After making sure everyone was alright and ready, Beth gave Blood a nod, the lupine woman leading the way down the tunnel. She rather quickly vanished from their perceptions, though Beth could detect her the longest thanks to her Silver-level mana detection skill. The rest of the group walked for a few minutes before Blood reappeared, reporting that there were beasts in a room just ahead.
"What do we have?" Beth asked.
"Trolls and orcs," Blood answered.
"Orcs? Really?" Beth asked, eyebrow raised skeptically.
"What it says," Blood replied with a shrug.
"You get orcs and other sapient species as dungeon beasts sometimes," Andrea cut in. "Overall, it's thought the more numerous the sapient species, the less common they are as mindless beasts. One of the reasons why you don't see plain Jane humans as much, though it does happen. Occasionally, you'll find a dungeon or trial with a level that has mad cannibals or something like that. Not pleasant."
"I thought orcs were pretty common as sapient beings, though," Beth said leadingly.
"Not quite as much as you might think," Andrea shrugged. "You still get them in dungeons and such from time to time. A better example would be Blood herself; wolves are pretty common still as animals, and rather common as beasts, but they don't often awaken. So, you find a lot of stuff with wolves as enemies because they're not very numerous. Are there Awoken wolves in the Milky Way? Sure, a couple hundred million even, but compared to a galaxy with ten trillion sapient beings, even a billion is still basically a rounding error, let alone less."
"That does explain some things," Beth said while frowning thoughtfully. "The first two dungeons that appeared near our home were an ant dungeon and a wolf dungeon."
"Makes sense; they're common beast types," Andrea said. She seemed to realize something after a moment, however, as she said, "Wait a minute. What do you mean, 'Appeared near our home?'"
"Uh, we're from a newly inducted world," Beth said, looking down and to the side as Andrea glared at her. "Blood is a bonded companion I got when I cleared the wolf dungeon solo, the first time it was ever cleared."
"You’re this strong, stronger than me and able to put up a fight against this freak," Andrea growled, jabbing her thumb in Adam's ribs, "and you're not even from a developed world?!"
"Nope. That a problem?" Beth looked back up and directly into Andrea's eyes.
"Nope," Andrea replied, losing the scrunched look on her face and slight air of hostility. "Just wanted to make sure you weren't fucking with us."
"Nope. At least, not like that," Beth said, forming a sly grin at the end.
"Oh, behave," Andrea said, punching Beth in the shoulder. "At least, until we're out of here."
"Gotcha," Beth said with a much broader grin.
"If you two are done?" Adam said with a slight shake of his head at their antics.
"Sure, sorry," Beth said, not sheepish in the least.
"Let's do this, then," Adam said, clearly eager to get on with the fighting.
He led the way into the room, where they found two large, lumbering trolls and more than half a dozen orcs. Adam calmly and methodically started slaughtering the orcs, not struggling even though they were level two-twenty and he was only in the low hundreds. His Mana Physique was more and more showing its worth, as he had no trouble fighting a hundred levels up despite not having more than one skill at Gold and no weaponskills at Expert.
The cleanup after the fight was quick, as there was nothing to harvest from the beasts other than their cores, which Blood could get quite handily. Beth did take note of the ore and minerals lying around the place, but nothing in that first room had any real value. A bunch of low-grade mana copper and similar minerals wasn't worth the space it would take up in their necklaces, so Beth didn't bother with having any of them pick anything up.
The group moved on to the next tunnel and the next room, finding much more of the same. Beth was consistently impressed with the amount of power Adam was able to bring to bear, especially as they moved further into the dungeon and his output remained consistent. After quickly moving through seven or eight rooms, they started to get to a place where there were more valuable ores lying about. That mainly consisted of mana iron, and mana iron was not only considered better than mana copper, but this mana iron was also rather high mana density. Beth still didn't start tossing pieces in her necklace yet, as she was trying to be a bit more selective about what she picked up, especially after having participated in a high-end auction and seeing the value of the rare pieces there.
It took another dozen rooms before they started finding anything of value, or rather, anything Beth deemed worthy enough of their spatial storages. The point that they started finding very high mana density mana iron was when Beth started tossing select pieces in her necklace. The others didn't seem as interested in the ore, but Beth didn't really blame them, as she was the only smith among them and even the high mana density ore wasn't super valuable. It was a good thing that Beth had quite a bit of free space in the necklace, even with the thought of having to again pack the ship up and store it within the necklace.
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
Another dozen rooms saw a significant upgrade in what they were seeing, not so much the beasts, though they did get a bit stronger, but in the ores. They were now finding hunks of mana gold ore of decent mana density, but the chunks weren't of particularly great purity, with a lot of rock and scrap mixed in. The others had perked up at the sight of gold, but they deferred to Beth, who said it wasn't worth grabbing anything yet. The group reluctantly left all the ore on the ground, moving on to the next room, but that quickly changed after five rooms.
"It's worth it now," Beth said.
"What's worth it?" Andrea asked, but it didn't take the exuberant girl long to figure it out.
"The ore," Beth said. "Start grabbing any loose pieces that look like this."
She demonstrated what to look for, and the other three quickly keyed to it. They emptied the room they were in, which was the size of a large house, of any ore that met the specifications. Every room after that had more and more ore that met Beth's approval, and they had over a thousand pounds of mana gold ore between them in short order. Not only that, but Beth stopped them in the ninth room for a while as she pounded away at the incredibly tough walls, once again turning into a one-woman mining machine. The others were a bit annoyed at the delay but were delighted at the huge amounts of high mana density mana gold ore that Beth was able to rip out of the wall over the two hours she spent tearing the rock apart.
They eventually moved on, as the Path wasn't quite that generous, and Beth had gotten all the easy-to-reach ore out of the walls with her hammering. They had gotten thousands of pounds of ore out of the walls, and they moved to the next room to find it was a good thing, as the area had changed again and there wasn't any more gold. Nor did it progress through the metals and move on to platinum or something like that, as there wasn't anything obvious in the next room. In fact, it took them some time to figure out what was going on, and that only because Blood found a gem on a corpse in the third room when she looked for the beast core from that troll.
"Well, that changes things," Beth said.
"Look for gems on the bodies?" Blood asked.
"Not only that, but I think we need to check the walls…even the floor and ceiling," Beth replied.
They did just that in the rooms they had already cleared, and it turned out, as always, Blood's random nose for treasure was a winner. She found a very tiny crack, nothing more than a hairline fault in the wall of the second room, that smelled off to her. When Beth and Andrea went to work on the immensely tough stone, pounding it into tiny chunks of rubble, they quickly revealed a small pocket of gems buried in a little crevice behind the hairline fault. It wasn't anything near as big as what they had found under the mountains, and the gems didn't have quite the same luster, but it was still an impressive haul. Beth and Andrea spent twenty minutes carefully extracting everything in the little pocket, dumping it all in Beth's necklace as they went.
They found similar things in several of the other rooms as well, including Beth finding a section of gems hidden in the floor of the last room of the 'gem area.' The enemies didn't change from area to area, only increasing in level as they moved further in. The next section of mine they encountered deviated from the generally very straightforward area they had moved through so far. Now they were in a complex series of twisting tunnels that very much resembled Beth's oh-so-favorite dungeon layout: a maze. Their group of four was easily able to handle the maze; between their great memories and Blood's skilled scouting, the twisting series of tunnels was more a tedious time sink than anything.
The maze was purpose built to annoy them, with nothing of interest or value that the team could find within despite spending nearly an hour extra time searching a section of the complex series of tunnels and rooms. With that disappointment, they moved into the next section which, while not a maze, was still a series of interlinked rooms with short tunnels between. The main danger here was a fight getting out of hand and the noises or mana discharges attracting beasts from other nearby rooms to join in the fight. Well, that would be a challenge for other teams, but Beth's team would have the upper hand even against multiple rooms, so they weren't as cautious as another group might be.
They didn't find any secrets in this section, but they did encounter something that made Beth extremely happy. When the others asked what was going on, she explained that some of the ore pieces had small amounts of mithril in them. It wasn't a lot, and it wasn't very high mana density, but mithril was still mithril, no matter how small the amount or low the mana density. Any smith worth their salt would be over the moon to get their hands on some; at least, if they had the requisite skill to work it.
The rest of the team insisted on Beth searching out every bit of mithril before they were satisfied and ready to move on. Beth couldn't really complain about it either, despite it being a bit of a pain in the ass, as it was a lot of money they were talking about. Even given her love of coin, Beth might have protested a little at all the scrabbling around for just a little coin, but the auction really had changed her perspective. Not only that, but the auction she had bought the incredible airship in was only a monthly auction, whereas the yearly auction was supposed to be even larger and better. Every single copper coin might count if she wanted to purchase something truly outrageous, and they would at very least have enough time on-world to participate in the next monthly auction, let alone the fact that Seven Lights was in quite a few solar systems and they might be able to attend the yearly auction, even if they traveled off-world soon.
The rest of the dungeon was primarily a bust, unfortunately, as they found little of any worth apart from the beast cores they harvested. Andrea even insisted, as they stared into a large, rather ominous room that just had to be the boss room, that they backtrack again and scour the last section for anything odd. It proved fruitless, as even Blood's extraordinary nose for treasure wasn't able to sniff out anything but corpses and rocks. When they had totally satisfied Andrea's excited demands to scour for loot, they returned to the boss room, trying to get an assessment of what they were up against before rushing in headlong.
Only Blood's eyes were able to pierce the gloom of the frigid cavern, and what she reported was standard for this type of dungeon. Namely, it was a single massive, heavily muscled orc that was as wide as a barn door with a heavy layer of fat on its arms and torso. The enormous beast wielded a saber the size of a lamppost and likely ten times as heavy, with a long blade that curved slightly for the entire length and was a massive wedge of metal. Getting hit by that whistling freight train wouldn't be a pleasant experience, even for someone as durable as Beth, so containment and disabling were the names of the game today.
The boss would have really given any other team a good run for their money, but Beth and Adam's damage outputs were utterly unreal. Even Andrea was able to cause quite a bit of mayhem, and they quickly had one of the boss's legs mangled despite its fast regeneration. Once its movements were inhibited, Beth was able to go head-to-head with it, just being sure to avoid the massive swings of the beast's saber. The massive hunk of metal wasn't something that she could take more than a hit or two from, and even getting clipped by the side of the blade slightly fractured one of her arms.
When Adam activated his Presence, his damage output spiked through the roof. Combined with his Mana Physique, his Presence gave him a level of power that was close to unbelievable, allowing him to knock the massive boss off its feet with only a single sword swing. With him in the lead, the four of them tore the downed boss to shreds, quite literally, as they had to thoroughly destroy the regenerator to kill it. The action was too much for the boss's beast core, unfortunately, and the massive orc died when part of its chest exploded, the force knocking the four of them back, though all of them managed to retain their feet. The orc was unable to live after having developed a beast core and having it destruct, the extreme amounts of damage the team had done enough to ensure the core was shattered.
Hidden Ancient Mine completed. Calculating rewards.
Calculating…
All enemies defeated. Bonus points awarded.
All hidden caches discovered. Bonus points awarded.
Calculating…
Final score calculated at a B. Disbursing awards.