Duskbound

Chapter 65

Velik ended up spending another hour taking care of the remaining scorplings. Rather than fight them in the cavern, he retreated to the tunnels again and ambushed them in small groups as they spread out to look for him. The fights were challenging more in that he hadn't slept in days and was exhausted from killing that champion, but he still got the job done.

It was only once he was finally safe again that he realized he hadn't received a champion seed for killing the giant scorpling. As far as he was concerned, that was confirmation that he was in a dungeon, which meant if he didn't hurry, there was a possibility that the champion would appear again. He didn't really understand how the mechanics of its mana recycling process worked, but the fact that the monsters didn't stay dead was common knowledge.

Which means no matter how many of these monsters I kill, there will always be more. But I bet I could break those damn invisible walls now.

[Dread Lance] truly did solve all the problems he'd been having since coming to the deep wood. He'd leveled up several times and gotten a nice bonus to his physical when he'd upgraded his spear, but the champions were still so tough that even injuring them was a daunting proposition. The skill was not without its drawbacks – namely that it was exhausting to use. Even the two shots he'd unloaded into the brood mother had left him feeling winded like he was coming off a six-hour sprint. The skill also took a minute or so to charge to full power, and trying to hold it there for very long was an exercise in futility.

But it did turn his mystic stat into a true powerhouse, stacking it right on top of his physical and releasing all that energy in an explosive burst. He hadn't had the opportunity to test it out yet, but he was reasonably certain that it could catch multiple enemies in the detonation if they were close enough together. Of course, if he wasn't careful, he could also easily injure himself, so it was sure to be a tricky skill to manage.

Retreat or press forward? he wondered to himself after he'd finished hunting down the scorplings. On the one hand, he was tired and sore. He finally had a way free, and a large part of him demanded he take it. On the other hand, he still had plenty of healing potions and his haste potion, and if he left now, he'd have to kill the brood mother again when he came back. He'd already checked the compass and confirmed that his target was still here, or maybe that 'here' was the target if he was right about this place being a dungeon.

If that was the case, then it was the source of the monsters. An undiscovered dungeon hundreds of miles from civilization, just far enough away to never be detected, but close enough to threaten the frontier, was exactly the kind of problem that could account for the monsters constantly filtering out of the wild lands. And that meant, now that he knew where it was, that the smart thing to do was to flee, report the location, and let the experts dismantle it.

But if he did that, he would never get the answers he needed. Chalin was somewhere out here, tied to these monsters somehow, maybe a monster himself. Maybe he was this dungeon, and if so, maybe it was possible to free him somehow. A dungeon cracker team wouldn't bother to try. They'd slaughter the monsters, break the core, loot the place, and pat themselves on the back.

The problem with any of those was that he didn't really see them merging with his current skills. Nothing in his list played nice with the idea of just taking a blow, be it by tooth or by flame or by... chemical alteration, whatever that meant. If he took one of those four skills, that was likely to be the basis of a new skill to start building on, so he wanted to be sure it was the right one.

Or he could go the other direction and grab something else that was powered by mystic. There were a few utility class skills that used it, but they all felt so situational that he felt like he'd have the same problem. Whatever he took wouldn't have a prayer of merging into any of his current skills.

Either I'm starting a new branch in my build and I'll have to wait until I hit level 40 to pick up something to advance it with, or I need to take something that I can fold into what I've got now which may not be immediately useful. Really, it comes down to whether I should be building for the future or for the problem in front of me, and I already know the answer to that.

[Spear Warden] was his highest ranked skill, which meant if he merged something into it, he was practically guaranteed to get an extremely powerful skill, maybe even something to rival [Apex Hunter]. If he'd been able to rank up [Kinetic Charge] or [Phalanx] a few more times, he could only imagine how strong the skill he'd have gotten instead of [Dread Lance] would have been.

That brought him back to considering [Savage Rhythm] again. He could see it merging with either [Spear Warden] or [Dread Lance], and while it wasn't useful for a quick skirmish, if he was going to keep hunting champion elites, it wasn't a terrible choice. It didn't give him armor penetration, but not every champion was so tough that he couldn't hurt it with a normal attack.

A lot of them are, though, even if it's only because they're always a higher level than me. Maybe this is a skill better left for later, but it would be so useful if I could merge it into [Spear Warden]. Alright, let's go with that. Maybe it'll help cut apart these packs of scorplings I keep running into, too.

Decision made, he added [Savage Rhythm] to his skill list. New knowledge flooded his mind, ways he'd never considered to build off each successive strike until an opponent was completely overwhelmed in an avalanche of blows, or to chain one attack into another against a different enemy. The skill was actually more flexible than he'd given it credit for prior to choosing it, and he was hopeful that he wouldn't regret the choice like he had with [Phalanx].

There was an easy way to find out. With an eager grin stretching his lips, he started hunting for his first group of victims.Nôv(el)B\\jnn