"Look, Kyron! It's plains!"

The Specialty Dungeon is rather basic, but that's normal for their first run. This one takes the form of some plains that stretch out in all directions, with some hills to the north of the entrance. The boss for this Dungeon will likely be over at those hills, though there are no doubt some monsters and other resources in other areas.

"Caleb," Kyron says, having barely stepped through the Dungeon's entrance. "Stop rushing into Dungeons."

"Sorry, but no-can-do! Dungeons are fun!"

"You tried to blow up the last Dungeon we were in."

"That was an accident."

"So what's this about you making a volcano?" He asks. "You didn't do that after we met, and that was five years a-er, when we were thirteen."

"Correction, when I was thirteen," I tell him. "You were fourteen."

"And the volcano?"

"Let's not sweat the small details of my journey to acquiring a Class and instead focus on the monsters! Look! Boars!"

Seven boars with white-grey fur and clear tusks are charging at us from about a hundred feet to the west of the entrance. Those tusks no doubt have air magics whipping around them at high speed, adding in a razor-like effect that slices anything that gets within even half an inch of them.

"[Fire Bolt]!"

Kyron draws his sword as I begin casting spells, and we quickly move out of the path of the boars. My spells cripple the ones they strike, and Kyron moves in for the kill. Four of the seven boars are taken out in this manner in just the first charge, and the remaining trio finish their charge, then turn around and perform another one.

In a Tier Invalid Dungeon – what all Specialty Dungeons are until they're cleared – the starting monsters typically only have around 5 Constitution. It's not surprising to me that we're clearing this easily, and it makes me happy that I can still wipe things out with ease. Unfortunately, I'm not able to do it on my own yet, but that's why Kyron and I make a great team.

As he's taking out one of the boars, I cast several more [Fire Bolt]s in order to kill one entirely on my own.

+0.73% Experience!

A little bit more than double what I was gaining for the ones we killed together, as usual. The split isn't directly even – each person receives less than an even split when monsters are killed by a group.

Once we kill the monsters, we collect the small crystal spheres they dropped. All monsters within a Dungeon drop a monster core crystal, and those have an abundance of uses. The ones dropped by the boars here are only around a quarter of an inch in diameter, and all of them are a pale blue color. Standard monster cores instead of variants.

Kind of disappointing, but we'll no doubt receive other types of cores and other loot from monsters as we fight here. Boars are basic monsters, anyway, so the most we could hope for would be tusks, leather, or a leather item.

"Let's go east first!" I set off in that direction after we've collected the cores and sent them into our rings.

"Caleb, wait up!" Kyron exclaims, then hurries after me. "I was still killing that last one!"

"No, it was already dead," I tell him. "You just hadn't pulled your sword out yet."

"How should we explain to them why we were able to enter?" Kyron asks. "I didn't stick around to explain anything in favor of chasing after you because the last time I took more than a minute to enter a Specialty Dungeon's first run, you locked the Dungeon and I couldn't get in."

Normally, a Dungeon's entrance closes after a certain period of time from when the first person enters it, and it remains closed until either the Dungeon Boss is defeated or the entire party is killed. In the case of the former, it's only open one-way – the party can leave, but no one can enter. After that, the Dungeon remains closed for a period of time in order to "reset" and prevent abuse of being able to come in repeatedly to harvest more resources.

To one who knows how, they can manually lock the Dungeon entrance, in order to prevent others from entering after them.

"Should've been faster."

Kyron sighs but doesn't otherwise respond.

"Why are we going east instead of west?" He decides to ask after the third encounter with boars.

These ones wield earth magics, their tucks made of stone, and they shake the ground a little as they charge – and only as they charge. Though they would be a nightmare for most parties of a lower Level, they aren't anything Kyron and I haven't dealt with before. The quake range only extends about six feet from them, meaning I can still strike them with spells from my staff.

Hit one from afar with magic, then the melee fighters can move in and kill it before it starts charging again. Repeat this until the entire herd has been taken care of, and everything is fine. The trick is having a mage who can actually hit them from far enough away – or an archer who's skilled enough to shoot them through the eye.

"Cay, stop walking for five seconds so we don't get into another fight," Kyron says. "No avoiding the questions. You always go west first because you like taking out the air monsters first."

In a Tier Invalid Specialty Dungeon, the monsters are divided by their elements into the four directions of north, east, south, and west. It's always the exact same division, so we always know which elements are in which directions.

"In addition to that," Kyron continues. "Earth-magic monsters are going to be more difficult for us, since we're Level 0 and we'll no doubt have to fight ones made of stone by the time we reach this edge of the Dungeon. That staff will be ineffective against those, and my sword can't exactly cut stone. Even if I were strong enough and it were sharp enough, it's not durable enough – it would break."

"I'm not planning on going up against that stuff just yet," I tell him. "This is a Tier Invalid Specialty Dungeon. It's pretty large and will take three to four hours to clear completely."

"And I wanted lunch before doing anything else, but you ran off into a Dungeon."

"We'll get meat, don't worry," I tell him. "Something is going to drop some. Besides, we had dinner right before we killed the ugly dude, and it seems like our bodies are at that stage. It's not even been two hours."

"Normally, you're the one who'd say something like 'I've been dead for a thousand years, I need food', yet here I am-"

"Oh, you're absolutely right, I haven't eaten in a thousand years," I tell him. "I just think that we could cook up a better meal with whatever drops in here and whatever we find as we walk than what those lame-ohs would make."

Kyron starts to respond to that, then sighs.

"Fair point."

Kyron and I continue walking, taking on group after group of boars. We don't walk in a straight line, but instead, travel in a shifting pattern. This allows us to take on more boars, rather than the fewer we'll face if we just walk straight-on toward the eastern edge of the Dungeon. Before we even reach the first boulders this way, I've gained my first Level.

+0.28% Experience! You have reached Level 1! Increases have been applied.

That's 25 Mana, 0.010 Mana Regen, 1 Magic, 1 Luck, and 1 Vitality. On my next Level, I'll gain the same amount of all of those, plus 1 Strength, 1 Constitution, and 1 Agility. This is how I'll gain points every odd and every even Level, respectively.

As the terrain shifts to include boulders in the plains, we start to encounter new monsters as well. The first of them are deer which conjure [Stone Bolt]s to shoot at us, and those are trickier for us to defeat because they have a tendency to dash a little further away if we get too close.

Fortunately, they aren't too fast for us and I don't need my staff for everything. I know spells that can travel further than one foot per 1 Magic. Thrusting my right hand forward, I cast [Air Arrow] and gain the spell's Skill. Made up of compressed air, the conjured arrow is nearly completely invisible, only able to be spotted by those perceptive enough to notice the slight warping of the air.

My arrow shoots forward at a high speed and pierces into the right foreleg of one of the deer.

"Tch!"

"Where were you aiming?" Kyron asks.

"It's head," I answer. "I hate this spell!"

It travels fast and can travel up to 4 feet per 1 Magic before the magically-conjured air loses its compressed state and turns to just normal air instead of solid, but it has one major flaw. Aiming it is significantly more difficult if one isn't using a bow.

"Aim for the bodies, you dolt!" Kyron snorts. "Much larger target."

Grumbling, I try to hit the trio of deer several more times as they continue to shoot at us. Kyron's put away his sword and is focusing on striking their [Stone Bolt]s out of the air to defend me as I cast. Once I've managed to disable all of the deer, Kyron approaches and kills them with his sword.

"Hey, we got meat!" He calls to me.

"How much?"

"Just one deer steak," he responds.

"Let's wait for a second," I tell him. "And don't forget to start-"

"Looking for magical herbs and plants," he says. "I know, Cay. The terrain's changed a little, which means we can find those now."

As a Tier Invalid Specialty Dungeon, the herbs and magical plants we'll find won't be worth too much outside, but often make for nice cooking ingredients. Kyron and I skim the ground as we keep an eye out for monsters, and by the time we receive a second steak, we have some herbs and vegetables to go with the steaks.

Since we don't have cooking tools or wood, I use one of the boulders as a cutting board to chop herbs that I then rub into the meat. Or at least, I start to, but Kyron grabs my hand as I go to cut some with the [Air Blade], a small knife of compressed air, that I conjured.

"Caleb," Kyron says with a stern tone. "You are absolutely not going to be cooking with a poisonous herb."

"It's not that poisonous," I say. "And the poison cooks out, anyway."

"I'm not trusting it if we aren't doing this with a proper cooking setup," he says. "No. Absolutely not."

"But-"

"A proper cooking setup ensures that we avoid cross-contamination," Kyron says. "That any of the residue from the poison doesn't get onto the food after it's cooked. We don't have that here, and our Constitution is too low to fully resist even a low-level poison like this one."

I return the herb in question to my ring, and Kyron promptly pulls the herb out and puts them into his ring. He actually pulled all of the herb out, not just the bit that I was going to use for our meal.

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

Since Kyron has no objections to the rest of my seasonings, I finish the rub for the meat, then start searing it using conjured fire for the heat and air magic to suspend it in the air. Cooking it on a grill or skillet would be preferred, but since I don't have one of those, this is the best way. It also cooks it faster, as I can simply cover the entire thing in flames.

Kyron and I conjure [Air Blade]s to cut the meat, and just pick up the pieces with our fingers. Once we finish, we conjure water to clean our hands, then continue on our way to the eastern edge of the Dungeon.

After another couple thousand feet, the boulders begin to grow more frequent. Originally, they were more than a hundred feet apart, but they start being closer together, reaching only fifty feet apart in some cases after another two thousand feet. This is where Kyron and I start growing more cautious.

Even though we're both now Level 4. Though one gains less Experience from the "same" monster after gaining a Level, that doesn't work as well here. The monsters in a Specialty Dungeon gradually grow more powerful the more monsters which are killed inside of it. Because of that, we're not facing monsters that are the "same" as others that look identical – we're facing stronger variants of them.

Fortunately, the regular boulders makes it more difficult for the boars to charge, and it's resulted in them not appear as much anymore. We do, however, have to start looking out for snakes that blend into the boulders. Those keep us walking as much between boulders as possible, to give us an earlier awareness should any attack us.

Since they're still weak enough, I just use [Fire Bolt] from the staff to kill them, and Kyron cuts any that survive and draw too close to us.

"While I'm happy that I've reached Level 5 now," Kyron says after killing one such snake for the umpteenth time. "Which is phenomenal, by the way-"

"And only because it's a Specialty Dungeon," I say. "If we were in a regular Tier I Dungeon, we'd not have a chance of going above Level 5 by the end of it."

"Yes, I know," Kyron says. "Monsters growing tougher and all that. Anyway, while I'm happy that I've reached Level 5, those are rock clusters, and that makes me nervous."

"You? Nervous?" I scoff. "You just don't want to go into martial arts against monsters made of stone with only 65 Mana and 12 Magic."

Clusters of rocks in a rocky area like this means that some of them will be earth elementals – monsters made of several rocks. The only way to deal with those would be the same way we'd deal with breaking any rocks: brute force. I could manage it with some [Air Bolt]s or [Ice Bolt]s, but earth-based magics will be completely ineffective against them. Monsters made up of an element either absorb it or are completely unaffected by it.

Magic doesn't have to be fair, and people aren't the only ones who can utilize that.

"Right," he says. "Because at the moment, I don't have enough Mana Regen to make up the cost of any spells that would help me, and I'm not physically strong enough to take on any of them after we've killed this many monsters in here. Doing that would be stupid, and we didn't kill a Demon King by being stupid."

"You put all of the antlers that dropped into your ring, gimme one."

"Why?"

"Because I'll just take it out if you don't."

Kyron rolls his eyes and hands me one of the antlers that dropped, then I tell him to help me make sure a boulder is clear of monsters. Once we clear it, I pull out some of the leather that dropped from a boar and get to work. Instead of pestering me like he did back when we first met, Kyron keeps watch to make sure nothing attacks while I focus on this. A little earth magic allows me to create a mortar and pestle, water magic helps me produce some water, and fire magic allows me to heat up the mixture.

Using stuff that we found or which dropped, not the leather. As the concoction cools, I hold a blue, quarter-inch monster core over the bowl and infuse it with a touch of my magic in a way that shatters it. The shards quickly turn to dust as they fall, and I mix that into the creation before setting it to the side to finish cooling. As that cools, I finish cutting the leather into various strips and pieces, then begin marking on it using an ink I create using more ingredients we've found and another broken monster core.

Once the solution finishes cooling, I treat the cuts of leather I produced with it, soaking it in before pulsing with my Mana to make sure it sets. The next step is making the final product. It's not my best of work, but it will do for our purposes. If I had a day or two, I could make nearly-identical goods of a much higher quality.

I examine the right-hand glove that I created. It looks simple in appearance since I didn't decorate it or anything, and it lacks fingers mostly because I think that looks cool on Kyron.

[Glove of Great Impact] Grade: Minor This boarskin glove has been treated to enhance their durability. A punch made while wearing these delivers extra force.

Unlike magic items that cast spells with a trigger, these gloves don't have a uses counter. Instead, they'll last and deliver the additional force until the gloves wear out and break. Passive magic versus active magic, and all that.

"Non-elemental?" Kyron asks as I hand the pair of gloves to him. "How did you do that? I know I saw you using a couple of earth monster cores. Doesn't that always enchant with the element of earth?"

"No," I answer. "I just don't usually bother changing things because it reduces the effects and isn't as fun. I utilized the earth element within those cores to enhance their durability. Basically, it's like punching with a stone wall, but without any stone actually being there."

"That's pretty neat," he says. "I've known you for almost five years now, and I'm still learning more about your abilities and talents. Then again, I'm also apparently still learning about your major activities. What did you do with a volcano, and how old were you?"

"Time to kill more monsters!"

I ignore the strangling motion that Kyron makes at me in favor of walking forward. The first of the rock clusters is another two hundred feet from here, and the boulders are down to no more than twenty feet apart by the time we reach it. Disappointingly, it's not an earth elemental.

That's another thing about the rock clusters – only some of them will be earth elementals. Without us knowing which ones, we have to be cautious of all of them. Well, normal people have to be cautious, but I know that Kyron and I can handle any that come our way.

The first elemental we come across is around three feet in height and made up of about twenty stones of varying sizes, including the ones for its legs and arms. Most of them are for those, actually – it has four making up each limb, two for its body, one for its head, and one that floats around it.

I initiate the fight before it can launch its first spell, throwing an [Air Bolt] at the elemental. It immediately conjures four more stones to float around it, using those as shields. Having encountered elementals enough to know they do that, I'd already begun casting more.

Unfortunately, the damage to our souls from the sacrifice we made has affected my Mana-shaping somewhat, and I can only cast two spells simultaneously. Two proper spells, that is – simple creation/manipulation bursts like I did outside of the Dungeon don't count. In the seven years from when I gained the ability to use magic and the time I burned the life energies within my soul to kill the Great Demon King, I had built up the ability to cast more than two thousand spells at once.

Hopefully, it doesn't take me that long again.

My [Air Bolt]s impact the stone elemental's protective rocks, and it occasionally summons and launches smaller, fast-moving stones at me. As I'm within fifteen feet of the monster as I need to be for these spells, the speed at which those fly at me is dangerous.

Thankfully, I'm able to strike most of them out of the air with [Air Bolt]s, and the ones I can't will only leave some bruising. So long as I'm not hit by too many, that's all they'll do, too.

The stone elemental suddenly stumbles toward me, and its head starts to turn to face Kyron, who'd snuck up behind it and punched it. He's going for another punch, and the stone elemental starts to move stones to block the attack – just in time for my next pair of [Air Bolt]s to fly at it. Kyron's strike lands, and the elemental struggles to keep up with our attacks now that we've caught it off-guard.

+14.72% Experience!

All of the stones making up the elemental and which it has floating around in a defensive formation fall to the ground, the life of the monster gone now. The high amount of Experience compared to before is due to several factors. First, that fight was more difficult than the others we've had so far. Second, I was using my actual magic for it, instead of a magic item. Third, I did most of the work here.

I plop myself onto a boulder as I let out a long breath and stare up at the clear blue sky.

"Have you ever wondered where the light comes from in a Dungeon without sun and yet is just as bright as a normal sunny day?"

"How wounded are you?"

"I think it had around 10 Magic," I answer. "So it's a little less than I'd have been if it was stronger. We've managed to kill enough to raise the monsters up 5 Power. Stone elementals also naturally have a high Constitution, and it seems like it was around 13 Constitution, by my estimates."

The monsters we've been fighting in this area have had 10-11 Constitution, and the jump isn't because of how many monsters we've killed so far. No, it's because of what I said – stone elementals simply have naturally-higher Constitution values.

Since we're nearly to the edge of this side of the Dungeon, a "tougher monster" appears. For this part, it's the stone elemental.

"How much Mana did you use?" Kyron asks as he picks up the loot.

"50 Mana total," I answer. "But the fight took long enough I already recovered some, so about thirteen minutes for a full recovery. What's the loot?"

"Hold on."

Kyron walks over to me, then pulls a couple of items out of his ring. One of them is a brownish-grey monster core that's half an inch in diameter, the largest we've received so far. Not just a larger monster core, but an elemental one as well. I didn't expect anything less than that and the brownish-grey earth crystal that dropped as well.

"Don't look so disappointed that's all that dropped," Kyron tells me. "That's normal for their drops. Are we going to wait for a full recovery, or try to kill another elemental?"

"Based on this fight," I tell him. "We'll be able to handle two more elementals before I need to rest. That's factoring in some rest time on using Mana between the fights as I can still use the staff for the other monsters around here, unless something unexpected happens. How much Mana did you use up for the fight?"

Even if his gloves were enchanted, they wouldn't have reduced his Experience too much, as their effect isn't strong enough to make a massive difference. Small, but still a little significant. No, Kyron definitely used either [Enchant: Air] on his fists while fighting to add an elemental advantage to his attacks or [Air Impact] to add a burst of air magic when he struck, in the direction of the strike, coming from the strike.

That basically means that he punches twice with every punch, though the gloves only add on to the impact of the punch itself.

Though we were technically "just hitting rocks", we were hitting an elemental, a type of monster made up of that magic. Just as its own element will either do absolutely nothing to it or be absorbed by it, its opposing element will deal additional damage. That's not something that would happen with, say, the boars – it's unique to monsters made up of the element.

For the most part, but the exceptions aren't usually notable.

"I used [Air Impact]," he tells me. "[Enchant: Air] didn't seem like the best of ideas at the moment, since it would do less damage against these with my current Magic. Ten strikes in total."

At its base cost, [Air Impact] uses 3 Mana, so he used up 30 Mana. That's the same ratio as me – a third of his current maximum. That will take him more than sixteen minutes to recover. One good thing about Kyron, however, is that he knows how to adjust. The only reason it took him ten hits with [Air Impact] was no doubt because he was just figuring out how his punches fare at his much-lower Strength than he's used to.

"So we can do two more, then," I say. "For both of us. Let's do that, then rest until we recover to full, then go to empty again and head back to the entrance."

Since we'll be looking for stuff to harvest and bring out with us on top of fighting monsters, we'll actually spend more time between elemental fights, too. That will only add to how much Mana we've recovered.

"Alright," Kyron nods.

I return to my feet and we set off to locate another earth elemental, since those give us the most Experience here. We kill a few monsters, and during our fifty-minute rest, I cook us a small meal using just one of the deer steaks that has dropped. The further we travel, however, the fewer deer there are here, slowly transitioning to just elementals and the snakes.

The fifth of the six elementals we're going up drops something different. More specifically, it drops something additional. Instead of just the earth monster core and the earth crystal, the fifth stone elemental also drops a stone rose. Its petals are thin and delicate, and Kyron carefully places it into his ring.

We got lucky there – a flower drop from a stone elemental is a one-in-ten thousand chance with our Luck. That's what Luck affects – monster drops in Dungeons, and nothing else. I'm actually happy with the drop, too, since I was planning on coming back here after we got stronger and just [Air Bomb]ing the area until I got one.

Might still do that in the hopes of getting another.

"Woo!" I exclaim once we finish the sixth elemental. "Look, Kyron! The edge of the Dungeon!"

A Dungeon of this style is just a large, circular piece of land. This one is only a few miles across, though they can be any size. One we went in shortly after reaching Mythical-Tier was over a thousand miles in diameter.

In a Dungeon with a clearly-defined edge like this, the ground simply disappears and the space below is just a black void that the ground of the platform disappears into. Back in our era, people researched Dungeon Edges as extensively as they dared, in the hopes of finding out if there was something there.

They dropped items, lowered items, even lowered people. If they lowered something enough, the item they were using to lower them would severe and the person would disappear forever. I'm not entirely sure why that happened, but I hope that after a thousand years, people know that the void is just a shortcut.

"Caleb, don't-"

Kyron's voice disappears as I fall into the void. Everything except myself and the stuff on me disappears from view, leaving in me in blackness. That lasts all of three seconds however, then I find myself falling toward the ground from about twenty feet above.

I twist my body and thrust my hands toward the ground, manipulating the air to catch my fall before I crash into the ground. It takes up the last of my Mana, but the air successfully saves me.

"Like landing on a cushion cloud!" I proclaim after bouncing off and landing on my feet.

I'm now back at the Dungeon's entrance, the runes on its frame glowing crimson instead of blue. That's a sign that the entrance is closed, but that doesn't worry me too much since I know that no matter how strong the monsters in here get, Kyron and I will kill anything that gets in our way.

"Hi, Kyron!" I wave to my husband as he suddenly drops out of the sky, and he lands in a roll, quickly springing to his feet.

"You really need to stop jumping like that."

"I'm really disappointed," I tell him. "Short falls like this one has aren't very fun."

"Let's just rest up," Kyron says. "You've taken quite a few hits from those golems, and I can tell you're more out of Mana than I am."

"Sure!" I plop onto the grass. "My body is really sore from taking all of those hits. Can you give me a massage?"

Kyron snorts, then tells me to take off my robe and lie on my stomach.

"Woo! First massage in a thousand years!"