“Alright, alright, there’s so potential good news here. We might just have the right people ta handle this problem. Seedlings ain’t generally able to grow husks that work correctly fer anyone with more than one soul, so Cecile and Elicec are gonna be able to put a damper on that mother root’s plans. Next piece of good news: they grabbed a ssenger drone of mine, probably thinking it’s the full , and any attempt to tamper with it is gonna cause a nice big explosion. That’s gonna lead us directly ta where the current pod nest is. Dave, I know ya were starting to co up with a plan, but we’re gonna go with mine. I know what these things are, and yer still real green to all this, and I swear that if ya make a joke about that statent, it will be the last one ya make. Glunderlin, yer gonna take the Twinoges here and let them into the entrance to the caves. Ya two are gonna take another ssenger drone with ya. Dave will, too,” l explained, making sure to glare at the mont he brought up the joke part. I hadn’t really been thinking about the joke, but he was right; there was an easy one there, but I wisely kept my mouth shut.
“What do you want to do?” I asked, not sure where he had in his plans.
“Yer gonna go kick down the door of whatever building that is about ta be a dungeon and hopefully free that core before it ends back up where it started. Fire should work pretty good on the Reltleon pods, don’t hesitate, they ain’t real, just puppets of the mother root,” l said. I thought I could handle that. I hadn’t really had a chance to see what combat was like with monsters outside of a dungeon, so now was as good a ti as ever.
“Got it; what are the mini yous for?” I asked, ignoring their proper na.
“Yer really gonna keep calling ‘em that, are ya? It’s so I know what happened; I may not get all the info, but even their lack of return will tell a lot. Now get going, all four of ya. I gotta figure out if these mana orbs are safe because we may need them before this ss is over,” l said, barking the order. Even Glunderlin jumped to obey, racing us out of the building.
“Point at where I need to go, please,” I said to the mayor once we were back outside.
“Straight down the road, it’s what looks used to be a big open building at the center of the intersection. I doubt anyone will try to stop you going in, but if they do, say I sent you,” Glunderlin said. I nodded and took off at a sprint down the street, hoping l would be safe in the room with Chip. There was still so pain in my knees during the run, but nowhere near what it had been on the retreat from the desert. Regeneration hadn’t fixed everything yet, clearly, but it probably didn’t help that I kept adding new injuries on our rapid fire dungeon excursions.
The building quickly ca into view and it looked sothing like a four-way intersection with a large train station built on top of it. There were several guards at the sides I could see, but they all looked terrified of whatever was happening on the inside. Just how few people were actually capable of handling dungeons? Had I already jumped above most of the population? That didn’t seem right. Then again, specialized tasks didn’t always have a large pool of people to pull from. Maybe that held true here as well.
“Sorry, no ti to talk. Glunderlin said it was fine,” I yelled as I leapt over the guard standing in my way, mostly to see if I could. The landing stretched sothing a bit, but nothing broke. While this may have been sothing any human in their twenties in reasonably good shape could do, it certainly wasn’t sothing I had been able to do. That confird one of my theories: my body was getting rebuilt better than it had been, likely in part the strength training I was trying to keep on.
I stopped in front of the door and heard a few murmured words of hope from the guards as I tried to open it. It didn’t seem locked, but like sothing was blocking it from the inside. Good thing I had a makeshift battering ram in my possession. Two heavy mallet blows later and I was through the door and glad for my improved night vision. Every light in the building had been snuffed, but with the bit of light flooding in from the opened door behind , I could easily see a dozen figures standing in the center of the room. The fact that they were entirely unmoving, showing zero reaction to my sudden presence, was sowhat unnerving.
“Hey, what are you guys doing?” I called out as I walked towards them. No answer ca. There wasn’t the tiniest hint of movent, even once I was directly behind one of the figures. I poked it from behind, my finger going straight through what felt like long rotted away wood. I pulled my hand back and gave it a shove. The figure broke apart, collapsing to the ground in a pile of dust and splinters, revealing a thick root from the foot of where it had stood to the center of the circle of these husks. Each of them had a similar root running to the center into so sort of egg.
My destruction of the husk looked to have triggered sothing as the egg rapidly cracked, and a creature erupted out of it with a sickening squelch sound accompanied by an ear-piercing cry. Rising out of the egg and quickly growing was best described as a plant abomination. With what I assud was a head, it stared directly at with a palpable rage. I realized I should have switched to my fire elental orb much earlier at the exact mont one of its appendages elongated and slamd backward across the room into one of the pillars.
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I coughed in pain, very tired of being thrown against things. At least nothing seed broken or even bruised this ti, but it had beco a repetitive experience that I wanted to stop having. I used recall to launch a series of fireballs at it as it rushed toward for another strike, pulling my mallet up at the last possible mont, countering its charge with my own hard swing directly in the center of its mass. I managed to knock it down at the cost of slamming my back again into the pillar behind .
Water started pouring out from several spots in its body, extinguishing the flas as it writhed on the ground to find its footing. That wasn’t a great developnt for . I was afraid of switching to the Aether orb and just knocking the whole building down on top of us, so instead, I swapped over to my least-used mana orb, Imbuing, and, using core projection, infused so fire mana directly into the mallet. Pushing the mana that way felt so much harder than it did on the elental orb, likely because of how few ranks I had on it, sothing I was going to need to change when I had more free ti to consider how best to do so.
I managed to catch one of its appendages with a swing of my mallet as it shot out at again, sending a small burst of fire into the dent I left on it. The thing scread in anger, pain, or possibly even just annoyance. I had no idea which, but the launching of its entire body off the ground at told it wasn’t any sort of attempt to surrender. I hit it again with my mallet twice before it managed to land its own blow. A new appendage shot out of its midsection and ramd hard in the chest. This ti, I did feel sothing break, hopefully just a rib or two at most.
I turned my Life orb back on; I was just going to have to deal with the mana drain. I needed the pain dulled and the healing to start, but what I really needed was this damned thing to stop getting back up. I ducked under another attack and landed a swing of my mallet into the joint of the arm-like protrusion. It cracked with my force, and this ti, the fire didn’t imdiately go back out. I swung again before it could recover, putting more strength and mana into the blow, aiming for under what I thought was its head. An even louder crack resounded through the room as it toppled backward again.
“Help , please!” a voice cried out, badly muffled from sowhere inside the creature’s body. Dammit, what had it managed to seal inside itself? I grabbed a large screwdriver from my System storage into my offhand and used the mallet to drive it deeply into the thing, ripping off pieces as I went. It soon stopped struggling against , and I found what had pleaded for my help. The creature had grown around what looked like a dungeon core. No, it was a forr dungeon core, now a traveler, whatever that was.
Monsters Defeated
Seedling Golem, Core Infused
250 Experience
Experience Gained
250 Points
Multipliers Applied
No Armor
x1.1
No Weapon
x1.1
All At Once
x1.5
I Stand Alone
x1.5
Total Experience Gained
681 Points
“Are you okay?” I asked it.
“Yes, thank you so much. I thought for sure it was going to use to destroy all the good my brothers and I have done,” it said.
Before I could say anything, a second mini-l floated into the room and yelled in his usual voice, “Dave, we need ya in the caverns the second you finish there; the brothers are overwheld. Take this new drone, send back the old one!”
We do not know where the Seedlings ca from, only that they first showed up after the expansion of the year 3.92.23-PT, and they have been a growing problem ever since. Every attempt to eradicate them has seed successful, only for a new infestation to spring up years later and be noticed far too late to save the world it was found on. As yet, no universes have been overtaken, but countless worlds have been annihilated in the eternal crusade against them. These are only one of many naces that soone choosing a career in extermination can expect to deal with.
System Paths, Careers in the Spiral by Glarppp
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