I kept my senses constantly aware of our surroundings, even during the fighting. I managed to scare the other party away, but I was a bit disappointed they didn’t choose to fight. However, I was quite certain they wouldn’t give up on us so easily.

Everyone was still quite tense from the encounter with the other party, and they were all eager to get to the next floor. I was certain we wouldn’t make it before we needed to take a break and sleep for the evening. The fighting on this floor wasn't too bad, but it was still exhausting for the others.

During the short breaks from fighting, while we were just exploring or waiting for traps to be disarmed, I enjoyed looking at how in my energy body my new trait worked on making new pathways so my energy cores could connect to one another. Currently, I have seven new ones that are incredibly small and I think won’t ever be as significant as the main one. The cores that have been started are in the neck, brain, both shoulders, both lungs, and one in my stomach.

The amount of them is truly astonishing, but I don’t know exactly what they will do. Will they function similarly to the original core that I had, or will they be more like extensions of it? I have no idea. Perhaps this is just the beginning and these are the building blocks for something even bigger and better. I guess I will be able to find out in the future.

Another strange thing is that I haven’t been able to locate my mind companion. I think I will actually call it to me the next time I have a chance, but not today, as I don’t want to be distracted just in case the other party discovers us.

We continued fighting, but as I suspected, we weren't close to the next floor's staircase. Everyone seems to be accepting the fact that we will be continuing to fight until we find one. This was unacceptable for multiple reasons, but most of all because I didn’t want to get hit by my own party members as I’ve noticed their aiming capabilities starting to diminish.

"We should find a place to camp. We have already pushed ourselves too far. It seems that we won't be getting out of this floor as soon as we wanted," I said. My words came as a heavy blow to the others, but they all understood that we can't keep pushing.

"Rich is correct. We were all hoping to get to the next floor before we needed rest, but let’s make this rest as short as possible. No extra downtime this time. Everyone eats as fast as possible and everyone gets to sleep immediately. Rich will take the first watch, and the second will be Arabella." Horus agreed. It took a while for us to find a suitable campsite.

"Rich, if I remember correctly, you do not need to sleep this time, so please prepare the food before the rest of us wake up and while Arabella is on watch so we can get moving as soon as possible," Horus said to us after we reached our campsite. I gave him a firm nod and he watched me a bit longer than usual, trying to figure out what I was thinking, but then he followed his own command and we quickly ate and I watched as they all went to sleep.

We were in a tunnel-like ruin structure, but the tunnels were quite wide and the stone seemed to be quite well-kept and didn’t damage easily. However, there were still sections that were collapsed, sometimes so badly that we needed to go around them. We were currently in a side room of a bigger room.

I didn’t like that we didn’t have an escape route, but I have come to realise that this is actually the best choice in the ruins of this dungeon as any path that you leave to your campsite will probably be attacked by roaming monsters. Roaming monsters are a lot weaker and there are fewer of them than in the normal monster packs who patrol a certain area, but they are still dangerous.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

Usually, we set up ourselves in a hidden position where we could see and attack anything that came through the only way into our campsite. But that’s what every party that is sent down here is instructed to do. So this wouldn’t work this time since we possibly needed to defend against someone who would know this fact. As I looked at the room, I noted just how thick the walls were. With a little bit of testing, I figured out that I could remove those stones, so I started to work.

My idea was to make a hollow space just above the doorway so anything that came through we would have a perfect opportunity to attack them from above. If any other party came through this door, they would expect us to be at the sides of the doorway, which should give us plenty of opportunity to attack back.

I still didn’t like it because they could overwhelm Arabella, for example, and defending against who knows what abilities in a closed space didn't sound promising. Unfortunately, there wasn’t anything else I could do during my watch as we still needed to be mindful of the dungeon monsters.

My shift went by slowly as I waited for the proverbial shoe to drop, but it didn't happen. There was only the expected amount of roaming monsters which I took care of with my throwing daggers without them even finding me. I didn’t want to jump down and attack just in case the other party was waiting for our lookout to make a mistake like that which would allow them to quickly take one of us out without possibly alerting the others.

Finally, Arabella joined me in this room and I did enjoy the look of brief panic when she didn’t find me where I was supposed to be. It only took her a singular moment to locate me after which she gave me an approving look.

"That's quite a nice idea but I don’t think there will be room for two of us up here," she said, which confused me a bit. "Why would we need room for the two of us up here?" I said while starting to climb down.

I wasn’t looking at her so I didn't know exactly what her facial expression was but I guess she was a bit confused. "You aren’t going to join me, wait, you aren’t thinking of going out there like you usually do. It isn't safe and what if they attack us, we would need you to have a chance at defeating them."

I turned around to find her closer than I expected and quite worried. "No need to worry, I won’t go far. I will try to find another lookout place that could keep an eye on this doorway from the other side. I don’t quite like being so closed in without knowing the capabilities of our opponents." She seemed to accept my explanation and after a brief conversation, I headed outside where unfortunately I was going to not keep my word as I needed to move further away.

If there was going to be a fight, I want the odds to be in our favour as much as possible. I was going to need to follow some assumptions that I hope were going to be right because if they weren’t, this could end really badly. But I have some good evidence to suggest that I was at least somewhat right in my guesses. If I was wrong, they would have already attacked us but since this hasn't happened, I was going to try to execute my main plan.

Of course, the best plan would have been to somehow disguise our passing, making their party unable to find us, but none of us had any abilities that would work and the energy control that I had that could help dispel some of our trail, I wasn’t so certain would work against the people in the other party.

I was now moving quite fast, hoping that I could reach my preferred ambush spot before they did. Thirty minutes of running later, I slowed down to a crawl but I didn’t detect anyone ahead of me. This was a decent ambush site. The tunnels here went in multiple different directions and the one that we chose to go in had traps just a bit after the tunnel started.

While I wasn’t the best with traps, I had looked at them being disarmed for quite a while now and I slowly worked on rearming them but making it look like they were still disarmed. Whatever these traps were, my danger sense went crazy when I tried to rush through them so we need to take our time and disarm them.

Just in case they had someone with the same kind of ability, I made sure that I could trigger the trap with a few stones that I could throw, but hopefully, it will work as they will be expecting all traps to be disarmed.

Setting myself in a good hiding spot and making sure that I didn’t leak any energy while I was doing this, I set in to wait. This was the biggest gamble as I expected them to follow our trail exactly as we left it. They of course could have some other sort of ability that could lead them straight to us and there was a possibility that amongst all these tunnels there was a faster way to us.

Luckily I didn’t have to spend long contemplating on my choices as my senses started to pick up disturbances coming from the way we originally came from. It could just be a monster but as time went by, I figured it was the party as they felt a bit too strong to be the roaming monsters.