First things first, time to finally sell off our loot. Oh how exciting.
But what we get to do is really put Enchant Item through its paces. Several of the random rings, along with a few other things we found, get enchanted. A couple of rings (+9 Speed and Health Regen) are keepers. The rest get sold, as does every other piece of loot.
Then...we shop around, and buy a very nice magic helmet for Toblerone. Extra Might always works well at this stage (although it won't later).
Now, to the dwarven mines...but we are going to handle this a little oddly. This quest actually involves two separate dungeons. If we did them in order of difficulty, we'd have to do most of the easy one, turn around and do the hard one, then go back and finish the easy one. That...is way too complicated.
So we'll just do the hard one first! It is found to the northeast of the tavern in the middle of nowhere in this zone, which we visited a couple of chapters back. So we work our way over there, veeeery slowly across the mire.
Welcome to Snergle's Iron Mines. Snergle himself isn't here, but plenty of other enemies are.
We enter a pillared main hall that has none of these enemies. Beyond it a corridor extends in both directions, with a big door to the north and a hallway to the south. North is the way we go.
As with all doors, we Ring of Fire behind it...and hear dwarven grunts of pain. A few more casts, and...we're ready to enter.
Here are the dwarves! They tend to have moderate to high health, high magic resistance, and hit pretty hard. The elite Dwarven Lords also are skilled enough to wreck armor (but oddly enough, nothing else.) Their one weakness is they themselves lack armor class, so they are particularly vulnerable to melee.
So with Huaryu providing Bless and Heroism, we do just that. Some healing, a few emergency armor repairs by Toblerone, and these dwarves go down pretty fast.
This room is some sort of throne room...classy. A single door leads to the east, so we take it. It's a winding hallway with stairs, with one door at the end and another halfway up.
The door halfway up is interesting...it introduces us to a new mechanic. As before, there were a couple of objects in this game that required high Might in order to activate. Well, guess what? There are doors and such that work the same way for the other statistics.
In this case, this door requires a high enough Intellect to enter. But Eno has that covered, so we are able to enter...a library. The dwarves apparently are bookworms. Who knew?
This library's bookshelves contain a number of basic spellbooks. Most we know, but a few flesh out Cate's and Eno's spell arsenal. A single barrel has white liquid, so Eno also gets some Luck.
Further down the hall there is a small window that overlooks the throne room. Nice view.
Now we go to the end of the hall and come to the door. Ring of Fire reveals more dwarves behind it...and some slimes too (Just like Dragoon's Keep). Since slimes are immune to physical damage and dwarves are resistant to magical damage...it's a nasty combination.
We pop a few spell potions and Ring of Fire down the slimes, then open the door and finish off the last few dwarves.
Beyond this room, is a passage leading to another room with dwarves. In this, we discover one thing about the Dwarf Lords...they can't fit through their own doorways. Methinks they need to lose some weight. So we can hit them, and they can't hit us. Easy.
Beyond this is another hall, leading to one final room. After clearing out the dwarves, we search a cabinet to find...a Cell Key. Interesting. On the floor is a belt, which turns out to be super magical with +18 Endurance. Sweet! Since Toblerone had plenty of that and is feeling chivalrous, Cate gets this belt.
Back to the throne room overlook...and it looks like more dwarves have moved in behind us. Let's go down and kill them. We do so and...what is that gray monster!
Introducing, for the first time in this game, the main enemy we are sworn to fight! This is a Devil Spawn, weakest of all the different types of Devils. It doesn't have a lot of health, but throws nasty Fire magic around to great effect. We kill off the dwarves with melee, and then move on to cutting down this devil. It's also pretty weak to melee.
Well, it looks like we may be in for a rough ride. The devils in cahoots with the dwarves...the rest of this dungeon will be fun!
