Chapter 22

  “Injecting stimulant,” an artificial voice said.

  Dalex’s eye’s flared open to absolute darkness. He blinked a few times and felt around. He was lying face up on a bed of hard rocks and dirt. Slimy goo covered most of his surroundings and a fair amount of his body, probably mutt blood. Was he blind or was it just that dark? The armor-provided compass in his peripheral vision still glowed blue, so his eyes were probably working fine.

  He mumbled to himself, “How long was I out?” and the system obliged with a message informing him he had been unconscious for seven seconds. Good to know.

  After his own voice faded, the depths of the cavern were silent. No squeaking bats. Not even any dripping water. But after a moment, Dalex realized he could hear a slight throbbing sound.

  He sat up and stared into the darkness in the direction of the noise. As his eyes adjusted, he noticed the curving lines of soft red light floating in the air before him—a spherical object, motionless in the air. Dalex’s memory triggered. It was the right shape for the {attack golem}. It had followed him off the cliff. The red lights indicated that, not only had it dropped its {invisibility}, but that it was idling in defense mode.

  “Thanks for looking out for me, buddy,” Dalex said, getting to his feet and brushing at the goo coating his armor and clothes in a vain attempt to dislodge the mutt blood. “{Status}.”

  He raised a hand and cast {illuminate}, revealing a small patch of the cave around him. The flash of white light nearly blinded him. When his eyes adjusted, he discovered the dead bodies of the three mutts that had fallen into the cave with him. The spherical {attack golem} floated over one of them, brilliantly silver in the light of Dalex’s spell.

  But his {illuminate} cast light only so far. He couldn’t see the cavern walls or ceiling. He stood on an island of blood-covered rock in a sea of darkness. He took a single step forward and then stopped, squinting into the blackness. A pair of yellow eyes stared at him from just beyond his light. A chill went down his spine, and the mutt began to growl.

  A thundering boom erupted from behind him. A light flashed and something shot past Dalex to slam into the mutt. The creature let out a whimper and then was silent, its eyes vanishing into the dark. Dalex heard a wet thumping sound, presumably the mutt’s dead body hitting the ground. He looked back and saw the muzzle of a cannon protruding from the sphere behind him. Apparently, it had taken the {attack golem} a moment to recognize the mutt as a threat.

  “{Skull Anchor},” Dalex said, summoning the axe to settle in his hand. This was not over. One mutt lurking in the dark meant more nearby. The {attack golem} was having trouble identifying them in the dark, probably for the same reason {wards} didn’t always trigger when mutts were around. Dalex’s own {far realmer} magic wasn’t good at tracking the enemy’s {far realmer} magic.

  “{Rays of the sun},” Dalex chanted, and the {attack golem} suddenly glowed with beams of white light, bringing daytime to the perpetual night of the cavern. From wall to wall, Dalex saw his surroundings, and they were covered in mutts. Hundreds of them, maybe more than a thousand, spread out in every direction, some of them even clinging to the walls. Not all were dog shaped, but most had four legs. Some had tails and others didn’t. The numbers of eyes to a head ranged from one to at least ten. One of the closest to Dalex, standing in intimidation pose just thirty yards away, had two heads, both of them fixed on the uninvited human guest.

  “This looks like more than four or five to me,” Dalex said. Why hadn’t they attacked yet? Were they scared of something?

  Every mutt in the cave stared straight at Dalex, waiting for some sign to pounce and devour him. The {attack golem} fired the signal gun. Now that its targets weren’t hidden by darkness, it let forth a storm of fire and brimstone that would have made a phoenix blush.

  The sudden cacophony of sound and light triggered the mutts to attack. They flooded across the cave and down from the walls, a circular tidal wave of gray fur and teeth with Dalex and the {attack golem} at its center. Their heavy paws thundered against the rocky ground. They howled and roared and yipped, drowning out Dalex’s thoughts and even the blasts of weapons fire from the {golem}.

  And, then, they died in droves. The {golem} spit fire from a dozen different barrels and weapon nodes scattered around its spherical surface. Cannons blasted fist-sized shells that exploded on contact with mutt flesh. Chunk, boom. Chunk, boom. Chunk, boom.

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  White hot laser beams burned holes in mutt skulls and cut groups of them in half with a single sweep. The lasers buzzed with energy, turning even the solid stone of the cavern into molten liquid.

  A single long gun rose like an angular pillar out of the top of the {golem} and then swung down parallel to the ground, its barrel level with the swarm of oncoming mutts. When it fired, a bright blue light blossomed all along the barrel and it fired a glowing plasma projectile that pierced through five mutts at a time, blowing bowling ball sized holes through torsos and heads.

  While the {golem’s} fire came close to hitting Dalex, it always stopped just short of hurting him. The mind inside the {golem} carefully calculated what was too dangerous for the human that had summoned it.

  The roaring of the mutts became whimpering and screams as they were ripped apart in a dozen different ways. The {attack golem} created a swathe of bloody black corpses a dozen yards thick and deepening.

  And yet the mutts came in like an inevitable tide. Each that died was replaced by two more. They bore down on Dalex in a solid wall of gray fur, pounding claws, and snapping jaws. He hefted his axe, tuned his {adamantine} armor for maximum magical output, and leaped forward to meet them.

  His first swipe chopped down to split a mutt’s head from snout to brow. The two sides of its face lolled in different directions and the beast went limp, crashing to the ground. Brain matter and blood leaked from its split skull onto the cold rock. Dalex jumped atop the mutt’s body to meet the rest of the horde at eye level.

  He chopped left at the next closest mutt, slicing across its throat. Blood spilled over Dalex, splashing off his armor, and the mutt staggered back so it could heal. One of its partners lunged toward Dalex from the other direction. He was too slow turning to meet it, but a cannon round from the {attack golem} hit it in the side and blasted it several yards away.

  “Thanks for the assist, Buddy.”

  Buddy blew away another two oncoming mutts and then turned its attention back to its own problems. More mutts thronged below its floating spherical body. They jumped up, trying to take a bite out of Buddy and almost succeeding. One leaped high off the back of its packmate and scraped the {golem’s} shiny metal shell. Buddy sliced the mutt in half with a laser and then lifted a few more feet off the ground. It continued firing, trying to whittle down the closer mutts so they couldn’t pile up on each other.

  Dalex dropped his axe. {Skull Anchor} existed for enemies that didn’t warrant the entire arsenal of his Benefactors. The weapon disappeared into the {astral mortar} which rose and congealed into the {blunderbuss}. Dalex shouldered the weapon and pointed it at an oncoming mutt. Right before its teeth closed around him, he pulled the trigger. The plasma blast entered the beast’s open mouth and ripped it apart from the inside, blowing its body into a hundred chunks and leaving the head intact to bounce off Dalex’s armor.

  Dalex swung the {blunderbuss’s} barrel left and fired again, liquifying another mutt with a single trigger pull. He walked his aim from left to right, firing again and again, creating a pile mutt gore ten yards high. Then he turned around and did the same for all the mutts charging him from behind.

  But they still. Kept. Coming.

  And now Dalex heard the sound, the one Seventh had explained {adamantine} emitted and which Hitasa had described coming from the mutts.

  Rum-rum-rum-rum-rum-rum-rum-rum. It permeated the cavern like a cat’s purr.

  “{Fly},” Dalex said, and he jumped off the ground to float several yards in the air. He sent a few more plasma shots into the crowding mass of mutts below, but he quickly realized that, even as devastating as the {blunderbuss} was, it worked too slowly. He dismissed that weapon and selected a new one.

  “{Staff of storms}!”

  A new weapon appeared in his hands, similar in shape to the {blunderbuss} but with a protrusion like a Tesla coil in place of an open gun barrel. It didn’t have a trigger either, but a paddle on the side that he pressed to ignite the tip of the coil with electrical energy. It sparked and glowed hot. He pointed it at the mutts below and released a dozen lightning bolts at once into the heap.

  The air surged with electricity. Fur burned. Brains fried. Mutts melted. The gray rock of the cavern turned black and then glowed red. Dalex flew over the beast horde, sending shock after shock of branching lightning into the endless mass. He killed hundreds of them, and yet there were more and more. They swarmed beneath him, using each other as spring boards to try to bite his feet.

  Dalex rose higher but was too late. There were too many mutts, and they were too big and too fast to anticipate. One of them clamped its jaws around his foot and dragged him back down to the ground. A dozen beasts clawed and scraped at him, fighting each other to get in a scrape.

  Dalex let loose a scattered bolt of lightning, scorching the ground around him and clearing away a layer of mutts. The close intensity of the blast took a few more durability points off his armor, and another dozen mutts immediately dove in to take the place of their fallen pack mates.

  Buddy swiped a crisscrossing pattern of lasers through the pile and blew chunks out of the swarm with automatic cannon fire. It could only do so much. A dark shape flew down from the cavern ceiling. A winged mutt like a bat slammed into the side of the {attack golem}, knocking it out of the air. Buddy kept shooting as it fell, putting a dozen holes through the bat mutt’s torso and scorching the ground with lasers. It righted itself at the last second before hitting the ground. Twenty mutts pounced, sticking their claws into its shiny hull and keeping it pinned down.

  The mutts just kept coming. Some of them healed quickly, not injured enough to be outright killed, but even that did not account for the numbers pressing down on Dalex and the {golem}. They had to be coming in from unseen entrances to the cave.

  Dalex needed to get airborne again. “Measure depth!”

  The system responded with 4,622 feet. He wasn’t sure what was happening with Hitasa and the others. He didn’t want to blow them up by accident.

  “{Tear of God} on me, right now. Detonate at my depth.”

  A warning message appeared. “ALERT: USER IN BLAST RADIUS!”

  A roar like a hundred lions bellowing together echoed down from above. The mutts froze and began to quiver. Dalex didn’t think anything of it, but seized the moment.

  “Do it now. Right this instant!” He fired another shot from the {staff of storms}. He let go of the weapon with one hand and raised it, shouting, “{Finger Eater!}.” A thin blue sword appeared in the open palm of his free hand. He slashed wildly around, creating as much space as possible. The blade sliced through mutt flesh and bone with ease, forcing them back and giving him a little more space.

  “{FLY}!”

  Dalex launched off the ground. A mutt leaped after him, snapping jaws closed on empty air. He was free!

  Dalex flew over Buddy’s location and the mound of mutts that were keeping the {attack golem} from taking off again. He fired the {staff of storms} at the pile twice, and Buddy surged out of the mutts’ clutches, knocking a bunch of them to the side with sheer force.

  The first blast had penetrated only a short distance into the den, nowhere near the concentration of mutts at the bottom. The next one would do far more damage.

  A sound like crunching rock echoed down from above. Dalex rose as fast as he could, Buddy trailing after him. And then something small and black flashed past him and slammed into the ground below.

  The entire cavern erupted in a ball of fire.

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