Nate pulled up the camera screens as soon as he appeared in the room with the Dungeon Core.

“Where are you?” He sent to Aura, concentrating on the connection they now shared.

“I’m coming toward you right now,” She replied.

He found her running toward him on the cameras a second later. She was only a room away from him and the Core. From what he could see, she was completely healthy and unharmed. There were no signs that she had gotten into any sort of action during the night. Which he was glad to see. It didn’t seem like she was throwing herself into the oblivion of death each night still.

“How have you been?” He asked her when she joined him in the room.

“A little tired,” Was the yawn-filled reply. “I haven’t really gotten any sleep since coming to this dungeon last night. I don’t know enough about these blighted elves to feel comfortable falling properly asleep anywhere near them. I can’t wait to go back to the first dungeon later.”

Nate nodded. That would be one of the goals they would be working towards that night for sure. They needed to get her back to the portal so she could transfer back to the first dungeon.

Alone, she could possibly make it if she was careful and watched the cameras constantly. However, it would be much easier, and less stressful with his help. At least, he hoped it would be.

At the moment, there were five different groups of blighted elves in the dungeon. Only two of them were in between them and the portal though. That meant in the worst-case scenario, they would have to deal with ten enemies.

Nate pulled out a metal element core and slipped it into the hopper of his gun. He had only three cores left that he could use from the bag he had taken from Jace.

With that completed, he was ready to start attacking the first group they came across when the time came.

Together with Aura, they followed the screens to find the first of the blighted elf groups. They were a few rooms away and taking things very slowly. There was no danger-sensing elf with them. However, they had clearly studied the information left by other groups in the portal room.

They may have been taking the rooms slowly, but it was obvious that they knew what to expect. Each of them had suffered injuries, but all of the group members were still around.

That said, they were currently stuck. All of the information they had studied was currently useless.

As soon as Nate had reactivated all of the traps and modified them all, the information they had became outdated. This meant that they were currently stalled and slowly beginning to panic. This was the first time in the dungeon run that they had been forced to actually figure everything out themselves.

Needless to say, they were not handling the newfound pressure well.

In the meantime, Nate and Aura made their way to the corridor just outside the room and hung back just outside of sight. Unfortunately, they couldn’t enter the room at the moment. If they did, then all the traps would deactivate. He had gotten around that in the first dungeon by creating sections in every room. That way, only the section he was in would be deactivated at the time.

It also wasn’t something that he had gotten around to adding to this dungeon just yet. He actually hadn't even thought about doing them until that moment. It had made sense in the first dungeon because of how the traps were constructed. They were more localized and easily split into sections.

The traps in this dungeon weren’t designed that way. They could be, he supposed. It would just take a lot more work, time, resources, and possibly energy. The gain for all that extra effort just wasn’t enough, in his opinion.

It was easier to wait for one of them to come near the exit and take them out then.

Was it cowardly and unsporting, sure. Was it the smart play, absolutely. Sound tactics rarely had anything to do with what people stupidly perceived as honor anyway. Those notions had no place on the battlefield, and while he might be able to come back to life in this form, he wasn’t going to let it make him complacent.

Training was all about getting things right for when it mattered. That meant while he could use his ability to come back to life, it was a crutch, nothing more. He couldn’t depend on it, saving him in his normal form.

For the first time since the creation of this dungeon, Nate could hear the blighted elves talking. Standing just outside the room with them in it, was close enough that the lyrical strains of their language were able to reach his ears. It wasn’t what he had been expecting. The language flowed together and was mildly pleasant to the ear, but that was it.

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Growing up, he had heard so many fantastical tales about elves that he had somewhat expected to be captivated by the beauty of their language. What he got instead was something that sounded like the verbal equivalent of flowing water. It was natural, and no less impressive for it, just not what he had been expecting to find.

Not that it would have mattered either way. They were invaders and had come to kill people to gain power. It did help ease his conscious a little bit. The beasts in the first dungeon had been unthinking beings. The cultivators who had stepped inside had been taken out by the dungeon itself and not him. What he was about to do was take the life of a properly thinking individual.

They were enemies, and that was all that really mattered.

He had no real compunction against what he was about to do. It wouldn’t have mattered to him whether they were human, elf, or some other thinking species. All that mattered was that they were the enemy.

No, it was simply because this would be the first person that he had ever truly killed, and that made him pause.

There had more or less always been three circles of people for Nate. Those he cared for, which was by far the smallest. These were the people that he would feel sad and lost about when they died or eventually left him. The largest consisted of those he was indifferent towards. They could drop off the face of the planet and he wouldn’t care at all.

Then there were those he hated. This should have been the smallest group, but had recently ballooned in size to include several families. He wouldn’t mind torturing those he hated.

But he didn’t actively hate the blighted elves, they were just enemies. More than that, those three circles had never been hard tested. As a result, they were mostly an academic study. There was no hard proof to back them up. He had never been able to get revenge for his parent’s death back on Old Earth.

So, what he was capable of had never been tested.

He liked to think he could do something, but until now, the closest he had come to finding out was against Jace. And he was determined to find out what he was actually made of.

And that all began here, now, in this dungeon, with these opponents. In a place where the only one who would see him potentially fall apart afterward was, Aura.

While they waited for the first elf to approach the exit of the room, Nate inspected his weapon. There was so much he didn’t understand about how it worked, and it would be incredibly easy to ignore it all and simply say it was magic. Except that wasn’t how normal items worked, according to what he had seen.

The closest thing to magic that he had seen was how the dungeons and the traps were made, but even they followed consistent rules. The computer on his wrist that controlled it all needed energy and resources for everything it did. The process might not make a lot of sense to him, but there was a logic and consistency to it all.

There was no reason to believe that this weapon was any different. The crossbow certainly hadn’t been. He hadn’t understood the meanings of the runes and symbols on it, but after using it, he knew what they did, mostly. He knew that a large part of what made the crossbow so powerful, even without the enchantments, or whatever you want to call them, were the materials it was made from. The thing was an absolute unit of power that he hadn’t even fully touched on yet.

The gun though, had no runes or symbols immediately visible on its surface. There might be some underneath the various removable parts, but that was only a guess. He had never had a reason to take the thing apart before.

It was a curiosity and one that he was interested in investigating at some point in the future, just not right then.

Right now, he had to focus on the blighted elf that had taken the lead for the group. She was carefully approaching the exit to check on what trap was awaiting them.

She ripped the hardened leather vambrace off her arm and used the hatchet she had hanging from her rear thigh to cut it into strips. Then she took the cord from the vambrace and tied it to each piece in turn. Once that was completed, she tossed it at the doorway.

The lead piece slammed into the ground as a force of localized extra gravity activated. All the various connected pieces of vambrace that soared in behind it made it an inch or two farther before they too, were pushed into the ground. They had never even had the chance to reach the exit of the room and activate the actual last trap for the room.

The blighted elf woman who had tossed her vambrace frowned and turned back to the rest of the group. She raised her hands in an upturned plaintive gesture and walked back to them.

“What do you think? Should we keep waiting, or just attack?” Nate sent to Aura in a message, since they didn’t know how sensitive the elves' hearing was.

She was sitting down on her haunches while they waited, her tails splayed out behind her. “It makes no difference to me. There is an argument to be made for both of them. The faster we attack them, the more groups we can potentially attack tonight. While the reverse is also true. The more time we take watching them, the fewer we can attack, but the safer each of those will be.”

“This is one of those times I wish I had another long-range weapon. A crossbow with plenty of bolts would be very helpful right about now.” He complained lightly. The gun was nice, but it was also different from any other weapon that he used in his normal form. Using the gun was good for getting items, but worthless when it came to practice.

They waited for a few more minutes, just watching while the group talked things over in the room. The entire time they were discussing how to proceed, Nate and Aura were going through the cameras, checking on the other rooms. They discovered a few different groups, including two that had met up and joined forces.

All of them had sustained injuries in some form or another, with three of the groups actually missing members. The groups that had joined forces had one of their danger-sensing people and someone who appeared to be talking to an elf they had left in the portal room. That particular elf was making changes to the information board as they were told new information.

It was interesting, but it also meant that the longer they waited, the more elves would be coming into the dungeon and getting injured. The new changes he had made to the traps had slowed the elves down. That meant that if he hurried, he could move on to one of the larger groups and get more rewards in a shorter amount of time.

Nate cracked his neck and stood up. “Long-range attacks only.” He crept to the edge of the corridor corner and aimed the gun at one of the blighted elves. Breathing out, he squeezed the trigger and let the battle begin.