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 re...
2025-05-22 11:52:15 +0000 UTC
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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 ...
2025-05-21 12:00:00 +0000 UTC
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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...
2025-05-20 12:12:49 +0000 UTC
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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 pa...
2025-05-19 11:01:27 +0000 UTC
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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 spea...
2025-05-16 11:26:55 +0000 UTC
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“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...
2025-05-15 11:48:08 +0000 UTC
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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 coul...
2025-05-14 12:11:54 +0000 UTC
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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...
2025-05-13 12:11:46 +0000 UTC
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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 extraordin...
2025-05-12 12:39:40 +0000 UTC
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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 w...
2025-05-09 13:23:57 +0000 UTC
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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 monst...
2025-05-08 12:30:45 +0000 UTC
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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 ...
2025-05-07 13:46:10 +0000 UTC
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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 ben...
2025-05-06 12:32:34 +0000 UTC
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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, ho...
2025-05-05 13:34:54 +0000 UTC
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“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 ...
2025-05-02 12:02:07 +0000 UTC
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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
2025-05-01 11:17:14 +0000 UTC
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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 hypnot...
2025-04-30 11:29:16 +0000 UTC
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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 distribut...
2025-04-29 11:48:13 +0000 UTC
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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.
I...
2025-04-28 12:59:36 +0000 UTC
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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 fight...
2025-04-25 12:14:04 +0000 UTC
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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 sta...
2025-04-24 12:06:34 +0000 UTC
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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...
2025-04-23 13:02:15 +0000 UTC
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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 tha...
2025-04-22 12:25:34 +0000 UTC
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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 wand...
2025-04-21 10:50:46 +0000 UTC
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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 pro...
2025-04-18 13:23:54 +0000 UTC
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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 dif...
2025-04-17 13:04:44 +0000 UTC
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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 e...
2025-04-16 13:31:34 +0000 UTC
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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 t...
2025-04-15 13:37:55 +0000 UTC
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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 ...
2025-04-14 13:33:51 +0000 UTC
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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.
2025-04-11 13:49:26 +0000 UTC
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