Chapter 308: Vaulty-Tec
“You’re in, obviously,” Ishi said to Joma. “You did an excellent job interrupting my movement, which kept me from triggering my Unstoppable buff. Your build can adequately address almost anything I can send your way, and what weaknesses I identified were immediately covered by your companions.”
“Yaaaay!” shouted Cloaky. “I’m useful!”
“You’re worthy of love regardless of personal utility,” Joma said softly to the garment. “But good job.”
That was oddly wholesome coming from the normally bitter pugilist. Joma took another moment to consider what Ishi said. “Without Cloaky and Nottagator, I’d have lost.”
“True, but it’s not exactly a fair comparison,” said Ishi. “My heritage gives me a number of advantages.”
“No such thing as a fair fight,” said Joma, shrugging. “Someone trying to kill me won’t stop and give me a break just because they have ‘a number of advantages.’” Joma waved a hand at Ishi. “If I had to give you one piece of feedback, Princess, it’d be that. I asked if you were ready. You said yes, and you still weren’t ready for me to attack. You can’t let your guard down like that, especially when combat is definitely coming. You always, always need to be–”
I threw Somncres at Joma full force. The Iskarim raised a silvery arm and batted it aside without flinching before finishing her sentence. “–ready for someone to attack you.”
Ishi nodded, and then both women gave me an annoyed look for slightly different reasons. I raised my hands in surrender. “Just trying to help illustrate a point.”
My defense earned me no relief from their combined ire and, in fact, seemed to make things worse. I judged it wise to keep my mouth shut while the ladies finished their feedback.
Ishi’s armor finished regrowing one of the holes Nottagator had carved into it, and Ishi burched away a few splinters. “Speaking of being prepared,” she said, “I suppose this advice would have had me more ready for your Atrocidile to make an appearance. Has she always been able to walk through walls and swim through the floor?”“It’s a combination of abilities,” said Joma, a rare hint of a smile peeking through her fur. “I’ve got an Animal Husbandry evolution that lets me make a companion manifest as a spiritual entity, so she can stay incorporeal and move through physical objects. Notty also has a Spiritual Magic evolution that lets her project an incorporeal clone. With both, she can mix them together so you aren’t sure which is the real Nottagator. Mainly, she stays hidden in the walls while attacking with her manifestation.”
“And she still has her full suite of abilities while doing this?”
“She does, Princess,” said Joma, nodding.
As Nottagator’s absurd combo was explained to us, Vaulty appeared and presented himself for his tryout.
I was sticking around once more to referee the match, but I wasn’t sure how much Ishi could learn from a series of giant explosions–that she didn’t already know. One way or another, we were gonna find out.
“I am prepared to demonstrate my capabilities,” said Vaulty.
“Not yet,” said Ishi, holding up a hand. I was glad to see she was already taking Joma’s lesson to heart. The Dragon princess might struggle with admitting she’d made a mistake, but she wasn’t above correcting the error. “I want you to give me everything that you’ve got. No holding back.”
“Very well.” Several panels slid away on Vaulty’s frame, revealing a dozen more cannons. His shoulder pauldrons clicked open, collapsing down into hidden grooves as a dense block of metal revealed itself. It unfolded into a massive gun, nearly thirty feet long. Despite the size, it merely looked ‘kind of big’ on Vaulty’s large frame. “I anticipate that you will regret that request.”
“Hot diggity!” said Cloaky. “Is anyone else aroused?” Then the sentient clothing stage whispered to Joma, “Vaulty’s kind of a badass.” The Iskarim slowly nodded in agreement.
“My abilities do not discriminate between enemies and allies by default. In order to ‘not hold back,’ I will not be modifying the attacks.” Vaulty swung towards me and Joma. “I recommend the evacuation of non-combatants.”
My hand twitched as I started to reach for Gracorvus by instinct, but the shield was still in Hiward with Papa Junior. Instead, I took a superfluous glance at my health and Shielding.
HP: 3,185/3,185
Shielding: 3,000/3,000
If the collateral damage of Vaulty’s attacks could smash through my defenses and wipe out more than 6,000 effective health, then the primary target–Ishi–would become a dark stain on the wall, assuming the attack left any of the walls behind. I doubted that Vaulty could dish out anything quite that destructive.
Buuuuuuuuut given the chance that it might happen, I wasn’t about to leave my extremely important diplomatic ally and increasingly serious girlfriend alone to have her face melted off without some emotional support to help carry her through.
“I’m good,” I said. “Plus, I need to referee and stuff.”
Joma tapped her foot while Cloaky folded himself into an origami EXIT sign. The cape even started blinking. His mini-yeti mount grumbled, but decided to play it safe and allowed Grotto to teleport the pair of them out of the room.
“Okay, all clear!” I said, giving Ishi and Vaulty a double thumbs up. “Ready check!”
Ishi wasn’t ready. While her armor was fully repaired, she needed to spend some more time in my aura to regenerate back to full HP. One oddity about Dragons was that, while their health pools seemed to be massive, their natural regeneration was kind of shit. Her mana regen wasn’t bad, though, and once she was full up on spell fuel, she used Telekinetic Surgery to clean up any remaining bruises and broken clavicles.
I then excluded Ishi from my auras to keep things fair, and she pulled her shield out, placing it between herself and Vaulty. She spread her silver wings and took to the air, with an arrow nocked and a staff floating at her side.
“Ready!” she said.
“Ready,” said Vaulty.
“Fight!” I shouted.
Ishi drew back her bow, and Vaulty disappeared.
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Even the hefty golem’s soul had vanished from my Soul Sight, indicating that a potent stealth ability had just been used. Then again, I’d never properly fought with Vaulty. He might just be that
good at stealth, and this was par for the course, no active skills or cooldowns needed.Either way, Ishi narrowed her eyes for a moment before casting a pair of AoE spells. One landed where Vaulty had been before he’d pulled a Houdini, while the other covered Ishi’s own position in total darkness. I took out a cheap backup shield and held it up while I worked on activating my Where’s Nuralie? evolution, letting my vision pierce through stealth and invisibility. The only downside to the evo was that it took six seconds of concentration to kick in.
Also, it still didn’t work on Nuralie, since her Agility was too damn high!
Ishi and I got a total of two seconds to react to Vaulty’s disappearance before the room erupted.
A wall of violet flame flashed through the air so fast that it appeared to instantly fill the room, despite my enhanced perception. The flames were joined by a wailing cacophony of tormented voices, then a deafening bang. The stone of the floor below me cracked, shattered, and became shrapnel, moving upwards at several thousand miles per hour, uncaring that I was in its way.
All of this was accompanied by a potent pressure wave that threatened to tear me off my feet and send me hurtling into the wall at my back. A quick pulse of Gravity Anchor kept me in place, but it didn’t stop the icy chill of a thousand souls trying to shred my spiritual essence. My ears twitched with the rapid-fire sound of dozens of tiny spatial tears twisting reality next to my skull and creating tiny, crackling sonic booms that rattled off my Shielding.
Critical Damage reduced by Body of Theseus!
Aegis of the Master prevents you from becoming Stunned, Cursed, and Stupefied!
Spectral damage is reduced by 50% from Exposure Therapy–Corruption
Shielding: 3,000 -> 2,613
The notifications came hard and fast as the System kindly let me know that I had resistances out the ass against whatever Vaulty had just done, and I’d still eaten close to 400 damage. That attack could probably one-shot most Delvers of my level, and the damage that had gotten through my wall of DR was nearly equivalent to a full health bar for somebody with a Fortitude of 20. Even Nuralie or Etja might struggle with that one, although they each had their own emergency skills and cooldowns.
When the attack cleared, the room was an absolute wreck. We’d chosen this chamber for size; it was several hundred feet in all dimensions, giving us a solid playing field for these kinds of spars. Vaulty’s attack had scoured every inch of the place, shattering the walls, ceiling, and floors. I could see the dark substance of the Closet’s boundaries below and beside us, whereas other walls fell away to reveal shimmering portal barriers that Grotto kept surrounding all of our more sensitive facilities.
Ishi exploded out from beneath several feet of rubble, spinning to locate her attacker.
Vaulty was still nowhere to be seen.
“Well, hot damn,” I muttered. “Vaulty is kind of a badass.”
Ishi whipped around and started rapid-firing arrows and spells at what seemed like a random spot in the room. The attacks landed, and space rippled as Vaulty’s frame reappeared. The undead golem’s cannons roared in exchange with Ishi, but the Dragon princess was much better prepared to dodge and block against the onslaught, now that she knew where her enemy was.
At least, she’d thought she knew where her enemy was.
While Ishi exchanged heavy artillery fire with Vaulty’s frame, Vaulty himself wasn’t there. Where’s Nuralie? finally kicked in, and the mass of spiritual energies that made up Vaulty’s actual body popped up in my Sight on the other side of the room. A half-dozen hands peeled off from the twisted mass of souls that was Vaulty’s true form, a chilling diaphanous wave in Ishi’s direction. Rubble from around the room began launching itself towards the princess.
Ishi was taken by surprise as the first piece of debris smashed into her temple. It bounced off her helm, but the princess was clearly stunned by the attack. Before Vaulty could capitalize on it, however, Ishi went full-Dragon.
It was technically a violation of the sparring rules, but I couldn’t fault the woman. The transformation was automatic in a few circumstances, such as when she suffered a sufficiently traumatic brain injury, was about to involuntarily lose consciousness, or just got really fucking mad. This situation probably counted for all three.
Ishi’s transformation was not a long, drawn out affair. It was so fast as to nearly be instant. Limbs elongated, scales grew, and a tail erupted from her body so fast, they knocked chunks of the hurled debris aside with enough force to turn them into a lethal shotgun spray of stone shards. Where the woman had once hovered, a silver Dragon the length of a twelve-story building now flew.
Ishi blurred through the air and slammed into Vaulty’s frame, her claws shredding the golem’s armor even as it continued to fire into her chest and neck. While the frame’s attacks left gouges and patches of necrotized flesh behind, Ishi was unbothered and dismantled it in short order. Then she flowed with sinewy grace to spin and orient on Vaulty’s Spectral form. The ghostly fellow watched her for a moment, then an entire brand-spanking-new golem frame popped into existence around the mass of disembodied souls.
Ishi took a deep breath, and space began to fold into itself within her toothy maw. I dug in my heels to keep the rapidly-darkening orb from yanking me forward, then had to activate Gravity Anchor again once the force grew too powerful.
“Okay!” I shouted, teleporting to the middle of the room between the two of them. “Claws and cannons in, lady and gentleman. You’ve already destroyed our sparring room. I’ll not have the two of you break the rest of the Closet as well.”
Ishi’s eyes narrowed, then she turned her head and breathed out with disastrous force. A line fractured the material universe, pulling all the debris from that entire swath of the room into itself, then colliding with Grotto’s portal walls and causing the entire thing to shudder and break in a mind-twisting shower of planar sparks.
Half the stone of the room was just gone.
Ishi returned to her human form and gave a dainty cough. “That attack cannot be aborted once begun,” she said. “I would be happy to assist in rebuilding this facility.”
A few hunks fell from the ceiling. Then, the remainder of the roof collapsed.
We then went through our feedback session, whereupon Vaulty was offered the third slot on Ishi’s team.
Vaulty wasn’t technically a Delver, but we were all betting that he would be recognized as one the moment he tried to enter a Delve. He was the composite of a bunch of Delver souls, and there was already a precedent that non-human entities could become Delvers in atypical ways, which we’d seen with Shog.
Speaking of, I sure hoped that limb-stealing horror was doing well back in his home dimension. I kinda missed being called ‘Slayer’ all the time.
Anyway, Vaulty was big, ranged, AoE DAMAGE. Alongside Joma, Ishi, and Nottagator, those four could probably handle a Level 21 Platinum Delve alone, but there was still room for two more in the party. Nottagator was an animal companion, after all. She wouldn’t count against the party size.
You know, like how Shog didn’t count against the party limit as my Dimensional Summon. Even though he was sort of a Delver.
Maybe I should get Sam’lia to send Shog a letter. Grotto refused to use his PSA evolution to contact the c’thon, and it’d be good to catch up.
Beyond the current finalists, we had a shortlist of other Delvers who might be solid for the team. One of our most promising candidates was another member of the Ravvenblaq tribe and a likely shoo-in for the fourth slot.
As for who the fifth member might be, there were some options, but nothing was locked in yet. Shog was technically a Delver, as mentioned. He wasn’t the best fit for a fifth, but even if he was, they couldn’t have him. If Shog wanted to slice and chomp his way through some Delves, he already had a team to do that with. He was my friendly eldritch horror, and I wasn’t about to introduce any party polygamy.
Man. I really wanted to summon him for a quick check-in. Just to say hi.
I wasn’t going to, since a literal goddess told me not to bother him, but come on! He’d be in and out of the Dimensional portal in no time. Wouldn’t even take five minutes.
Alas.
We had our feelers out to old acquaintances to fill the fifth slot, and I was pretty sure we’d grab somebody pretty soon. The way Shog grabs people with his majestic tentacle beard…
All I wanted to do was say hello!
Make sure the guy’s alive, even. Geez.