When the momentary blur of teleportation faded, Lia found herself in a small stone chamber, lit by flickering torches. There was a doorway behind her that appeared to lead outside, and across from it, a stairway leading down into the darkness. “Um, Matthew, I’m assuming you can hear me, but…is going out of the dungeon off-limits? I know I should have asked that earlier, but I forgot, sorry.”
“It is not off-limits, but you’re unlikely to find anything that would significantly help you out there.” Matthew’s voice replied. “And yes, the outside is that door you’re looking at. The rest of the dungeon is down the stairs. For future reference, if you feel the need to explain an action or ask a question but don’t want to talk, just raise a fist and I’ll read your mind. Oh, and I’ve rendered Alisha inert for the sake of this dungeon; I need to test you, and her buffs make that difficult.”
“Okay, thanks.” Lia replied, turning to face the stairway down. She briefly considered casting a spell for light, but quickly dismissed the idea; though it didn’t come up often anymore, she did have Skills that let her see in the dark, many derived from Rose; Rose had gathered a multitude of them via her Mother of the World Skill, which were then evolved and had their level maxed out via Lia’s Will of the People Skill.
Lia hadn’t been sure how the evolution would work when Skills had multiple potential evolutions, but it seemed that it just gave Lia all possible evolutions. She assumed that this was due to Will of the People being the Skill associated with her Pride Title; as one of the Sin Skills, it got to do far more than a normal Skill would ever be allowed to.
Whatever the case, she had enough different vision-enhancing Skills that any external light was superfluous to her. So, she crept down into the dungeon proper, taking her time and staying alert. This sort of thing was something of a new experience for her; she had never actually been in an unknown dungeon all by herself before.
At school, she was always with teachers or had information, and the dungeon Amelia had dropped her in after she had reincarnated Lia was patterned after a place Lia knew well. This dungeon was a complete unknown, so she had to take it slowly and methodically.
She raised a fist, giving Matthew a cue to read her mind. This is slow, but it’s because I have absolutely no information about this dungeon. Until I have an idea of what I’m dealing with I can’t afford to speed up and make careless mistakes because of it.
So, she proceeded on, patiently disarming traps and marking passageways as she took them, working her way ever deeper into the labyrinth that was the dungeon. Yet, despite it all going so well, a sense of unease was building within her; something was wrong, and she wasn’t sure what.
It took her roughly ten minutes to realize what was bothering her so; she hadn’t encountered any signs of life, let alone any monsters. When she made that realization, she took the opportunity to grab one of the many detection Skills Rose had, using it to scan the area for nearby monsters.
As it turned out, there were indeed monsters, and they were…the walls? Curious, she took a moment to analyze the status of one of the nearest one.
Name: ---
Race: Wall Mimic
Level: 80
HP: 4,000
Stamina: 4,000
Mana: 500
Strength: 625
Defense: 1,540
Dexterity: 110
Magic: 202
Magic Defense: 1,540
Mental Fortitude: 1,540
Wall Mimic:
Instead of the usual mimicking of treasure chests or other valuable items, the Wall-Mimic instead mimics dungeon walls, confusing dungeon visitors by moving and tricking the unaware into moving in circles.
Frowning, Lia thought back on her route through the dungeon. She had made quite a few turns, but the distance between each had varied and she had never seen her marks, so she hadn’t noticed anything overtly wrong and had assumed the dungeon was just a tightly-packed labyrinth.
But, now that she knew she was being tricked, she was going to have to handle things a little differently. She turned off her detection Skill to save Stamina, then pulled out her tablet and opened an app that allowed her to make drawings. She took a brief moment to make a rough sketch of her surroundings, then turned her attention to the wall mimic.
Seeing as how the mimics had yet to attack her, they were likely going to remain docile until they were attacked themselves. That gave Lia the first move, and while she would normally choose to just dump modeling wax on the thing, she wasn’t sure that would work.
The issue was that the mimics were fit into the walls so well that Lia couldn’t even tell there was a seam, at least not without careful inspection. Yes, they had to move around, but they could easily shrink themselves, then grow to fit whichever wall they were next to. Lia hadn’t actually tried to convert something that was fit into something so snugly, but…what harm was there in trying? Worst case scenario, she’d start a fight, but she was going to have to do that anyway, so that wasn’t a big deal.
She began to cast the spell, and, fortunately, the mimic didn’t respond. That made sense; after all, if they were trying to get people lost, divination spells would be cast pretty often by their prey. And, unless they knew for sure that they had been found out, they would likely consider it premature to attack whenever a spell was cast.
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Mimics were, as a rule, ambush predators and scavengers; they preferred to have an overwhelming advantage on their targets, or for their targets to be weak and weary. They weren’t bright, and did little to deviate from their favored style of hunting, so really the hardest part of fighting them was finding them. Or, at least, that’s what Lia had been taught in school; she had never actually fought a mimic herself.
Her spell went off, and several globs of modeling wax were withdrawn from her storage, spearing into the mimic at several different places. Immediately it began to move, but as its Dexterity indicated, it was slow, and it only managed to scoot out about a foot from the wall before it was fully consumed by the wax.
Lia put it and the excess modeling wax from its conversion into her storage, thinking back on the moment the wax hit it. It seemed like the wax had gotten between it and the wall in the instant before the mimic had moved, but it was hard to tell for sure. The next time around, she’d have to paralyze the mimic and then use the video-taking feature on her tablet to get a better idea of what was happening. It wasn’t a scenario that was likely to come up often, but it was still something she thought would be good to know.
Lia paused, looking around with the detection Skill to make sure she was well and truly alone before she pulled the cocoon back out and looked at the conversion options. A quick skim informed her that there was nothing immediately relevant in combat or utility for this dungeon, so she stuck it back in her storage to be used in later tests.
The area behind the mimic was yet another corridor, so added it to the impromptu map she was making and made a mark on the wall for good measure, then set off down the corridor. Every so often she made sure to flick on a detection Skill to check for mimics, watching carefully for any sign of them.
The next mimic she found she paralyzed as she had planned, pausing only briefly to explain why she was doing it to Matthew, and was pleased to see that the modeling wax did, in fact, go through the wall; it seemed that it simply squished the mimic inwards ever so slightly to make room for the wax. With her curiosity satisfied, she then dealt with other mimics as she had the first, and her map began to quickly fill out.
She silently thanked herself for enrolling in mapmaking classes before she died; her Job had been Hunter, and she had figured that it was likely she would end up in a situation where it was important. Making accurate maps was quite difficult, particularly getting the scale right, but with her training she was able to make something that more or less worked for her purposes.
It became clear pretty quickly that the labyrinth was less of a labyrinth and more of a grid, made to look like a labyrinth by the mimics. By the time she came across the tunnel she had entered from, she was reasonably confident that all she’d have to do to get out was walk in a straight line from the entrance, taking out any mimics that got in her way.
And she was right; when she got rid of the mimics, the exit was in a straight line from the entrance. By the time she was through, she was feeling pretty good about things so far; her tablet indicated that she had been in the labyrinth for about an hour, and for her troubles she had bagged a couple dozen mimics. She was confident that Matthew would agree her only real mistake was not using a detection Skill earlier; other than that, she had passed through without accidentally triggering any traps, and she was still near full on all her resources.
Her modeling wax stores had taken something of a hit, the mimics were fairly large, but she had literal boatloads of the stuff in her storage; she needed a lot for her work, and Rose had risen to the challenge by making plants that existed purely for the purposes of modeling wax. They gave next to no nutritional value, but they grew quickly and were able to be almost entirely converted into modeling wax when fed to things that specialized in converting plant matter to modeling wax.
They only really worked because they were being grown within Yggdrios, which was able to supply a truly absurd amount of nutrients to them as they grew, but that wasn’t a big deal. They just sent out resupplies via Rose or Amelia’s storage when they went to the front lines, and that was able to satisfy their needs for the time being.
Lia exited the corridor, and was finally met with her first real room. It was a large square room, dominated by an ornate fountain that took up almost all of the available floor space. Lia turned on a detection Skill, switching from the one she had been using, which was focused on range and efficiency, to one that was focused on giving more information about the targets.
As she had suspected, the fountain was absolutely filled with monsters, fish of some sort according to her Skill. They mostly hovered in the level ninety to one-hundred range, with a few outliers that went up into the low one-thirties. The levels were a little concerning, as they were out of the range that they liked to use for safe training, but with all of Lia’s buffs, she was probably capable of handling it.
As the swarm had grown, the part of her Supreme Empress race that gave her the effects of all passive buffs to swarm members that any swarm member had, regardless of whether or not she was in range of the buffer, had only grown more and more powerful. Each category of buff may only have counted the most powerful, but in aggregate that was still something in the realm of a two-hundred percent increase to her stats and numerous other buffs in various categories like Mana efficiency and the power of her spells and abilities.
She had one of two ways in mind to approach this; she could either unleash powerful lightning magic, hopefully dealing large damage to the monsters within the fountain, or she could attempt to evaporate or otherwise remove the water, hopefully leaving the fish greatly weakened.
Both approaches had their issues. For the first, the fish could well be resistant to lightning magic, and a powerful enough spell would likely kill a lot of them, drastically reducing the number of potential troops she would get from it. For the second, the fish could be amphibious, or they could replace the water in the fountain somehow. And, even if the second did work as Lia hoped and she could just put them all into cocoons with little resistance, there was a chance she couldn’t get any land-dwelling monsters out of them.
Unfortunately, she didn’t have any way of viewing their statuses or analyzing them from this far away when she didn’t have line of sight on them, so she just had to make a guess as to what would be best. After some deliberation, she decided to not be greedy, and zapped the pond with a strong lightning spell.
She was met with a torrent of messages stating that she had killed things, and the detection Skill she was using confirmed that only a few of the monsters, mostly the higher-leveled ones, were still alive. Not wanting to waste her advantage, she dashed into the room, preparing spells that would send out globs of modeling wax to hit the survivors.
Unfortunately, the path to those survivors was blocked by the hundreds of dead fish that were floating up towards the surface of the water, so Lia had to improvise. She let the spells she was preparing fizzle, hurriedly bringing up more defensive spells as arcs of fire were shot out at her from the water.
Fortunately, only a couple spells made it past her barriers, and they handily missed her. Lia reached the edge of the fountain and cast her next spell, one that forcibly pushed all the water out of the fountain in one giant wave. The living fish were able to resist the pull of the wave, staying in a fountain which was already refilling at an incredibly rapid rate, but the majority of the dead fish were swept out of the fountain, giving Lia a clear line of sight on the living ones.
As she prepared her modeling wax spells once again, the fish made their second attack. She was prepared for their fiery shots this time, using a spell to rocket her up into the air and over their attacks before raining the modeling wax down on them, hitting the majority of the survivors and instantly cocooning them.
The remaining few were easy pickings, and she soon found herself checking the conversion options. As she had feared, there were no options that would let these fish to walk on land, so she began picking through the flooded room and putting the corpses into her storage, cocooning a couple for use in later conversions.
When she was done, she left the room and stopped in the hallway, drying herself off with a quick spell. Checking her Mana, she decided to take a quick breather; thanks to her buffs, she’d be back at full in five or so minutes, and she could use that time to thumb through her storage and see if she had anything that could potentially get the fish to be functional outside of water. So, she quickly informed Matthew of what she was doing, sat down, and began to look.