Chapter 12 - 11 — Gate Failure [II]
So HP and EXP were measuring separate things entirely.
HP was how much punishment a thing could absorb before it stopped, while the experience came off its level and its classification, which meant something wrapped in armor could take twice as long to kill and still pay exactly the same.
All five of us were breathing far too hard for something that had lasted less than a minute.
Nia found a shallow cut along Idris’s forearm and put her hand over it, and soft light gathered under her palm and drew the edges of it closed, and then her fingers shook once it was done.
"Okay, so I got twelve EXP from—"
"Tomas." Bria did not look up from her shield. "Stop shouting your private numbers out loud inside a dungeon."
"Why? Who’s listening?"
"I don’t know. That’s the point."
She was right, since each of us could only see our own EXP and Health and Mana unless we chose to say them, and there was no reason to hand that out for free.
[Ability Deactivated: Aten.]
I looked down at the Goblin I had killed.
My first punch had broken its jaw, and it had still come back at me with a knife, because a broken jaw is not a stop condition when the thing has fifty HP left.
In training, a clean hit ends the exchange and somebody calls the point. Down here it had kept trying to open my ribs with its face hanging off.
We moved deeper, and the party fixed itself as it went.
Bria kept the shield forward and checked the floor before each step, while Idris walked beside her without crowding her sword arm, and Nia held the protected center.
Tomas stopped standing at full draw and only nocked an arrow when something moved.
I stayed close enough to the front to reach anything with the gauntlets without putting myself where Idris was swinging.
The second lot were waiting near a collapsed junction.
Two Goblins with crude crossbows fired down from a wooden ledge while another pair came along the rails with hooked blades.
Bria angled her shield up and caught the first bolt, but the second went past the edge of it and opened Idris’s upper arm.
I got him behind a stone support before either of them could reload.
Tomas worked out where the shots had come from and put an arrow into the nearest crossbowman’s thigh, which was not where he was aiming, though it dropped the thing off the platform and separated it from its weapon.
Nia waited until Idris was fully behind cover before she healed him, instead of kneeling out in the open where the bolts were still coming.
The two on the rails split around Bria.
I took the one going for Nia, caught its hooked blade against my left gauntlet, and when it hauled on the weapon to pull me off balance I drove my forehead into its nose.
[Ability Activated: Aten.]
[Mana: 144/150 → 142/150.]
I burned through the wooden haft of its weapon rather than coating both hands, then hit it across the throat with the gauntlet that was not on fire.
Bria pinned the second one against the wall with her shield while Idris stopped hacking at its head and put the point in under its ribs.
Tomas finished the Goblin that had fallen from the ledge and then put two arrows near the last crossbowman until it stayed behind cover.
I climbed the side supports and reached it before it got another bolt seated.
It swung the crossbow at me like a club, so I took the impact on one gauntlet, trapped the weapon under my arm, and put a compressed burst through the other hand.
[Additional Mana consumed: 8.]
[Mana: 142/150 → 134/150.]
[Goblin — Level 2]
[HP: 36/70 → 0/70.]
[Four Level 2 Goblins defeated.]
[Contribution threshold met.]
[Experience acquired: 40.]
[EXP: 30/100 → 70/100.]
Seven Level 2 Goblins, seventy EXP, ten apiece without a single exception.
Five times the level, confirmed as far as normal monsters went.
Afterwards Tomas went along the tunnel pulling out any arrow that had not snapped, and Idris picked up one of the Goblin crossbows, turned it over twice, and put it back down because the thing was held together with cord and optimism.
"I’m down a decent chunk of Mana already," Nia said. "Just so somebody knows."
Bria worked a bolt out of her shield and found the crack it had left underneath, and she did not say anything about that at all.
The rails ended in a broad chamber at a raised stone platform, and the thing waiting on it stood up as we came in.
It went nearly twice the height of the smaller Goblins, with thick arms and skin the dark rust color of old iron, and its pointed ears lay flat back against its skull.
Mismatched iron plates were strapped across its shoulders and chest, old scars crossed its face around one blind eye, and the heavy axe in both hands was stained dark along the cutting edge.
[Hobgoblin — Level 5]
[Green Gate Boss]
[HP: 260/260.]
"That’s nearly four times a Goblin," Tomas whispered.
Four times the HP, and the number told me nothing at all about what it would pay, because the line under its name said Boss and I had no idea yet what that did to the arithmetic.
It came off the platform before we could finish deciding anything.
It went at Bria and brought the axe down toward her head, and she got her shield up in time, and the force put her on one knee and split the shield’s outer layer along the crack that was already there.
Whatever her Tank Ability was doing kept her arm from breaking, but she was not taking a second one from that position.
Idris went for the open side and his blade skated off the iron plating without biting, and the Hobgoblin threw an elbow into his mouth that put him on his back.
Tomas shot at its good eye. It turned its head, so the arrow went into its cheek instead, and it ripped the shaft out without letting go of the axe.
Nia started toward Bria.
"Wait," I said. "Not while she’s inside its reach."
She stopped.
I went around toward the blind side.
[Ability Activated: Aten.]
[Mana: 134/150 → 132/150.]
It heard me anyway and swung flat and level, and I got under the axe head, though the wooden handle caught my shoulder and spun me half around.
Bria used the opening to put her shield into its knee, and Idris finally stopped attacking armor and cut into the back of the same leg.
[Hobgoblin — Level 5]
[HP: 260/260 → 211/260.]
It rounded on Idris, and Tomas put an arrow up under its raised arm into the soft flesh at the armpit.
Nia got Bria’s shoulder working well enough to lift the shield again, but the light around her hand guttered before the wound had fully closed, and she had to stop.
After that we wore it down properly.
Bria stopped trying to overpower the axe and simply kept it busy, while Idris worked the ruined leg and Tomas held his shots for the gaps in the plating instead of firing constantly.
I used the gauntlets to push the axe handle off line, hit its ribs when the handle went past me, and spent Aten in short bursts rather than dumping everything into one swing that might miss.
[Additional Mana consumed: 6.]
[Mana: 132/150 → 126/150.]
[Hobgoblin — Level 5]
[HP: 211/260 → 91/260.]
Then it worked out who was keeping everyone upright.
It broke off Bria entirely and charged Nia.
Bria was too far to cut it off, Idris was too hurt to get there, and Tomas hit it clean in the chest plate without slowing it at all.
I got between them.
It raised the axe for a straight downward cut, and I did not try to catch the blade, because catching it was how Bria had ended up on one knee with a split shield.
I stepped inside the swing instead, clamped both gauntlets around the wooden handle, and let its own momentum drag me in against its chest.
Then I put Aten through my right fist at the moment I landed.
[Additional Mana consumed: 12.]
[Mana: 126/150 → 114/150.]
[Hobgoblin — Level 5]
[HP: 91/260 → 0/260.]
[Green Gate Boss defeated.]
[Boss experience multiplier applied.]
[Experience acquired: 100.]
[EXP: 70/100 → 170/100.]
A Level 5 normal would have been twenty-five under the rule I had just worked out, and this had paid a hundred, so the Boss line on its name had multiplied it four times over.
[Level increased: 1 → 2.]
[Excess experience carried forward.]
[All attributes increased by 1.]
[Strength: 18 → 19.] [Endurance: 20 → 21.] [Agility: 17 → 18.] [Perception: 16 → 17.] [Willpower: 32 → 33.]
[Health: 200/200 → 210/210.]
[Unassigned Attribute Points: 0 → 3.]
[EXP: 70/200.]
One point into everything automatically, three more to put wherever I wanted, and two hundred needed for the next one with my seventy carried over instead of thrown away.
I left the three where they were.
I was standing in a dungeon with a split shield, a bleeding swordsman, and a Healer running on fumes.
Deciding what kind of Player I would be for the rest of my life was not something to do in ninety seconds because a number looked good.
The level itself was quiet. My breathing came back sooner than it should have, some of the weight went out of my arms, and the gauntlets moved a little easier, and that was all.
"We’re alive," Tomas said, and sat down flat on the stone and laughed at the ceiling. "All five. That’s a hundred percent. Statistically we’re excellent."
Idris leaned on the wall and made a show of examining his sword, which fooled nobody with that much blood on his mouth.
Nia sat back against Bria’s cracked shield and tried to look like someone resting rather than someone who could not stand.
I waited for the clear notification.
It did not come.
The Hobgoblin stayed where it had fallen, and no exit opened anywhere in the chamber, and the low vibration running through the mine did not fade out the way it should have.
It got stronger.
The pale-green crystals in the walls were brighter than they had been.
A deep pulse went through the floor, and dust came down off the ceiling, and the old rails began to shake in their beds.
Then the green inside the crystals darkened to yellow, and then to orange, spreading outward through the chamber one crystal at a time.
[A dungeon Mana surge has been detected.]
[Warning: Gate structure destabilising.]
[Gate Failure confirmed.]
[Previous Threat Classification: Green.]
[Threat Classification recalculating.]
[Current Threat Classification: Orange.]
[Emergency exit unavailable.]