Chapter 13: [13] : Weight of the Warden, The Stone Golem

Declan stood at the edge of the dark underground lake. The water was churning with hundreds of armored leeches. They snapped their metal teeth, hungry for the guy who had just vanished right in front of them.

Declan looked across the thirty-meter gap. Sloane and Kendra were standing near the crater ridge. They looked like two very nervous mice waiting for a cat to do a trick.

He checked his stamina bar. It was sitting at a perfect 100.

"Void Blink," Declan thought.

The world went pitch black. A split second later, he appeared fifteen meters in the air, right over the center of the deadly lake. Gravity tried to pull him down into the writhing mass of leeches.

"Void Blink."

Another flash of nothingness. Declan’s boots hit the rocky shore right next to Sloane and Kendra. He didn’t even stumble. The Kinetic Dampener trait on his boots completely ate the downward force of his fall.

Kendra jumped back, startled. Sloane just crossed her arms and shook her head.

"Show off," Sloane muttered. "Did you get the Relic weapon?"

Declan opened his inventory and pulled out the Dull Warden’s Halberd. The massive, eighty-pound polearm hit the dirt with a heavy thud. It looked like a piece of junk. The iron was dark and unpolished. The axe head was completely blunt.

"That’s a Relic?" Kendra asked, leaning in to look at it. "It looks like a rusty shovel on a stick."

"It’s a stat stick right now," Declan admitted. "I don’t have the twenty base strength required to swing it properly. The system drops my attack speed by eighty percent if I try to use it like this. It’s basically a giant paperweight."

"So you went into a death trap for a paperweight," Sloane said flatly.

"I went in for a canvas," Declan corrected her. He willed the halberd back into his inventory. "I need to upgrade it. But Relic items don’t cost one Origin Point per level like Scavenged trash does. The system says it costs fifty Origin Points per level for a Relic. I need five hundred points to push this thing to plus ten and get the mutation."

Kendra did the math. "You don’t have five hundred points. We barely have fifty."

Declan pulled his mutated +20 Carnage Cleaver out of his inventory. The jagged red blade pulsed with dark light. He rested the flat of the blade on his shoulder and gave his two scouts a very corporate smile.

"That is why you two are going to work overtime," Declan said. "Find me things to kill. Let’s go."

For the next two hours, the trio scoured the Ashlands. The gray, rocky terrain was ugly, but it was packed with monsters.

Kendra was actually a great scout. She used her bow to pull aggro from a distance. She would shoot a monster, yell, and run back to where Declan was waiting.

They fought packs of Level 6 Ash-Lizards. The lizards spit globes of burning acid.

Declan just used Void Blink to teleport right through the acid spit, appearing directly behind them. One swipe with the Carnage Cleaver applied the Hemorrhage trait. Then he just snapped his fingers.

Blood Burst.

The lizards exploded from the inside out, painting the gray rocks with bright blue digital pixels.

Sloane mostly just stood in the back. Whenever Declan took a stray hit, she threw a glowing green heal at him. But honestly, his +10 Predator’s Coat had fifty defense. The monsters were barely doing scratch damage. He was just farming them like a guy cutting grass.

By the time the sky above the Ashlands turned a deeper shade of purple, Declan had racked up exactly five hundred and twenty Origin Points.

"Stop," Declan called out. Kendra was just about to shoot another lizard in the distance. She lowered her bow and wiped the sweat off her forehead.

"Break time?" Kendra panted.

"Upgrade time," Declan said.

He sat down on a flat rock and pulled the Dull Warden’s Halberd out of his inventory. It rested across his knees, heavy and ugly.

"System," Declan commanded. "Enhance the Dull Warden’s Halberd ten times."

The bright white light of the enhancement system swallowed the weapon. The chimes rang out in his head, one after another. Since it was a Relic weapon, the light was much thicker and brighter than before.

[System Enhancement Initiated]

↳ Dull Warden’s Halberd +1. Damage increased.

↳ Dull Warden’s Halberd +2. Damage increased.

↳ Dull Warden’s Halberd +3. Damage increased.

↳ Dull Warden’s Halberd +4. Damage increased.

↳ Dull Warden’s Halberd +5.

The standard red warning box popped up, telling him the weapon would shatter if he kept going. Declan’s SSS Rank talent, Boundless Enhancement, crushed the warning box instantly.

[Talent: Boundless Enhancement activated. Cap removed.]

↳ Dull Warden’s Halberd +6.

↳ Dull Warden’s Halberd +7.

↳ Dull Warden’s Halberd +8.

↳ Dull Warden’s Halberd +9.

The heavy iron shaft was changing. The old leather grips fused with the metal, turning into a sleek, dark alloy that fit perfectly in his hands. The blunt axe head didn’t get sharper. Instead, it grew thicker. It looked like a solid block of dark steel forged for the sole purpose of breaking tanks.

[Dull Warden’s Halberd has reached +10.]

[Triggering Conceptual Mutation...]

A wave of heavy, oppressive gravity pulsed out from the weapon. The gray ash on the ground around Declan was pushed away in a perfect circle.

The white light faded. Declan looked at the new stats.

[Warden’s Halberd +10]

↳ Tier: Relic (Mutated)

↳ Damage: 300 to 450

↳ Stat Requirement: Strength 20 (Requirement unmet. Attack speed reduced by 80%)

↳ Trait Unlocked: Weight of the Warden

↳ Functionality: During any downward swing, the weapon’s mass increases by 500%. This massive weight increase does not slow the user’s momentum or require extra stamina to swing.

Declan stared at the text. He did some quick math in his head. The halberd weighed about eighty pounds normally. A five hundred percent increase meant that the second he swung it downward, the weapon would temporarily weigh almost five hundred pounds.

And the system explicitly stated it wouldn’t slow down his swing speed. That meant the kinetic energy behind the strike would be completely ridiculous.

"Let’s check this out," Declan said, standing up. He grabbed the halberd. It was still sluggish to lift because of his low base strength, but he managed to rest it on his shoulder.

"You’re in luck," Sloane pointed a finger down into a small ravine just ahead of them. "Kendra spotted that ten minutes ago. We avoided it because it looks like a tank."

Declan walked over to the edge of the ravine.

Down below, pacing back and forth, was a massive monster made entirely of jagged black rocks and glowing orange magma veins. It was easily nine feet tall.

[Obsidian Stone Golem]

↳ Level: 8 (Mini-Boss)

↳ HP: 1500 / 1500

↳ Defense: 200

"Two hundred defense," Kendra whispered, walking up next to him. "My arrows would literally just bounce off that thing. The cleaver bleed effect might work, but you’d have to cut stone first."

"I’m not going to cut it," Declan said.

He gripped the Halberd with both hands. He didn’t bother using Void Blink to get down there. He just jumped off the ten-foot ledge of the ravine.

His boots hit the ground with a loud crunch. The Kinetic Dampener ate the fall damage, leaving him standing perfectly still right in front of the massive golem.

The Stone Golem turned around. Its orange magma eyes locked onto Declan. It let out a sound like two boulders grinding together and raised a massive stone fist to smash him.

Declan didn’t dodge. He planted his feet. He hauled the heavy Warden’s Halberd up over his head. Because of the stat penalty, his upward movement was incredibly slow. The golem’s fist was already coming down.

"Let’s test the physics engine," Declan smiled.

He brought the halberd down.

The instant the downward arc started, the Weight of the Warden trait activated.

The dark iron axe head didn’t just fall. It tore through the air. The sudden addition of four hundred pounds of mass, combined with the speed of his swing, created a literal sonic boom. The air pressure around the blade warped visibly.

The blunt head of the halberd smashed directly into the top of the Stone Golem’s head.

CRACK!

There was no struggle. There was no resistance. The five-hundred-pound kinetic strike hit the two-hundred-defense monster, and the system’s math simply broke.

The golem didn’t lose health points. It just ceased to be a solid object.

The massive stone body shattered into a million tiny fragments of dust and pebbles.

The shockwave of the impact hit the ground, carving a spiderweb of deep cracks into the solid stone floor of the ravine. A cloud of ash and rock dust exploded outward, completely hiding Declan from view.

Up on the ridge, Sloane and Kendra coughed and waved the dust away from their faces.

"Did he die?" Kendra asked, trying to see through the smoke.

The dust slowly settled. Declan was standing in the center of a newly formed crater. The Stone Golem was completely gone. All that was left was a massive pile of blue digital pixels floating up into the air.

Declan easily lifted the halberd back onto his shoulder. Since he wasn’t swinging downward anymore, the weight went back to normal.

He looked up at his two scouts.

"This works really good," Declan said.