After picking up the loot from the Chicken Shredder, we continued on our merry way. The items were luckily not as strange as the boss had been, though they had their own oddities. There was a necklace with a wishbone pendant on it, granting the wearer an increase to their Charisma, which we gave to Lia, a pair of gloves that suspiciously looked as if they were made of rubber, granting the wearer greatly increased protection against corrosive damage to their hands, in addition to increasing their dexterity by a single point, and finally, an egg that was simply described as ‘mysterious egg’ by the Inspect-Ability. I had tried the gloves on, but while they shrunk to fit my hands, I wasn’t happy with the way my magic was flowing through them, so they were put away. Lia didn’t even try them, as her claws made them a non-starter. Maybe I’d use them for my alchemical experiments, but not for combat.
Our battles continued apace, with clucking chickens trying to kill us, only that now, the skelepigs were completely phased out and replaced with their bovine equivalent. Going from skeletal pigs trying to run us over and trample us to death to skeletal cows trying to do the same wasn’t terribly surprising but incredibly annoying. Before, Lia and Silva had been strong enough to grapple the skelepigs and slowly break them apart, but the cows were too heavy for that. Lia had to work with the cleaver she picked up after fighting the first boss and literally dismember the skeletal cows, while Silva guarded her back and I focused on using my Darkness Rune Mastery and Mind Magic to confuse our enemies.
It made the battles tedious and brutal, forcing me to repeatedly heal my comrades between fights. But at least the battles did quite a bit for my skill-levels, the healing increased my Blood Rune Mastery to twenty-three, while the repeated use of Darkness Rune Mastery, often in conjunction with Mind Magic to push the attacks home increased the Rune Mastery to twenty-two, and Mind Magic to seventeen. Realising that I had done quite a bit of attacking with my Mind Magic, I made a mental note to try using it to help Lia, as it would push my abilities back towards a beneficial direction, hopefully reaching an equilibrium with my offensive use of the ability.
It was obvious that the dungeon was supposed to be tackled with a group of five and while the challenges were possible for us, and the EXP great despite my high level, it was getting harder.
Luckily, it didn’t take long for me to reach level thirty, the harder battles, alongside the Dungeon Traveller buff giving enough to push me over. As expected, I immediately gained an increase in every attribute from my Dragon-Touched trait, which, in turn, pushed my Dexterity and Vitality to fifteen, granting the respective traits.
Trait gained You gained the trait: Dexterous Casting For having fifteen Dexterity at your level, you gain an appropriate trait. Dexterous Casting increases the speed with which you can draw runes during spellcasting by ten percent.
Trait gained You gained the trait: Blood Vitality For having fifteen Vitality at your level, you gain an appropriate trait. Blood Vitality increases your blood production and decreases magical exhaustion's effects on you.
Looking at the traits, neither was terribly powerful, not compared to some of the others I had received. Still, given that they were granted for accomplishing certain attribute goals before reaching level-milestones, I couldn’t be too disappointed by them. I was getting stuff for free, after all, so I should be content with that. But those two weren’t what I had been after. It was a different milestone, even if I had to make a decision. Either, keep the two points, allowing me to reach thirty Intelligence at level thirty-five, or use them and get twenty-five Intuition at level thirty. The problem was, both attributes were important to me, each in their own way.
Intelligence directly increased my magical power and memory, allowing me to put more force into my spells. Intuition, on the other hand, increased my perception, not just of the physical world around me, but also my magical perception, making it easier to notice connections and comprehend things. In addition, it allowed me to think a little faster, increasing the speed at which my mind operated.
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I doubted there was a ‘correct’ answer to which was the better choice for me, both were necessary. As such, I decisively put the two points into Intuition, trying to keep a certain balance between the two. Otherwise, I’d be tempted to keep pushing Intelligence up, always chasing the next milestone, until I was knifed in the back by an enemy I didn’t see coming. There was simply no telling what I might miss if I didn’t keep my Intuition high enough. A balance was necessary, even if I might miss out on certain traits for my Intelligence.
Trait gained You gained the trait: Magical Instinct For having twenty-five Intuition at your level, you gain an appropriate trait. Magical Instinct increases your ability to make intuitive leaps when trying to understand magical processes.
Closing my eyes, I tried to comprehend the difference between before and after. There wasn’t some sort of immediate epiphany, no great lightbulb in my head starting to shine, nothing obvious. And yet, I felt something tingling at the edge of my perception, realisation teasing me, trying to draw me in. Opening my eyes, I began staring at the walls, blinking my magical sight on and off, trying to make out the puzzle pieces I needed, only to come up empty.
“What just happened?” Lia asked me after I had been staring into space for almost two minutes.
“Level-up, I’m now level thirty,” I told her, grinning proudly when her eyes widened. She had been catching up quickly, but now I was continuing my path forward. Sure, she would almost catch up at some point in the future, at least if she was always with us while fighting, but that was just part of being in a party.
“Congratulations, Mistress,” she gave a bow of submission, before standing straight with a grin on her face, “There was more, right? I felt… something,”
“One of my traits periodically increases my growth, it just happened again, increasing every attribute at the same time. Making me just a little better,” I explained, causing her to frown but she didn’t ask further, and I didn’t offer any additional explanation. Instead, I continued moving forward, happy that she had pulled me from my mind before I wasted more time. The Dungeon Traveller buff was slowly ticking down and every moment wasted meant a potential loss of EXP, if the buff ran out before we finished the dungeon.
In addition to multiple groups of enemies we had to dispatch, there were also traps. The meat hooks we had seen before, and the explosions of goop continued, only now the floor started to become unsafe. When we first came across that sort of trap, it almost did me in, only a minute difference in the visual texture of the floor clued me in that something was there. The entire area was coated with a thin film of goop, a different goop from the one oozing from the walls. This goop was nearly transparent and mostly harmless, until it suddenly turned sticky, nearly immobilising you. Most of the time, that was no problem, we all were strong enough to break free, but the traps weren’t random. Most of the films were right where an enemy might notice us, or in the area of effect of another trap. Dodging a swinging meat hook was rather difficult if your foot was suddenly glued to the floor.
The floor traps were so annoying that I didn’t mess around, and didn’t care about how much time it took, I made sure to wash each of them away with conjured water. Sadly, just conjuring water did little for my skill level, I had done that conjuration so often when showering that it simply didn’t count any longer, but I managed to deal with that sort of trap, allowing us to progress smoothly, if slowly.
Finally, we reached the next large chamber. By now, I had pretty much no idea where in the building we were, the hallways made from the strange bone-like substance had twisted and turned randomly, making it so I had pretty much lost all sense of direction, to say nothing about the few dead-ends we had walked into, each of which had housed nothing but groups of enemies. Not even a single treasure chest, as disappointed as the gamer within me was for that.
Looking around in the wide open room we had entered, I could almost hear the boss fight music play. Moments after I warned the others, I noticed movement near the ceiling and readied myself for a fight- Dropping down from above was another bovine skeleton, only this skeleton wasn’t from a cow or a bull. Our enemy stood on two legs, tall enough to tower even above Sigmir if she were here, and that was within taking the long, wickedly sharp and pointy, horns into account. Its arms didn’t end in hands or hooves, one ended in a chain, tipped with a wicked-looking hook, the other in a blade, quite similar to the one Lia had picked up.
Staring at it, I activated Observe, knowing that combat was imminent, and learned that we were facing a Moonotaur, at a rather impressive level of twenty-eight.