Part 14
OK. Thanks to No Gravitas, I have a version of Steamband that seems to work. At least, it hasn't crashed yet. So... let's go!When we left off, we'd just killed Dracula on our way to slaughtering quite a lot of Tiger-Men.
Tiger-Men look like this!
I'm shuddering even now.
They're not too bad - the worst thing they can do is gaze to stun, which briefly weakens us. Luckily, they usually get distracted trying to do one of the many things we're immune to. They and their escorts (Panther-Men, Jaguar-Men) can hit us, but they can't really hurt us to any significant extent. So we chop our way through them.
Midway through the level, we run into this guy again, for the first time.
He's incredibly tough and resists all our weapons, but luckily for us, he can't really hurt us appreciably. So I end up duking it out with him for a while, and at the end... treasure!
He drops a number of nice items, but the only one we end up equipping is this:
A nice AC boost over our current cloak, plus, much cooler.
I'm not sure it's actually better than the stealth our old fur cloak gave, but there's no way I'm not going to wear a Shadow Cloak when I find one.
We complete the quest without issue & go back to town for a new one.
I don't know what these are, but they sound nice!
Back on level 16, we kill another dragon and get another spray of loot.
These are neat, and would give us ~+60 AC, but for now I want to keep the +15 speed our current legs give. When I get back to town, I think I'll swap out the ring of muscle +4 for celerity +6 & our legs for these.
Then on level 15, we run into...
Huh. Three dragons. That's kind of a lot, and they burrow through walls, so we won't be able to fight them one-by-one. Still, we should be able to...
OK. That's too many dragons. Still, we can whittle down their health and maybe kill one or two, see if they drop...
What the fuck.
We book it to level 14.
Immediately on entry, we find our first Fuijin!
He can deal some damage in melee, but only takes a half-dozen rounds to kill. A nice XP pinata, I think.
Nope! They're summoners!
For some reason, most of the major demons in this game are Awgwa, from L. Frank Baum's Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. (Baum is of course better known for The Wizard of Oz.) It's an odd choice, from an odd book, but hey, whatever fits.
And then another swarm of mechanical dragons appears!
I kill the fuijin, and then teleport to the other side of the level.
...the dragons pursue. (You can see them eating holes in the vault to the left.)
And then I find on the other side of me are these guys:
I ran into them before, in the lost update. They're certainly not tough - I can kill one in one round, easily - and they don't do any damage in melee. But they can do nasty damage with their rifles, and they breed explosively. They're yet another way for levels to be rendered uninhabitable.
And they resist our rocket attacks, of course. It's a sad thing, but even with 40 skill points dumped into them, our rockets haven't been useful in some time, for anything more than clearing out weeds. They just don't scale well.
Anyway, we teleport out again, this time to the top-left. Unfortunately, it's not far enough away. In no time at all, we're swarmed by Fuijin and their demon pals again:
Plus, of course, those damned dragons.
The good news is, we're swarmed by Fuijin! It's so nice when quest targets come to us, instead of the other way around.
We slaughter the Fuijin...
...activate our rod of recall, and begin a fighting retreat.
And we're out!
Next up, a blast from the past (HO HO HO):
And some stats/skills, since I haven't shown them off in a while.
(We're capped on Swift Blow, unfortunately, because we unlocked it so late. Bit of a fuck-up, but not the end of the world, hopefully.)
(This is with combat buffs on; our resists are a lot lower otherwise.)
Uniques: