Waking up after exerting myself so much was painful, especially the headache, but weirdly, my chest hurt the most, which was strange. Even after hours of resting, after my headache was nearly gone, and everything else seemed in peak order, the left side of my chest still hurt. Did the monster do something to me?
That didn’t make any sense. Not finding anything wrong, I decided to go and look at my achievement page. I had quite a few notifications. I guess I have more time to go over everything as it would be quite good to see how much I’ve gained over our time here in the dungeon.
The biggest thing was that my adventurer's class leveled up twice in this fight and got me more stat points in energy storage, giving me a new trait. Whatever was governing luck in this world was certainly being nice to me today. The new trait was called multiple energy cores.
Looking inside my energy body, I could see how my energy core started to slowly branch out, building pathways to the presumed other cores that will eventually start to grow. This seemed to have taken some of my energy regeneration, an actual noticeable amount, but it wouldn't hurt me too much.
It'll take some time until I can start to take advantage of this new upgrade, but I have also gained quite a lot of other stuff. My first homesteader class is now level 33, while the other two are level 32. All three also gained a two-level from this fight, which was quite good but not quite enough to get me to my next stat milestones.
I was quite close with my perception and constitution to the 640 milestone. Presence was also really close to the 320 milestone, but wisdom wasn’t too far off. Hopefully, I will have as much luck with them as I had with energy storage.
Technically, my strength also wasn’t too far away from its 2560 milestone, but that's because I was getting a lot more of it than any other stat. Agility is also quite close to 2000, getting to 1977, but my vitality is starting to lag behind, not even reaching 1900.
During this fight, it also seems like I was able to get past three skill milestones, giving me new choices in ability. For my camouflage skill milestone, out of the three choices, I picked thermal masking as I really didn’t have a good way to hide my body heat, and hopefully, this will make hiding myself easier and less energy-consuming.
My tracking skill also leveled up, but that probably happened before we entered the puzzle room. When the choices were given, I truly had to believe that this was a lucky day as one of those choices was ethereal sight. Not only was this another vision ability, but it also sounded quite powerful as well.
Although how it would possibly help me, I had no idea. What even was ethereal and where could I possibly see it? I tested it out, and perhaps there were wisps of something around that looked like wind, but even while fully concentrating on this ability, nothing really changed from my regular vision.
I guess that further testing is needed. Now for the last major upgrade, my basic energy construction skill ranked up. All the choices were quite good. One was energy chains, then there was energy shield, and lastly, energy armor.
Two were defensive, and one was offensive/crowd control, possibly. I have already been doing something similar to energy armor but completely manually, which takes a lot of concentration and extra energy, so perhaps having a system-helped version would be quite useful. Then again, the other two also sounded good.
After a while from the options, I disregarded the energy shield as it would do basically the same thing as energy armor, and I felt that it would be the better choice for me from the two. But that still left energy chains.
In the end, it came down to usage time. I would be using energy armor constantly compared to the situational usage of energy chains, no matter how good it might be. With that done, I looked over some of my level gains for abilities. The most impressive being my weapon abilities reaching level 60 and armor enhancement reaching level 77.
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With the level gains, I find it a lot easier to strengthen those abilities and use them more freely, allowing me to use them more specifically, like strengthening my chest area or arm armor, for example. They have advanced quite a lot in this dungeon, but this makes sense as they are one of my most used abilities and something that has kept me alive.
After Adam woke up, I thanked him profusely for keeping me in the fight. His healing was really crucial for me to be able to keep going, especially after the first heavy attack landed and broke my bone.
It was quite quiet, but everyone seemed to be handling everything well enough, so I just focused on myself. I still had a lot of healing to do, but no matter what I did, my chest still hurt every once in a while. Once again, I tried to find a reason, but I couldn’t, but my searching did lead me to my mind palace.
No longer did I have a singular small castle with a small wall; I would now more call this a citadel than a castle. My mind companion was doing excellent work, building everything up and strengthening what was already made. With my instruction, we also had some aerial defenses in the form of mounted ballistas.
I couldn’t find my companion immediately, so I figured he must be somewhere inside the structure, but I didn’t feel up to searching for him, and it kind of felt impolite to call him here if he was working on something important. I also still needed to name him.
The rest time we needed to take so Adam and Luana would be ready to continue went by quite fast. Fortunately for us, the next floors were a lot easier. None of us could simply fight through those floors anymore, and we all needed to put everything we had into the boss fights. Like this, we were still able to make good time descending until we reached the 74th floor, which brought with it a different kind of danger.
POV Luana
After we found ourselves on an extremely dangerous floor and won against it. Things weren't much easier on the next floors, but for some reason, it seemed like everything was going as expected. We had one more floor to clear before we could once again choose if we wanted to leave or not. Currently, I would choose to stay, and I knew that Adam felt the same.
Perhaps my choice was also influenced by the item I got from the last boss, a ring that allows me to boost one type of elemental spell to be up to 40% stronger, which is incredibly beneficial. Currently, it's set to fire type, and clearing out the smaller packs of mutated goblin-rat creatures we found ourselves against was incredibly easy because of that.
However, we were in a weird, empty part of the ruins, and I was starting to get concerned because we should be encountering more monsters. Suddenly, Rich raised his hand and showed us a fist, which meant we needed to stop. I didn't understand why he couldn't just mentally tell us that, but we all stopped. Horus, who was closest to the front after Rich, he walked next to him to try to figure out what was going on. I had a good line of sight to what was in front of us, but I didn’t see anything.
That calmness didn't last long as another party of delvers appeared after they dropped their camouflage. The only thing I could do when I recognized who they were was to curse inside my head. This was not good. I knew two of them, and even a few teachers had warned the rest of us to stay away from them.
They were extremely politically connected and came from old families, and unfortunately, they were also quite like what Rich would call ‘complete dicks.’ Just the look on their faces and those evil smiles made me shiver, and they didn't promise anything good if they were going to do anything to us.
I could see Horus trying to think of something, but the best-case scenario would be that they would steal everything from us, and even Adam's family couldn’t do anything to punish them afterwards. It seemed that the other party had come to an agreement as they started to walk towards us fast, acting like they owned the place. Before they got too close, a horrible presence burrowed deep into me. It felt like I was a bunny, and a giant hawk was about to catch me. I heard that familiar cold voice.
"Hey Horus, since we are in this dungeon, if we kill anyone, no one can find out, right? Doubling our loot sounds quite good, but since I will be doing most of the murdering, I want the majority of it."
Every movement stopped, and my mind finally cleared enough to see it was Rich who was emanating that dreadful presence and apparently quite ready to kill the other party with his bare hands, which he was currently using to crack his fingers. We all had asked him to stop doing those cracks because, with his bones, it sounded way too loud and scary.
The first one to speak was Horus, to my complete surprise. "No, they are our schoolmates. We aren’t supposed to be doing things like that now, aren't we, Hunruka?" Horus's answer and his question got things moving again. They didn't answer immediately but tried to size Rich up, and whatever they found, they didn't like.
"Adam, wait, let me think, Horus, we were here trying to welcome our schoolmates, and your party member here seems quite bloodthirsty. You should choose your party members better, but I’m glad that being from the same school actually means something to you. We're all in a hurry, so let's not waste our time. Let's do what protocol demands and head back towards where we came from."
"That sounds fine to us. That’s why protocols have been set up. We wish you the very best and hope for a fast stair find for you and your party," Horus said, and the other party reciprocated. It all happened so fast.
We backed off while constantly looking at each other seeing if someone will make a move, but as soon as the corner was turned, we started to move even faster. "We need to find the staircase down as fast as possible. I do not trust them, and good thinking, Rich, you probably saved our lives there," Horus said, to which Rich just shrugged his shoulders.