Chapter 9 Leveling

The next morning Sam managed to get all her new equipment on correctly and ran towards the training field. Once again she was the last one to arrive.

It didn’t take long for the trainer to sort out the squad. Jasper, Leophon, Deon and Zach had reached level ten. This meant that they had to go to the quartermaster to get their new gear.

“The rest of you can go back to the dungeon. Remember that you can’t go back to the third floor, as your squad is not together. You know the rule, if you’re a tier one recruit you need your full squad on the third floor.”

“Sorry sir, but you haven’t really explained that part. What do you mean with first tier?”

The trainer scratched his head.

“Right, I might have forgotten that part. The ranks within the legion have different tiers. As recruits this means that when the sum of your stats is between one and one hundred, you are tier one. At tier one you can go to the first two floors of the dungeon on your own, and to floor three when you are with your whole squad. Tier two has a sum of between one and two hundred statpoints, and can go to floors one, two and three on their own, and floor four with the whole squad. Tier three can go up another floor, you get where I’m going with this. Now get going. I need to get some gear for these four.”

Soon after that Sam arrived at the dungeon portal together with her squad mates. The other seven members of the squad that hadn’t made it to level ten were all pretty close to do so. This meant that they had decided to move on to the second floor to level.

While Sam could have joined them, she decided that she could use some combat experience fighting the low-leveled creatures on the first floor. When she was confident in defeating those, she could always move her way up to the next floor.

When, after a few minutes the others went left to the second floor, Sam went right. No need to share the experience with the others. Within five minutes, she had found the first fire snail.

“Okay, let’s see what this new equipment can do.”

Sam readied herself by lowering her shield, so that it was between her and the snail. It would not do to have the slow snail attack her, and not use the shield that she needed to learn to fight with.

It didn’t take long for the snail to move close enough to try to attack. The slow creature had made its way towards her, leaving a wet glistening trail of mucus behind. Then, when it was about three meters away, it suddenly jumped.

Sam hadn’t expected the sudden jump from the creature. Nothing about its appearance even looked like it could move quickly, let alone jump like it did.

Because she had lowered her shield all the way to the ground, to block the creature, it was out of position. Even when she tried to move it up, she was too slow.

The snail managed to jump over the shield, and head-butted her in the chest. Sam stumbled backwards, and almost tripped over a rock. The snail however, had landed on its, well it didn’t have feet, on its belly. Now it was only about a meter away from her.

Now that she knew that, the snail could move and jump like that, Sam paid more attention. Apparently, these level one creatures could be good training after all.

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Even before Sam could finish that thought, the snail attacked again. Once more, it jumped towards her chest, but this time Sam had been expecting it. She moved her shield between herself and the snail, and even though she was pushed back again, this time her footing was better.

Immediately she readied herself for the next attack. Now that she knew the snail’s attack pattern, she tried something new. When the snail attacked, she tried to parry the snail. Unfortunately, the shield was new to her and the parry failed. She managed to hit the snail with her shield, but it still hit her on the shoulder.

A droplet of the mucus hit her neck, and within moments it started to burn. Luckily, it looked like the snail was all out of energy. Sam didn’t know that snails could look exhausted, but this one certainly did.

“It seems like three jumps is the most these creatures can do before they’re out of stamina. Well, time to finish this one and look for another one I guess.”

Now that the creature couldn’t move, it was easy to kill. Sam just put her sword behind its head and pushed down.

Now that she had found out one of the weaknesses of the snails, Sam moved more confidently through the first floor. Every time she encountered a snail, she let it exhaust itself on her shield, while she practiced blocking and parrying the snails.

After an hour, she had killed six of the creatures this way. More and more she managed to use the shield to defend herself without getting hit. But then she encountered two of the snails at the same time. Up till now she had evaded the snails that were with two or more, but now that she was confident in using the shield, it was time to challenge herself.

She could have just used her sword to cut one of the snails down, and then train with the second one, but where was the fun in that?

“Okay, show me what you’ve got”

What the snails got was more than she had expected. Once again these low-leveled snails managed to surprise her. When they got within the three meters that she had determined that their maximum range was, one of them jumped towards her head, and the other towards her knees.

Up until now, all the snails she had encountered jumped towards her chest. This made them really predictable. But now that there were two they chose different targets to not get into each other’s way.

Sam had been bracing herself to block the doubled weight of two snails, but now she quickly had to change tactics. She ducked under the snail that went for her head, while parrying the snail that went for her knees. Luckily she had practiced parrying enough that she could carry out the move without hurting herself.

The downside from this was that she now had two snails on two different sides of her. As she turned, she found that she now had one snail in front of her, and the other had been parried to her right side. Carefully she stepped back a few paces. Now she could at least keep an eye on both of them.

Slowly the snails slithered closer to her, but this time one of got into range a bit sooner than the other. This made their attack both easier and harder to deal with. On the one hand, Sam only had to defend against one snail at the same time. On the other, as soon as one was done attacking, the next one would jump at her.

Sam decided that enough was enough. Instead of parrying the first snail, she hit it with her sword as if she was playing baseball. The snail was sent flying for several dozen meters, which meant that it was out of the fight for now.

With only a second to spare, Sam got back into position to catch the second snail on her shield. Now that she decided to fight back actively, she blocked the snail instead of parrying it. This gave her the opportunity to lung at it with her sword.

With one of the two snails taken out, she hunted down the second one.

“That could have gone better.” She said to herself.

Evaluating her performance, she decided that now that she knew their tactics when there was more than one, she could keep fighting two snails at the same time.

The second time she fought two snails, Sam simply sidestepped the first attacks. While doing this she sliced at the one that jumped higher, injuring but not killing it.

This tactic proved to be inefficient for these skirmishes. The injured sludge was still able to attack, it was almost as if her attack didn’t do any damage. When it attacked again, she sidestepped once more. This gave her a good look at the side that she injured before. There still was a cut, but it was only a shallow wound. Way shallower than the cut she had given it.

“No way, these things can heal if I don’t kill them with one attack?”

Knowing this, she decided to test out her new found knowledge. Immediately she killed one of the snails, so she could experiment with the second one.