The room, it turned out, was nearly as large as Merrick had thought. Something about the impromptu flight through the air must have skewed his sense of perception, he thought, considering the entire room was only three or four times larger than the area where he’d found the withering goodberry bush with his friends.
All in all, it still took him almost an hour to do a circle around the perimeter. Unfortunately, he did not find an exit and had to spend another hour doing another circle looking for clues. Even the hole he knew must be present, the one he’d come flying out of, wasn’t locatable for him. He was unsure if it was because of the less than stellar lighting or the angle of exit but the entire escape chute seemed to have been swallowed by the dungeon.
A small voice in the back of his mind told him that he should have long since gone to sleep and warned that he was going to oversleep on his departure. He wasn’t sure the exact time, but he was fairly confident there were less than eight hours before the caravan that he’d sold his alchemical services to was depart to the wilds to begin settling the foundation for a new stronghold.
“Yeah, Merrick. Listen to yourself, you’re going to miss your ride if you don’t kick your ass in gear and climb through thirty miles of soil in less than eight hours,” he scoffed to himself. Merrick attempted to use his cold logic to smother the tiny hopeful part of his mind clinging onto the idea that they weren’t going to die in the Mulberry Grove. Somehow, the tiny voice managed to outlast his attempts, though it wisely stopped protesting as loudly so he could focus on immediate survival.
“What’s this, then?” Merrick found a depression in the wall, almost a hole of sorts. It was located on the far side of the room from where he’d landed which he considered a good sign. Frequently with dungeon architecture, there was a bit of an implied optimal path for delving. If you entered a room and went straight through, you’d frequently find a descending path on the opposite side. Other entrances and exits to the room were either lateral movements, parts of other paths that intersected with the one you were on, or skill-based challenges that would allow delvers with different sets of skills to progress instead of hitting a dead-end.
It would stand to reason, he decided, that opposite an ‘entrance’ to the room that brought him down so far should be an exit. Of course, he was unable to locate his entrance so he was navigating based on using the side of the goodberry bush he crushed as his entrance angle.
The hole, Merrick decided by squinting at it, was perfectly circular. More perfect than any circle he’d managed to draw at the very least. It was larger than his hand and Merrick could see that it seemed to narrow farther in before curving up out of sight.
“I’m not sticking my hand in this!” Merrick shouted to the walls. He hadn't seen any bramblekin since his battle at the bush and felt more confident about shouting now that he knew there weren’t any entrances for them to come pouring through either. As far as he was concerned, he’d completely cleared this room’s combat challenge and should have therefore been able to progress. No matter that it was bizarre for such weak enemies to be located so deep in the dungeon where magica was thick in the air.
Merrick stood there for a few moments, waiting to see if there would be any response to his shouting. Of course, the tiny voice in the back of his head started piping up again about wasting time instead of getting rest for his trip. Just as Merrick’s eye began twitching, a bush rustled and a bramblekin came rushing at him.
With a simple sidestep and swipe, Merrick managed to remove the creature’s head and twist its horn off with his other hand in a simple motion. He may not ever be an amazing warrior, but the bramblekin presented almost no challenge for him at this point. He kicked the creature’s corpse away, cursing silently at himself for forgetting he was now barefoot, and watched as it dissolved away. In its place were three copper coins.
Merrick looked down at the horn in his offhand and pondered to himself about what that could mean. It was, apparently, common knowledge that if a delver harvested the bramblekin’s horn they could only expect to get a single copper at a maximum.
Merrick sheathed his sword and picked up the coins, rolling them around in the palm of his hand to help him think. Fidgeting had always been a useful tool for him, both for encouraging his thought processes and for preventing his anxious spirals.
“Tsk.” Merrick clicked his tongue and turned to begin ‘writing’ on the dungeon walls. He used the bramblekin horn to start etching his thoughts into the surface of the rock some distance away from the mysterious hole that total didn’t want to eat his arm. He always avoided writing temporary notes into his journals if he could help it considering how expensive a bound book of quality parchment was.
“Captured, no scratch that, Kidnapped. Heh, scratch that. Kidnapped in a dungeon because of innate skill.” Merrick carved his thoughts into the wall, occasionally scraping through a word with the horn in lieu of erasing it. “Encouraged to merge a new sword. Potential combat challenge ahead? Dungeon understands [[Merge]], wants something from me. What?”
On his last question mark, Merrick managed to break the tip off the apparently fragile horn.
“Well that won’t do, how am I supposed to keep track of my days of captivity in this prison cell without a suitable tally mark maker.” Merrick chuckled to himself and tossed the horn into his pack for later disposal. He’d been taught the merits of not littering as a child and it had always stuck to him. As he removed three previously harvested horns from his pack and channeled his [[Merge]] skill, he idly wondered to himself if Dungeons were supposed to be treated with the same no-littering respect that was due to the public parks. Surely the dungeon had some way to remove unwanted refuse considering the fact that he’d never tripped on rusted gear discarded by past delvers…
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[Merge Successful. One T2 Bramblekin Horn Merged.]
[SML: ::100%, GRW Mod: 0%, GTR Mod: 25%, RFN Mod: 0%, CFT Mod: 0%. TP: 102.5% See More…]
In his hands was now a larger horn, still smooth at its base and roughly cylindrical in shape before bending backwards where it’d normally follow the contours of a bramblekin’s head. The mass increase was surprising to Merrick, with it having retained almost all of the weight of the three horns that comprised the merge.
Thus far his limited success with merges had lost large amounts of mass each time. His operating theory, which he’d already jotted down in the margins of a used page in his journal, was that his skill was using some unknown resource to exchange quantity for quality when he did his merges. Either he was wrong, or the bramblekin horn had not improved qualitatively, only with size.
Regardless, this larger horn wouldn’t make a great writing implement. It was cumbersome to close his hands around it due to its size and curve, making it awkward. Really, he couldn’t see it being considered useful if he was making a scrimshaw. As it was now, he was worried it would poke even larger holes in his pack as it shifted if he continued to carry it around.
Subconsciously, Merrick glanced around for a trashcan before remembering he was several miles away from civilized society. With a frown on his face he set the horn on the ground before backing away, wondering if the dungeon would eat it the same way it had the rest of the bramblekins’ bodies.
“No such luck I guess,” Merricked waited about thirty seconds before picking the horn up and looking for somewhere to tuck it away so nobody would trip on it in the future. Just as he prepared to pull his hand spade out of his pack and dig below one of the nearby tree’s roots, his eyes lingered on the mysterious hole again before snapping to the merged horn.
“Damned blood loss, I’m telling you right now.”
Horn in hand, Merrick wandered over to the wall’s depression and sized it up. The horn in his hand wasn’t large enough to fill the hole and he still wasn’t keen to stick his arm in to investigate, so he did the next best thing he could think of. He counted out thirty horns in his pack, including the nine he’d collected on the first floor of the dungeon.
[Merge Successful. One T2 Bramblekin Horn Merged. See more…]
[Merge Successful. One T2 Bramblekin Horn Merged. See more…]
[Merge Successful. One T3 Bramblekin Horn Merged. See more…]
[Merge Successful. One T2 Bramblekin Horn Merged. See more…]
[Merge Successful. One T2 Bramblekin Horn Merged. See more…]
…
[Critical Success! Merge successful. One T3* Bramblekin Horn Merged.]
[SML: ::100%, GRW Mod: 0%, GTR Mod: 82.5%, RFN Mod: 0%, CFT Mod: 0%. TP: 108.25%]
[Total 108.55% Potential. No Excess Detected. No Personal Blessings Detected. Variant Change +/- %8.25. Improved Output]
Merrick had no issues merging the horns he’d collected, each one being a replica of the other created by the dungeon. The tier three bramblekin horn had followed the same pattern as the tier two, significantly increasing in size once more to the point that Merrick was sure that the fourth tier would slot perfectly into the hole.
It wasn’t until the third tier three merge that something had changed. The horn had condensed in size rather than increased, back down to the same size a tier one horn would have been.
The odd third tier horn he was holding in his hand now looked very different as well. It had the same cylindrical base but the tip of the horn split into a fork, looking a bit like a Hercules beetle’s horn. It also had streaks of glowing yellow veins running through it, which reminded Merrick much of the glow the dungeon’s namesake berries bathed the rooms with.
“Why?” Merrick couldn’t help but wonder to himself. Admittedly, he didn’t mind taking a break to ponder the issue to allow his untracked resource pool to regenerate. The strain probably wouldn’t be as bad on a normal day, but he was currently battling blood loss, hunger from a day and a half of fasting, and sleep deprivation. Also, he thought, whatever you classify the fatigue of bouncing from one life or death situation to another. He was sure it must have its own word, even if he didn’t know it.
Regardless, a break was in order. Even the tiny annoying voice in the back of his head agreed on that.
Merrick pulled up the full log for the last merge he’d done, expanding all the ‘See More…’s until he got to the final line that he’d not begun to dissect yet.
“108.25 Potential. That means the GTR Mod must be carried over between merges,” Merrick scrolled up to verify and, sure enough, the GTR Mod seemed to be additive between subsequent merges. He hadn’t had a chance to experiment with that yet, considering the brambleblades hadn’t had any of the Mod values filled out.
Merrick mulled over the impact of his discovery before jotting down a new theory in his journal.
“108.25% Potential doesn’t mean that I’m making something 8.25% better than its potential like I thought. I think it might mean that I’ve got a 8.25% chance of increasing it past its potential. Like a randomized upgrade. If I’m not wrong that must mean that getting up to 100% only means I guarantee a successful merge.”
How far off had he been, then, for the last five years to have never had a single success. Even with a percentage of a percentage of the SMR stat, he should have statistically had success before the copper coins. He’d attempted to use his [[Merge]] skill thousands upon thousands of times.
“There must be negative modifiers I can’t see. That or I’m the unluckiest man alive.” Merrick concluded to himself.
He took a glance at his surroundings and decided that maybe, just maybe, that later reason might be the correct theory.
With a frown on his face, Merrick looked down at the horn in his hand and considered his next steps.
