Chapter 360: Completing the Puzzle
After their small break to recover mana, stamina as well as take care of some real life needs, the group dosed their fire and moved on.
Although they had talked about many things, some of them important, some of them mindless gossip and chatter and some of them completely idiotic and revolving around a disgusting topic. The main topic that remained in their minds was the purpose of the dungeon and the strange nature of those within it.
They played around with the elves a little bit more. Testing their responses to certain things, such as traps, as well as playing around with their aggro range. They responded perfectly well to traps, provided the same trap was back to back.
They would understand they had walked into a trap, unlike some game NPCs who would walk blindly into it one after the other, and would search for the source. They would even avoid the same trap if they could still see the outcome of the first trap.
However the moment they lost interest or couldn’t find the perpetrator, and left the view of their companions corpse, they lost all of the intelligence they had previously shown and would mindlessly stroll into the exact same trap that had tripped them up a few minutes ago.
It was as if they were sleep walking, and only briefly woke up when they were ’activated’ by certain stimulus, before they went right back to sleep.
It was the same case with their aggro range. With the Elves it was much farther than the Yeti’s, which made sense since they were archers. But one could step into their range, get their attention and then step out of it by a few extra metres.
Even if they could still see you, they would go back to their dormant state and resume their patrols. It was rather eery, in all honesty, seeing the light leave their eyes as they shifted back to their mindless persona.
A most curious discovery was one that they found on complete accident, although it wasn’t concerning the behaviour of the elves but instead what they were carrying.
After one of their trap experiments, they had decided to leave the bodies where they were. The loot gathered from the elves had been rather disappointing as of late, as they rarely dropped any Source Remnants and didn’t have anything of value on them other than their weapons, but they had plenty of those already to sell.
However just as they were about to walk past them, Lilith was suddenly yanked to the side by the sudden appearance of a dragging force originating from the fragments in her bag.
It was so strong that the bag was literally lifting off of her body and pointing in the direction of the corpses.
This phenomena made it incredibly easy to find the exact corpse responsible for it, or more specifically what was underneath the corpse they were directed to.
Shoving it out of the way, and trying not to spring their own trap in the process, their eyes widened in surprise and brows creased in confusion as resting peacefully underneath the corpse was a bundle of the fragments they had been collecting.
It was half a dozen of them, all of which were standing on end and pointing towards Lilith’s bag, as if they wanted to join their siblings.
"Why are these... Aren’t they supposed to be in the chests?" Figg asked, glancing around in confusion as he searched for the missing chest.
"I think they’re drops." Saige explained, "I think whoever was collecting them when they were running the dungeon died on this floor, and they simply... appeared here for us. As if they can only exist in one instance, and were dragged to this one by the sheer amount we have collected.
This is probably what would have happened if we died with them."
"Well... Sucks to be them!" Belladonna laughed, before gesturing to Lilith, "Do you think that is all of them? Seems like its reacting a lot, even if it’s more than usual."
"I don’t know," The Hellion admitted, as she pulled the bag off of her shoulders. The fragments on the ground kept themselves pointed at the bag, following its movements perfectly as Lilith removed it, opened the top and poured out the fragments they had gathered.
They clattered and rung as they hit the ground, before all of them leapt into action and began to smack against each other as if they were fighting amongst themselves.
However despite the chaos, there was a perfect order to it all, as the fragments rapidly aligned themselves into the perfect sequence. Fixing the errors that Lilith had made when she had been fiddling with them, and assuming their rightful place.
A dual bladed, two handed axe rested on the ground before them. A weapon that had been forged from the strange black metal and had been shattered apart by an unimaginable force. It’s blades, although they were cracked and fragmented and had been dwelling in those chests for god knows how long, were still sharp enough that a feather would cut itself in half just by falling on the edge.
However, when Lilith tried to pick up the axe, the fragment she grabbed hold of simply lifted itself from the structure, failing to take the rest of it with it. The pulling force had left it completely, having been wiped out by the final dance to properly arrange themselves, as if to say they had finally found all of the pieces.
Yet when they looked at the broken axe on the ground, it was easy to see that was not the case. Apart from the fragment Lilith held in her hand, there was a hole in the axe.
Just below the top and right between where the twin blades met, there was a perfectly circular hole. A hole that, by no coincidence in their minds, was the perfect size to fit the uniquely coloured ’Essence of Sin’ cores they had received from the Mini-bosses and which Lilith could not consume.
Although placing them in the hole did nothing, even with the fragments made whole and placed perfectly, they were not lost for solutions. If these two didn’t work, that only left one more to try.
The final boss of the entire dungeon. A complete and utter unknown, and the final obstacle to the first clear.