Septima had been cursing herself for not picking that Yellow berserker class when they had entered the dungeon, but by now she had long forgotten about that complaint.
Hells, Karta had been at level twenty and now she couldn't even walk thanks to the forced reset, so who knew what she'd be like if she'd taken the class leveled with the beast hordes.
At first people were slightly surprised to hear that a class could even be reset as the village spirits specifically explained that selecting one was for life, and the only way to get a better one was to accrue achievements before level fifty, but the technical mumbo jumbo that Aki tried to explain to the group had everyone either agreeing or confusedly following along.
Something about their class still being too weak and the XP not properly connected to their bases. He only convinced everyone to reset because of the paths that could only be accessed while at level 1 or 0 however, which were honestly quite ridiculously good.
So much so that people only believed that he wasn't making stuff up when he opened his stats and enlarged the part with his attributes for everyone to see.
You could apparently do that.
Unfortunately, the march through the monster infested forest, setting up camp and having the classers recuperate while everyone else got things running in the small fort almost smack dab in front of the giant namesake of the dungeon, had apparently been their cheat day of what would make most of her own training look like children's play.
Four hours of sleep, that was all they would get for their first month inside the dungeon, as she was so gently made aware when Aki awoke the whole dungeon with what he called punk rock music.
After that lovely while, they were given enchanted bracelets that would constantly cause them damage of one kind or another and work off their own mana, making sure that they were alway regenerating, uncomfortable and wearing personalised training gear that would apparently be constantly upgraded.
What most people complained about was how he had made them sign a contract that in exchange for aether, they would be truthful and loyal, plus give 99.999999999% of their gained experience for the duration of their training inside the dungeon to him.
She, a few humans and most male farvit grimaced at the implication that as their sleep resistance rose and time passed, they would be given less and less to sleep.
Robert and her raised a few complaints about this, but Aki just silently listened and then showed them what the journeyman and master path gave before appealing to their own knowledge on military training and how much they estimated each person would gain after a whole year of this.
They could do nothing but shut up and run around carrying logs under a gravity formation that their torturer adjusted to only just above what a specific group could handle before they were sent to run a track course. The fact that Aki actually admitted to enjoying all of this was certainly not helping her mood either.
Perhaps if she could blow off some steam! But no, no alcohol, no stimulants, only have protected sex. It was like infiltrating that monastery of warrior nuns all again! Even then she’d been able to organize a monthly orgy with all the beauties, which had taken surprisingly little convincing on her part, yet the human had been very specific about how much she could force out of any trainee, and she knew him to have methods of identifying her moments of weakness.
At least she had coffee. Hot, bitter coffee that sent a good tingling down her spine and gave her energy and mana. That she was forced to drink it while running, spilling some on the ground and having to share with those that had the magical skills to levitate her cup while their hands were ocuppied by other exercises was another downer, but she had been promised a reward if she could endure a week of this, specially for her.
Really, they hadn’t know each other for long but she could tell that the young man was actually so stressed she’d thought it possible he’d fuck her as a reward, but he’d just looked at her as if she was an idiot for suggesting it, though she could tell that either she was chipping his defences or he was starting to care less, the later of which was rather dangerous for someone of his power.
……….
Karta was finally made to join the others on their third day of exercises, having been spared from even the constant regeneration to better allow her soul to heal.
As it stood though, she was still plenty stronger than almost anyone else around despite the loss of stats when her class reset, so that meant that Aki gave her much harsher restraints.
She barely had time to start on the exercises though, as the combat personal was quickly separated into teams, though not all were equal in size and flexibility, she, an archer, two mages, a leather worker, a healer, three warriors and a rogue were sent out of the camp to hunt down food and materials for practice.
The point of sending both a doctor and a crafter was apparently to have them train the 'spelunking' or 'Macgyver' skills, plus learn how their professions could or would be applied in scenarios of risk plus where the materials they'd be using would come from and how their sources behaved, the later of which was apparently rather important and something most crafters present recognised as necessary.
Thanks to the two general 'classes' Aki bothered to give while people were too tired to move though, she also understood that even without a combat class could be deadly if allowed to use their skills in certain ways, but more noteworthy would be that taking a smith to fight a metal golem was a great way to both help deal with it's defences, mine resources and also have your metallic gear fixed after the fight, while the same could be applied to many more scenarios with other specific supporters.
Most people just seemed happy that they could take out their restraints and instead take actual equipment that buffed their stats, resources and skills. They were even going to be escorted by Lea, so surely they'd not come to much danger.
She couldn't help but notice that oddly enough, it seemed like all the enchanted arms, armour and accessories had been produced by Aki however. When did he even have the time to do all of this? Could it be that he’d already surpassed any notion that they’d had about this whole assimilation?
How did one individual even produce so much so quickly and consistently? Another skill everyone had been training had been ‘Equip’, which was obviously going up at a ridiculous speed exactly because all at the camp were equipped with several special trinkets to be worn all the time unless they were to go to sleep, and she was pretty sure that after the crafters were actually allowed to start production they’d even have base equipment of great standart, most likely all enchanted as well if her instincts were to be trusted.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
Honestly, she was more than a bit overwhelmed by how ridiculous all this was. Aki had made a point to have some casual discussions with her at this point, learning about orcs in general and her tribe while explaining a bit about ‘earth’s culture in turn, and the contrast between the sides of his personality as he demonstrated it in different situations made her question whether they had been partially an act to hide his actual feelings which showed some times or whether he had not even showed himself even once.
With her high perception stat being enhanced by several skills, she could easily tell that different from any other humans, the young man was either propence to extreme burst of emotion that kept happening even as he talked about the same subject or he was constantly casting spells and reinforcing his body in one way or another for either avoiding this exact ability of hers or for a reason she could not fathom.
It was also that same stat that pointed her to the fact that there was a very big and hot beast coming in their direction at an extreme speed, meaning that even the small moment where she was lost in thought had been of great detriment already. So much so in fact that before people registered she had started screaming something the giant boor had already broken the tree line and almost ran her over.
To her luck however, several roots stopped the monster’s movements, though it seemed to be having a particularly hard time moving it’s face despite the fact that there was nothing around the area that would serve as a neck to the mass of muscle, fur and fat.
“You are clearly not being stimulated enough if you have time to be constrained by stray thoughts. Expect an increase in difficulty when we go back.” Emotionlessly said the menacing woman with sharp features and dark eyes, who was apparently the same summoned monster that Aki made into his mount. “You guys would have no chance with it’s fur intact, so I guess I will need to make a handicap, but understand that I will only interfere when someone is coming close to death.” Sighing while seeming frustrated, Lea burned off a few spots to allow for the trainees a chance at passing through the beast’s skill enhanced hide. Since Karta was walking backwards so as to make some distance between herself and the monster, she did not see the sadic glint in her eyes as the draugr released the terrified monster with an order to attack them. “Now jump.” She chuckled, all getting out of the way of the boar’s sudden acceleration despite it’s complete stillness mere moments ago.
……...….
Aki was not actually enjoying his vacation as much as he let on. It had been around five days since he slept, and although some people seemed to also have realised, he was spending a lot of time with crafting their restrictions, equipments and also meals, plus laying down formations that constantly caused effects on a given area, there was simply no other enchanter to tell them how fucking much mana he was actually wielding to put all those effects into materials, because for some reason all the mages present had such an under developed mana detection that they could only tell it was a lot.
Really, he’d set up several traps that kept the monsters alive, together with formations that would attract them to fall into them. Whenever he got close to bottom he’d ask Lea to kill one before going at it again. Though he had tried to make something that would accumulate mana around him so he could extract it from either the environment or from the object, the earlier was far too inefficient and the later was simply out of his grasp.
He was pretty sure that at this point he had already spent at least a million mana since he’d gotten into the dungeon. Luckily he was able to mass produce enchantments as long as he had the mana and the spell transcript thanks to his grimoire, which could apparently enchant just as well as it casted pre-programmed spells written onto it.
The heavy set book did not actually have an end to it’s pages, it kept growing as he learned new spells, variations, applications and modifiers, all perfectly organized into sections that could be easily accessed with a command of his mind. Unfortunately however, it was starting to degrade.
The leather cover had lost its luster, the strange forms that seemed to be runes had stopped appearing when one turned to look at it, and it was also bursting at the seams as it came closer and closer to what an encyclopedia or thesaurus looked like.
More importantly, he had to deal with whiny adults, supervise most of everything, teach techniques he’d both bought with his own money and also derived with his own efforts, explain common sense in the multiverse, try hard to learn about orc culture and hunting stuff so he’d not completely blow his chances with the orc goddess all the while keeping some degree of distance between them because of reasons, ignore their annoying neighbor and even train through the whole process.
*ROOOOOO….*
He started to play Eminem on the air itself, shielding the camp from the intimidation effect immediately after having done it several more times through the few days they’d even been there.
“*COWARD!*”
Immediately, the music stopped. Eyes twitching, Aki slowly turned towards the giant castle close by, specifically at the tallest tower where one could get the impression of a giant golden reptilian iris staring back.
“So you are sapient?” He grinned, a stretched smile that was clearly hurting his face. “Don’t worry little kitty, papa will teach you exactly how to be nice while there are guests over.” His words did not reach the tower, but the well timed accords and beats of ‘Unlike Pluto’ started playing all over the camp, “I just want revenge, and a little bit more~.”
That afternoon, only two things could be heard throughout the whole dungeon, the screams of a dragon and a playlist of soft but threatening rock, inspirational rap and love songs.
The hunting training was canceled when a moody Lea started a killing spree after escorting the group to the camp, complaining about cramps the whole time and how this was not how a proud descendent of a phoenix should be at any moment in time.
The castle made of black rock was turned into a ruin where all the monsters were turned into mush by the body of the final boss being used as a flail to murder them.
The moment Aki was done with defeating the thing however, was when the screams became what was obviously the sound of a tortured animal, which sometimes became the sound of a wailing woman begging for an end to the pain.
Promises of pleasure, riches and power were ignored, the despair and the shrieks of when the privates were targeted were obvious even to those who couldn’t hear the already hoarse but loud words.
Next came what was obviously a river of vomit, blood and an unidentifiable clear liquid, dropping from the only standing tower’s balcony with a volume that was clearly not natural. When shriveled orbs started to float down the flow of bodily fluids, it became clear that these had been several pairs of eyes, all destroyed with prejudice and many torture devices.
When the screams started again, those who retained a modicum of capability to decipher the horrendous sounds were actually confused by the fact that these were actually cries about terrible smell of all things, but they soon understood that it was not something normal either, as the there was no more space for begging between the vomiting, convulsions and moans of a barely conscious being.
Then, there was silence.
An hour after that, a radiant Aki came back to camp carrying a five meters tall reptilian humanoid female who had blind eyes, no nose or tongue and was completely smooth where there normally would be genitalia.
Humming a song, he proceeded to lay down what seemed to be the corpse of the dungeon boss near his room before then proceeding to cover it with a metal building, where the sound of scales breaking and flesh being butchered begun to reverberate for a while before loud snoring begun anew.
What most failed to realise however, was that there would be a notification in case of the defeat of the dungeon boss, meaning that the giant was still alive despite not breathing or moving.