Chapter 51 Sci fi (Patreon)

            Now that the dungeon confirmed that his electric core essence creatures produced usable electricity it was time to significantly raise the output. In his home world, they used capacitors to do this. With that in mind, the dungeon began experimenting with making capacitors using essence channels.

            It took nearly a year to make the first essence channel capacitor, but it was too large to be useful, so the dungeon spent two more years looking for a way to make essence channels that performed the same action that were much smaller. What the dungeon ended up creating were essence channels very similar to the electric core, albeit they only held energy until the essence creature released it. Once the energy was released, it gladly leapt from the creature into its surroundings.

            Once the dungeon had a small enough essence channel capacitor, he began designing an essence creature around it. The dungeon’s starting base was a bear, but from there, the dungeon changed things dramatically. The dungeon needed this bear to have a lot of human characteristics, so he gave the bear human legs, lower back, and hands. This bear was going to be fighting with human weapons, not its claws and teeth. From there, the dungeon made the bear’s head asymmetrical; in fact he made the right side of the bear's face elongate specifically so its right eye could be moved to a more practical position. From there, the dungeon removed its left eye and further improved the bear’s remaining eye with the best features of every creature the dungeon had access to.

            Once the material side of the bear was finished, the dungeon gave the bear the earth ability durability, and the wind ability oxygen. Normally, the dungeon would just give his creatures separation as it could separate oxygen out of the air, or anything else, but the dungeon was trying to save as much room as possible in the bear, and oxygen’s essence channels took up less space than separation. That said, it always surprised the dungeon how much sharper his essence creatures became after they had a boost from increased oxygen intake. Then, before starting his experiments, he added nullify electricity so the bear’s new power wouldn’t kill him.

            From there, the dungeon began implanting essence channels for capacitor. The dungeon was stuffing in as many essence channels as he could. Normally, the dungeon didn’t do this because once a spell was implanted in a creature, the effect did not stack. Capacitor by design was different. The more capacitor channels in the creature, the more powerful of an electric charge it would generate. Generally, a mana channel’s strength was limited by how much essence was stored in the mana core, but capacitor was designed to store extra essence, so it was not limited by the amount of essence in the mana core, but by the essence stored in capacitor over time.

            The dungeon managed to cram one hundred and twenty-six capacitor essence channels inside the bear. The issue with this was that to fulfill the bear’s function, the bear needed to have all the energy left at the same spot. With that in mind, the dungeon had to redesign the bear’s arm. The arm was made much shorter, in fact the dungeon just removed the bear’s forearm, and moved its hand down to where its elbow used to be, while giving it some extra movement in its shoulder. From there the dungeon made its short arm as thick as the bear’s thigh so the dungeon could force all one hundred and twenty six capacitor essence channels through its right arm.

            Once the bear was complete, it was time to give the bear its weapon, a rail launcher. Making the rail launcher was by far the simplest part of the job. It simply required two rails connected by a projectile and an insulation medium. Since anything with essence could conduct essence electricity, the dungeon had its ants, commanded by their queen, bring in some wood from outside of the dungeons area of influence, and used its arm bear to put the final product together. The two rails were made up of silver mixed with carbon nanotubes, and the projectile was made out of crystalline hardened steel.

            Once the rail launcher was ready, the dungeon had its projectile bear take up the weapon and charge up its capacitor channels. It took nearly a day for all of them to fully charge. Once it was charged, the dungeon had the projectile bear fire a test shot inside one of the bulbs. The bear did not fire the shot by pulling a trigger, instead it released all one hundred and twenty six capacitors into the rail launcher. In a tiny fraction of a second the projectile made a strong magnetic field and flew down the rail, as it flew down the rail it accelerated so quickly the air caught fire, and melted the rail gun, and the projectile bear’s arm. Fire followed the projectile until it reached the far wall, and the projectile went through the carbon nanotube wall, and into the earth until it was out of the dungeon's sensory range, which was at least a hundred and twenty feet. After nearly an hour of calculations, the dungeon estimated the projectile moved at two miles a second or over nine times the speed of sound in air at sea level. Neither the projectile bear nor the rail gun survived the shot, but it was worth the sacrifice. Few things would survive that shot, and the dungeon hoped that those few things were limited to the immortals. Considering this was one of the easy sci fi weapons to create the cost of the bear was worth it.

            Although the entire system needed to fire the rail launcher was ready, the dungeon still felt that it needed more mobility. Fortunately, the ghillie dragon was very mobile, and with the addition of a saddle made the projectile bear much faster and gave it a nice elevated position to fire from. Furthermore, to the dungeon’s delight, the ghillie dragon was not badly hurt when a new projectile bear shot his rail launcher from the back of the dragon.

            Once the dungeon did everything necessary to make sure the system worked, the dungeon put a projectile bear on the back of each of the twelve ghillie dragons that lived in the root system of the dungeon. With his work done, he just had to wait for the next group of warriors to come by.

            The dungeon only had to wait three days. The dungeon wasn’t surprised when four warriors came. Only one of them was a tier-two warrior. He was specifically a vacuum warrior, which was a type of warrior the dungeon had seen more and more once they realized that the vacuum warriors nullified the liquid hydrogen sprayed out by the ghillie dragon. The reason why vacuum warriors nullified the liquid hydrogen was because vacuum warriors made a bubble of vacuum around them that somehow repelled all gas. When the ghillie dragon sprayed its liquid hydrogen, it easily entered the vacuum, but as soon as it did, it evaporated, due to the low pressure, and as soon as it became a gas, it was instantly shoved out of the vacuum.

            The reason why the vacuum warriors and their comrades were able to survive was because inside the bubble of vacuum, there was another bubble of air that they could live off of, furthermore, the vacuum warriors made air channels so that they do not die from carbon dioxide.

            As for the tier one warriors that joined the vacuum warrior, they were earth, wind, and light warriors. The dungeon hadn’t seen any fire warriors since they figured out that liquid hydrogen is very flammable. That said, on this day, they didn’t do much, as the vacuum warrior appeared to be in a hurry.

            When they entered the dungeon’s area of influence, the vacuum warrior already had a vacuum bubble around them. As soon as they entered, the rabbits, deer, wasps, hummingbirds, and shredder geese attacked, but they were hard-countered by the vacuum warrior. As soon as any of the creatures entered the vacuum bubble, the air in their lungs was forcibly ripped out, their blood boiled, and their lungs collapsed. All of the flying creatures crashed into the ground as soon as they entered the bubble as they used air pressure for lift. The shredder geese’s squalls were hard countered as the spell used wind to attack, and the wind disappeared as soon as it hit the vacuum bubble. Unfortunately, that wasn’t even the worst part. The vacuum warrior was able to make two more vacuums within a hundred yards of where he stood, and he was able to use those vacuums to wreak destruction around him. When he formed a vacuum bubble, all the air inside the bubble was violently pushed out, when he released the bubble, air was forcibly pushed back in, as the pressure sought to equalize. The power wasn’t that far from an explosion, the difference being that it was invisible.

            The group of four quickly made their way into the depths of the labyrinth. The vacuum warrior mentioned something about not wanting to be late for a date, and the other three just agreed as they jogged through the labyrinth.

            When they reached the first bulb, the vacuum warrior quickly sent his bubbles throughout the bubble, killing everything inside in a little over two minutes. It appeared that although he could manifest and control vacuum bubbles, they did not get that large.

            When he entered the second bulb, the projectile bear and ghillie dragon were waiting for him. The vacuum warrior was somewhat faster to act, in that he sent out his vacuum bubbles throughout the bulb, but fortunately, the ghillie dragon had his camouflage on, and the projectile bear was mostly hidden behind his large head. So, although the vacuum warrior attacked first, he missed the ghillie dragon by a large margin, giving the projectile bear time to raise his rail launcher, aim, and fire.

            As soon as all the stored power in the bear entered the rail launcher, the projectile moved at two miles a second, and the air burned from the bear to the vacuum. The vacuum warrior did not have time to realize that rail launchers, or any projectile going that fast, were not affected by vacuum, and in fact, worked better in vacuum, as the projectile moved through the vacuum at a speed far too fast for any of the warriors to register, and pierced the vacuum warrior, and continued through him, the warrior behind him, through the floor made out of carbon nanotubes, and deep into the earth beyond the dungeons area of influence. When the projectile hit the vacuum warrior, his entire body exploded, when it hit the warrior behind him, his body exploded. Furthermore, as soon as the vacuum warrior died, his vacuum bubble stopped receiving power and collapsed causing something like a minor explosion around the two surviving warriors, who were now stunned.

            By this time, the projectile bear was already dead from the heat coming off the rail launcher, but the ghillie dragon only sustained minor injuries, and he did not hesitate to spew liquid hydrogen and the two warriors had time to realize they were dead men before the cold took them.

            Moments after their deaths, the imp said, “If you can take on tier-two warriors, it is finally time for you to face mages.”