As more and more of the fire spirits began to close in, it was becoming painfully obvious that my previous tactic was just not holding up. Even with my enchantment attempting to proliferate the water as it landed, it was evaporating too fast to cause any real harm. Diane pursed her lips, watching the spirits getting closer. “Nora.” She called to the elder, who arched a brow. “You want to be useful?”
“What, you want me to handle the fighting, since your plan didn’t work?” She asked in an amused tone.
“Not quite. I just need someone who can handle the recoil.” Diane answered, pulling out a silver magazine and holding it out to me. “Drake! Water bullets! Make them big!”
I blinked, quickly understanding what she meant. Since the environment in this dungeon was so much harsher than we expected, my enchantment simply wasn’t moving fast enough to build up steam… Poor word choice, but it seemed apt.
I cut off the enchantment, causing the fire spirits to look around curiously as the weird rain stopped. Instead, I placed my claw on the magazine Diane held, enchanting it with Water Intent-X, focusing it in the form of bullets.
Once that was done, Diane pushed the magazine into her gun, walked over to Nora, and handed it to her. “Aim the long part at whatever you want to blast, and pull the trigger. Careful, it’s got a hell of a kick. Even with Drake’s buffs, I’m not confident in firing it repeatedly.”
Nora looked confused, taking the gun and examining it for a moment. She shrugged lightly, switching her spear to her left hand and aiming the gun at the nearest fire spirit. “Sure. Whatever you say.” She said in an almost condescending tone, pulling the trigger.
A loud boom resounded, together with the rush of a torrent of water firing out. The ground shattered beneath their feet, rocks flying in all directions. Nora stood, eyes wide as she looked in the direction that she had just fired. The spirits in that direction were gone. Not just the one she aimed at, but all of the ones in a line over a hundred meters long, and more than four meters wide. A line had simply been erased from the horde, causing the remaining spirits to freeze in confusion.
“What did you just give me…” Nora muttered, the gun only slightly raised from when she first fired it. She turned, shooting another column of water at another cluster, watching how the giant eruption of water wiped them out faster than the special environment could remove it. To be fair, Bella’s eyes were wide as well, shocked by the devastating power.
“That’s a pistol.” Diane grinned knowingly. “That one in particular, Drake enchanted to supercharge whatever skill was used to fire. Like I said, I can’t handle the recoil that well. If you want us to clear the dungeon on our own, we can, but it’ll take longer since Bella and I will need to recover after every couple shots.”
However, Nora quickly shook her head. “No, no, I like this!” She said in an enthusiastic tone, firing off another blast. Her lips split into a wide grin as she felt the power of the weapon.
Of course, whether I had Ghost Zone active or not, it was obvious to the fire spirits that we were near the portal at this point. With a high shriek, the remaining hordes began to launch torrents of fire in our direction. I was about to switch to my fire dragon form to focus on defense when Diane called out to me. “Stick with water, Drake! We’ll be needing you in that form for a while yet.”
Gritting my teeth, I slammed one of my clawed hands into the ground. My normal water attacks were weakened too much in this dungeon to be of use, so I had to do something else. Thus, I created a wall of red crystals between us and the attacks. Although it wouldn’t defend against all of the attacks, it didn’t have to. The spirits only knew our general area, so their attacks were highly inaccurate.
Meanwhile, as the wall shattered, Nora had already taken aim at the offending group. Her grin was practically manic as she pulled the trigger, firing it again and again every time the attack ended, picking new targets each time.
That is, until she pulled the trigger, and the only response was a faint click. “Little one! I think I broke it!” Nora called out in a panic, though her shooting spree had eliminated most of the enemies already.
“It’s not broken, it’s out of ammo.” Diane said, pulling out another magazine for me to enchant. Afterwards, she walked over to Nora, holding her hand out to take the gun. Although reluctant, Nora handed it over, and Diane showed her how to switch the magazines. “These can only fire a few times before needing to be reloaded. However, it’s the one that enchants them, namely Drake in this case, that pays the cost of the charging. That’s the only reason we can fire off big shots like this.”
“Hey, Diane…?” Bella spoke up, seeming curious about something. When Diane turned to look at her, she spoke in a hesitant tone. “Why didn’t you use that back when we were having trouble in the mimic dungeon? Or when we were running from the elves?”
“Hmm? Oh, the mimic dungeon was just because the enemy was above us, and I didn’t want to drop the whole place on our heads.” Diane chuckled, before shaking her head. “As for the elves… we were escaping in the car at the time. I didn’t want to risk the recoil from that thing knocking us off of Drake’s energy bridge. Also, that thing wouldn’t have been able to take out Jana even if she took a bullet to the face, I bet.”
Bella hesitated, nodding her head. Still, her eyes remained fixed on the gun. Seeing this, I couldn’t help but chuckle. “Diane, next time you log out, can you see if the Iron Forge has created any guns that the system registers as bows? If they are handheld projectile weapons, it might work. Otherwise… I wouldn’t be surprised if Bella switched to whatever they did count as.”
Bella’s face lit up as red as her hair at my teasing, and Diane chuckled. “Sadly, they didn’t register as bows. The proper guns that the forge made got classified as Firearms in the last big patch. If you’d like, I could try to get some samples for you?” She offered to Bella, whose face went even more red. “Their range is longer, and their firepower is higher. However, bow skills don’t work with them, and gun skills burn more mana. You’d need to retrain most of your skills if you wanted to transition.”
“Would that be okay…?” Bella asked hesitantly, looking between myself and Diane. Clearly, she had a great interest in firearms, though she didn’t want to be a burden to the team while relearning skills. And she wasn’t the only one, with Nora looking over at our conversation in interest.
“Hey, get me some, too! Especially if you can make them as strong as this one!” She called out in excitement.
Diane simply ignored Nora for now, focusing on Bella. “You can train your skills fast by fighting higher level opponents. It’s not a perfect result, but you were already behind us in training time to begin with, and you still caught up for the most part. Better now than when you’ve unlocked more powerful bow skills.”
Bella gulped, but nodded her head as Nora huffed. “Hey, don’t ignore me like that and have your little precious moment!” She complained, before storming out of my ghost zone area to go shoot at more of the spirits. “And get me more ammo ready!”
Diane rolled her eyes, holding the spent magazine out to me to refill. “I don’t think we have to worry about Nora having a bad impression of us anymore.” She said in an amused tone. “Shall we collect the bodies and follow along? There are a ton of spirits here, and the only thing I saw that could be scavenged was the core… so they should be quite valuable.”
“…What corpses?” Bella asked, looking around. Anywhere that Nora shot with her gun turned into a steaming trench, not a trace of the monsters remaining.
When she realized this, Diane’s face fell. “I’ve made a horrible mistake.” She said, turning quickly to look at the trigger happy chimerae. “I hope the boss’s body survives, at least…”
“Sorry, Diane. We need the boss’s loot to try to get the key.” I chuckled, causing her expression to falter even further. The three of us moved to follow Nora, Diane reluctantly replacing her magazines whenever she ran out of ammunition. As we walked, my claws tapped at the ground rhythmically. I couldn’t properly type in this form, but the system seemed to understand what I was trying to convey.
Can you try to get a few more enchantment skill books when you buy the guns? I asked, glancing at Diane out of the corner of my eye.
Diane looked back up at me, nodding her head. Let me guess, you want to make Bella some special firearm skills? She responded, to which I confirmed. My projection skills were perfect for the creation of new skills, and could easily form the foundation for Bella’s new fighting style. After all, I couldn’t imagine that there were many dungeons available that had skills for a weapon type that didn’t exist a month ago. Got it. I’ll see what I can find. We’ll need to head back to Fallcry if we want to collect them, though.
That was fine with me. Preferably, I’d like to have Hammerhead make Bella’s guns. However, I didn’t know if Hammerhead knew the production method or not. If he didn’t, we’d be relying on the Iron Forge whenever Bella’s weapons needed an upgrade.
As I was thinking about that, Nora’s voice shouted out. “Oi, you guys! There’s a black box over here! I think it might be one of those treasure chests you mentioned!” She shouted, and the three of us hurried over.
Sure enough, Nora stood before a black, obsidian chest with glowing red cracks scattered across it. As soon as we approached, Nora kicked the chest open. Inside was a fire spirit core, a fire resistance potion, and a pair of black cloth gloves.
Next was Diane, who received black pants and two cores. I simply received two cores and nothing else, while Bella received a black dagger and a helmet. Bella smiled slightly, handing the dagger over to Diane without a word. “This is a high level dungeon, the weapons here can’t be bad, right?” She asked, to which Diane nodded.
With that out of the way, we continued our dive into the dungeon. Or, rather, we continued to follow behind Nora, who was happily shooting everything she could see with Diane’s gun. It was as if she had been given the greatest toy in the world and couldn’t wait to play with it.
Naturally, I stayed in my water dragon form the entire time, since my water enchantments would naturally be more powerful like this. Though, as we moved deeper and deeper into the dungeon, the heat became more oppressive. Diane and Bella stuck next to me, having me release a cooling aura by generating ice with my Water Intent-X. It evaporated quickly, but this wasn’t a difficult application to maintain.
That was when we saw the boss. Or, at least, what seemed to be the boss in the distance. It was a giant being made of lava, sitting on the side of a mountain. When I appraised it, my eyes went wide, claws digging into the ground.
“What’s wrong, Drake?” Diane asked, feeling the sudden tension.
“Raid boss.” I muttered, and her eyes widened in realization. For a being to be qualified as a raid boss, it had to be able to fight well beyond its level, even for a boss. Which meant that my water attacks, even in my draconic form, would truly be useless against it. The only one who could reliably inflict any damage between the four of us was Nora, though even she would need to play some tricks in order to kill it, most likely.
