Chapter 26 – Back To Normal

The morning after returning to Veritas everything looked to be back to normal. Last night Trainer Quincy told them that these troubles were way above their paygrade, and that they shouldn’t worry about it. After ordering them to return to their previous schedule he hurried to the headquarters though.

Now they were doing their morning exercises while waiting for him. The three types of classes all did their own thing, with the fighters going through mock battles, the archers practicing on moving targets, and the mages using up their mana with either spamming small spells to increase their casting speed, or bigger spells to increase their accuracy.

Sam herself was standing in front of Leophon. The large man was her opponent this round, and he was quite handy with his shield bashes to keep her on the defensive. The only thing keeping her in the fight was the balancing of her stats. Even though they hadn’t talked about it, Sam was quite certain that Leophon had invested a large part of his stats in strength, with only a smaller part in agility. Sam had no chance of fighting on an equal foot with her strength stat, but she was a tiny bit faster than her opponent. This gave her a small edge to keep in the fight.

“You know, this would be easier if I could use mana based attacks. I have more mana than you, so that would even the odds considerably.”

Leophon only grinned at her.

“You know Sam, I don’t mind that much. It’s pretty fun to toss you all over the place.”

Sam’s face clouded over a bit.

“Yeah, I don’t really appreciated that last one. It hurt my butt.”

“Maybe you should grow it out a bit? You wouldn’t have hit the ground as hard if you had a bit more there to cushion your fall.”

“Not cool, dude. I’m not pointing out your obvious physical flaws.”

“What flaws? I’m the strongest one here.”

“Nope, not going there, way too easy.”

There was a lot of confusion apparent on Leophon’s face. Sam though, didn’t hesitate a moment to take advantage of his confusion. Without warning she darted inside his guard to finish the fight in one quick stroke.

Leophon, while being caught off guard, managed to dodge her attack though. On the back foot, he let himself fall down. Sam overextended to end the fight, but was caught unawares by a devastating kick. With perfect aim, almost as if it was planned, she flew through the air towards a water barrel.

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Missing the barrel by inches, she fell down next to it. She did jostle the barrel, which meant the ladle filled with water fell right on top of her head like a hat.

Of course this caused a lot of hilarity in the group.

“You think that’s going to be the new fashion trend, Xanthe?”

“Nah, even though Sam’s pulling off the look like a star, I’m not sure the nobility will do the same.”

It took the group almost half an hour to return to being serious. Right after that though, Trainer Quincy finally turned up.

“Gather around. It’s time to up your training another notch. Today, and the next few weeks you will all continue doing your exercises in the morning, but after those you will all go to the dungeon individually. As you know you only have clearance for the first three floors, but as soon as you gained more than a hundred stats in total you will be promoted and get to go solo on the third floor. Once a week you will go to the dungeon with the whole squad. Make sure that you all gain those one hundred points before the first time you go in with the squad, so you can go to the fourth floor.”

“Sir, most of us already have those points, why haven’t we been promoted?”

“How about, because I say so? The thing is, you need both the points, and the recommendation from your commanding officer. You’ve all proven yourself on the wall, so I’ll allow you to be promoted. This will also help you train against new foes in the dungeon, so it’s a win-win in my books.”

“Thank you, sir. I think I speak for the rest of us that we will go and get our promotion filed at the headquarters as soon as we’re done here.”

“See that you do. I expect all of you to go and gain a lot of levels in the next few weeks, because we might need you in the legion earlier rather than later. For now I’ll give each of you some individual advice, after that you can go and get that promotion done with and go to the dungeon. Remember, you’re to enter individually, so no meeting up inside or some such nonsense.”

“Sir, yes sir!”

Soon Sam was once again entering the dungeon, this time with the plan to take a page out of Jasper’s book and rush towards the third floor. It wasn’t that long ago that they had to take the entire squad to stay alive on that floor, but since then she had grown a lot. Not only had the last few times as a squad been pretty easy, she had also gained a lot of levels on the wall. She had also activated her achievements to get some extra stats, which also was a nice boost to her fighting capabilities.

The first floor didn’t even challenge her anymore. The few slugs she saw were dispatched within moments. The toads on the second floor didn’t offer a bigger problem, though it did take her a bit more time to kill them. She had just fought them so often that she knew what they were going to do before they themselves did.

The ants on the third floor though, were bound to be quite the challenge for her. She had fought them a lot, so she did know how to defeat them, but that was all while having the entire squad to back her up. Fighting as a individual was bound to be a lot harder, if only because there were no archers or mages to thin the numbers and kill the spitters.

She kept thinking about how to fight while she made her way through the dungeon’s first two floors. In the end she didn’t manage to think of a better way to fight than to just go winging it. Being on her own would give her a mobility that the squad didn’t have, so she was planning to just go and see how it would go. If it became too dangerous she could just run away.