Chris
"So this is it? This is a dungeon?" I asked after arriving at the place Austin indicated.
Hal was a bit miffed that he spent hours searching for it only to have Austin find it rather than him, but that went to show the power of professions. Hal's Dismantler profession was never going to beat out Austin's Explorer at finding something no one had found before.
"Yep, this is it baby!" Austin said proudly, hands at his sides as we gazed at his discovery.
All three of us, Hal, Austin, and me, stood and examined the place around us. The dungeon looked little different than a random hole in the ground, but it was markedly different to any mana sense.
It glowed when looked at through that lens, taking in more mana than I had in me by several orders of magnitude. I wasn't sure of the science behind it, but just by looking at it, it was easy to tell why the mana density rose around the area.
"Why does it siphon mana from the area like that?" Hal asked as we all stood and watched.
It flowed... not gently but with enough speed to be noticeable toward where the ground opened. Gravity had no effect on the flow, as some of the mana was coming from down the slope we were standing on.
"I think it's supposed to be a filter for it or something," Austin voiced his opinion.
"No, I thought it needed mana to grow and spawn monsters," I rebutted.
A new voice interrupted our conversation from behind us. One I really should have seen coming.
"No, you idiots. If you actually listened when I spoke you would know the answer already." Abigail said while carrying Gabriel on her back.
His bandaged legs stuck out a little longer than before but he was still a long way away from walking on his own. The Healers were still working out the most efficient way to regrow them but the process had at least started. It took nearly 6 people to work and a shit ton of healing mana, but it was working.
Rachel had to use [Ritual Cast] to link all of the healers together so they could pool all of their skills together. The healing was slow-going and mana-intensive, but it was still going.
While we trained together he had made attempts to create legs made of ice but it hadn't worked well enough yet.
It took too much control to make everything work and he wasn't there yet. He was certainly getting better but it would be a while until he could make Icy legs work. By the time he had the fine control down his legs would be mostly regrown by then.
Keeping his balance was the hardest part. Any sort of weight shift or uneven ground sent him toppling to the ground as he couldn't shift as fast as required. It was hard to witness at first but he was working through it. The small muscles for balance did more than what he could stimulate with his magic, at least for now.
"The dungeon is both a filter and it requires mana to grow and populate the dungeon so you both are right but also wrong. The monsters aren't spawned from mana, they are transported here from other places. Everything in there is a real monster, not something that's only conjured from mana." She corrected.
"Yeah, that's the reason the monsters don't disappear after you kill them and you can take their parts outside of the dungeon after you finish," Gabriel added.
What began as a simple curiosity quickly became a lecture when those two got involved. They went on to give a little more detail about them but my interest started to get distracted after a while.
I was glad to hear that the monsters inside were real. I wasn't sure what else they would be but I was worried they wouldn't feel the same. Like fighting a hologram or something if they were mana constructs the dungeon made.
The logistics of how that worked were still above us, much to Abigail's chagrin, but we knew that they were taken from somewhere else for some reason or another.
Every piece of information about dungeons we had learned, either from our own tutorial or Gabriel's, seemed to deliberately leave that part out. Like the System didn't want us to know the specifics of it just yet.
For as much as we were given in depth information about some things, others were withheld for seemingly no reason.
While the history of dungeons was interesting and all, there was something much more important I wanted to know.
"How deep is it?" I asked.
From the quick lesson Gabriel and my Mother gave us of their tutorial, we learned that dungeons had floors and each floor increased in strength from the last.
Their tutorial's dungeon ranged from level 1 all the way to over level 50. Every floor had a range of 10 levels capped by a boss monster, or ' 'floor guardian' depending on which name you wanted to use. There were other things that could be inside of a dungeon but they were by no means standard.
Every dungeon was a touch different and you couldn't go into them thinking they would be the same.
Some would have more traps than others, some would have mini-bosses spread throughout certain floors, some had a steep challenge increase from floor to floor while others had a smoother curve.
What was most important was the amount of floors it had.
At least that was most important to me right now. The loot the dungeon would drop was also important but that was of secondary importance right now. A good fight was something I desired more than anything the dungeon could drop.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
"We don't have any tools to measure that and it's impossible to tell without them. None of us have that good of a mana sense to detect the amount of floors the dungeon has." Gabriel said, "Especially with this being the first one we've come across and without previous ones to compare against."
Not getting an answer right now was disappointing but it wasn't the end of the world.
"I guess we'll have to find out the hard way!" I said excitedly, pulling my hammer from my back and started walking toward it.
After hearing that Austin had found the dungeon, I had come prepared for battle. My armor was dusted off from its stay in storage and sat comfortably on my shoulders again. The familiar weight was comforting to wear again after not doing so while we traveled.
Not wearing it was an attempt at what Abigail claimed would acclimate me to being back. I didn't think it worked but it was nice to not wear the cumbersome plate as much, even though it felt weird not to.
My hammer had gotten a bit of love since the end of the tutorial but it could also use a decent fight again.
Abigail shook her head behind me at my enthusiasm but none of them made to stop me. They knew I was looking forward to this and was half the reason we stopped where we did.
"Come on, Nightlight! I don't know if I'll be able to see in here." I shouted over my shoulder to my dungeon companion for the day.
I was not about to carry a torch down there. It felt like an affront to bring fire with me while fighting, not when I had such a willing participant to light the way right next to me.
We had already planned out who would go in the dungeon and Austin and I were up first to scout it out. Everyone else had other tasks to do that pushed their turn for later or after the threat level was established.
Jonathan was a good option to scope it out along with Hal and Rachel, but none had the same enthusiasm about it than I did and let me go first. They didn't care for the fights of the tutorial as much as I did.
"Oh, is Big Bad Christopher scared of the dark?" Austin mocked but started following anyway.
The two of us approached the cavern and I almost expected to feel something as we crossed the threshold but I didn't. The mana was thicker but that was about it. I half expected some kind of sensation to come over me or a feeling to signify I was in a dungeon but nothing changed.
The slope wasn't too steep and we marched on into the depths.
It was similar to walking inside of a normal cave. The air grew muggier and the light level decreased as we made our way deeper, but it didn't have the wetness you would expect from a cave and stalactites dripping water from the ceiling were missing.
The rough stone and jutting rocks were the only sights as we descended and it became increasingly dark until Austin powered up one of his skills. As much as I joked at him about it he did make a really good night light.
It was a subtler glow compared to the luminescence I had seen him put out before, but it was enough for us to see. It worked well to not completely kill our dark vision. If it stayed that way when he started launching skills was yet to be seen.
"Do you still gain strength from [Rising Dawn] even though you're underground," I asked curiously.
It probably wasn't the best time for idle conversation but the thought popped into my head and I became curious.
[Rising Dawn] was the skill that gave him strength during the day and peaked at noon. It was a similar type of skill to my [Glacial Presence(R)], but instead of relying on the temperature around me, it was tied to the height of the sun.
"Yes, I still get the boost from it. The sun is still up even though I am underground. It doesn't stop being up even though I can't see it." Austin answered sarcastically.
Something about that didn't seem right, "I feel like that's cheating. The Sun doesn't even reach here, how does it give you strength?"
He looked over at me a touch more serious than normal, "The Sun is more than just light."
I wanted to ask how that worked exactly but our conversation was cut short as we ran into our first monster. We were only a few hundred feet into the dungeon and we already hit our first monster.
It was an odd little thing to look at. We were only on the first floor so it wasn't that high level, not even above level 10, but it was still an odd thing to look at.
It was like no animal I had seen before but even without knowing what it was, there was clearly something wrong with it. It was salivating excessively and heavy breathing could be heard from it. It lumbered down the passage we were walking with its back turned to us, it was a surprise it hadn't noticed us, most beasts knew I was there before the reverse was true.
I was no expert veterinarian, but it reminded me of rabies or something like that. The monsters that came in the waves were sort of like this but this one was far worse.
It gave off a sense of unnaturalness as well that was unpleasant. The feeling wasn't the same as the Demonic Leopards but it was similar in the wrongness it gave off. We knew that the dungeon monsters would be like this from Gabriel but seeing it firsthand was different. It was the main reason that the monsters were inedible.
Looking at the thing, I knew no one would want to eat it but seeing that it was most likely diseased only made it worse.
[Identify(C)] said it was only level 3, a small little thing.
"Do you want to give it a poke or do you want me to?" I whispered to Austin with a shrug.
"Be my guest," He waved me ahead.
I gave it a light tap and we were on our way again. The rest of the floor was similar and was made for people way lower level than us. The gradual slope had leveled off after we hit the 'First Floor' and became more flat but the monsters stayed the same. There were still dips and bumps but it stayed generally level the rest of the way with the monsters all being under level 10.
We breezed by most of the monsters with either an [Ice Arrow(Un)] or a [Solar Beam] and spent little time on them. They didn't have any parts that were useful to gather and were a waste of time to try and skin.
The winding path was tall enough for us to stand up straight in, luckily, and it wasn't that hard to navigate. It had areas where the ceiling was higher but it mostly stayed at around 10 feet or so.
The walls were rough stone and came in tight in some areas but it looked and felt like a normal cave.
The floor guardian only took a smidge more effort but it was easily defeated. It reminded me of the first time we took on a level 10 boar.
The first evolution gap between level 9 and 10 had seemed so steep then. Back then, it took everything in me to kill the boar when now it was as easy as waving my hand.
Not all dungeons had to stick with the same 10 levels a floor standard but it was nice that our first delve into one was one we had experience with. Not personal experience but a first-hand account was close.
After we killed the floor guardian we made our way around the room in search of the reward chest. We were told that they were rewarded after completing each floor and only appeared after the floor guardian was defeated.
"It really is a treasure chest!" Austin exclaimed from the other side of the room.
I quickly made my way over to him and it examined the box he was staring at. It was a rectangular chest that was only around 2 feet wide and a foot deep.
It wasn't even that tall either at only about a foot high. Whatever was in there wasn't very big.
"Well, open it up," I told him.
He quickly lifted the lid and revealed what was inside. There were a few copper coins laid out inside the box with a chunk of metal next to them. My [Metallurgy(C)] skill was saying it was similar in strength to High-Carbon Steel.
I examined the chunk of metal a bit more but nothing new jumped out at me. Vinny would have to look at it with [Material Analysis] to get a better appraisal but it didn't stand out to my senses.
If the color hadn't given them away as copper coins, the lackluster prize of the first floor definitely did. The loot was disappointing but we didn't expect much for the first floor.
"Our first coin! Should we frame it?" Austin joked picking up one of the coins inside the chest.