Synn stood within a vast room of pristine, untouched earth. There was no vegetation, no water, no plants and no monsters to battle. ‘This isn’t looking good’ he thought to himself.
He wandered across the vast room his eyes scanning back and forth as he progressed. Just as he’d gone past an area the ground began to quake and shake. As the earth was shaking and sifting it began to pull and grow upwards forming a humanoid shape.
This hadn’t been in any of the scenarios he’d discovered when he studied the possibilities for the dungeon. ‘You have got to be kidding me. A Lesser Earth Elemental’.
Already he could feel a suppression kicking in from a monster so many levels above him. So he quickly took the opportunity as it filled out it’s shape to allocate some stats and xp points to his levels and as he hit level 7 he could feel the relief as the pressure from the boss dropped and as he hit level 8 he felt back to himself.
‘This is really not going to go well for me.’ The realisation that the boss must exceed level 10 playing on his mind. It had cost him 7200xp and 36 stat points and he knew his loss of stats would affect his ability to harm the boss.
As the boss finished forming its eyes glowed yellow and locked onto Synn. An ominous shiver ran down his spine as it stared into his eyes before it glowed an earthy yellow and three more opponents sprouted up from the ground. These three looked like warriors clad in armour and all holding spears. ‘Scratch that,’ he thought as they pulled back their arms into a throwing stance, ‘javelins’ as they assumed a throwing stance. His twin axes in his hand Synn prepared to dodge the volley of spears, all three came at him with slightly different timing and one clipped his calf, albeit slightly, as he failed to move quick enough. ‘Great, need to adjust to being hampered by that loss of stats, don’t want to push off and find I’m still in the way of one of these projectiles.’
Having dodged the wave of missiles and with the summoned soldiers empty handed he ran at the closest one looking to smash it back into the earth.
Closing in he noticed a new javelin forming in its hand.
‘You have got to be kidding me. How is this dungeon passable solo with cheats like this, I’m supposed to be the biggest cheat in here!! Fine, time for some aggression!’ He roared as he swung his axe cleaving the first opponent in two, so it crumbled back to the ground. He was already whirling into the second dust warrior his offhand axe coming round in an arc that slashed through the head and throwing hand of the second. The third launched its javelin from close range and it was the smallest margin that it missed by but Synn had already thrown his axe and it impaled the warrior in the head. He used metal manipulation and pulled the axe back towards himself thinking himself quite clever but it came at him with an awkward, slow spin and the sharp edge currently aimed at his hand. ‘Okay, no throwing the axes and summoning them back, at least not until I’ve had some blunt objects to practice on.’
He sauntered towards the lesser earth elemental now that it’s guards had been. Just as he was about to start cleaving chunks from the elemental it glowed once more and three more guards sprouted up around Synn.
‘Come on! How is this fair?’ He internally asked nobody in particular.
He made his way through the summoned warriors once more and this time quickly moved into the boss. He managed to get a few axe strikes against the boss before he had to turn his attention to the next round.
The slow progress continued and before Synn knew it he had already faced 10 rounds. At this point he switched to his swords as his arms had become heavy from fighting the summons for so long. Luckily the accumulation of damage was evident on the lesser earth elemental. That was until a new skill appeared, as he was fighting three new summons it drew energy from the earth and some of the damage began to be filled.
“NO!!!” He yelled. “I am not going to be defeated by a worthless pile of sand.” A throwing knife moving quickly from his chest strap and striking the elemental a moment later in the eye.
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It wasn’t a kill strike, but it disrupted the spell and that’s all he could hope for as he finished the three summoned warriors.
Synn felt he had been fighting for several hours, and he wasn’t wrong. Every time he failed to disrupt the Lesser Earth Elemental from healing it seemed to take twice as long to defeat the next three summoned warriors due to his drop in morale.
The boss was on its last legs but so was Synn, his right arm now hung slightly lower, he’d been caught in a trap at one point and taken a javelin to the shoulder. It had torn through flesh and muscle and Synn was pretty sure that the bone itself was in a bad way, if not fractured then at least chipped. He’d managed to pull the javelin out and taken a minor healing potion to plug the bleed and undo a bit of the damage, but the arm was still barely functional. His defence and attack were at least 40% slower when he did have to resort to using and that was only because not gritting his teeth and forcing the arm up to block blows or strike would mean certain death.
He was in front of the boss at it was struggling to hold its form together following his last strike, but it still glowed yellow once again and summoned three more warriors. Synn decided to take a gamble on the three disappearing the minute he defeated the Lesser Earth Elemental and dived into his opponent with both swords out, penetrating it as they both tumbled to the ground.
A cloud of earth exploded around him, and the three fast approaching spears disappeared just in the nick of time. He forced himself into a sitting position and spat out the mouth full of dirt that he had unfortunately been awarded when defeating the elemental.
On the ground was a glowing yellow pouch that was his reward for the dungeon so he picked it up and stuffed it deep into his backpack under the Sianzin ore before carefully limping his way out.
The two guards and the party waiting for their slot to begin starred at Synn as he exited, his top shredded and many open wounds showing.
“Laddie! You okay there?” A female voice called out with a tinny voice from under the heavily armoured guard to the right of the entrance.
“Don’t suppose you have a healer on standby within the guild? Do you? I could do with a patch up.”
“We can send for the healer, it won’t be cheap at this time of night, they are very protective of their sleep and charge accordingly.” She nudged him with a friendly elbow that pushed at least one more broken rib around and left him keeled over to try and recapture some of the air that had been expelled from his lungs.
It cost 15 silvers but it was worth it. It wasn’t a full heal as the young lady who had performed it was merely an apprentice but her knowledge seemed spot on and she had picked up on all his injuries. While they couldn’t all be 100% she restored him well over 80% and it made him realise that he definitely needed to find some healing skills he could syphon in the near future.
Restored, Synn grabbed his backpack and headed back to Lance’s apartment. Lance had been off with his usual groups getting some last minute experience and growth ready for the Academy entrance trials. Synn had been tempted to join them but then he’d have to explain how his entire skillset had changed. Between dungeon runs Lance had also spent time packing up his apartment so that he and Synn were living on the bare minimum. What he could box up and store back at his parents he had done and everything else he was slowly trying to sell. Lance was confident they were both going to be living it up at the Academy in just over a week and that they were taking the girls with them. Unfortunately, Tommy, Samson and most of the others had already missed the age cut off for trying to enter Armageddon. Still Lance hoped that if he made it into a faction at the Academy, he could have them join one of the external forces and work alongside them all again.
Synn flopped onto his sofa and pulled out his reward. He’d had zero energy earlier to examine the reward, but the small pouch felt amazingly powerful in his hand. ‘Was it a blessing or curse to find such a good reward.’ He wondered ‘Maybe he’d used up all his good luck.’
He tipped the contents of the pouch into his hand and gasped excitedly “A seed, an elemental, freaking SEED!!”
Elemental seeds were exceedingly rare as they were forged by nature usually only in the most saturated of areas and over hundreds of years if not thousands. ‘I guess that’s why my dungeon variation was so abnormal, it was reshaped by the seed! I wonder if it has been searching for a suitable successor?’ he pondered but unfortunately most of his previous studies and research hadn’t told him much about situations like this.
He held the seed to his bare abdomen at the midpoint between his heart and belly button, he knew enough that this was where rare treasures like seeds would be absorbed into the body.
Elemental seed detected. Would you like to merge and assimilate with the seed? Accept YES/NO?
‘Hell yeah!!’ he answered instantly.