Sell you a Bridge chapter 102

Hell October 2nd 2010 8:00 PM EDT

Hell  was pretty unpleasant, to the surprise of literally no one. Aside from  the walls made of bone, the unidentified stone of the floor,  and the  weird troughs of blood mysteriously sitting around, the fucking monsters  were nightmarishly strong and WOULD NOT stop coming. We were currently  fighting what appeared to be some kind of evil demonic centipede  humanoids, and even fifty strength couldn't get through them. From what  we'd found online these were Cave Vipers, and were actually the weakest  of the vipers, but they had one specific trait that made them hard to  deal with.

I heard my usually cheerful and upbeat  girlfriend shriek in unbridled rage and then a loud bang sounded from  behind me as she conjured a literal fucking car on top of one of the  vipers upside down, the massive yellow hummer smashing the thing like a  bug. I darted around mine so she was in view so I could check on her and  saw her eyes blazing with purple blue lightning as she started dropping  heavy shit from the air rapid fire. "I HATE magic immunity! It's so  stupid! Nothing in the real world is just immune to magic, but every  other goddamned monster down here is totally spell proof!"

I  dipped under a sword strike from this stupid viper with agreement and  activated my shadow dancing ability, creating a brand new construct I'd  been working on around my sword. A chain with hooked black teeth of  condensed shadows and used my power to start it whirring to life. My  King's Sword of Haste turned into a fucking chainsword. Given the magic  immunity that meant nothing in terms of hurting the viper, but Reggie  and I had plans for this kind of thing. I used another burst of shadow  to create a condensed shroud of shadows and dropped it, jumping a few  inches up into the air.

In a series of moves that had  taken us ages to time out, Reggie triggered his translocation on a Black  Knight standing next to the Balrog at the back of the room. The second  before that I released my hold on the shadow shroud causing the  condensed power to explode out teleporting the Knight into position  inside a forming cloud of obscuring smoke a few inches off the ground.  It slammed down onto the stone, staggered from being dropped with no  warning and the noise attracted the now blinded viper, which attacked  the obscured Knight.

As the two of them clashed in the  artificial dark meanwhile, I'd ended up within range of the Balrog,  which did NOT have magic immunity, and my King's chainsword of Haste,  lashed out at the monster with all of my fifty dexterity and strength  behind it, propelled into instant motion by my absurd reflexes. The  remaining Knight guarding the demon tried to jump in front of it, but he  was too far away and far too slow to make it as the whirring black  shadows tore open the throat of the enraged Balrog.

Of  course, despite being easier to cut into with my chainspell than the  Cave Viper had been without, the red bastard was stronger and had more  health than the other monster. Having his throat slit pissed him off and  jammed up his firebreath, but I still had to deal with his sword and  the now arriving Knight. I shifted into my shadow form as the demon and  the Knight tried to split me in half and popped back up behind the big  red monster whose scimitar had nearly bisected the Knight with one  swing, cleaving my chainsword through the back of one knee as he roared  in fury before porting back over as it tried to spin and catch me so I  could finish off the wounded Knight before it had a chance to recover.

With  the Knight out of the way this was a single combat situation with a  crippled opponent and I had no reason to waste anymore points.  Integrating all my abilities into a cohesive combat style was easier  said than done unfortunately. Wanting to make the most of my strength  and take Del's advice about growth I decided to hold off on personal  powerups for a while, but that had left me leaning heavily into my  shadows exclusively for battle and that wasn't exactly what I had in  mind when I decided to try to synergize. Plus there was no reason to  think someone like Nightshade couldn't counter me at least partly, and I  could run out of points, so I needed to use everything I had as  economically as possible.

This fight was mostly leaning  into my ninja skills and my reflexes now that I'd cut the other guy down  to size, but I was also trying to work in my ability to fly so I could  capitalize more on my existing three dimensional combat style. My  wallwalking gave me some serious versatility before my Devil  transformation, but now I could take advantage of that range of motion  without using points or needing walls. Despite my self imposed handicap I  made short work of the Balrog, though the chainspell breaking down in  the final minute or two of the fight was annoying, even if it didn't  really effect the outcome by that point.

I'd been hoping  to get some training with my Hole bloodline, but throwing around spells  when more than half the enemies here being magic immune seemed like a  massive waste considering the absurd amount of points using that ability  cost. Not much point in storms of reflected lightning or fire if you  have a bunch of invulnerable meatshields throughout the room for enemies  to hide behind. Once I finished off the Balrog, I turned to make sure  my team was all good and then dropped the five points from my thirtieth  level into my point value bringing me up to an even three hundred.

The  power up and training focus had skyrocketed our leveling and clearing  speed as I'd been hoping, and I got more levels in the last day than I  had in almost a whole week before it. Not to mention we had cleared  easily half this level already, with the extra points income making  traversing longer distances between fights a snap for me with my shadow  travel. After depositing the points I turned to look over the rest of my  team as they finished clearing their enemies out. The other monsters in  the room had mostly been handled by this point, a few Cave Vipers and a  Black Knight or two, and they were just polishing off the stragglers.

Kit  and Reggie were working through a crowd of Cave Vipers. Artemis had  started working on enchanting their guns and making magic bomb casings  both of which were useful against opponents like the Cave Vipers because  they weren't directly casting spells. They had taken to supporting each  other when Artemis started to outpace Reggie a bit because of her  bloodline, though my friend had become shockingly versatile and creative  with his power to make up for the gap as best he could. I watched them  finish the last of the Cave Vipers in good time with a frag grenade of  enchanted shrapnel and was glad to see they were holding up well.

Artemis  was putting lightning arrows from her Blitz bow into the remaining  Knights. She'd upgraded it with the anvil and her smithing skills  because it fit her too perfectly to abandon it even for an objectively  stronger weapon, and the lightning arrows had gotten denser and more  powerful as well as easier to cast and permanently imbued with her  purple lightning magic. Each arrow tore a hole in part of Knight and she  made short work of them while Zee continued smashing the Cave Vipers in  their ranks to paste with heavy conjured items, most of them seemingly  propelled with force during creation.

Finally we finished  clearing the room and we all slumped to the floor, exhausted. I looked  around dubiously. "I refuse to believe there's nothing here we can use.  That was way too much work for no payoff. There's no chest here so there  must be something else. Maybe a shrine or something? Some kind of  hidden room? Zee any chance for an infravision spell?" My aura sight was  less than reliable for things like that considering every one of these  walls was humming with magical power, secret passage or not.

Zee  smiled and cast infravision. She actually couldn't learn that one  officially because diablo didn't have a book for it, but she was able to  create a knock off version with her insanely overpowered magic stat by  studying one of the scrolls she found. It was expensive and difficult  and she told me scrolls seemed to be getting too complex for her to  understand well anymore, but she finally managed the spell. She cast it  on me, since it synergized well with my aura sight, and I turned to scan  the room. I lit up as I noticed something in the corner. "Over there!" I  pointed to a seemingly normal section of bone. "There's a room on the  other side."

Artemis was the  closest, and she made her way over to the wall, pointing at the spot I  was gesturing to. "This one?" I nodded in response and she just reached  out and felt around before stopping and just staring for a minute. She  looked back over at me. "What do you think? You saw inside are we  talking some kind of lever or is just bricked up and we need to smash it  open?" I wasn't sure, we'd seen both often enough so I just shrugged.  She rolled her eyes. "Always helpful huh Morgan. Fine." She turned to  Reggie. "Blow it up."

My  bomb happy gold hoarding teammate grinned and shooed her away, busily  setting up some plastic explosives he had in his handy dandy backpack.  He saw us looking worried and chuckled. "Don't be such babies. These are  shaped charges. Besides I don't know what this bone is from but it  seems pretty sturdy. Whatever is inside should be fine once  I get this  opened up." He was lining the putty up in the shape of a doorway against  the wall, with only a thin line of the stuff on the bone. Once he  finished he pulled a length of fuse from his pack and set up a detonator  , making sure to to us space.

He  had us all back away from the wall and take cover behind one of the  larger corpses before he hit he button on his detonator and there was a  muffled thump. The air shifted as the concentrated explosion displaced  some of it, but it was far from the indiscriminate blast movies would  have you believe. Reggie was damn good at his work. There was a loud  boom after the explosion though as the section of wall came crashing to  the ground and we all stood up and headed into the room to look around.

There  were chests and a bookshelf or two and we combed through the room  pretty quickly. We stopped and gaped when Zee found a fucking  resurrection scroll, which she very carefully put away with a promise to  study it, though she didn't have much hope. Still even having that in  our back pocket would make the dungeon much less terrifying and let us  push that bit harder. The big thing we came across though was a book.  Not a spellbook, but a book on a stand made of steel. I recognized it  from the game.

We  flipped it open and something insane happened. I felt a sort of pulse  in my mind leading me to where the Warlord of Blood could be found. Now  this may not have seemed important but the Warlord was right next to the  stairs down. We'd just found a dynamic map through the thirteenth  level, all we had to do was beat the Warlord and we were home free. But  judging by how deep we were I was betting it wouldn't be easy. I turned  to the others, who were already grinning in anticipation. "So. You guys  up to take on another boss?"