The Runesmith

“All of them should be in the city now… how much time do I have before the shit hits the fan…”

Roland had gone through the compound to check if everything was in order. His whole house had been turned into a fortress throughout the years of development. He had created the defensive structures with the cultists in mind but angry skeletal monsters weren’t that far removed from the equation. In a sense, it would be a good test run if ever the time arose that he needed to face one of those cultist monstrosities.

At the moment he was making his way through his secret tunnel, his aim wasn’t to fight or set up any traps but to gather intelligence. While this was the longest one it was not the only secret corridor he dug out. Another one that led out to safety had been created as well.

If all failed and he was overrun by the monsters there was a way for him to get out. This was of course something that he would only do in the worst case scenario. His escape would be accompanied by some fireworks that would probably take out even a cult abomination. However, his home would be gone and it was his last ace in the hole that he wouldn’t play lightly.

“Hm… at least they aren’t able to detect these secret passages and they do have that defensive mechanism the Lich triggered.”

Roland had arrived at the wall leading toward the dungeon. When descending to the secret area he had dug through it and made a person-sized hole. Now only a fist-sized opening remained that allowed him to glance towards the inside. There he saw the usual room he visited to start his journey to the mining area.

He would not be going in there or digging up the path again. Instead, he just needed to stay here to magnify the signal with the help of his suit. During his many trips down he had continued to search for the best path. While performing that task he placed many of his runic mapping devices everywhere.

With their help, he could follow the monster on the inside and come up with the right paths to avoid confronting them or the adventurers. Thanks to that solution he had remained unseen by the adventurers. There was always a possibility of an adventurer selling information about his whereabouts to the thieves guild. Roland was still a somewhat high-profile person in the city, someone could want that data to predict his movements.

His pedantic nature pushed him to be secretive after all the trouble he had been through. Now that the mine was discovered this process would help him in denying some facts. No one had seen him wandering the lower regions and the guards rarely saw him going through the main entrance. Even the large golem that was used to carry all the loot had not been inspected by anyone.

“I should probably stop worrying about that, what’s done is done…”

After giving out a sigh he turned his eyes to the mapping device. There was an option to enlarge the minimap to encompass the entire visor which he decided to use. There was actually a possibility to show the map in a 3D-like render but then it became a bit harder to read. The easier way was to divide the dungeon levels by numbers and just go through them one by one.

As always the field was flat and presented to him. The first thing he noticed was the lack of humans or other people of the races. Only the monsters remained and they were close to the exit. At the moment they were at the third floor level while the last of the people were at the first.

‘It seems that the miners and adventurers have successfully been evacuated, now can they stop them from going outside?’

The people outside the dungeon had one advantage over the monster wave. There was only one exit to which all of the corridors connected. They only needed one spot to defend and if they managed to stop the skeletons then it would be over. The only problem was that everyone was taken off guard and not enough defensive measures were taken.

‘Will Arthur be able to gather enough guards? Are there enough adventurers at a high enough level and will they take this seriously enough?’

Roland was worried that either there won’t be enough manpower to stop the skeletal soldiers from bursting out or that they won’t be able to gather the required forces. The vast majority of the adventurers were still only steel and bronze. The only useful help would come from the silver ones while the others might just get in the way and then be used to create more forces.

‘I really should have placed more of them…’

Roland never expected a full-fledged dungeon break to take place. If he knew there was so much danger then he would have mapped out the entire dungeon area and placed runic batteries everywhere. As it was now he could not monitor all of the passages or know what was happening in the lower level. Without a proper connection, he would need to get in range with his armor to be able to connect to the limited web of detecting devices.

From the spot he was in now he could at most detect down to the beginning of the fourth level. It didn’t look good, the wave of skeletons continued to pour forth and it didn’t look like it was stopping. It boggled his mind, where did the Lich hide this number of skeleton soldiers without being noticed?

There were too many of them to have been created from actual adventurer drops. Judging by the bone weapons that most of them carried in the lower levels, they had been created from monster remains instead. However, even though the dungeon was vast not every monster could be turned into a skeleton. The lava golems could not as the caster required the corpse to be made up of some type of flesh.

‘Did that Lich find a spawn point or some kind of trap?’

There were traps that when activated could force a person to fight against a larger group of monsters like the Troglodytes. In the lower levels, such places rarely existed but could have been somehow found by the Lich. Roland was unsure when the monster escaped, it could have even been a month or two before this whole debacle started.

For the time being, he remained here to watch over the situation. While he felt somewhat responsible for this predicament it wasn’t like he could control what others would do when reacting to the threat. He helped out the most to his ability and now needed to think more about his own side than the others.

The thought of going up and helping the guards defend the entrance did cross his mind. However, it would be quite a dangerous endeavor, and the time spent blasting away the skeletons could be used differently. Thus after staking out the dungeon from a safe location he decided to return back to his home to prepare for the worst.

First of all, he needed to restore the large cannon that proved capable of harming the Lich. It was his best bet at destroying that thing but there weren't many more shots he could take with it. The whole thing wasn’t designed to use his armor which was also deteriorating quickly.

His trip here was not only to peek at what was happening inside of the dungeon. He had also used up the last bit of runic wire along with a large quantity of smaller runic batteries. With them, he had placed several detection devices inside of this tunnel at the ceiling area.

The tunnel he created didn’t stray away from the main road that much. The soil was quite hard in some places which forced him to produce this tunnel in a somewhat fixed way. Thanks to this though he would at least know if a large number of monsters started flowing toward his location. With an activation of his armor’s agility-boosting spell, he made the trip back to his workshop. There he was greeted with a silence that he had lately come to forget.

In the past, before he even came here and back in his old world he had slowly gotten used to solitude. When he appeared in the body of Roland Arden he was ostracized by his own family which didn’t really bother him as much. He was used to it and thought nothing of people avoiding him.

It was the reverse, when finally he started gathering friends and acquaintances it became uncomfortable. At first, he didn’t know how to handle the attention he was getting. Slowly with time, his heart started opening up and finally, he got used to the chaos that all of it brought along.

Bernir’s badly timed jokes, Dyana’s outbursts of anger, and Elodia’s calm demeanor, all of it was different, and found a way into his life that he would do his utmost to protect. He even started to get used to the constantly annoying rugrats.

‘I guess I’m getting sentimental in my older years…’

Finally, he delved back to work, with the help of his new skills he was able to give orders to both his spider drones and the turrets on the walls. With his brain and all this firepower he should be able to direct it all at any potential enemies. However just as he was going through them one by one he noticed a dot on his screen, there was someone running towards his house.

“Hm?”

“Hey Boss, open up!”

“Bernir? Why are you back, you were supposed to go back to the city.”

“Hah, you didn’t think that I’d leave you to fend for yourself here, now did you? Now could you open up the gate, I’m feeling vulnerable here…”

“Awoo!”

Roland could see his assistant outside with the help of some golemic eye cameras. He was standing there with the weapon he was given to protect Lobelia and his wife, next to him was a large dire wolf that continued wiggling his tail. While he expected Agni to return, Bernir was a surprise guest. For some reason, he decided to come back here and Roland couldn’t help but smile.

“Hold on…”

With a command given the heavy-duty gate started sliding open and Bernir quickly headed inside. He was met by a metal cage that also had one separate exit through which he needed to get through. Only people that were registered to the magical device with their mana pattern could get through. It was similar to a thumbprint scanner and worked by injecting a tiny bit of mana into the door handle.

“Worf!”

“Stop it Agni, there is no time for this…”

The moment the gate opened up Agni charged at his owner and headbutted him right to the chest. Lately, the roughhousing between the two had increased but Roland didn’t really mind as this felt as if he was just tapped by a regular-sized dog. The more problematic thing was all the licking to his helmet that Agni attempted soon after. After wrestling the pooch down he finally turned to Bernir who had closed the secondary entrance behind him.

“How was it?”

“What was?”

“The city… how did it look? Are the soldiers heading to the dungeon? Were there any adventurers preparing?”

“Ah that, aye, it was really troublesome for me to get back, but you know me not even my wifey can stop me!”

Roland wasn’t sure what happened back in the city but Bernir had probably run away while forcing Dyana to stay back. He couldn’t imagine the wife being fine with her husband going back to endanger his life. However, people in this world were a lot more heroic so perhaps she was also fine with him protecting their livelihood.

The whole workshop was filled with the items they had made. Bernir had also built up his own little workplace that turned into a full-fledged smithy. In a way, they had a stake in all of this, if this workplace collapsed for one reason or another they would lose a lot of money. All that hard work they had spent would go up in flames if his home was destroyed. They had kind of threw in a lot of eggs into this basket that needed to be safeguarded.

“Alright but if things get too dangerous just run and don’t look back.”

“Aye, I’m not stupid I don’t really have a death wish, even more now …”

For a moment Bernir seemed to be in deep thought but Roland didn’t really want to prod. Even though his assistant wasn’t in possession of a combat class he didn’t really need to. There were multiple weapons that he could use and a lot of runic batteries or even cables that connected to the compound's power source. Then they also had a stash of Elokin’s Crystals that could be used with other types of weaponry.

“I also really wanted to try that thing you made… “

“Ah that one… Are you sure you can handle it, last time you fell over and almost blew a hole through the entire testing chamber?”

“Don’t worry boss, I’ve been working out!”

Bernir flexed his biceps which were rather large. While he was not a warrior thanks to having a tier 2 smithing class his strength and stamina ranking was high. He would probably be fine in using the heavy piece of equipment that they were testing for such an occasion. Thus while the half-dwarf descended into the workshop Roland continued to monitor the surroundings.

The thickest part of his walls was at the main gate. It was quite a similar setup as at a castle gate with a narrow walkway going up. There he could stand along with Agni to look out into the distance. Though the entire place was rigged with sensors and active turrets which could be set to auto-fire. For the time being, they were set to only aim at monsters but targeting humans was of course an option.

It was quite a boring display, time continued to tick but no monsters were appearing. Soon enough he started hearing footsteps from the back which were accompanied by a clunking sound. He didn’t really need to look back to know that it was Bernir with the oversized prototype strapped to his body.

The contraption was quite clunky and hard to move with but was simple. First of all, there was a large battery pack strapped to Bernir’s back. This was the power source that could both use the crystals they had stored and the runic batteries. The rest was just a set of cables that connected to a control rod in the front.

It kind of looked as if he was carrying a flamethrower with fuel in the back but the magical weapon could do much more than that. The simplistic design would allow even someone like Bernir to produce magical spells but came at a risk. The cables weren’t made with the best materials and would overheat. Thus he needed to wear a thick flame-resistant suit under it to not get burned.

In all honesty, Roland didn’t expect this thing to be of use if they weren’t going against monsters and defending. Bernir would be a sitting duck if one of them made it close enough to pounce. Luckily the enemies didn’t possess many ranged units that could potentially put an arrow through his cranium. This didn’t have to remain constant though as creating skeletal archers was always a possibility.

‘Let’s see…’

While Bernir was trying to get used to the heavy equipment Roland decided to take a look at his map. Some time had passed since his return from the underground tunnel and it looked like the monsters were about to reach the top floor. Soon he would know if they actually were able to leave that space and if they chose to head here.

Normally undead went towards were more living creatures lived. This would point them towards the large city that was radiating it along with the ambient mana everyone was producing. This would mean that his small workshop should only atract a smaller number but he wasn’t that sure if this would be the case. The Lich had a strange attraction to him or perhaps more to his mana pattern.

“Here they come, get ready Bernir they will be crossing through the dungeon entrance any second, no idea if the soldiers will be able to hold them for long…”

“Aye, I’m ready boss but could I ask you for a favor?”

“Ah sure, what is it?”

“Could you scratch my back… I can’t really reach it with all this on…”

“...”