[ Conditions met. ]
Sam’s expression changed to almost panic. The last time this happened he was gone for a while, only a week in his mind, but why is it happening again? It felt clear that this was drama for the Entities, perhaps something to get rid of him as an Ascendant. One follow-up question was if Dia was coming with him or not... or if he would even disappear.
Turning towards Dia and the receptionist with a disturbingly stressed expression he focused on the receptionist.
“If I suddenly disappear and she doesn’t come with me, please contact Janik and take any money from my account you need to keep he-”
[ Conditions met; Player will be transported to Solo Dungeon. ]
Before he could complete his sentence the warm white light had done its thing yet again.
The light faded, and he immediately looked around, sending out all his Psyhands to try and map anything and everything. He was in a dimly lit hallway with a dead end in front of him. The hallway was made out of polished stone speckled with glowing red crystals speckled across them, giving the area a very poor level of lighting. The walls, floor and ceiling were reflective enough that he could see the sources of light, as well as himself, barely on their surface, creating an almost kaleidoscope-like feeling. Since he could touch it all with his Psyhands, nothing seemed to be an illusion, at least.
He saw this going on for a while before it turned to the right. The first thing he checked was his phone; as expected, there was no signal. He started walking down the hallway.
It was completely silent, the only sound he could hear was his steps echoing across the smooth, hard surfaces around him. As he walked towards the bend he did a quick inventory; he had his phone, the box of poisoned toothpicks, the box of normal toothpicks and all his weapons. He didn’t bring his backpack of survival or exploration stuff as he intended to go to the training room in TAC, not... this...
The only light source he had, if needed, was his phone. Even with the flashlight on, it’ll last quite some time as it worked on Aether crystals instead of normal batteries, one of the massive upgrades for the phones marketed towards Players. But he didn’t need to use it just yet, though each glowing crystal was dim, collectively it wasn’t too bad.
Rounding the corner he looked straight into a large room, it had the same surface and dim glow as the hallway, so he was able to see all the walls, ceiling and floor. The entire room was like a short oil-drum shape, where it wasn’t as tall as it was wide, but the top and bottom were bulging outwards as if overfilled with pressure. The whole place was about the size of a soccer field, just symmetric in shape. This meant that the floor had a slight bowl design to it. In the middle of it was a pedestal-like cylinder, which was the only different or standing-out detail in the whole area.
No quests or information had popped up, so he didn’t have much choice than walking to the pedestal, he would end up there at some point anyway, so might as well do it now before he grows tired, hungry or worse. The larger room made his echo die out before it could properly bounce back, making everything feel a bit weird. As he came closer to the pedestal he saw that in a concave area on the top of it, was a spherical crystal that lit up more the closer he got, until it turned painful to look at. Reaching out with Psyhands he could feel it was there, and round as he saw, but he couldn’t move it at all, at least not with the power of the Psyhands. As he got within arms reach of it, the crystal pulsed even brighter and shattered.
[ Wave 1 ]
A window popped up, taking his focus for a second as he wondered what this was about. As soon as the window closed he saw that the pedestal was gone, and in its place with the same warm white light that transports him around, a single goblin stood.
Before Sam could react, it lunged forward with its rusty broken sword and landed a hit in his thigh.
[ Armour, Defence 50 has negated the damage. Critical hit. ]
His expression was panic, he was being attacked from nowhere but now that the attack landed, he almost wanted to chuckle. Had the situation not been this fucked up he would have found it amusing. But afterwards, his expression changed into uncertainty. Why was this happening? And what was going to happen afterwards? The system window mentioned Wave 1... Wave one, the first... of how many? And how would that change?
Quickly considering things he realised that he needed to test and find out the rules for this, trying to think on it, hoping the System would explain things proved useless. There was no information popping up and no explanation.
During the time these attempts of learning went on, the Goblin kept attacking Sam, adamant that he could get an attack through. Though most of its attacks were normal hits, now and then a critical hit landed, but it didn’t go through his Defence.
Sam took his time, he walked around the area, trying to find things as the Goblin kept shouting... what Sam assumed were obscenities at him, relentlessly attacking him. But after this had gone on for a while and after Sam confirmed there were no more exists than the one he came in from, he took out the goblin.
A simple attack with a cheap dagger took him out.
[ Wave 1 complete, choose reward:
Random Box
Sustenance
Time extension until the next wave.
The next wave is in 1 minute. ]
“Ah... fuck...” Sam commented to himself, he was somewhat understanding how this was working out...
As the counter started counting down immediately, Sam realised he had to choose, but at the same time he wondered if he could wait to accept, would he get multiple windows open and ready for triggering when he wanted? And if he went for more time; just how much time was he given? What level of sustenance and how much did he get if he went for that?
There were many wildcards here, he understood there was some kind of wave survival thing, he had played them in games when he was younger. A lot of the Tower System had RPG-like elements to them, and though it wasn’t the same it was close enough for comparison to things. After all, the System was some reality show thing.
The first reward was bound to the weakest, smallest or just ‘less’, if there was any difference between them, but he had to imagine that getting the random box, or time, on wave 1, had to be worth less than wave 50 or something. So for now it was the best to test with.
He left it for now, moving it out of his focus without selecting anything, he also wondered if the next target would land in the same area as the first goblin. Briefly considering getting the core, out of habit, and wondering if blood from the collective mobs being killed would pool up in the centre, his worries were handled as the dead goblin disintegrated into smoke-like particles without leaving anything behind.
“Ah.” Sam let out subconsciously as he got the answer before he properly asked it.
[ Wave 2 ]
Time hit zero and the same white light faded in like before, this time there were two Goblins. Both came in around the centre of the area, roughly where the first landed. This time Sam didn’t wait a second and cut both down right away, having zero chance of survival they both instantly died, and the same reward window opened, it looked identical except for listing that it was the Wave 2 rewards instead. At this point, he also realised that he hadn’t gotten any XP added to him, no popups nor anything in the XP log.
This testing proved true the next two Waves as well, completing Wave 4 which had four goblins attack him, and now having 4 windows open. Needing to find out how the contents worked, he took the Wave 1 and 2 reward windows and triggered a Time extension on both.
[ Time extension selected: +1 hour added to pool. ]
[ Time extension selected: +1 hour added to pool. ]
The countdown to the next wave now had a choice next to it, there was an option to extend with [ 2 hours ] available. It didn’t auto-extend and the time seemed static, at least for now. Needing to check the others, he triggered Sustenance on one, and a Random box on the other.
[ Sustenance selected ]
[ Random box selected ]
Sam held out his hands as he would normally do when it came to getting these rewards, and this didn’t seem to be an exception, in one hand a random box came into being, and in the other, he had a small bottle of water as well as a single slice of bread with some toppings on it. The simplest of meals. Immediately opening the Random Box, it produced a single E-rank Aether crystal.
Thinking about this for a second, it made sense. If it followed his expectations then the Sustenance gave him a simple meal, time gave him time he could use to get rest, and random box gave him the stuff he could find in a random box but ranked either according to the Wave number or the monsters called. He didn’t know if the food would change but at least there was food.
Now the question was, how long was this going to last?
The next wave came in, five goblins now, all angry and all ugly. They charged him and though he could take them out with one blow, he needed to test something else.
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Bringing in five simple daggers, he needed to attack one Goblin to see how that worked out. He didn’t know if he needed five separate attacks or if a clustered strike counted as multiple or one. The simplest way to test! He sent the five daggers into one goblin.
[ Static charge triggered ]
A sphere-like wave of eclectic energy snapped outwards with a powerful electric snapping sound, hitting all of the goblins that were within the 5m/16ft range, which was all of them as he targeted the central one. They all died instantly.
Sam felt a small smile form, he didn’t know how this would work on targets with a Defence rating, but just this part was amazing for him. He would need to test other things but he needed a weaker source of damage... He took out a few toothpicks and got ready for the next wave, leaving the reward window to the side for now.
As the timer hit zero, five small goblins spawned with one larger one, so a total of six but with one being bigger. It didn’t look like it was on a chief level, but it was just larger.
This was a perfect test, so he went to it before it became too annoying. He easily shanked them with the toothpicks, and it was almost dumb that this worked. Pricking them with the toothpicks seemed to ‘mark’ them with a static charge, which looked like a small icon over their head, however, the icon disappeared when they went behind each other, so he needed to see them to see it.
He pricked one of them twice, then another of them twice, he now had two individuals with two charges each. They had all gathered around him in the hopes of damaging him but none of them got through his Defence, so he had time. As he ended up picking one of them the fifth time, the static charge pulsed outwards, hitting and killing them all. He didn’t get to test other things with that group but he got some important checks.
The seventh wave started, it was now five goblins and two larger ones, still at the start of the process he had plenty of time to test, after all his Defence was much, much higher and harder than needed at this point. If he hadn’t been wearing his armour this would have been quite different. But he had found that if he killed them instantly, the next wave started right away after the one-minute delay, but how long could he postpone it?
Temporarily disabling Static Charge before killing all except one of the weak ones, he reenabled it for future use but intended to keep this goblin alive. Sam sat down and prepared to take some time and relax, the Goblin didn’t want any of that, though, and though it couldn’t hurt him, it could damage his items or keep him quite annoyed. Luckily for Sam, it was weak as shit, since the collective strength of the Psyhands was almost 26kg/57lbs, he could just hold it down without much effort. Placing one hand over its mouth kept it from screaming but allowed it to breathe, so Sam now had plenty of time.
Having no idea how long he was going to be here, he had an idea he wanted to check, looking up on the TAC information app, he read up on the use of Aether crystals, he wondered if he could charge his phone with them, and to his surprise he could; it wasn’t even a problem. Many phones had a port he could just touch an Aether crystal to and it would absorb the energy it needed, it would degrade the crystal and damage its value, but in a pinch it was possible.
This was good news, as long as he had random boxes and Aether crystals, he had a working phone. And though he might be lacking connection or internet, he still had a pocket computer he could play around with. Right now he decided to test this out and waste battery on it, he wanted to get it to lose a few percent at least, but that would most likely take a few hours due to how long battery time they had.
[ Next wave in 1 minute. ]
According to the clock on his phone, he had been lounging around for about an hour when the window popped up, the goblin was exhausted trying to get through Sam’s defences for so long. So it seemed he only had an hour to do this, which made sense. If not then he could just spend the rest of his time like this, given that he had enough food.
Pocketing his phone he got up and waited, wanting to see what happened, and as expected; when the timer hit zero the next wave came in even without affecting the existing target, so now there were five small goblins, three large ones and the one from last round.
Needing to test one more thing, he sent his full arsenal at one of the goblins, using the Cluster attack he wanted to see how that worked out.
[ Static charge triggered ]
The group was killed by the wave of energy like before. It seemed that there was a cooldown to how many times it could trigger from one target, he would need to find that for max abuse of this ability.
The following wave, number 9, was similar, it had five small goblins and four large ones, he needed to test one more thing, and split up his weapons, sending them at two of the targets, as he hoped this triggered two pulses, one from each target. The pulse wouldn’t trigger the others according to the skill description, but it was still very practical.
He hadn’t needed to move so far, as they all spawned around the same area, so he could just mow them down without effort, though that was mainly due to them being the scrub tier. However, this was about to change a little.
[ Wave 10, boss wave ]
Sam readied himself, but was somewhat disappointed, in a good way. As the group spawned with five goblins, five larger goblins and a Chieftain. It wasn’t an issue at his current level but thinking back to Janik’s comment, had he been a mage or ranger, he might have run out of resources by now, and a warrior would be more tired than he was... a bit, perhaps, depending on his training.
As the group charged him, two of them opted to throw their rusty swords at him. He didn’t even bother with dodging at this point, but he did wonder; should he extend the fights or just rush through the easier ones before things started doing damage? He will suddenly end up needing rest anyway, but if he rushes through the easy ones he could stack up on time and resources, and then be more ready when the time comes.
On the other hand, he could delay things and take it easy with the scrubs to postpone the harder things, this wouldn’t tire him that much, but that could also make him properly tired when the dangerous things came along.
Pondering this for a brief moment, as the attacks against him failed and failed again, he concluded that he needed resources anyway, and he was far from tired or worn, having just woken up a few hours ago at most. It was better to face this with energy rather than waiting. Just ploughing through the easier ones would also allow him to amass reward windows that he could just trigger whenever he needed them, so it wasn’t all bad.
As he was considering this, there was another thing he needed to test first. The goblins he had killed so far, along with their weapons, disappeared right before the next wave spawned, was there a way to affect this?
Not intending to give the group around him any effort, he attacked the boss with enough daggers to trigger Static Charge, the 62 damage from the 2x Main Stat calculation took care of the group with zero effort, and all of them almost disintegrated around him.
Sheathing his weapons he used a mix of his Psyhands and normal hands, picking up weapons and holding onto their corpses, making sure he was holding a weapon and a corpse in his normal hands, and similar in Psyhands, maximizing the test results.
[ Wave 10, boss wave, complete, choose reward:
2x Random Box
2x Sustenance
2x Time extension until the next wave.
The next wave is in 2 minutes. ]
“Oh!” Sam exclaimed in surprise, the boss waves gave double rewards, as well as having a double delay before the next wave, that was very good to know.
Holding onto the corpses and items, making sure to not touch them all, he waited for the timer to reach zero. The untouched corpses disintegrated and the ones he held onto remained, both physically and with the Psyhands, same for the weapons.
This was an incredible find, but he wondered; would they remain after killing the next wave?
The next wave materialised, which was a single but larger goblin, he had a proper weapon this time and looked a bit sturdier. Giving into the spirit of testing, Sam let himself be attacked.
With a shriek, the Goblin charged at him and landed an attack, it was a critical hit due to lack of dodging and Sam’s Defence ate it without any damage to him. The Goblin fell immediately afterwards, and Sam got to testing his next plan. Letting go of some of the corpses and weapons from the last wave he waited for the timer. As expected the things he was no longer interacting with were dematerialized, but the ones he was holding onto remained, letting go of them immediately after the dematerializing was done, they remained as the two new Goblins spawned.
He didn’t know what to do with this information, but at least now he knew.
He let go of every corpse and rusty weapon, walking over and sitting down within range of the spawning area, he pulled out all his weapons and cut down the two new arrivals, he was going to blitz through everything he could, only testing the damage now and then by getting hit, he needed to know when he was in actual danger. Not expecting that to be for a few waves he could at least do this as passively as possible to keep his energy use down as much as he could.
With 34 weapons floating ominously around him, aimed at the rough spawning area, yet another reward window was added to the stack as he waited for the countdown to end.