The Pinnacle Warrior

Though they’d had a bit of trouble with the last, just due to Skandr recovering from his poisoning, the next irregulars that the party fought were not at all difficult for the Wanderers, now that they were at full strength. Now that their finisher, Astrid, had a weapon that was capable of ripping through the irregular wyverns’ defenses, it really was just a question of getting the beasts into range for the party. Once she could lay into them, Astrid’s hammer smashed through everything the monsters put forward, whether they were using their defensive Skills or not.

While defending themselves, the wyverns could survive one or maybe two strikes from her hammer, but no more. The first pair of strikes, including the echo, would break scales, while the second would destroy everything else and expose the monster to Muti’s blade. There, the wyvern fell quickly, and it was almost casual for the party to tear through the rest of the floors. Eventually, they got to the point where they needed to leave some of the materials behind, their spatial pouches insufficient to carry even just the tails of the wyverns.

“I’m pretty hesitant to leave this much money just laying around,” Benedict said, gesturing at their latest kill. “I know we’re getting a good deal on it, and it was the whole body, but a single corpse was enough to replace some of our equipment, right? Now, with all of this? It’s a gold mine.”

“I mean, we are going to the Boss,” Astrid shrugged. “I don’t want to keep irregular parts instead of an entire Boss, you know? Something has to be left behind.”

“Yes, but then why do we want to plan on fighting the Boss right now?” Benedict retorted. “There’s no reason to kill it right now, right? We can go in there, check it out, and retreat to come back. We’ve already cleared out the majority of the path, so coming back will be fast if we decide to just sprint up, deposit materials, and then come back. We’ve already learned that the Dungeon branch here isn’t replenishing itself so quickly that we will need to worry about the path back, right?”

Astrid opened her mouth to reply, but then couldn’t help but agree. After all, they were full of valuable materials already. This wasn’t the Wandering Trials, where they couldn’t go back, sell materials and gear back up, and then come back after emptying their spatial pouches.

“I think he’s right,” Skandr said as Astrid came to the same conclusion.

“Yeah,” Astrid nodded. “Let’s clear the path to the Boss floor, check out the environment we’re going into as well as see if we are fighting against an irregular, and then get back to Neverwood.”

Benedict grinned in victory as the rest of the party readied themselves to do just as she said. With that decision made, Muti quickly sawed through the base of the wyvern tail in front of her, stowing it in her spatial pouch. The others all squared their shoulders and prepared to go, and only a handful of seconds passed before they left the irregular wyvern corpse behind.

With a grin of her own, Astrid mentally checked her experience progress.

Total level: 54,019/300,000

That was nothing to disregard, making good progress, even as they were fighting smaller numbers of stronger creatures. The fact that they were fighting irregulars that were an entire watershed above them was huge, allowing them to progress as if they were fighting significantly more creatures than they actually were. She was a bit more than a sixth of the way through this first level of Steel, and they’d spent less than a week really trying to gain some experience. Now that they were starting to be better equipped, it would continue to go even faster, with today alone providing about 20,000 experience to each member of the party.

“Then there’s no time like the present,” Skandr said, pushing into Felix’s back, though the man didn’t budge at all.

“You haven’t practiced at all with any weapons, have you?” Felix asked, pulling Skandr’s attention away from hustling onward as fast as possible.

“I wasn’t the one who was supposed to be doing much with that, though,” he protested. “Benedict is the one who was supposed to be learning more with weapons, since spellcasting is different from pure Skill influence with regards to interacting with enemies.”

“That isn’t what I’m asking,” Felix said, though his gaze did wander over to the Bard. For his part, Benedict did look somewhat abashed and stopped talking.

“I don’t know, I just don’t like it,” Skandr said simply. “I don’t think I’m ever going to spend any Skill slots on a weapon Skill, so it generally doesn’t seem worth it. Now that I have my staff, I guess I could talk to Olafson about if it would be worth it for me to learn more about using a quarterstaff, if this can be used that way. After all, I’m not gonna be killing any of the monsters we’re facing with any weapon I use, regardless of what it is. Might as well learn to use a quarterstaff to keep them at bay, if I have to.”

Felix grunted and stared at Benedict, who raised his eyebrows and started blowing harder into his flute to maintain the influence of Voice of Liberation over the party.

“I will ensure that he gets more practice,” Muti promised as the party continued on downward, trekking between felled trees towards the next floor. They stopped talking about that as the call of a wyvern greeted them, and they hustled into position, ready to confront another irregular.

***

Another five irregular wyverns were slain by the time the party reached the bottom of the ninth floor, two left entirely untouched, with every single one of the five spatial pouches filled to bursting with mostly the tails of the irregular wyverns they had harvested. Then, at the doorway leading to the tenth and final floor of the branch, the party looked at each other.

“Am I the only one who’s scared?” Benedict asked, though his grin seemed to be completely at odds with his words.

“Yes,” Muti answered simply. “Now steel yourself, because the time to conduct our initial investigation of the Boss floor is at hand.”

That reminder made the rest of the party go quiet. Though Benedict’s question wasn’t at all a joke, with the reminder that they were about to enter an unfamiliar Boss floor with their first true dragon to fight, they all prepared themselves. Instead of the somewhat relaxed positions they had already fallen into on the rest of the floors, they got into a much firmer stance. With Felix and Astrid taking the lead, they all focused on moving forward as cautiously as possible. The stairs they descended were broader than any that they had descended or ascended through before, nearly twenty meters across and just as tall. The path they trod seamlessly transitioned into a steep switchback that led down into the caldera of a volcano. Though the path was that of a gradual incline, they were all far more than comfortable with braving the steep path that was between.

Unlike the dragon turtle, this location was obviously not an active volcano. There was no smoke, and instead of heat, the area was not at all warm. In fact, winds whipped through the valley, each gust so cold that, though Astrid was unbothered, Skandr and Benedict both shivered.

“I wish we’d been able to ask what kind of dragon is usually here,” Benedict said, shivering, though Astrid suspected at least a large part of that was due to something other than just cold.

“We were told,” Felix shook his head. “A true wind dragon, so just like the wyverns initially were just gale wyverns before becoming irregular, this, if irregular, was something that was similar to those, just much stronger.”

“Oh, right.”

Astrid shook her head and looked out at the surroundings. The winds continued to howl, growing stronger and even colder. Frost started to gather on the stones nearby, each member of the party’s attributes serving to help them not be frozen as well.

“I’m going to guess that this isn’t just a wind dragon,” she said, looking in the sky and seeing nothing. “This cold is too different from the rest of the branch. Maybe a frost dragon, then?”

“Don’t make any assumptions yet,” Skandr said, his cloud companion somehow insulating his robe and making him look much broader instead of thin.

“It is approaching,” Muti declared, putting to rest any further discussions. Instead, they all looked around until they could see it. Coming from the opposite side of the Boss arena, the side facing the doorway, the dragon swooped down, literal clouds billowing from its mouth. From where the clouds touched its neck, wings, and forelegs, the charcoal-colored scales were covered with thick ice. The ice immediately became an armor of sorts, making barriers at least fifteen centimeters thick along everything it touched, and, even without a roar, the dragon spread its wings, slowing its approach, and a psychic wave smashed into all of the delvers.

A fear much more potent than anything she’d felt before smashed into Astrid. Her knees buckled as she desperately fought against it. As Astrid struggled to maintain some semblance of sanity, she spent fully half of her mana to strengthen Heroic Aura over the rest of her party. As the overwhelming fear slowly dissipated, the dragon started its approach, seeming to take its time. The icy armor now firmly covering most of its body, Astrid stood with Felix and took the measure of the dragon. Surprisingly, it wasn’t much larger than the irregular wyverns they’d fought until now, its wingspan being maybe twenty five meters and its body, including its tail, just about as long from nose to tip of the tail. Unlike the wyverns, even the irregular ones that had longer snouts, the dragon had a notably long face, long, sharp fangs bristling out of its snout. Each of its four legs was tipped with nearly meter-long claws, and before she could continue to evaluate it, it swooped down faster than any of the wyverns they’d faced. In its mouth, an icy white light started to swell, not emitting fog, but seeming to compress on itself and shudder as the dragon began its opening attack.

“It can control wind!” Skandr shouted, though Astrid couldn’t see what it was doing. Of course, she believed him, and she shouted her own commands to the party as the dragon drew closer, the glowing light in its mouth becoming so bright that Astrid started to doubt the decision to have come here.

“We’ve already seen what a wyvern’s breath can do! Dragons are even stronger, their breath weapons are famous! Protect yourselves!”

She did the same, flooding her body with Fortitude-aligned mana and raising her shield while fortifying it as well. Felix did the same beside her, the three more fragile members of the party huddling behind them as Muti’s Shadow Aura spread out over the rest of the party.

As fast as they were, the dragon was faster still, and all those preparations were all that they could do before the dragon swooped overhead, strafing past as its wintry breath smashed into the party.

The flames of the wyverns that had struck at them were powerful, yes. A few times, instead of trying to surround, trap, or separate the party, the wyverns would use the breath to strike somebody directly. With Astrid’s shield and a hefty investment of mana, she’d been able to protect herself, but it was still painfully hot and surprisingly heavy. It was painful, but simple enough to deal with. Those flames had a greater substance to them than regular fire, but a wyvern’s breath, even if it was irregular, couldn’t compare to a dragon’s, to say nothing of an irregular dragon Boss’s.

As the blast of ice and wind smashed into her, Astrid’s shield slammed into her collarbone, breaking that bone as she struggled against the force trying to blow her away and freeze her at the same time. An insidious mana overwhelmed what she’d pushed into her shield, and she felt the Dungeon silver piece of equipment begin to shatter from the single attack. The Steel tier Boss’s breath was simply too powerful for the mid-Iron tier equipment, and Astrid was grateful when the dragon continued its pass and its attack was over.

Frost nearly half a meter thick had been pasted onto her shield, and her feet were frozen to the ground. With a grunt, she freed herself from the trapping as she looked at the rest of her party and smashed her hammer against her shield to break up the heavy remnant. She and Felix had shielded them from the worst of the frost, but Skandr’s face was pale and his eyes seemed to be unseeing. Benedict was only a bit better, his jaw clenched, but fighting to free himself. Muti was fine, or at least she wasn’t trapped, though ice covered both of her weapons and she moved with obvious stiffness.

Felix grunted as he did the same as Astrid, freeing his feet from the ice-covered ground as he met Astrid’s eyes.

“We’ve learned everything we need to,” Astrid commanded. “Let’s get out of here.”

Nobody argued, and, with breaths shaky from that single attack they had sustained from the dragon, they tried to retreat up the slope, but the dragon had only swooped past; it was far from finished. Though there was not another light gathering in its mouth signifying another breath attack, it wasn’t some weak creature to have to rely on that. Instead, with a snarl that shook Astrid’s stomach inside her body, it swooped down toward them, landing on the path up to the exit. The ground shook as it smashed into the caldera slope where it landed, and a cruel light in its eye let Astrid realize that it knew exactly what it was doing. It could have landed on one of them, but instead, it saw them as prey, something to play with, and wanted to watch them struggle.

“Back me up if you can,” Astrid said, pushing an uncomfortable amount of mana and stamina into her hammer’s head as she created a compressed Spectral Graviton. Then, with her mana exhausted and her stamina nearly the same, she spent two charges of Physique while targeting Skandr and Felix. For the first time, Astrid truly fell to the influence of the second aspect of Physique: a Moderate stamina cost to be applied to her to include the others in the recovery from Physique. Fortunately, that just meant she could recover more and, as she activated Body Surge and wastefully spent a third charge of Physique to cover for all of the suffering for her entire party, she threw herself at the head of the dragon.

It batted one of its hands at her almost dismissively, and it had evidently not expected what she could do. Instead of going for a killing blow or holding herself back in the hopes of defeating the Boss, she twisted slightly in the air to avoid the hit and smashed her hammer into the dragon’s elbow.

With over 1000 Power fueling her strike, combined with multiple Skills and the boost from all of the recovery that Physique had given her, the hammer smashed through the ice and then through the bone, and the echo strike fully pulped the limb to hang uselessly from tendons. The dragon’s arm, previously so carelessly thrown forward, flopped uselessly as the attack scraped off Astrid’s shield and still managed to cut through her armor on the left side of her waist. She grunted in pain, feeling the blood run down her waist and already beginning to freeze, but she’d come out on top of that exchange.

The dragon, hit so heavily, was forced to twist as it tried to instinctively catch itself on its left arm and tumbled. Even as she came out on top of that particular exchange, Astrid glanced at her party, which had continued to rush past the dragon, revitalized by her usage of Physique, and she hustled to follow after them. The dragon screeched in rage and agony as it turned to follow after them, and after it, she heard its wings begin to flap.

Looking back, there was already nearly a hundred meters of separation between them, but she had seen how fast the monster could go. That was only a second of flight if it got going, so she dismissed her hammer, loosed her sling from around her wrist, grabbed a random piece of Steel tier ammunition that Skandr had prepared for her, and placed it in the loop of her sling. She spun it twice, the whir of the tendons through the air screaming before she loosed the stone with a crack that nearly deafened her.

The stone flew free and smashed into the only part of the dragon that had no armor remaining: the broken elbow. Where it made contact, the stone exploded into a curtain of lightning that twisted and arced into the dragon, which shuddered and fell from the sky as its arm was severed. It had only gained a few meters of elevation, but as its wounds were smashed into the ground, its head thrashed back and forth in the air, a relatively weak but still sky-shattering breath shooting from its mouth as the Wanderers fled up the stairs.

“Just keep running!” Astrid commanded as Benedict resumed playing his Voice of Liberation, with its focus being entirely on hurrying the party onward. The stairway disappeared behind them, and they all continued on their path, the monsters on the ninth floor already slain.

“The more I move,” Skandr said as his steps grew more confident, “the better I feel. But that was bad. I never thought the breath would be that hard to deal with.”

“Yeah,” Astrid agreed. “My shield’s in bad shape, and I know it wouldn’t survive another one of those. If we want to fight that, I’ll need that replaced.”

“And I’ve spoken with Olafson about strengthening the enchantments on my shield,” Felix said, though he looked at Skandr apologetically as he said as much. The blurring environment around them passed remarkably quickly, and they were already about halfway through the floor.

“Don’t worry,” Skandr laughed. “I know that his work’s better than mine is now, to say nothing of what it was like when I was Iron. I’m looking forward to more opportunities to learn how to enchant.”

Felix smiled at that, and the party continued on their way, putting out ideas on how to take care of the dragon when they were better prepared. After all, this was only a scouting expedition. The next? That was for extermination.