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Duskbound 3- Chapter 25

The dungeon core hung from the ceiling of a cave like a singular massive tooth, a stalactite at least thirty feet across at the base. The shape wasn’t particularly surprising to Velik—cores could come in all sorts of shapes, though in almost all cases, they were physically connected to the rest of the dungeon. But this one was absolutely massive, and rather than looking like smooth stone or crystal, its surface was pitted and etched and stained.

Some sort of creeping plant covered i...

Duskbound 3- Chapter 24

They caught up quickly, with Torwin’s trip through many different areas taking longer to relate than Velik’s slug fest. Torwin was grateful he hadn’t been thrown into that. The sheer number of monsters would have burned through ammunition faster than his bracer could generate it, though he suspected he’d have had an easier time with the champion. Piercing high-armor targets was something he was well equipped to do, though no one ever really fought an elite of that caliber solo.

...

Duskbound 3- Chapter 23

Somewhere in the mass of thousands of kill notifications from his time in the arena, Velik had reached level 49. The enemies hadn’t been particularly strong, barring the champion at the end, so he’d failed to make much progress to 50, but he was still one level closer to unlocking a new skill slot. Another welcome surprise was that [Aspect of the Wind Tamer] had gone up to rank 6 as well.

At least I saw some gains from this whole debacle, he thought to hims...

Duskbound 3- Chapter 22

Dungeon cores weren’t alive in the same manner that monsters of flesh and blood were, but they were closer to that than to slabs of stone they resembled. They were closer to a stimulus and response system than anything else, one that primarily reacted to mana. That was why dungeon cores were paired with guardians in the first place. Even the limited intelligence of a monster helped offset the reactionary behavior of the core itself.

The problem that this particular dungeon core had wa...

Duskbound 3- Chapter 21

Losing a leg hadn’t slowed the champion down much, but it had forced the monster to hold its weight up using one of its arms, leaving only a single tentacle-like limb to smack at Velik with. That made it a lot easier to dodge its unending flurry of strikes, and even allowed him to stab the spear into the vulnerable joints between its chitinous armor plates. Whether that actually hurt the monster was still open to debate, as its only visual reaction was to flail harder.

The champion hi...

Duskbound 3- Chapter 20

“This is cheating,” Velik said as he drove his spear through the skull of some sort of furred bipedal monster that was seven feet tall and probably weighed three hundred pounds of solid muscle. It was the hundredth monster he’d killed in the last two minutes, but every time one died, a cage that had been previously empty and open somehow swung open again, releasing a new monster.

The dungeon seemed to just be throwing monsters at him as quickly as it could. Some of them were as hi...

Duskbound 3- Chapter 19

Something was not right with this scenario. There’d been nothing inside that window slit when Velik was climbing past it. The dark was no obstacle to his vision, and he knew it had just been an empty, dusty room in there. The lizard that crawled out was one thing. It was small and could have been clinging to the wall inside the tower.

This frog monster thing was something else entirely. It was too big to hide, and it smelled too foul for him to have missed it. Its skin was da...

Duskbound 3- Chapter 18

Despite their concerns, the trip to the Verdant Belt was a peaceful one. There were frequent monster attacks, but those didn’t really count in Velik’s mind. Monsters were everywhere, after all. If they’d had to clash with Slokaran soldiers, that would have been something, but thankfully, no humans revealed themselves over the next week and a half.

They took all due precautions, which Torwin credited their success with. They traveled at night, first and foremost, because most peopl...

Duskbound 3- Chapter 17

Slokara didn’t look that much different from Ghestal, as far as Velik could tell. The trees were the same. The fields were the same. The only real change was that the mountains were on the north side instead of the south. It had taken them a solid three days to get through, which was extraordinarily good time, according to Torwin.

Once they were finally out of the mountains, they set up a camp in the trees and took a solid twelve hours of downtime. Velik could have kept going, but it ...

Duskbound 3- Chapter 16

Velik didn’t recognize the mountain beneath him. An avalanche had dropped tons of snow down the slopes, presumably taking Torwin with it since he was nowhere to be found. A crater half a mile wide was directly below him where the ice elemental had been sitting. Velik had grossly misunderstood what he’d been fighting there, likening it to some sort of sculpture of a frozen tree that telekinetically controlled nearby ice and snow.

Now it looked more like a wyvern with a five-hundred-f...

Duskbound 3- Chapter 15

The snow yetis had been an anticipated hazard of the climb, but Torwin was still surprised to be attacked in such numbers. Yetis were tribal creatures, usually consisting of two to four families that shared territory. Including the young, there shouldn’t have been more than fifteen of the monsters at most.

This pack was at least thirty strong—every one of them an adult. That meant it wasn’t bad luck that they’d stumbled across the yetis’ hunting grounds. This was a war party. ...

Duskbound 3- Chapter 14

Velik occasionally had an issue where certain monsters were too well defended to be easily killed. Usually, this was some combination of high physical, thick natural armor, and some sort of skill that helped them resist damage. To counter this, Velik had his own high physical, a legendary ranked weapon with a [Sharp] enchantment on it, and a full set of skills designed to help him mangle whatever was giving him trouble.

Lately, however, he’d noticed that it was the 2025-05-07 13:46:10 +0000 UTC View Post

Duskbound 3- Chapter 13

The cold air was bracing, but the snow flurries… less so. It wasn’t the chill that bothered Velik. It was that they were obstructing his view, and the damn yetis knew it. He was almost certain they were doing it on purpose. They’d hardly be the first monster to use some sort of magic to bend the weather to their advantage.

While the first few days of their journey had been easy and relaxing, the trip up the mountain had been anything but. The climbing wasn’t so bad, especially s...

Duskbound 3- Chapter 12

Torwin was content to let Velik take the lead. Much as he hated to admit it, a thousand-mile run had more than worn him out. Even in his youth, he doubted he could have done something that punishing. Galling as it was, he was the weaker half of their partnership.

There was a bright side, however. Velik was in the best mood Torwin had ever seen the usually taciturn young man in. He smiled. He laughed. He made jokes. He tackled the mountain with enthusiasm, more than happy to carve handho...

Duskbound 3- Chapter 11

“How’s Sildra’s new druid circle coming along?” Velik asked that afternoon as they sat down for a break next to a creek. Velik was eating travel food—cheese, apples, and a chunk of bread with a bit of spiced jerky—but Torwin had supplemented his own meal with a cask of something that smelled strong enough to knock the leaves off the trees overhead.

“Surprised you care enough to ask,” Torwin said. “I always got the impression you didn’t much like her.”

“It�...

Duskbound 3- Chapter 10

An old woodsman relaxed in his camp, one he’d used a thousand times over a forty-year career. He’d lived in the region his whole life. He knew the dangers. He knew what to look out for. He knew how strong the monsters were and how to handle everything he shared the forest with.

When [Danger Sense] niggled at his mind, he was more confused than anything. “Probably just another one of those wood sprites,” he muttered. They were annoying, but nothing he couldn’t ...

Duskbound 3- Chapter 9

Torwin stood on a stone patio, hands on his hips, and glared out over a flower garden flanked by two big shade trees. Wood benches stood over the flower beds on the edges of brick paths, and everything was in full bloom. Small bees flitted from flower to flower, their gentle buzzing almost hypnotic.

And of course Velik couldn’t just sit still for an hour and enjoy it.

The young hunter was nowhere to be found, because of course he wasn’t. He almost seemed to delight in...

Duskbound 3- Chapter 8

Velik wasn’t entirely clear on the exact reasons Jensen had decided to move his operations from Cravel to Ashala. It had something to do with trying to put some distance between himself and his father, and Jensen had rambled on about some justifications in things like ‘better market distribution’ and ‘access to nobility-backed contracts.’ Maybe some of those were even legitimate reasons.

All Velik saw was a man running away from a fight he didn’t think he could win.

Re...

Duskbound 3- Chapter 7

The wyvern was massive, easily twice the size of anything else Velik had seen over the last few weeks. It had scales like steel plates and teeth like sabers, and its breath was imbued with nauseating gases so powerful that not even close to 200 physical was enough to ignore their effects.

It was also quite dead, the top half of its skull having been torn off by a [Dread Lance] originating in its left eye socket. The ground shook as the body slammed into it, sending loos...

Duskbound 3- Chapter 6

For all the grief the Monster Hunters Guild had given him, Velik had been generously compensated at the end of their relationship. He’d been allowed into their vault to take his pick of some of the most powerful equipment and support tools they’d collected over a century-long history of fighting monsters.

With a little guidance from Jensen’s [Treasure Hunter] to help him pick the most valuable piece out of the set, Velik had claimed the Fangs of the Wind Dragon. I...

Duskbound 3- Chapter 5

The engineers stared up at the massive golem, slack-jawed and speechless. Their lanterns cast harsh shadows across the machine, but even in that flickering illumination, they could clearly see where the chest plate had been torn off and the power core pulled out. One by one, they turned their stares from the golem to Velik.

“How?” the lead engineer asked. “Just… how?”

“High level combat class,” Velik said with a shrug.

“That armor plating must be six inches t...

Duskbound 3- Chapter 4

Velik figured he knew what Jensen wanted long before he ever got back to the base camp. As it turned out, the golems he’d dismantled could repair themselves, and pretty quickly, too. Halfway there, he ran into one that was in the process of pulling its legs back into place, having already fixed up its arms. After breaking it apart again, he picked up the pace.

The base was swarming with activity. A first aid station had been set up to help a half dozen injured workers, including two m...

Duskbound 3- Chapter 3

A great wolf stood in the empty hallway, peering through the slice of doorway that wasn’t really wide enough for it to get through. It could squeeze through, but that might leave it vulnerable. Better to just open them up a bit more. And in this form, Velik’s physical surged more than high enough for him to do that. He rammed a shoulder into the right-side panel, forcing it into the wall another foot and giving him plenty of space.

The instant the golem thought he was distr...

Duskbound 3- Chapter 2

Tempest’s magic had its limits, and Velik quickly found them. He’d pulled the dust-laden air out of the tunnels and blasted fresh air in, but the farther Velik got from the base camp, the thicker the air got again. After a few minutes of walking—during which time he disabled three more wandering golems—he found the edge of Tempest’s range.

An almost straight line where the dust had been swept away ran across the floor in front of him. New dust was already settling down, but th...

Duskbound 3- Chapter 1

They called it a sky bridge, which didn’t make much sense to Velik, since they’d had to dig several hundred feet into the side of the mountain to get to it. Without Jensen’s [Treasure Hunter], nobody would ever have known it was there. No one had doubted him when he’d pronounced the location of the dig site, however, and fourteen hours later, a man with an enchanted pickaxe had ripped through a sheet of metal a foot thick, letting them into the ruin.

It was thei...

Duskbound 2- Chapter 78

As much as it pained Bertrim Nelspir to do it, especially after the idiot boy had basically abducted their monster detector, he couldn’t deny Velik and his team a proper reward for not only destroying a dungeon that was making more of the corrupting monsters, but saving what was left of two different gold teams.

It had been the work of another month to cleanse the city, though that was aided greatly by the addition of two new druids—one of which was local and had immediately signed ...

Duskbound 2- Chapter 77

Velik beat Healer Greenbaum’s predictions for his recovery time by over a week, though in all fairness, the moment he was able to access the energy granted to him by his mystic stat, he activated [True Form] and just sat in his wolf shape, rapidly healing. He even stopped the expensive potion regimen Jensen had been funding now that he’d reached the point of being able to recover on his own, and he ended up giving the man thirty thousand decarmas to cover the cost.

...

Duskbound 2- Chapter 76

Velik woke up in a strange bed in an unfamiliar room to the all-too-familiar sensation of things hurting. Every part of his body was raw, except for what was so numb that he couldn’t feel it at all. It took a few minutes of struggle just to get his chest to expand enough to take a breath, and that action felt like he was willingly driving himself into a bed of nails.

But he’d survived, somehow. He could vaguely remember killing the agent of corruption trying to force its way into hi...

Duskbound 2- Chapter 75

There were still plenty of lizards alive, but Torwin and Aria had thinned out the herd. Velik wasn’t worried about getting swarmed by them, not now. Of more concern was the fact that he didn’t think he could keep holding his wolf form much longer. He hadn’t gotten back the mana he’d been expecting from his fight with the monster, and using [Dread Lance] multiple times had burned through his reserves.

Reverting now would be a death sentence. He needed to get to s...

Duskbound 2- Chapter 74

I need to find a way to gain access to all my gear at once, Velik lamented as he used his ring’s [Power Surge] to help him leap all the way up to the dungeon core. He’d already had it ready to go before even entering the chamber, but now he wanted his spear back. [Mana Drinker] was quickly becoming his favorite enchantment now that he was taking in the mana directly.

“Traitor,” the monster spat out. Velik could hear the clicking and scr...