Although I was now safe from the monsters and robots, because of the sun’s radiation, I wasn’t exactly safe from the radiation myself. So I needed to take care of things here as quickly as possible and got out of here.

The first thought on my mind was, of course, loot. If I'm going to go through a hard fought battle then I should get something from it. But maybe that’s just my inner gamer speaking. Man, it's been so long since I’ve played a game, it’s definitely a top priority once I get settled in a city. But gaming can definitely be an expensive hobby, I’ll need some spare cash. So I walked over to one of the shutdown robots wondering if it was worth storing or not.

I looked carefully at the outside, while also observing the inside with my (Space-Time Sense). Although it looked rusted and old on the outside, the inside wasn’t in as bad of a condition. There were lots of various components and parts that might be valuable to sell, and I wondered if I might be able to learn anything from this robot, but for the most part it didn’t look like anything groundbreaking. However, more unexpected things than this have come out of dungeons, so it’s not impossible that I’ll be able to learn something from these robots.

As I was looking at its exterior I was able to make out a faded logo of intertwined lines and a lizard’s face. This got me curious, it seemed that the company this logo belonged to was more diverse than I first thought. If the company was manufacturing combat robots like this, and they were also manufacturing some kind of drugs in the building I had investigated, then maybe I would be able to find something valuable if I looked into places with this logo on them. It was something to think about anyways.

With my inspection done I decided to store each of the robots. Although it might not be too valuable, I didn’t care all that much. I had the mana to spare since I didn’t have to fight the horde, and I had plenty of space in my Internal World after years of building it up. So I put my hand on the rusted metal and worked my magic.

I was expecting it to easily disappear, but there was a resistance that fought against my power. Ahh right, just because they aren’t moving doesn’t mean that they’re dead. Resistance to magic could sometimes be weird with blurry lines between the rules. However in this case the robot was somewhat like a golem, and just because golems didn’t have souls or minds and such didn’t mean they had no resistance. Anything animated or even controlled would have some resistance, and things with energy were also more resistant, but it didn’t make much of a difference in this situation.

All I had to do was use a bit more effort to overcome its resistance, and it slipped right into my Internal World without further issue. The same thing happened with all the other robots before I took another look at the scene with considerably less mana than I had started with. Although I had overcome a disaster, it wasn’t because of anything I had planned, I had no idea when the sun would come up. If I wasn’t saved by the bell so to speak, then I might’ve been dead in the worst case scenario… Well whatever, it’s all in the past now. Learn from it and move on!

After catching my mental breath I decided to go to the top of a tall building a few blocks away. My spells had already drawn in all of the monsters in a large radius, which subsequently died in the sun, which made getting to the top of the building as easy as just walking there.

I got to the top and took a look at the sprawling city. Even in its current dilapidated condition it was still quite impressive. I started to scan the city for an area that might have fewer monsters, but as expected of a city enclosed in a dome there weren’t any neglected or open looking areas. I was about to give up when, in the distance, I could see a very large building with the lizard logo on the building’s surface, carved deep into the rock. Thinking back to my earlier observations I decided that it might have valuable things in it since it has the same logo as the robots, so I noted the building’s direction and decided to head in that direction while it was still light out.

I couldn’t find a peaceful place, so I might as well check out the interesting building. After all, treasure is meant to be found, and I fancied myself somewhat of a treasure hunter.

As I walked through the desolate streets I noticed every little detail that was off, cracks in the buildings and windows, intermittent sounds in the distance, misaligned things inside the buildings. I was actually getting used to the information overload… not. It was as annoying as ever, but I couldn’t just turn it off, even if it was annoying it was still helpful, so I left it on as I made my way through the city.

-Break-

I woke up lying on the ground in the dark room I had chosen as my resting place. I was much more tired than I should have been, and even after treating my body with healing magic my skin was still itchy and sensitive. It seemed that walking around in the irradiated sunlight was having more of an effect as time passed, I just hoped that it wouldn’t escalate too much farther as time passed.

I sat up with my fatigued body and just sat there for a bit as I waited for my body to catch up to my mind. I was on the top floor of a fairly tall building at the moment, having arrived here while it was still light out. Strangely enough the sun never peaked over the horizon, but that didn’t stop it from being just as bright as noon day.

I had arrived near the building I had seen, with the lizard logo on it, and it was much larger up close than it had looked from a distance. I had thought about exploring while it was still bright out, but I decided to wait until I had the full amount of ‘day-time’ to explore, and I hid myself away in a tall building near the complex with the lizard logo.

I had to clear out the monsters on my way up, but it wasn’t that big of a deal, and I promptly fell asleep once I reached the top. I didn’t have to worry about attracting monsters from all the way up here, even at full mana reserves. In addition I kept my concealment going permanently, I had learned my lesson and would try to keep it on unless it was necessary to have it off.

Looking around the room I was in, there were multiple cameras that had turned on sometime while I was asleep. It was a bit creepy knowing that everywhere in the city probably had cameras just like this watching everything going on. Maybe that’s one of the Environmental Hazards? Hmm, it makes sense, that could be how those robots were able to corner me last night. Haah, oh well, just another thing to add to the list of things I need to think about.

Getting up from the ground, after I shook off some of my fatigue, I decided to go to the roof of the building and scope out the lizard logo complex I had come all this way for. It wasn’t that far of a trip up to the roof, considering that I had chosen a spot so close to the top of the building to sleep in.

Observing the sprawling complex from above, I could see that it was much larger than I had initially thought. There were many interconnected buildings with some walkways and sparse open grounds connecting them. Perhaps this was the main center for whatever organization the lizard logo belonged to? It certainly looked big enough for it.

Looking over the large stone building below me, I noticed something strange about the complex, there weren’t any monsters roaming in or around the building. All around the city there were occasional monsters roaming the streets, but there seemed to be a dead zone all around this complex for some reason.

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Looking at the sides of the building I could see many different openings in the walls, almost like things had broken into the building. Or maybe things had broken out? In any case it was quite a strange place compared to the rest of the buildings in the city which didn’t have nearly as much visible destruction.

But that wouldn’t stop me from exploring the place. I wasn’t going to go down there during the nighttime though, so I was going to have to wait for the daytime before exploring and hunting for treasure inside the concrete complex. At least I would be able to heal a bit more and recover from my fatigue and the lingering effects of the radiation exposure.

-Break-

There wasn’t much I could do while waiting for daylight to come, since I didn’t want to attract monsters by practicing magic I knew would probably attract the monsters, so I did what I always did back when I was bored while trapped inside of my own mind. I thought about my future plans, and what I would do when I was free; or in this case, now that I was free.

After this is all finished I need to be ready to deal with surveillance and tracking. Just because I’ve been missing for about a month doesn’t mean they would’ve stopped trying to find me. I could hide in the wilderness, but I’m tired of isolating myself. I want to live in a city, maybe I could even hide from them in the capital…

Hmm, that might actually work… Or, maybe not. Hiding in plain sight, or hiding right under their nose, might work in fiction, but actually hiding is just better in reality, who would’ve thought. No matter how much I want to live in a city, it just doesn’t seem realistic at the moment.

That line of thinking was just making me depressed, so I started to think about something else. Well, even if I can’t live in a city, I can still visit one if I’m careful. I’ll have to get in touch with Mystdell and Genesis anyways, and sort things out with them before doing anything big.

Maybe I could go live in a different country, but that is a long term goal. I mean the entire country of Tallen is huge, even compared to Earth. Tallen’s surface area is roughly 7.85 quadrillion km², and Earth’s surface area is only 510 million km². Just traveling to another country would take absolutely forever, unless I use teleporters, and that just isn’t going to happen with my current identity.

It’s a bit of a conundrum, in order to travel to another country, so I can hide from the government, I first need to hide from the government well enough that I can go to a different country. At that point I would be better off just staying in Tallen. Well I’m sure I’ll figure it out.

I continued to think about my future and other things that awaited me after I got out of the Dungeon of Tribulation, as I waited for daylight.

Eventually the sun started to brighten and signal the start of a new, but short, day. I didn’t have anything to pack or get ready, so I didn’t waste any time getting down to the bottom floor of the building.

A few monsters had wandered into the building during the nighttime, but I took care of the few that did as I left the building. I then made my way through the once again empty streets towards the lizard logo complex. When I neared the building the first thing I noticed was the rubble surrounding it on the outside. This rubble seemed to come from the holes in the building, probably strewn about by who knows what leaving from the inside of the building’s rooms instead of the entrances.

I debated whether to enter through one of the openings in the side of the building or one of the actual entrances. In the end I compromised between the two and decided to enter one of the openings near an actual entrance. I wanted to get a feel for what the building was for, and that would probably be easier looking at whatever was at the entrance area.

Stepping over the rubble, I entered the building and took a look around. The inside of the building was almost as bland as the outside, with a style that looked designed mostly for functionality rather than feel. There were desks similar to the ones I had seen in the first building I had explored, and again there were boards and posters on the walls, with some of the posters being exactly the same as the ones I had seen in the first building.

I only spent a little time exploring the mundane space, and there didn’t seem to be much of anything worthwhile to discover there, only traces of escape from whatever had made the holes in the building’s exterior. So I moved on to explore deeper, hopefully more interesting, parts of the building complex.

Although the building was large, it was mostly made up of large open rooms, and in many of these rooms there were numerous holding cells that all seemed to be broken. In any case, these rooms didn’t have anything of value in them, so I didn’t bother looking much into them. Though from what I saw the lizard logo company seemed to be using this building as some sort of research facility that operated on live subjects, at least in the places I saw.

After searching for a while I slowly went deeper and deeper into the complex. At this point I was starting to wonder if there was going to be anything in this building worth my time, but just before I gave up hope, I looked around a corner that opened up into a large spacious room unlike the ones I had come across before. There were cables and wires, platforms, machinery, and other equipment all throughout the room. And near the center was something I did not want to see, a robot. Although this robot had a different design than the ones I had fought previously, instead of a lizard it looked like a sphere with a bunch of different appendages coming off of it all over its metallic body.

The robot didn’t seem to be active at first, but after a bit it turned slightly to the right and made a few movements with its legs. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was doing in this room, but I could sense a large amount of mana radiating out from the robot, but as I felt the robot’s mana I also sensed a large amount of mana coming from the center of the room. Looking a bit closer I could see that the robot was connected to a few different places, and it seemed to be looking at, and interacting with, multiple different devices. Why it was doing things manually was something I wondered, but I doubted I would be able to find out in the short time I had remaining on this level.

Stepping a little bit closer to get a better look, I suddenly felt the mana density increase significantly. Woah, I wasn’t expecting that. Is the mana being confined to this room somehow? If that was true then it’s probably what’s keeping the monsters from detecting this place, in fact the mana surrounding the whole building is thinner than the rest of the city, that’s probably why there weren’t any monsters in and around the complex.

While I was observing the room, the robot suddenly moved from its position and walked over to the center of the room. In the center of the room there was a metal sphere that seemed to be the focus of all the equipment within the room, everything seemed to be set up around this sphere for whatever reason.

The robot interacted with a few different devices near the sphere, which caused a sudden hiss of air to come out of the sphere before it started to open up and displayed what was inside. Inside of the sphere there was a simple orb that seemed to be the source of the abundant mana within the room. The robot reached out to the orb and drew in mana from the orb into itself. With that the robot had presumably gotten what it wanted from opening up the container, because it promptly closed the sphere before I could get a clearer view. But that one peek had been all I needed.

Was that a Skill Orb!? There’s no way, right? But it couldn’t be anything else. Although it was faint, I could feel that it was indeed a Skill Orb when I had looked at it.

All skill orbs were easily identifiable due to the feeling they would give off when observed, and this orb definitely gave off that feeling. However I could tell that this Skill Orb was different from most Skill Orbs, it was an Archetype Skill Orb.

Archetype Skill Orbs were different from other Skill Orbs because they would display their Skill without being absorbed. I could tell that this Skill Orb was an Archetype Skill Orb because the robot had just gotten something from it without it disappearing.

This was huge. Even just normal Skill Orbs were rare, but Archetypes were rare even for Skill Orbs. In the past I had seen an Archetype Skill Orb of (Enhanced Senses) sold at auction for over 100,000 Gold Credits, and it was said that it was only going to be used for training newbies. Based on that alone I could tell that, regardless of if the Archetype Skill Orb in front of me was amazing or not, it would still be incredibly valuable.

I have to get that Skill Orb at all costs. It wasn’t even a question in my mind, I had to get my hands on this Skill Orb. The question was, how? I wasn’t exactly sure, but I knew one thing for certain, I needed to distract that robot if I wanted to get my hands on the Skill Orb. Although the robot looked slow and sedated at first, I could tell through its easy movements that it was extremely dextrous and nimble. It probably wouldn’t be able to move nearly as fast as I could in a straight line, but it would have no problems maneuvering around corners and obstacles.

I wasn’t sure how exactly I was going to distract the robot, but necessity breeds innovation. I would come up with something, I was sure of that. It is also said that haste makes mistakes, but I was sure that wasn’t going to happen, nothing in my life ever went wrong.