Golems and Scorched Earth

Today was the day that Stella was going back into the dungeon, she had prepared quite a few extra supplies. She had made a few of the blood cures so that she could use them if the need arose, along with a few warded jars so that she could keep samples safe.

Before she headed down she decided to go visit Vish to see if he made any progress on the record player. Upon arriving at his workshop she heard a tune that sounded familiar even though she had never heard it before.

"Hey Vish what's with the music, did you figure out the record player?"Stella said

"Yea I did took a little bit of figuring out but it was worth the effort."Vish responded

"The disc is called 'wait' made by someone called C418, there should be other discs, how did you find this one again?" Vish was quite invested in finding another disc after listening to wait.

"Monster dropped it, If I find another Ill come to you, do you think you could make the record player smaller?"Stella asked

"Smaller? Why would you need that, last you told me you have quite the workshop size shouldn't be an issue."Vish stated

"After hearing the disc I was wondering if I could listen to it on the go, maybe while I'm out shopping or in the dungeon even."Stella explained

"I can try, but I'm more interested in making a device that can make more records, this could be a big seller if they could be made."Vish wanted another disc so that he could experiment on finding out the material to try making something similar

"Well you surprised me, I didn't think you would be able to make the record player, how much was the price again?"Stella hoped it wasn't too expensive

"The record player is 1 million valis."Vish stated

"What, 1 million?!"Stella exclaimed

"Yea it's a custom order, and it wasn't easy to make either you are getting off cheap with it being only 1 million."Vish explained

"Fine, here's your 1 million valis, even though I am the only customer you get."Stella begrudgingly handed over the valis

"Thank you kid, and the reason it is 1 million is that you are a customer."Vish said with a smile on his normally blank face

After Stella left Vish's workshop she made her way to the guild for any new info she might have missed. One of the guild employees handed her an updated map showcasing a few new deadends with monsters, they didn't however have the creepers or the spiders on the map.

Stella headed into the dungeon and upon making it to the 1st floor she took the golems out of her storage bag, turns out the golems were 'items' so they could be stored. She decided to see how the golems would fair in combat without her help.

The golems did pretty well on their own, Tank took aggro of the monsters keeping them out of Ranger and Melee's way. Melee attacked monsters that got close to Tank and Ranger, keeping both of them from getting hit too hard and too fast. Ranger took out stragglers and helped keep Tank and Melee from getting overwhelmed.

Although their actual abilities were questionable, to say the least, Stella had definitely seen Ranger hit Tank with an arrow, Melee aggro too many monsters, and Tank trying to attack monsters.

These issues were ironed out while they headed to the 15th floor and during the trip, she realized the greatest part of the golems; they scaled with her skills and her stats, they didn't scale exactly with her stats but they did follow along at about .5x the amount and with the skills also affecting them they were easily as strong as she was. She was kind of sad that she didn't have to just swarm enemies with hundreds of golems, but that could be an attack she could do as an ace up her sleeve.

Stella and her golems were not struggling at all, and now that they came upon the creeper cave things would only get easier. Stella pulled her wand out and made the golems just follow instead of attacking.

As she made her way through the charred hallway, she had her ice focus ready for any attacks. The first creeper she met took 2 frost bolts and a kick to the head freezing the creeper before shattering its head.

Skeletons were weak against ice and fire while they were weak to shock, the creepers were weak to ice and shock but always exploded when fire was used against them. Stella stuck with the shock focus because of its chain attacks, and everything went along smoothly Stella and her golems made their way down to the spider's nest without any difficulty.

The spider's nest looked nowhere near as intimidating as it did before, now that she had the fire focus. She gathered a small amount of spider silk before scorched earthing everything in her path. Webs? Turned to ash. Spiders? Reduced to atoms.

Stella did have to wait for everything to stop burning before continuing but she pulled out the jukebox, ate, rested up, and played 'wait' while she waited. After her short break, she made her way down the once web-covered pathway passing by ash more ash and a node?

The node seemed to be a normal bright node it also had 3 primal aspects contained inside it. Stella used her wand to probe the node realizing that she could fill her wand with vis using the node, with this discovery she came up with a method to take the node with her.

Jarring a node wasn't too difficult, one simply needed a jar big enough to fit the node inside without it coming in contact with the walls of the jar, then by pushing some vis through the jar and the node, you could link the node to the jar.

This allowed one to take node with them, and Stella did just that. After taking the node she made it to the end of the passage the spiders had once occupied, and what was at the end surprised Stella greatly.

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Word Count: 1041

This chapter didn't really have a fight, it was mostly focused on the golems and the dungeon but the next one...? Suggestions and power stones are always welcomed!