Dungeon Duel (Rogue Dungeon 5) - Chapter Seventeen

Roark barely made it through smithing a pair of iron counterweights for the first trebuchet before he decided the long train of black hair that had come from his Mega-Evolution had to go. It kept blowing into his face and sticking to the sweat. He could pull it back into a queue, but with the horns, he would just look a bloody fool, so he got out his Kaiken Dagger and started sawing away at it.

There had been a time when he’d thought long hair made him look roguish and sophisticated, but Danella—the golden-haired thief who’d taught him about life on the streets—had destroyed that notion in short order with a harsh dose of reality.

“What in the bloody hells have you done with your hair?”

“It was getting long.”

“So cut it off.”

“Noblemen wear queues all the time.”

“Do they look like right bellends, too?”

“Get stuffed.”

“Think it’ll catch more lice or rats? I hope it’s rats. I’m starving.”

“Bloody hells, fine, I’m cutting it!”

As her ghostly laughter rang in his head, Roark chuckled to himself and finished hacking off the fistful of hair. Strange how not so long ago even the memories of the best times with Danella would cut him to the soul because of their bleak ending, but now he could look back on at least some of them with a measure of fondness.

“What are you doing?” Zyra’s dusky voice surprised him from his musings. He found her perched on the closest workbench, human legs crossed.

“Some much-needed grooming.” He held up the hank of hair as proof, then tossed it into the nearest forge fire, letting it burn in a plume of oily smoke.

The Orbweaver made a pouting sound low in her throat. “I liked it. You looked so much easier to catch hold of with long hair.” She curled her slender fingers into a fist as if to demonstrate.

Roark snorted. “Add that to the reasons to cut it off, then. It got in the way while I was working.”

Zyra shrugged, one pair of arms braced behind her on the bench, the other set toying idly with the gathered tools. She selected a driver and pointed it at him. “Either way, what I meant was, why are you cutting your hair with a dagger when you can just go into the grimoire and change its length?”

“Honestly, I didn’t think of it,” he admitted, scratching his onyx-plated jaw sheepishly. “Old habits, I suppose.”

With a thought, he opened his grimoire and flipped to his spinning avatar. After a moment’s trial and error, he figured out how to alter the hairstyle back to the shaggy mane he was more accustomed to. He closed out of the tome and offered Zyra a smile.

“Much better,” he said. “A tad more even this way. Thanks for the tip.”

“You’d never survive without me,” she teased. But as soon as the taunt was spoken, the playful air they’d been enjoying a moment before dissipated, and a heavy shroud settled in its place like the deadly fumes from a poorly vented forge. Silence reigned. Zyra had always been the straightforward sort, preferring to solve things with a shout or at the tip of a blade, but she seemed to have reached the end of her interest in this argument. For whatever reason, Zyra was keeping her own counsel now, and the words she left unspoken seemed to yell the loudest and most fervently.

Roark had no idea how to approach her in this silent state and felt certain he would only make things worse if he tried. Instead, he busied himself tying on a leather smithing apron.

Zyra hopped off the bench. “Well, I didn’t just come to set your hair to rights, Dungeon Lord. I’ve got more replacement webs for you to Hex.”

“Of course.” He’d precast several more Discordant Inversion spells in his Initiate’s Spell Book in preparation for this. He took the first from her and selected the surface to Hex.

[Would you like to Hex this surface? Yes/No?

Note: For every Hex you inscribe, Cursed! will extract a share of your Health equal to your Enchanting level x your character level.]

A hefty price to pay now that his levels in both were so high, but his Health-regen could more than keep up with it, and the results were well worth the cost. As he worked, he caught sight of movement high above on the glowing surface of the Vault—a Herald tangled in another web. The squad of webcrawlers assigned to the western side dropped down from their perches and attacked. Lowen’s soldiers were taking their chances on flying out less and less as more of their fellow Heralds were sent for respawn.

Grim satisfaction beat in Roark’s chest as the webcrawlers dispatched the Herald. No more rushed out into the night. It’d had a rocky start, but they were turning this into a proper siege.

One by one, Roark Hexed the replacement webs, pausing now and then to go through the motion-intensive cast for Discordant Inflection and replace the inscriptions he’d used from his spell book. It took time and stamina, but it gave his Health a chance to recover when it dipped too low. By the time he’d finished the last web, the heat from the nearby forge had him dripping in sweat and his muscles trembling from the strain.

“That’s the last of them,” he said, handing it to Zyra.

She nodded and stored it in her Inventory. For a moment, she looked as if she’d leave without another word, as she’d done so many times over the past few days.

Then she turned back and used her long spider’s legs to stretch up to his height. He felt her lacy veil brush against his cheek, then her lips and fangs.

“Jotnar,” she muttered jokingly as she pulled away. She cut through the throng toward the Vault. “If they weren’t so filthy useful…”

Roark grinned and turned back to his battlefield smithy. Time to put that usefulness back to work.

He stoked up the fire once more, then called for an apprentice to work the bellows while he melted down the gathered scrap in a massive crucible. When the last chunk of metal was glowing and liquid, Roark pulled the crucible out and poured it hissing into the counterweight mold. While that cooled, he returned to the fire and started on the next. In Hearthworld there was very little waiting in the molding process—what would have needed to sit overnight cooling in Traisbin took only minutes here—but Roark was reluctant to waste even a single second when already the horizon was tinged with dawn. Who knew how much time had passed in the Devs’ home world, but one thing was certain, every second brought them closer to the day Hearthworld’s gods planned to wipe this world from existence.

All around his station, accomplished smiths from the allied dungeons worked tirelessly, crafting individual parts of siege engines. Roark’s initial thought had been to have each smith build a trebuchet, battering ram, or siege tower from scratch themselves, but he’d quickly dismissed that notion. With each station focusing on crafting one or two specific pieces, they turned out parts much faster. Then the Construction specialists ferried the parts away and began to assemble them.

Already, Roark could see the early stages of three massive siege towers beginning to climb high above the allied troops, a battering ram’s chains being riveted in place while a group of Thursrs and Rock people dragged its ram over, and beyond that a trebuchet’s uprights being fastened to the wheeled base. Each engine had been specially chosen for the allied mobs whose particular skills would work best with it. Trebuchets for the Rock people of the Crystal Caverns, many of whom now had the Meteoric Flare ability to catch on fire with no harm to themselves thanks to Transmute Flesh. The battering rams for powerhouses like the Trolls and their hybrids, and siege towers with ballistae on top to deliver the troops to the Vault’s numerous entrances and exits while archer types rained enormous Undead Chaos Bolts on the Heralds’ hive.

Roark crafted half a dozen more counterweights, then went back through, cracking open the molds and retrieving the immense spheres of iron. With more time, he would’ve done what he could to smooth out their rough edges a bit. It irked his pride a little not to, and he couldn’t avoid hearing the brawny old mage-smith he’d been apprenticed to at the academy clucking disappointedly at the ugly creations. This, however, was a war, he reminded himself, and not just against Lowen, but against the ticking clock. A rough edge here and there wouldn’t affect the efficiency of the trebuchet, so he was forced to call it good enough.

That put paid to his quota for the trebuchets.

He turned to his next project with no small amount of glee. The mechanism for a ballista that would sit atop one of the siege towers. Other than their nails, hangers, and wheels, the tower would be mainly wood, but the ballista was a complicated bit of machinery with metal winches, cranks, gears, shafts, and springs, every one of which was vital to its operation. If one piece failed, the ballista was so much worthless scrap.

Because of this, only Roark and the two most highly skilled smiths in the allied dungeons were entrusted with crafting the ballista pieces, and rather than smithing them from scrap, each piece would be made from top-quality Steel Ingots Roark had smelted himself.

Roark spent more time finessing the ballista parts than the counterweights. He labored over them with a critical eye. Turning the arms on the metal lathe he’d brought straight from the Troll Nation smithy. Carefully measuring out every tooth in the gear mold, then rasping each surface clean when it came out of the mold. He heated the lengths of thin rod to steel’s perfect yellow glow before threading the end through the head of a spring shaping rod, then coiling it around. A time-intensive process, but one that he reveled in. There was a simplicity to it, yet one that required single-minded focus.

Ick often spoke of meditative practices, and though Roark had never fully mastered the ability to turn off his mind, when engaged in work like this, he came close.

Once the myriad pieces of his ballista were finished, Roark called over one of the master craftsmen from the Construction specialists. The Bloodleech set to work quickly and efficiently assembling the creation, putting each piece in its place with a deftness belied by its handless meaty arms.

Unfortunately, Roark didn’t have the time to admire the engine as it came together. He turned back to the forge and began to heat the thick metal rods and enormous flanged heads for the ballista’s bolts. When they were hot enough, he made certain the ends were spotless, then applied the flux and stuck them back in the fire, taking care not to let even a breath of air blow across their glowing yellow surfaces when he pulled them back out. These he wired together securely.

Then it was time for patience. Hammer too soon, and he’d destroy the joint. He counted out the seconds in his head as the metal cooled and joined with the wire. Finally, it was time. He applied the trip hammer to the welds, a lesser smith helping him manipulate the enormous and unwieldy bolts. The process would have been far harder had his helper not been a creature of rock and fire, a mid-level Magma Selkie, himself immune from the scorching heat of molten metal. What Roark wouldn’t have given for such an assistant back in his home world.

By the time the sun had risen over the horizon, he had created a stack of the bolts. All that was left to do was to Curse them with Undead Chaos.

Roark was just hefting the first bolt to begin when a message appeared in the corner of his vision. It was from Randy.

We need help. The cops distracted Lowen’s side for a while, but he just started dropping mobs in the middle of LA, and the cops are having to deal with that. We’re not doing well here. Pwnr’s guild and I aren’t enough. We can’t hold Frontflip indefinitely.

Roark scowled, glancing around at the siege engines under construction, then up to the webcrawlers. All this preparation would be for naught if Lowen captured the Devs’ home and managed to steal back the World Stone.

He had to get there, but he couldn’t just step through the dimensions to Randy’s aid—in that, Lowen had the upper hand. True, the heroes might be able to pass easily between the worlds, but Roark had to travel by portal.

Unfortunately, he only knew of one person who had access to reliable portals.

“Damn it all.” He tossed the ballista bolt to the trampled, muddy grass and sent a reply to Randy: Hold as long as you can. I’m on my way.

Still cursing himself, Roark opened his messages with Talise. Time to take another deadly gamble, and this time not only with his own life.