Overall, Cal was a fan of her new class.
Sure, there were some hiccups along the way. Gods only knew how much she missed her old Dexterity. She was confident that she’d eventually be sundering the class if they ever escaped the dungeon, too.
For all that was true, there was something to be said for simply walking up to an enemy and cleaving it in two. While it had never been her intention to take a pure combat class, more and more, she could understand the appeal. Cal was also fairly certain that she’d made the right choice of class, with her new skills being ideal for most of the enemies she’d faced so far.
Unfortunately, for all that she was enjoying moonlighting as a battle-hardened warrior, there was one glaring con to the Indefatigable Onslaught class. Opening up her class quests, Cal scrolled through them with a scowl.
Naturally recover 1000hp in a single battle.
+ 2 Class Points
+5000xp
…
Slay 100 worthy foes in a single, uninterrupted fight
+ 2 Class Points
+5000xp
…
Fight uninterrupted for over an hour
+ 2 Class Points
+5000xp
Altogether, they weren’t that bad! They weren’t. Cal had the Endurance for a long, protracted battle, and with her class skills, her recovery was even more impressive. An hour of straight fighting wasn’t exactly her idea of a good time, but provided she was doing the ass kicking instead of getting her ass kicked, she didn’t really mind.
So why aren’t there any places for me to actually fight that long!
She’d tried. She had! But this gods-forsaken dungeon flat-out refused to help her out! No matter how many scorpions Cal collected, no matter how many gryphons she taunted, the battles were always over far too quickly. The only fight she could recall that could have actually helped out was the unending army of undead in the desert crypt. Regrettably, that had been before she changed classes, and as best they could tell, it was a one time deal.
In the end, the answer was as simple as it was bothersome.
Cal needed a new region. Certainly, in a dungeon this big, there had to be at least one area with a swarm-type enemy, right? There had to be! All she had to do was hunt it down, a task to which she was ideally suited.
Unfortunately, the dungeon wasn’t making it easy for her. Already, she’d scouted out a good deal of the surrounding regions they hadn’t hit, aided by the far-reaching views from the peaks of the mountain region. Not having found anything so far, Cal was beginning to accept she’d have to start ranging farther out.
And so, that was today’s goal. Rather than slogging away and fighting a horde of gryphons again, Cal had decided to find something new. Venturing in one of the few directions she’d yet to really check out, she was leisurely strolling along the shore, where the ocean met the mountains.
And if there’s nothing exciting after these regions end, then I can just keep going. Even without her Apex Shroud, it wasn’t as if there was much danger if she kept to a biome’s periphery, right? Pretty much none of the regions she’d been to had any sort of dangers on the far outskirts.
In fact, if I level up enough, maybe I can just cheat and get us out of here in a few weeks. Why bother slowly cutting through endless monster-infested death traps? If she stuck to the edges of each region and refused to enter any of them, she could hopefully walk right up to the four mana collection sites and free Sett all by herself!
“Easy. And then the other two will owe me so much that I’ll hire Tess as a personal chef for a few years, and Verin… Well, I don’t know what I’d make Verin do.” She was supposed to be some incredible artist, but she’d barely drawn a single thing in all the time that Cal had known her. “Bears some thought. I’m sure there’s something she’s good for.”
But yes! As soon as Cal perfected her cheating strategy, they would all be out of here in a heartbeat.
It was right then when the world around her shifted.
One moment, all she could see was the endless shoreline and towering mountains. The very next, the ground grew barren, an empty expanse of cracked and desiccated earth.
“Um. That’s a new one for me.” Had she stumbled upon an illusion region? Somehow, that didn’t feel correct.
Twisting about, she sighed in relief as she spotted the same shore she’d been traveling down. Even if the environment had taken a complete 180, it wasn’t as if she’d actually been teleported somewhere far away.
Still, there was definitely some sort of spatial shenanigans going on. To her left, the new region cleanly bisected large rocks, and to the right, it extended into the water, the dusty earth seeming to float atop the ocean. It was as if two entirely separate places were occupying the same location at once, a fairly trippy experience even for her.
“Sort of cool. If it is an illusion, maybe something I should snag Tess for.” Cal did want to scout out any new regions, but this one was already weird enough for her to call in the cavalry. “Bye, new region! See you tomorrow, hopefully.”
Thus said, Cal confidently took a step out of the wastelands.
Only to slam her head against an invisible barrier.
“Ow. What gives?” Reaching out, Cal probed at the space before her, finding that it entirely rebuffed her, even when she fully activated her Apex Shroud. “That’s… less than good. System, you have anything to say about this, or am I supposed to figure it out on my own?”
As if waiting for her to ask, a notification popped up, eliciting a curse from Cal.
You have been inflicted with the Curse of Confinement!
Until the curse is lifted, you are unable to leave your current location.
You have received a quest!
Transgressor
You have attempted to cut through the dungeon, avoiding its challenges by refusing to properly venture into any of its regions. Please be aware that there are no paths forward without a challenge. While you may sneak directly through a region or exit a region without defeating its boss, further attempts to entirely bypass an uncleared region via burrowing, flying, or skirting its perimeter, will result in escalating punishments.
Requirements:
Lift your curse and escape the region.
Rewards:
+1000xp
You get to live.
Even before she was done reading, Cal raised her hands to the sky with a shout. “Are we serious? How was I supposed to know? Let me off with a warning and stop being a dick about it!”
When her words were met with nothing but silence, Cal sadly had to conclude that no help was forthcoming. Taking stock of her situation, she scowled at the notification preceding her new quest.
A curse? Seriously? With her Apex Shroud, Cal could ignore a wide array of impediments and attacks, but the skill couldn’t generally remove existing debuffs from her. A curse was just about the worst case scenario.
“Well, whatever. Something has to be fueling it, right?” While Cal didn’t like to bring it up every five seconds like a particular high noble she knew, she was a princess. With how frequently royals and nobility tended to run afoul of curse magic, her royal tutors had drilled the basics of curses into her at a young age.
At the lower levels, most curses without set durations had to be actively maintained by a caster or a cursed object. Ergo, all she needed to do was find said caster or object and smash it to bits.
Taking in her surroundings once more, Cal noted just how similar her environs were to the deadlands surrounding Tess’s settlement. Not an overly pleasant place, but thankfully, her version was much smaller, and if she strained her vision, Cal thought she could see the end in the distance.
As for spotting anything else… No luck.
“Probably in the middle. That feels right, right?” Thus said, Cal ventured forth.
Unfortunately, she didn’t make it very far.
No sooner had she taken a single step than the ground around her shuddered.
Readying herself for battle, Cal immediately channeled her mana into the ring Tal’ket had rewarded her with. A massive feather materialized in her hands, its mottled white and jade-green coloring making it as stunning to behold as it was deadly.
Chicken Scratch
Boost the effects of all mana enhancement abilities. Mana channeled into this sword will increase its sharpness, adding cutting winds and air damage to all attacks.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
Armed and ready, Cal went entirely invisible and dashed to the side as she surveyed the ground from a distance.
What’s it going to be? Worms? Moles? Uh, some other burrowing monster I can’t think of right now?
As it turned out, the answer was something far stranger. Seemingly immune from the omnipresent lighting of the dungeon, the deep cracks and furrows in the earth were filled with dark shadows. As Cal watched, those shadows began to writhe and quiver.
The darkness took on an almost liquid quality, turning the jagged divots into rivers as it flowed along them. From these ominous waterways, small, inky orbs ascended into the air. As if molded by some invisible sculptor, the orbs began to shift, growing and growing while sprouting legs and tails and mangy heads.
By the time the transformation was complete, five, fully formed hyenas stood where once she’d been. Not entirely solid, they had a particular ethereal quality to them, skirting the line between translucency and opacity. Patches of gray and purple dotted their skin in a manner that made them look diseased, and where their oily spittle hit the ground, it hissed and sizzled.
With her own Identify skill hobbled from changing classes, all Cal got when she looked at them was a name: Cursed Hyena.
I mean. Seems about right.
The real question was, fight or flee?
With a few more levels under her belt, Cal probably would have chosen the latter. Unable to keep Apex Shroud fully active at all times, however, she was wary of running away. If she did have to fight them off eventually, she’d rather get their measure now before the dungeon decided to do something vindictive like summon a million of them.
A few steps. A healthy dose of Empowered Strike. And that was all it took.
She flashed back into existence as her feather sliced through the air, and by the time she was done, one hyena head fell to the ground.
If there was one small mercy, it was that the beasts weren’t truly living, biological creatures. The severed neck contained no manner of blood or bone, only more discolored darkness. This did not, however, seem to allow the creature to live without its head, making her job much easier.
You have slain a Cursed Hyena!
You have gained a stack of Rising Tenacity. Stamina recovery enhanced.
You have gained a stack of Wellspring’s Renewal. Mana recovery enhanced.
You have gained a stack of Surging Vitality. Health recovery enhanced.
All three buffs had been fairly early class skills, low enough on her skill trees that she’d essentially been forced to take them. She hadn’t maxed any of them out, but they would boost her recovery whenever she killed something, or to a much smaller degree, whenever she landed a hit or got hit herself. She could truly become a monster at high enough stacks, provided a battle actually lasted long enough.
Not at all concerned with Cal’s skill notifications, the remaining four hyenas homed in on her as one. Letting out scratchy, yipping barks, they pounced to avenge their fallen sibling.
Sadly for them, they were entirely out of luck. By the time they landed, Cal was long gone, having gone fully invisible once more.
A high-pitched swish was the only warning they got before another head hit the ground. And then another. And another. In short order, Cal popped in and out of existence, dispatching each of the hyenas with a single strike.
Nice! So they’re horribly weak defensively, and they don’t have any special way of tracking me through my shroud. Simple enough.
Left unsaid was that she did not want to discover what would happen to her if she actually got hit. Something told her that her Curse of Confinement would be the least of her worries if any of them took a proper bite out of her.
Well, no biggy there. Guess I just have to make sure that doesn’t happen.
With none of the hyenas dropping any sort of loot, Cal played around with Apex Shroud until she found a relatively low-cost setting that seemed to prevent the region from detecting her. Prepared as she could be, Cal set off to break her curse.
----------------------------------------
It only took an hour before she spotted it, or, put another way, Cal was forced to walk for an hour over the barren earth before anything changed.
In a slight recess, hiding it from casual view, a single slab of stone sat undisturbed. Despite its nondescript appearance, the flat, rectangular rock had a clear purpose.
“Yeah, that’s definitely an altar. Honestly kind of glad I can’t see mana, because I’m almost entirely sure that thing’s covered in creepy curse magic.”
With no other items of note in sight, Cal was forced to conclude that the altar was the cursed object keeping her confined. Not that she wanted to mess with a cursed altar, but that seemed to be the way things were headed.
Still hoping to get home in time for dinner, Cal didn’t second guess herself. Filling her feather sword with as much mana as it could hold, she slashed down, dropping her invisibility right as the blade connected with the stone.
The force of the impact reverberated up the quill of the feather, rattling her bones. Other than that, though, her strike did a whole lot of nothing.
No dramatic, eerie noises. No offended bosses trying to kill her. And certainly no lifted curses. After all, the altar didn’t have a single scuff mark on it, let alone a crack.
“All right, can’t say I’m a fan of that one. So breaking the altar is a no-go.” Or, at least it was with her power level. A fully empowered strike was the best she had, so if the altar could withstand that, she was out of luck. “What else?”
Intent on answering just that, the dungeon finally reacted. Whether from her momentary reappearance, or from her attack on the altar, the surrounding earth took note. Once again, the darkness that had seeped into the soil rose up, spawning a horde of hyenas. No longer confined to the small space on the edge of the wastelands, the foul creatures rose in droves, until a solid dozen of them ringed the altar.
Not seeing any other path forward, Cal repeated her earlier stint, rushing from scavenger to scavenger, lopping off their heads. The entire fight would have been a perfect repeat of the first if not for one key difference.
“Damn. Respawning.” Before she could get even halfway through her new foes, more orbs plucked themselves from the darkness, replacing the downed hyenas. Only just now realizing what she’d just said, Cal pulled up short. “Wait! Not-damn! Respawning!”
At last! Cal had finally found her swarm enemy!
She killed a few more just to verify that the dungeon would truly keep creating new enemies to replace the old, and only once she was satisfied did she fully cloak herself in Apex Shroud and take a step back.
Okay. I don’t need to eat or sleep, so I don’t technically have a time limit here. Verin and Tess might get worried if I take too long, but this could be the chance I’ve been looking for to clear out some of my class quests, right?
Presumably, the region would disappear after she escaped, which meant that the altar could wait for now.
Turning back to the hyenas, Cal was about to jump back into her own form of scavenger hunting. In the brief time it had taken her to consider her options, however, something had changed.
Are they… bigger?
A handful of the hyenas had abruptly grown after she’d taken her eyes off them. Initially, she worried they had some mechanic to passively empower them over time. When she spotted one of the corpses she’d already defeated, however, things grew much clearer.
Two hyenas stood around their defeated companion, actively tearing into its body with their wet maws. Chunks of dry, dark flesh disappeared down their gullets, and as Cal watched, they began to visibly grow. In a matter of seconds, all evidence of her earlier fight was gone, not a scrap of her original foes remaining.
That’s maybe a problem. A hundred regular hyenas? She’d be fine. But if they kept getting stronger with every one she killed? As much as Cal liked to throw caution to the wind once in a while, even she wasn’t willing to play those odds. With her luck, by the time she finished her class quests, the place would be filled with super hyenas as big as buildings.
Do I have a choice, though? She could wander for another hour and hope she stumbled upon a different cursed object, but the chances of that felt vanishingly rare. There was an altar here, and there were enemies. Cal was at least 90% sure that removing her curse had something to do with those two things.
Idly, she wondered what had happened to the corpses she’d left at the very start of the region. Maybe if nothing eats them for long enough, they disappear? It was worth a shot, at least.
In a flash, another hyena collapsed in two halves, with Cal vanishing in its wake. This time around, however, she didn’t wait for it to get gobbled up.
The closest of its companions greedily sprinted forth to enjoy the free meal, but well before it could start eating, Cal delivered another empowered strike, aiming for its front legs instead of its head. The feathery sword bit through the darkness with almost no resistance, and the cursed creature crashed to the ground with an angry growl. Before the others could arrive, Cal made fast work of its back legs, transforming it from hobbled to immobilized.
Unfortunately, the rest of the hyenas wouldn’t be such a simple matter, with a full ten of them descending in a pack.
Please let this work. With giant warding strikes, meant more to deter than to damage, Cal met their charge. Her repeated disappearing and reappearing act drew startled yips which only grew louder as her blade scored shallow cuts across their bloodless bodies.
And, despite the overwhelming difference in numbers, it was working! Sure, she struggled to disable them like she had before, but as long as she kept fighting, all the hyenas were focused on her. Each second she bought was another to test her hypothesis in hopes that the corpse would vanish on its own.
For all her confidence and enthusiasm, though, Cal had her limits. Her Perception, stuck at the baseline after her class change, wasn’t up to keeping track of so many enemies, and her Dexterity wasn’t high enough for any fancy footwork or dodging. Dropping the physical portion of her Apex Shroud, she lunged forward, stabbing one of the beasts in its thigh.
Even as the hyena cried out, so too did Cal, as for the first time in the fight, she felt pain.
Cursed Hyena has attacked you for 10 damage!
Right from her blind spot, a hyena she thought she’d disabled had managed to move just enough to jerk its neck forward, sinking its teeth into her calf. Leather and bandages absorbed the brunt of the attack, but the very tips of its teeth still managed to puncture through, digging into the leg below.
Unfortunately, the initial damage wasn’t the worst of it.
You have been cursed!
“Gah! Shit.” Too occupied to read, Cal sliced her sword through the hyena’s snout, dislodging it from her leg. “Fetch!” While she needed a moment to heal up and understand her curse, Cal had no desire to waste all of her hard work. With one firm punt boosted by her considerable Strength, she booted the original corpse away before fully activating Apex Shroud once more and taking in her new curse.
Slumbering Curse (Minor, Stacking)
Enhances your body’s natural need for sleep, gradually making you grow more and more tired.
She had to read through the notification three times before it fully sank in. My natural need to… But I don’t need to sleep! And indeed, as best she could tell, Cal didn’t feel remotely different than she did before.
“Hells yeah! I’m immune! I love this region!” Having confirmed that she wasn’t about to turn to stone or leak blood from her eyes, Cal tracked down where her kicked corpse had landed.
When she did, however, Cal was met with a rather odd sight. Having punted the hyena inwards, she’d inadvertently relocated it to the sloping pit of the altar. A quick glance confirmed that it had tumbled down, now lying directly atop the slab of stone.
All at once, its body lost its cohesion, returning to the liquid state it had formed from. The inky substance then sank into the stone, vanishing without a trace.
“Oh. Man. Actually, in retrospect, maybe should have guessed that. Cursed altar. Cursed sacrifices.” Well, whatever. You live and you learn. At the very least, that confirmed that there was a way to kill her enemies without them growing stronger. Now Cal just had to decide which was worse -- making sacrifices to a cursed altar, or fighting an endless wave of hyenas that continually got stronger.
“Yeah, hate to say it, but I think the sacrifices are the right move.” Maybe if she sacrificed enough, her heartfelt devotion would lift her curses? A girl could hope, right? More than that, it was the only real path forward she could see.
Having made her decision, the elegant, regal princess eyed the remaining carrion feeders with a renewed bloodlust.
“All right! Let’s see how many sacrifices it takes before I get to go home.”
Keeping an eye on her class quests, Cal could only hope the answer was a lot.