Area Message: The second boss of the Seared Wilds Tower has been defeated. The remaining bosses grow stronger. All bosses gain the Elite status. Further boss kills will lead to further power increases.
Boss Defeated: The Queen Tyrant
Level Up! Fifty-Four to Fifty-Five
Dungeon Delvers who were not in the arena will receive fifty percent of your team’s experience.
I breathed a sigh of relief as the gra...
2025-03-18 15:39:37 +0000 UTC View PostArea Message: The first boss of the Seared Wilds Tower's second floor has been defeated. The remaining bosses grow stronger. All bosses gain the Elite status. Further boss kills will lead to further power increases.
I stared at the message for a moment. I’d only just finished dropping the hammer on Ursa Prime, and now we had a whole new problem.
Tori had no such concerns. She nodded knowingly. “Romeo and Juliet mechanics.”
“What?”
Tier Three Dungeon: The Seared Wilds Tower (Floor Two)
Objective: Complete Three of the following objectives:
Objective: Defeat Ursa Prime (0/1)
Objective: Defeat The Cosmos Unleashed (0/1)
Objective: Defeat The Queen Tyrant (0/1)
Objective: Defeat The G.O.A.T. (0/1)
Objective: Defeat The Chthonic Abysslord (0/1)
Objective: De...
2025-03-16 13:00:36 +0000 UTC View PostTime Limit: Eight Hours, Seven Minutes
The six of us—the twins, Jessica, Calvin, Tori, and I—stood on a boat next to the final boss of the Tour de City dungeon—a greenish water elemental that had risen from the Chicago River and promptly exploded under the combined attentions of four Rank One dungeon delvers. The loot wasn’t worth discussing. Calvin had already picked it up for the stockpile growing in the fortress outside the Field Museum, and now the only thin...
2025-03-15 15:16:04 +0000 UTC View PostThe first skill, Remote Voltsmithing, looked like a solid option. It’d be especially powerful if I worked with the same people a lot, or if I could give and take Creations from people between fights or dungeons. The problem I saw was that other than Tori, I didn’t team up with the same people all that often, and that a lot of my fighting was solo. The second part was intriguing, though. Could I use Creations as traps? Or could I, with some work, build creations that piloted and activated ...
2025-03-14 12:57:57 +0000 UTC View PostTori absolutely won the boss drops, and I couldn’t help but feel jealous of her luck. She’d claimed the purple-glowing item, and even though I wanted it, I couldn’t help but admit it’d be good for her.
The Queen’s Blessing (Epic, Charge 10)
+5 Body, +15 Mana
This staff allows the wielder to grant the Elite status to a friendly target twice per day. The Elite status grants five temporary levels and suppresses all Tier Zero d...
2025-03-13 13:10:15 +0000 UTC View PostThe Queen Tyrant: Level Fifty-Eight Elite-Plus Dungeon Boss
Current Difficulty: Extreme
The Queen Tyrant remembers ruling with an iron fist—a tiny one, but an iron fist nonetheless. She was the undisputed heavyweight champion of the Cretaceous. Now, she finds herself in a new world, one filled with weak and helpless prey. The Queen Tyrant remembers ruling, and when she’s finished, no one will dispute her right to rule again. 2025-03-12 13:06:28 +0000 UTC View Post
The Trial was overwhelming.
With Tori and the twins taking care of the Reliquary of Bones’s first boss, and with Calvin’s promise that he had teams who could handle The Void, The Field of Warriors, and The Watery Grave, I had time to sit down and work. But the puzzle in front of me felt exactly like the woman with the Ford Explorer. That sat against one of the lab’s bare walls, guts still spilled onto the cement floor. I wanted to work on it, but I needed to work on the T...
2025-03-11 13:20:40 +0000 UTC View Post“That…that could work,” Jessica said, when Calvin finished talking.
I wasn’t so sure. There were a lot of moving parts, and just like in an engine, every part needed oiling, and every part was a point of failure. His plan felt more complex than it needed to be, but as I went through it, there were only a few actual points of failure.
The biggest one was on Tori, Bobby, and me. If we couldn’t break through to Rank One, the odds of successfully clearing the Willis Tower we...
2025-03-10 13:03:55 +0000 UTC View PostHello. I'm so tired. This book launch has been incredibly stressful, and I wanted to thank you all for your support and for reading. It means a lot to me. Thanks.
Tori sat on top of a massive stone statue, legs crossed and hands on her knees. She stared out over Lake Michigan as the sun set behind her.
Mom—Jessica, but more Mom with every day—didn’t want her working on her Trial outside the walls of Museumtown. She kept saying things like ‘when you get sucked int...
2025-03-09 16:40:04 +0000 UTC View PostI stood in Cindy’s Automotive’s empty garage, admiring everything we’d accomplished. Every car—except the forest-green Ford Explorer—had been Pulled into the street, Crushed, and stacked on top of each other to form a crude wall. The lifts had been lowered manually, with Calvin mashing on the controls while Tori and I slowly grappled them down. And the sound system that had once blasted Led Zeppelin and ACDC was once again working—this time hooked up to my old MP3 player.
Ri...
2025-03-08 14:30:07 +0000 UTC View PostWe emerged, still soaking wet, from the Watery Grave and into Museumtown. From the Shedd Aquarium’s entrance, everything seemed to be more or less in order. I nodded to the two Level 20-somethings who stood on either side of the dungeon entrance. “Should be clear in there. We got one hundred percent. But there are five bodies.” I told them where to find the Delvers I knew about and what kind of condition they were in.
“Got it,” the Level 24 Rogue said, nodding his head. ...
2025-03-07 13:59:58 +0000 UTC View PostThe Contingent Cast I’d picked was a messy one.
I hadn’t had many choices, after all. Iron Body, another Contingent Cast, and what few spells Bobby had picked up.
Worse, he hadn’t been interested in giving them to me. I’d had to trade, and I only had one thing he was interested in. So I wouldn’t be getting any loot from this next fight; he’d get my pick.
But in return, I got access to two new Spellcodes—and I’d spent most of the night working one of them into...
2025-03-06 14:00:55 +0000 UTC View PostTori woke up eventually, and I managed to get a few hours of sleep before she shook my shoulder. An ominous orange glow filled the Howling Moray’s rock tunnel maze—a glow that hadn’t been there before—and I closed my eyes as the searing light redoubled the headache I’d picked up last night.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
She only pointed up.
Bobby was already gone, and I let Tori throw me through the air with Push. She joined me in the tunnel a moment later, and...
2025-03-05 16:31:07 +0000 UTC View PostAfter ten minutes of pondering the tome, I realized something.
This wasn’t going to work. Not the way I wanted it to, at least.
My initial plan had been to decipher the spell, convert it into the Spellcode I needed for the player-piano-looking Spellcode Scroll-Reader, and simply strap the whole thing to my armor—or jam it into the Warrior’s Sheath. Either way, I’d planned on treating it like a component in a machine.
It wasn’t a component, and I could not&...
2025-03-04 13:55:53 +0000 UTC View PostChurch bells rang in the distance.
I’d never been the most into Church. None of us had, really, but Cozad’s bells had rang at noon every day whether we were in town or not, and they were a good indicator that lunchtime was coming up at school. The teachers knew, even if they refused to admit it, that every single kid lost every shred of focus when the bells sounded. We might still have half an hour of class, but work was no longer getting done.
Their rhythm formed a pretty mel...
2025-03-03 14:15:35 +0000 UTC View PostThe compass spun wildly in the half-second before a pair of massive jaws clamped down on my arm; the Autoplate Pauldron and Voltsmith’s Grasp took the worst of the crushing bite, and I felt needle-thin teeth shattering and snapping, but though the armor held, a few fangs plunged into my arm like daggers.
Howling Moray: Level Forty-Two Boss
Current Difficulty: Trivial
The Howling Eel hunts the upper reaches of the Watery Grave, keep...
2025-03-02 13:44:47 +0000 UTC View PostRose-Tinted Compass (Common, Charge 20)
+4 Awareness
This compass points in the general direction of living foes.
Sharkskin Diving Suit (Rare, Charge 20)
+4 Body, +2 Awareness
This armored diving suit provides resistance to the Hemorrhage debuff, as well as increased resistance to piercing and slashing damage.
I’d hoped for more.
So had Tori, clearl...
2025-03-01 14:30:02 +0000 UTC View PostSaltwater erupted in a massive circle, and the glass barrier shattered behind Tori and me as a gigantic steel cage crashed into the pool we’d just climbed from. It pressed down around Bobby, pinning him under the water with only a tiny air pocket at the very top of the dome-shaped bars; he could just get his head out next to the rusted chain connecting it to the ceiling above.
My fist tightened on the Trip-Hammer’s grip—none of us had noticed the cage. In fact, I doubted it had ev...
2025-03-01 00:22:35 +0000 UTC View PostTier Two Dungeon: The Watery Grave (Floor One)
Objective: Defeat The Blood in the Water (0/1)
Objective: Defeat The Howling Moray (0/1)
Objective: Survive (0/1)
Completion: 13%
Fragile Walls: This dungeon is close to breaking. Its inhabitants will be freed if a threshold of Delver deaths inside is reached.
Break Counter: 4/5
S...
2025-03-01 00:22:33 +0000 UTC View PostWhen Calvin finally showed up, I couldn’t help but sigh in relief.
Before Bobby and I could deal with the Shedd Aquarium, I had so much to do, and Calvin was exactly the person I needed to help me do it.
The three of us—Calvin, Jessica, and I—sat on the Field Museum’s steps, with the swirling fog gate to the Reliquary of Bones only a few feet away. It wasn’t comfortable, but the only chair in the sloped room had been destroyed by the fight with Saul, and no one would hav...
2025-03-01 00:22:32 +0000 UTC View PostJessica woke up early.
That in itself wasn’t unusual; if she was anything, it was an early bird. She’d planned on being up by four thirty—or as close as she could get—every workday, and by five or five-thirty on days she didn’t spend at the Field Museum.
But this time was different. This time, her heart wouldn’t stop pounding, both in time with and faster than the pounding at the side of her trailer house.
Tori was already up. She’d catapulted herself out of he...
2025-03-01 00:22:30 +0000 UTC View Post“Absolutely not,” Jessica said as Bobby and I walked into her clinic.
I’d used the point in Body, but it hadn’t healed everything. Bobby was beat up, too; he hadn’t taken as many hits as me, but when he did get hit, he didn’t have the same level of armor I did—or even as much Body.
Tori didn’t look any happier to see Bobby. She shot a glare his way and headed for the door. Bobby held up his hands before she could get by, though. “I’ll wait outside...
2025-03-01 00:22:29 +0000 UTC View PostHello, Patrons,
I'm attempting to break through onto the front page on Royal Road's rising stars list, so expect a few chapters over the next couple of days to make up for the difference. Should be a total of 1 for today, 1 for tomorrow, plus (hopefully) five extra over the next hour to catch up to tomorrow's RR+20. Sorry for spamming your inboxes.
The Voltsmith’s Grasp ticked back up to six out of fifteen Charge as I slammed the Trip-Hammer into Urse Pri...
2025-03-01 00:22:23 +0000 UTC View PostThe crowd went wild.
Bobby started laughing. “This is the most Bears thing ever. Fourth down, at the fifty-yard line, and they go for it? Unbelievable.”
I readied the Trip-Hammer and tried to clear my head a little more as Da Bears got themselves back into a formation at their forty-five. Now that they were Elite and Level Thirty-Nine, the fight had changed; I didn’t care about extracting little bits of information from the announcers. I just wanted to survive and win.
Olivia Rodriguez was tired.
She’d been trying to say something—anything—for days. Ever since Paul had disappeared. But she couldn’t even move her mouth, much less make anything but sounds.
On the other hand, she was a soldier. Not just any soldier, but one of the best. The toughest. She’d made it through Hell Week before SHOCKS pulled her out of the ranks. Nearly a decade of missions later, she’d fought the impossible—and won. Super-soldiers. Hulking mo...
2025-02-28 14:09:27 +0000 UTC View PostSoldier Field had always been a curiosity. I’d visited it once before, but not for a game—just to see it. Its glass-and-steel bulk rose from the inside of the old stone brick stadium like a butterfly breaking free of its cocoon, while the fake Greek facade down below helped it blend in with the museum and aquarium to the north. Bobby and I headed for the main doors, where sixty thousand Chicago Bears fans used to flood in every Sunday during football season like they were having a religio...
2025-02-27 14:30:01 +0000 UTC View PostWe exited the dungeon a few items—and another Rank One Voltsmith’s Box—wealthier. Nothing the boss had dropped was particularly interesting, but the Voltsmith’s Box had three unique items in it. Taken together, they had the potential to change how I thought about my class—and about the Autoplate Pauldrons.
The first was another Mana Coil. I’d seen these before, and this one didn’t seem to do anything special until the second item came into play.
It was called a Conve...
2025-02-26 14:30:01 +0000 UTC View PostIt wasn’t a boss.
It was crabs. Lots of them.
With knives.
Knife Crab: Level 14 Monster
Individually, not one of them posed a threat. A single rail gun shot could take out two or three, and Tori’s magic would easily handle a half-dozen in a single cast, while her well-placed Gravity Well at the tunnel entrance bought us a few critical moments.
The problem was that for every Knife Crab I crushed to death, two more pushed through the fading cor...
2025-02-25 14:30:01 +0000 UTC View PostMy augs were at their worst between twelve and thirteen years old.
It turns out that there are all these settings in a set of augs, and that they need to be adjusted. Constantly. Like, every six months, ideally. If they’re not, the augs don’t grow with you, and they end up the wrong size for your eyeball and eardrum.
Alice didn’t have this problem. She had a set that automatically ran the necessary diagnostics. They sized themselves every three or four weeks. Micro-adjustmen...
2025-02-24 14:56:59 +0000 UTC View Post