The door was a dark blue, somewhere between the black and blue of the hallway. Cautiously after the last room, I stood to the side of the door and reach one hand out to open it. I flung the door wide as hard as I could and listened to see if any shots were fired.
I heard the sound of rapid shots fired and saw a spray of bullets that came out of the doorway where I would have been if I had stood in front of the door to open it. ‘Shit, how am I going to get into the room now?’ I waited to see if the firing would continue or die down. At my current angle, I could only see the shadow swarming the room. From that I knew that I would have to deal with the dodging creatures again. ‘Fuck, I hate those creatures.’
I continued to listen to the shots being fired and found that they were coming in three-round bursts with two seconds between each burst. There were five rounds of these bursts, and after that, there was a 30 second break before the firing resumed again. When the next 30 second break came, I dove into the room, and immediately took off towards the ceiling.
As my height increased. I felt one of the dodging creatures grab a feather. I have no idea how I continued to fly past the pain of having my feather yanked out, but if anything I would have said that the pain was less than the other times. ‘Did accepting the wings as part of myself and learning to fly lessen the pain of losing feathers?’
Determined not to lose this feather like I had the other, I immediately spun around. I looked for the creature with my feather. I could see it circling the edge of the room, reaching to insert my feather into its own bony wings. With a snarl, I dived towards the creature and snatched the feather before ascending again. To ensure I did not lose the feather before I could put it back in my wing. I tucked it into my corset. Unfortunately, with no pockets, this was my only option. ‘Screw this stupid dungeon and lack of pockets and stupid clothes.’
With my feather secured, I looked around the room to see what type of creatures I would be dealing with other than the dodging ones. I could see two area bosses. One with an AK-47, and one with a semi-automatic rifle that kind of looked like a deformed M-16. There were also several mid-tier creatures with their little pistols in their giant hands, looked as awkward as ever. The AK-47 posed the most danger to me, so I immediately set about switching to the acid rounds to test them out and deal more damage. I quickly fired three at the area boss with the AK before it could sight on me and release its attack.
I did not have time to see what the results of the acid rounds were as I was too busy dodging the automatic fire attack from the AK-47 while simultaneously dodging the three-round bursts from the semi auto rifle, and on top of that, to make things even worse, the mid-tier creatures were among the dodging creatures and firing sporadically at me too. It was a miracle that I was not hit within the first minute of the attack. There was no way I could continue going on like this without taking serious damage. I needed to cut down on the number of enemies firing at me.
The dodging creatures could be ignored for now. I focused instead on the mid-tier creatures since they took fewer shots to kill. With a thought, I switched to the fire rounds. I began firing at the mid-tier creatures. This was made easier by the fact that they were standing still while hiding among the dodging creatures, making them easy targets as they were the only thing that was not moving in the surrounding swarms of shadows.
For most of the creatures, it only took two shots to kill them. There was one that died with a single shot, and three that took four shots each. I must have just kept clipping them instead of hitting center mass. While simple, this took longer than I would have liked. While I took care of the creatures, I still had to dodge the area bosses and the remaining mid-tier creature’s fire. This often made it, so I would have to pause and focus solely on dodging before resuming my firing.
I started to hate that the room was completely smooth and looked like it had been carved out with magic. I would have loved to have some stalagmites to hide behind. Before I could focus on the area bosses again, one of the shots fired hit me in my upper arm.
“Fucking hell! That hurts, damn it.”
The injury made it even more difficult for me to aim. Not only was my arm less stable, but the blood running down to my hand threatened to make me lose my grip on the shotgun. I was only able to get off two shots before having to dodge the next burst of fire. I continued dodging and firing at the area boss with the AK for a few minutes until finally I was able to deal enough damage to kill it.
This left me with only the other area boss and the dodging creatures. It seemed that the remaining area boss with the semi auto was the one who had fired into the hall. The creature fired a three-round burst every three seconds. Since I knew the attack pattern, with the 30 second break I would pump three or four rounds into the creature before resuming my dodging to avoid being hit. Since I was able to fire more rounds, it only took another three iterations of dodging and firing before the creature was killed. Since I no longer needed to worry about being fired on, I was able to stabilize myself and start firing at the dodging creatures.
The lack of light in the room made this more difficult than I would have liked. I switched back to the regular rounds, since those were not as finite a resource as the special rounds were. Even though I should have been able to kill a dodging creature within two or three shots, I often found myself misjudging where they were with the shadows and the lack of illumination.
After I killed somewhere between ten and 15 creatures, I received a notification that the shotgun leveled up.
Level 7 Shotgun
Abilities: infinite basic ammo
Rate of fire: 1 per 0.4 seconds
Damage range: 1-18
Critical hit rate: 18%
Critical hit Damage: 35
Being unable to clearly see the creatures made it a frustrating task to kill them. If I had to estimate, I would probably say I fired over 300 rounds before I took care of all the dodging creatures. The only way I could tell that I killed the last dodging creature was when a door appeared on the far side of the room. Since this has happened previously, I knew this meant that all of the creatures were killed, and I was now completely sure that the room was empty.
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I landed and checked my health. I was expecting to lose one or two percent, but was not expecting to see that my health was down to 82%. I went to pull the feather out to reinsert it back into my wing. Only to find that the feather was gone. ‘Damn it! There must be a time limit to reinsert the feathers.’ Since I could not do anything about the feather, I looked around for something to help me take care of my new wound. ‘Fuck, this room is too smooth. There is nothing I can use here.’ I checked my shoulder wound and did not feel any fresh blood when I pealed back the makeshift bandage. With nothing else to use, I reused the bandage, struggling a bit to apply it to my arm. Once the bandage was in place and I no longer had blood dripping down my arm, I began wiping the blood onto my pants. I removed as much blood as possible from my hands to prevent losing my grip and grimaced at the liberally stained pants. ‘I can’t afford to get hit again. I’m probably too close to negative effects from blood loss as it is.’
Before I left the room, I gathered up the dropped shells. I found about 50 acid shots, over 100 fire shots, and six tracker rounds. I then surveyed the room one last time before heading to the other door.
When I opened the door, I was almost blinded by the bright white hallway. After blinking rapidly to help my eyes adjust to the light, I could see that everything was a white marble. It took at least five minutes for my eyes to adjust before I could see without squinting against the brightness. The hall was identical in size and shape to the previous two. This led to the likely conclusion that the room would be the same size and shape as the previous room as well.
I strode to the door and continued using the strategy of standing to the side while throwing the door wide open to avoid an initial attack. I expected to hear gunfire immediately, and was shocked when I did not. I listened for several minutes, but still did not hear anything. ‘Are they learning? I really hope not.’ I turned my head to look at the room from an angle. I could not see much from the narrow slice of room visible, but from what I could see, it was constructed from the same white marble that was in the hallway.
While I could not see any creatures, there were many shadows cast on the floor, indicating a large number of creatures in the room. The only thing I could infer is that they were not dodging creatures due to the lack of shadows. ‘If I fire from this angle, I will not hit anything, but if I’m lucky, I will get some return fire that will tell me about what I will face in there. I really wish I had a grenade. That would make things so much easier.’
I fired into the room while staying pressed against the wall out of the line of fire. This provoked an immediate reaction. I listened to the returned fire patterns for a minute. It sounded like there were two creatures with the semi-automatic rifles. Unfortunately, their 30 second breaks did not line up. However, there was a ten second overlap where neither of them was firing.
I took the opportunity provided by that break to sprint into the room and started skirting the walls while firing to give myself the opportunity to see what creature were in the room. There was a horde of basic creatures and three area bosses. Within seconds, I had killed several of the creatures and knew that this would be extremely difficult when I spotted the AK-47 in addition to the two semi-automatic rifles held by the other area bosses. ‘Fuck, I want cover… maybe that would work.’ I shifted my aim to the ceiling and shot three rounds in rapid succession. This gave the basic creatures a chance to cut off my path. There was no time to see if there was any effect on the ceiling. I switched to an aerial plan and launched myself into the air, immediately firing at the area bosses.
The instant I was in the air, all three area bosses began to fire at me. If I had thought it was difficult to dodge fire from an AK-47 and semi-automatic, it was even more difficult to dodge from an AK-47 and two semi-automatic rifles. Although to be fair, these creatures had separated instead of clumping together. ‘Fuck, they are learning. How will I dodge all of these?’ I switched to the acid rounds to inflict maximum damage when I was able to return fire. Before the automatic barrage from the AK-47 stopped, I had been clipped by several rounds on my legs and one on my waist. I did not feel any blood from the one that clipped my waist, so I was hopeful that the corset had provided some protection. The instant the barrage stopped, I prepared to fire while still having to dodge the semi-automatic fire. I waited for the ten second overlap in the firing break and took the opportunity it provided. I was able to hit the creature with ten acid rounds in that time with no fire to dodge.
I immediately had to start dodging again and could not take the time to see if that had been enough to kill the creature. When there was no further barrage from the AK-47, I knew that the creature must have been killed. I continued to dodge while waiting for the next opportunity to fire. When the time came, I again fired ten acid rounds into the creature and had to dodge again. It was quickly obvious that the creature was killed when it did not resume firing.
I continued to dodge, although less frantically than before, until the next opportunity to return fire came. This time I fired five rounds, then observed for a few seconds to see if that would be enough to kill the creature. It was quickly obvious that this was not enough to kill the creature. I followed up with another three rounds before the time ran out to fire. I began dodging again, when after the first few bursts of fire, the creature died. ‘Hun, what the fuck happened? Oh yeah, there was that continual damage from the acid.’
With all the creatures who could fire taken care of, I switched back to the basic rounds and began to take them out. There must have been about 50 of them. Most of them took two shots to kill, so it took a few minutes to kill them. I was left with a floor covered in the dust of the defeated creatures and three piles of acid rounds to collect.
I landed and began to examine where I was grazed by the bullets. ‘I’m so fucking glad that these things can’t aim for shit.’ There were three grazes on the lower half of my legs that had already stopped bleeding. Another two grazes were on my left thigh above the top of my boot. One had stopped bleeding, and the other looked like it was well on the way there too. The last area I examined was my waist. There was no damage to my skin. The bullet grazed one of the boning pieces and I could see that it was solid metal from where the cloth had been torn.
With my self-examination completed, I checked my status. ‘The fuck is this! How did I lose that much health in one room!’ My health had gone down to 75%. I was now missing a full quarter of my health. While that may not seem like a lot, with how each room was increasing in difficulty and how the creatures were getting smarter, I was worried. I had no idea how many rooms were still to go. What if I was not even a quarter of the way through the dungeon? I would be dead from loss of health before I even reached the end. While I would never admit this to anyone if asked, I seriously contemplated turning back and attempting again later. I think it was my own stubbornness that sealed my decision to push ahead and complete the dungeon.
I was still unsure if my health was continuously decreasing by room or time taken. I would have to get through this as quickly as possible, even if it meant being reckless with my ammo. I gathered up the acid shots and added them to the inventory stored on the buttstock. Before I left the room, I looked up at the ceiling to see if my shots had done any damage to it. While I could see some soot where the shots impacted, there was no damage to the ceiling. ‘Fuck so much for bringing the ceiling down on them.’ After looking around the room one last time to ensure I had not missed anything, I opened the door to exit the room and did a double take.