After the End: Serenity

It was another long slog the following day. It didn’t get any harder; it was simply exhausting, and easy to make mistakes.

Serenity guessed that was the actual lesson of the level. Care was needed, even when tired.

The final encounter of the level only reinforced that idea. It was a large open room, with a number of spiders that seemed to be calmly dangling from the ceiling, but when they tried to get a few they were faced with more than they’d expected and several hidden ones as well.

It didn’t matter. With three people able to hit them before they got close and two people who could kill them in a single hit once the spiders got to them, they were able to stay at the entrance and kill their way across the room.

This time, Serenity was able to sort of pay attention to the chests.

Bow of Energy Arrows

This bow can either use normal arrows or create its own arrows. Arrows created by the bow are made of lightning, while normal arrows may be fired as is or converted to lightning, fire, ice, or wind. Creating arrows costs mana at the time of use.

Basic Magegun

This pistol acts like a mundane weapon; however, its ammunition is created using mana, and can be of any Affinity possessed by the user.

The bow went to Serenity and the gun to Lancaster. Only Serenity and Echo were able to use a bow, which made the decision easy. There were also 4 Etherium.

Everyone except Moira finished the ‘gain a level’ Goal; Moira would finish it on the next level, since she only needed another 65 experience. They hadn’t expected it to have a reward, since it was Required, but it did - it had a storage bag for each person who completed it.

The storage bags buttoned into a flap of the backpack, clearly designed to fit, and provided about four times as much storage as the backpack itself without adding any weight. They didn’t have any time suspension, but Serenity hadn’t expected any; they were another low-level utility item. Common, probably about as expensive as the bedrolls (while less tricky, they were in high demand and there were few people who could make them). Still, unlike the bedrolls, they weren’t rechargeable and would last only as long as the cores used to make them had power. That would depend on the usage, but Serenity only expected to get about a year out of the bag.

Serenity sat before he ate the crystal this time. It was refreshing, and he could tell that the amount was rising with each level of the dungeon, but it still wasn’t enough. His best guess was that his core needed two more levels.

Either way, it was time to leave the dungeon and get a good night’s sleep. He was looking forward to using the new bedroll (though probably not as much as the others were).

The following morning found them sleeping in before heading to the fourth floor. The new bedrolls were indeed comfortable. Even Serenity felt like he’d slept better.

The fourth floor was a disappointment in some ways, but not in others. It was very easy, because it was the same goblins-and-boars level they’d faced in the larger group, except with fewer enemies. The individual boar-riding goblins were less frequent and each group of archers had fewer members.

They were able to head directly to the goblin camp, where they found that it also was less inhabited than the first time they’d seen it. They didn’t have a good AoE to kill everything, but it was still simply not a challenge.

The rewards were a bit lackluster, as well - another Crossbow of Bolt Creation and another Basic Magegun. They were easy to divide, since Echo had used a gun before and Moira hadn’t.

Everyone now had a ranged weapon from the dungeon. They all suspected that wasn’t by accident. When they asked the other groups, they found that the early levels were giving a suspiciously high rate of ranged weapons.

Serenity was looking forward to the fifth level, where he was expecting to finally finish his Core and be able to take a real Path, and the fourth had only taken a few hours. After the long slog of the spiders, everyone else was eager as well. They took a break outside the dungeon for lunch and headed back in.

The fifth level reminded Serenity of the second, in a way. They were both destroyed and abandoned versions of places on Earth. Instead of an overgrown suburb with animals turned into miniature monsters, the fifth level was an urban metropolis filled with undead.

The undead were individually weak, but tended to attack in groups. Unlike previous levels, there wasn’t really such a thing as a safe place to rest.

Serenity knew this reflected reality better than some of the other levels. Unless there was a controller, mindless undead like these would spread out and wander aimlessly. They weren’t innately hostile to life … but they were attracted to it, so it was a distinction without a difference.

Unless you were trying to control undead and needed them to not attack every living being they saw, in which case the distinction was important. It didn’t matter right now, since he wasn’t trying to control anything.

Still, despite the continual interruptions, Serenity was more comfortable than he probably should have been in a destroyed city. Thomas’s memories cried about how wrong it was, but the Final Reaper had spent a great deal of time in cities that were in equally poor condition.

It helped that all of the enemies they fought were undead, which made Serenity feel safer. While he wasn’t trying to control them, he knew he could if he had to.

As they traveled farther into the city, the basic zombies and skeletons started to give way to Skeletal Knights and ghouls. After two hours (and their first encounter with a Skeletal Mage), the group rested with their backs against the wall of a skyscraper. Rissa helped them all regain stamina and mana, but even once they were full they felt a bit tired. It had been a long day, and the individual skeletons that wandered by while they were resting didn’t help.

Two hours later, they holed up at the end of a blocked-off alley. Sitting surrounded by bricks and old, decayed trash still wasn’t safe, but it was better than resting against a wall with three sides open.

“I’m beginning to think that coming in here in the afternoon was a mistake.” Serenity watched the sky. It looked like the time of day in the level matched outside.

“We weren’t that tired, and there was plenty of time in the day left.” Lancaster gave the same argument he’d used that had convince them all to enter.

“Yeah. I don’t really want to be here after dark, though. If we’d come earlier in the day, we’d be farther into the city, but we might be able to get that overnight protection we got against the spiders.” Serenity stared at the shadows. They were already long. “It wouldn’t last all night, but ten hours would be a huge help.”

“Should we go back?” Moira voiced the idea Serenity was debating.

Rissa shook her head. “No. We couldn’t make it before sunset anyway. We’ve only got an hour, maybe two.”

“It might get us easier nighttime enemies.” Serenity still wasn’t convinced which way to go.

“I don’t want to do all that walking, fight at night, then fight our way back here. We’re going to have to fight at night no matter what. We’d be farther in when we have to rest. Why waste the time and walking we’ve already put in?” Echo seemed to mind the walking more than the fighting. Knowing her, that was probably true.

“Good point. If we leave, it’ll be less fighting at night, but we’d be farther in. As long as we can get through this with only one night, I think I’m for pushing on. We can hole up if it gets too bad. We’ll have to find a spot for the overnight protection anyway. Anyone really want to turn back?” Serenity didn’t see any big objections, so they continued forward.

Progress forward slowed almost to a halt once the shadows fell deep enough into the city to cross from one building to the next. For all that there was still light in the sky and the sun was not quite below the horizon, new types of undead began to rise from the shadows.

The first were shadows given form. Much like the shadow wolves of the beast wave, they were weak but could only be killed with magic.

Unlike during the beast wave, Serenity and Lancaster had weapons that could attack with magic. Echo and Moira had spells, of course. Echo tried to lend Rissa her magegun as well, but Rissa was such a bad shot that no one really wanted her shooting even sort of towards them.

They also didn’t really want the healer wasting her mana missing the enemy. It was best to have her concentrate on fixing the damage done by the shadows.

Checking every shadow before they moved forward was the first problem. The second came once the sun slipped below the horizon.

The vampires came out.

The Final Reaper didn’t like most vampire variants. They could be powerful, but tended to have some resistance to the control of a necromancer, even before taking the mental powers of the more powerful ones into account. The most powerful were usually also insane as far as the Final Reaper could tell.

The extreme sun sensitivity didn’t help. A few varieties could become daywalkers, able to stand the sun, but even then it usually meant either a loss of power or becoming something other than a vampire. The Final Reaper had known a few who made that choice, and some of them had been friends for a while.

Serenity was quickly coming to the conclusion that he liked vampires - at least, these vampires - even less than the Final Reaper had. Here, they were simply enemies to get through, as mindless as the zombies, ghouls, and skeletons of the daytime. They could be anything from someone who looked more or less like a normal human to a vampiric ghoul or even a floating head.