“Die!” The giant screamed, sending its club down on my head.

I dodged to the side, and the club struck the floor with a thud, the ground shaking a bit. I had gotten used to fighting monsters of this size now. If I went back to battling the monstrous version of Xin in the dungeon this time, I was confident that I knew how to beat her.

“Weakness!” I cast against his knee, “Dark Slash!”

I caused him to fall to the ground. He managed to catch himself before his hands hit the ground, but it was enough for me.

“Create step!” I leaped up into the air, creating a step in midair to push off of, gaining an even higher jump.

“Blindness!” I cast, knocking out his eyes. “Create Step!”

As soon as I blinded him, I changed the location I was moving to. Predictably, he swung where he thought I was going to be. He was letting out a bellow of annoyance, unable to see.

“Sword Break!” I brought my sword on his head, and there was a resounding crack.

A moment later, he collapsed to the floor. I created a cushion and landed safely. Once I was back on my feet, I watched as he slowly started to degrade into miasma. Pulling out some waters of life and drinking it, I had to remind myself that a giant like him was probably my limit battling solo. Then again, a few weeks ago, I’d have never been able to fight him head-on like that. I would have likely fled, or tried to use some kind of trap on him.

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{Demon Knight has increased to level 20.)

{You have unlocked the skill, Spectral Shadow.}

Dark Priest was at level 20. True Hero was at 40. Mimic had made it to twelve. Suffice it to say, leveling was going well. Perhaps, it wasn’t at the speed it would have been with my party, but it wasn’t bad after two weeks of hunting in the forest. I kept my distance from demon patrols, which was easy with my Map and Sense Life. As long as there wasn’t some structure for them to hide in, I could always see them coming.

At this point, I had completed a total of 10 of the 50 challenges. That meant I had unlocked ten different safe rooms. What did the murals tell me? It just depicted the various battles going on. After the fort fell, the reinforcements arrived and manage to take back their fort with considerable difficulty. Finding out about their princess being captured, they made several failed attempts at bringing down the gateway fort. Meanwhile, very little was revealed about the state of Carmine.

As for the rewards from her challenges, they were all essentially what I expected. More star armor. I wanted to know where in this dungeon she was finding this armor. Then again, it could be on a single mob who only had one piece of armor every cycle. After 1000 cycles, she could easily have enough to give 50 away without concern. Just because it wasn’t valuable to her, didn’t mean it didn’t have value to me.

Leaving the corpses to be reabsorbed by the dungeon, I continued my trek. Of course, by this point, I was beyond the gated fort and was slowly making my way closer and closer to the demon castle. As I did so, more patrols appeared, and it was becoming harder and harder to defeat enemies, especially since the monsters were higher level, put up more resistance, and thus attracted the soldiers if the fight grew animated enough. Still, if I wanted to grow stronger, I had to keep fighting.

That’s when I ascended a hill and saw something I hadn’t expected. It was a village. This was my first dungeon village.