“My phone is out of battery.”
All the anticipation shifted to anger. “Ask your friend then,” Victor hissed with unconcealed rage.
“Yo, John, can you search if a man called Victor Harrison died? No, I am not a mob boss… No, I didn’t kill him. Just search for it, you idiot. Ah, give it here.” Sound of rustling and a few grunts. “Errr, boss, was this Victor Harrison guy a famous singer?”
“No.”
“Politician?”
“No.”
“Scientist?”
“No, he was a nobody living in London.”
“What’s a London?”
“A city in the United Kingdom, a country. Use that in the search.”
“Okay…” Time stretched on for a while before he answered. “Yup, nothing.”
Victor had no idea how to take the information. Did that mean he was still alive or dead? He wasn’t famous when he was alive, so it made sense if his death didn’t appear on the front page of Google. “Can you search a death registry?”
“Boss, I’ll be honest…I only learned what Google was yesterday. I ain’t got a bloody clue how to use this thing.”
Victor had honestly had enough of this subordinate. Although he had a lot of points to spend, wasting any more on this pointless conversation irked him. “All right, never mind then. Stay safe. I may come to visit you sometime.” He didn’t wait for the moron’s response and hung up. Even if that idiot gets captured by the US government, it should be fine. If he can survive being reduced to atoms, then what can Earth scientists do to him?
Then, with a sigh, he skimmed the endless gray dunes. If Victor woke up here, he would have thought he had traveled back in time before the dinosaurs, when the whole planet was covered in volcanos and seas of lava. But he knew where he was, underground in a magical dome that made no fucking sense with dragons above and unknown biomes and creatures below. Well, that phone call was useless. But, in a way, the fact it was inconclusive gave him some piece of mind. Dead or not, he was here now, and he might as well make the most of it until Terry worked out how his darn phone worked.
Victor winced when he saw that he had spent over a million stat points on that conversation. “It’s fine. I have another sixty million in the bank and plenty more monsters to slaughter.” But that was for another time; he needed to let the silly, fleshy beings take a well-deserved rest right now. “Or I could go ahead. There is really no need to wait for them…” He looked below his feet that hovered a meter above the gray sand. A depression in the sand showed the presence of his favorite pet. There was something special about Wiggles. Perhaps it was because he reconstructed him from the ground up, giving Wiggles a much stronger connection to him than all his other undead. It also helped that Wiggles didn’t have great intelligence, and it actually obeyed all his commands to the best of its ability. Unlike his human undead, who all seem to mess up his orders on purpose or through sheer incompetence.
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“Wiggles, go venture to the next floor and keep going. Keep me posted through the mental link on anything interesting.” Wiggles was on par with a Senior dragon in strength. Apart from the harsh environments, the monsters were numerous but relatively weak individually. Except that leviathan we encountered a few floors ago. The funny thing is Wiggles is far larger, so when he swam through the ocean floors, the leviathans avoided him as if he was the ocean’s apex predator. When Wiggles was underground or only showed the tip of his head, it was hard to appreciate how titanic and menacing he was. But with the ocean allowing for a full view, his neon-green flesh and enormous circular mouth lined with rows of human-size teeth made him look like some kind of eldritch horror awoken from the darkest depths.
The ground rumbled, and Victor watched as gray dunes crumbled and boulders scattered as the earthworm made its way to the tower in the distance. Although we set ourselves up halfway across this floor, it will take Wiggles a full day at maximum speed to reach the next tower… Due to the insane distance between each floor’s tower and the fact it was only increasing, Victor was starting to doubt if the stories of Delvers making it to the last floor were true. For a normal human to get as far as we have, it would have taken at least a year… And that wasn’t even the main issue.
Genus mentioned that human-made products only lasted so long in the mana-rich environment before degrading. So how would a Delving party get past the first twenty floors without a food supply? The graveyard floors had swamps but absolutely nothing with any meat or fruits. The ocean floors had edible sea monsters but only seawater to drink.
Victor thought about Alice. He suspected she was currently at a decent level for a human to reach, and she survived a few days without food and water and seemed fine upon waking up. Back on Earth, a human would die after three days without drinking water, but she was only a little parched. Is that the effect of mana or stat points? Perhaps she invested a lot of points in her CON stat? But even with the help of skills, I don’t see how it’s possible…unless there’s a class specializing in assisting a Delving party during long trips? He chuckled at the thought of a person whose sole job was to conjure food and water out of mana. Hahaha, a food mage! They must exist! He added the quest to confirm if food mages were real to his ever-growing list of plans to interact with humans or visit a human city.
“Well, once I conquer this dungeon, I’m going to head back to the surface, shove a Doom Ray up any dragon’s arse that opposes me, and put that Genus fellow on the throne, and if he doesn’t do as I say, he can have a Doom Ray up his arse, too.” Victor almost shook in excitement. If the first twenty floors gave him sixty million stat points, what would his stat sheet say after the hundredth floor? “Maybe I could destroy the planet with a maximum-power Doom Ray with all my points shoved into it… That’s a scary thought.”
Honestly, at this point, his falling stats problem was almost laughable. Assuming he encountered no more issues, he should have centuries of lifeforce by the end of this dungeon. Then he would have time to explore the world and find a permanent solution, if one existed.
“Maybe this new life ain’t so bad after all.” Victor chuckled as he went to find his minions. Wait, my minions. A cold feeling rippled in his chest. The phrase it’s lonely at the top played through his mind. “Okay, add making some companions to my growing list.” But, to be fair, he had only been in this world a few months and had killed almost everything he had come across so far. “Just another reason to interact with civilization soon. Should I put more effort into my avatar and use it to adventure with Alice? Or perhaps I could use an undead as my emissary?”
Alas, these were questions for the future…a future that looked a lot brighter with every passing day. “Who would have thought having overwhelming power could be this fun?”