Thomas's legs swept in an arc while his body somersaulted midair and his left foot struck a frogman's face with precision. The repulsive brown creature shot backward from the force, spiraling wildly before splatting against the distant wall of the rock cavern.

A group of thirty more frog creatures leaped toward Thomas without hesitation, haphazardly jabbing at him with their poisonous spears. He responded instantly by flinging his right arm in a circular motion, making horizontal circles in the air. Each whirl of his arm conjured a blazing white crescent of purified mana, humming with power, that spun away into the frogmen in a flash of light. Each crescent sliced through bone and sinew, sometimes bisecting the entire torso of the poor monsters. Many of the spinning scythes of death shot straight through the beasts, before blasting into smoky remains on the wall.

As Thomas defeated the first wave of frogmen, a second wave of stubbier toad-like soldiers rushed him. There were about a hundred of them, each carrying a spiked club and a grim face full of malice. Beyond the soldiers, Thomas saw toad archers lining up to launch a volley of what appeared to be poison-tipped bone arrows.

He sighed. Sometimes all the non-stop action was fun. Other times it was just a grind. Today was going to be a grind day.

He concentrated briefly, thickening the mana coating over his skin to several additional layers deep. Then he conjured a tall barrier of mana that hovered behind him, curving around to each flank. The battle could go downhill fast if any of these slippery bastards were clever enough to get behind him. Fortunately, Thomas’s wall moved as he did, rotating to perfectly protect his flanks every time he faced a different direction. It had taken him months to figure out how to do that.

Next, Thomas stretched forward his arms and vented physical mana from his hands to form two double-edged swords. Each one was needle-thin and wide as a man, extending out to thirty feet, then forty, then finally fifty feet long. By this time, the horde of squatty frogmen was practically on top of him. He started swinging with wild abandon, each immense blade slicing through the monsters effortlessly. The blades were near-weightless, and he felt virtually no resistance when they met a foe. The only defense that could have possibly stopped them would be an equivalent shield made of mana, which these pitiful creatures didn’t have. He was ruthlessly exploiting a glaring weakness of these frogmen. They had numbers and they had poison. But they didn’t stand a chance of stopping Thomas’s blades. He cut through them like butter.

What was “butter” again?

He would have to ask Tyrek later.

It was a complete massacre, as always. Thomas danced through the small horde like an acrobatic menace, while bodies and limbs flew in a macabre deluge of blood and bone. Occasionally, an errant spearhead or arrow would strike his skin, but the invisible coating of wild mana protected him better than a full suit of mithril armor. It was stronger than steel, more flexible than leather, and as lightweight as air itself. Lethal strikes were turned into glancing blows that didn’t even warrant his attention.

When only three frogmen remained, Thomas slowed his attacks. He was perfecting a new technique where he could siphon mana from any monster he was in contact with. It was still too slow to use in full combat, but three of these frogmen were no threat to him.

He knocked back two of the trio, while using one hand to grapple the leg of the third, and immediately started draining it. The creature’s leg shriveled in an instant, the skin crackling and puffing dust into the air as the muscles dehydrated. Thomas looked up at the frogman’s face and saw it was already dead.

Hmm, how long was that? Two seconds?

The final pair of frogmen jabbed in with their poisonous spears, one from either side, thinking they had Thomas flanked. But Thomas had predicted their move long in advance and merely knocked their spears away by windmilling his arms. He then grabbed one of the frogmen by both its wrists, before siphoning away with all his might. A heartbeat later, two desiccated arms cracked loose from the monster’s torso, which then fell to the floor, dead.

Without warning, Thomas’s battle-tuned danger sense rang in his ears. He leaped to the side, the last frogman lunging at where he had been a moment earlier. He slapped it on the neck with his siphon fully activated, mid-strike, and his arm came away with the creature’s head in his hand.

This ability is totally badass.

Since every monster in the dungeon was essentially a mana construct, his siphon would work on them all. It was the ultimate overpowered ability for combatting dungeon creatures. Now, if he could only get it to work from a distance. Then he could sit around and drink tea, while he cleared dungeon rooms!

Not that he had any tea to drink. Or even knew what it was, to be honest.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

“Hmph. Is it just me, or are there way more of these little buggas than usual?” said a gruff voice from the cavern entrance.

Tyrek stood there, dragging the stretcher with his father lying within.

Thomas scratched the back of his head with one hand. “Yeah, they were feisty, all right. Let’s see what they were guarding.”

He walked around to the far edge of the cavern wall, where the frogmen typically took up residence, from what he remembered. There were several primitive mud huts, lined in a row, with the more prominent chief’s hut at the end. Hanging from the roof edge of this final hut was a small wicker cage, holding a fluffy white monster about as long as Thomas’s forearm.

“What have we got here? Hey there, little friend. Why did they have you trapped like this, I wonder?” The monster looked at Thomas, a little dubiously. Then, when Thomas lifted the cage from its hook, it made a sharp noise with its jaws and started furiously wagging its tail.

At first glance, the cage was nothing remarkable. It was only when Thomas focused intently, ramping up the mana sensitivity in his vision, that he could see the special liquid that covered the bars, blocking all magic. The swirling wild mana streams from the dungeon were actively diverted around the cage, rather than blowing straight through it.

He lifted the cage to his face and looked the creature in the eyes. It panted with its tongue out to the side, and its beady countenance seemed to hold a trace of intelligence.

“If I let you out of there, you have to promise not to kill me. Agreed?”

“Hah!” Tyrek snorted a laugh from across the cavern. “I bet you five silver it bites yer nose off!”

His bet didn’t have any real threat to it because nobody in their dwindling trio kept coins anymore. They were utterly useless in the dungeon and amounted to nothing more than dead weight. But that didn’t stop Tyrek from placing fictitious bets on random things every other day. It made Thomas think he must have been quite the gambler in his previous life, before the dungeon. Thomas invariably played along.

“You’re on, you cowardly pansy!” taunted Thomas, before turning to the monster. “Okay there, little friend, you’re free now,” he said, lifting the gate at the end of the cage.

The fluffy white monster shot out of the cage and immediately began to run around in a circle, jumping up and down and wagging its tail. It was making that sharp noise again, although it didn’t seem like an attack. Perhaps it was just excited to be free.

Thomas stood with his hands on his hips, appraising the beast. It was clearly an aberration of the dungeon. Aberrations were rare and seemed to occur when the calculating rules of the dungeon collided with the unpredictable randomness of wild mana. The end result was an oddity of uncharacteristic weirdness that was far outside the norm, even for a monster dungeon.

This creature, for example, didn’t resemble anything Thomas had ever seen. Its camouflage was frankly pathetic. The pristine white fur, although beautiful, made it an easy target. He couldn’t think of a single floor in the dungeon where fur like that might be an advantage. It simply made no sense and he didn’t trust it for one second. With camouflage as terrible as that, it was probably poisonous or evolved into a crazed nether beast of dark and terrible magic. That was how the dungeon worked. It lured you into a false sense of security, then spat on your shattered corpse.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Tyrek. “You know what that is, boy?”

Thomas shook his head. He didn’t want to get his hopes up too much. He had a feeling he was about to be disappointed.

“I can’t believe it! You’ve gone and gotten yerself a dog! A DOG!” Tyrek leaned back and laughed out loud. “The fluffiest white dog in the deadliest dungeon on the continent! Oh, Fate does have a sense of humor!”

Tyrek began to guffaw, holding his sides and shaking. This made the dog even more excited, its tail wagging even faster. Suddenly, it teleported to a shadow at the cavern’s edge, then teleported to another shadow, then another. In no time at all, it was bouncing around the chamber, from shadow to shadow, in the blink of an eye.

“The little bugger can even shadow-blink!” Tyrek shouted, laughing even louder now. He was starting to completely lose control and had to sit down to collect himself as tears of laughter started pouring out of his eyes.

“Why does it keep making that noise?” Thomas asked, his excitement waning. If Tyrek was laughing this hard, the monster must be a total waste of time. He just didn’t understand what was so funny. The shadow-blink ability alone seemed absolutely amazing.

“It’s what they do, son,” said Robert, limping to his side. He gave Thomas a reassuring pat on the shoulder after seeing his confused frown. “Don’t worry, Thomas, this is good. Dogs are wonderful companions. This little ball of fluff will soon become a close friend of yours. I’m sure of it.”

“Then why is Tyrek laughing so hard?” Thomas asked, still skeptical.

“Because it is white and fluffy and so decidedly un-monster-like,” Robert said. “It is like an aberration of aberrations. It’s the last thing anyone would expect to find on floor seventy of a prison dungeon. It’s like someone is playing a cosmic joke on us, here in our little secret corner of the world.” Robert’s eyes twinkled as he looked at his son.

Thomas strode over to the hyper little dog and proffered some charred meat from his pocket. It wasn’t the best fare, by any standards, but it was what Thomas was used to. He had eaten charred monster meat his entire life.

The dog looked up at Thomas’s face briefly, as if checking that he was serious, before snatching the meat away and blinking to the shadows.

He tossed a few more pieces onto the floor. “I’m not sure if you understand me, but there’s plenty more meat where that came from if you follow me around for a little while.”

A few minutes later, the little dog blinked to Thomas’s side, trotting beside him with its stubby little legs. He held out more burned meat before it could change its mind and it furiously wagged its tail again. This dungeon aberration was turning out to be very interesting.