This Quest is Bullshit - Chapter 135

Chapter 135 - Gods Damnit, We Have to Go to the Dead Fields Again

Eve let out a quiet groan as she trawled through the Dragonwrought’s vault for the thousandth time. She knew, of course, there would be nothing new to find there. Her team were the only ones still adventuring and finding loot, after all, but still she searched.

With any luck, buried under an ebonsteel cuirass or hidden beneath a bathroom rug of eternal warmth, she’d find something, anything enchanted with poison immunity. As a Manaheart, Eve of course already was immune, and Art and Reginald both had some physiological protection as well. The drake and been unaffected by toxic mist of the Dead Fields during their last visit, and Art had even lived in the stuff for years before his ma got taken by the hunters.

That left Wes and Preston, neither of whom Eve had much chance of convincing to go back if they’d have to wear pelsid-ooze masks again. Luckily, Preston’s Paragon class came with some significant resistances to poison and disease, but it remained to be seen how well they would hold up to the Dead Fields.

So Eve searched.

As they’d deposited all the useless bullshit they came across in their travels, Eve’s group had accumulated over thirty thousand contribution points, most of which she intended to convert to gold if she lived long enough to retire. As she’d discovered, the Dragonwrought’s policy of using the vault to distribute loot meant that universally useful items tended to be taken while niche enchantments tended to stack up. Nobody in her party needed a redsteel gauntlet that doubled the damage of piercing-based ice attacks, yet somehow the vault had accumulated six of them.

That isn’t to say they hadn’t taken everything they could use. Health and Mana potions had been in short supply before, but that hadn’t stopped Preston from buying all of them. Similarly, the Twice-Blessed Paragon had finally exchanged his old Priestess robes for a flowing white shirt, boiled-leather vest, and leather pants that were, to Eve’s eyes, far too tight. To help defend himself, he’d selected a crossbow enchanted to shoot bolts with varying poisons from blinding, stunning, to killing.

The whole ensemble painted the picture less of a holy man than of a hunter in the wilds, if a particularly flamboyant one given the two-foot-long phoenix feather stuck through his hat. Eve was certain neither of Preston’s two goddesses would be happy with it, which she supposed was the point.

Wes, by contrast, had already been fairly well outfitted, so the only upgrades he’d found in the vault had been a few pieces of jewelry that helped bolster his defenses, including a new pair of earrings that gave flat physical damage reduction. As little as the fire mage liked wearing earrings, he liked dying less, and his ears were already pierced.

For their part, Art and Reginald picked up a few smaller pieces of jewelry that came with stat bonuses, but both of them found fit a rather limiting factor. Art’s talons prohibited him from wearing gloves or boots, and just about any piece of armor they found was far too big for the child. Reginald had the opposite problem, far outgrowing anything the vault had to offer.

Eve still wore her dragonhide armor, though it had begun to show the wear of repeated adventure. She held out hope this trip to the Dead Fields would produce the materials needed for armor that could dissociate with her, having already found underclothes that filled that need. Apparently dissolving fabric was easier than hard leather.

Not even the Dragonwrought vault could compete with her leyline-enforced griffin bone club, but Eve had found a nice pair of waterproof boots as well as two spiked gloves to improve her unarmed strikes in the all-too-common situations where she lost her club.

All this to say the party had long combed and re-combed the vault for anything remotely useful, and thus far nothing with poison immunity had turned up.

Eve pushed herself to her feet, letting out a sigh as she stared down at the heap of rejects before her. For a moment she stopped to wonder why they even had a collar of minor asphyxiation, before deciding she really didn’t want to know.

As she turned to go, however, one particular item caught Eve’s eye, less for its enchantment than for how utterly ridiculous it looked.

The pearly white theater mask looked like something a particularly bad clown might wear, with two over-sized sad eyes shedding a single black tear and a hyper-exaggerated frown that stretched twice as low as any human mouth ever would. Two sets of leather straps with rusted buckles stretched around the back, allowing the wearer to tie the hideous thing to their face without having to hold it up.

Knowing she’d remember if it’d had poison immunity on it, Eve Appraised the silly mask.

Tragedian’s Diving Mask
Rarity: Epic
Contribution Points: 137

Eve furrowed her brow. Diving mask? Why in the hells would someone enchant that to be a diving mask? Uncertain what exactly a diving mask was, Eve picked the item up and hesitantly held it to her face, thankful there was nobody around to see her do it. She inhaled.

The air tasted… different. Staler and dryer than that of the vault, and smelling faintly of old garlic, yet undeniably still air. It wasn’t exactly pleasant, but she supposed if drowning was the other option, she’d take the diving mask any time. Mask still at her face, she Appraised it again in hopes of getting a more detailed description.

Tragedian’s Diving Mask
Rarity: Epic
Effect: While unequipped, slowly stores air in a pocket dimension. While equipped, replaces all air that wearer would inhale with that from the pocket dimension.
Air Stored: 9999 days
Contribution Points: 137

“Ayla’s tits,” Eve exhaled, pulling the mask from her face and turning it over in her hands. “It’s perfect.”

How could she have missed this? Sure, it didn’t have poison immunity, but they didn’t need poison immunity if they didn’t breathe in any of the poison in the first place.

Eve tucked the mask under her arm and made her way across the vault to grab the pole leaning against her side of the chasm. She did the vault vault back over the supremely enchanted magma river, wrote her withdrawal into the ledger, and stepped into the twisting passages of Dragonwrought Hold.

And thus it was that Eve, with the shit-eatingest of shit-eating grins, went to go show Wes the best hundred and thirty-seven contribution points she’d ever spent.

——

“No. No way. Absolutely not.”

“C’mon, Wes,” Preston said, placing a hand on the mage’s arm. “We always knew we’d be going back to the Dead Fields eventually.”

“But we don’t have to go back now!” Wes argued. “Can’t we at least… I don’t know, stop by Pyrindel and commission something that isn’t so…”

“Sad clown?” Eve offered. “I don’t know, I think you make a great sad clown.”

“Also, I’m pretty sure showing up in Pyrindel is a great way to end up back in jail,” Preston said. “I don’t think they’re too happy with us there.”

“Ilvia, then,” Wes insisted. “There’s gotta be some enchanter somewhere that can put poison immunity on something that doesn’t make me look like a failed circus performer.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Eve said. “I think it makes you look like a middling circus performer at worst. You know, good enough to get by, but not good enough to make a lasting impression.”

“I don’t know,” Preston snorted. “That mask is certainly making a lasting impression on me.”

Eve sighed. “If you’re really against wearing the mask, I suppose we can visit Rathis on our way north. I’m sure he’d be happy to stir you up some pelsid ooze.”

Wes snatched the diver’s mask from Eve’s hands. “Nope. No need to bother the Scavenger.”

“We should probably visit him, though,” Preston said. “At least check in to see how he’s doing, maybe bring him some supplies. It’s gotta be lonely out there for the old rat.”

“Ooh, maybe he can help us find some of those dissolving mist-deer-things you mentioned,” Eve said, a grin stretching across her face. “We can even unnecessary gear and loot at his cave so it’s not weighing us down in the dungeon.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Wes argued. “For all we know there isn’t even a dungeon there. Maybe it’s just a totally normal, ruined, ancient, long lost, abandoned city without any deathtraps or terrifying monsters.”

Eve blinked at him. “That is a dangerous level of optimism, my friend.”

“It’s not like he could jinx it,” Preston countered. “This is us we’re talking about. Our mere presence means we’ll find the most dangerous possible version of this place anyway. No amount of jinxing could make it any worse.”

“Well if Wes didn’t jinx it, you just fucking did.”

“Anyway.” Wes clapped his hands together to refocus the conversation. “I’ll go stop by the kitchen and get provisions. Eve, you wanna grab Reginald’s bags while Preston rounds up the kiddos?”

“How come I always have to fetch the saddle bags? You know how bad the stables stink.”

“Because they’re three hundred pounds and you have the most Strength?”

“Preston has Strength scaling too, now!” Eve argued. “He can totally lift them.”

“Yeah, but he doesn’t have professional experience as a Courier.”

Preston laughed. “Would you rather try and escape a two-hour conversation with Beatrice?”

Eve paused, her entire life flashing before her eyes as she envisioned growing old, dying, and decaying to dust before Beatrice finished telling a single story. “Nope. Stables it is.”

She shot from the room like a rocket, running almost fifteen times the speed of a normal human even without using Defiant Charge. She slowed to normal walking pace for most of the trip down to the stables, but did make a point of running when she actually got inside.

Apparently whoever had swept the stables in years past had either died of old age or simply left, and the two kobolds that still worked at Dragonwrought Hold were far too busy taking care of the four geriatric adventurers to bother cleaning it. When she’d first visited, Eve had blasted the accumulated waste—as well as the desiccated corpse of the horse that had generated it—into oblivion with annihilation Mana, but try as she might, the smell still lingered.

Even making it in and out with Reginald’s saddlebags in under four seconds, Eve still suffered a whiff of the oppressive scent. “Why do we keep this down here, anyway?” she muttered to herself. “It’s not like Reginald fits down here anymore.”

The green drake growing to the size that he had had truly been a revelation for the adventurers. Beyond the ability to carry three of them through the air, it meant they could equip him with enough saddlebags to lug about all their supplies, freeing up Eve to be that much more mobile in combat. The downside was that they had to resize the leather straps every month to make up for Reginald’s continued growth.

Saddlebags obtained, poison problem solved, and Wes so hilariously tormented, Eve navigated the dark hallways of the keep to rejoin the others, kit up, and take to the skies. They had a long and perilous journey ahead of them, fraught with dangerous environments and monsters far too high level for them to even consider fighting, but the rewards, as far as Eve could tell, would be plenty worth it.

If the previous stages of this secondary quest were anything to go by, reclaiming the Crown of Lost Burendia would come with a whole heap of ability upgrades Eve had long imagined to the point of salivation. Not to mention the exp. Gods below, finishing a secondary quest this big had to be worth a pile. Eve got goosebumps just thinking about it.

Of course, those were all standard quest rewards, even if turned up to the nth degree. She could only wonder what else there might be. She was chasing a crown, after all.

Who didn’t want to be queen?

Next