gravel and larger stones making a kneecap of sorts between where the two points meet. Then the torso is four more cave spikes, lain on their sides. Two more each for their arms, leading to giant fists of stone, and then a boulder that forms the head. I shoot with a Power Shot. It does 1, 450 damage. That's so much less than it should do. Clearly, the armor is applied before the multiplier from the ability.

That's bad. And it doesn't bleed. That's worse. Gigi and Ash step forward to fight one of the golems, and El moves to intercept the other. I don't know if she'll be able to hold her own against it for long. We don't have Shell to protect us anymore, and we can't heal ourselves. This fight might be really out of our league. I keep shooting, firing arrow after arrow. They should do 590 damage, but they only do 290. So these creatures have three hundred armor. That's barely a hundred less than mine.

And it means that Vincent is, in fact, completely useless in this fight. He can't tank any hits, he can't cast any spells.

"Do you have any abilities you can use?" I ask him.

"My abilities are working just fine."

"Just this," he says. He fires a bolt from his staff. It looks kind of like a Magical Dart. It splashes against one of the golems. Vincent sighs.

"It only did twenty damage."

"It's better than nothing," I point out, still firing as fast as I can manage. We aren't doing much, but we're doing something. That counts.

"How is that not a spell?" I ask. He shrugs.

"It's coming from the staff, and it uses stamina instead of mana," he says. Can't really argue that. My equipment makes me attack faster. My bow makes me shoot faster. My agility helps me shoot faster still. I can launch arrows at the golem fighting El at a near ridiculous pace. While I can strike with my sword every two seconds, I can shoot an arrow every second and a half. I can launch forty arrows in a minute.

That's still just 11, 600 points of damage over the course of that minute, but it will add up over time. I notice that El is fighting differently than she usually does. She isn't just tanking hits and trading attacks with her enemy. She is dancing more defensively than usual, making it harder for her to be hit. The golem isn't very fast, and she seems to be relying on that to keep herself from getting hit. It's a good strategy, but it means that she's only hitting about once every ten or so seconds.

Even if she's getting five hundred points through its armor with every hit, she's still only doing about three thousand damage per minute. The others aren't faring as well as she is. Gigi is almost exclusively huddled behind her shield as the cave golem smashes its huge fist into her shield. Each blow pushes her back a few inches. Ash is also being pushed back as the monster slams into her shield, but she's at least getting a hit in here and there. This battle is going to take a really long time.

I can see why Amanda snuck past them. I would have too, if it had been an option. Even if we can make it so that these things never hit us, even if they do no damage to us at all, I'm not sure we can make it through this fight. My arrows are going to take almost half an hour to kill one of these things. And that means stamina is going to start draining a lot faster than any of us can keep up with it. When Vincent runs out of stamina, or runs low on it, he can just stop helping.

Even if he fires every second, that's only twelve hundred damage a minute. Sooner than later, he's going to run low on stamina. Until then, he can help. Once he runs low, it will be up to the four of us to carry the day. We need to take one of them out. I keep concentrating my fire on the one that El is fighting, hoping that she is doing enough damage for the two of us to be able to take the thing down relatively quickly. Maybe we can take it out in twenty minutes. Maybe in fifteen.

Would it be faster if I got up there with my sword? I could at least get the benefit of flanking. I'd only do four hundred damage a hit with that, but that's more than my bow is doing. I'd have to fight as defensively as El is, so I wouldn't be hitting as often. But maybe. I do the calculation as I keep peppering the golem with arrows. If El and I are both fighting it, we can probable attack it every five or six seconds. Let's say every six seconds so the math is easier.

If I'm attacking that frequently, that means I'm hitting ten times per minute. Four thousand damage. But it means that she's hitting ten times per minute as well. If she's getting through five hundred damage, that means five thousand from her, or nine thousand between us. No, the arrows are much deadlier. I can shoot so much more frequently that it makes up for the difference in raw damage. The problem, though, is that I'm not going to be able to collect many of these arrows after the fact.

The golem is made of stone, and most of the arrows are breaking when they hit it. I've got hundreds and hundreds of arrows in my spatial bag, but I may have to start rationing them after this fight. It's probably going to take me five or six hundred arrows to kill this thing. I've always hated battles like this. When I played video games and there was an enemy that took an inordinate amount of ammunition to kill, it was always frustrating.

It was like the game designers couldn't think of anything clever to make the monster dangerous, so they just made it a huge sack of hit points. It's frustrating when you hit something a hundred times and don't kill it. Killing Blow doesn't work. Which makes me more frustrated. I knew it wouldn't. It almost never does. But two percent is still a chance, and I was still hoping. That would be so much better than having to hit this thing so many hundreds of times.

As we gradually chip away at its health, the cave golem starts to glow an eerie red color. I don't need to say anything, though; El jumps back out of the way as soon as the glow starts up. The golem doesn't move to follow her; seems like it's stuck in place while it does whatever it's doing. What it does is explode. It shatters into its constituent pieces, sending rocks flying in all directions. I raise my buckler to shield my eyes, but I still get hit for 503 damage. Vincent, thankfully, hid behind me.

But he still takes several hundred points of damage, judging by how far down his health dropped. Where the stone golem was are instead are twelve rock spikes. Thankfully, they aren't at full health. It seems like the damage we'd done to the golem is spread out among them. They swarm towards El. She starts to kite them around the cave, moving just fast enough to stay out of their range as they swing their gravel arms at her. I keep shooting at the weakest looking one in the pack.

I should probably spread my attacks around, trying to slow them down or something, but I think it would be better to reduce their numbers if I can. And while they have a maximum of 51, 000 hit points, when I actually look at one, I see that it's much less. Cave spike. Mythic elite monster. HP: 22, 500/51, 000.