In the end they decided to clear the dungeon before leaving. So this weird forest was a dungeon? I had read about them in stories but didn’t know that much about them. After we set up camp in the ‘boss room’, the room where the giant grizzly was, I brought one of those crazy deer inside and the knife man started butchering it.

While we waited for the knife man to make supper the hunter woman held her hand over a pot and a ring on her thumb glowed before water started streaming from her hand. “Oh, cool.” I said, watching her. “Is that magic too?”

“Sure is.” she answered. After a few minutes the pot was mostly full and she looked tired so she stopped. Seeing that I was staring at her using the magic the whole time, she pulled the ring off of her thumb and handed it to me. “Hey, Brie, you mind teaching him to use magic items?” she asked the Mage.

“Sure, Fontina,” she replied then motioned me over.

She explained to me that with my intelligence it would be extremely hard for me to learn specific spells, but that I should be able to learn to use magic items. Essentially, a magic item contains a skill, and if you tie a magic item to your mana channels you can use the skill it contains for a little bit of mana. As you couldn’t transfer skills using crystals, even though you can give up talents to them if you are willing to spend a gold to do it, this is how many people got useful skills from others.

In order to tie your mana channels into it you need to feel the channels in your body and connect the ones in your finger to the ring. This will let it use the mana it needs to let you use the skill, like digging a stream into your pasture so that your animals have the water they need to grow, only the ring didn’t die without mana. I put the ring on my index finger and tried to follow her instructions. I can see the veins in my hand, so I tried to imagining something like them that carried magic instead of blood. It was pretty hard to do since the only thing I knew which used used mana was my status. I kept opening and closing my status to try and sense if there were any changes in me but it took until everyone was asleep before I could feel the difference. When the Status was open my head seemed to use a little bit of mana but it was also the source of the mana.

The knife man was apparently an assassin named Edam and the swordsman was named Camembert. After I told them that I didn’t actually need to sleep that often, Cam and I were keeping watch. I spent all night trying to find the mana pathways in my body and make them do something and finally, just as the sun started to come up, I was able to make one in my finger reach out and touch the ring. The ring started to glow, which got Cam’s attention. “Hey, you got it.” he said as he restarted the fire. “In that case, why don’t you try and refill the pot for me? I like eating oatmeal while we are out on missions, but it uses too much mana for us to do it too often. You don’t have anything else that uses mana, though, so you should be ok.”

I nodded and he told me to just imagine the moisture in the air becoming rain drops and coming together. “There’s moisture in the air?” I asked. He grabbed his face with his hand and explained that there was always a little bit of moisture in the air, even in the driest places. He told me to imagine there was a fog around me when I did it, and about a minute later the water started dripping from my hand.

Over the next hour I slowly turned it into a small stream of water, and by the time everyone was awake we had oatmeal made. Cam explained to everyone that I had ‘condensed’ the water for the oatmeal, and they thanked me. They must really love their oatmeal.

We spent the day walking around the forest killing random creatures. With my spear shaft cracked, I had to cut down a small straight tree with a saw one of them had to replace it. It seemed lightly now, but Cam explained that was just because the replacement was a softer, weaker, and more flexible wood named Poplar that didn’t grow near the village. He suggested that I replace it with a good oak shaft once we got back.

I managed to kill several dozen more wild animals while we were out. One of those, a wild boar with frozen tusks, made me feel really weird, like the bear that broke the shaft of my spear did. We got back to the cave around sunset. Once there, after I refilled the pot for them, I told them about the weird feeling I got when stabbing the bear and the boar. We checked the bag of talent candy they gave me and I found that two of the Talent crystals had light within them. One was black and one was red. The black one was from the boar, an Average talent called ‘Rage’, which increased your strength in proportion to your stamina use, granting you up to four times the strength. The red one was from the Bear, a minor talent called “Tough Hide” which made it harder to penetrate your skin in proportion to your endurance.

They also explained to me what the blue crystals were. Dungeons were living creatures that produced a kind of energy called “Development Points”. They slowly gave them to the creatures that were born inside of them, and could use them to rapidly age or improve the creatures. If a creature had some DP that weren’t used, however, they formed blue stones in their chests. People and creatures from outside the dungeon could take these Development Points, or DP, and absorb them into their body. If you had them you could then use them to improve your stats, remove status effects, restore health, mental energy, and physical energy, and even buy talents. It was why people collected them from monsters that they killed. The tiny blue crystal I got from the first boar was worth about 5 DP and a DP was worth about a copper or a little more on the open market. This is why they offered me five copper for it.

The cave was still empty, which they explained as something called “respawn”. Essentially, the Dungeon could make baby creatures and raise them somewhere secret, then when they got bigger it could teleport them to any area that wasn’t near people. They said that the reason might be because people disrupt the flow of DP and blocks certain areas from teleportation. Even our equipment had enough of us still in it to block the teleport for a little while, about equal to the time we were in close contact with it, up to a day. Our bed rolls and cooking equipment should keep the ‘respawn’ away for ten or twelve hours, or more as we carried it all of the way here. That meant that the dungeon had to make enemies “respawn” in areas we weren’t in then send them at us if it wanted to kill us. Directly controlling them cost DP, though, so it couldn’t do that all of the time.

We would stay there that night, then visit the core room and get our reward for clearing the dungeon before heading back to town. While the actual body of the dungeon was somewhere nearby, the cores were needed to spread DP to the animals in the area. The dungeon would give anyone that reached the core some amount of DP crystals and sometimes useful material it produced as a bribe to get them to leave. After all, if a party made a good profit they usually wouldn’t keep risking their lives and equipment for the small DP stones.

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The team that hired me was named ‘Yellow Hornets’. “I know, it sounds kind of dumb,” said Cam, “but we forgot to prepare one before we registered so the Guild picked one for us. We could change it, but that costs three gold.”

“I like it. Very scary.” I said, squirting water from my hand at the ground outside the cave. It was kind of like drawing when you peed in the snow.

“How is that scary? There’s a team called the Wyvern Hunters, one called Last Chance, and one called Rengon’s Wrath, made up of His priests and holy warriors. Compared to that, our name is really bad.” Honestly, naming your team after the god of Justice was pretty cool. I would guess they hunted bandits.

“Well, Hornets, bees, and wasps die if they lose their stinger, right?” I had figured this out one night when reading about them in a book on animals from the library.

“Usually, what about it.” said Cam as supper was served.

“And they have to know they can’t defeat humans, or boars, wolves, bears, or anything else that they might attack.”

“Probably.” said Edam. He didn’t seem very patient.

“So, they are literally killing themselves fighting a futile mission to stop a threat to their family and queen, just hoping that they can hurt it enough that it will leave them alone. Sounds pretty heroic and scary to me.”

The four of them stared at me for a few seconds. “You know,” said Cam. “I never thought of it like that. When you think about it like that, our name is heroic.”

“Even if I won’t die fighting a hopeless battle.” said Edam. “You guys are on your own if things get that desperate.”

The other three shrugged, then went back to their food. Because of my talent I ate three bowls of stew, but Edam had anticipated that and made enough. I then went outside the entrance and continued to practice with the ring. Eventually my brain got tired from doing it and I started getting a headache, so I went back inside and got my shield and spear. “Got a headache using the ring, so I’ll be out here practicing with my spear if anyone needs me.”

Brie shrugged. “At least he knows what mana depletion is now.” she said, then went back to the spell book she was reading. An hour later, though, the sounds of exercises stopped and she once again heard water spraying. “What?” she said, and got up, only to see me walking around watering all of the flowers and bushes in the area. “Ok, explain.” she said.

“You need to water plants to make them grow, and the ground here is pretty dry, since there isn’t a creek nearby.”

“That’s not what I meant. You just said you were getting a headache from overusing magic, right?” I nodded. “That means you were out of mana an hour ago, or almost so.” I nodded again. “Then how do you have enough mana to waste it like this?”

I thought for a minute. “Troll regeneration?” I asked, and she got a surprised look on her face.

“Of course,” she said. “I’ve been ignoring it sense I’m not a melee fighter, but it does make you regenerate mental fatigue, or mana, at ten times the rate. And since your Willpower is almost as high as mine, you have almost as much mana as me. The normal eight to ten hour time to fully recover mana is only an hour or less for you.”

I shrugged. “Maybe.” Then I went back to watering wild plants.

She ran back inside and started energetically talking to her friends. Something must have excited her, but I didn’t pay attention. I didn’t see any enemies nearby, so it didn’t concern me.

I alternated like that, using the ring to make water and practicing spear and shield moves, all night. A few animals came by, but they were easy to beat. I had forgot to bring a hunting knife with be, so I cut them open with my spear tip and had to dig around for ten minutes in the chest of the first deer to find the DP crystal. After that it got easier, so I got it out of the wolf in five minutes and the Boar in two. When the sun came up, Cam came and got me for a quick breakfast, and was surprised when he saw the bodies of three animals piled there. “You killed those yourself last night?” he asked, and I nodded. “And judging by the holes in their chest, I take it you took their crystals, too?”

I nodded. “I can give them to you if you want. I washed them off with the ring’s magic, so they are clean.”

Cam shook his head. “They’re your monsters, so you keep them.”

After breakfast Cam pushed some vines at the back of the cave to the side to reveal a small tunnel. We walked through it and after about twenty meters we entered a well-lit room covered in ivy. On a stand in the middle of the room was a black sphere the size of a fist. “I think you already know why we’re here.” said Cam. We waited for a few seconds for a response, then he shrugged. “Fine, we’ll do this the hard way.” He walked over to the Core and tapped on it with his sword pommel.

Immediately several DP crystals popped out of it, like its surface was the surface of a lake, though it had to be hard judging by the sound Cam’s sword made. They gathered up the stones that were from the size of a coin to the size of a pebble. “Not bad,” said cam. “Probably at least five hundred.” We then turned around and left.

As we picked up our stuff from the cave, Brie spoke up. “You know, with no one knowing this dungeon exists, we are probably the first adventurers to make it to the Core.”

“Sounds right.” said Cam.

“Which means you are the first person to ever mug it. Of course it didn’t know what to do. It probably hasn’t even bothered learning human speech yet.”

Cam paused to think about it for a few seconds then shrugged. That’s when Fontina showed her true self. “So, you take a young girl’s virginity and all you can do is shrug?” she asked.

Cam looked horrified at the suggestion. “I mugged her, I didn’t...wait, what makes you think it’s a girl?”

“So you prefer doing that to little boys?”

“What? Of course not. You’re just making it sound worse than it is.”

Brie spoke up. “By that logic, every time we mug a core in Verlos we’re forcing ourselves on an old woman. I seem to remember you doing it the last time.”

Fontina looked shocked and started defending herself. “Well, cores are like elves and don’t really age past late adulthood, so as old as it is, it’s like a forty year old human at best.”

“So you prefer older women?” asked Edam, joining in the fun. “Explains why you keep turning me down.”

“I turn you down because you’re an asshole.” said Fontina.

“Got it, you’re not into assholes. Nice to know what you’re into.”

She picked up a small rock and threw it at him.

I was surprised to see them joke like that. They were super serious earlier, but now that they were getting ready to leave the were joking around. Not to mention that I was told that most women weren’t cool with that kind of joke. Maybe these two were different? Maybe I should test it. “I don’t know, he looks more like a boob to me.”

“Careful, there, Edam. You keep being a boob and once we get a few drinks at the pub, Cam won’t be able to stop touching you.”

“Hey, it was one time, and I swear she was into it.”

“City guards don’t get called when she’s into it.”

“They do when her husband walks in on us and she needs an excuse.”

The conversation really died down after that, so we finished packing up and headed out. We only ran into three small monsters, a squirrel and two horned rabbits, on our way out. Cam said it was because we had taken all of the spare DP the core had, so it couldn’t replace the monsters we had killed. We only got one DP out of each of them, but I kept their bodies. Squirrel and rabbit meat were both good, and they weren’t too heavy to carry back.

When we got back to town we all went to the pub to celebrate a successful dungeon clear. It was a very young dungeon, though, so they were surprised at how much we got. It must have been good at hiding and efficient with its DP use. As I had helped them so much, I was offered a half share of the loot instead of the five silver they promised me. I wasn’t sure if that made the deal better, but once Brie explained everything to me, I knew it was a great deal.

For one thing, we got over nine hundred DP from the dungeon, which meant I got over 200. Then there were the skill crystals. They averaged three each, with me getting two. I seemed to be a bit less lucky then them on the quality, as they averaged Average, so they said that if I wanted I could just keep my two skills as my cut. As we didn’t grab anything else, that was all of the loot. I gave Fortina back her water ring, and gave the pub owner the two horned rabbits, asking him to cook something for us with them. Squirrel wasn’t exactly the best for drinking with, after all.