We battled five more groups of skelepigs around this side of the building until we had to make a decision. We now had cleaned up this area, there were no more undead around that I could detect but there likely would be just as much on the other side of the building, likely in other areas, too.
We could continue hunting them, they were good EXP for Lia and a trickle for me, but it would take time. With me relatively useless against them, only blunt strikes with my Ice Magic effectively working, I was limited to support. Sliva and Lia were more effective, but the fact that there was no flesh to rend for Lia, no blood to rip Astral Power from, limited her a great deal. Amusingly, the destruction of their groups had given me another point for my Ice Rune Mastery and my Ice Magic, bringing them to twenty-three and twenty-five.
Or we could move into the building and find out what we truly were dealing with. I was nearly certain I was looking at a dungeon of some sort, which meant we’d get a first explorer title if we were the first to clear it, making it very attractive. I was somewhat confident that nobody had been able to clear out the undead around the area as we had, unless they were far weaker during the day, to say nothing about actually clearing the dungeon, meaning the title would still be up for grabs. Given its permanent and stacking nature, combined with the natural limitation on gaining it, there would be only so many dungeons that could be cleared for the first time by anyone, I was willing to take some risks for it.
“Let’s go in there,” I quietly told Lia, before starting to make my way across the open space we had cleared, aiming for the main entrance. We could have gone for the loading docks on the other side, but this was where the workers used to enter and exit from.
The door was hanging precariously on its hinges, looking a little warped and beaten, as if something had forcibly ripped it open. Shaking my head, I moved forward with my concealment wrapped tightly around me, Silva and Lia following a few steps behind me.
The moment I crossed the threshold, a blue window opened, just as I had expected.
You have entered an instanced Dungeon, the Dark Slaughterhouse. Only those of your party can enter this dimension from the outside. You are the first to enter the Dark Slaughterhouse. For the first three hours, you gain the Dungeon Traveller-Buff, granting Bonus EXP.
Nodding to myself, I felt a grin form on my lips. This was even better than I expected and I made a mental note to eventually run some tests with the locals in regard to this dungeon. I wanted to know how the dimensional mechanics of this instancing worked, if it was a sort of magic I would be able to replicate. I was somewhat confident that it was possible, given that the Grandmother had her own essentially private dungeon, but comparing myself to her was, a stretch and would remain one for a long time. I was confident that I’d eventually gain power comparable to hers, but it would take a while and a lot of effort. Effort for which I could now lay the foundations if I was willing to take a few risks and crack some skulls.
The inside of the building looked decidedly odd. I was relatively certain that magic must have made a lot of alterations, as I doubted the normal engineering code allowed for solid walls of interlinked bones, occasionally dripping some glowing and distinctly unpleasant-looking orange goo. If nothing else, that had to be a huge hygiene concern, to say nothing of the many sharp edges I could see. The only light I could see came from the glowing goo, almost like mood lighting, but the only mood this lighting could evoke in me was disgust.
With only three of us, we were limited when it came to formations, mainly, we had Sliva move up front, with Lia in the middle and me bringing up the rear. Normally, I would have had Lia bring up the rear but at the end of the day, One-of-a-Kind-Vampire or not, I had a dozen levels on her, to say nothing of the vast amount of actual experience in battle. She might be stronger and more durable, but if it came down to it, I was confident that I could destroy her ninety-five fights out of a hundred, even if I was unable to use any magic.
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Before we actually moved into the building, I did a few experiments on the walls, testing their durability and potential susceptibility to my magic. If I would be able to circumvent some of the challenges this dungeon had to offer or could find some other secrets, it would be time well spent.
Sadly, even a five-rune Overflow Blizzard Icicle, propelled by an additional burst of Ice Magic simply shattered against the walls, not even leaving a scratch mark. This was some durable stuff and when I tested my Death Magic, it did nothing, other than give me a headache. Similar experiments on the goo yielded similarly disappointing results, the stuff seemed to simply ooze out of the otherwise solid bones. No, if I wanted to disrupt or assert control over anything here, I needed vastly more power.
Thus, the intended approach had to be followed, moving through eerie hallways of bones, worrying that some sort of bony aboneimation tried to jump out and bone us. It didn’t take long for trouble to come for us, only it was a different sort of trouble.
Instead of undead trouble trying to murder us, meat-hooks were swinging from the ceiling, acting like a pendulum with far too much power to be physically possible. They swung at speeds that made the air whistle, only to stop on a dime when reaching the ceiling and, a few seconds later, swing back the other way. Given that even the chains the hooks were swinging by looked more like an assortment of barbed wire, I doubted trying to handle that was a good idea.
Instead of trying to dodge our way through, I first tried to cheat. The meat-hooks were close enough together that a strong impact on one of them should send it careening into the others, creating a wonderful tangle that hopefully even the magical force animating this place couldn’t instantly solve. So, given that there was no way I was willing to get close to meat-hooks moving about at the speed of stupid, I conjured up a hailstone, crashing into one of the hooks, in the middle of its downward motion. Bullet Time allowed me to hit the timing near perfectly, only for the hailstone to shatter on impact without changing the hooks trajectory in the slightest.
For a moment, I considered trying to throw a non-magical object at the thing, just in case that changed things, but with our current lack of suitable items, I had to give up. Just as I was contemplating sacrificing one of my bags, Silva decided she had enough and simply moved.
With her superior strength, she had quite the acceleration, pushing her body right after a pair of meat-hooks swung down, moving beneath them as they were on the way up on the other side. She made it look so easy, and maybe it truly was.
“Can you manage?” I asked Lia, studying the tempo and patterns of the hooks for a bit.
“I think so, yes,” Lia nodded and the moment I spotted an opening, I made my move. Bullet Time once more activated, not that it would help me much, as I dashed past the swinging hooks. I was lucky that I was slender, otherwise I might have been gutted on the way, as it was, I easily made it.
On the next opening, Lia gracefully slid underneath the hooks, making it look easy, but she had the highest physical stats out of all of us, so maybe it actually was easy for her.
But either way, it was only the first obstacle, and I had a feeling there would be more.
A feeling that was proven right only moments later, when a few more skelepigs came tumbling out of the walls, immediately beginning to dash towards us. Given that there was no way to retreat, we all moved forward, even I was engaging in melee.
Where my companions had the brute strength to simply tear these things apart, I had to be a little more intelligent, but that was okay. I didn’t need brute strength, not if I could use their strength against them. Just as the thing tried to take out my knees so I could be trampled at their leisure, I spun aside, pushing it forward and past me as much as possible. With the momentum I managed to add to its already high speed, the skelepig had no chance to slow down before it crashed into the swinging hooks, with explosive results.
We were all showered in small bone fragments, the skelepig broken far beyond what even the insane force of the hooks should cause.
Grinning to myself, I watched as Lia copied my solution, bodily tossing two more skelepigs into the swinging hooks of doom, while Silva simply broke them with brute force. Maybe she liked the taste of bone, it would explain why she happily carried a large bone in her mouth, as we continued on our path deeper into the facility.