We were still making good time descending, but the fighting started to get complicated as the monsters we encountered began to exhibit a multitude of different abilities. If the trend continued, we might finally get stuck if we ended up in a disadvantageous environment and opponent. But, like with every other combat, luck plays a large part in whether you will succeed or not.

Fortunately, we were still able to bypass most traps by me just running into them, but we have encountered some traps I haven't triggered because my danger senses have started to warn me about them. Thankfully, we have Arabella and Horus who are both quite capable of disarming traps.

I also figured out that some traps that might pose a danger to my defenses I could just launch an attack against, which would nullify them. All of this combined allowed us to get past the trapped areas of the ruins relatively fast.

The real question is how long will we be able to keep this up as I imagine these traps would grow quite deadly to any one of us. Horus has warned us that in the future we might need to start backtracking and find different ways through if we find something too time-consuming or too dangerous for us to tackle, which made complete sense.

The fighting was a complete blast as I was able to roll over most monsters by just bisecting them with a single strike. And the few monsters we have run into that have required more usually were in lower numbers so the difficulty wasn’t greater.

Protecting my party members has also grown harder as we have run into more ambush-type opponents who have usually been able to launch their attacks before I could intercept or taunt them. This also led to our most serious injury where Horus lost four fingers. Adam had him fixed in less than a minute but we did take a break afterwards so everyone had the chance to absorb what happened.

Even with everything going on, we were still pushing ourselves even further ahead of schedule. I continued to observe everyone’s mental health. We've been taking more breaks and talking. As a result, everything seemed to be satisfactory. It seems that my party members truly were the best of the best and I wasn’t complaining.

I also believe that us all gaining levels have helped everyone keep their sanity as I know that I certainly am looking forward every time I level. While I haven’t seen anything noteworthy, I was moving ever closer to my stat milestones which will hopefully allow me to get more powerful traits.

We were approaching the boss room of the 71st floor. This area has been especially tough as we were in quite high-tech ruins where we were fighting golems and trying to get past incredibly intricate traps.

On my left hand over my armor was a new bracelet that I got from the last boss from the previous floor. It was a straight upgrade for my shield which was now laying forgotten and probably absorbed by the dungeon as bringing it along would be pointless extra weight. It was when deployed a lot smaller than my previous shield but in every other way, it was far superior.

When deployed, it resembled a Viking shield that was made out of brass-looking metal. But it wasn’t shiny, it was dull. It was incredibly receptive to my energy which helped increase its effectiveness when using the abilities this shield came with.

Increased toughness, deploy/store, and shield others. Deploy/store allowed me to change the shield from its bracelet form to its shield form. Usually, this would take at least a few seconds but I can push it to be almost instant. Increased toughness allowed me to truly make the shield something that could protect me but that also consumed a lot of energy.

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Shield others was something that actually made me a tank and not just someone who could only taunt monsters, now I can actually defend my party members as well. Luckily, this ability worked even when the item was in bracelet form. When someone else was attacked, a large portion of the damage would reflect onto my body instead of my party member. There were many limitations on how much damage it can transfer but it was still really good.

Of course, my armor and defensive abilities helped mitigate any damage that made it to me. Thanks to this, we have already been able to save a lot of time not having to regrow Arabella and Horus's arms as they would have lost them from trying to disarm the horrible traps for this area.

To my surprise, items with abilities weren’t that rare for second-rank adventurers. The problem was that they simply didn't end up in the open market as no one wanted to sell them. When you did have such an item that you didn't want, you usually traded it for another item that suited you more. It seems like there was more of a barter system for these items rather than selling them for coins or anything else. And after fighting with it for about a day, I had to agree this item was just so damn useful.

My musings were interrupted when the door we used to enter this room shut behind us. Everyone cursed, but Arabella and Horus were the loudest. "This is stupidly complex," Horus complained. As if the room had heard him, we all heard stone grinding against stone.

When it stopped, water started to slowly fill the room. We all started to panic a bit, but I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself. I've never experienced this feeling before, nothing quite like being threatened by slowly drowning. "At least the water is warm," I said to everyone, which seemed to calm the situation down a bit.

"Rich, go see if you can open the door that shut on us. Luana and Adam, see if you can stop that water from coming in. Arabella and I will try to once again solve the puzzle," Horus said, and we all followed his orders.

I moved to the door, but it looked like a solid piece of rock I couldn’t see through. Knocking on it, it felt like the most solid object I’ve ever come across. I tried to punch as strongly as I could, but all I did was end up hurting my hand. I tried a multitude of ways to get through it, but strength didn’t work and there didn’t seem to be any other way to open the door.

The water was now up to my shins. I looked at what Adam and Luana were able to do. It seems that they truly were able to slow down the water, but they didn't seem to be able to stop it completely. No matter what they tried, some water still got in. Arabella cursed again, and we heard the stone grinding again, and the water started to pour in faster. This isn’t good. We all moved to the puzzle to try to figure out what it was and if we could help Arabella and Horus.

Arabella began her explanation of how the puzzle worked, but honestly, she was making it sound way more complicated than it actually was. It was a type of labyrinth puzzle where you needed to deliver an exact amount of energy to different nodes inside the labyrinth. If you messed up your energy containment or even if you brought too much, you could mess up a part of the labyrinth, making the puzzle possibly unsolvable. There also seemed to be a sort of a timer because if you don’t bring the energy to the nodes fast enough, they will disappear, which will cause you to fail immediately.

It seems like multiple people can do this at the same time and honestly, perhaps it was meant to be done by multiple people. The amount of nodes was ridiculous. We put our hands on the puzzle so we could also join in, but it soon became clear that Adam and Luana weren't really that good at controlling energy. "You guys really need to do some more training with your energy, you guys suck," I told them when they retreated without doing too much damage.

For me, controlling energy wasn’t the difficult part. Honestly, nothing was truly difficult, it was just time-consuming to figure out the labyrinth as we couldn’t see it from up top, we could only sense where the nodes were where we needed to bring a certain amount of energy.

I wish that they had called me earlier because I was better at this than both of them combined. "Horus, don’t go back in," I quickly told him as I saw that he almost lost control the last time he finished a node, and luckily, he listened to me. He slumped down in exhaustion.

Arabella stopped without me having to say anything, which actually allowed me to concentrate better as I wasn’t constantly worried about others. I was certain that if we met up in the labyrinth none of us could have stopped the explosion that would have taken out a part of the labyrinth.

I was constantly battling the time. I needed to add more and more energy packets that were constantly moving so I could keep up. I never had to do such fine control before with so many different amounts of energy and having to move them all independently, and eventually, I did mess up and one of the energy packets exploded.

This, however, happened in a good spot with multiple ways around it. My mind sank into this task and I constantly moved the tiny energies along the paths, ensuring nothing went wrong until finally, I didn’t see any more nodes.

I came back to myself to find out that the water was almost up to my neck, but it was starting to drain. We all celebrated but readied ourselves for battle when the doors behind the puzzle started to open. It was time for us to release some of the tension we gained from the puzzle room.