Pov Carl

I punched away a stone guardian and was pleased to see that it had only small cracks. More and more of them were waking up around these ruins. Every floor seems to have a type of ruin or a few different types, and almost always there's some sort of stone golem.

While they don't give much loot, they usually guard some quest or treasure. This time, I’m not after those rewards. I pulled up my hands in the position I was taught for fighting unarmed and readied myself for a training session to get better at fighting without a weapon.

I didn’t have much time left in the gold rank, and I really needed to shore up my weaknesses before I ranked up. I waited for them to fully come awake and watched as they charged me. All of them had some type of weapon, which just made this training even more realistic.

Monsters got stronger every floor, and these ones were no exception. I could barely dodge their weapon attacks; of course, I wasn’t using any of my boosting skills, otherwise things would get a bit too easy.

My attacks did little damage, but I also didn’t have any proper attack skills for my fists. That didn't seem to matter too much as I dodged another one of the two-handed sword wielder’s strikes, and this time, my blow destroyed its hand. I quickly pulled it in and drove its head into my knee, destroying it completely and with it, its core.

The rest of its body I threw behind me to protect against the two spear-wielders who were trying to pierce me, successfully blocking their attacks. I weaved between my attackers, smiling all the way while delivering strikes as I could. Some of their bodies seemed to be more resilient, taking half a dozen strikes to truly end them, but I was hoping some would show up that were even stronger.

My fun continued as I was completely surrounded. Sometimes I even had to leap onto the roofs of the ruined buildings so I wouldn’t get surrounded too badly and just get crushed by their mass. They seemed to have decent intelligence when fighting, but I would barely call them functioning out of it. So it was easy enough to make sure they couldn’t trap me in a way that I couldn’t escape.

Of course, I could always pull out my main weapon and activate all my fighting skills, so I wasn’t in any true danger. As time passed, I needed to bring my opponents away from the places I had been finding them, as it was getting truly annoying dealing with all the rubble on the ground, and it was messing my opponents up more than me. That was making things a bit too easy for my liking.

It took me another hour to kill everything. There really weren’t any good loot drops, given that the skill stones I got were just common skills. Most didn’t see these drops as good loot since we all had access to the skill orb in the adventurers’ guild. My clan and a few others, however, were collecting the stones, as we knew sooner or later we would lose access to that orb.

This room was quite big, but I didn’t care to fight the other monsters in it, as they really weren’t a good challenge for me, so I went and entered one of the tunnels that led to this room and set up a small camp to wait for the four hours it took for the room to reset. Hopefully, no one else would show up here. While the room itself wasn't anything special, it was a place you needed to cross if you were moving from one area to another around these parts.

I sat back and just enjoyed the quiet, as I really didn’t have many of these types of moments nowadays. It was nice to have the party back, and fighting with Vinny, Caspian, Sandy and Ziiipe was so nice, as we truly complemented each other really well.

Right now, we were all on a break as we were getting close to reaching platinum rank, and all of us wanted to work on other stuff before we ranked up and once again started pushing forward, this time as true powerhouses of the dungeon.

It has been a little annoying having so many new platinum ranks running around thinking they own the place. Many of the guilds have changed leadership unwillingly. The big three have not changed, as they already had platinum ranks, and none of the clans have been touched, as we all have a safe haven we can retreat to, although many have lost territories they had held to the new platinum rank guilds.

Those outsiders are a true menace, but I’m still seeing how they are schooled and whipped into proper adventurers, as ETG is ruthless in its training methods. Not even platinum ranks could walk through these floors without having to worry about dying to some trap or a particularly nasty monster with high alpha damage.

That term ‘alpha damage’ made me laugh a bit. Things have really started to change as the younger generations come up with their own terminology and methods to explain how things work in a more methodical way than I did back in the day. I just attacked, trying to do as much damage as possible, but nowadays there are all these terms to explain different ways of doing damage.

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‘Area of effect damage’ for crowd control was one of the first terms we commonly started to hear just a few years ago, as it became commonplace when fighting in areas with lots of small monsters that individually weren’t too strong, but whose numbers could easily overwhelm you.

I was really good at alpha damage—that means doing as much damage as you can in a really short time, most of the time in just one attack. But thanks to the tattoos I have, I’ve also been able to have a lot of sustained damage that I can constantly deal.

As we looked into this new way of quantifying battle terminologies, we’ve been able to standardize quite a lot, which means that even when we need to change parties and move members around, new groups aren’t starting from zero in terms of their ability to fight together in a way that multiplies their fighting strength.

This way of thinking has really changed how our younger generation approaches fighting and how they train. It’s the reason why quite a few of my sons and daughters have started to catch up to me.

We are also careful not to power-level our members as much as the guilds do. While it’s good for gaining strength quickly, individuals suffer a lot from lack of experience, and in the end, that’s what keeps you alive.

It doesn’t matter how strong you are if you don’t know not to step on a specific kind of bump in the tunnels—because the result is a wall of spikes as thick as your torso, nailing you into the other side of the wall.

I continued to think about the way we fight and about the clan as a whole, but eventually, my thoughts drifted toward my own family, especially my grandchildren. As of late, it seems like I’m getting more and more of them, and I even secretly got myself a skill that helps me remember stuff better, especially my grandchildren's names, as some of them are really out there.

This skill also helps with the political stuff. For some reason, people kind of don’t like it when you can’t remember their full names. Like, stop having five names—what’s wrong with one or two? And then there are all the titles.

Honestly, it's just really annoying. But unfortunately, as the clan leader, while I can delegate a lot of stuff, there are meetings and events I need to show up for, and I need to mingle at those. What happened to my nice life where I just battled alone on the silver floors?

My musings of days gone by were interrupted when I heard fighting inside the room. Damn it, that means there’s a group that isn’t just passing through. Then I felt a powerful attack, way stronger than anything the monsters in this room were capable of. It also felt wilder than adventurers' attacks. Then I heard the roar. "Shit, it’s a wandering boss."

Immediately, I rushed out. I wasn’t going to join the fight if whoever was fighting the wandering boss was doing well, but I had a feeling they were struggling. It didn’t take me long to reach the battle location and see that a party of ten had already lost three members and were barely holding on.

I was about to pull out my weapon when I changed my mind. This opponent was too powerful for me not to rank up after defeating it, so this would be my last chance to properly test out my hand-to-hand combat.

I used my movement skill to get in front of this black lizard-looking monster that was about to eat a person it had just pushed onto the ground. This time, I used my attack skills as best as I could, but they were barely working at 20% since they were meant to be used with a weapon.

Still, it was good enough to rattle the monster's head and get its attention. "Run away, I’ll take this!" I yelled out loud and was pleased to see how they immediately came to rescue their downed companion while yelling thanks, as I started to dodge the tail whips and skill-type attacks that looked like water moving in a way lightning would.

It got in some good hits, and I felt some blood in my mouth that I spit out. Then I cracked my neck and rushed back in. I was getting used to its movements. It was called ‘monster attack patterns,’ but even without that official name, I had long practiced this kind of fighting.

While I started to deliver attacks, I mainly focused on defense and learning what this monster could do. By this time, the party that had been caught by this particular wandering boss had long since left.

I had some injuries, and it still looked fresh, but I could now see a weakness, and I exploited it. It liked to shift its back leg whenever it started a tail whip to the left, so I used this movement to jump underneath the monster and roll out the other side, delivering a few heavy blows to the back leg, hearing a satisfying crack. It wasn't broken yet, but a few more attacks like that and it would have one less leg to use.

It retaliated with its water attack, and dodging them was really hard as they were a bit homing, and they spread out exactly like lightning. It was good that I had a lot of experience fighting monsters that did lightning-type attacks, although it was a bit weird to combine that experience with water-type attacks. Curious that I hadn’t seen a report about a creature like this, but we were on a new floor, and there were still many secrets to be found.

After that, the fighting got more intense as the monster realized it wasn't just hunting someone weak, but someone that could actually kill it. Its hide was really strong and seemed a bit bouncy, which probably meant that my blunt attacks were having less effect. That didn’t matter to me, as it just meant I would get the chance to practice more.

We separated once again, both of us breathing heavily. It had run out of mana long ago, but damn, that body was resilient. I also felt pretty bad and spit out some blood once again. I was also feeling something I hadn’t felt in a long time: the sensation of running near empty on mana. It was not a nice feeling, and I didn’t miss it, but the fact that almost everyone else constantly experienced this made me feel a bit better about my talent.

Just in case this wandering boss had anything else in store, as monsters of this type usually did, I pulled out a throwing spear. Faster than it could process the change in tactic, I poured the last of my mana into my attack skills to strengthen the throw and watched as the throwing spear buried itself deep into its head, in the spot where I had already cracked its skull.

The fight was instantly over, and I felt the nourishment that poured into me. After about a minute, I felt my rank barrier crack and shatter, bringing me into the realm of the platinum ranks.

I dragged myself to the monster's body as I needed to start butchering it to get the loot. There was something I wanted to do, but I was hesitant. I wanted to enter my inner realm and see what that platinum rank brought with it, yet I was afraid that I wouldn’t get any new talents like many others have been getting. As I entered and observed my talent section, the only thing to change was that my talent was now just more.

That was so boring, but I felt the strength now nourishing my body. My mana capacity has once again grown immensely, and it was even stronger. Perhaps I would never have to feel again how it felt to run low on mana.

It will take some time before I am properly acclimatized to my new rank, and it's kind of unfortunate that my talent will most likely negate the increase I would have gotten if I had just reached platinum rank. Making it hard to measure how much a rank-up will improve me.

I know a few other platinum ranks I could test myself against, who have been trying to push into our territory. I think the surprise on their faces will be sweet to witness.