Chapter 152: The Bear Enters the Mines — Part Three

Chapter 152:
The Bear Enters the Mines
Part Three

 

EVER SINCE I’d one-hit the rock golem, Jaden and the others couldn’t see me the same way.

“Where’s all that power stored up in that little body of yours?” Toya said as he bopped me in the head a couple times from above. He was tall.

“I can barely believe you’re a girl like me.” Senia was touching my upper arms through my bear onesie. “Hmm, feels flabby.”

Wait, what was flabby? The bear onesie? Or my arms?

Ehh, whatever. I shook the two of them off and plowed ahead. We’d changed the order of our lineup after the iron golem incident, so now weak little old me was heading the party with Jaden.

“We’ll cover you, so relax,” Mel had said earlier—and taken a step back.

It usually didn’t bode well to make changes to a party halfway through a dungeon, but…I couldn’t really argue against it, could I? We pushed on.

Still, those rock golems were way weaker than I’d expected. The only problem was that I couldn’t hit them any harder than I had back then. I’d been pulling my punches, and I still wound up shaking pebbles and dirt free of the ceiling when the golems hit the walls.

“Well, the tunnel is reinforced with earth magic, so it probably won’t collapse if you’re hitting it a little.”

They’d used magic on it like I had with the Bear Tunnel, but…I kinda thought the tunnel had collapsed just a little earlier from the force I’d used earlier. If I didn’t hold back, this bear might wind up wrecking the joint.

 

In the end, I finished off rock golems with reserved bear punches that wouldn’t damage the walls of the delicate tunnel.

“Looks like we’ve completely switched roles,” Jaden said as he watched me take out a rock golem with a bear punch.

“Glad I didn’t make fun of you that one time,” Toya said.

Jaden laughed. “If you had, you sure would’ve ended up like those golems, Toya.”

“It’s okay,” said Mel. “We would have made sure to put ‘Here lies Toya, killed by a bear,’ on your gravestone for you.”

“Don’t just kill me off!”

The three of them laughed. Toya did not.

We kept on through the tunnel without any issues before reaching the next level. Iron golems would appear from this point, they said. Since the golems became more powerful with each level change, it was really starting to feel like a dungeon. Sure, the game I’d played had those, but were there actually dungeons in this world too?

And how many? Could I explore more?

 

First step in my new level was, as before, using my detection skill. I detected iron golems.

Five golems waited in what seemed to be the deepest part of the tunnel. I wondered if those were the iron golems Jaden and the bozo rangers had mentioned? And beyond those things was that first golem, the one that might’ve started it all.

But…I wasn’t picking up a golem further in. Was it on an even lower level?

Eventually, we came out into a cavern, and there it was towering at the center. It was the same size as the rock golems, but covered head to…toe?...in iron. Its arms were thick and strong as hammers—one hit would squash you like a fly.

If only you could talk to these things, you know? I’d recommend a career change. Maybe carpentry?

Anyway, this thing was built like a tank. It didn’t seem like it would go down as easily as the rock golems—I couldn’t just hit it. Maybe I could melt the iron if I used a fire bear, but using magic like that in a tunnel would be as good as suicidal. It’d turn the place into an oven, burn up all the oxygen, and it’d be game over for us.

I wondered if I could suffocate the things by wrapping their heads in water, but that probably wouldn’t work. Or—oh, what if I splashed brine on them, causing them to rust up, so they couldn’t move? But then we couldn’t sell the iron…and how long does it take for things to rust, anyway?

Next up was wind magic, but the question was whether that could cut through iron. From what I’d heard, these things were sturdier than normal metals. Maybe I’d be able to lop through them with bear wing magic?

Earth magic…was a maybe. I could make bear golems to pin them down so we could attack them…but we had to have a way to attack them for that to work.

Finally, I could just avoid fighting entirely by burying them in a hole, but digging a random hole might weaken the structural integrity of the whole mine…and again, how would we get the iron? And let’s say I did that anyway…well, somebody might dig them up someday and get hammered.

For now, I decided to watch how Jaden and the others fought the iron golems, so I’d have a good point of reference.

 

Jaden’s party began preparing for battle.

First, Mel fired a clod of earth at the golem with magic—you could harden dirt by compressing it, and skilled mages could compress it more to make it even tougher. Wham! The golem’s movements slowed for a moment. Toya tried attacking it then, but the golem deflected the attack with its arm. It was like clanging an iron column with a sword—no way to just cut through it.

When the iron golem was facing Toya, Senia circled around to its rear. She was holding a knife in each of her hands. Was she dual-wielding? But what was the point when Toya’s sword hadn’t worked?

Senia dashed to the iron golem in an instant and slashed at its leg. She wasn’t able to lop it off entirely, but yeah—somehow, she had definitely cut into its thigh. Could you really do that? Kill an iron golem with knives?

“Senia has mithril knives,” Mel explained to me when she saw my surprise. Okay, that made sense, especially given her rank.

Toya and Mel distracted the golem while Senia attacked from its blind spot. After she slashed the golem in the same spot about two or three times, the iron leg broke off, falling to the ground with a clang.

The one-legged golem lost its balance and fell over. Senia really had cut through that thick leg with a knife, and she looked way proud of it too.

Down by one leg, the golem was limping and thrashing when Jaden came down with his sword. The iron golem raised its arm to defend itself, but Jaden slashed down with his sword.

Wow…what could I even say? “Um. Is Jaden’s sword also mithril?”

Mel nodded. “Yup. But it’s not just like he can cut through an iron golem just because it’s a mithril sword. Jaden can do that because of his skill with a sword. If Toya tried that, the blade would snap.”

Made sense. If any nobody with a mithril sword could slice right through a golem, they’d give out the swords to D-Rank and E-Rank adventurers like candy. No, it was the combination of Jaden’s ability with the mithril sword that made it all possible. It was their skill that made Jaden and his party C-Rank adventurers, not their gear. I mean, Senia had literally sliced through an iron golem with a knife. What could you even say to that?

“What about your sword, Toya?” I asked.

“It’s a good sword, but it’s not mithril.”

Maybe that was why the golem had been able to fight it off—that and his skill, maybe. Then…where were my skills at? I’d used swords when I’d played the game. There’d been an assist function, so I’d picked up some things from playing. Thanks to my bear gear, I could wield both swords and magic at about the same level as I had in the game, but what did that mean, in practice, for my swordplay skills?

Sure, I could handle a sword the same way I had in the game, but was that really skill? If I had a mithril weapon, would I be able to take down an iron golem using the sword skills I had from the game?

I wanted to test it out, but I didn’t have a mithril weapon.

Ugh, why couldn’t I have one already?

 

The iron golem tried to stand up, even with a missing arm and leg, but that was a no-go. It swung its single arm and punched at Jaden, but he dodged and took several steps back, getting in an attack on the monster mid-dodge.

Toya groaned. “If I just had a mithril sword too, I could take down an iron golem.”

“No way,” Senia said bluntly. Toya opened his mouth to reply, but Senia beat him to it, “You borrowed Jaden’s sword the other day and you could barely cut a piece of grass.”

Toya just silently glubbed at her, his mouth opening and closing like a fish.

“Give you a mithril sword?” said Senia with a sneer. “Please, that’d be pearls before swine.” Oof. Absolutely annihilated, Toya.

That whole time, Jaden was still dodging and slashing at the iron golem. The iron golem gradually slowed, then it finally collapsed. It’d been ruthlessly hacked up. Well, no one would be putting that thing up for display, that’s for sure.

 

A wild thought had come to my mind watching Jaden’s party battling. Just bear with me here for a second, but…what if I had a mithril weapon? I didn’t know whether I could wield one, but it would be helpful when I couldn’t rely on magic or my brute bear strength.

Senia put the mass of iron that the golem had become into an item bag. I looked at the destroyed golem, noting the mana gem in its chest. As long as you didn’t care about selling the mana gem, couldn’t you go straight for that instead of bothering with all the hack-and-slash?

Apparently not. “The location of the mana gem depends on the golem,” said Jaden, “so you’d have a hard time destroying it.”

“Really?”

“If we could do that, we would’ve already defeated those five iron golems a long time ago.”

So no one-hit kills on these guys, then. Still, I wondered if there was a way to destroy it from the inside without damaging its exterior, sort of like with the black viper. Maybe I could make micro vibrations in the air, drive them into its body, and shatter it from within? Hmm. It was an idea, at least…