The Warlord: Level Seventy Dungeon Boss

  Current Difficulty: Challenging

  The first line of defense in any orc village is its warriors, and the second is their commander. The Warlord watches over his people, ready to spring into action to help protect them—and his people stand ready to protect him, too. The third line of defense rarely exists. It’s also rarely needed after The Warlord is through with intruders.

  Myriad Aura - This boss grants any monsters that join the fight Myriad and Elite.

  Alert - This boss’s allies will be alerted to intruders’ presence if any monsters escape.

  The Warlord stood in his stirrups. He loomed over me, easily nine or ten feet tall himself—and that wasn’t counting the seven feet of his mount. The spear’s head looked carved out of steel, not forged. And there was no fog gate.

  I didn’t know what we’d done to trigger The Stronghold’s Open Floor Plan, but this boss, at the very least, wasn’t bound by a room.

  “You good over there, Hal?” Tori asked.

  “No. I found the first boss. Get over here.” I readied the Trip-Hammer and poured Charge into it. The two hammers started to spin, and I readied myself to receive a charge.

  Then the boss bellowed something in his language; I couldn’t understand it, but as he did, a momentary resonance hit in the dungeon’s energy. A pair of orcs ran up the stairs, weapons at the ready. They took one look at me and split up. The first charged me with an axe.

  The second turned and started for the stairs again.

  “Erika, that’s you!” Tori yelled as the rest of the team rallied behind me.

  “On it,” the antimage said. She moved, and as she did, so did the boss.

  My Trip-Hammer came down on the orc, crushing its skull on impact. It was only Level Fifty, but the moment spent killing it pulled my hammer out of line. The Warlord didn’t waste time, either. In less than a second, its massive spear was down like a bull’s charging horns, aimed right at me.

  I let go of the Trip-Hammer, which was caught up in the dying orc’s body, and threw myself to the side. As I did, the Voltsmith’s Grasp lined up, and I fired two quick shots.

  Both punched into the boss’s armor. Neither did anything meaningful beyond that.

  I half-expected to hear the two announcers’ voices as The Warlord charged past me. Instead, all I heard were screams from the stairs. “Hey, Hal, can you guys hurry it up? There’s a lot of them down here.” Erika asked.

  “I’m on it,” Tori said. She jogged across and started casting at the stairs, dropping Gravity Wells and Pulling the orcs up toward Erika. I watched them act like a meat grinder as The Warlord pulled around and readied his spear for another charge.

  The Trip-Hammer revved. Then a fireball crashed into the boss, and the stink of burning hair and skin filled the Union Center’s outside ring. The spearhead shifted toward Zane, who glared back at it as the boss’s mount lurched forward in a smoking, thudding lunge.

  The kid didn’t move. He started casting a spell instead. As the boss’s charging wolf-thing rushed closer and closer, Zane’s eyes didn’t leave it.

  When the boss was only feet away, he finished his cast, and a molten spear appeared out of the ground like a spike. The boss was too close to react; his mount impaled itself on the molten spike, howling in agony as the red-hot steel bored into its body. The Warlord threw himself clear and roared in its language again.

  Then Carol and I were on him. His spear fell from his hand as he backpedaled, blocking the Trip-Hammer with his battle standard before spinning it around to catch Carol’s own spear tip and knock it off-center. It bit into the boss’s shoulder, but it wasn’t the lethal blow it should have been.

  “Seriously, though, hurry it up,” Tori yelled. “There’s getting to be a lot, and we don’t want to alert the next floor! And Erika’s worthless!”

  “There’s not a single good target in here!” she shouted back.

  I kept on ignoring them, except to push myself a little harder. The Trip-Hammer revved. The Warlord howled.

  And a pair of orcs charged us from behind. The first one’s axe cut into my back. Muscle parted and bone ached from the blow; I didn’t have the Body points to tank that kind of hit. The wood and concrete floor below me went slick with blood, and I spun the Trip-Hammer to fight the new threats. “Carol, Zane, the boss is all yours!”

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  “Got it!”

  The Warlord yelled again as Carol stepped in front of Zane, shielding him with her armor and spear. I slid in behind them to block the oncoming orcs, which came from the ring we’d been clearing. It was ridiculous. Unfair. And totally in line with the boss’s mechanics. I wanted to get the boss dead so we could move on. But even more than that, I wanted to feel that resonance when he called for reinforcements.

  But he didn’t. Carol stonewalled him in her Warrior set-up, and Zane’s magic rained down faster and hotter by the second until, by the time I’d killed the fifth orc joining the fight, the message I’d been waiting for and hoping to delay came in.

  Boss Defeated: The Warlord

  Dungeon Delvers who were not in the arena will receive fifty percent of your team’s experience.

  Blues. Rare weapons and armor. But when I looked at them, they were all worthless to me except as Charge batteries. So, Carol took the Warlord’s Sticker, a long spear that was almost—but not quite—awkward for her to wield. Erika grabbed a gauntlet that created a temporary shield on command, shrugging. “It’ll help give me options against non-mages.”

  And after some discussion, I shoved a spell into my inventory. According to the description, it’d summon orcish allies to help me, but they’d be half my level. If I had a proper summoner build going, it would have been acceptable. As it was, hopefully someone in Museumtown could use it.

  I had leveled up, though—from Sixty-Six to Sixty-Seven. I dumped one point into Charge and one into Body to fix up my battle wounds, then checked my status.

  [Hal Riley] [Class - Voltsmith] [Level - 67, Rank One]

  [Stats]

  ?Body - 39 (+5)

  ?Awareness - 47

  ?Charge - 4/97 (+15) (93 Used)

  Stat Points Available: 0

  [Class Skill - Decharge/Recharge - Drain the charge from magic items to power your own creations]

  [Class Skill - Remote Voltsmithing - Use your Voltsmithing to empower Creations even when others are using them—or when no one is.

  [Skill - Spellcoding - Transfer spells from Tomes to Spellscrolls, allowing weaker versions to be cast with Charge instead of Mana]

  Items

  ?Fabrication Engine (Epic): 1 Taser Rover, 1 Rail Gun Rover

  ?Voltsmith’s Grasp Upgrade One (19/30 Charge) - Rail Gun Module, Taser Launcher

  ?The Trip-Hammer, Tower’s Bane (25 Charge)

  ?Warrior’s Sheath (Bio-Electric Scanner) (7 Charge)

  I was inching closer to one hundred points in Charge. Based on what I knew about the Consortium’s numbering for gear and upgrades, that might be significant, but it’d be at least two more levels.

  In the meantime, I had a couple of goals of my own to deal with.

  For one, I had that resonance to hunt. The boss had triggered it on occasion, and I had a feeling that his screams of rage and demands for help had caused the dungeon to create orcs specifically to help him. There was a connection between Charge and the dungeons themselves. I needed more interactions with bosses like The Warlord to confirm it, but I already felt it in my gut. The dungeon—this one, and the others that had been grafted, at the very least—ran on Charge.

  I needed more time with resonance. I needed a boss we could take our time with, so I could study it and figure out what made the dungeon tick.

  But at least some of my Charge was going toward Erika in the near future. It wasn’t likely that I’d be able to take advantage of any knowledge I did learn from The Stronghold—at least not right away.

  And that led us to the next problem.

  As we moved down the stairs, the chairs and concrete-and-steel walls gave way to rough-hewn wooden buildings that clung to the bleachers like clods on a tractor’s side. We made it down two sections before our forward progress was cut off by a wall hidden in the buildings, and we couldn’t move any further toward the stadium’s floor or the massive Charge weapon the orcs were building.

  “Thoughts?” Erika asked.

  I pointed behind us, through a gap in the Union Center’s wall that doubled back into the ring around the stadium, but a few floors lower than we’d started. A massive wooden gate blocked it. “There’s a door right there. That’s probably our Inner Gate. Let’s figure out how to get through it.”

  “Sure,” Tori said, her tone biting. “There’s no way that the gate doesn’t turn into a ‘defend the point’ fight the second we get close.”

  I stared at her, then shrugged. “Does it matter? We need to get through it.” Then I set out for the base of the wooden door.

  It was gigantic. Easily twenty feet wide, the door filled the entire walkway, blocking any movement back and forth. It wasn’t actually all wood. As I got closer, the frame of a rough iron portcullis appeared, overlaid with wood on either side. I gave it an experimental tap with the Trip-Hammer, then revved it up and slammed it into the mass. Splinters shot every which way, but the core stayed intact—and so did the wood on the far side. “Alright, we’re figuring this out the hard way, then,” I muttered.

  “Uh, Hal,” Tori said from a few feet away, “ I was right.”

  “I know,” I said without looking. The same Charge resonance that had triggered when The Warlord summoned his swarms of minions was starting to spike, filling my weird sixth sense until it was almost overwhelming. This was it. A moment to learn something. I set the Trip-Hammer aside and pulled out a set of tools from my inventory. “Can you keep me alive? I’ve got some work to do to understand this door—and to understand the principles under it. If I can, I can make…I don’t know. Something.”

  She stared at me. Around her, the others were already getting ready to fight—or in Zane’s case, casting spells. Then her eyes narrowed. “You already know how to open the door, don’t you?”

  I nodded. “Yes. Yes, I do. Now, can you buy me time or not?”

  Tori sighed. “Yes. Just be ready to open it when I tell you to. Got it?”

  “Got it. Thanks, Tori.” I sat down in front of the door, pulled an Emitter and Charge battery from my inventory, and got to work.